by Rula Jebreal
She went to bed feeling as she had felt so many years before, on the night when she had lost not only her innocence but also the possibility of ever being happy. She lay awake for hours, under the covers, and then she got out of bed, trying not to wake up her sisters. For a long time, she gazed at them as they slept peacefully. At least part of the reason why she had put up with all those terrible years had been her desire to remain at her sisters’ side, but she couldn’t take it anymore.
She waited for her stepfather to get up, and then she confronted him. “I’ve told Mama everything, and now I’m going away. But if you dare to lay so much as a finger on one of my sisters, I’ll make sure you pay a heavy price.”
The man stared at her for a moment, flabbergasted by her self-assurance, a quality he had not recognized in her. Then his eyes regained their usual cruelty, and he replied to her with a sneer: “What do you think, you little whore? A fruit tree grows in my garden and I can’t taste the fruit?”
Nadia grabbed a gas lamp and threw it at him, but he dodged it. Then she went to her room, and while Nimer laughed scornfully on the other side of the door, she took a few articles of clothing from a drawer, caressed her still-sleeping sisters with her eyes, tucked a little bag under her arm, and headed for the door. Her mother ran after her. She caught Nadia’s arm and pulled it, trying to embrace her, with tears in her eyes. “Please,” she said, “don’t tell anyone what happened. If you do, you’ll ruin our reputation. Think of your sisters—their reputations will be ruined, too.”
“You disgust me,” Nadia said. Her eyes were also full of tears, but they were tears of anger. “You should have protected me, and you did nothing.”
“I am doing something. I’m staying at my husband’s side, because that’s my proper place, and your sisters are too young to go away with you. Here, take this.”
She handed her daughter some money, which Nadia snatched from her hand, judging the offering the least her mother could do for her. She considered her mother as guilty as her stepfather, and she hated her at the same time that she pitied her. The year was 1959, and Nadia knew that it wasn’t at all easy for an Arab woman in Israel to rebel against her husband. But Nadia had no choice; she had to leave, because the alternative to leaving would have been death. Nothing on earth could have made her bear the rape, the violence, the tyranny one minute longer.
She raced down the hill and away from that house like a madwoman chased by ghosts. She didn’t turn around.
2
When Nadia arrived in Jaffa, a sense of freedom rose up in her. She felt the bitterness of a difficult choice but was proud of herself for having had the strength to rebel against such cruelty. “From now on, I make the rules,” she told herself as she walked along aimlessly. “Nobody’s going to make me suffer anymore.”
Jaffa was smaller and tidier than Haifa, which was, above all, a port, where everything revolved around the loading and unloading of goods and the activities of the underworld that flourished there. Jaffa, on the other hand, seemed to have developed harmoniously, filled with public amenities, restaurants, and hotels and surrounded by green parks. The streets were lined with lemon, mandarin, and grapefruit trees, and the rose-colored houses of Jaffa had a colonial style that, though outdated, was decidedly more charming than Haifa’s modern buildings.
After wandering through the city all afternoon, she saw a sign: HOTEL SHALOM. She thought, “Maybe I’ll find a little peace there,” then crossed the street and entered the lobby. The middle-aged Russian matron at the reception desk was surprised when Nadia asked for a single room. The hotel’s guests were usually tourists or businessmen away from their wives and looking for fun.
Nadia took a room with a terrace overlooking the sea and immediately fell asleep, finally able to release some of the tension that had accumulated in her during the past several hours and to feel relief at having escaped from a bad dream that had lasted for years. After her nap, she took a long bath and went down to the desk to ask if anyone on the staff knew of a restaurant that was hiring waitresses. The Russian lady replied that she knew a restaurant owner, one of her regular clients, who was indeed looking for help, and she gave Nadia the address.
The owner, a Moroccan Jew named Yossi, was immediately struck by the beauty of the girl, who displayed the self-confidence of a grown-up.
Nadia showed herself to be a hard worker, but she was melancholic, and at times her eyes were so sad that Yossi wondered what could have wounded her so deeply. Apart from that, she was perfect. Customers left her lavish tips, and she was always willing to help out her colleagues. One day she asked Yossi if he knew anyone who had an apartment to rent; the hotel was too expensive for her to consider living there permanently. He offered her his beach house, facing the sea, which he and his family used only in summer. At first Nadia was reluctant to accept, but in the end it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.
Her friendship with Yossi grew from day to day. He saw her home each evening, and they talked at length about their respective lives. Actually, it was he who did most of the talking; he told her that he had been married for twenty years but that the love between him and his wife had vanished long ago. He loved his native country, and he was fond of repeating that there was nothing in the world better than wandering around the medina in Fez, lured in one direction or another by the smells and colors of the souk.
One evening Nadia asked him if he would like to come in for a drink. Taken by surprise, he wasn’t sure how to respond. He decided to accept. Nadia, who knew very well what she was doing, intended to demonstrate to herself that her sensuality was intact and that she had overcome the trauma of the abuse she had suffered. Yossi and Nadia became lovers, and she asked him to teach her everything about that subject.
