Miral (20 page)

M
iral and Lisa, on the other hand, remained in touch, as if their friendship represented a challenge primarily to themselves and only secondarily to other people. A few weeks after her return to school, Miral had already taken her last exam when she received a telephone call from her friend. Lisa had some errands to run in Jerusalem the following day, and she asked Miral if she'd like to get together. It would be their first meeting outside the sphere of protection that Haifa had—up to a certain point—guaranteed them, and Miral felt a bit uneasy at the idea that someone might see her with her Jewish friend.

Miral appeared at the designated place and time, wearing a pair of close-fitting jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a white cotton sweatshirt. Lisa was lovelier than usual: her yellow dress was cut low enough to reveal the perfect shape of her breasts, and her hair fell loose on her shoulders, except for the two tresses that framed her face. Miral hadn't imagined that she would be so happy to see Lisa again; she led her to a quiet restaurant, where they had lunch and exchanged news.

As they were chatting, Lisa casually communicated her most important piece of information. “It turns out that I'm exempt from military service because of my asthma. I won't have to join up. I'm really happy about it,” she said, keeping her voice low. Miral began to cough, stopped, and started again. Her second outburst attracted the attention of the owner, who started to approach their table, only to be stopped by a gesture from Miral, who indicated that everything was all right. Not even noticing this, Lisa went on: “You know, I've thought a lot about what you told me when you were in Haifa, about the Occupied Territories.”

When the coffee came, Miral wanted to read the grounds in her friend's cup and tell her fortune. She told Lisa to drain the cup in one swallow, took it from her, and quickly inverted it on a saucer. Then, turning the cup upright, she began to scrutinize its contents carefully. “Something is going to change your life,” she announced, interpreting a thick trace of sediment left by the cardamom coffee. She upended the cup again and rolled it, gently pressing its rim against the saucer. Then she inspected the coffee dregs once more, smiled, and said, “Before the end of next year, you're going to fall in love with an older man. And this time it will be true love.” Samer immediately crossed Lisa's mind, and with him their romance, which had been wrecked for absurd, unacceptable reasons. “Come on, don't think about that,” Miral said, guessing her friend's thoughts and smiling. “You two weren't meant for each other anyway. He's a great guy, but he's also a narcissist and a little immature. You need to be with someone sensitive and sweet….” Lisa laughed; here was more proof that their friendship was leaving behind the sources from which it had sprung and becoming something exclusively between the two of them. They were two friends, simply two friends.

After paying the check, they decided to take a walk through the Old City. The air was pleasantly cool. “I'd like to see the place you feel most attached to,” Lisa suddenly declared, interrupting the thread of their conversation. Miral wavered for an instant, fixing her eyes on her friend, and then hailed a passing taxi.

“Ramallah please.”

When Lisa heard Miral tell the cab driver their destination, her first instinct was to get out of the car. She opened the door when the cab was already in motion, but Miral held her back with a gesture both delicate and forceful; her eyes, and an almost imperceptible movement of her head, let Lisa know that it was all right.

Meanwhile, the brown Mercedes was traveling on Saleh el-Din Street, crowded with shoppers carrying their purchases. Lisa looked at the shops, which extended out to the edge of the street, and the merchandise, which was displayed from floor to ceiling. The asphalt surface was riddled with potholes, and the taxi bounced along, leaving the last houses of Jerusalem behind. Neither of the girls uttered a word.

They were barely out of the cab when Lisa cried, “Why have you taken me here? Is this some kind of test?”

“I only want you to see that there's another world just a few kilometers from yours. A forgotten world, but it exists,” Miral replied, walking a few meters ahead of Lisa and trying to avoid the puddles that the preceding days' rains had left everywhere.

“Has it occurred to you that I can get hurt here? Israelis aren't allowed!” Lisa said, crying out again and doing her best to keep up with Miral's rapid pace.

“Come on, Lisa, you know I'd never make you run unnecessary risks. Stay close to me, don't open your mouth, and if you really must talk, speak English, never Hebrew. I'll say you work for a European nongovernmental organization. You won't be in any danger.”

Lisa noticed some kids playing soccer with an improbable ball that seemed to be made of rags. As soon as the children spotted the girls, they abandoned the makeshift playing field and ran toward them. As she watched the group of dirty, shouting little boys coming closer, Lisa thought that they were surely carrying rocks in their pockets, and once again her instinct was to run away, retrace her steps, return to the Ramallah road, and wait for a taxi to pass. But seeing Miral walk calmly toward the children, Lisa only slowed her pace. She saw the children surround her friend, who started distributing candy among them, stroking their heads, and affectionately patting their backs or behinds.

“A warm hand clutches mine,” Lisa wrote in her diary that evening.

Miral had her eyes on Lisa. The kids were holding her hands and leading her from one shack to another. They wanted to show her photographs of their dead brothers or fathers, or the few books they possessed, which they displayed as though they were precious heirlooms. Lisa was able to perceive in their eyes suppressed but intense emotion. She reciprocated the children's smiles and let herself be pulled along. In a few minutes, the kids were able to erase everything she'd ever heard about the refugee camps.

