Miral (10 page)

T
he first time Miral went into a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, she was thirteen years old.

On the afternoon of the previous day, a Thursday, Jamal had gone to Dar El-Tifel to fetch his daughters. Miral had watched the English teacher, a petite woman with short hair, and her father conversing at length. Her father seemed embarrassed, frequently touching his head with the palm of his hand and never looking the teacher in the eyes. Then he turned toward Miral, who had just heard him say, “It seems it was only yesterday that I first held her in my arms.”

The last few years had indeed gone by in a flash, but apart from the appearance of a large color television set in the place of the old black and white, and a few new Persian rugs, her father's house had remained almost exactly the same. The jasmine bush had become a tree, and now its branches almost reached the roof. The pomegranate tree had become taller and denser, and on the hottest summer days it provided pleasant shade. And in that same time, Miral and Rania had become two slender and graceful young girls. Miral resembled her mother, with exotic Middle Eastern features, sharp and soft at the same time; Rania had beautiful dark skin and fuller lips than her sister. Until that moment, Jamal had not noticed, or had not wished to notice, the recent changes in his daughters. His mind refused to accept the inexorable passage of time, and he couldn't believe that many years had gone by since the death of his wife.

His daughters, he suddenly realized on that autumn afternoon, were indeed grown up. Miral, in fact, needed a bra.

The following morning, Jamal went to call on Nur, a kindly neighbor who had recently celebrated her fortieth birthday. She had been widowed young and had no children but possessed an acute maternal sense. That was why Jamal consulted her whenever his paternal instinct was insufficient to cope with raising two girls.

Although Jamal considered Nur an intelligent woman, she wasn't particularly well regarded in the neighborhood because she spoke Hebrew perfectly, having worked in an Israeli shop, and had recently begun a relationship with an Israeli man, a Druze. Jamal had always come to the woman's defense, in an effort to counter the increasing animosity toward her, a dislike nourished by a series of rumors that, as they passed from mouth to mouth, became ever more nasty. This peculiar attachment stemmed chiefly from the fact that Nur and Nadia had been good friends but also from Jamal's admiration for Nur's independent streak.

The year before, Jamal had covered the same short distance and, purple faced with embarrassment, knocked on Nur's wooden door. As soon as she opened it, he blurted out, but almost in a whisper, “Miral has got her first period. What should I do?” Nur's broad smile made him realize that there was no reason to worry.

“This time,” he said as soon as the heavy door opened, “all I need is some advice about how to buy Miral a bra.”

That afternoon Jamal drove Nur and Miral along the street that skirted the walls of the Old City. They were headed for the commercial zone of Jewish Jerusalem, where a myriad of clothing stores, one next to the other, could be found. Greatly curious, Miral gazed at the unfamiliar streets. “How different the buildings are, taller and more modern!” she exclaimed in wonderment. “And so many cars!” After their vehicle crossed into West Jerusalem, she thought, “Everyone seems to be running, not walking. It's as though they're all in a big hurry to get somewhere.”

On Ben Yehuda Street, Miral was reminded a little of Haifa, the city where her mother was born and where they went every summer to visit their aunt. Miral was struck by the girls in miniskirts and high heels, by the outdoor cafés where men and women were happily chatting together. The brightly lit shop windows contrasted fluorescently with the darkness of the narrow streets in the Arab Quarter, where the buildings were sometimes crammed so close together that the sun's rays could barely penetrate.

The area they were driving through was just as she'd imagined the cities of Europe would be, but she had never imagined that such a place existed only a few blocks from where she lived. Occasionally, she had seen the western parts of the city from atop the Mount of Olives, but with different eyes, deploring the tall hotels built up against the Old City's walls and the enormous buildings that seemed to besiege the white ramparts of Jerusalem.

Suddenly, Jamal slowed the car and, at a sign from Nur, stopped in front of a shop window filled with brightly colored lingerie. Nur accompanied Miral into the shop while Jamal waited outside; he would go in later but only to pay. Miral chose a simple model made of soft cotton, and picked out three different colors: one white, one pink, and one red. Her father was unequivocally opposed to the red one, and so Miral and Nur compromised with one white and two pink.

