Dalia learned to be a stoic mother, communicating the demands and tenders of motherhood with the various tempers of silence. Against this quiet detachment, the girl offered fits and petulance, mixed with bursts of kisses and feverish need meant to provoke her mother. Dalia’s love found its expression during the child’s sleep. Then she stroked her daughter’s hair, loved her endlessly with the kisses she withheld during the child’s waking hours.
II.
EL NAKSA
(the disaster)
EIGHT
As Big as the Ocean and All Its Fishes
1960–1963
I SPENT MUCH TIME IN my youth trying to imagine Mama as Dalia, the Bedouin who once stole a horse, who bred roses and whose steps jingled. The mother I knew was a stout woman, imposing and severe, who soldiered all day at cleaning, cooking, baking, and embroidering thobes. Several times each week, she was called to deliver a baby. As with everything else she did, she performed midwifery with cool efficiency and detached nerve.
I was eight years old when Mama first let me help her deliver a baby.
“This is a very important job. You must be very serious, Amal,” she said, and proceeded with her cleansing ritual before leaving.
“Wudu and salat. Do it with me,” she instructed.
We passed the homemade soap between us. I watched her, imitating every detail, every motion. The splashing of the face with water, the rinsing of the hands, elbows, feet. Mumbled affirmations of faith in Allah. I moved as her mirror image. We washed and prayed, then she braided my hair. Before we left she held her special scissors over the babboor’s open flame and wrapped it in cloth “in the name of Allah, most Merciful and Forgiving.”
At the expectant woman’s home, I was as Mama was, deliberate and grave. I handed her the towels, stood by with the scissors, and held my nerves (and the food in my stomach) because she warned me, “Don’t be weak and don’t get sick.” Stern as steel. “Whatever you feel, keep it inside.”
I remember that day well. The slow strokes of the comb traveling in Mama’s hand from the top of my head to the tips of my long black hair. Approval in her face when I anticipated a need for more towels before her cue. Imparting skills and forestalling weakness were the ways Dalia loved. Everything else, the hugs and kisses I so craved, she held with the clench of her jaw and the grip that rubbed itself in her right palm. Whatever you feel, keep it inside.
That evening she let me and Huda, my best friend, sleep on the flat rooftop.
“Thank you, Mama.” “Thank you, Um Yousef,” we said excitedly.
She didn’t answer us, just pulled the shades over her heart and went on with her evening cleaning. From the roof that night, Huda and I watched Mama wait for Baba to return from the garage. She walked around with a broom in her hand, Um Kalthoom singing from the radio, and she swept the dust at the threshold until there was nothing but moonlight to sweep.
Mama never danced at weddings and rarely visited friends. Once, I awoke far into the night and found her tenderly stroking my hair. She kissed me then, one of a few precious kisses perched in my mind, and said, “Go back to sleep, ya binti.”
My early years in Jenin’s refugee camp are metered by such discoveries. Like the time when I was four and I saw Yousef ’s penis. He was getting dressed and didn’t notice me watching. For days, I thought about it, inspecting myself, looking at Mama in the bath, and worrying that something terrible was wrong with my brother. Naturally, I caused a stir when I grabbed Yousef ’s crotch, unmindful of the neighbors, and my brother hit me hard. Everyone who witnessed the cause of my hysterical screaming agreed that Yousef had done the right thing. Except Mama.
A neighbor woman said to her, “Dalia, a girl just can’t do that, even if she is four. Best break her of the devil’s habits early.” Break her. Beat her. Teach her a lesson. Another said, “You can bet she won’t do that again.” Still another: “He’s her older brother and he has every right to hit his sister if she misbehaves.”
But Mama took my side, reprimanding Yousef. “Don’t ever hit your sister. Ever,” Mama said, and I waxed triumphant, ready to be received into my mother’s arms. But she would have none of that either.
“Stop crying, Amal,” she ordered, not angry, mean, or even firm. Matter-of-fact, efficient, tough.
On a morning in April, the month of flowers, I discovered a side of my father I had never seen before. So ceaselessly did he work and so infrequently did I see him that I had only adored him from afar until that day. I was five years old. I awoke before dawn in a panic to wet clothes, and I rushed to sort out my predicament in the only room that offered privacy. To my horror and shame, Baba was waiting for me as I emerged from the toilet. More than punishment, I feared his disappointment.
That day is one of my clearest childhood memories. Without words, Baba helped me into clean pajamas and I levitated off the ground in his enormous arms. He carried me a few steps, my small head buried in his neck, and sat me in his lap on the terrace, a four-by-three-meter patch of stone and tile covered with a canopy of grape vines—Mama’s stubborn attempt to duplicate the glory of her gardens in Ein Hod. It was still dark, but I recall the shadowy landscape of the countryside’s blossoming fruit trees. Peach, pomegranate, and olive were in bloom when, by the light of a wax candle, my father read to me for the first time.
