1967
FIVE ISRAELI SOLDIERS, FOUR on the ground, one in the watchtower, were manning a checkpoint near the village of Bartaa. They rotated their duties in sets of two, shuffling and sitting back in the ennui of tedious cruelty. David was idling in the jeep when two Palestinians approached the checkpoint, IDs and permission slips extended for inspection. All was in order but the soldier at the gate ordered them to step aside, halting the long line of Palestinians waiting to cross. The soldier was a corpulent New Yorker whose family had immigrated to Israel.
“Hey!” The soldier stuck his head in the jeep, where David sat eating watermelon. “Come see this son-of-a-whore Arab. He looks like your fucking twin!” he said, laughing.
Dread washed away the boredom. Jolanta’s butterfly wings fluttered in David’s belly; Moshe’s demon breathed down his neck. The secret he did not know, did not want to know, had followed him and he hesitated before getting out of the jeep.
Following the officer, David suppressed an impulse to kick his superior, to watch the fat New Yorker roll down the hill. He did not want to see that Palestinian again. The one who had his face without a scar.
Peering beneath the rim of his helmet, David approached the Palestinian and the two men became yoked in the same angles of their jaws, the same dimples on their chins, the same fullness in their lips.
Their stares bulged with questions—
Who the fuck are you, Arab?—How did you become a Jew, Ismael?
—and in the air hovered a secret David did not want to know.
With the sorrow of so much gone so wrong, Yousef asked using the few Hebrew words he knew, then in Arabic in case the soldier understood, “Is your name Ismael?”
The New Yorker–cum–Israeli soldier laughed.
Violent wing-flapping butterflies cluttered David’s vision and demons blew in his ears.
David slapped the Arab. He struck him next with the butt of his rifle. He knew not why, but now he could not stop. He kicked the Arab’s groin repeatedly. He did it again and again until
that
Arab—
that
face—was unconscious. The man’s friend cried nearby. “Please, please stop. We are not terrorists. He has done nothing. Our permits are valid. Please,” he begged.
“Okay. Okay,” the New Yorker responded, pushing David aside. “I don’t want to have to fill out all the paperwork for a checkpoint fatality,” he said.
Yousef lay bleeding. “Okay. Take him where you came from. Now!” the fat soldier ordered.
David walked away breathless.
1968
I FEAR I MAY BE impotent. From when he beat my genitals, I think there is permanent damage.
Urinating hurts. But I hurt more when I see Fatima. She walks past the garage and I hide beneath a car hood, pretending not to notice her, when all my friends know she has no business in Jenin but me. And they all watch me hide, and they in turn hide from the sorrow on her face.
My little sister, Amal, searches for me, too. I see her with Huda, staring at me across the street. I know she is waiting for me to fill the void Baba left.
Soldiers search for me.
Mama is wasting away.
I am damaged, of no use to the people I love. I’ll die if I stay here. But something in me remains afire. Something that refuses to break, insists on a fight.
1967–1968
AS THE CONQUEST IN 1948 did for Hasan, Israel’s attack in 1967 and subsequent occupation of the West Bank left his son Yousef with a tentative destiny. The grip of Israeli occupation wrapped around his throat and would not let up. Soldiers ruled their lives arbitrarily. Who could and could not pass was up to them, and not according to any protocol. Who was slapped and who was not was decided on a whim. Who was forced to strip and who was not—the decision was made on the spot.
Yousef matured in the likeness of his father, his quiet temperament whispering Hasan’s legacy. He found refuge in the belly of solitude and braced his air with deliberation and thought. Because the occupation curbed Palestinian movement, Yousef could no longer travel to his work and gave up his post at Bethlehem University, accepting a teaching position at the UNRWA boys’ school, where his father had worked as a janitor.
For the same reason, Yousef was unable to escape to the hills at will. Instead, he tipped his after-hours energy into the garage he had inherited from his father. Before long, Yousef was away from Amal and his mother most waking hours. Occasionally, he could be found at the Beit Jawad coffeehouse, puffing on a hooka, idling with friends over backgammon or cards. But every Friday, after the Jomaa prayers, coerced by the call of solitude, the seduction of natural beauty, and the potent compulsion of habit, he would risk the humiliation and interminable delays at checkpoints to venture to the hills, as he and Hasan had done since before Yousef could remember. There, under the shelter of trees, Yousef read. It was a daring endeavor, each time a solitary incitement to honor his father’s memory. Just as Amal continued to read at dawn, as she and her father had done, Yousef kept returning to the pastures with a book. These were the conditions of helplessness, grasping at continuity, salvaging what could be kept of their source of strength—Hasan, their baba.
