Mornings in Jenin

by Abulhawa, Susan

  Huda returned to live with her mother and brother soon after the war. But she and Amal still spent their days together and that was the only sense of continuity they had.

  As before, the girls mostly fended for themselves, but now Amal was bound by custom to ensure the proper running of the household. Before the war, the backdrop to Amal’s life had been colored with Baba’s love at dawn, Mama’s stoic rearing, and Yousef ’s clandestine love affair with Fatima. Now, those hues were replaced by military green and the pale emanations of depletion. Neighbors looked at her with pity and whispered.

  “What is the girl going to do?”

  “She’s almost marrying age. That’s good.”

  “Yes. God willing she’ll find a good man soon to take care of her.”

  Though her body had already begun to stretch and curve with new form, Amal was a child, twelve years old, on that cool January Friday when the citrons were ripe and the vines were being pruned and Yousef unexpectedly came home from the Jomaa prayers.

  Amal was delighted by the surprise. She made lunch, their biggest meal, and was preparing the floor with a covering of old newspapers, where they would eat. The prospect of spending time with her elusive brother elated her and she was eager to flaunt her culinary skills. Dalia had also been coming up for air from the abyss of unreality and Amal thought it would be like old times. Something like the family they had been.

  “Amal, can you deliver this to Fatima?” Yousef asked, holding out a sealed envelope.

  Crestfallen, she asked, “Aren’t you staying to eat lunch with us?”

  Yousef felt Amal’s dejection and pretended to follow the “intoxicating aroma” of her cooking, ending up next to his sister.

  “When did you get so grown up, Amal?” he mumbled with a mouth full of the food she had prepared.

  “I’m almost thirteen.”

  Surprised by the forward move of time, Yousef paused, sizing her up, seeing the physical evidence that time does indeed pass, irretrievably. He looked at his little sister and felt a lash of guilt for having paid her little mind since the war. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  Those perfect words, wonderful to her ears, resonated against Amal’s chaotic, awkward sense of self. She beamed.

  They shared the makloobeh—a pile of rice made golden in the syrup of lamb, eggplant, and ginger—and passed the cucumber yogurt sauce, the browned pine nuts, and the crisped onions. Amal was happy.

  The meal was embellished with spurts of laughter from Mama, who found humor somewhere in the hive of her unseen world, while Yousef and Amal conspired purposelessly in risible peace and smiles, placing that time together in a box of good memories. The memory of their last meal together with Mama.

  After lunch, Amal ran with Yousef ’s envelope to fetch Huda. Together they hurried on their familiar delivery mission of shuttling Yousef ’s and Fatima’s love letters. “Just like the good old days,” Huda said.

  “Yeah. On our way back, let’s see if the Warda house is still there.”

  Just like the good old days.

  Fatima spotted Amal and Huda from her window and waited anxiously for a letter from her lover. Her dimpled smile brightened the house as she took the letter in a dramatic thrill.

  “Help yourself to some cookies, girls. I have some hot tea on the stove,” she said, tearing into the envelope as she walked to the back room.

  They helped themselves and waited. A large mirror, its gaudy gold frame flashing with counterfeit gems along its border, leaned against the wall, projecting the fullness of Amal’s form. She had never seen her entire body at once like that. They had only one mirror, small and insufficient, fixed above the bathroom sink in Jenin. In Fatima’s home, she witnessed for the first time the buds on her chest, which had been sore for weeks. They rounded the cloth of her shirt in a bulge that summoned her hand to trace the signs of woman.

  “What are you doing?” Huda, chomping on the sweets from Fatima’s kitchen, looked at Amal’s breast cupped in her guilty hand.

  “My chest is sore,” Amal said, trying but failing to capture a casual tone.

  “Aunt Nadia says that’s what happens when they start growing,” Huda said indifferently. “I wish mine would start growing soon.” She inspected herself with excited hope.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you like yours?”

  “They hurt.”

  “I know you like them,” Huda said accusingly.

  “So?”

  “Can I touch them?”

  “No!!!”

  The silence that followed was broken by Fatima’s sobbing from the other room.

