Mornings in Jenin (27 page)
2002
THE PAST SEEMED LIKE a dream now. I do not know when its ghosts stopped haunting me or when my baby girl became a woman. Or when I grew into Dalia’s legacy as a distant mother.
Some months earlier I had discovered that I had aged irreversibly. My naked reflection stared back at me in the mirror, the graceless specter of a body reshaped by the pitiless hands of age. The years had thickened my waist and loosened my skin. My breasts hung like wilted flowers and my hair had turned into winter.
Only the scar on my abdomen had not aged. The webbed skin was as young and tight as it had always been, embalmed by cruelty, that indelible ink of memory and preservative of time. I ran my hand over my patch of pickled youth as I had done countless times in my life. But I did it now with a stale, vestigial nostalgia, with Sara’s words hovering at my thoughts like dragonflies over water: “Mom, I’m going to Palestine. I want you to come too.” And there were the other voices too.
Breathe, child
. I’d breathe them away but they’d return.
“It isn’t just because of these filthy politics and injustice, Mom,” Sara said, the rims of her eyes darkening into red and tears pooling over them. “I want to know who I am.”
There it was, her life’s sorrow at having so little family. So little sense of belonging. So little of a mother. A great big “so little” throbbed under her decision to go to Palestine, behind her eyes. But she was her mother’s daughter, and I watched her yank it all back inside, cover it with resolve, and concentrate it all in the burning challenge of her gaze.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, turning away from the urge to take her in my arms.
I did think about it. In fact, I thought of little else, until I stood before myself in that mirror and made the decision to return to Jenin, after three decades of exile.
After four hours of questioning and unmentionable searching at the Lod airport, Sara and I were cleared to proceed.
“Sara!” shouted a male voice.
My daughter rushed past me, landing in the arms of a handsome young man. I realized who the boy was when I saw David standing behind him. She and her cousin Jacob had been corresponding since David had come into our lives.
Jacob was twenty-three years old, the younger of David’s two sons and most like his father. “Shalom, Aunt Amal,” he said, revealing a welcoming youthful smile, for which I was not prepared.
Aunt Amal. Shalom
.
“Hello, Jacob,” I responded, turning from the awkwardness toward David, who took me in his enormous embrace. Standing there, my smallness in his bigness, in what felt, what
smelled
even, like Yousef ’s arms, I was twelve years old again, motionless in Yousef ’s embrace after he returned naked from the dead in 1967, the green ruffle of his borrowed clothing irritating my skin—much as the Nike logo on David’s shirt now rubbed against my cheek.
“It is good to see you, sister,” he said.
“You too, David. You too.”
I wanted to see Jerusalem before going to David’s home in Netanya. To stop by the orphanage and to find Ari Perlstein’s office.
“But Jerusalem is in the opposite direction,” David insisted, and I let that be that. He had the same
so little
sorrow in his face. That ache of not belonging and the shakiness of an inverted identity.
Ari Perlstein will have to wait
, I thought, even though Ari had no inkling of my pending visit. Before leaving Philadelphia, I had tracked him down over the Internet but had shied away from calling him. After all, what would I have said?
I’m Hasan’s daughter, remember him?
Or,
Hi, guess who? I’ll give you a hint: Go back fifty, sixty, seventy years or more. Another hint: Ein Hod, ring a bell? Ha ha. No, really
.
* * *
“Dr. Perlstein?”
“Yes.” A small head lifted itself from the sea of books pushing at the seams of the professor’s small office.
“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time. I’ve traveled a long way to meet you.”
“Forgive me, at my age, my mind fails sometimes. Do I know you?” he asked, his benevolent demeanor just as I had imagined.
“No. But I believe you knew my father, Hasan. Hasan Abulheja.”
The wholeness of the room—its walls of books, pounds of dust, and absent-minded old professor—gasped and held its breath for a long moment, until Ari’s eyes, spread large behind the bifocals on his nose, leapt beneath the bush of his brow. He maneuvered his small body fitfully around the messy wooden desk, coming toward me, his limp now accompanied by a shuffle.
