by Rula Jebreal
Nadia, who had never expected him to return, was as disturbed as he was, but now it was too late. She fixed her eyes on his and said, with an air of defiance, “No, she’s not your daughter. What do you think, that you’re the only man in the world?” She wanted to wound him, even though she wasn’t exactly sure why. “I’ve slept with many men, before and after you.” As unconsciously as he had broken her heart, she had broken his.
Struck in his pride and his heart, Hilmi leaped to his feet, determined to go away forever. He wouldn’t even stay in Beirut, he thought, but rather start over in some distant place, perhaps in Europe.
One afternoon during her second year of marriage, Nadia went to the hammam, remaining in the tepidarium for a long time as she observed the other women, especially those her age, trying to guess which of them wore the veil in public. For many of them, the visit to the hammam was the only time in the week when they were free for a few hours to be what they were, whether good natured or irascible, solitary or extroverted, and not actors performing preordained social roles.
As she was getting dressed again, Nadia looked at herself in the mirror. She was the most beautiful woman there and also the unhappiest. Although Jamal was gentle and kind, marriage had not given her any real sense of equilibrium. One year after the birth of Miral, the daughter born of her relationship with Hilmi, Nadia had brought Rania into the world. Maternity had granted her a new glow and a brief illusion of happiness, but she realized that nothing, not even beauty, could be an antidote to her sadness.
“When a woman is beautiful,” she thought, “everyone expects and almost requires her to be happy as well.” She could not bear the knowledge that her husband, her sister, her daughters, and even Fatima in her own way, all wished her to be necessarily, obligatorily happy, satisfied with what she had become and with what she was doing. They insisted that she should learn to see the beauty around her. Nadia had continued to conceal her weaknesses from others; she appeared strong and self-assured in public, but deep down inside she was tormented by her past.
She tried to be a good mother, but for her serenity was only a distant oasis, an unreachable mirage.
Nadia got into the car, not knowing exactly where she would go. She drove slowly along the streets of the city. The shops were closing, and the farmers who had come down from the country to sell their produce were returning to their villages, mingling with the few people who were still out and about.
The radio was broadcasting a traditional song, which reminded her of her belly dancing days in Tel Aviv, when she had admirers who would travel across the country to see her. She felt nostalgic for all that attention—the flowers, the compliments, the dinner invitations—and felt anxiety mounting inside her.
She waited on the beach for dawn, accompanied by a bottle of arrack, and thought that there was no continuity in her life. Fatima had tried to pull her out of the spiral of masochism she found herself in and had even succeeded, but only for a while. The reality was that Nadia was groping in the dark, looking for a way out.
She immersed her feet in the cold, clear water and tried to imagine her future: it looked colorless to her, like the last drop of liquor at the bottom of the bottle. A wave higher than the others soaked her skirt from the hem to above her knees. She smiled and then started laughing nervously as she realized that if there was anything missing in her life it was her childhood. She had no happy memories of herself as a child—no pleasant mental images of frolicking on the beach or playing with friends or smiling or receiving a gift. At that moment, she felt a deep hatred for her mother and even a little for her father, who had gone and gotten himself swallowed up by the sea without having raised her, protected her, or held her hand.
She stayed three days with a woman friend in Jaffa, savoring again the freedom of the good old days, and then went back home as though nothing had happened. Jamal forgave that flight, as he did all the following ones, in hopes that her anguish would subside in time, that she would grow more attached to him and her two daughters.
He bought her the liquor she required to combat her attacks of depression and tried not to ask her too many questions. So he wouldn’t be recognized while making these purchases, he would go to a café far from his neighborhood. But because he was an imam, people knew his face. The bartender would invariably slip the bottle into the bag, smile maliciously, and say, “Imam, you are a righteous man,” following this declaration with a loud laugh that spread among his customers, from table to table. The love that Jamal felt for Nadia made him able to bear even these humiliations.
Nadia decided one day to visit Fatima in prison. It felt strange to walk through those dark corridors again, inhaling the odors of mildew and low-grade tobacco that rose from the cells. Fatima looked as she always did, alert and round faced. Their meeting was warm and friendly, even though they did not speak to each other with the same frankness as when they had shared a cell. Nadia didn’t reveal that she had started seeing men other than her husband, or that she drank arrack into the small hours of the morning, sitting in an armchair with a lit cigarette in her hand. Fatima could see that Nadia had not found the peace she yearned for, but she urged Nadia to keep believing in what she was doing for the other women of the community, and tried as always to raise her friend’s selfesteem. But it was all useless. Fatima’s smile turned bitter when Nadia told her that the three months she’d spent in prison had constituted the happiest period of her life.
