Mornings in Jenin (10 page)
1967
A YOUNG MAN, A STUDENT at the University of Bethlehem, bursts through the doors of my classroom in the middle of my lecture on polar and parametric curves. Under normal circumstances, I might welcome the interruption. But not this day. Not for this explosion of news in the middle of my lecture.
“The Jews are bombing Egypt! There is war!” he yells, and leaves, running down the hall.
War. The word detonates a baggage of dread, which I have lugged on my back since I was five years old. Since 1948, when war and I were formally introduced.
It makes my blood run cold.
By the time I regain my bearings, my students have cleared out of the classroom in a frenzy, rushing beneath a sound banner of “Allaho akbar.”
I must get back to Jenin
.
Throngs are already filling the hallways and streets of Bethlehem. I run, pushing and shoving my way toward the dormitory where I rent a small room run by the Omar Bin al Khattab Mosque.
Haje Um Naseem opens the peep flap of the ancient wooden doors and closes it quickly when she sees me. In a moment, preceded by the clang of unlocking bolts, the heavy door swings open, slowly. Haje Um Naseem’s tiny frame is dwarfed by the immense door as she waves me in.
“Yousef, ya Wliedi!” she says nervously. “Have you heard the news?”
This is the first time I hear her utter my name. In my two years of living in Bethlehem, she has always called me “Wliedi.” Son. She brings me leftover food daily when I return from work. “Here, ya Wliedi. Eat, eat,” she says kindly.
There is charity in everything Haje Um Naseem does or says. Perfectly erect, she is no more than four foot eight. She swims in her oversized thobe and today she drowns in worry.
“I have to get back to Jenin, haje,” I say, moving quickly past her.
She follows me, extending her neck forward to monitor the floor so her hidden legs, keeping double time, do not trip on her thobe.
“Ya Wliedi! It is too dangerous to go now. The trip is too long and who knows what could happen in the next hour. They say Jordan and Syria are already on the move to defend Egypt, and Iraq is coming too,” she says.
“My family needs me,” I say, packing a small bag while Haje Um Naseem watches me from the doorway.
“I’ll call for Abu Maher to take you. You will never find a taxi in this mess,” she says, turning on her hidden legs. She is right. Most vehicles are already fleeing to Jordan.
Haje Um Naseem reappears in the doorway as I am leaving. She looks serious and authoritative. “Abu Maher will have the car ready in five minutes. For any reason, if he is unable to return tonight to Bethlehem, you will make sure he remains with your family in Jenin. Here,” she says, shoving a wad of dinars into my shirt pocket.
I need the money. I have less than twenty fils in my pocket and no way to pay for gasoline. But my pride moves my hand to return the money.
“Wliedi! I’ll not have you disobey me. Anyway, it is the unused portion of your rent, which you may repay when you come back. Go, Abu Maher is waiting. Allah protect you both.”
I kiss the top of her head, on her hijab, and leave.
1967
DAVID HAD BEEN HOME less than an hour when Yarel, a high school buddy, came with reports of a particular Arab prisoner.
“The son of a whore should be dead from the beatings. He’s tough . . . ,” Yarel said, beginning what sounded like a long irrelevant story.
“Why are you telling me? I don’t care,” David interrupted.
“Well, I made the boys leave off beating him . . . ,” Yarel started again.
“I don’t care. Here, have some kugel. Ma made it.”
Yarel’s serious tone did not waver. “David, you need to come see this Arab. It’s like . . . he’s your twin.”
“Oh yeah?” David was amused. “You saying I look like a goy, shithead?”
“I think you should come with me tomorrow.” He leaned closer. “Take away the scar, and your faces are . . . the same.”
David swallowed, searching his friend’s face for some hint of a practical joke. “Okay. Pick me up tomorrow.”
In a cell with fifteen others, Yousef crouched naked on the precipice of life, his hands tied behind his back, his face hooded, as David and Yarel signed in at the Ramle prison, overcrowded now with detainees rounded up at random after the war.
“That’s him, the one with the red paint on his arm. I marked him so we could find him,” Yarel said, pulling the hood off Yousef ’s head.
David looked down at a man, black and blue, gashed and clotted. His eyes were buried in bloated flesh and his groin was swollen.
“What the fuck, Yarel! You made me come all the way out here for this?” David fumed. He had only a limited leave from the army and Yarel had dragged him on an hour-long ride to the prison for nothing.
“Fuck you, David. He wasn’t so swollen yesterday. Believe me, I’d rather be home with my girlfriend on my day off instead of here.” Yarel was convincing. “Do what you want. But I think you should come back. I have a few friends here. I’ll see if they can transfer this one to the clinic. In a few days he should be fine.”
