Miral (9 page)

T
wice a month, Miral and Rania would spend the weekend at home. They anxiously awaited those Friday mornings when they would spot their father swiftly walking up the long, tree-lined drive.

Before returning to the city with the girls, Jamal would have a long conversation with Hind. The topics they discussed ranged from Jamal's daughters and the orphanage school to the future of Palestine. Jamal always left Hind's office with a smile stamped on his face, and more than once, as he took his girls by the hand and began walking toward the gate, Miral heard him murmur, “What a great woman she is.”

Jamal had hung the photograph of his daughters and the headmistress in his living room, above the television set. He would stare at it at length during the interminable nights when he was assailed by sadness, for it imparted a great feeling of peace. Miral's proud gaze, which reminded him of her mother's, Rania's slight pout, and Hind's serene, reassuring expression showed him that he had made the right choice in entrusting his daughters to her.

As soon as they arrived home, the girls would take a bath. Jamal knew how much Miral loved this moment, and he would watch as she heated the water on the fire and then poured it into the copper bathtub. The rising steam dulled the bathroom tiles and made the mirror and the windowpanes opaque. Everything looked blurred and muffled, warm and foggy, as in happy moments in the most pleasant of dreams.

Rania was always a little reluctant to share the joy of this ritual, but she would soon get into the tub with her sister, and the two of them would spend a long time immersed in the hot water, which gradually became lukewarm and then cold. Jamal would suggest repeatedly that they get out of the tub. Then he would try to run a comb through his daughters' tangled, curly hair, covering it with a thick layer of conditioner, but despite these affectionate and awkward efforts Miral and Rania often went back to school with knots in their hair, which the oldest girls would help them undo. After the bath, Jamal would go to the mosque for the midday prayer, and upon his return they would have lunch together, sitting around the little copper table incised with flowers and plants, on ottomans of colored leather.

Jamal usually prepared roasted chicken with curry, basmati rice, and seasonal vegetables. He was a good cook, inventive and patient, and his daughters spent the two weeks between visits anticipating the taste of that meal. The following morning, they would go to the produce market, and then to the carpet souk in the afternoon.

 

In the fresh-produce souk, Jamal taught his daughters how to choose the best heads of lettuce, which were almost always near the bottom of the pile. The girls learned to evaluate the smell, color, and feel of vegetables and fruits. Jamal could tell whether a tomato had been grown with natural fertilizer or not, and he knew whether the taste of an orange would be sweet or sour. After making his food purchases, he would offer his daughters object lessons in the ancient art of haggling with its most talented practitioners, the vendors in the rug market. Jamal loved Persian rugs and had made the family home particularly welcoming by filling it with them. Many years later, after his death, Miral would count no fewer than thirtythree rugs spread on the floors or hung on the walls of the house's three rooms.

For their part, Jamal's daughters had something to teach their father as well. Having been influenced by the strict rules at Dar El-Tifel, Miral and Rania proudly showed Jamal how to fold his clothes, which had been washed and ironed by a woman in the neighborhood, and stack them in the wardrobe.

Sunday afternoons at home were dedicated to discussion. Father and daughters spoke of the girls' problems and of the importance of their education. Gently caressing the girls as he spoke, he would say, “The uncertainty of our condition puts us in a position where everything is more difficult, where everything has to be overcome with great effort, and a life of freedom is even more difficult for an uneducated woman. You both must study and learn as much as you can. That's the only way you'll be free.”

At other times, the girls would eagerly set out for the Esplanade of the Mosques, where their father spent considerable time each day watering his roses, bougainvillea, and olive trees or reading in the shade of a large pine.

On Fridays the faithful would arrive from all over the country to pray in al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Miral and Rania would join the stream of people entering through the Damascus or Jaffa gates, having crossed the Old City to reach what Arabs call the Haram esh-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, Islam's third-holiest place, after Mecca and Medina. The contrast between the narrow streets of the Old City, rendered still narrower by the baskets of vegetables women from the Occupied Territories brought in daily, and the splendid view of Jerusalem and the Judean Hills that could be enjoyed from that spot was so great that it often overwhelmed the faithful, who would linger in the gardens after prayer, eating Arab bread and hummus while their children played happily around them, against the solemn background of the Mount of Olives.

