Tasting the Sky (10 page)

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Authors: Ibtisam Barakat

BOOK: Tasting the Sky
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The school year finally ended, and Basel and Muhammad
raced home carrying their certificates. They both had passed. Mother was thrilled, and her arms fluttered like wings, reaching out to embrace them.
We had a picnic in the backyard, and Basel and Muhammad showed us their certificates and grades. An Alef meant “excellent.” My father brought home
kullaj
and
kunafah
pastries to celebrate my brothers' success. Now only summer separated me from going to school every morning with them. But summer came with its own strange surprises.
“The time we've been looking forward to has come,” Father told Mother one evening as he drank his sweet spearmint tea. “Now that Basel has turned eight and Muhammad seven, our boys are old enough to be circumcised,” he said. Mother answered with a smile.
“We'll have a big celebration for them,” he announced.
“What is circumcision?” I asked. I had heard the word before but had never really understood it. My question floated into my parents' sudden silence and hung like a bubble in the air. Mother dismissed it by saying that only boys are circumcised.
“What happens to a boy when he gets circumcised?” Muhammad asked, his voice sounding alarmed.
Mother turned to Father for an answer. He gave none, other than saying it was something that the great prophet
Abraham had done with his sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Honoring Abraham, the Muslims and Jews circumcise their boys.
To spread the word about the upcoming celebration, my parents decided to take us on a trip to the villages where many of our relatives lived. The nickname for all the villages was
balad
, place of origin, because here people lived a traditional life, unlike ours in the city. They knew one another so well that every house, orchard, and even water well had a name to indicate its owner.
For me and my brothers, going to the
balad
meant having lots of fun. There we would eat all kinds of fruits right from the trees, tie a rope on a pear tree and swing, and ride donkeys or horses if someone helped us climb up on their backs. And I would make bracelets for my sister and myself by stringing threads or thin metal wire through green acorns. The date for the circumcision was set for the Friday after we returned from our visit.
On the day of the trip, we woke up earlier than our parents, fed the goats and chickens, filled the grain and water cans to the rim, and impatiently waited outside for Father and Mother to join us. I loved seeing Grandma Fatima because everyone always said that I looked like her. She was strong and beautiful. Straight as a pillar, she could balance a jar of water on her head and walk for a mile without losing a drop.
“Do you think the house will be safe with no one in it?” Mother wondered out loud. She was worried that if some soldiers came during the day and noticed we were gone, they might take over the house as a hiding place for their
training, trample the garden, or use the water supply and leave its lid open. If they came, no one would see them because our house stood alone. But there was not much we could do to protect it except lock the big front door and close the metal shutters. So we set out on our journey.
We took the bus from Ramallah to the town of Beit Hanina. “Sit quietly,” Mother instructed. But I liked to turn my head and gaze at the girls who were, like me, dressed in clean, new, and colorful clothes. We all shook our feet in delight at our new shoes and looked at one another's hair ribbons, white socks, and especially our tin or plastic necklaces and rings. The windows in the bus were open to the hot breeze and road dust. And the bus stopped many times to pick up and drop off passengers.
At the Beit Hanina junction, we got off and waited for the bus that would take us to Nabi Samuel, the village where Father was born. As always, while we waited at that junction, he bought us ice cream from Mufid's shop, and Mother pointed to a two-story house on the main Beit Hanina-Jerusalem road and told me it was where I was born. “Dar Thehaibeh,” she would say, remembering the name of the woman who owned the house. Seeing that house always made me happy.
In no time, we were on our way to Nabi Samuel. The village sat on top of a sharply rising hill preceded by many smaller ones. The old bus climbed slowly, and as the driver negotiated the gears, gas, and gravity, it felt as though at any moment it would roll backward. Then, reaching the top of a hill, it hiccuped forward, and I gripped my seat and prayed.
The bus raced down the other side, faster than either the driver or I wanted it to.
Nabi Samuel is named after the ancient prophet Samuel, who is believed to be buried there. A mosque honoring him is built on the highest point of the hill. Nabi Samuel seemed to have only a few homes; Father told us most of the people who used to live there, many of them our relatives, left because of the wars. But he knew the names of most Samuelis, whether they were living there or not. He could climb up and down the genealogical tree of Nabi Samuel the way my brothers and I climbed the fig tree next to our house. He told us many stories about our aunts, uncles, and dozens of cousins whom we had never met.
When the bus had come as close as it could to the village, we got off. As we walked the rest of the way, I lifted my eyes to the minaret that split the sky like the body of a bird between its two wings. The hot wind whistled faintly as it ebbed and flowed. It felt as though the trees were whispering secrets.
Aunt Rasmeyyah, Father's older sister, saw us from afar and hurried to meet us. Her sons followed. After kisses, embraces, and exclamations about how much we had grown, Father took my brothers and me for a walk.
First we went to the mosque. Only yards from the entrance, on the right side, we stood by the graves of Grandpa Hussein and Grandma Sarah, Father's parents. We said a prayer for their souls. They both had died before I was born. Their graves were marked with white stones that formed two necklaces around them. “Was Grandma Sarah
pretty?” I asked my father. He said she was short and thin. Her eyes were brown and almond-shaped like a deer's, and she had a sweet smile. Standing by Grandma Sarah's grave, I said
Marhabah,
hello, and spoke to her as though she were standing with us. “My brothers did so well in school this year,” I let her know.
I followed my father and my brothers up the minaret's spiral staircase. Only one person at a time could fit on the tiny steps. Bending through a low door, I walked out to find myself standing on a narrow balcony that surrounded the minaret like a bracelet. We stood as far away from the edge as we could, gluing our bodies to the minaret. When we touched the rail, it shook. I knew the balcony was not meant to hold more than one person. But each time we visited Nabi Samuel, my father wanted us to see the magnificent beauty of the land stretching in all directions, just as he had done a long time ago when he was a child.
Birds flew onto dancing treetops below me, and many distant towns flickered on the bright horizon, each with a minaret that pointed to the sky like a pencil pointing to a page. Vehicles that shone in the hot sun as they passed through Beit Hanina on the Ramallah-Jerusalem road appeared so small I felt I could pick up many of them in one hand and put them all in my pocket. Maha would be excited to see them.
“Do you know that a long time ago a man fell from this minaret but was not harmed?” Father mused.
We were astonished, for the minaret was so high. “How?” we all asked at once.
“He fell onto the back of a donkey,” Father said. “And afterward, the donkey took the man home.”
“Like a taxi?” we all asked, and laughed.
But Father said that he believed the story, and that God could make anything happen, God could have sent the donkey to this man the way He sent the ram to save the prophet Abraham's son, as the story in the Qur'an says.
I thought about God. I did not know who He really was because each time I asked about Him, who His parents were and what He looked like, my father said that no one knew what God looked like. But that He created all things.
“Who created God?” I then asked.
“No one” was my father's usual answer. “People's minds are too simple to grasp the endless nature of God,” he would add.
Looking down from the tall minaret, I thought God must be kind to send a ram to save a boy and a donkey to save someone falling from a minaret. Then I remembered Souma, my donkey friend at the shelter during the war. I imagined the donkey my father mentioned standing there under the minaret the way Souma had stood in the shelter after the war. Was he sent to save me? But Souma and I now were in different worlds. And he must have grown just as I had. Would I recognize him if I saw him? Would he recognize me?
As we ate the feast Aunt Rasmeyyah prepared for us, many people came to say hello, and my parents invited them to the circumcision celebration we would be having in ten
days. They looked at my brothers, patted them on the shoulders, and said that circumcision turned boys into men.
Before leaving Nabi Samuel, we visited the fields Father owned on one side of the village. He had bartered with someone to care for them, and now the land had trees with juicy yellow and purple plums, olive trees full of fruit, and grapevines that faced the sun all day and held grapes that had quickly ripened. Each field had a name, as though it were a person or a town. The flat field at the bottom of a hill was named Thaher Emran, Back of Emran, because it looked like the back of a man lying on his belly. Thaher Emran was planted with wheat. The golden seed braids waved like hands urging me to come nearer. The tender tops against my hand felt like long eyelashes.
Father then led us to a sunflower field with stalks taller than my brothers and me, even taller than him. I disappeared under a yellow sky of petals and discs. Scarecrows wearing jackets and hats and looking like dancing men flailed in the wind in many places. The daring crows stood right on the scarecrows' heads.
Before we left, my father found an abandoned soldier's helmet. A bullet had gone through it. Water had settled inside and caused it to rust. He buried the helmet in a little grave and said a blessing for the soul that might have been lost from the bullet.
Looking out at the red fields of Nabi Samuel, Father seemed sad. Many people had been saying that much of the land in Palestinian cities, towns, and villages would soon be
confiscated by the Israeli government. He picked up a handful of the dry, red soil, then held it and stared at it for a long time.
 