That evening at the dinner table, David recounted his day with Yarel at the prison in Ramle. Moshe was home, eating with the family as he rarely did, and Jolanta was busy at the kitchen counter, as she usually was.
“Yarel said the Arab and I look like twins,” David said, biting off a piece of bread.
A plate crashed to the floor in the kitchen. David turned to the sound and saw Jolanta stiffen.
“Are you okay, Ma?”
“I don’t want you to go back to that prison.”
“I wasn’t planning on going back. But I don’t understand why you’re upset . . .”
Moshe looked down at his plate, slammed his fork to it, and stood, pushing his chair back. “Let him go, Jolanta. He has to go sometime.” With that Moshe left. He walked heavily down the stairs, let the gate slam as he left their courtyard, turned the corner, strode three blocks farther, entered his refuge, and called out to the bartender, “Ben, pour me the usual. On the rocks.”
Moshe had wanted David to know what had happened all those years ago. His gift to Jolanta in 1948 had grown into a secret too heavy to carry. That truth was not a butterfly but a demon—a demon with the beautiful face of an Arab woman who had served him lamb. Whose sons, one at her chest and the other at her legs, had moved with her, and who still cried, “Ibni, ibni!” inside Moshe’s head.
He had not wanted all this. He had wanted wholeness: a homeland, a wife, a family. He had fought to save the Jewish people. But at his heels now were the awful evictions, the killings, the rapes. Moshe could not face all those faces, their voices. He found so little rest in his life. What repose his heart could extract was in the solace of drink. So he walked every day around the corner, then three blocks farther, and entered his refuge to silence the demons and himself.
David left with Yarel a few days later and signed in at the Ramle prison early that morning. The tight sound of their army boots echoed off the dingy walls as they walked toward the clinic. In a moment, David stood over Yousef ’s bed. His swelling had lessened and an IV bag dripped fluid into his arm, still marked with the red paint. Less than six inches separated their bodies, and in that space fit nearly twenty years, a war, two religions, a holocaust, the Nakbe, two mothers, two fathers, a scar, and a secret with wings flapping in the slow butterfly way.
David felt the Arab’s wrist. “He has a pulse.”
Swollen eyelids opened slowly and David’s scar parted the haze of physical pain. They beheld each other for nearly twenty seconds. Twenty eternities, wherein David lingered, dangling by the hooks of too many wrong questions.
Is it possible they
captured a Jew by mistake? A Jew who is related to me? A Jew who came to Palestine without knowing his relatives had also survived?
He searched his mind for answers, opening and closing the doors of memories for a clue to who, or what—if anything— this prisoner might be to him.
A tear slid from the corner of the Arab’s eye.
Ismael!
He reached his hand toward the soldier and fell unconscious again, his arm dropping to the side of the bed.
1967
I CHANGE.
My world changes, beginning with the day Haje Um Naseem calls me by my name. I go back to Jenin and have to push my way through the crowd into our home. My sister is stiff with fear against the wall. She cannot see me and I want to go to her. I want to speak to her, to pull her in to absorb the fear away, but I am pulled away by my father. He hands a weapon to me from his small cache in the kitchen hole to defend against the fury closing in on the earth. For the first time in my life, I hold a gun.
I need to find Fatima. You cannot go, my mother says. Mama, an experienced victim of war, is gathering supplies and mapping out hiding places with other women. She tells me that Fatima has gone with her mother and sisters to her uncle’s house in Ramallah. Then she adds, she’ll be safe there.
In the days that follow, I am once again surrounded by fire and fleeing souls. By fear coiled around rage. I fire my weapon, but in the moment of truth, when the test of my courage looks me in the eyes, I cannot take the life of another. I am afraid of violating life. Afraid of losing mine. So I walk with the others, my arms high in surrender. One of the Jewish soldiers pulls my face, searching it with amazement. I am puzzled then by the disbelief in his eyes. But now I understand it was recognition.
In that week I see how familiar words can break like glass and reassemble into goblins that waylay the mind with their claws. “Example” was but a pebble. I had heard and said it countless times before: “for example.” Such an insignificant and mediocre word invades the happy days of my youth and steals the memory of playing soccer with young Jamal, whom the Jews make an “example” right before my eyes. I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old “example” and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power, despite reason or history.