On Saturdays the people who traversed the Old City were mostly Jews from West Jerusalem, who passed through Herod's Gate or the Damascus Gate on their way to prayer at the Wailing Wall. Miral and Rania were particularly entranced by the Orthodox Jews, with their long ringlets of black hair, white shirts, and short overcoats and trousers of heavy black cloth, which they wore even on the hottest days of the Middle Eastern summers.

The way taken by the two groups of the faithful, Jews and Muslims, was the same until they came to a fork in the road. There the Muslims turned to climb up to the Esplanade of the Mosques, while the Jews continued toward the entrance to ha-Kotel ha-Ma'aravi, the Wailing Wall, the only fragment remaining of the temple built by Herod the Great.

Jamal felt that his religion and that of the Jews had many points in common but one great, fundamental difference. Islam seemed to be a religion that loved to show itself and hide itself at the same time. The splendid Qubbet es-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, with its gold roof visible from any point in the city and the extravagantly colorful tiles covering its six walls, together with the many minarets scattered around East Jerusalem, seemed to bear witness to Islam's demonstrative aspect. The interior court-yards of the palaces and the mosques, on the other hand, with their fountains and their mihrabs, were emblematic of a religion that also loved to conceal its magical beauty.

The Jewish religion, on the other hand, seemed to be fascinated by mystery—or at least that was the conclusion Jamal had reached during long nights of reflection. No other place in the world was so sacred to Jews. The Temple Mount—that open-air synagogue with the Wailing Wall and the steady clamor coming from the religious schools, the yeshivas—made Jerusalem the dominion and destination of an unending pilgrimage of Jews from all over the world. Many who lived there were convinced that the branches of the city's olive trees were moved not by the wind but by the breath of God himself.

Christian pilgrims would walk the length of the Via Crucis—also known as Via Dolorosa—which traversed the Old City. They would make a stop at each station along the way before reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they would be enveloped in pungent, intoxicating clouds of incense.

One summer afternoon, when Jamal and the girls were at the vegetable souk, Miral was looking at the chickens hanging in the butcher shops, the cuts of meat dripping blood on the street, the cafés where old men smoked their narghiles and drank mint or sage tea, or cardamom coffee. Then she turned, attracted by a group of people who were passing in front of them. “Papa, where are those tourists going?” she asked.

Jamal, who was intent on buying grape leaves from an old woman seated on the ground with a big wicker basket at her feet, raised his eyes and looked in the direction Miral was pointing. “Those aren't tourists,” he replied with a smile. “They're Christian pilgrims on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Jamal and the girls then made a stop at Jafar's shop, where they did honor to their little tradition by eating a
knafeh
each. All the while, Jamal had been thinking that if their city was truly a melting pot of cultures and religions, it wasn't right to know only one part of it. “If you'd like, we can go visit the Holy Sepulchre,” he said.

Excited by novelty, the girls enthusiastically accepted. The three of them walked up the last stretch of the Via Dolorosa. When they stood before an iron gate with a sign that read
HOLY SEPULCHRE
, Jamal said, “For centuries before the struggle with the Jews over the city, we had to battle for it with the Christians.”

The girls and their father decided to pause for a minute. The heat was stifling, and Rania wanted a glass of water. To their left was a little souvenir shop. Many of the items on sale there seemed mysterious to Miral and Rania, particularly the wooden crosses and the crowns of thorns. An old man sitting on a straw stool looked up from the copy of
Al-Quds
he had been reading intently, signaled Jamal to approach, and gave him a bottle of water. The two men began to talk, while the children watched the groups of pilgrims that thronged the entrance to the basilica. After a few minutes, the old man rose to his feet, and he and Jamal walked toward the church. Miral and Rania, still fascinated by the many souvenirs in the shop, lagged behind and had to run to catch up with the men just before they merged with the stream of pilgrims. The girls followed Jamal and the shopkeeper and remained silent.

Once they were in the church, the old man stopped every so often, leaned on his stick, and talked about the significance of a rock or a lantern. Miral failed to understand much of his discourse—she didn't know who the Copts were or the Syriac Orthodox Jacobites or the Armenians or the Orthodox Greeks—but she saw priests with long beards and funny hats. They passed by, swinging lanterns of incense and intoning incomprehensible litanies. All this, combined with the acrid air, which was heavy with myrrh, incense, and the fumes of oil lamps, made Miral feel disturbed and exhausted when she stepped out again into the sunlight. Then the old man raised his stick and pointed at a minaret a few paces away.