Nur had dinner with them that night, and after preparing the coffee, she went back home. Miral watched her father as he waited for the coffee to settle and then asked him point-blank: “Say, Papa, why don't you and Nur get married? You would make a handsome couple.”

Jamal seemed flustered and tried to swallow, but his saliva went down the wrong way, and Miral was obliged to pound him on the back to keep him from choking. They began to laugh but eventually managed to regain a somewhat more serious tone, whereupon Jamal replied: “Because I don't love her. She's very dear to me as a friend, but in my life I've loved only your mother. And I still do.”

M
iral became good friends with Amal, a classmate who was a year younger than she was. During warm spring evenings, the two of them would have long conversations in the room they shared, illuminated only by a candle and the pale moonlight filtering through the window.

Unlike Miral, Amal was uninterested in politics and remained steeped in the peasant culture of her family. An intelligent and sensitive girl, she was the only one capable of counterbalancing the restlessness of her friend. Amal, who also had a younger sister at the school, didn't much like going home for summer vacation, which meant leaving her schoolmates and the tranquil atmosphere of Dar El-Tifel to work in her family's fields.

Amal was born in a Palestinian village near Ramallah and given as her name the Arabic word for “hope.” Her father died when she was six, and her mother remarried. This second husband was a man who owned and cultivated various fields near the village. Although the family was fairly well-off, Amal's parents asked Hind to take charge of their daughters so there would be more time to devote to their crops and sheep. Hind accepted. She liked the girls.

At the beginning of each summer, Amal's mother came to fetch her daughters from Dar El-Tifel, and would bring them back punctually on the first day of school, turning over to Hind a check for their support, along with a basket of fruit and vegetables as a gift.

Upon her return from summer vacation one year, Amal was suddenly distant. Miral had rushed to tell her that they would once again share a room; then she gave Amal the T-shirt she'd bought in Haifa for her thirteenth birthday, which fell in early September. It read,
BE HAPPY. DON'T WORRY.
Amal would not look at her, and barely thanked her, then went up to their room and went to bed. Miral felt that she was hiding something, but no matter how much Miral insisted, Amal wouldn't say what was wrong.

Amal's gaiety seemed to have vanished. Her teachers noticed a decline in her scholastic performance; she often fell asleep in class, hardly touched her food, and spent a lot of time in the bathroom. After having been informed of the situation, Hind decided to have Amal looked at by the school physician, her cousin Amir. When Amal appeared at the door of the infirmary, Amir welcomed her with a big smile, in an attempt to put her at ease while trying to hide his own nervousness. The symptoms that had been reported to him did not, in fact, leave much room for doubt.

The tests proved that the girl was pregnant. When she was questioned, Amal replied that she had known a boy but that she would never reveal his name, and then she committed herself to an absolute silence.

Amir went to knock on the door of Hind's office, aware that he was going to confront her with one of the most difficult decisions of her life. In the meantime, Hind had been pacing back and forth nervously for more than an hour, pausing at the window every now and then to watch a group of the youngest girls playing outside.

“She's only a child!” Amir exclaimed as he opened the door. Her cousin's scowl sufficed to make Hind understand that her worst-case prediction had proved true.

Before her cousin could say another word, Hind began to cry out, “Who was it?
Who was it?
”

Amir had never seen her in such a fury. He sat down on one of the leather armchairs before replying.

“She wouldn't give me any details,” he said in a grave voice, slowly drawing out the words as though it cost him an effort to pronounce them. “She spoke in vague terms about a boy, but she wouldn't tell me his name or anything else about him.”

Hind sank down in the other armchair and asked, “How many months?”

“Two. We still have time, if that's what you intend to do.”

Meanwhile, Amal had gone back to her room, her eyes swollen from weeping. Even though the sun was high in the sky, she undressed and went to bed. All she wanted to do was sleep, to sleep and not think. The memory of Mustafa obsessed her. Of all her memories, the tenderest recollection was of the day she met him.

She was returning from work in the fields, carrying a big basket of eggplants on her head. In the past few months, her body, although still immature, had begun to grow shapelier, rounding off, little by little, the angularities of childhood. Even though the sun was setting, the air was still stifling. The intense green of the hills around Ramallah was turning to straw yellow, and the landscape showed itself barer with each passing day.

