Mornings in Jenin

by Abulhawa, Susan

  Appearing from the corner of my eye, a silhouette of outstretched arms hurried toward me. “Hello, darling!” said Khalto Bahiya, Mama’s eldest sister. She lived in Tulkarem, where she worked as a maid in nearby settler homes; she had set out for Jenin as soon as she heard the news. Although she lived less than ten miles away, it took her three days to make the trip. Twice, she was turned away at the checkpoint. On the third try, soldiers allowed her through. But Mama had already been buried, and when Khalto Bahiya realized that she had not been able to kiss her little sister good-bye, she had hurled curses at the soldiers.

  I hadn’t expected Khalto Bahiya to be there, but I was immensely glad to see her. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother’s fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiya’s beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time had scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution. But even these lines disagreed on their faces. Khalto Bahiya’s face incorporated them into her joy and her pain, so that lines appeared and hid according to her expressions and provided frames and curves to her tenderness. Gentle folds nestled her lips and made her face open when she smiled, like an orchid. On Mama, the lines had always seemed incongruous— as if her beauty could accept no change or outside interference. The wrinkles on Mama’s face had carved her skin like prison bars, behind which one could discern the perpetual plaint of something grand and sad, still alive and wanting to get out.

  “Come here, ya binti.” Haj Salem motioned me to sit next to him with a raised arm, revealing a jagged oval of sweat that moistened his cotton dishdashe. I settled uneasily onto a cushion between him and my long-suffering Ammo Darweesh, who drooped in the disrepair of his wheelchair, fastened at one hinge by rope and tape. His youngest child, my cousin Fouad, was ill with a fever and slept in the communal room, the reason we endured the mosquitoes in the open courtyard.

  Ammo Jack O’Malley rested comfortably on the other side of Haj Salem, the two of them playfully arguing like schoolboys over who was taking a longer turn with the hooka muzzle. “Damn Irishman.” “Damn Palestinian.” They laughed, one raspy and toothless, the other like a sputtering malfunction.

  They had gathered to decide my fate. That much was clear.

  “Amal, may the remaining years add to your life. We’re all grieving with you for your loss,” Ammo Darweesh started. After offering his condolences, he offered me a home: I could live with my uncle, who, for a living—minimal at best—made glass baubles that he peddled to tourists from the bag of curses and salvation of his wheelchair.

  “You are family and I will do everything I can for you,” my ammo said sincerely.

  “Or you can live with me in Tulkarem,” Khalto Bahiya interrupted with an inviolable sense of family. Even though she already had five mouths to feed, my khalto was prepared without question to assume responsibility for her sister’s child.

  My third option was to live in Jerusalem with Amto Sameeha, she whose parents had once saved Ari Perlstein’s family.

  Ammo Jack leaned forward, across Haj Salem, his small blue eyes prying their way through the fiasco of his hair. “There may be another choice, Amal,” he said, capturing me in the intensity of his look. At that moment, the theater of chickens and hookas faded. Everything peripheral to the line of Ammo Jack’s gaze held its breath. Ammo Darweesh cleared his throat. Haj Salem and Khalto Bahiya glanced at each other, then at the ground. It was Ammo Darweesh’s place to say what came next.

  “There is a school in Jerusalem that would like to have you,” he said, half-convinced it was the right thing, half-ashamed he could not offer me something better himself.

  “But the choice is yours,” Khalto Bahiya interrupted, nervous that I might misunderstand their honest intentions. “Our homes are always open to you, anytime and for as long as you want.”

  Ammo Jack, still leaning forward but having unlocked his stare now, said, “It is a good place for girls like you, Amal, and the schooling is exceptional.”

  Like me?

  It was an orphanage by night and a competitive academic institution by day. As a Palestinian orphan with impressive marks, I would be admitted without question or financial obligation. They had been discussing the subject even before Mama had passed away because Ammo Jack thought I would have a better chance at a merit scholarship to university if I graduated from that school.

  But Haj Salem put it another way. “Your father would have wanted this for you,” he said, challenging my most tender sympathies. “Everyone knows that you have inherited your father’s love of books and it seems you are too far ahead to take more benefit from our schools.”

  Then he spilled his signature phrase, to which he had earned exclusive patent: “I’ve seen it all.” He launched into a monologue to which I listened impatiently then, but which I would revisit many years later as the greatest wisdom ever imparted to me by another human being. “We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him. I have tried to use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice.”

  Now his stare stretched to the whole of my past and future. Some somber and deeply wise expedience deposited in his wrinkled brown face an unimpeachable promise that what he said was truth. “We don’t like to see our own leave. This is hard on the hearts of your kin. But you have honored the gift of Allah with diligence and hard work, and all of us know that we should help you now to complete your journey, not to stifle Allah’s gift.”

