Mornings in Jenin (26 page)
Amal and Huda feigned repulsion, each knowing full well the other’s interest, and took turns at the window, pretending to check up on Yousef, who slept in the stupor of pain.
Huda returned wide-eyed from her turn at the window to report a new development. “Your brother is awake. I think they’re talking about the bad magazine.”
Back in spying position, they struggled to hear the exchange between Yousef and Ameen, but they could decipher only bits. There was talk of “that Yahoodi” and she heard Yousef say, to the disbelief and consternation of Ameen, “He’s my brother, Ismael.”
Huda heard it all and she cried when Amal warned her, sternly, not to reveal Yousef ’s secret, even though neither was entirely sure what the secret was. But they kept it to themselves, not for loyalty, but rather because they would not have known what to repeat.
Ismael was dead. Everybody knew that!
David listened, longing to go back in time. He would have done things differently. He would have taken Yousef in his arms and called him “brother.”
Would that have made the difference? Would Yousef have married Fatima and remained in Palestine? Would history not have happened?
So many questions. At the end of each was where David lingered. Now he turned his sorrow, as big as his life, to his sister, Amal. “Was that the first time you learned of my existence, when you overheard Yousef and Ameen?” he asked.
“Yes and no.” She attempted to explain that, for her, he had lived in the mist of other people’s memories. “I was born years after you disappeared. To me, you never seemed real, even after I learned of Yousef ’s discovery.”
David inhaled, swallowing words he was too vulnerable to utter, and freed a sigh instead. Then, with a soft intensity, he asked, “And now?”
“Now, what?”
“Am I still an abstraction?”
No
, she thought.
Of course not. You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion
. In the complicity of siblinghood, of aloneness and unrootedness, Amal loved David instinctively, despite herself and despite what he had done or who he had become. She ached to gather him in an embrace and absolve the pangs of conscience that tormented him. She wanted to fill a seat at his table and share in his loneliness. But all that left on her lips was an arid, “I don’t know.”
2001
ON JANUARY 20, 2001, a disbelieving and fascinated David locked his attention on the letter that I had not unfolded since Huda had handed it to me thirty-three years earlier in the hospital bed where I lay recovering from the bullet. I never showed that letter to anyone until now. Even in 1983, when FBI and CIA agents swarmed into my life demanding information, I did not divulge the letter’s existence. Not because it concealed relevant evidence, except of my brother’s humanity—but simply because it was mine.
Now I produced it for my brother David, who seemed to eye it as a historic document, an academic thing for study, for forensic science, or for museums and private collectors. At David’s impersonal gaze on my bundle of family relics, I almost returned the letter to its box. But the first fold revealed the date; it was an impossible coincidence that I would meet David and open Yousef ’s letter on the exact day of the year that Yousef had written it thirty-three years earlier.
In that moment of implausibility, I heard my father’s voice:
Thus the tears flowed down on my breast,
Remembering days of love;
The tears wetted even my sword-belt,
So tender was my love.
A longing crystallized in the still air of my Pennsylvania home where I sat across from the brother who had grown up in a different world only a few geographical miles from Jenin. I watched my arm extend the letter toward David and saw the physical evidence of time intersecting itself in that gesture, as Huda had extended her reluctant arm thirty-three years ago, with that same piece of paper, folded along the same tragic lines.
As David read the words of Yousef, his initial intrigue changed to something personal and he began to cry. In his tears I glimpsed, but did not fully understand, the grim spirits of a mistaken identity.
“Did you ever suspect? I mean before Moshe told you?” I asked.
“I always knew something was not quite kosher.” He paused, grinning at the accidental humor. His lip raised on the left side only, as Yousef ’s had. Old Maple swayed outside, her leaves brushing at the window to the sibilant rush of winds.
“I guess it started when I was twelve, sometime before my bar mitzvah when my cousin Ilan told me in the heat of a fight that I was ‘not a real Jew,’ that he’d overheard his parents remark in private that I was a goy who could never be of the People.”
Shaken by the incident, David had taken the matter to his mother, who had reacted with characteristic tenderness, enfolding his worries in the vast warmth of her protection, and adding, in an acerbic footnote, “Ilan is stupid and always has been.” That had been the end of it for a while, but David had learned many years later that his mother had gone to Ilan’s parents that day and had unleashed her wrath at their doorstep in a string of invectives and curses, leaving David’s aunt and uncle struck dumb.
David smiled, imagining the look on their faces as his mother exhaled fire at them. “She must have made quite an impression because my uncle practically paid for my entire bar mitzvah,” he chuckled.
