Miral (3 page)

A
few days after returning from Mecca, Hind was seated at her desk when she received an unexpected visitor, an officer in the American army. He was a man of about forty, with ash blond hair and intense blue eyes that reminded her of the Mediterranean.

“Hello, I'm Colonel Edward Smith,” he said to her with a smile she considered overly friendly.

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel.” Hind held out her hand to shake his.

He lifted it gently and grazed it with his lips.

Withdrawing her hand, Hind attempted to overcome her embarrassment. “Please have a seat, Colonel, and tell me what I can do for you.”

The colonel seated himself on the chair opposite Hind's desk and began at once to explain the purpose of his visit. “Miss Husseini, some years ago, I was the president of the American University in Cairo. Your uncle and older brother were students of mine. In fact, you and I go back a long way. We knew each other when we were children, in the days when everybody called me Eddie. But a few years' difference seems like much more of a gap at that age, so maybe that's why you don't remember me.”

Hind was taken aback by her visitor's sudden switch to familiarity, but she supposed it was called for if he really was a childhood friend. However, she didn't recognize his face, nor could she recall where she might have seen him. Seeing her confusion, he added, “We spent several Christmas Eves together at the American Colony Hotel.”

Hind began digging in her memory, where she glimpsed a faded image of a tall, thin boy who had a knack for repairing the toys that the younger children invariably broke shortly after receiving them. She remembered those blue eyes smiling at her while she sat on the rug in front of the fireplace, weeping over her new rag doll's torn dress. He didn't know how to sew, he told her, but he would do his best to have it mended. A few days later, he returned the doll to her, its dress in almost perfect condition.

“Eddie, of course,” she said suddenly, trying to hide her emotion. “Now I remember.” It was the first time in years that she had seen one of her childhood friends. “Can I offer you some mint tea?”

As he sipped tea from a green glass with a golden rim, Eddie told her of his plans. “I'm going to stay in Jerusalem for a few months before I return to the United States. I have a room at the American Colony. This morning I looked out my window and saw all these children, playing in the midst of ruins and tottering walls. When I inquired about what was on the other side of the gate, they said it was you and told me about the work you're doing. I wanted to meet you, and…now I just want to ask if there's anything I can do for you.”

Hind felt almost embarrassed by this unexpected offer of aid. “I'm touched,” she told her guest sincerely. “I see you haven't changed.”

“Oh yes, I have, unfortunately—I've changed a lot. Life leaves you no choice. But I don't forget to lend a hand to someone who I think deserves it. And people like you are really hard to find, believe me.”

Hind, who had spent all her money and had even resorted to selling her mother's wedding jewelry, asked her old friend if he could assist her in securing financing to complete work on the school. He told her that he would use all his influence to help.

Eddie kept his word. Within a few weeks, he found a Saudi petroleum company, Aramco, which was prepared to finance the building of the walls enclosing the grounds as well as the construction of the school. From then on, after tea almost every afternoon, he and Hind took a walk around the property to see how the work was proceeding. They talked to each other about their lives, their dreams, their disappointments, and their successes. Theirs was not a romantic relationship, but during those months they formed a deep friendship that would continue by correspondence for many years to come.

On a chilly December morning that just barely mitigated the sun's lukewarm rays, Eddie left Jerusalem for the United States, for good. He and Hind promised they would keep in touch. They never saw each other again.

 

In the meantime, Hind did not wait idly for new donations to arrive. Eddie's offer of help had shown her the path she must follow to obtain financial support.

To guarantee her school greater autonomy in its educational choices, she decided to concentrate upon international agencies and organizations rather than on local government entities. She wrote to a Kuwaiti sheikh, Muhammad bin Jassim Sabah, who a few weeks earlier had publicly declared his desire to improve the quality of childhood education in the Arab countries, including his own. Hind described to him the activity of her boarding school and the program she intended to carry out, and before long the sheikh replied by sending her a considerable amount of money.