Amal rounded a bend in the road, and her village came into sight. From where she was, it seemed to be perched precariously on the very top of the hill, almost on the verge of sliding down. The village looked uninhabited; the only sign of life was the smoke rising from the chimneys of the white houses. She stopped to rest a moment. The air was still and hot, and sweat plastered her black hair against her forehead.

Amal heard the sound of a motor approaching: first a barely perceptible buzzing, and then more and more insistent. A boy on a moped rounded a curve a little farther downhill. He was going fairly slowly, skillfully zigzagging in an attempt to avoid the roadway's rocks and holes, leaving behind him a wake of dark dust. When he was a few meters away from her, he slowed to a stop. He was wearing a cap and an oil-stained T-shirt, and when he smiled, he revealed two rows of perfect white teeth. Amal knew him by sight: he was Mustafa, the son of the village mechanic, a teenager two or three years older than she was.

“Do you want a ride? I'm going to the village,” he said, smiling the whole time.

Exhausted by the sun and encouraged by his big smile, Amal could see no harm in accepting the invitation, and she gave the boy an affirmative nod. Mustafa tied the basket to the vehicle and restarted it. Amal climbed on behind him, and after a few meters, in order to keep from falling off, she put her arms around his waist.

Suddenly, Amal forgot the heat and her weariness, and she wished that the road were much, much longer. When Mustafa felt her arms around his body and her weight lightly pressing against his back, a thrill of delight such as he had never felt before ran through him.

On the following days, her mother and stepfather were astonished to see Amal, who was usually rather reluctant to go to work, leave early for the fields with a smile on her face. Every afternoon Mustafa would offer to go down to Ramallah to buy some spare part needed in his father's shop. Without ever fixing an appointment, the two young people ended up meeting on the same curve at the end of each day.

One day Mustafa arrived early. He parked his moped on the shoulder of the road and walked down the slope that led to Amal's family's field. He saw her busily harvesting grapes as a light wind tousled her long hair. He knew that she usually bound up her hair with a red kerchief when she worked, but he noticed that every time he came to pick her up she would untie her hair and let it fall loosely on her shoulders.

He liked her as well with the kerchief as without, but when he saw her on that day, with drops of sweat on her brow, and very likely in the hollow between the breasts he could barely make out through the T-shirt she was wearing, his heart beat faster. While she had her back to him, he crept up to her slowly, without making any noise, and tickled her right arm with a blade of grass. Amal turned around at once and was surprised at seeing Mustafa. He moved closer to her, and soon they were looking into each other's eyes from a few centimeters away. Suddenly, Mustafa embraced her, and Amal's arms fell naturally around his waist. Mustafa felt his temples pounding the way they did when he hit top speed as he raced down the last stretch of road before entering the city.

Their naked bodies came together under the shade of a tree, the experience giving new meaning to the deep attraction they felt for each other. On the way back to the moped, Mustafa picked two figs and offered one to Amal, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear so that he could get a good look at her face. She slowed down and gazed at him, savoring the fruit's sweet red pulp. As they rode home, neither of them said a word. Amal squeezed Mustafa's chest so tightly that he had to make an effort to maintain control of his motorbike. They made their good-byes, as always, with a “so long” and a simple wave of the hand. But their eyes were still embraced in a kiss.

The following evening, Amal waited in vain for more than an hour, sitting on the low stone wall at the roadside, hoping to see Mustafa round the curve at any minute, her eyes fixed on the road below. In the silence interrupted only by the chirping of crickets, she listened attentively, hoping to hear the hum of the motor, which she had learned to recognize when it was still very far away.

When the sun disappeared definitively behind the hill, Amal picked up her basket full of grapes and set out toward the village in the dark, tears running down her cheeks.

She had heard the older girls at school tell stories like this, about boys who disappeared after they got what they were looking for. Even though she and Mustafa had never spoken for very long, she couldn't imagine that he would be someone like that. Trying her best to look straight ahead, she went to the mechanic's shop where he worked and asked where she could find him.

Mustafa's father came out, wiping the grease off his hands. “He didn't give you a ride home this evening?” he asked, smiling tentatively. “He went to Ramallah this morning and hasn't come back yet. I thought he was with you.”

