We were all up before the sun, waiting in the lobby of the hospital for permission to see Jehad and, we hoped, bring him home. Sitti Wasfiyeh looked small and frail as she sat there patiently, counting her rosary beads for hours.
Finally the lawyer walked in, a small stack of papers in hand, and motioned for us to follow him. Jehad’s release had been secured. “Alhamdulillah,” we all sighed. Thank you, Lord!
I helped Sitti Wasfiyeh to her feet and we followed the lawyer to a hospital room, where Jehad sat in a wheelchair. We rushed to him as the lawyer negotiated with the guards, going through the stack of papers he had brought. Heavy bandages covered half of Jehad’s face. Doctors had been unable to save his eye. His arm was in a cast, with fourteen screws in the bones of his right hand and forearm. The official record stated that he fell, hitting stationary objects in such a way that caused severe trauma to his optic nerve, secondary to deep ocular lacerations and fragmentation of the orbital bone and optic canal. There was more medical jargon I didn’t understand—multiple metacarpal and phalangeal bones comminuted at the level of the metacarpophalangeal joint. But Jehad got up when he saw us and kissed Sitti Wasfiyeh’s hands, our mother’s, then me. I understood a new kind of joy that day. It was the sort of happiness that comes only when life takes everything and leaves you only the people who matter most. Being with my family in the relief of Jehad’s safety that day brought us back to life.
Jehad wanted rest when we got back to the apartment. We had a small meal together. He ate very little and said even less. Seeing Jehad so defeated was hard to bear. He had been spared, but we could not be sure any of us would survive in Kuwait much longer. The emotional toll of the day had exhausted us, and we went to bed early. Mama tucked Jehad into bed, taking all of our pillows to make sure he was propped up as the doctors had ordered, to reduce the pressure on his remaining eye.
I watched him sleep from the doorway, knowing I would never forgive myself. Jehad had stayed in Kuwait because I’d sided with Sitti Wasfiyeh and refused to leave. I will carry his broken dreams for the rest of my life.
I’d like to tell what happened to my brother. What they did to him. The ways they violated and broke him. How Kuwaiti police and military colluded with the Americans to empty him of himself. I’d like to tell because I want the world to know what they got away with, what the powerful always get away with. But it is not my story to tell, and Jehad has found solace in silence.
We were one of a few Palestinian families from our neighborhood still in Kuwait. Street after street of apartment buildings stood empty. The corner stores that once flashed with lights and colorful FOR SALE signs were now dim and shuttered. The kids who played ball in the street had disappeared. The young men who used to gather on corners to watch and harass us women were no more. The balcony clotheslines that once decorated every building with laundry were bare.
We had stayed because we could not leave Jehad behind. Now that he was back, we packed up what we could carry of our lives: clothes, a few kitchen items, the framed photo of Baba on the living room wall, and Mama’s Singer sewing machine. There were two more families left on our block, one in our building and another in the adjacent one. They came to welcome Jehad back, and we decided to all leave together in the early morning, believing there might be some safety in numbers to get through the checkpoints on the way to the airport.
We wanted to take our cars on the fourteen-hour journey to Amman, but they had Iraqi license plates—we had been forced to change them during the occupation, and now Kuwait would not allow Palestinians to get new car plates. Um Buraq promised to sell our cars for us and send the money. And to my surprise, she showed up at four o’clock on the morning of our planned departure to drive us to the airport.
“I want to make sure the paperwork for the cars is in order,” she said.
“Liar. We already did that,” I said, hugging her. “You came because you love me. Admit it, you old bat.”
There had been times when Mama tried to forbid me to see Um Buraq, believing she was a bad influence. But now she embraced her and thanked her for helping us get out of the country.
While Mama cooked up a breakfast to start us on our journey, Um Buraq and I made one last run to an ATM with Abu Moathe’s card. “I’m a little scared that this might be the day we get caught,” I said.