  I sat motionless, unbelieving, in the stupor of an accidental imposter. I had done nothing to earn the frightening credit they granted me. The diligence and hard work of which he spoke were merely cowardice and fear of purposelessness, of divine punishment, of rejection; fear of light and sound that seemed to turn up one notch into war, death, and the debasing surprises of lonely bullets that tumbled end over end in the flesh. Forthrightness scrambled to set the record straight that what they witnessed in me was pure fear, not a gift or its honoring. Honest language struggled on my lips to assemble the proper order of words.

  “But . . . ,” I said. “I don’t . . . I mean . . . I’m not . . . God, I didn’t . . . It isn’t like that . . . You don’t understand.” Finally, my mangled thoughts came out in the honest-to-God simple truth of my existence since Baba had left: “I’m scared.”

  I vomited those words. My lips trembled and I almost cried. It was the unpredictability I feared and hated.

  “Maalesh.” Khalto Bahiya tried to comfort me, but I no longer needed reassurance; I needed food. My belly roiled a loud reminder that I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Khalto Bahiya had already prepared hummus, fried eggs, salata, and leftover koosa, bowls and platters of which she spread out on the ground over old newspapers. We all shared the food, arms reaching over and across to grab bites with strips of bread. The chickens pecked nearby at a handful of old bread thrown on the ground. We didn’t use utensils, and we dipped into the same plates. Many years later, after I became accustomed to U.S. corporate luncheons, I amused myself by imagining the consequences of reaching and dipping my bread for a taste from another’s plate.

  I remained with Ammo Darweesh after everyone left and Khalto Bahiya went to bed next to my cousin Fouad, whose fever had broken and who was now wide awake drawing pictures on Khalto’s sleeping face. “Where is his mother?” I asked, for the first time noticing her absence.

  “She’s visiting her parents,” Ammo Darweesh answered, it being understood that he and his wife had quarreled and she had left him with the children, as she often did, to return a few days later.


  It was that night that I learned the facts of Dalia’s broken ankle so many years earlier in the small village of Ein Hod, before my time, before Israel, before refugee camps. My uncle showed me a picture of a dashing young man on a black Arabian horse peering from beneath a white turban. He told me how that handsome man had wanted to marry my mother. It was hard to believe my uncle and he were one and the same. The story he told resolved in my ears like a lyrical verse, settling into the poetry of Dalia and sinking into the quicksand of a Palestine that could never be the same.

  “Is that Ganoosh?” I asked, happy to finally see a photograph of the fabled family horse.

  “Yes! That’s him,” he answered, his face opening up to the fresh air of the past. He pulled himself closer to me, his useless legs, small and limp, dragging behind the force of his arms, and he let loose a string of tales about Ganoosh and Fatooma— about the goat that thought Fatooma was its mother and cried whenever the horse left its sight. The way my ammo had had to sleep in the stables when it thundered to ease the horses’ fear. How they had carried him with great speed through the Galilee and along the Mediterranean coast. And how those magnificent animals were likely the greatest loves of his life.

  The time I spent with my uncle that night is one of those occasions that increase in wonder with age. Ammo Darweesh filled the late hours with stories about Baba when they were young boys, about my jiddo and teta and great-grandparents. It was the nearest I would ever again come to the company of Baba, and I decided then that I wanted to live with my ammo rather than at the orphanage in Jerusalem or at Khalto Bahiya’s home. When I spoke my thoughts, Ammo Darweesh’s face closed, a web of lines gathering at the corners of his eyes.

  “See this,” he said, pointing to the photograph of himself. “This is you now, and if you stay here, you will undergo a similar transformation to what I am now.” His face was now clear, revealing the truce he had made with his own fate to keep bitterness at bay.

  “The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope. You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take it.”

  “But I don’t want to leave Jenin.”

  “Then I have to convince you somehow. Because someday, when your father and I meet again, I will have to report to my older brother how I set his daughter on the right path, the one he would have wanted you to take.”

  That was all my uncle needed to say.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Leaving Jenin

  1969

  A CROWD OF FRIENDS AND family gathered at the little house where I was the only remaining resident, knotting the narrow alley just outside. They came to bid me farewell in a ceremony of kisses and hugs that lasted hours in the sweltering summer when Mama died. From the time people started arriving until I rode away with Ammo Jack in a yellow taxi, Huda and I kept our hands in a sure and sweaty lock. Osama was there, hovering around Huda with yearning and hurried glances that seemed to ladle into our palms the sap of some secret between them, something caught and oppressed by the strict ways of a religious culture that would not permit him even a gentle kiss on her cheek.

  Ammo Darweesh’s wife had returned from her retreat and the two of them, with their five children running about, were there with advice and gifts. “Study hard, and don’t stray from your salat,” my ammo whispered to me, laying a featherweight kiss on the lovely bond he and I had forged just days earlier. He wished they could take me in the taxi themselves, he said, but he reminded me that only foreigners were allowed to move freely.

  Um Abdallah kissed my forehead with savage maternity that seemed to love indiscriminately. Haj Salem cautioned Ammo Jack to be sure to impress on “that orphanage” that they should take good care of me. “You remember now what I told you to tell them there at that orphanage,” he said with as much sternness as his toothless mouth and wagging finger could muster.