Sometime later, Nadia offered to put on an exhibition of belly dancing in the restaurant, and Yossi gladly accepted. The show was such a success that it was repeated the following day and the day after that. Soon it became the restaurant’s main attraction. “I’ll never be like my mother,” Nadia thought as she danced, pretending not to notice the covetous eyes of the men sitting at the surrounding tables.
One day Yossi arrived at the restaurant in an obviously agitated state. Nadia saw that he remained restless for the entire evening. Once he had brought her home and they were lying between the soft linen sheets, he showed her a ring and said, “Nadia, I love you, and I want to marry you.” Although her fellow waitresses would have given anything for such a proposal, Nadia was terrified by it.
The following day, she packed her things and, without any explanation, left for Tel Aviv.
Some years went by, and Nadia adjusted well to life in Tel Aviv, which to her was the capital of the world. Once in a while, she felt a bit of nostalgia for Yossi and his kind manner, but she quickly forgot about him. Since wages were higher than in Jaffa, she entertained hopes that someday she could save enough money to travel and visit distant places. She had no desire to see her mother again, but when she learned that her sister, Tamam, had also run away from home, only to be caught and shut up in a Christian religious school, Nadia decided to go and visit her.
It was a Saturday morning in March, and the sun’s rays warmed the windows of the bus. After leaving Tel Aviv, the vehicle climbed the rocky hills of Judea and Samaria, eventually reaching Nazareth.
Tamam was elated to see her older sister. When she took Nadia back to her room, they gazed into each other’s eyes for a long time without speaking; then Nadia broke the silence and began telling Tamam about the past few years, first in Jaffa and later in Tel Aviv, mentioning her work as a dancer, her economic independence, and—especially—her freedom. She told her sister that she felt reborn, far from their stepfather’s tyranny and their mother’s weakness. What she missed most of all, however, was having someone she could talk to, someone with whom she could share her experiences, someone she could trust completely. She missed her sister.
In turn, Tamam described her life in the school, the stric
t schedules, the hard-eyed nuns, and the attitudes of the other girls, who tended to avoid her because she was a Muslim, even though they were all Arabs. But despite its harshness, the place was basically tolerable, Tamam said, compared to the hell of home. She cast her eyes down for a moment, and then seemed to fix them on a part of the wall where the plaster had come loose. Only at that moment did Nadia notice how bare the room was, how lacking in anything that might express the individuality of the person living there.
Drawing near to her sister, looking down to meet her gaze, she realized that Tamam was hiding something. Nadia saw a sadness in her sister’s eyes that reminded her of her own state of mind during the first heady days after she left home. Suddenly a shiver came over her, a question crossed her mind: maybe their stepfather had abused Tamam, too. When Nadia asked her, the younger girl wouldn’t reply at first, but her resistance was weak and she needed to tell somebody. A few minutes later, clutching Nadia’s hands tightly in her own, Tamam admitted that their stepfather had violated her for the first time on the very day that Nadia left home.
After visiting Tamam, Nadia walked back down the street leading to the bus station, with feelings of rage and guilt gnawing at her. Nimer had abused Tamam systematically, almost as if he were carrying out some kind of vendetta against the sister who had dared to revolt against him and go away. She walked rapidly, arms straight down at her sides, fists clenched, her whole body a contracted nerve. Her instinct urged her to run away again, even though it would be her sister she’d be running away from this time. Tamam was a reminder that neither of them would ever be free from the past they shared.
In response to her mother’s weakness and the oppression she had submitted to, Nadia had developed an uncommon pride, becoming a beautiful, arrogant young woman who was too injured to share her sadness with anyone else. She would do that only once in her life, years later, when she would spend three months in prison for punching an Israeli woman who had insulted her because she was an Arab. It was there that she met Fatima.
PART THREE
Fatima
1
Fatima gazed up at the sky through the bars of her window. It was six-thirty in the morning, and the prison was still wrapped in a muffled, dreamlike atmosphere. There was no sound, not a single cloud, not a bird; everything seemed frozen in place.
In half an hour, the guards would open the doors, and everything would begin again, as it did every day: the din, the words, and the continual feeling of emptiness.
She stretched wearily on the bed, looking up at the metal mesh of the bunk above her, which had been unoccupied for several weeks. Five years had passed since her arrest, five long years in which time had become so distended that it no longer existed. For months she had been promised that she could work in a nearby hospital, but they still hadn’t called her. Bureaucratic problems, she guessed.
She was sure they’d call sooner or later. They needed nurses, and she was well qualified.
The Six Days’ War of 1967 worsened the Palestinian situation. At that time, Fatima was working at the hospital in Nablus. There she cared for wounded soldiers, civilians, and children, seeing in the process things she thought no one should see in this life.
The war had been quick but ferocious. Women and children reached the hospital in desperate condition, their faces often unrecognizable. Dying Arab soldiers were brought to the hospital as well, and in their eyes Fatima had read confusion and fear, the same emotions she had seen in the refugee camps where her aunt and her cousins lived.