“How are we going to get caught? It’s four in the morning,” Um Buraq said. She had a point. “Plus, it’s a savings account. So he’s obviously not checking it regularly. I’m sure he has another card for his daily account.” By that point, we had withdrawn nearly 12,000 dinars, which we split evenly between us. The account still had a balance of a little over 9,860 dinars.
At last it was time to go. Our neighbors waited in three taxis as the five of us squeezed into Um Buraq’s Lincoln Continental. Mama asked Um Buraq how she’d gotten all those dings and scratches on her car. “People in this country can’t drive,” Um Buraq explained, and we set off.
Ajay had mostly been the one who drove her car. In the short time since he had left, she had managed to crash into sidewalks, a streetlight pole, and the side of a building. She was so tiny, she had to crane her neck to see over the steering wheel and swerved in and out of lanes.
Jehad didn’t say much, but Um Buraq went on apologizing for what the police had done to him. She said Kuwait would suffer a loss for not embracing a young man as smart and passionate as him. To spare Jehad, I changed the subject by asking about Deepa and Ajay.
“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you!” she exclaimed, bumping the car into the sidewalk, jolting us all. “Deepa bought a house!”
“Stop!” Sitti Wasfiyeh yelled. “Stop the car!”
Um Buraq slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road. “Bismillah!” she yelled. “What’s wrong, Hajjeh?”
Our neighbors in the taxi behind us also slammed their brakes, almost ramming into us.
“I want to sit in the backseat,” my grandmother demanded. “I didn’t survive four wars just to die in a car accident. Help me out of here!” she ordered, opening the door.
I had grown accustomed to Um Buraq’s crazy driving over the past months, but Mama and Sitti Wasfiyeh were bracing themselves. Um Buraq seemed puzzled. Jehad smiled, almost laughing, and that made me so happy I laughed too. I couldn’t stop, which made Mama laugh. Sitti Wasfiyeh was delighted to have provoked it all. “I’ve always been funny, even when I was a little girl. I could make people laugh like this,” she said. And that turned Jehad’s smile into laughter too. Even Um Buraq was laughing, all of us inside her banged-up Lincoln Continental at the head of a four-car caravan on an eerily quiet road, heading away from a deserted Palestinian city inside Kuwait.
“This country will never be the same without Palestinians. Look at all these empty buildings,” Um Buraq said when we all quieted down.
Mama began sobbing in the backseat. Sitti Wasfiyeh chimed in, cursing Israelis and Yasser Arafat. She raised her hands in prayer. “O God, my Lord, destroy the Jews for making us endless refugees and condemn Yasser Arafat for causing another Palestinian exodus. O my Lord, burn the Americans and burn the Jews. They are behind all these wars.”
“Amen,” Mama said.
Jehad remained silent, watching the world speed by his window.
We were stopped at two checkpoints along the way, but thanks to Um Buraq we passed without incident. She showed her ID, clearly listing her as Kuwaiti, and lied that we, along with the caravan behind us, were Palestinians who had sheltered and saved her entire family during the occupation. She spoke to them with the authority of a public auntie, and they responded with due deference to an elder, waving us all through after checking our IDs.
“Um Buraq, I don’t think we could have gotten through these checkpoints without more humiliation if it hadn’t been for you. May God bless you, keep evil away from you, and bring brightness and joy to all your days,” Mama said.
Sitti Wasfiyeh joined in with prayer and appreciation for Um Buraq. I liste
ned to Jehad’s silence. He was somewhere else.
Um Buraq took me in a warm embrace at the airport before we left. She kissed both my cheeks several times, wished me God-speed, and whispered in my ear, “I’ll send customers your way if you need money. Just let me know. And you can probably use that card in Amman. Give it a try. God be with you, Sister.”
I kissed her again, and when we pulled back, she cupped my face in her palms and said:
“Whatever happens in this ungenerous world, we will meet again, my sister.”
III.
JORDAN
THE CUBE, NORTH
THE NORTH SIDE of my universe is a gray wall with three protruding items. The first is a small toilet made of thick plastic, which flushes when it pleases. I try to coordinate my body functions with its timing, but it’s random, so it smells in here, which I prefer to the disinfectant they spray from little holes in all the walls.