“Ya ellahi!” he whispered in Arabic until he was upon me, his trembling, age-spotted hands impatiently brushing away tears from his magnified eyes. “Is Hasan here?” he asked, his voice breathless, exhausted by the sudden desperation of the stolen past, by the great urge to know, to see his old friend.
“No. We believe he was killed in 1967.”
We believe he was killed in 1967
. I had never uttered those words before, nor had I known that I believed he had been killed in 1967.
After an interminable silence, he offered, “You look like Dalia,” and he smiled a gentle, grandfatherly smile. “Sit. Sit.”
“There are others outside who would also like to meet you, sir. My daughter, Sara, my brother, David Avaram, and his—”
“David Avaram . . . Abulheja?” he interrupted, clearly confused by the Jewish name.
“No, just David Avaram. It is a long story . . . If you have time.”
“As of now, my schedule is clear,” he declared triumphantly. He grinned, shifting the ill-fitted dentures in his mouth as he dialed his assistant.
Ari had never married, devoting himself to study, and a graceful loneliness emerged as he spun the yarn of his life with the wisdom of a man who had read far more books than the hundreds crowding us into the center of his office.
Ari was a splendid storyteller, reminding me so much of Haj Salem, whom I was sure must have passed away by now. We all sat spellbound by the tales of his youthful adventures with Baba, from the first day they met at the Damascus Gate to the day my father helped them escape to the western portion of Jerusalem, shortly after it had been taken by Israel. He spoke of Dalia’s click-clacking ankle bracelets, of Jiddo Yehya’s perfectly symmetrical upward-curled mustache that climbed nearly to his eyes when he smiled, of Teta Basima’s cooking and gardening, of Ein Hod’s trees and orchards, of war’s unforgiving savagery, of fury and a friendship that had saved his life. And where his memory trailed off, I picked up with mine.
In Ari’s office, we were three generations hauled together by the willful drag of a foreclosed story swindled by fate but gathered in that moment to demand to be told. The story of one family in an obscure village, visited one day by a history that was not its own, and forever trapped by longing between roots and soil. It was a tale of war, its chilling, burning, and chilling-again fire. Of furious love and a suicide bomber. Of a girl who escaped her destiny to become a word, drained of its meaning. Of grown children sifting through the madness to find their relevance. Of a truth that pushed its way through lies, emerging from a crack, a scar, in a man’s face.
Emotion overwhelmed us all in that tiny office, where daylight falling through a solitary, small window high on the wall was the single hint of an outside world. The softening light was the only evidence that time had not stood still as I imagined young Ari and young Hasan sharing a tomato behind the market cart, that gesture laying the foundation of an eternal friendship. I had told David many stories of Baba, and this was one more lovely part of Baba to know.
“Your father was so happy when Yousef was born. I think I had never seen him happier or more proud,” Ari said, clearly conjuring an image of my father that only he could summon.
I was suddenly a child again, wondering if Baba had been as happy at my birth—maybe happier? Not happy at all, perhaps, for another mouth to feed in a refugee camp?
Ari brought me back from time. “Where is he now, your brother Yousef?” he asked.
Just then, the adan began to pour itself into the air. Into my skin.
“Allaaaaaaho akbar, Allaho akbar . . .” The adan sang from several minarets at once. That melody, which I had not heard for far too long, flowed unhindered to the moth-eaten corners of me, running through me like a river, like baptismal water.
“Ashhado an la ellaha Allaaaah, Ashhado an Mohammadun rasool Allah . . .” I sat there, eyes closed, opening the gates to a wounding nostalgia and longing for my lost family, for my lost self, and I let the song of a people swell the pause that climbed onto the end of Ari’s question.
Where is your brother? Yousef?
“Hayo ala salaaaaat. Hayo alal falah . . .” And the church bells of the Holy Sepulcher rang, lilting to the cadence of my sweetest and bitterest memories. I stood on my legs as the rhythm of Islam resurrected Fatima’s dimpled smile in her sky-blue dishdashe dress, taunting a thousand uncried tears.