In the afternoon we caught the bus once again and set out for Beit Iksa, the valley town below Nabi Samuel where both Grandma Fatima and Great-Grandma Jamila lived. The houses in Beit Iksa clustered around the only street in the village. The rest of the land was covered with orchards—almond, fig, apple, plum, pear—as well as vineyards. A giant eucalyptus tree and a water well, Bir El-Shami, marked the ramp that led to a higher field ending with Grandma Fatima's home.
Before we arrived in Beit Iksa, Mother reminded us not to cause any trouble for our grandmas, and to take only one piece of candy if offered. She had a silent code to communicate with us when we were visiting people or had guests visiting us. If she bit her lips, that meant “Stop talking.” If she opened her eyes wide and glared at us, it meant “I see you and you must stop what you're doing immediately.” She had many special eye movements, facial expressions, and finger gestures that asked us to eat, stop eating, sit, leave the room, or go find Father when needed. Most of all, before we visited Beit Iksa, Mother warned that we should stay away from the well, Bir El-Shami.
Like all the women in Beit Iksa, Grandma Fatima wore a long black dress embroidered with green, white, red, and pink flowers. When I asked her why she always wore the
same style dress, she said that Palestinian women had embroidered their dresses with these flowers for hundreds of years. You could tell which town a woman was from by the colors and style of flowers embroidered on her dress. Grandma strapped a wide belt around her thin waist and covered her long braids with a white scarf.
Her house had one room. She slept in one corner, cooked and cleaned in another, had a cupboard and a closet in the third. In the fourth were cushions where she and her guests sat to visit. The windows were old and the screens were rusted. But the breeze that came in and out with a fresh orchard fragrance made the room feel new and beautiful.
The treats Grandma baked in her mud-and-stone hearth were safe in a basket that hung from the ceiling, where ants could not get at them. Our eyes immediately went to the basket, and she smiled, reached up, took out some of the anise cookies she often baked, and gave them to us with tea.
Grandma worked all day caring for the land she lived on and also for the orchards she'd adopted. She said she missed her family's orchards in Kharrouba, the village from which she, Grandpa Hammoudeh, Mother, and her siblings had fled, along with all the other villagers, in the war of 1948. But Grandma still kept the key to her old house there and hung it on the wall where she could see it every day.

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