Then came the scream, and she was awake beneath her mother’s weight.
You are the prettiest of mothers.
Sara can never forget those last minutes of her mother’s life. At least ten minutes, maybe an hour, an eternity not long enough. It repeats in her mind and she records it in the letters she writes to her departed mother on a Web site for the world to see:
Your face is looking down at me. The words “I love you” are formed inside your half-parted lips, cracked from thirst. But no sound leaves you. I want to tell you then that I know you used to come into my room at night, when you thought I was sleeping, to put your arms around me. I know you loved me. I want to tell you this. Your breath was always full of love and it was full of sorrow. I want to tell you this, but I am terrified, because now I have the ultimate proof that you love me more than you love life. I wonder what you are thinking. I need your forgiveness. I need you, and I beg God not to take you. Not now. Not like this.
The sniper’s bullet, intended for Sara, burrowed in Amal’s flesh and drained her entrails of life in a pool of warm brown. It coated Sara’s dream, and every dream she had thereafter. Until the siege ended a week later, Sara was covered in her mother’s blood. The soldier who had held his gun to Amal pulled Sara from her mother’s lifeless arms. She fought him to stay. She asked him to shoot her. In her shock, she saw him surprised that she spoke English. As the soldier dragged Sara back to Huda’s home, he said to no one in shaking, broken English that he “cannot shoot anymore.”
The soldier gave Sara and Huda his thermos of water and two days later brought another and instructed them where to find “the woman’s” body when the camp “opens.” He had hidden Amal’s corpse beneath an uprooted olive sapling. He gave them food and enough to drink while the siege continued, but not enough to wash a mother’s blood from her daughter’s skin.
When the siege was lifted, reporters swarmed into the camp. Food and water followed and survivors set about their searches for each other, for their dead, their possessions, their will. Schoolbooks, unpaired shoes, utensils, the things of living scattered amid destroyed homes. Haj Salem did not survive. Fleeing neighbors had tried to get him out, but the advancing bulldozer would not stop and its tonnage decimated the old man’s house while he was still inside. When she heard this, Sara wept and wrote to her departed mother:
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?
April, the month of flowers, forever holds Sara in her mother’s arms. It is the month when mother and daughter fell in love again and stayed up all night talking while a fury swirled outside the walls protecting them. It is the month when Amal at last found home in her daughter’s eyes. Her Web site, www.aprilblossoms.com, is where Sara records her memories of that month, the month from which all things come and to which all return. The month from which Sara loves and hates.
Sara will go back to Pennsylvania. This is certain, for she has already written too much and her name is on an Israeli list of “security threats.” There is no place to hide in this land, where even shadows are uprooted. But Sara’s heart will never leave Jenin.
Huda roamed the camp in a daze. That place where she was born, where she had been abused and terrorized, loved and cherished, had once again been destroyed. The remains of people’s lives protruded from the waves of ruin. Huda wandered, looking for something to find. A woman’s bathrobe still hanging on a bathroom wall, still standing amid the rubble. It was the bathrobe of her friend and neighbor. That was a find. But she left it there. A human hand, only fingers visible, jutted from the ground. Someone buried alive. She gingerly walked around the hand, murmuring the Fatiha for that person’s soul. A little girl’s shoe. Schoolbooks everywhere, torn and imprinted with tank treads. A doll. She picked it up. It had but one arm. Huda sat slowly on the ground, the one-armed doll in her hands. She looked at it. Looked hard. She felt the circular motion of time breeze through her heart and saw herself a girl again. It made her smile, ever so sadly. She ran her hand over the doll’s head, smoothing its matted hair in a stroke that replenished her tears. She cried with a small whimper, something like the sound of a heart that keeps breaking. And with grace, Huda closed her eyes in prayer: Oh, Allah, help us all get through this life.
Only at the burial did Huda scream. She wailed over the body of her childhood friend. It was the only body she could bury. Jamil was never found. She knew, as mothers know, that her son would be killed. But what mother’s heart can truly prepare for that? She just screamed. A primitive call into the ether. The love and death of children creasing and contorting her face. Huda dug her fingers into the earth over the graves, kneading the dirt as if she were fondling fate itself, grabbing fistfuls of her pain and heaving it into the air and onto her face. She sat there sprinkled with dirt, crying.
David was there too. He stood quietly next to Huda over the seven long rows of graves. They knew one another well, for it was Huda who had given David the names and rumors when he came looking for his family. But now they did not talk. No one spoke.
The few remaining men in Jenin dug the graves. Children looked on in curiosity as the shrouded bodies were lowered into the ground. Women heaved dirt from the graveside and slapped it on their own faces. They mourned with a primal trilling that the world did not witness.
David cried silently. He stood over his sister’s body, inside the torment of sobriety, smelling of the want of liquor. Though he made no sound, the force of his grief was strong, hovering over the graves like rain that cannot fall. His tears welled inside a loneliness that could not be drowned, rocked, or touched.