Miral went up to Khaldun's friend Said. He gave her a half smile and then handed her a package that he drew out from under his T-shirt. While Miral was hiding it in her backpack, Said lit a cigarette.

“So you're smoking now, too? When did you get this package?” she demanded, snatching the cigarette out of his mouth, throwing it to the ground, and stamping it out with the toe of her boot. Her brusque gesture took Said by surprise, and he remained immobile for a few seconds, a questioning expression on his face and smoke slowly issuing from his nostrils.

“A relative who came here through Jordan brought it about a week ago. There was a letter for me, too. Sounds like he's doing fine.”

Miral put a hand on his shoulder. “Promise me you'll stop smoking?”

Said replied, “Is it going to kill me? I wake up every morning, and I know my chances of sleeping in my bed again that night are about the same as my chances of getting picked off by an Israeli sniper or crushed by a tank and winding up in a coffin.” Then, without pausing, he added, “Tell me, how much is the life of a boy in a refugee camp worth?”

Miral didn't answer.

“I'll tell you how much, Miral. It's not worth anything, because we don't exist—we're outside the world. Cigarettes aren't as bad for you as growing up here.” He kicked a can lying on the ground near his feet.

“What right do I have,” Miral wondered, biting her tongue, “to come here all full of my Dar El-Tifel healthy-living theories and talk this way to a boy I hardly know, a boy who lives in these desperate conditions?”

Lisa's arrival rescued Miral from her embarrassment, and she walked away from Said to meet her friend. After a few steps, Miral turned around to wave to Said, but he had already disappeared.

During the trip back, Miral saw that Lisa was still shaken, as though ghosts that up until a few hours before had existed only in a few newspaper articles or television reports had suddenly become corporeal and taken on well-defined names and faces. “From now on,” Miral thought, “she'll have those kids' faces burned into her brain. She'll feel their hands squeezing hers, and she'll see their eyes looking at her without pleading, showing her their living conditions with dignity, when nothing they have is dignified.”

As the taxi negotiated the curves along the road on its way back to Jerusalem, Lisa clasped her friend's hand. She was unable to speak but felt as though she must make Miral understand that their visit to the camp had meant a great deal to her. That day she had seen that the ugliest place in the world, where the sewers are open to the sky, where the houses are made of mud and straw or corrugated metal, could be a place where solidarity, the sharing of the same condition, could lead to very solid relationships. Anyone who entered that place unarmed won everyone's heart immediately, by the mere fact of having come there. Lisa was shocked to discover that her country contained such dark corners. She repeated to herself over and over, “How can places like this exist? This can't be my country.”

O
nce she was back at school and had reached her room, Miral closed and locked the door, sat on the bed, and opened the package. The first thing she saw was a photograph of Khaldun with some of his comrades, all of them dressed in black, with black-and-white kaffiyehs around their necks. Khaldun was smiling; a cigarette protruded from his mouth. On the back of the photograph he'd written, “As you can see, I haven't quit smoking, but in every other way I've changed a lot.”

He did seem different. Now he was a man; she couldn't say he was handsome, but charm and confidence emanated from him. Miral was amazed to see his softened expression, so much less angry than when he was just a kid. The package also contained a letter, which she ripped open impatiently. Khaldun's handwriting, too, was more relaxed, more mature than it used to be.

Miral wept for joy. Not only was Khaldun alive, he was even safe. She immediately went to Hind's residence and entered her office. Hind was examining some documents with three of the women who worked with her. “Mama Hind, I need to talk to you,” Miral said, holding out the letter. The two of them stepped out onto the balcony. “I'd like to read you a fabulous letter,” Miral said, visibly excited.

“But can't you wait a few minutes? I have to finish my work here. The documents can't wait.”

“No, I can't either. It's really urgent. I need to know what you think about this.”

Surrendering to Miral's insistence, Hind sat on a stool and prepared to listen to the contents of Khaldun's letter. When the reading was over, she smiled in simultaneous amusement and admiration. “What profound, beautiful words. This boy is a poet. And God knows we need romanticism, we need to dream. Miral, do you realize that a life has been saved? Now, I've got great expectations for this boy's future. He makes some very intelligent observations. I think I must compliment you on that score, Miral.”

Miral hugged her, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and hastened away with the letter.

 

Despite the fear she felt after her arrest, Miral continued to be politically engaged but in a different way. Jamal had noticed that when she was home during the weekends, some young men would come to visit Miral, among them the leaders of the resistance in the neighborhood. They met to discuss secret peace negotiations, the eventual makeup and development of the future state.

Jamal felt weak and incapable of protecting his daughter. One night, at two o'clock, there was a violent knocking at the door. Jamal got up, but before opening the door, he looked into the girls' bedroom. Miral, still awake, was holding a stack of about ten books. “I'll hide them. You go and open the door,” he told Miral, his face white with fear. Miral got dressed while her father went out the back way and into the courtyard. With great effort and the aid of a stout pole, he opened a drain cover and dropped the books inside. The soldiers looked everywhere but found nothing.