Within six months, Yousef had endured torture and random beatings that had marked nearly every part of his body. He had been forced to strip before women and his students, had been made to kiss the feet of a soldier who had threatened to beat a small boy if Yousef did not kneel. Most men had endured such treatment. Most were broken. And most had returned from the humiliation with violent tempers aimed at their wives or sisters or children.
Yousef turned everything inward, as Dalia had done. He cloistered the pain, letting it tangle with powerlessness. Silence consumed their little shack in Jenin, and both Amal and Yousef would later recall those times with a thick taste of emptiness.
Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. “Never let them know they hurt you” was their creed.
But the heart must grieve. Sometimes pain emerged as joy. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. For the generations born in the camps, grief found repose in a bed of necrophilia. Death came to resemble life and life, death, and there was a time in her youth when Amal aspired to martyrdom.
I can explain this, / but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there’s no fixing that
.
Yousef rarely joined the angry chanting of funeral marches. He did not celebrate martyrdom, nor did he show grief. A deep aching for life simmered inside him behind a shell of indifference.
Amal adored him so and longed to be in the folds of his every day. Sometimes, she and Huda sat across the street from the garage to watch her brother work, hoping that he would invite her to look beneath the hoods. To share in his life. To reassure her of family. To hug her as he had on that fortieth day after the war.
Yousef spotted her a few times but never asked her over.
They hardly spoke anymore, Yousef and Amal. After the incident at Bartaa, when David had beat him to the ground, Yousef closed the doors of his heart. Letters from Fatima came and were not answered.
While Yousef encased himself in a simmering decision, their mother roamed the crowded realms of her mind, embroiled in discourse with shadows. Um Abdallah was Dalia’s persistent companion, the two of them knitting all day on the balcony that leaned under their weight and shaded the front entrance of their home. Amal and Huda often marveled at the two older women, wondering if they were very brave or just unaware of the balcony’s rickety state. For it was essentially decorative, barely wide enough to accommodate two people. Other than that, Amal paid little attention to Um Abdallah then. But in revisiting those times years later, she grew to love the woman who had shown her mother such undaunted loyalty. Even when Dalia was most confused, Um Abdallah listened to her gibberish monologues and gently placed her back in the knitting chair if she started to wander off.
Huda returned to live with her mother and brother soon after the war. But she and Amal still spent their days together and that was the only sense of continuity they had.
As before, the girls mostly fended for themselves, but now Amal was bound by custom to ensure the proper running of the household. Before the war, the backdrop to Amal’s life had been colored with Baba’s love at dawn, Mama’s stoic rearing, and Yousef ’s clandestine love affair with Fatima. Now, those hues were replaced by military green and the pale emanations of depletion. Neighbors looked at her with pity and whispered.
“What is the girl going to do?”
“She’s almost marrying age. That’s good.”
“Yes. God willing she’ll find a good man soon to take care of her.”
Though her body had already begun to stretch and curve with new form, Amal was a child, twelve years old, on that cool January Friday when the citrons were ripe and the vines were being pruned and Yousef unexpectedly came home from the Jomaa prayers.
Amal was delighted by the surprise. She made lunch, their biggest meal, and was preparing the floor with a covering of old newspapers, where they would eat. The prospect of spending time with her elusive brother elated her and she was eager to flaunt her culinary skills. Dalia had also been coming up for air from the abyss of unreality and Amal thought it would be like old times. Something like the family they had been.
“Amal, can you deliver this to Fatima?” Yousef asked, holding out a sealed envelope.
Crestfallen, she asked, “Aren’t you staying to eat lunch with us?”
Yousef felt Amal’s dejection and pretended to follow the “intoxicating aroma” of her cooking, ending up next to his sister.
“When did you get so grown up, Amal?” he mumbled with a mouth full of the food she had prepared.
“I’m almost thirteen.”
Surprised by the forward move of time, Yousef paused, sizing her up, seeing the physical evidence that time does indeed pass, irretrievably. He looked at his little sister and felt a lash of guilt for having paid her little mind since the war. “You’re beautiful,” he said.
Those perfect words, wonderful to her ears, resonated against Amal’s chaotic, awkward sense of self. She beamed.
They shared the makloobeh—a pile of rice made golden in the syrup of lamb, eggplant, and ginger—and passed the cucumber yogurt sauce, the browned pine nuts, and the crisped onions. Amal was happy.
The meal was embellished with spurts of laughter from Mama, who found humor somewhere in the hive of her unseen world, while Yousef and Amal conspired purposelessly in risible peace and smiles, placing that time together in a box of good memories. The memory of their last meal together with Mama.
After lunch, Amal ran with Yousef ’s envelope to fetch Huda. Together they hurried on their familiar delivery mission of shuttling Yousef ’s and Fatima’s love letters. “Just like the good old days,” Huda said.