Not long afterward, she happened by chance to read a magazine article about the directors of an Anglo-Kuwaiti corporation, among them the sheikh Muhammad bin Jassim Sabah himself, who were currently in Jerusalem. While they had also come to visit al-Aqsa Mosque, the chief purpose of their trip was to recruit Palestinian teachers, engineers, architects, and physicians who were prepared to move to Kuwait. Hind quickly changed her clothes, putting on her best dress and a necklace of handworked silver. Without giving the matter a second thought, she headed for the Jerusalem Hotel, where, according to what she had read, the foreign visitors were staying.

Arriving shortly after lunch, Hind found the directors on the point of retiring to their respective rooms for the traditional afternoon nap. Summoning her rhetorical abilities, she attempted to persuade them to follow her instead to Dar El-Tifel, where they would be able to visit her school and see the results that she proposed to offer them in return for their economic support.

After an initial moment of bewilderment, the gentlemen agreed to go with her. She tried to capture their interest by discussing her projects frankly and explaining that her principal aim was to provide the most disadvantaged children with a proper education. The sheikh observed the children, saw how much work remained to be done on the buildings, and listened to Hind with a religious silence. Then he took her aside and told her that he would speak of her school wherever he went and would do everything in his power to help her complete its construction. “Every two months, write me a letter and tell me what point the work has reached and how much money you need. And, as God is my witness, I will always support you.” As he was leaving, the sheikh took Hind's right hand in his and said, “Miss Husseini, what you do honors not only your people but the whole Arab world.”

The sheikh kept his promise, and in a short time checks began to arrive, not only in his name but also from the most unlikely corners of the Arab community, from persons she had never met or even seen. Hind used the new finances to complete the construction as well as for hiring qualified teachers.

A short time later, the sheikh invited her to visit his own country. She was stunned by Kuwait's riches and by the rapidness with which it was marching toward modernization; wealth and speed seemed to be the country's characteristic features. And yet she felt something lacking, even though she was incapable of identifying what it was.

After she returned to Jerusalem, Hind realized that Kuwait, for all its perfect schools, its clean, efficient hospitals, its new highways, and its artificial oases in the desert, could not possess the cultural breadth of a place like her own city, whose history stretched back over millennia, and whose luminous white stones continued to gleam despite having been spattered with blood countless times over the centuries. Perhaps this was Jerusalem's secret: that it still appeared pure despite the horrific crimes that had been committed within its walls.

In this city of many faces, every affirmation seemed destined to produce irreconcilable contradictions. Perhaps its citizens appeared so adamant, so reluctant to compromise, precisely because they felt they were living on the edge of a precipice. For thousands of years, countless civilizations, tribes, religions, and armies had contended to control this city—besieging it, conquering it, losing it, and rendering it a crucible in which joy and suffering were fatally combined. Hind thought that was why the crusaders perceived the city simultaneously as paradise on earth and the entrance to hell. Jerusalem's inhabitants often found themselves forced, despite themselves, to choose sides; from one morning to the next, neighbors who had always greeted one another could find themselves pointing rifles at each other instead. Such irrational behavior had manifested itself so frequently over the course of the centuries that it had acquired an unwholesome logic of its own.

 

As the years went by, Hind and Eddie kept up a regular correspondence. During that time, he got married, had two children, and often reiterated his desire to return to Jerusalem to visit Hind and see how her school had evolved.

Despite some difficult periods during which provisions barely sufficed to guarantee the children one frugal meal a day, Hind never lost heart, continuing with her customary determination to champion her school. With time the number of orphans and refugees who were full-time residents and the number of day students increased considerably. Realizing that she would need to enlarge Dar El-Tifel, Hind wrote to her older brother Amin, who, with her four other brothers, owned the buildings and the plots of land around the school.

Amin replied in kind: He spoke to the rest of her brothers and they decided they would gladly turn over to her the titles to the buildings and land for a token price.