“That's the Mosque of Omar,” he said. “Omar was the second caliph. The Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem invited him to come and receive the keys to the city. Omar arrived at noon, the hour of prayer, and the patriarch invited him to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and pray. But the caliph did not wish to do so, from fear that one day the Muslims of the city might claim a right to build a mosque on the spot where he had prayed. He was a wise man, and he would do everything he could to protect the equilibrium of the various religious communities. That is the true spirit of Islam.”

On the way home, Miral thought that her city was indeed a complicated one, where a mystery revealed itself at every corner, or at least the next time you came across a place of worship with an obscure name.

Eventually, a woman's angry voice interrupted Miral's trance. The woman was blonde, carrying a small child in one arm, and engaged in a heated discussion with a clothing vendor. In point of fact, what they were having was not really a discussion, given that the woman did all the talking while the man stared at her impassively.

The woman saw the girls and their father and addressed them, saying in English, “He is a horrible man. I won't spend thirty-five dollars on a dress.”

After the woman left, the vendor finally opened his mouth, revealing an incomplete, yellowing set of teeth. “She was pretending to be an English tourist, but I heard her speaking Hebrew to her child. That's why I asked her for thirty-five dollars instead of thirtyfive shekels,” he said, laughing with satisfaction.

It was difficult for Jamal to explain to his daughters the origin of such antagonism without influencing their vision of the world. He wanted them to grow up with respect for people of other races. But he knew he would have to explain to them one day that the situation was the result of many battles fought by religious fanatics for possession of Jerusalem, year after year, century after century. The paths that made them different had sometimes come into being merely for political or economical expedience or for reasons that had long been forgotten. Many believed that their path was the only one, and in the name of that many were sacrificed; while others hoped that even separate paths that were stained with so much blood could move along in the same direction. As he ordered a chicken in a rotisserie, Jamal thought that he belonged to the second group.

 

The night before they returned to Dar El-Tifel, the girls would always lie down beside Jamal and talk without stopping. They would try to speak in turn, but mostly they babbled at the same time until they fell asleep. Then Jamal would gently lift them up and carry one and then the other to the bed they shared. Often Rania, knowing she had to go back to the school, would be in a daze the next morning, and so Jamal had to put his oratorical skills to work, aided by Miral, who loved to dream up new magical ways to convince her sister to return to school.

W
ithin a few years of entering the school, Miral became a spirited child, having shed the melancholy of her early days in Dar El-Tifel.

Twice a year, Hind and the head of the elementary school would visit the classrooms to hand out report cards. This was a genuine ceremony, in which the ten girls with the highest grades in their class would be called up, one by one, to the front of the room, where they would stand in a row while all their classmates applauded. One day, when Miral was in the third grade, to her great surprise she heard her name called out first and was unable to move. Hind beckoned her to approach the teacher's desk, and the other girls burst into applause.

When he learned of his daughter's accomplishment, Jamal was moved and wanted to buy her a gift. Miral asked Rania to choose it for her, and her sister said she'd pick out a new dress and a doll with black hair and dark skin. And so Jamal and his two daughters made their way to the toy market, but it turned out that all the dolls in Jerusalem had blonde hair and very fair complexions. Rania would not yield, and Miral began to feel irritated as well, for she couldn't understand why there weren't any dolls that looked like her. Their father told them not to get upset, for dolls as beautiful as they were, he told his daughters, were rare, and the more time they spent looking for one, the lovelier it would be.

In the end, their aunt in Haifa managed to find a doll with Middle Eastern features, and she truly turned out to be the most beautiful doll that the two little girls had ever seen.

 

As the years went by, Miral made friends with many girls her age, but more than anything else she loved to listen to the older girls' accounts of their lives outside of school. Fortunately, some of these tales had happy endings, but nearly all of them, particularly the stories of Aziza and Sahar, confirmed her sense that the world outside was a horrible place.

Aziza was eleven when she first went back to Gaza for summer vacation. Her grandmother was waiting for her. Aziza's father had been killed, like many other fedayeen in the bloody civil war in Lebanon. Her mother had remarried, in the process abandoning her three daughters to her first husband's family, an Arab tradition. Aziza's grandmother was very poor, occupying a damp hovel in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. Every summer since the reopening of the border, Aziza's uncle, who lived in Egypt, would come to visit his mother, bringing with him a few presents and some money.