The basket Amal was holding fell to the ground, and grapes scattered over the dusty street.

 

Mustafa had arrived in Ramallah before noon. He'd gone barreling down the ten kilometers that separated his village from the city, reaching such a speed in the final descent that his cap had flown off and he had been obliged to turn back and collect it. The sooner he brought his father the manifold he wanted, the sooner he'd be able to go to Amal. But the parts shop was closed. A demonstration was going on, and the rolling shutters of the shops were all down. Resigned to waiting, he had gone to a stand and ordered an orange juice. After half an hour had passed and no one had appeared at the shop, he decided to walk toward the center of town. In the distance, he heard shots and the screams of demonstrators, among whom Mustafa was sure he'd find the boy who worked in the parts shop, for he was one of the leaders of the resistance in Ramallah.

Mustafa had never taken part in a demonstration. None had ever been held in his village, and he preferred repairing motors to throwing stones. He walked down a narrow lane leading to the main street. Tear gas stung his eyes, and while his breath grew shorter and shorter, he looked to his right and saw, a hundred meters away, a group of boys, some of them very young. Among the slowly retreating group clutching rocks in their hands, Mustafa recognized the boy from the parts shop. His movements were sure and agile, and his nose and mouth were covered by a handkerchief. Mustafa waved to him, but the youth was enveloped in a cloud of smoke and failed to see him. For a moment, Mustafa thought the best thing to do would be to give up, go back to the juice stand, and wait for the demonstration to end. But the thought of not seeing Amal was intolerable, and all he really wanted from his friend were the keys to the parts shop. Mustafa would take the part he wanted, and early the next morning he'd return to Ramallah with the keys and the money he owed.

Mustafa looked at the young shopkeeper, who still didn't notice him. Mustafa decided he was too close to turn away. He started walking toward the boy, careful to hug the walls of the buildings as he advanced. The air had become unbreathable, and the distance still to be covered seemed immense. He saw a narrow side street and decided to turn onto it, but a tear gas canister whizzed past and struck the shutter behind him. He stood still, paralyzed by fear, suddenly aware of the danger he was in. After a few seconds, he could no longer see and breathing became difficult. The soldiers had come closer. One at a time, the boys advanced toward them, threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and then ran back to where they had started. Less than ten meters away, in the midst of the smoke and dust, Mustafa glimpsed the boy from the parts shop again.

Mustafa broke into a run, determined for all his wheezing and coughing to cross the street, but he had gone only a few meters before he fell to the ground with a tear gas canister lodged between his shoulder blades. A trickle of blood came out of his mouth and mingled with the dust of the thoroughfare. Two boys ran over to him, clumsily extracted the canister, and dragged him along the ground by the feet for more than fifty meters. Together with the other wounded, he was loaded into a car, which sped away, tires squealing, amid the shouts of the crowd. By the time he reached the first-aid station, he was dead. The seat of the automobile that had transported him was drenched with his blood. The doctors told the boys who brought him there that if they hadn't pulled the tear gas canister out of him, he wouldn't have lost so much blood, and then maybe it would have been possible to save him.

The next day, Mustafa was wrapped in a shroud, and someone spread the Palestinian flag over his lifeless body. The funeral procession traversed the village, and there were many mourners from Ramallah as well. The crowd applauded, honoring Mustafa as a hero. The boy from the parts shop asked to bear the coffin together with Mustafa's relatives and fired several rifle shots into the air in homage to the dead boy.

Amal trudged along in the procession, from beginning to end, without enough strength to raise her eyes from the ground.

She didn't want to get out of bed the next day, but her parents, who knew nothing of what had happened, made her go to the fields as she always did. “The fruits and vegetables must be harvested each day,” they told her. “You can't wait until tomorrow.”

And so she went out and worked the entire day, but it was impossible for her not to think about Mustafa. Taking advantage of her solitude in the fields, she gave herself over to incessant weeping. At the end of the day, she removed the kerchief from her head, loosened her hair, and sat on the usual wall, not far from the curve in the road. She waited until darkness made it impossible to distinguish the line of the horizon from the hills. Only then did she realize that Mustafa was really gone.