1969
WITHOUT BREAKING THE CONTINUITY of their dogged enterprise of knitting on the rickety balcony, Mama and Um Abdallah lifted their heads intermittently to glance at the world around them. By then Mama had plunged far into the abyss of her mind, defecting even from her own body, leaving it to the epidemic of misfortune, and it became necessary for her to wear a diaper. Um Abdallah, in her extraordinary loyalty, took charge of my mother’s hygiene.
Mama’s eyes were depleted and blank, her flesh shrank, and her respiration began to rattle. My family was gone and I was closing in on fourteen with a disfigured body. Life was mercurial and fickle, not to be trusted. One moment it had caressed me with the enchantment of a young girl’s infatuation, my first crush on a boy, and seduced me with every girl’s fantasy of finally becoming a woman. Then, cruelly and indifferently it had clothed me in maimed skin, spun from suspicion and the cotton of abandonment.
A portion of my smooth, soft flesh was torn from my waist. The sanctimonious angels who sit on people’s shoulders to monitor and report sin to Allah tormented me with “I told you so,” and I believed the horror that marked my body was punishment for the sin of masturbation. I bowed humbly before the smugness of those blabbermouth angels, submitting helplessly to everlasting purgatory.
There was nothing left for me but my father’s dream, for which he had drudged for pathetic wages, to save enough that his refugee children might get an education. I plunged into that purpose, though I had no intellectual or scholastic appetite of my own. I had no dreams save the wish to be loved and free, as I had been during the dawns with my father.
To honor Baba, to make his dream reality, I devoured books of history, literature, mathematics, and science with ferocious purpose. At night, for self punishment and to sustain the momentum of my scholastic solitude, I fingered the rutted flesh of my abdomen, a reminder that I was damaged goods no boy would want. The loss of muscle made me limp for some time afterward, augmenting my sense of defectiveness.
Huda remained by my side during my recovery, but soon I pushed her away. I say now, with shame and self-reproach, that I begrudged the wholeness of her body and wished my misery on her, so that I might have a friend in the house of the cantankerous, wretched, and mutilated. But she was always there, sturdy in her loyalty, and she did not waver or resent my abandonment.
Despite the assault against it, my body persisted in the habit of waking before dawn, the daily commemoration of Baba, even though my memory had already dissolved the features of my father’s face into a vaguely personified scent of honey apple tobacco. I read and reread the books he loved, and today, if I could make a wish list of material things, as we girls had done after the Battle of Karameh, I would covet only those tattered books.
I wrapped my new skin in a storm of paper and ink, unconcerned about my possessed mother wasting away kilo by kilo; about the crass incursions of imperious soldiers; or my best friend, Huda, and the love story unfolding between her and Osama.
I became known as a prodigious student and emerged from my self-banishment to the laudatory eyes of adults in the camp, who also approved of my indifference toward boys, which they mistook for piety. But I knew, and so did Huda, that it was just the anguish of deficiency. When I finally surfaced from the Siberia of my ornery determination, I found, once again, the enduring and solid ground of Huda’s friendship, and we picked up where we had left off.
While I was submerged in shame, study, and repentance, Huda was falling in love. By then, it was known in the camp that Huda was Osama’s girl, and it was only a matter of time before they would wed. In the physical transformations of adolescence, Huda’s cheeks rose high under her streaked cat eyes and her lips ripened, flattening into a curvy stretch over her slightly crooked front teeth when she smiled. The “odd little girl with those rare eyes” had blossomed into a Cleopatra, with a silky river of black hair and fine olive skin. Osama was the envy of all the young men in town.
Huda and I were fourteen when we found Mama cold in her bed one hot June evening. We approached slowly, lighting the oil lantern on the wall. As we had always done in the face of uncertainty, each of us reached for the other’s hand. Mama lay on her side, as usual when she slept, the shadow of her stiff form flickering against the wall. The murmur of conversation passing outside our window and the stale scent of an ending crept along the seams between the living and the dead. There, on the spongy foam and worn gaudy colors of her mat, on the floor, against the chipping bare wall of our little shack, in the makeshift nation of the forgotten, Mama had died alone.
