Mornings in Jenin

by Abulhawa, Susan

  “Not a bad place ta be, eh, love?” Ammo Jack said.

  I smiled shyly and got back into the car.

  It was dark by the time we arrived at Dar el Tiflel Araby, Home of the Arab Child. The headmistress, Miss Haydar, greeted us at the gate with rehearsed poise and led us to her study, where she began laying out the history and rules. Under the electric light, Ammo Jack and I watched a clear comedown in Haydar’s expression, as though we had somehow blighted her hopes. Over the next years I would realize that some elusive and ferocious romantic aspiration perked up in her whenever she knew a man was to enter the compound. Clearly, Ammo Jack was not what she’d hoped for, though neither of us understood then what was taking place in her face as she spoke to us.

  “This institution was founded by Miss Hind Husseini,” she said, “as in the Husseini family of Jerusalem,” lending the emphasis of a raised brow. The Husseinis were Jerusalem notables with a well-documented history of leadership and prominence in the city through the centuries. Miss Hind had been a wealthy unmarried heiress when Israel had established itself on most of Palestine in 1948.

  She had lived in a red-stone mansion adjacent to the hotel she owned where lords, diplomats, dignitaries, poets, and writers had lodged when they visited Jerusalem before Israel took the city. But in April 1948, three bloodied orphans had made their way to east Jerusalem, where they had wandered until someone had taken them to Miss Hind’s doorstep. The children were from Deir Yassin, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where more than two hundred Palestinian men, women, and children had been massacred by Jewish terrorists. Miss Hind had taken in the waifs. In the weeks that followed, as more atrocities were committed by Israelis, more children were taken to Miss Hind, until she closed the hotel and turned it into a shelter, then an orphanage, then a school.

  Miss Haydar had been among those first orphans and she had been adopted by Miss Hind, who had remained unmarried. In the brief orientation with Ammo Jack and me, Miss Haydar did not share her own story. She merely, self-importantly, introduced herself as Miss Hind’s daughter. The tragic circumstance of her adoption was disclosed by the girls during my first few days at the orphanage.

  Miss Haydar was a hard-hearted woman. She compensated for her short stature with high-heeled shoes that she wore with more grace than her own bare feet. She moved in those awful things with natural ease as if she had never learned to walk but on her tiptoes. Her hair was henna dyed and the only thing about her that seemed soft. It framed a stucco face that suffered far too much makeup and limited eyes that had lived almost exclusively in the confines of the orphanage.

  “You should feel privileged to have access to the education that will be provided for you,” she said, her eyes burning into me. “Families pay a lot to send their daughters here.” She was talking about the day students who came for school and went home afterward. I would learn to call them, as the other orphans did, the “outside girls,” and I never befriended a single one in my four years there. We scrounged or bullied money and food from them, but meaningful friendships with them were difficult when we looked at their new shoes, nice uniforms, and other privileges that smacked of a “normal” we all coveted. Ultimately, however, their tuition, along with international donations, is what subsidized the existence of us orphans—the “inside girls” —in Jerusalem.

  The main building was a five-story limestone beauty with the ornate arched doorways typical of Palestinian architecture. Its western wing served as a dormitory for girls aged ten to twenty- three. The remainder of the building housed classrooms, where I sat for biology, mathematics, Arabic, religion, geography, German, and English lessons. The balcony-hung back of the building looked on a large courtyard where a lonely basketball goal, well worn from use, stood at the far end, behind which a very old growth of ivy clung to the masonry wall enclosing the compound.

  “Grab your things and follow me,” Miss Haydar said, motioning imperiously toward my small bag of clothes. “Mr. Jack must go.”

  I wasn’t prepared for another parting. My heart sank and my shoulders sagged. I fell to my knees and tears pooled behind my eyes, though I did not cry.

  “Don’t leave me, Ammo Jack,” I begged.

  He moved his colossal body to meet my eyes, shooing unruly hair from his brow with a trembling hand. In his other palm he held a small package, wrapped in newspaper and brown tape.