Ari did not stand. He crouched over Amal’s grave, sorrow on his back, and spoke to her softly. “Take this,” he whispered to her body, “I owe your father my life. Tell him I never had a better friend.” And Sara watched Ari drop the eighteen-pearled brooch over her mother’s shrouded form.
Mrs. Perlstein’s brooch was buried with you, Mother.
When the hours had accumulated on them exhaustion and thirst, the wailing gave way to the plaintive silence of tired grief. Ari limped into the crowd of mourners and prayed the Muslim prayer for the dead. They recited the Fatiha, dousing their faces in amen, cupped in their hands.
“Your grandfather is the one who taught me to pray,” Ari told Sara later.
“I wish I’d known him,” she said.
“I will tell you everything I remember. I knew your grandfather since he was a boy and was by his side when he married your grandmother Dalia. I can even tell you about your great-grandparents, Haj Yehya and Haje Basima. If you like, I can take you to Ein Hod and give you a tour of your origins. I have not been back there since I was a boy. It will be poetic to return there now with Hasan’s granddaughter. Indeed it will. You will do me a great favor to come. It will please your grandfather Hasan, wherever he is. I am indebted to him.”
Stories from Jenin trickled out into neighboring towns. The sight of a boy dangling from a metal post, headband and armbands marking him as a fighter. The story of an old man, a centenarian haj, who was crushed to death inside his bulldozed home. The one about the Palestinian-Amreekiyya who was killed protecting her daughter. This woman had survived an Israeli bullet in her youth and died by the one intended for her child. Her story reached far and wide. Her tale sent Muna Jalayta calling the Colombian Sisters, crying, “Amal was killed in Jenin.” That tale traveled abroad and put an ache in the heart of Elizabeth, who cried on her husband’s shoulders for the woman and her daughter whom they had helped and loved. It made Angela Haddad and Bo Bo mourn the passing of an old friend. But that story, too, quietly passed.
When Israel finally opened the camp, the UN never cam
e. The American congressmen who tour suicide-bombing sites and express eternal allegiance to Israel never came. Jenin buried fifty-three bodies in a communal grave, Amal among them, but hundreds remained missing.
The official report of the United Nations, prepared by men who never visited Jenin and spoke to neither victim nor victimizer, concluded that no massacre had taken place. The conclusion was echoed in U.S. headlines: “NO MASSACRE IN JENIN.” “ONLY MILITANTS KILLED IN JENIN, SAYS ISRAEL.”
They murdered you and buried you in their headlines, Mother.
How do I forgive, Mother? How does Jenin forget? How does one carry this burden? How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?
Just around Sara’s heart, a silent scream has formed like a fog. It bears no words or definition. At times she thinks it is a political or humanitarian urgency to set the record straight. Other times it feels like anger. But in the shade of solitude, it is a wordless whisper from the depths of her, an unmistakable longing for just one more moment with Amal to answer her mother’s last words and say “I love you, too.”
FORTY-SIX
Pieces of God
2002–2003
ARI MADE GOOD ON his offer a few weeks later, taking Sara to Ein Hod. The two of them asked David to go along and all three walked through the village. Modern sculptures dotted the terrain. A few artists, mostly French Jews, worked outdoors on landscape paintings and residents walked about in shorts and summer dresses. “This is your family’s home,” Ari said, pointing to a splendid stone house with beautiful gardens and fruiting trees.
“Can we go inside?” Sara asked.
“Let us ask.” Ari knocked on the door.
A pretty Jewish woman in her early thirties appeared. Realizing that the strangers at her door were there on an errand of Palestinian nostalgia, she refused them entry.
“I know what this is about. You must understand this is our home now.” She emphasized the word our. “Besides, my baby is sleeping.” With that she closed the door and the would-be guests left.
Sara took photographs of the stables, where Ganoosh and Fatooma once lived. She had promised her great-ammo Darweesh to visit that stone building of his fondest memories. Three of his sons, Amal’s cousins, had been part of the resistance and lost their lives in the fighting. The others were imprisoned, and Darweesh had wished for death to come to him during that time. But he survived in his wheelchair—in an innermost, lowermost space.
David and Ari found Basima’s grave where the cemetery had been, just above the village. Most of the headstones had been removed. But a group of white-streaked red roses peeked over the tall grass.
“This is approximately the spot where we buried her,” Ari said. “Dalia planted these roses.”
Sara caught up with Ari and David. In their last days together, Amal had told her daughter about the grave and the roses. The story still fresh in her mind, she knew right away what the men were looking at.
“Should we say the Fatiha for my great-teta Basima?”
“Of course,” Ari said.
“Will you teach it to me? The Fatiha?” David finally asked.
“Of course.”
Before the day was over, Sara drove a bit farther to Haifa’s shore. She had promised her amto Huda to take pictures of the sea. In all her life, Huda had not been able to fulfill her girlhood wish of going to the ocean “just to sit, since I can’t swim.”