1967
HERE IN THIS DANK place, I live on the love of Fatima and memories of our future. These are the threads onto which I cling for breath. My body is stunned by the dialects of torture. I have passed the threshold of pain into numbness. I cannot see, for my eyes are swollen shut. I lie here, bound to myself with rope, and I think something or everything is broken. I think I will die. I think of Fatima, my love, and I can smell the jasmine in her hair. I can see her lashes float through the air when she glides her eyes, mischievously, sinfully, toward me in the crowded market. An urn is perfectly balanced on her head and it does not fall when she seductively pulls her embroidered scarf to cover her lips before looking away. Suddenly, she turns her head back, to be sure I am watching. I am thrilled and my breath goes dry in an open mouth. She is walking for me. The urn on her head saunters with her and I am struck by the symmetry of her posture. I imagine her dancing with the urn balanced on her head as her hips and belly curve into each other in a private performance for me. I read her letters again, scribbled with ribbons in my memory:
My love, my mother and sisters are going to Jerusalem on Wednesday evening until Friday. Meet me on Thursday before the dawn prayers in our usual place. I miss you unbearably. It has been two weeks!
I hear sounds around me. Soldiers are feeling for a pulse in my neck. Water is thrown on me and I am sober now. No matter; I return to Fatima, the link that holds my body to its breath.
I see her in the peach orchard beneath the clear sky of the Orient, beneath my body, which I fear will explode with desire. She whispers into my lips, “When we are married, Yousef. Not now.” But she lets me taste her softness, leading me into the hot paradise of her mystery. I take her breasts into my hands, keeping pace with the thrash of her heart’s beating. She moves her body in a web of inexperience, passion, and the fear of guilt and sin. Her body exhales into mine a declaration of love and it calms my fever. I rise over her, absorbing her nakedness, her sacrifice of culture for love, her submission to me. I taste her breasts, gingerly, and feel the earth’s spin in my heart. I make unspoken promises to God to deserve her love and protect her until eternity. I find the virgin grail that will someday bear my children, and I drink from her cup. She rises abruptly, alarmed by the surging ascent of pleasure. I kiss her lips. “Trust me,” I say, and she does. Her back curves with the arc of the rising sun and she tumbles, moaning, in my arms. Soldiers wrestle me from my memory of Fatima. They speak to one another and leave. Soon I am transferred to a clinic. I go where I am led and wherever I am, I return to the place in my mind where Fatima lives.
The swelling has lessened and the electric bulb seeps into my eyes. I find light for the first time in an eternity and it illuminates a scar from another life. The scar I drew with carelessness onto the face of my brother, Ismael. But Ismael is dead. A Jewish soldier, whose face is mine, has taken my brother’s scar. I think I am dreaming. I reach my hand to touch. But he backs away. Later, not now, I am sure that it was not a dream. Ismael lives. My brother is a Jew. He is an Israeli soldier.
Oh, Father, where are you? We were separated and I wonder, have the Jews taken you, too? Are you somewhere in this prison? In this clinic?
I am still alive. I am returned to the peach orchard where I had discovered heaven in Fatima’s skin. The camp is destroyed. The refugees have been made refugees again and I cannot bear the welcoming back. The graffiti of torture on my body is indignant and will have nothing to do with celebration. I see soldiers perched on lookout posts and my heart fills with hatred. Strangely, it is the first time I feel so. But I am certain it will not be the last.
There are too many people around me and I search their faces for Fatima. Um Jamal comes to me in search of her son and I cannot bear her anxiety, the pain of what she knows deep in her heart. I cannot look her in the eyes. I want her gone from my sight. I cannot tell her that Jamal’s life was taken to give meaning to the word “example.” A meaning to which it has no right. I cannot tell her that the child she carried, fed, and loved is buried inside a word, which takes its new form from Jamal’s smile and big ears.
There is gunfire and people let us be. Mother is stoic, though I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her. My little sister, Amal, is cowering in the corner. Something has crawled into her eyes and made them cavernous. Though I want nothing more than solitude, the force of Father’s absence compels me to reach for Amal, and she comes in hurried need into my chest, squeezing my bruised body as if she will fasten herself to me for all time.
Father has not been seen since the war. The sky leans on my fractured ribs as I conceive the inconceivable. That Father, the man I thought could never die, is dead. I lean back, a pillow at last, and hear the words of Rumi, murmuring in the susurrus of Father’s breath:
How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water? . . .
What hurts you, blesses you . . .
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
I can explain this, but it would break
the glass cover on your heart,
and there’s no fixing that.
Are these enough words,
or shall I squeeze more juice from this?
And in my mind I tell Father what I have learned. Ismael is a Yahoodi, a Sahyouni who fights for Israel.