Miral (23 page)

“No, I don't need money, I just needed to see you. I'll have you contacted again by the same boy who delivered my note. If you want to reach me for any reason at all, leave a message with my mother, and she'll pass it on to me.”

They said good-bye a few minutes later. It was the last time she would see him.

T
hat evening, Miral decided to ask Hind for permission to attend a peace rally. As she knocked on Hind's door, Miral worried about what she would do should Hind's response be negative.

Hind watched as Miral entered, and felt proud of the way she had grown up while in her school. Hind had noticed a great change in Miral since her return from Haifa. The dissidence and rage she used to read in Miral's eyes had been transformed into melancholy and introspection. What Miral told her only confirmed her impression that the girl had reached a new level of maturity.

“I'd like to ask your permission to leave the campus next Friday. There's going to be an important march for peace, the first ever organized by Arabs and Israeli Jews together. I really want to go, but if you tell me not to, I won't.”

Hind waited to smile until Miral had finished. “Of course you can go. You've graduated from school and passed your eighteenth birthday besides. I'm no longer making decisions for you. And to tell you the truth, I think the demonstration is a good idea this time; however, I would ask you to be careful. Have you thought about taking someone else along? I'm sure Aziza would like to go.”

Their eyes met, and they stood there looking at each other, smiling, for several seconds. Miral said only, “Thank you,” and left the office. Hind trusted her. Something really had changed.

 

On the following Friday, as on every other day, Christian pilgrims, Muslim faithful, and Jews from Israel and elsewhere reached the Damascus Gate. Normally, after passing through it and walking half the length of Via Dolorosa, they would come to an intersection; there the Christians would continue along Via Dolorosa, while the Arabs and Jews would take El Wad Street, which would bring them to their holy places. But that day, a crowd gathered right on the steps descending to the gate. It wasn't a gathering so much as an enormous human cordon that surrounded the gleaming white walls of the Old City, holding hands for peace.

All the demonstrators were young, euphoric, filled with hope, united by dreams of living in freedom and peace. Having finally compelled the politicians to listen to them, they felt invincible. The authorities were surprised at the number of demonstrators, enough to bring the city to a halt with their songs and high spirits.

They were finally speaking the same language; they were different people with a common objective, looking in the same direction for the first time. And there was nothing sweeter than the language of peace, without tear gas and Molotov cocktails. This time, the antiriot troops, bewildered and embarrassed when the young people gave them olive branches, stood by and watched with their helmets in their hands. Miral and Aziza joined the huge circle of people. From the windows of the houses, men and women were hanging flags: the multicolored flag of peace or the flags of Palestine and Israel, side by side. Others were applauding the demonstrators as they passed. The city was invaded and conquered by a feeling of brotherly love.

 

That demonstration sent an important signal: humanity had prevailed. It was a clear and evident message directed at both Palestinian and Israeli politicians. The extraordinary level of participation in the event confirmed the polls, according to which crushing majorities of both peoples were in favor of peace. And later that week, Prime Minister Rabin delivered a speech to the Israeli legislature in which he advocated increased openness to dialogue. He said that progress in the peace negotiations must continue as if there were no violence, and that efforts to combat violence and disorder must continue as if there were no negotiations. Now it was no longer the generals and colonels who were dictating the political agenda but the will of the people, which was shouting at the top of its voice: “Enough violence! More diplomacy!”

Miral was in the midst of that crowd, which was peacefully laying siege to the ramparts of the city, when she heard a female voice call her name. “Miral, Miral! Here I am!”

“Lisa! My God, you're here, too?” She said, surprised to see her. “I wouldn't miss this for the world.”

The girls embraced like old friends. Suddenly Miral felt selfconscious. It was so different to encounter Lisa in Jerusalem, in the city where there was such a clear-cut separation between Israelis and Palestinians. “Who did you come with?” Miral asked.

“Some socialist friends from Haifa. Five buses of us,” Lisa said. “You want to join our group? You can bring your friend.”

Miral cast an uncomfortable glance in Aziza's direction and said in a low voice, “Oh, no. Maybe we'll see each other tomorrow. I'll call you.” She gave Lisa a kiss on the cheek and hurried off. Lisa tried to stop her, but Miral was already too far away.

With Aziza at her side, Miral made a complete tour of the demonstration, looking for Hani the whole time. She was surprised to see some of his ex-comrades from the PFLP. Miral and Aziza stayed until the end of the march. It was the most joyous and impressive rally in many years. The echoes of the songs and slogans invoking peace carried all the way to the Israeli parliament building, the Knesset. The legislature suspended its session, and an extraordinary meeting of the government was convened to listen to the popular will.