Then Nadia asked a question that caught Fatima off guard: “How could you want to kill somebody you didn’t even know?”
Fatima, to make her understand that there had been a purpose behind her act, said, “I don’t see them as people, I see them as soldiers. Our people are suffering. They have made a war on us and we have no choice. It’s either resist or vanish. Their first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, once said, ‘We are people without a land, and this is a land without people.’ If this is a land without people, what are we?”
Nadia had already risen to her feet. She moved away toward the door, her long black hair caught up by a red ribbon, her slender figure contrasting with the gray cement cell.
Fatima felt no anguish, neither for herself nor for the fate of her enemies. She had to admit, however, that life in prison had introduced her to a side of the Israeli world she had never known before. The Jewish women who were her fellow prisoners were all thieves, prostitutes, and unfortunate wretches, basically victims in their own right.
Jamal searched everywhere for Nadia. At her relatives’ home in Haifa, where she told him she was going for a few days, he discovered that she had not been seen, just as she hadn’t been there on the other occasions when she’d gone missing. Nobody knew where she might be.
Jamal returned home and stared at the telephone for a long time; then he removed the stopper from the bottle Nadia had left on the night table and poured a little of the whitish liquid into his cupped hand. He raised it to his nostrils, and for an instant, he had the sensation of reliving the kiss his wife gave him the morning she left.
Nadia had returned to the Tel Aviv nightclub where she had worked as a belly dancer before her arrest. It seemed to her to be the only place where she had really been herself. And notwithstanding her three pregnancies and some added years, within a few weeks she was once again the club’s main attraction. She was still very alluring, maybe even more so than before, but hers had become the beauty of melancholy, like a lovely city built in a soulless place.
When Jamal found out that Nadia had returned to her former life, he thought that perhaps he should have been less tolerant with her and that his mistake had been to allow her too much freedom.
Nadia found a way out. For once it seemed so clear. She felt light, and the moment she realized it she had, for the first time, a sensation she recognized as joy: she could spare herself and those she loved a life that was only trouble.
The police found Nadia’s body on the beach at Jaffa. Her face was disfigured and her position unnatural. She loo
ked as though she had been trying to reach the sea; her arms were flung out ahead of her, and the waves were licking her hands. High tide was rolling in. One hour more, and the waters of the sea would have swallowed her body up again, as it had swallowed her father’s. The authorities called her case a suicide, but neither her husband nor anyone else who knew her well believed that. Nadia had never given up, not even when she was thirteen and her stepfather stole her future. Perhaps she had been the victim of an accident. They refused to let themselves believe it was suicide, the last terrible chapter in a life lived far outside the norms of her time and country.
Jamal decided that his daughters needed to grow up in a serene environment, where they would be in the company of other little girls. Above all, he wanted them to grow up far away from the disturbing dramas that had marked their family. And so Miral and Rania were entrusted to the care of Hind Husseini, who would bring them up in her orphanage, Dar El-Tifel.
PART FOUR
Miral
1
The day Jamal first took them to Dar El-Tifel, autumn had not yet begun, but a thin mist enveloped the hills around the city.
He had left the bathroom door half-open and was shaving, but he wasn’t whistling as he usually did. Instead he was just staring in silence at his own weary face in the mirror. He had looked like that on the morning of Nadia’s funeral, a month before. As Miral silently watched her father, she saw a tear gleam on his cheek before disappearing into the white foam.
Jamal was a tall, slim man with thin lips and large black eyes. An imam at al-Aqsa Mosque, he had been born in Nigeria and was among the many emigrants from Senegal, Mali, and other Muslim countries in Africa who arrived in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate. In their neighborhood within the walls of their Old City, entered through a green iron gate, nearly all the inhabitants were of African origin. Jamal had a refined stature, a dignity that was evident in his manner, his eyes, and his gestures. He had beautiful hands with long, thin fingers. The district where they lived was more than a neighborhood; it was a genuine community in which all the children played together and relationships, even among adults, were intense and cordial. People considered themselves not merely neighbors but virtually brothers and sisters, like an extended family. Miral’s father was one of the most respected people in the neighborhood, a spiritual adviser to many, a wise and patient friend.