  “I should not have kept this so long,” he began softly. “I meant to give it to your brother Yousef. But I couldn’t muster the grit to recount what I witnessed the day I saw this fall to the ground.”

  He handed the box to me awkwardly, in a painfully tender stroke.

  “There was nothing I could do, Amal,” he said, submitting to the questions he knew I would ask when I opened the box.

  But Miss Haydar tore me away, impatiently pulling my arm. “No more of this. It’s too dark to stay outside now.”

  She turned to Ammo Jack. “Thank you, sir. Please escort yourself to the gate.”

  Some thirty girls clamored to see the new arrival winding up the narrow, three-hundred-year-old stone staircase. I walked through their stares, my hard fists clutching the package from Ammo Jack and the dice from Lamya, the loose remnant of my former life. Miss Haydar showed me to my bed, a curious metal contraption she called a “bunk.” Sixteen pairs of these bunks lined the rectangular room, eight along each of the long walls, and all thirty-one girls who lived in that room held me in their scrutiny. Sixty-two eyes, a silent tribunal etching into my flesh.

  “Girls, show her around and make sure she knows the rules,” Miss Haydar commanded, then pivoted away on her high heels. The girls came toward me and I cowered inwardly.

  The closest one to me, a redhead with translucent skin and a soft smile, caressed my head. “Your hair is pretty. My name is Samra.” I would soon learn her name was an unending joke in the orphanage because “Samra” in Arabic means “the dark-skinned one,” and her carrot top stood out like an orange balloon in a dark ocean.

  “What’s your name?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Where are you from?” another asked. Then another and another.

  “Why are you sad?”

  “Will you be my friend?”

  “Did Haydar give you her stupid dissertation?”

  “Are you an orphan, too?”

  Not getting answers from me, they started answering themselves.

  “Of course she’s an orphan, stupid!”

  “Her name is Amal. I heard Haydar talking on the telephone.”

  “Why on earth would she want to befriend you, bucktooth?”

  “Haydar is full of shit.”

  An admonition resonating with seniority came from a pretty dark-skinned girl with a silky blanket of black hair. “Get away from her!” she ordered. “Can’t you see she’s upset? Give her some space, you leeches.” Everyone obeyed. That was my first encounter with Muna Jalayta, who became my dear friend.

  Before she turned to leave, Muna assured me that it wasn’t so bad here at the orphanage and that she would hold the girls off as long as she could. Then she smiled and left.

  Alone and red eyed, bewildered and dizzied by life’s turns, I opened the package that Ammo Jack had given me. Inside the crackle and hiss of tearing newspaper, inside a flimsy box, was an olive-wood smoking pipe. I lifted the pipe, holding the fragile memories of Baba, the two of us with his poetry and the rising sun. Near the mouthpiece, a line was worn in the pipe’s shaft where Baba’s mustache had rubbed against the wood over the years. The pipe still smelled of the honey apple tobacco that Baba had smoked, the scent of my father’s labored breath and tired clothes when he unleashed his love through the pages he turned for me at dawn. I knew that smell so well that I had unknowingly come to think of it as the aroma of the sunrise. I curled up with Baba’s love in my new bunk, letting that soothing waft of my father envelop my wounds and lull me to sleep on that first night in that Jerusalem refuge for Palestinian girls.

  I nev
er saw Ammo Jack again to ask him by what circumstance he had come to possess my father’s pipe. In the summer of 1971, two years after he had escorted me to Jerusalem, I learned that Jack had died in his sleep. I could not return for the funeral because Jenin was under curfew. I also did not have money enough to make the trip, but news reached me that thousands of people had turned out to bid him farewell in a display reserved only for martyrs. Ammo Jack was deeply loved by everyone who knew him, especially the refugees in whose service he lived the last years of his life. Even some Israeli soldiers who frequently manned Jenin’s checkpoints had gone to pay their respects to his daughter, his only relative, who had traveled from Ireland to bury him—for he had specified that he be buried in Palestine.