Toward evening Aziza suggested that they return to school. She and Miral were still full of enthusiasm, skipping as they walked through the streets and sometimes even breaking into a run. Even though she hadn't seen Hani, Miral was happy.

He probably stayed away out of caution, she thought. The police had blocked off the city.

“Hani was right not to come,” Aziza said, trying to reassure her. “Don't worry about him. He must not have wanted to get arrested right at the most delicate moment of our lives.” The two friends hurried back to school. They hadn't realized it was already dinnertime. With an automatic gesture, Aziza picked up a flyer from the street, a communiqué issued by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Seeing that Hani's name was written on it in thick letters, Aziza read the first line, and suddenly her expression changed. She awkwardly slipped the flyer into her pocket.

“Why did you hide that piece of paper like that? What does it say?” Miral asked.

“Nothing. Let's go, Miral. It's late, and Mama Hind will be worried.” Aziza began to run.

Miral caught up with her. “Please let me see it,” Miral said. “What's the matter?”

“I'll give it to you after we get back to school,” Aziza said.

“Please no. I want to see it now.”

Aziza remained silent for a while and then suggested they go to a café.

She didn't want to give her friend the flyer, but she knew she had to. “I'm sorry, Miral. This is going to hurt you a lot,” Aziza said, handing her the folded piece of paper.

Miral read the few lines in silence.

Miral made a fist with her right hand and pressed it to her mouth. She tried desperately to hold herself back, to keep from screaming. She couldn't speak; she couldn't move. The grief she felt added itself to that of the many tragedies her family and her people had suffered for years, and it was so intense that she could hardly breathe.

Night fell all at once; the sun, as it does in Middle Eastern countries, glowed with an intense red and then suddenly disappeared below the horizon. Overcome by nausea, Miral felt that all was lost; she crumpled up the flyer and dropped it on the ground. Everything had been useless. She walked along in shock amid the jubilant throng. Her struggle had no more meaning; her peace was lost. Aziza caught up with her at a corner and embraced her. Miral tried and failed to keep from vomiting. “My God, what are we doing to ourselves?” Miral whispered.

Darkness surrounded the walls of the Old City. Miral could not get over how suspicion could lead to indiscriminate murder, how hatred overwhelms and destroys everything, even the most righteous causes. Her barely newborn hope was swept away as soon as it appeared.

T
hat summer night in August Miral waited for the lights to go out, and then slowly opened the door of her room. The corridor was empty, its darkness barely relieved by the dim moonlight. She tiptoed down the stairs swiftly, careful not to trip over any of the flowerpots, and gently half-closed the door behind her. Walking through the garden, she inhaled the evening dampness. She quickly ran to the lowest point of the wall that bordered the parking lot of the American Colony Hotel. In the garden, absolute silence reigned, broken only by the rustle of leaves and her own heartbeat. She looked around one last time, to make sure no one had seen her, and jumped over the wall.

Emotion and haste had taken her breath away, and now she could feel her legs trembling. She was violating the rules of the school and feared more than anything that she would be discovered by Hind herself, who had welcomed her to stay and live at the school after her graduation. But she had not been able to resist. She had impatiently paced up and down her room the entire day, not speaking to her friends and not going down into the schoolyard. That evening she hadn't even touched her food, so great was her excitement about what was happening nearby at the American Colony Hotel, adjacent to the school.

She crossed the parking lot and found herself in front of the entrance. Making believe they didn't exist, she walked past a group of soldiers who were chatting beside the sliding door. One of them, a man with a thick mustache, noticed her and asked her who she was. After a moment of surprise, her temples pounding, Miral replied in English, saying the first thing that came into her head: “I'm an interpreter.”

The soldier took a puff on his cigarette, threw it on the ground, and crushed it out with the heel of his boot. He came close to Miral and stared into her eyes for a long time. “You don't have a pass, and I don't remember seeing you here before.”

Miral held her ground and did not turn away from the soldier.

At that moment, a riot came to her mind in vivid detail: the bitter odor of tear gas, the crush of the crowd, her sister's voice getting farther and farther away, the dull thud of gas canisters, and then bullets; a green stain in the middle of the smoke, a soldier running toward it, rifle in hand, the visor of his helmet raised, his mustache lending him a threatening aspect as Miral covered her face with her hands.

“Come on through, miss, but next time don't forget your pass.”

Miral snapped back from her memory. She smiled and made her way into the hotel lobby, pretending to know perfectly well where she was going.

She found herself at the white marble counter of the reception desk, where she recognized her friend Sara. According to Sara, rumor had it that an accord between the Israeli delegation and the representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization was imminent. They were discussing the birth of the Palestinian state. Miral felt her heart beating faster; to her ears nothing sounded better than the word “accord.” It was a word abstract enough to leave ample space for the workings of the imagination, and it contained all the hopes she had nourished over the years. Too excited to talk calmly, Miral took a few steps in the direction of a small sofa on the opposite side of the lobby, facing the reception desk.

