Miral (4 page)

D
uring the autumn of her life, Hind lived through a second youth, mentally speaking. Her leukemia progressed, ravaging her body, but news of the birth of a Palestinian state gave her great joy. She was especially impressed by the multitude of celebrations throughout the Arab neighborhoods that had followed the Oslo Accords.

From the terrace of Dar El-Tifel, near the tall magnolia tree that had stood with Hind through the most dramatic moments of Palestinian history, she had a view of Saladin Street, East Jerusalem's main commercial thoroughfare, which was packed with joyous, dancing people making their way toward Herod's Gate to enter the Old City. Hind would have liked to take to the streets with her fellow citizens, and this surreal vision induced her to abandon her usual prudence and hang the Palestinian flag from the balustrade of the terrace facing the city, despite the fact that, at the time, doing so was strictly forbidden.

Showing the flag from the terrace was a liberating gesture whose deeper significance she would grasp only later. At Dar El-Tifel, she had raised and educated generations of young Palestinians, and now those little girls, those young and older women, would help to administer the infant state. Her work was complete, she thought; her journey had reached its end. Now others would have to roll up their sleeves and build Palestine.

Hind's adopted daughter Hidaya interrupted this train of thought, bringing in a silver teapot and three green glasses with golden rims.

Hidaya had been brought to the orphanage many years before, as a three-month-old infant with neither parents nor identifying documents. Later Hind would tell her that the first time she took her in her arms she felt a deep attachment to her, a special feeling that in years to come would constitute the basis of a true motherdaughter relationship as well as a deep professional bond. Hind had offered her a finger, which the baby immediately squeezed hard with her little hand. It was a sign of the affection that was to bind them forever; Hind immediately adopted her, giving Hidaya her own family name, and later began teaching her all aspects of running the school, so that one day she might take Hind's place.

As Hidaya Husseini grew up, she distinguished herself by the scrupulous precision with which she carried out the little duties assigned to her and, later, through her strong passion for teaching. As she saw her daughter approach with the tea, Hind experienced once again the strength of the bond she had felt when Hidaya was still in diapers; and now, having come to the final chapter of her own life, she felt certain that she, like any self-respecting leader, had prepared her successor.

The tea was hot and very sweet, just the way she liked it. The fragrance of mint penetrated her nostrils and filled her with a sense of profound serenity.

A short while later, Hind's cousin Faisal Husseini appeared at the door. He was a robust man with a kindly air and the proud dark green eyes he had inherited from his warrior ancestors. As the highest Palestinian civil authority in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini had headed the Palestinian delegation during the negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords.

Faisal described what was happening in the Old City, the groups of people forming at every intersection, the automobiles honking their horns, the music resounding harmoniously in the narrow streets as all Arab Jerusalem reverberated with the joy of its citizens.

As he stood by the window, Faisal turned his gaze in the direction of the Jewish Quarter, tensing for an instant. This did not escape Hind, who asked him what he was worried about. Her cousin refilled his cup, and then confessed that the current celebrations put him in mind of a story told by his father, of the day when euphoria had spread throughout the other part of the city. It was November 29, 1947, the day that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 approved the division of Palestine into two states. And that was also the day of the
nakba
, the “catastrophe,” the beginning of the Palestinian diaspora. “In that instance,” he said, “there was a direct transition from firecrackers to bombs.”

Faisal went over to his cousin and sat down beside her, taking her right hand in his. “The Palestinian governing class has been in exile for many years, Hind, and they don't know how things have changed in recent times. They've never lived together with the Israelis. Frankly, I don't trust this optimism. It seems false to me, superficial.”