There are also two electronic receptacles where my prison bracelets fasten. Two small spots blink yellow when I must insert my bracelets to shackle myself. Robotic innards in the wall shriek and mechanically grab my bracelets, locking me to the wall. Then the yellow light turns green and an earsplitting alarm goes off, alerting the guards that they can safely enter. One of the “improvements” Israel made was to lower the volume on the alarm. When visitors come to survey the Cube, they are shown this feature to demonstrate how conditions are adjusted for my comfort and convenience.
But even the best inventions for confinement and subjugation cannot account for life’s resolve to freedom. These high-tech shackles are meant to hold me in place with my arms behind my back, but I fasten myself facing the wall, to my jailers’ great annoyance. I remain that way until visitors leave. In the meantime, sometimes I sing, and when possible, I fart. Their discomfort gives me pleasure. In this way, the north side is both the domain of bondage and the direction for defiance.
I waged my fight for writing utensils on the north wall. The guards had ignored all my requests for pen and paper until I used bodily fluids to write on that wall. In menstrual blood I wrote: Long live Saddam Hussein, and in feces: Israel is shit.
They made me clean it, but gave me a pencil to keep. I won.
Except for prison-industry guests, Israeli law allows only immediate family to visit Palestinian prisoners. My husband is gone. I have no children. That means only my mother and, possibly, my brother could come, but Israel revoked Jehad’s hawiyya and put his and Mama’s names on a visa blacklist. They cannot even enter the country, much less visit me in the Cube.
I have a recurring dream that I’m drinking coffee with Saddam Hussein. I am desperate to speak to him, but we sit in silence, staring at each other. We turn our cups over to allow the coffee grounds to paint our fates. Um Buraq arrives to read our fortunes, but I insist we wait for Jehad to arrive. Then both Saddam and Um Buraq point to an olive tree in our midst, and I am satisfied Jehad is with us. But the tree is also Bilal. Um Buraq contemplates Saddam’s cup and after a moment laments that Jehad should have left Kuwait before the Americans came. Saddam shrugs and motions to my cup. I turn it over and, to my horror, I see faceless men beating my brother. I seek Bilal for help, but the olive tree is gone. I wake up in panic, sweat, and regret. Then I try hard to get back to the dream to rescue my brother, to leave Kuwait before the Americans come.
UNSTEADY EARTH
ONE OF THE families in our caravan had a home in Amman, where we stayed for a couple of weeks until we could find a place. We eventually rented a one-bedroom, furnished apartment. It was the best we could afford at the time. Sitti Wasfiyeh got the bedroom. The rest of us rolled out our bedding in the family room. In fairness, Sitti Wasfiyeh urged Mama or Jehad to take the bedroom, but we insisted it was hers. She was our elder, after all.
“May God bless you, my children. Um Jehad, you are the only real daughter I ever had,” she said on her way to bed that first night, leaving us shocked by her sincere gratitude. I think it broke her heart that her daughters, who lived in Jordan, had not insisted she live with them. The three of us watched Sitti Wasfiyeh’s small, hunched body shuffle to her new room. Jehad jumped up to help her walk, and for the rest of the night, even in my dreams, I thought of my grandmother, her anguished life in a world that could not spare a space for her.
Amman felt like the worst place in the world, even though I had rarely traveled outside Kuwait, and never beyond our region. The small buildings with shops, passed off as malls, were uninspiring and overpriced. The quality of everything from food to clothing to hair salons was inferior to what I was accustomed to in Kuwait, yet cost nearly twice as much. I tried to find work, but unemployment in Jordan was already high before half a million Palestinians displaced from Kuwait descended on the country.