My eyes vented quiet tears. I cried, not for this woman’s death, but for my mother, who had departed that body years before. I cried with a bittersweet relief that she was finally and completely rid of the whorehouse world that had deflowered her spirit. I cried for the blunt impact of guilt that I could not, had not saved her somehow. I cried because, hard as I tried, I could not find in the small pale body the woman whose womb had given me life. And I cried for the imminence of a sad tomorrow on the barren, body-strewn soil of my days. Huda cried for me. Only Um Abdallah, who had left her constant companion to rest and returned to wake her, cried for Mama. She was the only soul who knew the person who had lived inside that emaciated corpse, over which the three of us wept.
Somewhere between me and the body of my mother hovered a memory of a time when Dalia had taught me to move an unborn baby inside its mother’s womb. The baby was going to die, everyone was sure. The mother too, perhaps; people had their doubts. Dalia was finally there. “Um Yousef the midwife is here with her daughter, Amal,” someone announced as we hurried inside where the woman had been straining, agonizing while we had waited for permission to leave our homes during curfew hours. None had been granted, so we had sneaked out, Mama’s special scissors tucked in her thobe. The woman had exhausted herself trying to scream the pain away. To frighten death away from her child. The dim light and smell of childbirth had filled the small room where the woman moaned on the bed. Dalia had slowly put one hand on the woman’s brow, the other on her belly, and begun reciting prayers.
“Breathe, child. Put it in Allah’s hands. There’s no better place for your fate than in his hands. Breathe, child.” Mama’s calmness was contagious. “Help me lift her.” She motioned to me. The woman’s aunt also stepped forward and together we inverted the woman, her legs high on pillows, her shoulders hanging from the rim of the bed. “The baby is tilted and could be tangled. We’ll do what Allah wills.” Mama’s last words to those in the room: “Go out and pray for her and I’ll yell if we need help.”
We
, she and I.
“Put your hands here,” she instructed me, and put her own on the other side of the woman’s abdomen. “Close your eyes, until you feel the movement, and let Allah guide your hands.” I was frightened, but I understood well.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside
.
Humming, as if coaxing the baby, Mama rubbed the woman’s skin for an eternity. Until there it was, the movement. “Now help me. Move your hands like this,” she said, still calm, still humming. The woman was moaning but calm.
Breathe, child
. I breathed and my hands moved with the baby, opposite Mama’s.
We were ready now. The women returned. “Your prayers helped,” Mama told them, “but my daughter did the most difficult part.” Peeking from the other side of the belly, she said to me, “
You
positioned the baby, Amal.” She smiled broadly with pride, moved to her feet, and came to me with a kiss to my brow.
How had I forgotten that day and why had it come to me now, in Mama’s death? Dalia had loved me. How could I ever have doubted that?
“Allaho akbar.” The funeral procession ended in Mama’s burial—the tapered end of my mother, the once-fiery Bedouin girl named Dalia, whose footsteps had jingled.
As is customary, women and men mourned in separate quarters. But Ammo Darweesh joined no one. I found him at the cemetery alone suffering a naked heartache, bound to his wheelchair.
Ammo Jack O’Malley mourned Mama’s passing. “I met yer mum when she was just a young thing, all broken over her lost baby boy,” he told me. “A good woman. Your father, too. I’m so sorry, Amal. El baeyeh fihayatik.”
Jack had a simple, spontaneous air that welcomed life as it came. His impromptu demeanor was not a manner of simplicity, for he was sharp witted and well educated. Rather, it was the legacy of experienced honesty and integrity that made him impervious to discord and invited the admiration of both Palestinians and our uniformed Israeli occupiers.
As far as we were concerned, Ammo Jack was an Irish Palestinian who visited his daughter in Dublin once a year and lived in squalor with us the rest of the time. He spoke Arabic as he did English, with that Irish inflection that curls the end of a sentence up into a question.