Hind tried to reassure her cousin—and, at the same time, herself—by saying that the worst was surely over. But Faisal went on, unconvinced. “Believe me,” he said, “what I'm saying isn't defeatism, it's only an objective analysis of the situation. Those people haven't been here all this time, and now they're back to collect the fruit of the work of others. I make no accusation; I'm simply stating the facts. They don't know what it means to live under Israeli occupation, to coexist with a people that suffered in the past and whose actions are dominated by fear. The new Palestinian state exists only on paper. Now we have to build it, and to do that, it's necessary not to forget the mistakes of the past that the PLO made in Jordan and Lebanon.” Faisal paused, poured himself more tea, and drank a long swallow. “Forgive me, Hind. On such a great day I should think only about rejoicing in our success.”

“My dear Faisal, I understand. You've always fought so that the Palestinian state could be established on a solid basis, with consideration for tradition and history. But maybe the situation isn't as negative as you think. Maybe people who have lived abroad and have no experience of the suffering we've witnessed will find it easier to create a functioning country that respects both Arabs and Jews. Maybe the new Palestinian governing class will surprise us.” Her words, however, were more an attempt to comfort her cousin than a faithful reflection of her feelings.

Hind asked Faisal to accompany her into the garden, where he was to listen to her verbal will.

“Remember,” she said after reading the will aloud, “the school must remain in the hands of the students. They're the ones best suited to run it. Hidaya will supervise the place—she's prudent and conscientious—but it will be necessary for you to watch over them.”

A short while later, Hind bade her cousin farewell. She knew he was a sensible man, and now that guns were finally being put back in their cabinets, there would be a need for men like him.

She returned to the terrace as the fading sunlight fell upon the Judean Hills. “Will I die in Palestine?” she wondered, while observing several of the older girls as they returned from the city. Among them she recognized Miral, one of her favorites, and beckoned to her.

Miral had finished her exams in May, and now, like every other orphan, she was continuing to live at the school while she planned for her life after Dar El-Tifel. Hind recognized many of the features of her own adolescence in Miral. She admired the girl's courage. Ever since she had become aware of Miral's political activity, Hind had counseled her to remember that what the new Palestinian state needed were not heroes prepared to sacrifice their lives for its sake but intelligent persons who would work for its good, because she was firmly convinced that prudence was the most precious virtue in politics. Hind considered Miral an authentic hope for the future of Palestine. She knew how attached the girl was to her people but also how much she wanted peace and how far removed she was from the fanaticism that was currently taking hold. Hind wanted her to have a chance.

Miral stood before Hind, her eyes shining and her face flushed with excitement. Her words were at first confused and her phrases heightened by emotion. Hind told her to calm down, to sit beside her, and to start again from the beginning. Miral confessed that she had often disobeyed Hind's orders about taking part in the intifada, and she described the demonstrations she'd participated in and the meetings she'd arranged to warn the girls of the methods used by the Israeli secret services to recruit informers. With a touch of pride, Miral revealed that she had helped many students become involved in the Palestinian uprising. But despite these revelations, Hind felt that Miral still hadn't disclosed the entirety of her involvement.

Hind had every reason to be concerned about the extent of Miral's activism. For one thing, the girl had been caught not long before, and Hind's prohibitions had obviously been reiterated in vain. Although Hind felt like a worried mother whose daughter was about to embark on her first journey alone, she was touched by the girl's frankness.

Now that her time at the school was drawing to a close, Hind's favorite student had put aside the logic that once governed their respective roles and demonstrated that she trusted Hind—even if she left out a couple of details.

Hind couldn't get to sleep that night. She listened to the street noises, the shouting of her still-euphoric neighbors as they returned home from a day of celebrations. The following morning, Jerusalem would awaken as it did each day, wrapped in a veil of instability. Perhaps it was the city's position that made it at once so appealing and so fragile, situated between Europe and Africa, between the desert and the sea.

 

Hind died one year and two months after the Oslo Accords. At Hind's funeral, Miral was among the mourners, and her sister, Rania, was at her side. Miral had returned to Dar El-Tifel for the first time since she left school. The year before she had watched Hind get into a car and travel down the avenue leading to the city for the last time, and as she did, she remembered walking along that same avenue with her sister and their father when they first arrived at the school.