Aziza knew that her uncle intended to marry her to his son and was only waiting until she reached the proper age. Soon after her fifteenth birthday, her uncle and cousin arrived in Gaza. Aziza knew the cousin and talked to him a little, but she didn't like him, finding him as repellent as his father, with his greasy hair and bad breath.

The following autumn, the uncle went to Dar El-Tifel to ask Hind to allow Aziza to leave the school. Hind had him shown into her office, where the man sat down heavily on the chair and crossed his legs. The hard look on Hind's face made him sit up immediately and arrange his legs in a more decorous manner.

After clearing his throat, he announced, “I want to take my niece to Egypt with me.”

“Ah, yes?” was Hind's only reply.

“She's a woman now, and I want to marry her to my son. Please understand my position, Miss Husseini. This is a piece of luck for the girl. My son is a very good match, and soon she'll have to get married anyway, so we might as well do it straightaway and keep it all in the family, don't you agree?”

Hind disregarded the question and asked Hidaya to go and call Aziza. When the girl arrived, Hind had the uncle escorted into the hall, telling him to wait there.

The interview with Aziza was brief. The girl was adamant: she had no wish to marry her cousin. Hind smiled and did not insist, because for her the girl's will was the only thing that counted. After dismissing her, Hind asked Hidaya to fetch the uncle and bring him back into her office.

“I'm sorry,” she told him, trying to conceal the disgust she felt for him. “Aziza is opposed to this marriage. Now you must understand my position,” she continued, using the same words and tone that the man had employed a short while before. “I can't force one of my girls to take such a step if she does not wish to do so.”

The uncle flew into a rage, leaping to his feet and clenching his right fist as he threatened to denounce her to the authorities. Hind, unimpressed, was intractable. In truth, the reputation and the fame she enjoyed made the man's recriminations futile. He was immediately shown the door.

After that, Aziza never returned to Gaza. Every so often she would feel remorse that she could no longer see her grandmother, who was too old and weak to visit her. One stifling June day, however, Aziza learned that her grandmother had died on her way to Jerusalem.

 

Sahar was a beautiful girl who loved to dress up. In the morning, before going down to breakfast, she would spend a long time brushing her hair, and in the evening she repeated the same operation, proudly admiring her reflection in the mirror. She used no cosmetics, because school regulations forbade them, but she kept a box hidden under one of the floor tiles. In that box was a tiny makeup bag she had traded with one of the cooks in exchange for a few English lessons. Whenever anyone asked her about her family, she would say that her mother died during an Israeli attack on her city and that she had never met her father. But her schoolmates knew that her father had left his wife and infant daughter not long after Sahar was born. After a few years, the wife fell in love with another man. This one promised to marry her, but—as he explained—he had many children of his own, and there was no room in his house for a child who didn't belong to him. Sahar's mother didn't hesitate; early the next morning she abandoned her four-year-old daughter in the shack where they lived and went to Jaffa, the home of her new husband.

Sahar stayed shut up in the shack all day, waiting for her mama to return. She found some milk and a bit of bread on the table. She waited and waited, and after night fell, she left the shack and went looking for her mother. She called her name again and again, but the street noises drowned out the child's voice. After a while, she grew hungry and sleepy and decided to turn back. But she couldn't find her way home anymore. Weary and dejected, she gave in to a fit of weeping, and then she fell asleep on the sidewalk.

She woke up in an unfamiliar bed and was about to cry when her gaze was drawn to a figure sitting in an armchair. After wishing her a good morning, Hind asked what her name was and whether she remembered what had happened to her the night before. Sahar wept as she recounted what she knew, what she had understood. Miriam held the child in her arms as Sahar said, “I'm sure Mama has lost her way. She can't find our street, just like me.” Then Hind told her, “You can stay here with us until she does.”

At Dar El-Tifel, Sahar became infamous among her schoolmates for the haughty airs she put on whenever she felt she was being observed. She was always alone, and whenever she spoke to anyone, it was only to describe the princely life she'd led before her mother died. The other girls regarded her with irritation, but her beauty intimidated them, even though they knew she was lying. And so they would listen to her in silence, pretending to believe her. And they watched her from afar, awaiting the moment when the sandcastle she had built for herself would start to crumble and the real Sahar would finally appear.