I
n 1967, after the Six Days' War, the rest of Palestine fell under the military occupation and the number of child refugees greatly increased, in particular the number of abandoned girls. Following an agreement with the city authorities, Dar El-Tifel, which had been a mixed orphanage for nearly twenty years, became primarily an orphanage and school for girls. Analogous institutions exclusively for boys already existed in Jerusalem. Dar El-Tifel would continue to accept boys, but only those younger than six. Hind was convinced that this was the right decision, because she knew that females were always the most vulnerable victims in cases of abandonment, and that without a decent education they would be marginalized. Later that year, the area of the city in which the orphanage was located passed from Jordanian to Israeli control. Hind was used to negotiating with the Jordanians for permits and authorizations, and especially to resolve the problem of identification papers, which many orphans lacked. Now she was required to deal with the Israeli military authorities. “I don't like soldiers,” she told her mother. “Their hands are stained with blood. Whenever I meet them, I can't help wondering how many people they've killed with those hands.”

With the passage of time, Dar El-Tifel became not only a renowned school but also a beacon for all the Arabs of Jerusalem. Its mere existence offered reassurance, and every little Palestinian girl who had survived the war or had been abandoned in front of a mosque, who had lost one parent or both, could find there a bit of serenity and a sound education.

As the school was enlarged and two new buildings erected, Hind developed its pedagogical system. After a few years, her intuitive measures coalesced into a distinct method that allowed the schoolgirls to play an active role in the classroom. Older pupils assisted the teachers in instructing the little ones, and the most gifted of these girls would, if they wished, be able to become teachers in time.

Strict discipline was the order of the day, particularly with regard to the schedule; the girls rose every morning at six, and lights were turned off every night at nine o'clock sharp. Physical activity was an integral part of the curriculum. When Hind observed the students complaining about the long hours of gymnastic exercises, she liked to repeat the Latin proverb
mens sana in corpore sano
, “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Hind desired her girls to be cultured and multilingual. She also wanted them to stay aloof from politics, fearing that the Israeli authorities would close the school at the slightest suspicion that anti-Israeli propaganda was being disseminated inside.

For the good of her institution, Hind tirelessly continued to solicit funding wherever her oratorical abilities could have an effect: Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and Egypt. Along with providing generous annual donations, those countries committed themselves to adopting an increasing number of her pupils.

Girls who had attended the institution, some of whom would later take up residence in the West, never forgot Dar El-Tifel, and a few of them acknowledged their fond memories in very concrete ways. Nual Said, for example, had arrived at the school in the late 1950s, orphaned by both her parents. She found a family there within its walls and, after graduating from Dar El-Tifel, won scholarships to study psychology, first in Jordan and then in the United States, in Chicago, where she married a pediatrician of Mexican descent and gave birth to two little girls. She never returned to Jerusalem, but one day she arranged a surprise for Hind's students. That morning a big truck turned onto the tree-lined drive leading to Dar El-Tifel. At first the custodian at the gate thought the driver had made an error, but he was forced to reconsider when an official-looking letter declared that Nual Said, an alumna of the school, hereby donated a truckload of shoes, dresses, and stationery to the schoolgirls currently enrolled. Apart from such conspicuous yet not altogether rare gestures, tokens of gratitude from former students allowed the school to carry out improvements every year.

Hind's energies were totally absorbed by the administration of the school, her activities ranging from soliciting funds to finetuning syllabi and even extending to counseling the girls about personal matters. Over the course of the years, she would have to make frequent use of her charisma and influence to protect the school and its students, retaining her calm composure even in the most dramatic situations.

During rare periods of free time, Hind tended the garden, seeking in the harmony of the various plants the serenity she was unable to find outside the walls of her school, and devoting herself to the cultivation of her flowers with the same exquisite attention she lavished on her girls. Convinced as she was that good fruit is above all the result of loving care, she left nothing to chance. In the month of March, when the rose garden was in full bloom, Hind spent the evening hours immersed in the fragrance of the freshly opened blossoms, mesmerized by their myriad forms and colors. When the girls saw her busily pruning the plants or pulling up weeds, some of them would join in and help. Such spontaneous demonstrations of affection were frequent, for the children of Dar El-Tifel respected her and followed her lead. In fact, they all called her Mama Hind.