The funeral was not only attended by the principal civil and Palestinian authorities but also by many women. This reflected an issue to which Hind had devoted her life—women's rights. On this day they participated in a ritual whose chief roles were usually taken only by men.

Hind often told her schoolgirls that the true leader was the one who left heirs; as part of their upbringing, she had taught them to carry on her work so that the orphanage school would not die with her. She would have been happy, on that day of lament, to see how her teachings were realized.

As the coffin was carried from the mosque, the women, whose heads were covered with white veils as a sign of purity, bore traditional gifts—rice, flour, salt, meat, fruit, clothes, and money—for the family of the deceased, which included the girls of the school. When the funeral procession arrived at the cemetery, a large group of women, defying the precepts of the Koran and the authority of the mufti, refused to abandon Hind's body at the burial place.

A heated argument ensued between the mufti and one of the women, an older teacher at Dar El-Tifel who was well known to the mufti; she had been a student at the school in her youth and had spent almost all her life at Hind's side. “Zeina,” the mufti said, “please don't make me use force. Go now.” But with the same proud look she'd had in her eyes when Hind spoke to her for the first time—after she and the other fifty-four children from Deir Yassin had been abandoned at the wall of the Old City—Zeina stood her ground, whereupon the mufti tried to induce her to leave by means of a gentle nudge. The crowd was struck dumb when Zeina responded by giving the city's highest Muslim religious authority a slap in the face.

When all was said and done, Zeina and the other women got their way and remained by Hind's side until the end, demonstrating how that extraordinary woman had, through her example, taught them not only patience but also tenacity.

The Arab community of Jerusalem felt such grief at Hind's passing that the period of mourning lasted ten days instead of the usual three. Every evening a muezzin went to Hind's resting place to pray. For several weeks, articles and poems dedicated to her appeared in the daily newspapers, and many ordinary citizens paid homage at her grave, which was always adorned with flowers. People brought her roses, carnations, and olive branches—the plants she had loved most.

Among the last things she had whispered to her girls before dying—words that would remain etched in their memory long after the failure of the treaty—was that peace was not only possible, it was vital. For both sides.

A
fter helping her younger sister, Tamam, finish her homework and her mother mend the fishing nets, Nadia remained seated for the remainder of the afternoon on the steps leading down from the little hill in front of her house in the middle of nowhere, an area known as Halisa. From that spot, she had a view of the entire city of Haifa and could glimpse the sea amid all the white houses and new buildings that were springing up haphazardly around the harbor. Nadia's father was a fisherman who had drowned, a few months before, during a storm. At the funeral, Salwa, Nadia's mother, stood beside the coffin and announced to her community that she was expecting a baby. Soon thereafter, Nadia, her pregnant mother, and her eight-year-old sister moved into a smaller house. With Nadia's help, her mother continued to repair fishing nets after the baby was born, and Nadia cleaned offices two afternoons a week, but their lives became more and more difficult. On weekends they would gather prickly pears and go to the beach to sell them to passersby and tourists. There were many days when Nadia and her family ate only a single meal consisting of a piece of homemade bread sprinkled with olive oil and
zatar
, a mixture of ground oregano and sesame seeds.

A sudden noise distracted Nadia from her daydream. She turned around to see a short man with extremely pale skin, an unkempt beard, and an incipient paunch that was pressing against his black leather belt. The man stared at her without moving or saying a word; his eyes were tiny, and Nadia didn't like the look they gave her. She was about to turn around and find the sea again, when the man called her by name.

Stepping closer, he asked if she recognized him, then embraced her, kissing her on the cheek with moist lips that made her shiver in disgust. As she later learned, the man's name was Nimer, and he worked in the port. Although he said he had attended her father's funeral, Nadia couldn't recall ever having seen him before.