In Jenin, Sara at last found the extended family she longed for. Huda became a maternal friend. Her great-ammo Darweesh had produced quite a large contingency of cousins—first, second, and third. But most of all, she loved Mansour.
A year after her mother died, Sara was still in Jenin, still helping in the slow rebuilding effort with occasional funds from wealthy gulf states. She took a job with a French nongovernmental organization and lived with Huda. Her uncle David came around often and so did Jacob. All very different people, they found one another in the memory of loss and the hope of rest, becoming something of a family.
Following his sister’s death, David stopped drinking. This is what he wrote on Sara’s www.aprilblossoms.com Web site:
I do not drink anymore, sister. Somehow you gave me this gift. I’ll never be wholly Jew nor Muslim. Never wholly Palestinian nor Israeli. Your acceptance made me content to be merely human. You understood that though I was capable of great cruelty, so am I of great love.
Sara was eventually deported back to the United States, where she took a job with al-Jazeera news agency. Her cousin Jacob went with her to study at Amal’s alma mater, Temple University. It seems he was predisposed to mathematics, like his uncle Yousef.
During Sara’s stay in Jenin, she was able to sponsor a visa for Mansour, whom she grew to love as the brother she had never had. Osama was released from Israeli detention and both he and Huda encouraged their son to go. Thus, shortly after Sara returned to her home in Pennsylvania, she sent him a ticket to join her and Jacob, to live in the old Victorian house that her mother had restored and where Sara had grown up.
David wrote of this on www.aprilblossoms.com:
Huda and Osama tell me that Mansour is studying art and working part-time with Sara. “He’s doing well,” Huda said. “I get letters all the time. Look.” She showed me a pile of them. “Look what he wrote here,” she said, reading a passage that described his awe at a world without military occupation. He had never imagined how thrilling to the spirit it is to live by one’s own terms and move freely about.
I visit Huda and Osama often. She makes such sumptuous food and they are very good about keeping me in line when I crave the drink. “Have a hooka instead,” Osama insists, and we smoke together muaasal. The honey apple tobacco is by far the tastiest.
Yesterday I was there, and Osama remarked how our children live like siblings together in your Pennsylvania home. One American, one Israeli, and one Palestinian. “How nice that is,” Huda said, her tiger eyes the prettiest I have ever seen.
“Yes, indeed,” I said, inhaling the smoke of honey apple tobacco. Love, David
. . . Love, Ismael
FORTY-SEVEN
Yousef, the Cost of Palestine
2002
I PLAN IT. I LIVE IT. I see it. I’ll make it happen. I’ll kill. I will.
But I can’t. I know I can’t. Love came to me in a dream and placed her lips upon my brow.
“Love is what we are about, my darling,” she says. “Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins.”
My darling wife. Beautiful Fatima.
And I struggle to fall back into my dream to find her once more.
I know I cannot desecrate Fatima’s love with vengeance. Much as I want them to bleed, I’ll not besmirch my father’s name with the lies they will tell. I can’t leave Amal alone in the world. I haven’t kept my promises. I tried. To protect my wife and children. To set my sister’s life toward family and love. I tried, Baba.
Now I’ve gone so far. Can I turn back? The wheels have been put in motion.
“I’m not going to go through with it,” I say.
“He’ll not go through with it. The coward. But it will go through him,” they say.
It will go through me.
I’ll live this pain but I’ll not cause it. I’ll eat my fury and let it burn my entrails, but death shall not be my legacy.
“I understand, brother,” another tells me.
Someone else drives the bomb into the American building. It goes through me.
And I see on television what I saw in my darkness. It lives in me with the necrotic years that will not end. And my face is broadcast and printed around the globe.
“The world knows your face, Yousef,” they say, and a bullet is handed to me. “Do the honorable thing if you’re found.”
My gun and solitary bullet are in my pocket. I carry my death, the honorable thing, in my clothes as I, their terrorist, search for work in the dank realms of
life. In Basra I am a laborer. In Kuwait, I haul stone. In Jordan I am nearly a beggar. Then, I am a school janitor. How fate is stubborn and holds to habit. I lay my head in a room beneath the library. How fate is merciful. And everywhere, I am alone with my father’s books, my bullet, Love and the memory of her, the past, and memories of a future.
I write so many letters to Amal. Stacks of them line my dirty walls. But what new hell will come to her if we are in contact and I am discovered. And oh, Ismael. I’ve carried your scar on my shoulders for so long that it has sunk into my own skin. Here it is.
I read April’s news and weep tears. I weep darkness and love. Here it is, at the library where I live: www.aprilblossoms.com.
Dearest Amal, with a long vowel of hope.
Sometimes the air is redolent with the sighs of memory. A waft of olive wind or the jasmine of Love’s hair. Sometimes it bears the silence of dead dreams. Sometimes time is immobile like a corpse and I lie with it in my bed.
And there I sleep, waiting for the honorable thing to come of its own accord.
Mornings in Jenin Page 29