Everywhere I turned in Amman there was a reminder of loss. My favorite Kuwaiti television series—of Um E’leiwi and Bu E’leiwi, Suad Abdullah and Hayat elFahd and Maryam Saleh—were now painful to watch. I missed Kuwait’s ocean, the warm blue immensity that accompanied us wherever we were, even when we camped in the desert during winter. The Arabian Gulf lapped at all my memories: its salty air brushing against our skin, threading our hair, and infusing our lungs when we sat at beachside cafés or evening concerts; the tide revealing and hiding tens of thousands of scampering crabs; the scorching sand blistering our feet; the boys we watched watching us on the beach, its warm water washing away our worries; ice cream from Ala’a Eddin in Salmiya, frozen booza dhahab cooling us in the heat. I was so far from those shores that held everything I knew in the world. I had not yet imagined a future for myself, but somehow I knew it had been derailed. I suppose I had always assumed that whatever dreams I thought to follow would unfold in the familiar landscape of Kuwait. Now the land had been pulled from under my feet and I wobbled in the unsteady terrain of refugees, struggling to carry on.
It wasn’t like that for Mama or even Sitti Wasfiyeh, who had sworn she would never recover from becoming a refugee again. It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replanted elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.
Mama soon struck a deal with a local tailor to take up his extra work, filling our apartment with the familiar hum of her Singer sewing machine. She started with simple hemming and mending jobs, then got an order for traditional tatreez embroidery, which was followed by a few more such commissions. I had watched my mother embroider now and then over the years, but I’d never paid much attention to it. To my young eyes, embroidered caftans belonged to another generation, and I foolishly thought them unrefined compared to modern European clothes. But in Amman, in the haze of my exile and idleness and through the lens of loss, the spectacular intricacy of tatreez crystallized as I watched my mother create gorgeous caftans, and I finally realized hers was a masterful testament to our heritage and her own artistry. She would spend hours upon painstaking hours hunched over her lap, needle and thimble pulling and pushing threads in and out of fabric, creating patterns that told the stories of our people in a pictorial language conceived by Palestinian women over centuries. Mama was fluent. She knew which patterns came from which village, what they meant, and how that meaning might change next to another pattern. She’d tried to teach me when I was a little girl, but I had wanted no part of it.
Now, in the Cube, I recall the day she gave up trying to teach me. She said, “I don’t blame you. If I had a chance to go to school like you, that’s what I would have done instead. You’re a smart girl. Someday you’ll have a desk job, not like me, who only knows how to embroider a past we cannot recover.”
Mama was more skilled than most, and before long she had carved out a niche in Amman embroidering wedding thobes—the most delicate and expensive tatreez commissions. One such dress would ordinarily require six to nine months to create, but our financial situation pushed Mama to work even longer hours, producing one every two to three months. Each of them was a work of art, meticulously embroidered to tell stories, and it pained me to see them sold.
Her first customer was a bride who wanted traditional tatreez designs on silk, an impossibly difficult material for embroidery. She specified that the design speak to the place of her heritage in Palestine and to that of her groom, and she wanted my mother to copy designs from the qabbah, shinyar, and radah parts of a tattered caftan that had belonged to her mother’s great-grandmother. But Mama suggested combining the old and the new, incorporating actual pieces of the ancient caftan’s tatreez into the bridal gown. The woman agreed once she saw Mama’s drawings, and the final product was stunning.
The bride-to-be twirled before the mirror in her gorgeous new dress, saying, “You are a genius, Um Jehad! Better than all those fancy designers. Their gowns can’t hold a candle to this. My friends will die of envy when they see me at the wedding, and I know my groom will love it too.”
The fitting and sewing room doubled as our family room, which was also our bedroom by night. I had nowhere to escape that woman’s happiness. My heart ached as I watched the bride admire herself in the mirror. Mama had wanted to design my wedding gown, but I went shopping for “modernity.” I’m sure I said something insensitive to her about being stuck in the past; that thobes were for a bygone world. I’m sure it hurt her, although she never let on. This moment with a stranger twirling in the gorgeous gown my mother had created should have been mine to share with Mama. I had to become another person, someone at the other end of disgrace, rape, and exile, to fully appreciate that my mother, a simple widow with an elementary education, was an extraordinary artist. My mother was a maker of beauty, a brilliant custodian of culture and history. And I was the ungrateful daughter who had not understood until now.
Against the Loveless World Page 11