“What was her name? Your mother.”
“Jolanta. It means violet in Polish”—he smiled—“and that was her favorite color.”
David painted a portrait of Jolanta as a warm, engaging woman whose wardrobe could have been mistaken for a field of wildflowers. She was short and grew round with age and had “the thickest eyelashes you’ve ever seen.” Always, she wore her dresses to mid-knee, short sleeves in the summer, long sleeves in the winter, with matching shoes and purse, and if a dress had no purple or pink hues in its flowery pattern, she pinned to it a small bundle of fresh violets, which she grew indoors.
“She loved to cook and feed anyone who walked into our home. As cliché as it sounds, cookies were always ready on the table when I came with friends from school. On holidays she used to prepare huge spreads and invite as many people as our home could seat, plus a few extra. She arranged those gatherings and cooked with much enthusiasm and love.”
David spoke of Jolanta with palpable devotion. In my mind, she was everything I had wanted Mama to be—loving, attentive, and affectionate. She had been a young girl of seventeen, frightened and weak, when Allied soldiers had liberated her camp. Her entire family had been murdered during the holocaust of World War Two. The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.
“What about your mother? What was she like?” David asked.
A sunless spirit arose from within and draped itself over me like an emaciated coat of armor, ready to battle any ill scrutiny of Mama’s memory. The incessant motion of Mama’s hand, which had lived independently of her will, the taut clench of her jaw, her impervious solitude, efficient midwifery, and stoic character would not compare favorably to the flowery nurturing of Jolanta, complete with matching accessories and cookies after school.
David’s question was a call to arms. It was Dalia and me against Jolanta and David. Dalia and me against the world. And I laid bare the fundamental truth of Mama’s heart, which I had found in the endless early-morning reflections of exile, peeling back the layers, the personal fortress that she and destiny had conspired to construct.
“She loved beyond measure,” I said.
That declaration rolled from my lips of its own volition, as truth gushes forth once it is acknowledged, as the air erupts from a drowning man’s lungs once he is rescued.
“When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, she loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from the tragic rains of her fate.
David listened attentively, grateful for a sketch of the woman who had given him birth.
“She lost something fundamental the day in 1967 when she thought I had been killed in the explosion that tore away the kitchen where I was cowering in a hole with my friend Huda and baby cousin Aisha,” I continued. “I suppose that was the last straw. Over the years I’ve often wondered with enormous guilt if I could have saved her.” If I had not gone off with Sister Marianne to Bethlehem, leaving her in that tent hospital alone with the demons that had surely begun to feast on her.
Had I remained, embraced her, would that have made the difference?
From the tin box where I kept Yousef ’s letter, I removed Mama’s silk scarf and the embroidered breast portion of her favorite thobe, the inanimate remains of her brief years on earth. I had wrapped them in plastic covering, which had preserved her scent over the decades. David held Mama’s clothes to his face and inhaled.
“She didn’t bathe much.” I smiled, suddenly and for the first time overcome by what seemed like the exquisite charm of Mama’s less than desirable personal habits. In that lighthearted interstice, I understood that Dalia, Um Yousef, the untiring mother who gave far more than she ever received, was the tranquil, quietly toiling well from which I have drawn strength all my life. I had to travel to the other end of the earth, improvise like a dog, and bathe in my own grief and inadequacy to understand how her persevering spirit had bestowed on me determined will.
“What happened to her?” David asked.
“She sank into dementia not long after the war in sixty-seven.”
But I could not explain to David that her condition had been nothing short of a merciful kiss from God.
Dalia matured in her youth, searching the darkness of her nights for the son she had lost, reproaching herself for not knowing where to find him. She did not love for the pleasure of fulfillment or gratitude. She loved against her will. She took little sleep from the night, lying awake on her foam mat until Baba returned and she, hiding behind feigned sleep, could be sure he ate the food she had left for him. She poured fantastic energy into her daily industry of cleaning, cooking, embroidering, washing, folding, birthing, planting—and she prayed five times each day, religiously. When Ammo Darweesh needed a wheelchair, she secretly sold the second of her twin ankle bracelets and laid the money on my uncle’s doorstep. She let me share in that secret. She watched over us all, carefully and unobtrusively from the shadows, hardening or recoiling into her mystery if anyone approached her with tender thanks. Alas, her heart was not of ice at all, but of a roiling lava contained by her own will, held back with her iron jaw and tireless fluttering hand, and the contents of that heart were seldom betrayed. Perhaps what made reality fade from her mind was not the unending string of tragedies that befell Palestinians, but rather, an immeasurable love that could not find repose.