“Yeah. On our way back, let’s see if the Warda house is still there.”
Just like the good old days
.
Fatima spotted Amal and Huda from her window and waited anxiously for a letter from her lover. Her dimpled smile brightened the house as she took the letter in a dramatic thrill.
“Help yourself to some cookies, girls. I have some hot tea on the stove,” she said, tearing into the envelope as she walked to the back room.
They helped themselves and waited. A large mirror, its gaudy gold frame flashing with counterfeit gems along its border, leaned against the wall, projecting the fullness of Amal’s form. She had never seen her entire body at once like that. They had only one mirror, small and insufficient, fixed above the bathroom sink in Jenin. In Fatima’s home, she witnessed for the first time the buds on her chest, which had been sore for weeks. They rounded the cloth of her shirt in a bulge that summoned her hand to trace the signs of woman.
“What are you doing?” Huda, chomping on the sweets from Fatima’s kitchen, looked at Amal’s breast cupped in her guilty hand.
“My chest is sore,” Amal said, trying but failing to capture a casual tone.
“Aunt Nadia says that’s what happens when they start growing,” Huda said indifferently. “I wish mine would start growing soon.” She inspected herself with excited hope.
“Why?”
“Don’t you like yours?”
“They hurt.”
“I know you like them,” Huda said accusingly.
“So?”
“Can I touch them?”
“No!!!”
The silence that followed was broken by Fatima’s sobbing from the other room.
“Fatima’s crying,” said Huda.
“I can hear she’s crying!”
“Fatima, are you okay?” Amal asked, pushing open the door.
Hunched beneath her oversized pale blue dishdashe, Fatima lifted her face from her hands. She looked terrible. She wiped her nose in vain, attempting to compose herself, but her hair clung to her wet cheeks and her eyes were red and swollen.
The letter was crumpled in her hand.
“Amal, dear, why don’t you and Huda go on home now,” she said very softly, achingly.
Amal and Huda walked the usual path, winding along the hills of northern Palestine. They found the old Warda house intact, but Warda was not there.
Both felt the sting of losing their one-armed doll, their child, but neither mentioned it. They grieved privately in their young hearts, because it seemed infantile now to cry for a doll now that they had buried Aisha, a real baby who cried real tears and bled real blood. But the hurt of losing Warda was worse, and that was a secret each held from the other as they walked on from the Warda house.
The trees had lost their leaves to winter’s chill and the silver wood of olive trees stood bare like colossal ancient hands, the gnarly and twisted guardians of time reaching from the earth, patiently resigned to wait for the ripe season. Homes, some centuries old, with dense vines hugging their masonry, dotted the hillsides, and shepherds moved about with their herds.
Many years later, Amal would recall that life-giving beauty she had taken for granted, never imagining something so breathtaking and ancient could be wiped away or that anyone would want to wipe it away.
At that time, most of the West Bank was still draped in green, the natural majesty that bows for the wind, sheds for the chill, and blossoms for the sun. But it changed. One home, one farm, one village at a time. Demolished, confiscated, razed—a ceaseless appropriation of Palestinian land. “Imperialism by the inch,” Haj Salem called it. Today, the path where the girls carried Yousef and Fatima’s love blends into barren wastelands, littered with the rubble of old homes, burned tires, spent bullet casings, and struggling olive saplings.
“I wonder what the letter said to make her cry.” Huda was concerned for Fatima. Their walk back was brisk, at least until they reached the checkpoint.
There, a slender soldier asked, “Where are you going?”
“Jenin,” Huda answered meekly.
“Jenin,” Amal said, despising her own subservience.
On cue, they produced the papers and cards they had been instructed to carry since June 1967. These were the color-coded ID documents that identified Palestinians according to their religion and the area where they lived along with various permission papers for travel east, west, north, or south. Special permission was required for medical treatment, commercial movement, university passes, such that a single individual ended up carrying piles of pink, yellow, and green slips, crumpled and tattered from persistent fingers, sweat, and the constant unfolding, inspection, and refolding.
At the opposite side of the checkpoint, another soldier questioned Osama Jamal, a fourteen-year-old boy who lived in Jenin—not in the refugee camp but in the actual town where the camp was located. His father owned the local bakery that captured passersby with the aroma of fresh breads, manakeesh, and fatayer.
Osama was pushed to the ground and kicked by the soldier at the checkpoint. Another soldier helped him to his feet before turning angry Hebrew words on the first. While the soldiers quarreled, Osama limped away with a fractured rib and a crushed ego, praying that the two girls from Jenin had not noticed him.
Once out of the soldiers’ view, Amal and Huda offered him help, but Osama refused until the pain conquered his pride and he relinquished his bags, leaning his body on their shoulders after they promised not to reveal that he had accepted assistance from girls.