  “Fatima’s crying,” said Huda.

  “I can hear she’s crying!”

  “Fatima, are you okay?” Amal asked, pushing open the door.

  Hunched beneath her oversized pale blue dishdashe, Fatima lifted her face from her hands. She looked terrible. She wiped her nose in vain, attempting to compose herself, but her hair clung to her wet cheeks and her eyes were red and swollen.

  The letter was crumpled in her hand.

  “Amal, dear, why don’t you and Huda go on home now,” she said very softly, achingly.

  Amal and Huda walked the usual path, winding along the hills of northern Palestine. They found the old Warda house intact, but Warda was not there.

  Both felt the sting of losing their one-armed doll, their child, but neither mentioned it. They grieved privately in their young hearts, because it seemed infantile now to cry for a doll now that they had buried Aisha, a real baby who cried real tears and bled real blood. But the hurt of losing Warda was worse, and that was a secret each held from the other as they walked on from the Warda house.

  The trees had lost their leaves to winter’s chill and the silver wood of olive trees stood bare like colossal ancient hands, the gnarly and twisted guardians of time reaching from the earth, patiently resigned to wait for the ripe season. Homes, some centuries old, with dense vines hugging their masonry, dotted the hillsides, and shepherds moved about with their herds.

  Many years later, Amal would recall that life-giving beauty she had taken for granted, never imagining something so breathtaking and ancient could be wiped away or that anyone would want to wipe it away.

  At that time, most of the West Bank was still draped in green, the natural majesty that bows for the wind, sheds for the chill, and blossoms for the sun. But it changed. One home, one farm, one village at a time. Demolished, confiscated, razed—a ceaseless appropriation of Palestinian land. “Imperialism by the inch,” Haj Salem called it. Today, the path where the girls carried Yousef and Fatima’s love blends into barren wastelands, littered with the rubble of old homes, burned tires, spent bullet casings, and struggling olive saplings.

  “I wonder what the letter said to make her cry.” Huda was concerned for Fatima. Their walk back was brisk, at least until they reached the checkpoint.

  There, a slender soldier asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Jenin,” Huda answered meekly.

  “Jenin,” Amal said, despising her own subservience.

  On cue, they produced the papers and cards they had been instructed to carry since June 1967. These were the color-coded ID documents that identified Palestinians according to their religion and the area where they lived along with various permission papers for travel east, west, north, or south. Special permission was required for medical treatment, commercial movement, university passes, such that a single individual ended up carrying piles of pink, yellow, and green slips, crumpled and tattered from persistent fingers, sweat, and the constant unfolding, inspection, and refolding.

  At the opposite side of the checkpoint, another soldier questioned Osama Jamal, a fourteen-year-old boy who lived in Jenin—not in the refugee camp but in the actual town where the camp was located. His father owned the local bakery that captured passersby with the aroma of fresh breads, manakeesh, and fatayer.

  Osama was pushed to the ground and kicked by the soldier at the checkpoint.
Another soldier helped him to his feet before turning angry Hebrew words on the first. While the soldiers quarreled, Osama limped away with a fractured rib and a crushed ego, praying that the two girls from Jenin had not noticed him.

  Once out of the soldiers’ view, Amal and Huda offered him help, but Osama refused until the pain conquered his pride and he relinquished his bags, leaning his body on their shoulders after they promised not to reveal that he had accepted assistance from girls.

  “You’re Yousef Abulheja’s sister, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Amal answered, thrilled that he had spoken to her. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  Huda produced a tissue from the constant stash she kept in her pockets because, as she repeatedly told Amal, “you never know when you’ll need a handkerchief.”

  Amal had never been so close to a boy other than Yousef, her baba, or Ammo Darweesh. The proximity flushed her with modesty and timid excitement, and a rush of bashfulness lodged in her throat. She accepted the weight of his arm stretched across her shoulder, pushing her head forward and her gaze downward, while something fluttered in her belly. They walked in silence, paced by the labor of Osama’s jagged breath, and Amal’s gaze fastened itself to a wrinkle in his pants that disappeared and gathered with each stretch of the thigh beneath the cloth, while the ground moved beneath their steps.

