Against the Loveless World

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Against the Loveless World Page 24

by Susan Abulhawa


  “You did good, girls!” She smiled at us from the kitchen table. Relieved that we had executed the task satisfactorily, Jumana and I washed the meat repeatedly as she instructed. Arthritis had taken the vigor from Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s hands and her movements were fitful, but she insisted on prepping the meat with spices herself.

  “You have to coat each piece separately,” she said, rubbing the spice mixture into the lamb. “And recite Quran in your heart when you do it … or at least think about blessed things. Give thanks to God and to the animal whose life will nurture us. O Lord, bless this day. We thank you for all things. Praise you, Lord.”

  Jumana helped spice the rest of the lamb while I beat the cardamom to powder with the mortar and pestle. Then Hajjeh Um Mhammad added the lamb to the pot of boiling water and poured in the cardamom, bay leaves, mistika, salt, black pepper, and cloves. The smells of a loving home waiting for its son wafted through the house. When the meat was cooked almost to perfect tenderness, we set up another vat to cook the sauce. Jumana and I took turns continuously stirring the jameed yogurt as Hajjeh Um Mhammad slowly added the pieces of cooked meat. She pinched turmeric and sprinkled it onto the white sauce. “It needs a bit more salt,” or a bit more of this or that, she’d say, tasting her work. “Are the almonds roasted?” she asked.

  “Yes. And the parsley is chopped,” I answered.

  “You’re such good girls, you two. God has given me the daughters I never had. Praise Him. Praise His wisdom and His mercy.” She looked up at the clock on the wall. “O Lord in your infinite mercy, bring my son home soon. O my God and my Master, please clear his path of the evil and malice of those people.”

  Jumana and I looked at each other. Bilal should have been home by now. We continued helping with the cooking and cleaning. Several people arrived to check in and wish us blessings. Most stayed, and when it looked like Bilal might not be coming home, more visitors, including Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s sisters and friends, returned to help bear the disappointment.

  “He’s coming today. By the Almighty’s will, he is coming home,” Hajjeh Um Mhammad insisted, refusing to accept anything less. She asked us to fetch her motor chair. As we did so, we heard the roar of a crowd, then saw a group of thirty or forty men hurrying up the walkway, carrying Bilal on their shoulders. He was smiling, but I knew it embarrassed him to be the focus of such adoration, and I could see weariness beneath the smile. He went first to his mother, kneeling to kiss her feet as she struggled to pull him to her face. He kissed her hands, then her forehead, then her cheeks. He pulled his aunts and others into an embrace. Then Jumana and me. It didn’t matter that we weren’t related; people accepted the physical affection as if we were his sisters. Before anything else, we were the dearest of friends, and his homecoming filled me with a happiness not unlike the day Jehad was returned to us from a Kuwaiti prison.

  I heard him whisper to Jumana, “Ghassan sends his love.”

  Hajjeh Um Mhammad rushed all the women into the kitchen to heat the food and begin assembling the layers onto the dishes. Heaps of saffron rice were molded into small hills on four large trays. Hajjeh Um Mhammad picked out the chunks of lamb and arranged them on top of each rice hill. As she sprinkled the parsley and roasted almonds on top, Ghassan’s mother arrived at the house, and Hajjeh Um Mhammad moved as hurriedly as her arthritic body would allow to embrace her friend. The two hajjehs held each other for a long and poignant moment. When they let go, Bilal kissed the hand of Ghassan’s mother.

  “Let me kiss your face, my son. You are as dear to me as Ghassan and Jandal, God rest his soul. Praise God for your safe return, my son. Praise God,” she said.

  “Ghassan is in good spirits, Auntie. They moved us to the same detention center last week, and I got to see him a lot. He sends his love,” Bilal told her. His words gave her some comfort, and she filled the room with more and more prayers for both men and for all Palestinian prisoners.

  “Come, come, Sister.” Hajjeh Um Mhammad pulled her friend away. “Let’s eat. By God’s will, we will eat our next meal together soon in celebration of Ghassan’s return.” She began ladling sauce on the rice and instructed us to bring the rest in bowls to place around the central trays. We set out the hot trays of mansaf, tender lamb in spicy white yogurt broth on a bed of saffron rice, topped with roasted almonds, parsley, and pine nuts.