The moment they left, Jamal collapsed into the armchair, his forehead dripping with sweat. The next day, when he retrieved the books from the drain, he saw a few sheets of paper sticking out of one of them and recognized Miral's handwriting.

Jamal was impressed by the authority in Miral's language. She sounded like a reporter. But he was also concerned for his daughter's safety. He called Tamam that same day and asked her to come to Jerusalem and talk to her nieces about the seriousness of his physical condition. The girls' aunt arrived the following day and spoke quite frankly to Miral and Rania. “Your father is worried. You're big girls, and you should understand certain things…but there's something more important than anything else right now. Your father has asked me to tell you that he has leukemia—you ought to have been told some time ago—and he's going to have to undergo a serious operation followed by a course of treatments.”

The girls were sitting side by side and holding hands, trying to support each other and to react to the news that had just come down on them. For some time, Miral had noticed that her father had lost a good deal of weight, but she had thought he was suffering from a psychological indisposition as a result of his concern for his daughters. “He's very sick,” Tamam went on. “You must stay close to him, and most of all you must avoid doing anything to worry him; you're going to have to stop your political activities. The idea of soldiers in the house again greatly upsets him.”

Rania suddenly began to cry, clutching her aunt, while Miral remained in petrified silence. Their father had always been their foundation in difficult moments, the one who had helped them through the hardships of life, both small and great. Miral ran into the bathroom and saw her frozen face disappear in the mirror in the blur of her tears. The thought of losing her father had made her invisible.

In the course of the following days, Rania decided not to sleep on the school campus anymore but to live at home with Jamal. Miral knew that this decision would have a bad effect on her sister's studies, but since she perfectly understood Rania's reasons, she let her do as she wished. Before long, as Miral had envisioned, Rania stopped studying. She spent her days at her father's bedside, together with the woman who came every day to assist him. Every now and then during the night, Rania would get up and go to his room. She would observe him as he slept, and she could see that he was getting thinner with each passing day. She wanted to tell him not to go away, not to leave them on their own, to say that they would never make it without him.

Miral came to see him every afternoon, but she didn't stop participating in the authorized demonstrations, although she went with less frequency. During that time, she became even more prudent; she would never want to be the cause of her father's final grief. Meanwhile, Jamal was sinking fast, but his mind remained clear, and he never complained about the spasms of pain caused by his disease. He loved to know that his daughters were nearby, and he was fond of showering them with advice and direction. Every time they entered his bedroom together, he would say that the sun had lit up his day. They would lie beside him on the bed and hug him for hours. Again and again, Rania would kiss her papa's cheeks, hollow though they were; his skin seemed extremely soft and transparent. Jamal continually implored his daughters to remain close and to take care of each other, no matter what directions their lives should take. He realized that Rania was neglecting her schoolwork, but he'd been unable to persuade her to apply herself more. In the end, Rania abandoned her studies altogether. Miral tried to dissuade her, but Rania was inflexible: “I'm not like you, Miral. Politics don't interest me, I don't like to study, and I don't have many friends here in Jerusalem. Next year I want to go and live in Haifa with Aunt Tamam.”

This seemed like a long-prepared speech, and there wasn't much that Miral could add. While searching for convincing words, she started to say, “Rania, listen—” but her sister interrupted her at once. “Forget it, Miral. I've already made up my mind, and there's nothing you can say to make me change it. Really, it's better this way.”

At school one afternoon, before she left the campus to visit her father, Miral went to speak to Hind about her sister, but instead she found only Miriam, the vice-principal, who was busy preparing some documents that needed Hind's signature. “She went out about half an hour ago. I don't know where she was headed,” Miriam told Miral. “Do you want to leave a message for her?”

“No, thanks. I'll see her another day.”

As she set out for home, Miral felt a little disappointed. Hind had to know that Rania had withdrawn from school, and yet she had done nothing to stop her. When she reached the house, Miral found Hind sitting at her father's bedside. Rania was in the kitchen, preparing some sage tea. Upon seeing Miral enter, the others stopped talking.

“How are you, Miral? Everything all right?” Hind asked, smiling good-naturedly. “I came here to speak with your father about Rania's situation, and we've agreed to let her do what she considers most appropriate.”

“What do you mean?” Miral couldn't believe that this combative woman, who wouldn't let her go to demonstrations, was now surrendering so easily to her sister!

“Miral.” Her father's voice was little more than a whisper. “For now, it's better this way.” His hand, scrawny as it was, could still exert a powerful grip.

Rania came in with the tea.

“If you want, Miral, I'd very much like to have a private talk with you, just the two of us. How do you feel about coming to see me tomorrow afternoon?” Hind asked. Her look did not betray the least concern. Miral nodded. “Good,” Hind said. “Then it's agreed. I'll expect you in my office tomorrow afternoon after classes.”

“All right,” Miral replied mournfully. Rania, by contrast, looked serene; as though liberated from a heavy burden, she moved swiftly and surely around the room, occasionally adjusting her father's bedclothes or the pillows supporting his back.