“Could you bring me a cup of coffee, please?” A voice abruptly yanked Miral out of her daydreams of peace. She turned and saw a middle-aged woman, dressed in Western clothes and looking at her with a questioning expression on her face.

“I'm sorry, but I don't work here.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I saw you talking to the girl at the reception desk, and I drew the wrong conclusion. You're so young…. Are you a journalist, too?” The woman smiled at Miral, revealing two large, parallel rows of exceedingly white teeth.

Miral realized that the woman's mouth, which was really big, reminded her of some singer, but she couldn't think of her name.

“Not really,” Miral replied, a little embarrassed. “I'd like to be.”

“Well, then, I could tell you a few things—after we order two coffees. It gets boring, talking only to colleagues all the time. Besides, they're mostly men, and therefore all the more boring.” With this declaration, she burst into loud laughter.

“I'll be glad to listen. I'm Miral,” she said, extending her hand.

“And I'm Samar Hilal. I write for
Al-Quds
.”

The woman made a sign to a waiter who was passing through the lobby carrying a tray laden with drinks. With a gesture, the waiter acknowledged her request and continued on his way. “That tray's on its way to room sixteen. The delegations have been holed up in there for hours, debating,” Samar informed Miral.

Miral's new acquaintance told her that she had been a journalist for almost thirty years, and that she'd worked for the same newspaper for the last twenty. “This will be my fifth coffee today, but I have a feeling that we're going to have to stay awake all night long. It will be several more hours before they deign to tell us anything, but this time I think it will be worth the trouble.”

Miral liked her right away, and the feeling was mutual; Samar wasn't in the habit of giving away secrets to strangers. She had penetrating eyes, a thin face, and slender hands with tapering fingers that she waved about as she spoke. Miral admired Samar's style. She had on a pair of light-colored linen trousers and a blue blouse, and around her neck she wore a beautiful necklace of silver filigree, one of those worked by the knowing hands of women from the nomad tribes of the Yemeni desert. It was difficult to pinpoint Samar's age, but considering her long experience, Miral thought that she must be at least fifty.

“By now we've become so accustomed to death,” Samar continued after a long swallow of coffee, “that sometimes it seems as if it's become just another ordinary, daily occurrence.”

Samar took a long sip of coffee and paused for a moment, gazing at an indefinable spot behind Miral. Then, as if waking up, she blinked rapidly a few times and gazed again at the girl beside her, who couldn't have been more than twenty. She must have a great deal of nerve to dare come anywhere near the American Colony on an evening like this.

“Imagine,” Samar continued, “when the war in Lebanon started I was working in our Damascus office. A colleague from the
Herald Tribune
and I hired a taxi to take us to Beirut. During the trip we noticed that the whole flow of vehicles was in the opposite direction. We saw burned cars and bodies lying alongside the road, and then I said to my friend, ‘Look what we do for our job. When everyone else is running away, we journalists head for the scene of the disaster, just like soldiers.' At a certain point, our Syrian driver refused to go any farther. He was terrified and wouldn't accept the additional money we offered him. Eventually, he unloaded us in Sidon and headed back to Damascus.” Samar saw Miral turn her head away for a moment. “Excuse me, I'm boring you,” Samar added. “Once I get started, it's hard to stop me.”

“No no, you're not boring me at all. On the contrary—but I just saw a waiter come back and whisper something to my girlfriend at the desk. I'm sorry—I was hoping there might be some news.”

“I believe it's still too early for that,” Samar said with a smile. “You'll see. When there's news, we won't be able to avoid hearing it.” She signaled to the waiter again and asked him to bring her another coffee.

Miral stared at her new friend's broad smile, wondering how her teeth could remain so white with all the coffee she drank, but then berated herself for thinking of such a thing on such a night.

“Please go on,” Miral said.

“As I was saying, we had to stop in Sidon. We could hear mortar fire quite distinctly, and Israeli planes were flying above our heads. Then and only then did I realize that I was in the middle of a battle. I was a frontline journalist, as they say. But it's one thing to read about that in textbooks and quite another to wind up there for real. So we both panicked, until I saw the flag of Qatar flying from the balcony of a consulate building and ran toward it with my press card and my life in my hand. Through a window, I caught a glimpse of a man wearing a long white galabia with a kaffiyeh on his head. I waved and screamed at him, ‘Journalists! We're journalists! Let us in!' The people from the consulate opened the door and we took refuge inside. At one moment, I could see the building across from us, where there was a Lebanese antiaircraft position. Then it was gone.”