“I used to wish Mama was different. More like Jolanta, perhaps,” I said, remembering Dalia, remembering how I had once thought her a selfish, hard, efficient mother who reared me from a cool remove.
“I loved Jolanta. She was the only mother I ever knew. But she allowed me to live a profound lie that came to much personal harm, for the sake of uncontested motherhood,” David admitted, as if to protect Dalia from an unfavorable comparison. He paused and took a drink. “Jolanta loved me, too. I have no doubts. But love cannot reconcile with deception.”
He gathered hurt from his distant stare and focused it in a grip around his glass, placing it on the table as if to mark the spot wherein lay the betrayal.
Love cannot reconcile with deception
. And it cannot become inured to an existence paid for with the currency of another’s misery—my mother’s misery.
“When you were talking about Jolanta, her demonstrative adoration, I felt envious of you,” I confessed. “But I think now, contrary to what I believed in the stupidity of youth, no other woman than Dalia could have been a finer mother to me.”
2001
“AT LEAST YOU KNEW who you were and where you came from,” David said, motioning for another beer.
“I have to run to the store for more,” I said. “Want to come?” “Of course.”
The car ride was difficult, a new environment to conquer together before we could reach the same level of comfort we had attained in my home. But it was a short ride, so we filled it with niceties. “Beautiful town,” David said.
“That’s the Delaware River.”
“Snow doesn’t accumulate like this in Israel.”
Israel
.
“It does in Lebanon.”
Lebanon
.
Back at home, another beer and my long-lost brother was enough at ease to recall the difficult trip he had made with Jolanta to her hometown in Poland.
“Other than the day she died, seeing the death camp where she lost everything was the saddest time of my life,” he said.
“I’m going to have another cup of coffee. Like another beer?” I offered.
“Please.” He looked at me, and I looked back without judgment.
He told me about Moshe’s confession. How it had unraveled him.
Here he was now, decades later, holding it together with
something stronger than kahwe
.
“I tried to pretend my father had taken his secret to the grave,” David said, swallowing more from the glass. “But his words flooded every moment of silence, every hour of insomnia.”
“And Jolanta?”
“I felt she had betrayed me,” he said. An unsettled score in the lap of the deep affection he held for her. With Moshe, it was different. “My father and I weren’t as close,” he said, “and also, because he did tell me, I could let it go. He told me everything. Even things he didn’t have to tell. The day he confessed, I felt closer to my father than I had in all my life.”
Moshe had used his last breaths to reveal the past and to beg his son’s forgiveness. He had spoken of his dreams, the aspirations of the Jewish people for a homeland. He had unveiled the secrets of the Irgun, the atrocities they had committed to run Palestinians out of their homes. “Mercy was a luxury we could not afford,” Moshe had said. He had described the faces that haunted him. “Too many, my son.” The Arab woman whose ankle bracelets had chimed when she served him lamb. How he had learned to love her Arab child and had turned to drink to hush her cries of “Ibni, ibni,” that remained as clear to him as on the day he had seized her son from her arms. “I heard her and kept walking,” he had whispered to David. Moshe had spared no memory, sweet or horrid, before he passed away finally into the night.
* * *
At last, the full story of that fateful time during the Nakbe, when my family lost their baby boy and the land was swept away, unfolded there in my Pennsylvania living room, some fifty-three years later. But I was the only survivor to live that moment with Ismael, our missing link, and I felt depleted by the wounds of others.
I leaned back into the sofa, closing my eyes as I close a book after the last page has been read. But David had one more thing to say.
“I know the things my father did make him a terrorist, to you and others,” David said. “He did some evil things, but he was not evil. He was good to me. He was my father, Amal.”
I did not reply. I held David’s words, felt their weight in my palms, and felt my eyes well with tears.
“Do you understand, Amal, what I am saying?”
I understand
. “There are things I will tell you. In time,” I said.
“If it’s about Yousef, I already know,” he said.
Just then a horn blared in my driveway. It was the taxicab arriving to take David to the airport.
“Don’t go,” I pleaded instinctively.
“I don’t want to go,” he answered immediately.
We caught each other in a desperate stare, each looking into the other’s eyes for evidence of a mutual imperative to refasten a destiny torn. And something formed between us in that reflexive moment. Something soft.
David changed his flight to the next morning.
“Here’s to new beginnings,” he said.
Before I could raise my glass to meet his, Sara walked through the door. I could see from the anticipation on her face that she had been waiting to return home since the moment she had left, and I felt immensely happy to see her at that moment.
“Habibti, I want you to meet my brother, David.”