For a long time after, my senses could conjure from memory the sweet scents of spring that had bewitched the air. My father’s olive-wood pipe had protruded from the side of his mouth and the smoke of honey apple tobacco also had marked that special morning.
“Listen to the words I read. They’re magical,” he said. And I tried very hard to understand the classical Arabic prose, but to my young mind it seemed another language. Still, the cadence was mesmerizing, and Baba’s voice was a lullaby. I dozed in his arms.
I told no one of the incident and I lived through the day in anticipation of night, the darkness just before dawn, hoping to once again have a special place in Baba’s morning.
I fit perfectly into Baba’s lap. His arms circled and held me there, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. He read to me again.
Stop, oh my friends, let us pause to weep
over the remembrance of my beloved.
Here was her abode on the edge of the sandy desert
between Dakhool and Howmal.
The traces of her encampment
are not wholly obliterated even now.
For when the south wind blows the sand over them
the north wind sweeps it away.
The courtyards and enclosures
of the old home have become desolate;
The dung of the wild deer lies there
thick as the seeds of pepper.
On the morning of our separation
it was as if I stood in the gardens of our tribe,
Amid the acacia-shrubs where my eyes
were blinded with tears by the smart
from the bursting pods of colocynth.
I could hear the turbulence inside Baba’s chest, the protests of his lungs against each inhalation of honey apple tobacco.
“Baba, who do you love more, me or Yousef?”
“Habibti,” he began. I couldn’t help but smile when he called me that. “I love you both the same,” he said.
“How big do you love me?”
“I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees.”
“What about the universe and all its planets? You forgot that part.”
“I was getting to it. Be patient,” he said, puffing on his pipe. He exhaled, “And I love you bigger than the universe and all its planets.”
“Do you love Yousef that much?”
“Yes. As big as the ocean . . . but without all the fishes.”
My heart grew with all the fishes, the idea that Baba loved me just a little more. “What about the sky and earth? Do you love him that big but without all the bir
ds and trees?”
“Yes. But don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t, Baba, I swear.” My heart swelled with birds now. “What about the universe part?”
“Don’t be greedy.” He winked at me. “I have to get to work, habibti. Tomorrow.”
Habibti. Tomorrow.
It was difficult to wake up so early and I would nod back to sleep in Baba’s arms. Eventually I became accustomed to rising before the sun, a habit that has long endured. Every dawn, while Baba read on the terrace of our small adobe home, he and I witnessed the sun pour itself over the land, drenching everything it touched with life.
Many a night has let down its curtains
around me amid deep grief,
It has whelmed me as a wave
of the sea to try me with sorrow.
Then I said to the night,
as slowly his huge bulk passed over me,
As his breast, his loins, his buttocks weighed on me
and then passed afar,
“Oh long night, dawn will come,
but will be no brighter without my love.
You are a wonder, with stars held up
as by ropes of hemp to a solid rock.”
At other times, I have filled a leather water-bag
of my people and entered the desert,
And trod its empty wastes while the wolf howled
like a gambler whose family starves.
Baba said, “The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn.” I was six then and high marks in school became the currency I gave for Baba’s approval, which I craved now more than ever. I became the best student in all of Jenin and memorized the poems my father so loved. Even when my body grew too big for his lap, the sun always found us cuddled together with a book.
My life before the war returns to me now in memories bracketed by Baba’s arms and scented with the tobacco of his olive-wood pipe. We had meager possessions and scarce necessities. I never knew a playground nor swam in the ocean, but my childhood was magical, enchanted by poetry and the dawn. I have never known a place as safe as his embrace, my head nestled in the arch of his neck and stalwart shoulders. I have never known a more tender time than the dawn, coming with the smell of honey apple tobacco and the dazzling words of Abu-Hayyan, Khalil Gibran, al-Maarri, Rumi. I did not always understand what they wrote, but their verses were hypnotic and lyrical. Through them, I felt my father’s passions, his losses, his heartaches, and his loves. He passed all of that to me. This great gift from Baba was something no one could take away. And decades later, in the bleak early hours of a Pennsylvania February, the words of Gibran’s haunting rhythms and the memory of Baba’s soft baritone would be my only thread of solace.
NINE
June in the Kitchen Hole
1967
THEN CAME JUNE OF 1967. The hot month of pretty things and no school. I was meandering in the abandon of childhood, one month before my twelfth birthday.
Not to be outdone by Lamya, our friend with a monkey’s capacity for cartwheels and flips, Huda and I had resolved to execute the perfect somersault. We were practicing in the soft clearing near the peach orchard, west of Jenin.
“You call that a cartwheel?”
“Let’s see you try, Amal!”
I did and landed flat on my back.
“Pathetic,” Huda snickered.
“Oh God!” I moaned. “My leg! I’m really hurt.”
“Get up . . . come on. I know you’re pretending.” Huda’s voice spiked with concern. “Amal. Amal. Oh, my God!”
I erupted with laughter and Huda’s alarm turned to irritation.
