Tasting the Sky (13 page)

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Authors: Ibtisam Barakat

BOOK: Tasting the Sky
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While waiting for my brothers after school, I snuck into the Jalazone Camp twice. Slipping down the steep road that led to the camp houses, I felt like I was walking to the bottom of the world. I had to lean back in order to keep my balance. A group of young boys were running up the steep street, then lying down and letting themselves roll like barrels.
Most of the houses of Jalazone were crowded shacks, some as small as the mudroom of our goat. Many had roofs made of uneven zinc or asbestos sheets held in place by rocks. They were jammed together on both sides of a tiny street that split the camp like a trickle of water. Spring-green spearmint, parsley, garlic, and scallion plants were planted in rusted cans by the doorways.
Many doors were open. Women asked me whose
daughter I was. I did not tell them. What if they knew Mother? If anyone told her I'd gone to the camp, she might keep me home from school. The camp women were busy with house chores. Their daughters all helped, and the look in their eyes told me how strange it was for them to see a girl wandering after school. But I was happy.
People in Jalazone seemed poorer than us and our Mahasreh neighbors. Women did most of their chores on the street. Water from laundry and dishwashing spilled between the feet of those who walked, for the camp had no sewage system. Bad smells wafted up from puddles of dirty water.
Many small children played in the street, running barefoot or even without clothes. Their faces were brown or gray with dirt. One child put his head out a window and screamed that he was hungry. His mother covered his mouth with her hand. “I fed him,” she yelled from the same window to anyone who was listening. I knew many camp families did not have enough food. The flour and sugar
mu'an
rations donated by the UN for refugees came irregularly.
Going to Jalazone filled my heart with sadness. After only two trips, I no longer wanted to return. I also gave up on finding out whether Nofaleyyah's mother had six fingers like her daughter, or what the television in the camp elder's house looked like. Instead, I filled my hours of waiting by reading books I borrowed from my brothers or from my school. But because many of the stories reminded me of sad feelings I'd had, I retold them to myself as happier tales.
I knew what it felt like to be terrified and have to run
in the darkness of night and lose a shoe. So my Cinderella had her own magic wand and never had to worry about being missed. She would never lose her shoe.
I gave Leila Wa Al-Theeb, Little Red Riding Hood, a dragon friend to go with her to her grandmother's house so she would never have to feel like I did when Zuhair stopped me on my way home from school. When the wicked wolf saw the dragon's flaming breath, his jaw dropped so low that the swallowed grandma slid out safely on his tongue.
But the story that occupied my mind for the longest time, the story that I retold over and over, was about a baby elephant named Boo. He lived with his mother in faraway wild forests. Every day Boo and his mom searched for food, water, and safe places to rest and sleep. With their giant bodies and enormous ears, they stomped through the forests. Over time Boo's mother taught him how to be a good elephant. He learned quickly, and she was happy with him.
One day, Boo's mother told him that she was feeling ill and would soon die. She must walk to a distant place near a big body of water and lie there. Many dying elephants would lie by that body of water, which became what people called an elephant graveyard.
“Let us go,” Boo's mother urged, nuzzling him with her trunk. Boo cried upon hearing his mother's words. He roared in anguish. Then they began their last journey together.
They walked side by side, and I walked with them through the winding roads of the forests. I knew that when
Boo's mother finally left him by the water and closed her eyes, he would feel what I had felt when I was separated four years ago from my family in the war. I wanted to be there for him, to comfort him and speak into his giant ear that he was not alone. He could hold my hand.
Boo's story made me worry about Mother. I became anxious that she might die during the day when I was away at school. I feared that the soldiers might harm her. I felt bad that I could not go home right after school. But it was too scary for me to risk walking alone with Zuhair on the road.
I also panicked about Mother at night. When she slept, I tiptoed in the darkness to where she lay. I put my hand close to her nose. I wanted to see if she was breathing and alive. Feeling her breath reassured me, but only momentarily. I wondered if she had died the second I walked away. I checked her breathing over and over for a long time until she woke up, agitated.
I continued until she asked me why I kept reaching for her nose and mouth. Whimpering, I told her. She said that she was not going to die soon. She also promised that she would not die without telling me first and saying goodbye the way baby elephant Boo's mother did with him. So I stopped checking on her breathing at night. But I never stopped feeling sad for Boo. Thinking of him walking back home motherless, tears rolling down his cheeks and tusks, I pulled the covers over my head and quietly cried with him until I fell asleep.
 