  Haj Salem wept at Jack’s funeral. After that he never returned to Beit Jawad’s coffeehouse, where the two of them had shared countless hookas in the manufacturing of friendship—a dainty thing they had created from the playful grouchiness of men growing old in the tedium of a timeless battle to leave the world a better place for the young.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Orphanage

  1969–1973

  MUNA JALAYTA WAS RIGHT: the orphanage wasn’t so bad; and from the beginning she took me under her wing. It was sometime during my second year, a hot summer night suffused with humidity and the sounds of vigilant bugs, that I could hear Muna tossing in the bunk above mine.

  “You awake?” I whispered.

  “Who the hell can sleep, besides the snoring dumbasses around us!” she huffed, dangling her head from the side of her bed. “Let’s try the cool tile.”

  “Good idea,” I said, getting out of bed and removing my night shirt.

  “Even better idea. Naked on the tile.” But the floor space was too cramped. “The balcony?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  We stepped through the double doors into the open air and were instantly embraced by the moon.

  “Wow! I’ve never seen the moon so close,” she said, gripping the wrought-iron bars of the balcony. Her womanly form was outlined against the night’s lantern sitting low in the sky.

  “Full moons remind me of my father. Even though I can’t really remember him. Isn’t that silly?” she said, inhaling the night, eyes shut. “He told my sister that a full moon is a portal to God’s ears. Silly.”

  “Let’s complain to it about fat-ass Haydar. Maybe it’ll suck her up into outer space,” I said clumsily.

  “And who says Abulheja doesn’t have a sense of humor!”

  “How did they die—your parents?”

  A pause. “My father was a professor who lectured the truth about King Abdullah’s dirty dealings with Golda Meir. The Arab leaders betrayed us just like the British. Sold us up the river. Sons of bitches. I’d kill every one of them if I could, from the Hashemites to the House of Saud.” Another deep breath in the night. “Students loved my father and lined up for his classes. I suppose that made him a threat to the Hashemite monarchy.

  “It was a February day and rain had started on our way home from my aunt’s house. My mother, father, my sister Jamila, and I were hurrying under umbrellas. Mother was yelling at me to stop splashing in the puddles when an agent of the Hashemites of Jordan called out, ‘Ahmed Jaber Jalayta.’ ”

  When Muna’s father reacted to the call of his name, the agent shot him once in the head. A second bullet tore through Muna’s mother’s lungs as she tried to shield her husband. Two quick gunshots and terror muffled by rain inaugurated Muna’s first memory, at the age of four.

  We lay on our backs, her head on my belly, mine on the ball of our nightshirts as the moon poured light on our dark skin. “I’m sorry, Muna,” I said, stroking her hair and wiggling my sweaty toes against the metal balcony rail.

  I remember that night clearly, the comfort between two friends. At the edge of Muna’s memory, I felt an unstoppable evolution inside of me. No longer a girl, not yet a woman, I wondered which of us was better off—she who lived with the detailed terror of her father’s death or I who lived without the knowledge of what had happened to mine. I leaned into Muna’s hurt and kissed her forehead. We held each other on a carpet of moonlight and in quiet wonderment, I put my arms around her. She kissed my scar and we fell into sleep.

  Muna took me into the folds of her clique, which was something akin to family. Among my new friends were the “Colombian Sisters,” Yasmina, Layla, and Drina. They had been living at the orphanage for three years prior to my arrival. Following the 1948 war, their father had been able to emigrate to Colombia, where the three girls were born and had blossomed to the spicy beat of the salsa and merengue—which they taught me to dance. But their South American life had come to a halt when their father had died of cancer. Rather than use what little money he had on medical treatment, he had spent it to secure his family’s return to Palestine, where an uncle had helped them find a small flat and sent the girls to the orphanage because it was the only route to continue their schooling. Their two oldest brothers, already out of school, had remained with their mother in Ramallah.