  There were too many people to fit indoors. A group took one of the trays to the terrace and ate in the crisp, cool breeze of October in Palestine.

  Mansaf was always a dish for large gatherings or holidays in my youth. Eating it by hand makes it all the more cherished. The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another. I missed my mother. My brother and grandmother. I balled a bite of mansaf in my hand and looked around the room. Bilal, Jumana, Samer, Wadee and Faisal, other friends, Hajjeh Um Mhammad and her sisters, neighbors, and more family. This was where I belonged, but so much of me was still scattered elsewhere.

  HARVEST

  NOT WANTING TO give people more fodder for gossip, especially with Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s fragile health, I moved in with Jumana after Bilal returned. But I was there daily for the hajjeh, even though she had plenty of people caring for her.

  “May God brighten your days and clear your path of wickedness, my daughter. You always check on me. May God’s angels always check on you. Amen,” Hajjeh Um Mhammad would say.

  A couple of days after Bilal’s homecoming, Hajjeh Um Mhammad collapsed in the kitchen. The doctor said it was exhaustion, probably a combination of excitement over Bilal’s homecoming and preparations for the harvest in the coming week. Age had stolen her strength and agility and she hadn’t been able to do as much as she used to at harvest, but there was no way she would miss it again, especially with Bilal home, though the doctor had ordered her to rest.

  The evening before the big day, Jumana and I prepared salads and mezze dishes to take to the groves. Hajjeh Um Mhammad and her friends kneaded dough to make fresh khobz bread, which they would bake outdoors on a hot taboon. We started the first day of harvest early, packing for a long day, and began hiking to the groves before the sun made it over land. I even carried a basket on my head as the elders did, and as I imagined my ancestors had done.

  Although Hajjeh Um Mhammad could not walk well, she had always insisted on making this annual trek to the olive groves. This year she relented and allowed Bilal to drive her to the top of the hill, where she could walk a short distance to join the elder kinfolk and friends gathered to sort the olives, bake bread, and prepare food. The women who managed to balance a load atop their heads and converse with one another while simultaneously walking the steep, rocky paths, sometimes carrying a child too, were a marvel to behold. I struggled to keep the basket from falling off my head, holding it in place with one arm. Then I had to use both arms, which provoked some children (and adults) to laughter.

  “Accept who you are, city girl,” Faisal teased. “We’re taking bets when and where the basket is going to fall.” Wadee laughed, and so did the children.

  “Whose side are you on, Jumana?”

  “Well, ordinarily I’d be on a sister’s side. But there’s a prize involved. I have to go with the safe bet that the basket is going to fall off your head before you reach the trees.”

  “And if I make it? Will I get the prize?” I asked.

  “Nope. This one here gets it. She’s betting you’re going to make it just fine,” Jumana said, pointing to a little girl of nine or ten. Her name was Amna, a relative of Bilal’s.

  “Come here, beautiful Amna,” I said. “You’re my only true friend. We’ll show them, won’t we?”

  “Yeah.” The little girl looked up at me, smiling sweetly.

  The prize was a bag o
f M&M’s, which Amna won and put aside for dessert after lunch and a hard day’s work. “Want to share with them?” I asked her.

  Amna grinned sheepishly. “Only if they work hard. And they have to show me how many olives they picked and sorted!”

  Bilal had already laid the tarps by the time we arrived. We got to work right away, toiling among those ancient trees as the sun inched along its arc. Amna taught me the proper way to pick olives. “Some of the lazy boys try to just shake and hit the branches to make the olives fall, but that’s wrong. My father says it’s wrong to beat a tree that’s giving you blessings. Do it like this,” Amna said, picking one olive at a time with rapid dexterity, letting them fall onto the tarp laid beneath the tree. The plop of hundreds of olives falling at once from the trees all around made music like rain from clear blue skies.