 

According to Arab tradition, it was not good for a woman's reputation if she and her daughters lived alone, for the common belief held that a husband guaranteed social protection. Thus, eight months after the funeral, Nadia's mother got married again, this time to Nimer, the man who had stood in front of Nadia on the hill. He moved in with them in their neighborhood in Halisa.

Nimer was a shrewd businessman who dearly loved money and cultivated good relations with the fishermen of the city. He started managing the net-mending operation, keeping for himself all the proceeds from the work, which Nadia and her mother continued to perform by themselves. One of his strongest convictions was that his wife and stepdaughter were insufficiently productive, and so he had Nadia drop out of school when she was only twelve. “Work strengthens the mind and the body,” he liked to say, as he watched his stepdaughter bustling about the nets from daybreak till dusk.

Nadia's little sister Tamam was only eight, but Nimer decided that the time was right for her to drop out of school as well. She was already rather skilled at knotting nets, and he saw no reason why she shouldn't do more of it.

His wife's efforts to dissuade him were in vain. “Another pair of hands is always needed,” he said, justifying himself by declaring that he had taken on four more mouths to feed. He constantly reminded the girls that he had done his part; now it was up to them to demonstrate their gratitude.

Nadia wondered what she should be grateful for, since she and her mother and sister were earning money for him, while he did no work, spent his time gambling, and forbade them to buy anything except simple food and a few articles of secondhand clothing. However, observing that her mother made no objection, and knowing full well that her stepfather, when he wished to be particularly convincing, would use his belt, Nadia ended up giving in.

At those moments, when their backs were burning under the leather strap, the girls would look at their mother and wonder why she did nothing to defend them. She, in turn lowering her eyes and covering her ears to block out the screams, would run into the adjoining room. A woman of little education, who cowered before her husband's authority, she thought that putting a good face on a bad business was better than running the risk of finding herself and her girls alone again. The result was that she sided with her husband in every circumstance, remaining loyal and devoted to him and sacrificing her daughters.

 

Their first year together passed in a sad, recurring cycle of domestic violence—little instances in which Nimer bullied everyone while Nadia's mother became smaller and smaller, less and less present. The girls grew accustomed to the rage their stepfather systematically took out on them and could sense when it was about to arrive, like a wave that swells up before it crashes into the rocks. They recognized it from the expression on his face when he came home, from his narrowed eyes and clenched lips. At such times, the slightest wrong move or a single misjudged word would suffice to unleash all his fury.

One morning Nimer entered the bathroom by mistake while Nadia was taking a shower. Surprised, he stood motionless in the doorway and watched her for a length of time she found interminable. In her embarrassment, Nadia tried awkwardly to cover herself with her arms and hands. After a few seconds, her stepfather turned around and went away.

That same evening, he entered the girls' bedroom and slipped into bed with Nadia, who had recently turned thirteen. The bed creaked, and Nadia felt the man's whole weight bearing down on the mattress. A heavy odor enveloped the room, a mixture of tobacco and sweat that penetrated her nostrils. “Hi, Nadia,” he whispered, kissing her on the cheek, and she was conscious of the same sensation of clamminess and filth that had disgusted her the first time he kissed her. Then he began to touch her, and Nadia felt his rough hands descending lower and lower. She remained still the entire episode—pervaded by a feeling of nausea and fear of something she didn't understand, breathing only at intervals, trying not to make the slightest noise and not to think about the odor that was robbing her of air. Finally, without a word, her stepfather went away, closing the door behind him.

Nadia couldn't fall asleep that night. She felt sick and somehow dirty, without knowing why. She lay stretched out, her legs stiff, her body trembling incessantly, until the first rays of the sun lit up the summit of Mount Carmel. She knew that her stepfather would leave soon and waited until she heard the door close. Then, slowly, she got up. Her muscles ached from the rigid position she had maintained all morning.

Nadia filled the tub with steaming hot water and immersed herself in it. Instantly she began to tremble again. She placed her arms around her drawn-up legs and burst into tears. Her mother, passing the bathroom on her way to the kitchen, saw her daughter but asked no questions. Nadia scrubbed herself with a sponge until her skin was red and irritated. Then her mother reappeared in the doorway and reminded her to bring the prickly pears to the beach and to pick up the nets from the fishermen.