 

In 1982 three thousand Palestinians were killed in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, perpetrated by Maronite Phalangists with the protection and cooperation of the Israeli army. After news spread of the massacres, the tranquil atmosphere of Dar El-Tifel was altered. The girls of the senior class wanted to take part in a demonstration that was being organized jointly by Palestinians and by Israeli pacifists to protest the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The authorities had not forbidden the demonstration, but Hind was undecided and conflicted about the girls' participation. On the one hand, she was wounded by the cruelty of the massacre, which surpassed in ferocity the one at Deir Yassin. And she understood the girls' indignation, which reminded her of her own reactions when she was young. But on the other hand, Hind feared for her school. At the last minute, she decided not to allow the girls to go. She had recently begun to feel that the Israeli authorities were keeping an eye on her and Dar El-Tifel. She had always been obliged to obtain permits from the Israelis when she wished to travel, but what she needed most were documents for the children who had been collected from the streets and who had no known relatives. For several months now, the Israeli authorities had blocked the issuing of documents to anyone who did not have a birth certificate. Through acquaintances in one of the city's hospitals, Hind had nevertheless succeeded in obtaining birth certificates, already signed and made out by friends of hers who worked in the hospital. She understood that she needed to give these orphans an identity so in the future they could obtain a driver's license and work within a legal system. But Hind's righteous nature made her fear that this circumspect method might one day be discovered.

In the end, even the most resolute girls were persuaded to desist, in great part thanks to the intervention of the school's most authoritative teachers, among them Abdullah, the gym teacher.

If for many of the girls in the school Hind was like a mother, Abdullah was like a father. Short and thickset, he was a strong, goodnatured man proud of his sportive body. When gym classes were over, he would always reward the younger girls with sweets and caramels, and encourage the older ones to dedicate themselves to athletics as much as they did to their studies. He was Miral's favorite teacher, and she found in him a person willing to engage in dialogue and debate. He was a subversive and provocative force in the mostly conservative community of the school, and Miral admired him for it.

When she ran her four hundred meter, Miral felt happy, in harmony with herself and with the world. She saw only the red earth passing swiftly under her feet and thought of nothing at all until she saw Abdullah, with his stopwatch in hand, urging her on. Some years later, while running away from the Israeli police during a demonstration, she would remember with gratitude her instructor's voice: “Knowing how to run is always useful in life.”

In addition to being an excellent teacher, Abdullah was one of the city's leading experts on Palestinian history. The most disparate rumors circulated around him, making him a mysterious figure long before the Halabi sisters entered the school. Miral knew that he had served time in prison for political reasons before Hind hired him. The nails missing from most of the fingers of his left hand appeared to confirm the rumor that he had been tortured while in custody. Contradictory rumors explained why he had ended up in prison: some said he was a fighter in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an outlawed organization, while others maintained that he held a prominent position in the inner circles of the Palestinian resistance movement. What seemed certain was that he had refused to provide any information under torture, and that had earned him the esteem of Jerusalem's Arab community.

In the spring, when the heat was beginning to make itself known, Miral loved to spend afternoons reading the books that Abdullah would lend her. In this way she discovered the most beautiful novels of Palestinian literature, including Ghassan Kanafani's
Men
in the Sun
and
Return to Haifa
, and began to understand important events in the history of the troubled Palestinian people. The books were engrossing, the stories almost always tragic. Under the big magnolia tree on the east side of the garden, Miral got her first glimpse of the subtle connections and invisible threads that official history does not record.

One day Abdullah came to her and said ceremoniously, “Now you've read enough to know what the
nakba
is.” He gazed at his left hand for an instant, drew a deep breath, and went on: “The catastrophe, the disaster. The creation of the State of Israel in Palestine unfortunately caused the dispersion of our people. It's difficult to explain, something that every Palestinian feels inside, like an incurable wound, like a short circuit in our history. What we're living through is a terrible historical paradox.”

Miral did not completely grasp the teacher's words but understood that she had, perhaps, found a name for the malaise she sometimes felt.

In the years that followed, after Miral visited the refugee camps and participated in the First Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising in 1987, that malaise would be transformed into a desire to do something tangible, no matter how small, for her people, who were still waiting.