She had never forgotten the expressions on their faces, just as she could still see her parents being humiliated by Israeli soldiers every time they passed a checkpoint. They would pretend that nothing was wrong, tell her everything was normal, but she would nevertheless manage to hear the unspoken words—words of terror and of indignation at having been punished for crimes they had not committed. Freedom is one of those things that you don’t notice until you don’t have it. Fatima knew that in 1948 the Israelis were experiencing the realization of a two-thousand-year-old dream. She was only a child at the time, yet she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that it was at the expense of her people and her family.
And yet as time passed, she had tried to put aside those rancorous feelings and to concentrate on her own life. Whenever she was studying, she would make an effort to withdraw herself from the sounds of her house, which was too small for her large family, from the neighbor’s constant screaming at his wife, from the stench of garbage left to rot in the sun. Fatima hated her neighborhood in Jerusalem. She hated the soldiers, with their smug looks and their fingers always on their triggers. She had studied diligently and worked long hours to become a nurse, and she had finally moved to Nablus, two hundred kilometers from Jerusalem.
She would make her way down the bright, coldly lit halls of the hospital in Nablus with an assured step, wearing military trousers, gym shoes, a white T-shirt, and white coat. It wasn’t long before her dedication earned her a promotion to head nurse.
Every morning she walked to work through the Arab Quarter of Nablus, her kaffiyeh wrapped around her neck, nodding an occasional greeting before slipping into the labyrinth of narrow streets in the Old City. No one who saw her could have imagined that this inconspicuous woman, with such a reassuring, goodnatured appearance, would soon become the first Palestinian woman to organize and attempt to carry out a terrorist attack.
She had already been dividing her time between her nursing and her political involvement. At the hospital, she had met Yasir Arafat, with whom she was to form a close friendship in the future.
During the Six Days’ War, wounded women and children from the cities, along with a stream of young soldiers’ mangled bodies, were brought to the hospital.
Many of them suffered without complaint; perhaps they unconsciously accepted theirs as a tragic destiny that kept repeating itself again and again, a game in which they were pawns moved about by more powerful forces. As she disinfected, treated, and stitched those lacerated bodies, she told herself that no reasons could ever justify so much anguish.
She felt as though it were 1948 all over again. Fatima could see her parents once more, recalling their efforts to protect her and to make her believe that their life under the Israeli occupation was an unchangeable fact. She had grown up convincing herself that children in other places played hide-and-seek amid rubble and piles of garbage. But she was nine when the great change came, too old not to remember the life before it, which had suddenly come to an end without anyone ever explaining why.
All the pain, hatred, and resentment she had tried so long to suppress boiled up in her during the war, and that was when she decided to do something. The staff at the hospital had been advised that all wounded soldiers were prisoners of war: upon their discharge they would go into the custody of the Israel Defense Forces.
It began with a soldier she was caring for, a young Jordanian of Palestinian origin. With eyes he could barely manage to keep open, he implored her to help him escape from the hospital. Fatima didn’t have to think twice. Since the young man had returned to Palestine to fight for the Palestinian people, she felt that the least she could do was to help him get home. She gave him some clothes that belonged to a fellow hospital worker, and the young soldier quickly disappeared.
The next step was a natural consequence of the first. If she had helped him, she could help others, too.
And so she went to work, destroying medical records, burning uniforms, and obtaining civilian clothes for her patients. The military authority, perplexed, tried to figure out what had become of these soldiers. There was a great deal of confusion. Fatima’s operation, however, was short-lived. The hospital administration had already begun to suspect her when some Arab soldiers were captured while attempting to escape from the hospital. Even though none of them gave Fatima’s name, guilt nevertheless fell on her. The administration didn’t have her arrested, but she was fired on the spot.
Fatima, however, felt neither
worried nor guilty. On the contrary, the episode convinced her that she should move from collusion to action. Now that Jerusalem was completely under Israeli control, the resentment of the city’s Arab inhabitants had grown exponentially. What Fatima felt was an almost physical need to do something concrete for the cause she believed in, something that would leave a mark. She considered words and speeches to be important, but she was convinced that alone they were insufficient to change reality.
A few days after she was fired from the hospital, Fatima returned to her family’s house in East Jerusalem. It was there that she found the person she was looking for, a young man with a neatly trimmed beard and short, bristly hair. Continuing to pick out her vegetables, she gradually got closer to him, met his eye, and gave him an unequivocal smile. “Hello,” she said. “My name’s Fatima.”
“Hi, Fatima. Pleased to meet you. I’m Maher,” the youth replied, not in the least bit surprised at her boldness. He smiled as if they had known each other all their lives, but continued to dart glances in all directions. As the leader of a small resistance group answering to the PLO, Maher was aware of and responsible for any political activities in the neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Before Fatima could explain the reason for her approach, the young man interrupted: “I’ve heard about what happened to you. You were fired because you tried to save some Arab fighters.”
Fatima nodded.
With a knowing smile, he said, “You are very brave.”
Fatima looked at him without a word. In a way, it was up to him to steer the course of their conversation. “At the moment,” he said, stroking his beard and smiling, friendly but discreet, “we need people like you. This war is not over yet.”