 
Mother gave birth shortly before the end of the school year. My father was especially happy with the new baby. He carried him back and forth across the room and cried tears of joy as he sang for him. I was most excited about the baby's tiny feet and hands. I kept putting my feet next to them to compare sizes. Maha wanted to carry the baby, but he was too heavy for her. Muhammad liked to kiss the baby's ears. But sometimes he bit the baby's earlobes and made him cry.
To celebrate the birth, Father handed me a big box of Silvana chocolates to give to my schoolmates and teachers. I ate half of the box on the way to school and shared the rest with the girls and teachers I liked. Grandma Fatima stayed with us and took care of Maha, Mother, and the new baby while my brothers and I were finishing school.
On the last day of the school year, we stood in the playground to receive our certificates. The principal talked about the importance of hard work and obeying the rules.
“Man jadda wajad,”
she said, meaning that those who persist shall achieve. Then she announced that she was going to call out the names of those who ranked first in their classes and that they would receive presents.
I knew Mother would love me more if I ranked first. But I did not know what to expect. What did it mean to rank first? I had done everything my teachers had asked me to do. But everyone else in my class had also done that.
The principal now smiled. A mound of colorful, shiny presents was on the table beside her. She began with the first grade. “Ibtisam Barakat,” she called. I felt excited and a bit scared.
Lilian motioned that I should walk up and receive a purple package. When I did, the principal smiled and said something to me—perhaps a compliment, but I could not hear it because everyone was clapping.
Walking back to my place, I knew I wanted everyone in my class, especially Nofaleyyah, to receive a present. My classmates crowded around me, wanting to know what I got. I opened the wrapping before everyone to find an orange ball and a yellow pencil. They glittered like gold in the sun. I felt they were treasures.
Going home, I carried my certificate close to my chest the way Mother carried my baby brother. I placed it in her hands and showed her the presents. She walked slowly to her jewelry box, pulled out her only pair of golden earrings, and put them on my ears. I ran to the mirror to see what my first pair of earrings looked like. They sparkled like stars. And Mother's happy face sparkled, too. Now I felt that I had earned her love.
Summer passed, erasing the last traces of wild-flowers and green grass. Migrating birds appeared as though barrels of confetti had been poured across the sky and swirled in endless formations. I waved to them. And soon it was time to return to school again. I was eager to be in the second grade. I had missed Lilian and all my classmates. I wanted to show off how long my hair had grown in only three months.
But the second grade was different from the first. And it had a different teacher. I wanted to be with Lilian. I would repeat the first grade if my teacher would let me. So I kept looking away from my teacher and out the window, searching for ways to be with Lilian.
In the morning, bending my knees and hiding my head, I pretended that I belonged in the line of first graders. But
the teachers knew me, and one of them always reached in and pulled me out of the line. So during the day I asked to be excused and knocked at Lilian's door. I begged her to let me in, but she told me to go to the next room—the second grade. When she shut the door, I sat in front of it, crying.
Then Lilian and my new teacher talked. They agreed that because I often quickly finished my in-class work, then sat doing nothing, I could visit Lilian's class in my free time. But now, because my new teacher let me go to Lilian's class, I felt that she, too, was good, and I began to like her. Almost immediately I stopped wanting to leave the second grade and go to the first. But I continued to run to Lilian, to talk with her whenever I saw her during recess. And I continued to love her best.
That October I was planning to save a large piece of the cake Mother had promised to make for my birthday for Lilian. But only four days before my birthday, we heard terrible news and Mother canceled the cake. Father was first to hear it on the radio. It made him open his mouth wide in wordless anguish. He held his head between his hands as though the words that had entered his ears made his head too heavy to carry. “Jamal Abdel Nasser has died,” he shrieked. “Now we are all orphans.”
In the coming days, I learned that Abdel Nasser was the leader of Egypt. “He cared about all Arabs,” my father lamented. Abdel Nasser had been trying hard to stop the fighting between the government of Jordan and the Palestinian freedom fighters we called
fedayeen
when he had a heart attack and died.
People in Ramallah mourned, gathering in large groups and carrying empty coffins to show the sadness of having lost the leader they loved most. Father walked in one of these funeral processions. And though he had never bought a newspaper because he always relied on our radio, when he came home that day he brought one with him. Abdel Nasser's picture was at the center of the front page.
Mother read every word out loud, punctuating each sentence with her tears. When she was finished, she carefully cut out the portrait of Nasser standing in a decorated military uniform. Under the photograph she wrote in the best form she could muster:
“Inna hurreyyata al-kalemah heya al-muqaddematu al-oula lel-deemuqrateyyah.”
Freedom of the word is the first prelude to democracy. She had heard Nasser say this on the radio, and she repeated it often. Mother made a frame with cardboard, glue, and thread, and Nasser's photograph, with this sentence written underneath, was the only picture in our home.
When we heard recordings of Nasser's voice or speeches, we became silent as though we were hearing prayers. Father touched the radio gently and turned the volume up until Nasser's voice filled the world. Thumping songs, with tunes like elephant footsteps, followed. They shook the walls of my heart. I broke down sobbing, not knowing exactly why. A radio chant that wailed
“Nasser ya hurreyyah,”
describing Nasser himself as freedom, stuck in my mind like a rhyme. At the Jalazone school, teachers announced the loss by wearing black.
The death of Abdel Nasser was accompanied by increased
military activity in our area. During the months that followed, I repeatedly heard sudden explosive noises from Israeli planes that forced me to run to hide. “They are breaking the sound barrier,” Mother said. “It means they are flying faster than the speed of sound, faster than you can hear me speak.” Then the planes flew high and needled into the sky that spread above them like a thin fabric. They dragged white smoke threads that thickened into clouds before disappearing. These planes stitched fear into my heart. What were the soldiers going to do next?
Other planes flew low, and I could see their big bodies, like moving buildings. They sounded as though they were right above our rooftops, and hearing them rekindled the feeling of war in me. When I heard them, I made certain I had my shoes on and kept an eye on my sister and baby brother. If a war started, I was going to make sure that the younger children were not forgotten.
Pressing his cheek against the radio set, grimacing in anger at the static that always intercepted the words, Father cursed, saying that we were living in the middle of a daily war. Where was it leading us? It seemed to him that the planes flying low above Ramallah were meant to keep us frightened. And we were.
But Mother was the most frightened. She kept her suitcase by the door. The sight of that suitcase struck horror in my heart. I worried that she might leave without taking us with her.
Everything reached a breaking point months later on a spring afternoon when two soldiers came to our door.
Thinking they wanted a drink of water, Mother impatiently pointed to the water room. But they laughed, walked to the well, then returned.
One of them pulled out his gun and stood away from the window to guard the door. The other threw kisses at Mother, hugged and touched his body up and down as he pointed to hers.
His gestures were similar to Zuhair's. Zuhair was Palestinian like us, and the soldiers were Israeli, but it seemed they wanted the same thing. I looked at Mother's face. She was pale and trembling. Before the soldier left, he made a circle with his hands, meaning that he would return on another day.
“There will be no other day,” she promised.
“Khalas!
Khalas!”
she announced when my father came home, tears filling her face. “This is the limit,” she said, her voice firm with finality. Father did not argue. Though it was the middle of the school year and we would miss classes during the move, he quickly sold our house and found a place in the Irsaal area for us to move to. There, we would be surrounded by many other homes, and we would not have soldiers training near us.
 