  Five or six people toiled at each tree, picking as far as we could reach. Some, like Amna, climbed on ladders and filled buckets of olives from the high branches. Some sat on the tarps, sorting the olives into baskets according to color and ripeness. Children too small to pick ferried the baskets to and from piles destined for the olive press. Jumana, Amna, and I worked alongside each other on one side, Bilal, Wadee, and Faisal on the other, listening to a radio another family had brought. We talked. Sang. My arms grew sore and moist patches darkened the underarms of my shirt. The air was refreshingly cool against my face, even as beads of sweat rolled steadily down the groove of my back. I had never known the pleasure of such physical toil. Soon the smell of fresh bread wafted between the trees. It was nearing time to pause for the food being spread at the top of the hill, not far from the road where Bilal’s car was parked.

  “I stink!” Jumana sniffed her armpits.

  “Who’s the city girl now?” I smirked.

  Amna suddenly made a strange sound in her throat and dropped her bucket from atop the ladder, spilling its contents on the ground. The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t see her, but Jumana would later describe the fear on Amna’s face. Before we could say anything, a little boy a few tiers up the hill screamed, “The Jews! The Jews!”

  People scrambled to their feet, gathering as many olives as possible. I ran to Amna. Her legs were trembling, and I reached up to help her down the ladder as Bilal ran past us up the hill. Wadee and Faisal followed, ordering us to “wrap up the olives.”

  “Allah yustor,” Jumana prayed, hands shaking as she scooped the olives into buckets.

  We could see them now, settler children throwing rocks. Behind them, their fathers pointed rifles at us while soldiers guarded their flanks. Amna was reciting the Quran, still trembling, when her mother called to her. I watched mother and daughter flee holding hands. Clouds of tear gas crept menacingly through the trees, forcing people into the valley.

  Can something expected still be a surprise? We knew that Israelis were especially menacing during the harvest season. They know olives have been the mainstay and centerpiece of our social, economic, and cultural presence for millennia, and it infuriated them—still does—to watch the unbroken continuity of our indigenous traditions. So they came with their big guns, and the colonial logic of interlopers who cannot abide our presence or our joy.

  Two shots rang out.

  “Hurry!” Jumana urged.

  I ran behind her up the hill. The settlers appeared to be retreating, firing from farther and farther away. Hajjeh Um Mhammad had collapsed to the ground amid smashed plates of food and someone’s blood. Bilal was screaming to help his mother as a horde of soldiers bound and dragged him away. Faisal too was arrested. Wadee carried a boy who had been shot in the abdomen toward an approaching ambulance. The boy would die in the hospital that night.

  Hajjeh Um Mhammad was having trouble breathing, but she was conscious. As soldiers hauled Bilal away, I shouted as loudly as I could that his mother was okay, we would get her to the hospital, and prayed he heard me.

  The streets shook with mourning the next day as large crowds carried the body of the slain boy to his burial. He was eight years old. But there was still work in the fields, and we all went back to finish as much as we could. What had been delightful yesterday was unbearable now. Clouds dimmed the sky. No one spoke. There were no radios or songs. The sound of plopping olives was bitter and mournful. Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s kin took turns caring for her. She had recovered physically, but heavy grief anchored her to her bed.

  We left in the afternoon to pay our respects to the boy’s family. Some internationals came to help pick olives and offer their bodies and cameras as shields against another attack. They came again on the third day, but could do nothing but film when masked settlers arrived, once more protected by soldiers. I was engrossed in a robotic rhythm of picking, my mind emptied of thought. The ability to become vacuous was a skill I had honed over years. The slow stream of sweat trickling down the groove of my back brought me in and out of awareness. I was there, but not there.

  Pandemonium suddenly brought me to my senses—wails, fire, smoke, laughing settlers running away, and soldiers preventing the sole fire truck from reaching us. I saw those soldiers in the distance; their languid posture seemed to say they were bored by our swelling panic as the fire spread.

  Villagers converged from everywhere to extinguish the flames. Jumana and I grabbed our buckets and ran to fill them with dirt that we hurled into the inferno. It was like trying to mop up the sea with sponges, but to stand and watch the land burn would have been more painful than the burns on our skin and smoke in our lungs.