  “Do you get bread from my dad’s store?” Osama asked, the pain truncating and elongating his words. Amal lifted her head. But he was not addressing her and she saw clearly that Huda was as oblivious to his interest as he was to Amal’s.

  “Don’t talk, you’ll make it worse,” Huda responded with uncharacteristic assertiveness that was not quite confident but rather willful, and now Amal’s shyness was rinsed away with envy.

  At home, Amal found Yousef holding Mama’s hand and talking into the stagnant air that hung over her forsaken eyes.

  “Do we need bread? I can go get some,” she interrupted, indifferent to the perceptible gravity in the room, wanting only an excuse to be in Osama’s presence again.

  “Amal, I need to talk to you,” Yousef said. “But not now. Can you stay with Mama for a bit? I’ll be right back.” And off he went. Impatient to know what Yousef had to say and why Fatima had been crying, Amal looked uncharitably at Mama and sat in a rancorous mood next to her.

  Dalia turned to her daughter. She surfaced tenderly above the fluid canopy of unawareness, touched Amal’s hair with her lips, maternal at last, and said, “Yousef is leaving,” seamlessly returning to her depths. Come back, Mama! Amal’s heart called, but Mama had already retreated into her mind.

  Amal knew what Mama said was true. Yousef was leaving. She feared he was being hunted by the Israelis. So many men had gone away in handcuffs and blindfolds, never to be seen again, siphoned into the place wherefrom emerge only the subjugated and broken. She felt the approach of something frightening. Something she could not yet view or grasp, like the foul breath of a hiding beast. It made her shudder and her legs erupted in a directionless stride. She ran, unsure where to go or even why she was running.

  Huda. Where is she?

  “Huuudaaa,” Amal called beneath her friend’s window.

  Huda’s head appeared in the window long enough to say, “Not now. I’ll come over later. I can’t talk now. Bye.”

  God, what is happening! Amal ran, unable to control the explosion in her legs, the tender buds on her chest tormented with every stride. Her eyes stung with tears, her lungs burned with the cold until she fell to her knees, exhausted, in the peach orchard, the place that had once bustled with activity during the spring harvest and had been a clandestine meeting place in the winter for young lovers to hide from the watchful eyes of their families. Now it was off-limits to Arabs, another domain she dared not trespass.

  Yet there she was, just beyond the first row of trees . . .

  NINETEEN

  Yousef Leaves

  1968

  YET THERE I WAS, just beyond the first row of trees in the peach orchard, and it was growing dark. It was cold and I was too lonely to be afraid. I folded my limbs, winding into exhaustion and making believe that I lay in the embrace of Osama. I slept that way, melted into the darkness of a star-filled sky, and awoke before dawn above a thin layer of fog hovering low to the ground.

  I don’t recall how the sight to which I opened my eyes affected me then, but the memory of that morning’s landscape takes my breath away now. It was the picturesque backdrop of my parents’ lives—miles of pasture carpeting valleys nestled amid waves of olive groves. Trees like beckoning grandparents, hundreds of years old, wrinkled and stooped with heavy arms that stretched to every direction, as if in prayer. Those who took that glorious land, which had glistened green beside the blue Mediterranean waters since before Moses, claimed that it had been a “desert” that they had “made bloom.” A magnificent sun poured its light over the hills like yellow paint and lit the old Arab homes that were enduring the perils of abandonment. No other soul was in sight and I thought then that I understood the formidable enticement of solitude.

  Unthinkingly, I reached for my new breasts. Seduced by curiosity I caressed them with thoughts that roused shadows of guilt. Shame stirred, reminding me of scriptures, sin, and punishment. But I heeded nothing except the irresistible slip of my hand into my panties and there, under a tree in the forbidden peach orchard, I found the unspoken pleasures of womanhood.