I wept as we packed our belongings. Spreading sheets and blankets on the floor, we filled them with clothes, shoes, books, and kitchen items. We tied the blanket corners together into giant knots. I wrapped glass cups and plates inside blouses to protect them from breaking. The bullet inside the bed rolled against the metal as we swayed between
steps, put the bed down for a rest, then started again. Father roped everything to the sides of the truck.
On the first trip, he took only Mother to help him unload our belongings into the new place. When we were done filling the truck again, our house had become as empty as the feeling I had in my heart. I built a
qantara
of seven flat stones by the door, the number of our family members. And I watered our garden for the last time with as much water as I could, in case no one would be there soon to care for it.
Sitting on a large rock facing the house as one faces a dying friend, my father picked up tiny pebbles from the ground and tossed them to the side. He raised his head and looked at the sky. “What have I done to deserve this sorrow?” he shouted. “I neither drink alcohol nor gamble, as you ordered. I don't even smoke,” he pleaded with God. White clouds passed above him like angel caravans, perhaps carrying the complaints of others.
Mother locked the house. I wrapped my fingers around the window bars and looked into the emptiness. We had left nothing behind, but I still could see in my mind all of our things in their places. The brown cupboard standing with its screen doors open, the baby cot swinging like a pendulum, the Singer sewing machine pedal chugging up and down, pieces of cloth spread out on the tile floor.
I saw images of myself and my brothers reaching one more time for the Silvana chocolate box Mother always hid. Zuraiq's face appeared, then the sight of my brothers being circumcised, their mouths open with fear. I saw Mother handing me her only pair of gold earrings, and my sister and
me as we banged cups on the table, drunk with the joy of the noise we created.
Outside, on the step in front of the locked door, my three-and-a-half-year-old self stood silently, screaming for my parents to wait for me. The feeling of that moment stung like fire in my heart.
Taking a final look around, I knew that this was the only place that would ever be home for me. And now I was leaving it and might never come back.
Mother's voice pulled me like a rope. She seemed cheerful and chattered about how our new home was in a large building that housed three other families and had a brick wall all around it. She wanted many neighbors.
I walked to the truck and climbed to the top of the pile of belongings, where my brothers were waiting. Father drove away slowly, and the distance between us and our home widened. We waved to the hill, the horizon, and the house, to the stone person, to the plants, and to the green door with the two windowpanes like eyes.
Then my father took a turn and the road closed like a final curtain behind us.

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