  “I forgot already, haj,” Ammo Jack taunted him, and let loose a laugh.

  “Damn Irishman!” Haj Salem said, turning away to hide his grin.

  Khalto Bahiya had already returned to Tulkarem and we had said our good-byes the day she departed. Neighbors and friends made me promise to send word if there was anything I needed.

  “Anything, Amal. Anything.”

  “May Allah extend your lives and expand your fortunes,” I said, thanking them.

  There were tearful embraces and “God be with you” and “Bless you” and “Oh, I can’t believe they’re sending away one of our own,” and the like.

  Lamya, her round face streaked with dry trails of earlier tears, took my free hand and deposited in it a pair of dice. “Here,” she said with solemn penitence, closing my hand over the dice with her fingers, “I took these from your desk at school.” She must have done it years before—or she had taken them from someone else’s desk, because I had no recollection of it. But I thanked her, Huda and I both taking her in a threesome embrace, and I giggled silently at the petty torment Lamya must have inflicted on herself for having stolen from an orphan.

  Osama stood at the front of the crowd gathered on the dusty road leading to Jenin’s refugee camp while Huda and I held each other in a long tearful embrace. She whispered in my ear that Osama’s family had made an appointment to ask for her hand in marriage. She wanted more than anything to lunge into the safety of their love, and I was happy for the news.

  “Congratulations.” I squeezed my best friend tighter.

  “I’m going to miss you, Amal. It’s like half of me is leaving,” Huda sobbed in my neck.

  We stood crying, Huda with tears, I with my mother’s silence and taut jaw. We were enfolded in each other like the last word of an epic poem we had never imagined would end. A childhood story we had lived together line by line, hand in hand, was ending and we knew it would close the moment we unraveled our arms.

  “Don’t you two worry, now. You’ll see one another again,” Ammo Jack called out from the taxi, waving me in.

  It was time to leave.

  Huda and I let go, and I got in the taxi.

  I rode away in the sad wreckage of parting. Small children ran behind us in the taxi’s dusty wake. The people I loved grew smaller in the rear window until they faded, then disappeared at the turn in the road. The dice from Lamya still clutched in my hand, I turned to face front. The car’s vinyl burned the back of my thighs through my clothes and it seemed to burn through the grief of leaving as well. I was struck by that lack of grief and I tried to feel the sadness that had flowed moments earlier, but none came, as if jail bars had descended around my emotions.

  “Hard to believe I’ve known you since you were born,” Ammo Jack said, looking at me, searching my face. “You’re as smart as Hasan and as tough as Dalia.” He looked ahead now. “God rest their souls. Your parents were good people.”

  Their souls. Their.

  I said nothing. My teeth were clamped together inside my jaws, which I had unknowingly locked. A small band of tears leaked from my eyes—this time, and for the first time, because I missed my mother.

  Whatever you feel, keep it inside.

  More than an hour into our trip, Ammo Jack pointed from the window toward Jerusalem, its dome rising in the distance. “There it is.”

  The Dome of the Rock, al Aqsa, where the prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven in the fabled Night’s Journey, was the point where all of Jerusalem’s stories met. I had a memory of standing inside al Aqsa, beside one of its twelve solid marble columns that surround the rock of the ascension. The image of that massive pillar, which reached higher than my five-year-old mind could fathom, was the impression I had taken away from a family trip to Jerusalem in 1960, before Israel had conquered it. Mama had kept a photograph taken that day of the four of us—of her and Baba, Yousef and me—standing in the tiled compound, the golden dome above us. It was our only family photograph. The camera caught me clutching my father’s leg over his robe, as if I intended to go on photographic record as the sole
proprietor of him. I looked small and serious and when I found that picture after Mama died, it hit me how little I smiled. Father’s face, expansive and gentle, gave the impression of a smile, but his lips were relaxed. His smile was in his eyes. Mama stood next to him, upright in perfectly aligned symmetry, her natural posture, and unreachable depths clear in her eyes. Yousef gaily leaned on one leg with the heartwarming smile that always escaped from the right side of his mouth first, then spread across to the left. Of all of us, he appeared the happiest, the most tender, the most endearing.

  After Israel conquered Palestine in 1967, we never went to Jerusalem again. It was too difficult at first and eventually we weren’t allowed. On its first day of occupation, Israel bulldozed the entire Moroccan neighborhood of some two hundred ancient houses and several hundred residents, who were given less than two hours’ notice to evacuate. Muslims and Christians alike, Greeks and Armenians saw most of their property confiscated, while they themselves were evicted to ghettos or exiled.

  Ammo Jack asked the driver to take us to a place called Khilwa on the Mount of Olives.

  “This place is a wee bit out of our way, but you’ll like it. It’s a good spot to see the city,” he said to me. Moments later we were driving through narrow streets bounded by tall biblical stone walls, until we stopped along the edge of an old Jewish cemetery below the Seven Arches Hotel overlooking that eternal village.

  I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city’s viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable title, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.