  My hand emerged guilty and bloody, evidencing the arrival of the mysterious and long-awaited menstrual cycle. I smelled my scent, even tasted my own blood, and believed that I had been transformed overnight into a woman, that my world had changed in a way that was magical. I got to my feet and started back to Jenin, confident that Yousef was not really leaving, that it had all been a misunderstanding.

  A voice broke my fantasy in broken Arabic. “Stop!”

  A soldier!

  I lifted my pleading eyes toward the sun, but its indifferent and brilliant smile only blinded my sight with black spots as I was caught trespassing. First one, then two more soldiers were upon me like hyenas and I shook with fear. They asked me endless questions, passing the stack of identity papers between them. One soldier carefully refolded the papers and politely, compassionately, returned them to me. “Go home,” he said.

  Untrusting, I put a distance between them and me with reluctant, suspicious steps, until a primitive instinct discharged in my wobbling legs a sprint homeward. As I ran, a swoosh seemed to set my ear on fire as something terrible passed within an inch of my head. Then my abdomen cramped. My breathing frightfully quick and loud and my knees weak, I stopped at the edge of Jenin, not far from where Osama had asked to take a break from walking when Huda and I had helped him the previous day. I simultaneously looked and felt where my right leg was oddly wet and warm. In the inchoate realization that my own blood flowed, I entertained the notion of a colossal menstruation. My hand moved to the cramp in my side and as my fingers sank into a horrid slush, my knees buckled, my eyes bulged and rolled, and my last string of consciousness that day roiled from the depths of the earth, through my lungs, fleeing my breath as a wild scream.

  I’d been shot.

  I opened my eyes to light and an unfamiliar female voice speaking in Palestinian Arabic, “She’s waking up.” The light disappeared into a halo behind Huda’s face. Fatima stood next to her and Lamya next to Fatima. I heard Fatima say that Haj Salem, Ammo Jack O’Malley, and Ammo Darweesh with his family and others from the camp were outside the hospital, smoking and waiting for news.

  A familiar murmuring, that audible swirling of a broken mind, caught my ear and I turned my head toward it, finding Mama and Um Abdallah, the two of them looking like immobile room décor. Mama was dressed in her beautifully embroidered thobe, delicate but steadfast. And I thought then not of the bullet or the pain, or of Yousef, of Osama, or Baba, but of Dalia. I could at last see through the gaunt shell of my mother to the colorful, daring, and vivacious Bedouin girl whose fire had
been tamped with a hot iron and whose wits had been doused with the ashes of too much death and too many wars. Those were my meditations when I awoke from the surgery that removed the metal fragments from my abdomen. The bullet had come from the direction of a southern watchtower, not from the ground soldiers behind me who had checked my papers. Such was the conclusion of the physician who examined the trajectory through my body. The bullet had struck my right side just above the kidney and exploded, tearing chunks of flesh from my belly upon exit.

  “It’s burning,” I said.

  “Here. The doctor said you should take this for pain,” Fatima said, handing me two orange pills.

  “Bless your hands. Where is Yousef?” By their desolate expressions, I knew he wasn’t coming.

  “He looked for you . . . ,” Huda began, and Fatima added that she was sure. “He would not have gone if he’d known you’d been shot.”

  Gone where?

  “Here.” Huda extended a letter Yousef had left for me.

  Bismillah Arrahman Arraheem

  My dear sister, Amal,

  I have to go. Please understand. I’ve been writing this letter to you for weeks and I can’t find the right words. Every time I sit down with a pen I remember a promise I made to Baba.

  One Friday, while we sat in the west olive groves after the Jamaa prayers, Baba made me promise to take care of you if anything ever happened to him. He wanted you to get an education, to marry a good man. I was too naïve to believe the Jews would invade again, but I believe Baba sensed the war coming.

  I thought Baba would be around forever. I don’t know how to keep my promise to him. If I stay here, these Israelis will eventually kill me. They have all the power and they want all the land. So far, nothing is stopping them.

  They’ve taken everything, Amal. And still they take more. I can’t sit by and watch helplessly any longer. Please, little sis, forgive me for leaving. I’m going to fight. It’s my only choice. They have scripted lives for us that are but extended death sentences, a living death. I won’t live their script.