Samar paused, gazing for a moment at the black liquid in the bottom of her cup, and then resumed. “After about two hours, things calmed down. The Qataris in the consulate loaned us a car, a little red Fiat, and that's how we got to Beirut. People there were sitting in the cafés along the seafront, drinking coffee and aperitifs. They would point out the airplanes flying overhead and say, ‘That one's going to bomb Shatila.' ‘That other one's heading for Tripoli, where the Syrian positions are.' And then they'd calmly sip their drinks, as if life and death lived together in perfect order as far as they were concerned. You could hear the muffled sound of explosions not many kilometers away, and you could see the smoke from the fires. I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but it seemed to me that I could smell the persistent odor of death. No one else seemed to be paying any attention to it. Well, all right. By now you can tell me that I'm indeed boring you.”

“You're doing the opposite of boring me,” Miral promptly replied. “I agree with you—the boundary between life and death seems different here from what it is elsewhere. Sometimes I go to one of the refugee camps and teach the children English. It's hard to tell there if life is a gift or a curse.”

“I know what you mean. The refugee camps are absolutely the most unnatural places on the face of the earth, or at least on this part of its face. There, the concept of time doesn't exist, and there's not enough living space to do anything but wait. It's an impossibility, living on edge, outside of everything. They don't want a handout; they deserve the tools they need to recover normalcy, their dignity.”

Samar picked up her giant purse. She rummaged through it before finding a pack of American cigarettes. She held one out to Miral, who shook her head. Samar lifted the cigarette to her lips and lit it with a slow, almost weary gesture. As she inhaled deeply, a cold silence settled over the two of them. Both the woman and the girl were thinking that a new chapter in the life of their people was beginning, and each considered herself in some way both an extra and a protagonist in the drama that was unfolding. Their eyes met, and Miral felt that her activities so far—the classes in the refugee camp, the demonstrations, the flights from school and from the police—had not been undertaken in vain, or at least had not been completely useless.

At that moment, Samar's mind was assailed by a legion of doubts about what she had written previously and what she would write the following day. She wasn't fond of sentimental prose, and she was frightened of losing her objectivity.

Thus it was that Miral came to know—before her schoolmates, before the citizens of Jerusalem, even before the journalists had time to communicate the news to the whole world—that the negotiations had reached a positive conclusion, and that an accord between Palestinians and Israelis, at least in draft form, had been reached. The meetings between the leader of the Israeli delegation, Yossi Beilin, and Hind's cousin Faisal Husseini, the head of the Palestinian negotiating team, would ultimately lead to the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat in the White House Rose Garden.

That night Miral's eyes were full of hope and clouded with emotion as she hurried through the garden of Dar El-Tifel, lightheartedly whistling the Beatles' song “Here Comes the Sun.” Before slipping back inside the dormitory building, she turned toward the city, which seemed to be lying under a light mist. Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—they were all enclosed within the same walls, so near to one another and yet still so disparate.

Upon reaching her room, she opened the door without hesitating, confident that she had made it back undetected. Great was her surprise when she sensed in the darkness the presence of another person; greater still, when she discovered that the other person was Hind. Miral's astonishment only intensified when the strict headmistress, instead of scolding her, immediately asked her to sit down and tell her the news of the negotiations.

After giving Hind a detailed account, including her meeting with Samar—whom the headmistress admired as a journalist— Miral accompanied Hind back to her room.

When she returned to her own room, Miral stretched out on the bed without undressing and lay there staring at the ceiling. Unable to fall asleep, she tried to imagine how happy her mother would have been to learn the joyful news, which was running through the presses at that very moment and would soon spread throughout the country.

 

While the whole world joined Palestinians and Israelis in watching, on live television, the historical handshake between Arafat and Rabin, which put an end to decades of violence and distrust, Miral was discussing her future with Hind. The results of Miral's graduation exams had come in, and Miral had passed them all with excellent scores. Hind was beaming with pride over her performance and had summoned Miral to her office. As soon as she stepped inside, Hind embraced her, saying, “My dear daughter, congratulations!” Miral would never forget the elderly headmistress's parting words to her that night: “Today has been a great day for our people, a new beginning, but let us not delude ourselves; there's still a long way to go. I had lost any hope of living to see even this historical moment, but you, you're young, and you'll have the good fortune to witness the birth of a democratic Palestinian state. There will be a need for all of us but especially for you and other educated young people. I called you here to tell you that you've won the scholarship. You will go abroad to study, my dear, and the time has come for you to dig down deep and give it all you've got. I know you've been going through a difficult period, but of all the girls who applied for the grant, I thought you were the one who most deserved it. Go and study and come back. Make us all proud of you once again. I love you very much, you know—you're like a daughter to me. You'll study in one of the best universities in Europe. Believe me, Miral, sometimes you can serve your country much better from a distance.”