  Whether the Colombian Sisters fought or got along, it was always drama. I could never get enough of Drina’s laughter. It was a disorderly thing that tumbled off the walls like a drunken echo and always erupted from a wide-open mouth with head flung backward. She was the oldest of the three sisters and, with a strong athletic body, was also the toughest girl in school. Though I don’t recall that she actually hurt anyone, her crass approach to everything often gave the impression that she was gearing up to maul the first person to annoy her. What I remember most about Drina was the quick snap of her head that positioned her eyes in a straight burning focus on the object of her scrutiny, demanding honesty and loyalty.

  She snapped that look toward me once after I emerged from a grueling interrogation by Miss Haydar, who had held me for five hours in the dorm basement, the “dungeon,” to persuade me to rat out my accomplices. The five of us, Muna, the Colombian Sisters, and I, had broken into the art studio the previous night, as we had been doing every night of Ramadan. It was during the last week of that month of fasting that Miss Haydar had discovered us, and it was because of a pot of stuffed grape leaves brought to us by a French nun.

  That nun was Sister Clairie, whose name I could never pronounce correctly. She had taken a special liking to Layla, the middle of the Colombian Sisters, during Christmas that year when a group from the convent had brought gifts to the world’s less fortunate: us. Recognizing in Layla that spirit of giving, Sister Clairie had approached my friend with an extended hand. “My name is Clairie,” she had said, uttering her own name as if water gurgled in the back of her throat.

  “May I help?” she had asked, motioning to the nameless infant girl in Layla’s arms.

  “Thank you. She was left this morning at the front gate,” Layla had said, carefully placing the baby into the nun’s arms.

  “Layla always takes the babies,” Drina had said. “You’d think she’d given birth to them for all the fussing she does.”

  It was true. Layla’s nurturing instincts were so pure and well-known to us that every wounded girl, physically or otherwise, was put into her care.

  The same black hair, thick eyebrows, and full lips that fixed themselves around Drina’s penetrating eyes were transformed on Layla’s face by her sensitivity. The same features with distinct edges on Drina were soft and rounded on her little sister, Layla. The thick curls of hair, which all three had inherited from their mother, sprang from Drina’s head in confused, reckless coils but fell as obedient tresses against Layla’s back.

  The good nun returned to the orphanage nearly every week after she had met Layla. Each time, Sister Clairie brought a box of goodies. Often, they were things to replenish Layla’s medical supplies for the odd scrapes and cuts on girls who sought her out for mothering and bandages. But always there were chocolate treats and candy, which Layla shared with her sisters, Muna, and me.

  To ease the hunger of Ramadan, Sister Clairie came ea
ch evening to the eastern wall of the orphanage and passed a warm pot to Layla through a small hole in the stones. Her charity was a delicious secret among the five of us friends. In Pavlovian fashion, we arrived at the hole at least half an hour before five, when the good nun was due to arrive. Already it was February, the crisp breeze chilling us on our reconnaissance mission as we gently shoved one another for a peek through the hole.

  “She’s coming!” I whispered when I spotted the fair skin and rosy cheeks in brown habit, a face that looked only for God and thrived in cloistered piety.

  Drina pushed me out of the way. “I hope it’s grape leaves and stuffed zucchini like yesterday,” she said, peeking through the hole.

  “Anything beats the crap Um Ahmed makes,” Yasmina chimed in.

  We all moved aside for Layla to receive the coveted pot of food, which she immediately passed back to us so she could speak with her Christian friend.

  “I got it!” I assured everyone, hiding the pot in my blanket.

  “Mmm, smells good,” Drina mused, her nose in my blanket.

  As we had been doing all month, we broke into the art studio to eat our meal. Yasmina, the youngest of the Colombian Sisters, the most practical and organized of us all, divvied up the food in five equal portions while we waited for the adan to beckon us with permission to break the fast. Muna fasted with us in solidarity even though she was Christian. We had no plates, so we used paint trays from the art supply closet and sat in a circle, our eyes tightly fastened to Sister Clairie’s perfect gift and our ears keenly tuned to the first notes of the adan.