While she combed her hair, Nadia looked out the bathroom window at the lower part of the city. The clear morning sky allowed her to see Haifa Bay shimmering in all possible shades of red and yellow. Some noises rose from the port, the sounds of a ship docking or putting out to sea, but the neighborhood was still relatively silent, despite the fact that the previous night her adolescence had been shattered.

At eight o'clock, she woke up her two sisters, then fixed breakfast for Tamam and gave the baby, Ruba, some milk. At that moment, she made a decision: she would find some way to get out of that house.

 

The years went by, and none of the changes Nadia had dreamed of took place.

She became one of the most beautiful girls in the city, and her stepfather continued to visit her at night. Nadia let herself be violated, silently harboring a hatred that was barely masked by her deep black eyes. There had been a time, a few years earlier, when she had tried to rebel, threatening her stepfather and swearing to tell her mother everything, but a beating with his belt was the only reply he gave her.

One day she noticed Nimer staring at her little sister Tamam. Nadia knew that gaze very well, and a blind rage came over her. Gathering her courage, she told her mother the whole story while they were mending nets together. She didn't expect her mother to do anything to protect her. Perhaps she only hoped to find some solace for what had become an intolerable suffering. What she certainly did not expect was that her mother would spring to the man's defense and declare that it was surely Nadia's fault for provoking and seducing him.

If there was one thing for which Nadia had developed a profound intolerance as she was growing up, it was weak women who submitted meekly to the injustices perpetrated by their husbands and to the rules of their community. When she heard her mother's reaction, Nadia decided that the time had come for her to leave home.

She went to bed feeling as she had felt so many years before, on the night when she had lost not only her innocence but also the possibility of ever being happy. She lay awake for hours, under the covers, and then she got out of bed, trying not to wake up her sisters. For a long time, she gazed at them as they slept peacefully. At least part of the reason why she had put up with all those terrible years had been her desire to remain at her sisters' side, but she couldn't take it anymore.

She waited for her stepfather to get up, and then she confronted him. “I've told Mama everything, and now I'm going away. But if you dare to lay so much as a finger on one of my sisters, I'll make sure you pay a heavy price.”

The man stared at her for a moment, flabbergasted by her self-assurance, a quality he had not recognized in her. Then his eyes regained their usual cruelty, and he replied to her with a sneer: “What do you think, you little whore? A fruit tree grows in my garden and I can't taste the fruit?”

Nadia grabbed a gas lamp and threw it at him, but he dodged it. Then she went to her room, and while Nimer laughed scornfully on the other side of the door, she took a few articles of clothing from a drawer, caressed her still-sleeping sisters with her eyes, tucked a little bag under her arm, and headed for the door. Her mother ran after her. She caught Nadia's arm and pulled it, trying to embrace her, with tears in her eyes. “Please,” she said, “don't tell anyone what happened. If you do, you'll ruin our reputation. Think of your sisters—their reputations will be ruined, too.”

“You disgust me,” Nadia said. Her eyes were also full of tears, but they were tears of anger. “You should have protected me, and you did nothing.”

“I am doing something. I'm staying at my husband's side, because that's my proper place, and your sisters are too young to go away with you. Here, take this.”

She handed her daughter some money, which Nadia snatched from her hand, judging the offering the least her mother could do for her. She considered her mother as guilty as her stepfather, and she hated her at the same time that she pitied her. The year was 1959, and Nadia knew that it wasn't at all easy for an Arab woman in Israel to rebel against her husband. But Nadia had no choice; she had to leave, because the alternative to leaving would have been death. Nothing on earth could have made her bear the rape, the violence, the tyranny one minute longer.

She raced down the hill and away from that house like a madwoman chased by ghosts. She didn't turn around.