“I don’t know,” I answered Ari, surprised by the softness of my voice. So there would be no misunderstandings, nor more questions, I continued, “They say he was the man who drove the truck bomb into the U.S. embassy in 1983.”
Sara gasped. She had never known.
Jacob’s face fell, in the way that rocks fall off the side of mountains. He had never imagined.
David silently held himself under the weight of my words, not wanting them to fall so close to his son, whose eyes turned into a pleading exclamation:
But they’re supposed to be good. GOOD Arabs. Our peaceful Palestinian relatives. Not TERRORISTS!
Sara’s face opened like a wound. Disbelieving, intrigued, hungry for the full story of her life, hurt by the mother who had held so much back from her.
I was too tired and drained to meet her reaction.
The sky-blue dishdashe dress, ripped in the middle, levitated from the corners of my mind where I had long ago turned out the lights and spread above me like a cloud. I turned and saw Majid in my daughter’s features and closed my eyes at once, too weak to feel anything more. Afraid that I might find my brother’s fury lurking in my depths. Afraid his fury might also be mine. Afraid, always afraid.
But this time my defenses were no match for the oppressed memories and loves, rising up behind my ice with torches, blazing and demanding. Demanding that I cry for them, at last pay them with the tears they deserve. Release their dues in fury and sadness. Give them their long-overdue acknowledgment with remembrance and pain.
“Laaa ellaaaha ella Allah,” concluded the adan, and I saw the quiet comprehension facing me behind Ari’s eyes.
Ari, the boy whose childhood and even whose right leg had been damaged beyond repair by Nazi bigotry. The limping boy with only one friend, taken to an Arab village to breathe fresh air, unpolluted by the awful memories of his parents, forever damaged by concentration camps no matter how much they tried to pick up the pieces of their lives. Ari, the hunted boy, suffocating and cramping in a taboon while Arabs sought Jews, any Jews, to exact vengeance after 1948. Ari, the young man who watched his parents fade like ghosts into the mortal anguish of their memories, leaving him with relics of their lives, an eighteen-pearled brooch and shelves of books.
“Here is her brooch.” He showed it to me.
One, two, three, four, five, six . . . eighteen delicate old pearls
.
Ari, the man who could not marry because, like me, he feared love more than he feared death. Because, for the hated and pursued, the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.
Ari—the “self-hating Jew,” as he was called by his countrymen; “my friend” as Baba had called him—understood. And he pulled a blanket of compassion over my words.
He drove the truck bomb into the U.S. embassy in 1983
. To shield my words, to shield me and Yousef ’s memory from the chill of the fact of those words. I saw it in his face. Our eyes met and interlaced, until two heavy tears fell like anchors, their weight yanking me to my seat as they disappeared on the red Jerusalem stone floor.
Ari, the young Jewish man in my parents’ wedding photo, walked me through his last memories of my father, taking me on an ox-drawn cart that my father had borrowed to hide the Perlsteins on their wobbly journey to the other side of Jerusalem’s divide, when East Jerusalem was yet unconquered. The hand- drawn Star of David flag, which my father had made from a bedsheet for the Perlsteins to wave on the Israeli side when they crossed over, so they would not be mistaken for Arabs and shot, was hidden beneath Baba’s clothes as he navigated the dangerous path. They traveled through night’s darkness, where resolute men patrolled with anger’s purpose, guarding the year’s remains against the Jews, who in turn patrolled in the uniforms of a sudden nation on the other side, complete with a resolve and anger of their own.
“My parents were too frightened to move, to open their eyes,” Ari began, “but I kept watch through a crack in the side of the cart. When a Jordanian soldier called out, waving at your father, I thought for a fleeting moment that Hasan had set a trap to betray us at the last moment. Fear turned to suspicion inside that cart, not unlike the one where so much of our boyhood was stored in the wooden planks and uneven wheels. A plan came to me, a betrayal before being betrayed. I started to reach for the dagger, the one Hasan had concealed beneath a blanket atop the cart—‘just in case we need it,’ he had said.”