“That’s not funny, Amal!” she yelled. “Anyway, you still can’t even do a cartwheel, much less a somersault.” She knew how to make me stop laughing.
“Neither can you!”
“I’m not the one trying to outdo Lamya.”
It was true. Huda just liked to play, but with me, everything was a competition.
“Want to practice again later?” I asked.
“Yeah. Let’s go climb Old Lady.”
Old Lady was a fifteen-hundred-year-old olive tree with serpentine arms that twisted into the air like Samson’s locks bursting from the center of a grazing pasture. Fruit dangled from hundreds of knobby little twigs on an enormous misshapen trunk, which was also a resting spot for local shepherds.
Baba once told me that no one owned Old Lady. “This old girl was here long before any of us, and she’ll be here long after we’re gone. How can you own that, habibti?”
I loved it when my father called me habibti, my beloved.
“No one can own a tree,” he continued. “It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”
I asked Huda what she thought Baba meant.
“Your baba always says strange stuff. Haj Salem says he reads too much. Yesterday I heard Haj Salem tell your brother to go pull your father’s nose out of his books and drag him to the Beit Jawad coffeehouse to smoke a hooka with him and Ammo Jack O’Malley.”
Ammo Jack was a heavyset man with a cluttered laugh that seemed to rumble from untuned bass chords in his big heart. He had a full head of white hair, usually rumpled and unbarbered. His equally thick facial hair was yellow-stained by a long liaison with Lucky Strikes and occasional hooka pipes. His UN job was to administer the schools and clinics and he rarely visited his office, choosing instead the hooka-puffing company of Haj Salem at Beit Jawad’s.
We climbed Old Lady’s back, swung and dangled from her limbs, balanced on her neck, and finally rested on her belly, where her trunk split into three main branches.
“Is there anything left of the nail polish?” Huda asked, inspecting the chipped red paint on her nails.
Someone had given the polish to Mama as a gift a week earlier, but she was beyond such indulgences and had given it to me. At least ten of us girls had gathered to share it, painting one another’s nails, imagining that we looked like the Egyptian actresses in magazines.
“There’s a little left,” I said.
She perked up. “Let’s paint our fingers and toes again, but without all the other girls.”
“Okay. But first let’s have a spit contest.”
“Haven’t we had enough contests today?” Huda complained, but quickly relented.
A spit-dangle contest. That’s what we were doing when we were summoned.
“Your spit will go farther if you suck snot from your head.” I demonstrated, making hacking sounds. “Just regular spit breaks off. That’s how come you always lose this game.”
“That’s gross,” Huda complained.
“Amaaaal! . . . Huuuuuudaaaaaaa!”
Baba was calling us home to the camp, where we all lived in the shade of international charity.
“Your father’s calling.” Huda stated the obvious, as was her annoying habit. “Why isn’t he at work today?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go.”
We ran. I turned it into a race, but I stopped before we reached the camp’s first row of concrete shacks.
Something was happening. Too many people were on the streets.
Instinctively, Huda and I reached for each other’s hand and we walked slowly toward the commotion. Anxious throngs were chanting in the streets and alleyways. In their embroidered Palestinian thobes, women hurried about, balancing baskets of provisions on their heads. Uncertainty shivered in the air. Some people were crying. Some displayed their joy with the trilling of zaghareet. Israel had just attacked Egypt. A loud radio announced, “The Arab armies are mobilizing to defend against Zionist aggression.”
Baba came toward us and gathered Huda and me in his outstretched arms. “Habibti, something has happened. The two of you must go directly to the house.” He was calm and serious. “Now go, girls,” and we we
nt.
At our house, men were waiting for my father, who had gone off to telephone my brother in Bethlehem, where Yousef worked.
Mama hurried toward us when she saw Huda and me approaching. She surprised me with a tight embrace and mumbled into the air, “Praise and thanks to You, Allah, for my child.” Mama kissed me as she rarely did. If I could, I’d not have let her go. Her sudden display of affection made me grateful for Israel’s attack.
“Allaho akbar!” someone shouted. “Soon we’re going home to Palestine!”
With Mama’s new warmth lingering, I was hopeful. I conjured all the places of the home that had been built up in my young mind, one tree, one rosebush, one story at a time. I thought of the water and sandy beaches of the Mediterranean—“The Bride of Palestine,” Baba called it—which I had visited only in my dreams. A delicious anticipation bore visions of the old life, the one I had never known. My rightful life, disinherited but finally to be regained, in the back terrace of Jiddo Yehya’s and Teta Basima’s mansion, with its succulent grapes dangling from their vines, Mama’s rose garden, the Arabian horses Ammo Darweesh raised, Baba’s library, and our family’s farm, which had sustained half the village.
I comforted Huda, who seemed frightened, with a reminder that we would have our own room once we returned, and money enough for dolls. In my naïve confidence, I pointed to the disorganized and untrained men. “Just look at them,” I told her, impressed with the would-be fighters who walked among us. “Just look . . .”
Mornings in Jenin Page 6