  God intervened, or so everyone later said. More clouds gathered, and a bolt of lightning cracked open the sky. Rain poured. Jumana fell to the ground crying as the fire slowly died, a ground of embers hissing wherever raindrops landed. We stood there, covered in soot, rain streaking our skin black. We were waiting for the next thing—for rescuers, for settlers to return and shoot us, for lightning to set their colony alight. But there was nothing now. Only rain. I pulled the scarf from my head and wiped Jumana’s face. She finally stopped sobbing, and together we waded through the mud and char.

  We went to her house to clean up. I should have gone immediately to see Hajjeh Um Mhammad. Surely neighborhood children had already spread news of the fire. I should have been there when she found out, to give her a reassuring eyewitness account of the miraculous rain that contained the fire, to tell her that only a small part of the grove was lost. But I couldn’t. Selfishly, I retreated. I could do no more than wash the day from my body.

  Jumana and I bandaged each other’s burns, and we fell asleep where we sat on the sofa. When I opened my eyes again, someone was banging on the door. It was six the next morning. Jumana lifted her head at the opposite end of the sofa, our legs still tangled in the middle. It was her brother Wadee. His fiancée had called to tell him that Hajjeh Um Mhammad had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

  I wasn’t ready for another day of turmoil. I needed more time on the sofa, doing nothing at all. Yet just as I was pulling myself together to go to the hospital, another whirlwind of news sent our heads spinning: Ghassan had just been released.

  Bilal’s rearrest, the torched fields, and Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s hospital stay made the hours stretch and fold in on themselves, holding time hostage to different iterations of the same day that would not end. We got word that Bilal had begun a hunger strike. At the same time, doctors informed us Hajjeh Um Mhammad had suffered a stroke. The right side of her body was paralyzed. Doctors said there was also a problem with her heart, that it had grown too large to pump sufficient blood through her body. There was nothing more they could do. “It’s in God’s hands,” they said. Her sisters took turns at her bedside and a steady stream of visitors came and went. Hajjeh Um Mhammad was awake and talking, but only her sisters could understand what she was saying.

  Israeli settlers setting fire to trees during the harvest had become so commonplace in the past ten years that international aid organizations had been established for the sole purpose of defending Palestinian farmers. The
group that came to pick with us also pledged to replenish the soil and replant trees. I showed up as much as I could to help with replanting and turning over the soil, but I was not accustomed to such successive trauma without respite. I needed time to mourn, time to recover.

  I went back to working at the salon and helped at the bakery sometimes, though Ghassan didn’t really need me. I visited Hajjeh Um Mhammad every day, but I’m ashamed to say it became more of a chore than something I truly wanted to do. It was hard to watch her deterioration. My heart was perpetually stuck in my throat.

  Realizing I couldn’t understand her words, Hajjeh Um Mhammad mostly squeezed my hand as I relayed news from the village. There were some good days, when she was more alert. On one such occasion, she pulled me closer, insisting I comprehend. Two of her sisters helped make out her words. She wanted Bilal and me to marry. It wasn’t the first time she had suggested this, but now it had the gravity of a dying woman’s request. I knew our living arrangement was not sustainable in our conservative culture, and I wanted to stay close to Bilal. But marriage unsettled me. The physical intimacy of it. Its permanence. The ownership of belonging to a man. People would surely gossip that I had married both brothers.

  “You’re good for each other. Take it from an old lady who knows more about the world than you,” she whispered hoarsely. Her sisters concurred. They had all spoken of it. Of her four sisters, Hajjeh Um Mhammad was the only one who had given birth to fewer than five children, the only one without daughters and grandchildren. The only widow among them now would be the first to die, though she was not the oldest.

  She envied the abundance her sisters had produced—sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She’d once confided in me that she sometimes wondered if God was displeased with her for some offense she might have committed. Then she shooed away the thought, begged God’s pardon, and thanked Him for all she had and did not have. “One must always be grateful to God for one’s fate, alhamdulillah,” she had said.

 

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