“Hello, dearie,” he said to me in the days after Mama was buried. “Come over to yer ammo’s house later on ’cause we need ta speak with ya, ’kay, love?” He spoke to me in English, something he had started doing to confirm the fluency that my teachers had reported to him, and later, to help me exercise the language.
“Yer Englizi is getting ahsan, eh?” He often mixed the two languages like that.
“Yes, my English is getting better.”
“Good!” And he chuckled and coughed.
But what was going on at my uncle’s house? Why did they want to talk to me? And who were “they,” anyway? Whatever it was, I dreaded it. And for good reason. In their eyes, I was nearly fourteen with no mother, father, brother, or sister, poor and pious. All together, I was ripe for marriage.
The next hours passed under an oppressive worry and I formulated schemes to avoid marriage, partly because I feared that as a married woman I would have to expose the extent of my disfigurement. I considered running away. But nothing could bring me to commit such a cultural wrongdoing. Besides, anywhere I went, I was bound to run into Israeli soldiers and settlers, for Israel had already begun massive land confiscations and construction of Jewish-only settlements around the centers of Palestinian life. I even contemplated faking mental illness or a host of other maladies.
By evening’s arrival, I was spent, resigned with imagined defeat. Holding hands, Huda and I went together to Ammo Darweesh’s home and she waited in the alley as I timidly approached the iron door and stepped into the roofless room where my uncle, Haj Salem, and Ammo Jack O’Malley sat on floor cushions, passing the hooka muzzle and sipping kahwe from tiny cups, unmindful of the chickens roaming next to them. As is the custom, sugar was declined out of respect for the dead. So the kahwe was bitter in deference to Mama’s passing. I walked barefoot, a habit that coated my feet with stony skin and prompted people to greet me with, “Where are your shoes, child?”—sanction that was both compassionate and disdainful and reserved for those who lacked parental guidance.
“Take your shoes off, Amal, and come join us,” someone said, before realizing that I wore none. I walked slowly toward them on the cobblestone. It was dark and the light from two lanterns was fluttering with moths and mosquitoes.
Appearing from the corner of my eye, a silhouette of outstretched arms hurried toward me. “Hello, darling!” said Khalto Bahiya, Mama’s eldest sister. She lived in Tulkarem, where she worked as a maid in nearby settler homes; she had set out for Jenin as soon as she heard the news. Although she lived less than ten miles away, it took her three days to make the trip. Twice, she was turned away at the checkpoint. On the third try, soldiers allowed her through. But Mama had already been buried, and when Khalto Bahiya realized that she had not been able to kiss her little sister good-bye, she had hurled curses at the soldiers.
I hadn’t expected Khalto Bahiya to be there, but I was immensely glad to see her. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother’s fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiya’s beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time had scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution. But even these lines disagreed on their faces. Khalto Bahiya’s face incorporated them into her joy and her pain, so that lines appeared and hid according to her expressions and provided frames and curves to her tenderness. Gentle folds nestled her lips and made her face open when she smiled, like an orchid. On Mama, the lines had always seemed incongruous— as if her beauty could accept no change or outside interference. The wrinkles on Mama’s face had carved her skin like prison bars, behind which one could discern the perpetual plaint of something grand and sad, still alive and wanting to get out.
“Come here, ya binti.” Haj Salem motioned me to sit next to him with a raised arm, revealing a jagged oval of sweat that moistened his cotton dishdashe. I settled uneasily onto a cushion between him and my long-suffering Ammo Darweesh, who drooped in the disrepair of his wheelchair, fastened at one hinge by rope and tape. His youngest child, my cousin Fouad, was ill with a fever and slept in the communal room, the reason we endured the mosquitoes in the open courtyard.
Ammo Jack O’Malley rested comfortably on the other side of Haj Salem, the two of them playfully arguing like schoolboys over who was taking a longer turn with the hooka muzzle. “Damn Irishman.” “Damn Palestinian.” They laughed, one raspy and toothless, the other like a sputtering malfunction.