They lived in a three-room house whose doorway was framed by fragrant jasmine and a large pomegranate tree. Inside, two steep flights of stairs led to a bright, spacious living room whose floor and walls were covered with rugs. In the middle of the room was a sofa bed where their father now slept, which faced a wooden display cabinet filled with hand-colored drinking glasses that came from all over the Middle East and had been blown by the master glassmakers of Damascus, Marrakesh, and Cairo. They were always perfectly gleaming, for Jamal dusted them every week.
The bedroom, too, was filled with Moroccan rugs and had a low bed covered with pillows. The wrought-iron lamps and colored windowpanes spread a warm light suffused with bluish and reddish tones. The bathroom, though small, had a view of the Old City and a charming mosaic of blue and green tiles. Jamal had taught Miral and Rania that green was the color of Islam, and blue the color of purity, the sky, water, and infinity. One wall was almost entirely occupied by the large sink, which was slightly cracked on one side as a result of a clumsy attempt by Miral to climb onto it a few months before her mother died.
Every time she looked at that nearly imperceptible flaw, Miral could see again, just for a moment, her mother’s face.
The day Jamal took his two daughters to the orphanage, he woke up earlier than usual. As he gazed down from his bedroom window at the deserted street still illuminated by the uncertain light of streetlamps and the houses with full clotheslines and windowsills crowded with pots of geraniums, the first call to prayer reached his ears from the minaret of the mosque across the way.
Jamal was attached to his girls in different ways. While Miral had conducted herself like a little adult since her mother’s death, continuing to get the highest grades in school, Rania seemed more in need of protection. Whenever Rania couldn’t sleep, she would go into the living room, where Jamal had made his bed since the death of his wife, and put her arms around him. Only in this way, lying silently beside her father, could the child manage to fall asleep.
But Miral worried Jamal, as well, because she seemed to be afflicted by a deep anxiety. The night before he took them to the orphanage, she woke up bathed in sweat and told him that she had dreamed about her mother again. In her dream she found herself in a tree whose leaves were moving in a gentle wind. She had resolved to keep climbing all the way to the top. Rania was watching her from the ground, smiling and holding her hands up above her head. Her father was sitting on the grass, smoking, and their mother was walking toward the river. With all her might, Miral tightened her legs around the tree trunk and dug her fingers into its rough bark, which scratched her. She climbed until she reached the topmost branch. Then suddenly the wind stopped blowing and everything became silent. Miral looked and smiled at her father, who waved back to her. She could see her sister joyously hopping around the garden, but she was upset because she could no longer see her mother, not along the river or anywhere else.
Jamal tried to console her, saying that it was normal to have bad dreams after losing someone you loved so much. Miral gave him a look that was difficult to fathom, but it was as if his response had not satisfied her and he needed to offer some further explanation. He attributed it to her fear of losing the memory of her mother’s features.
His decision to place them at Dar El-Tifel had been difficult and, above all, painful; he would never have wished to be separated from his daughters, especially now that his Nadia was gone. But precisely because of her death, and because his family name was still tainted by his sister’s attempted attack a few years earlier, he preferred to have the five-year-old Miral and four-year-old Rania brought up in a more protective environment. He had long known Hind and had personally brought her several children who had been abandoned outside the mosque. Now he was bringing her his own daughters. Hind suggested to him that the school could become a second home for the girls. With this in mind, they decided it would be best to change the girls’ family name, and Miral and Rania Shaheen became Miral and Rania Halabi.
2
That morning Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods were teeming with the usual preparations in the souk. A muffled clamor filled Jamal’s head as he set out with his daughters, carrying in his right hand a small suitcase with the girls’ personal belongings. Rania clutched his little finger on that side as she walked along, and Miral held on to his left hand. Their father stopped at a stall to buy caramels for them. He knew he would visit them almost every week, but even so, he was uneasy. The children tasted the candy’s sweetness. It mingled with the bitterness of departure.
Miral looked around as they began walking. Apart from the vendors in the souk, there seemed to be no one on the streets. After a few steps, however, a flood of neighbors appeared at windows, and children who had been their playmates on sunny afternoons greeted them along the way with flowers and even more candy. Miral sensed that she wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. Her father had always managed to avoid answering the question of when she and Rania would return, and Miral had never insisted very much, partly because she didn’t want to alarm her sister. Ever since their mother died, Miral had looked upon Rania with different eyes: although Miral was only a year older, she felt that it was her duty to protect her little sister.
After they had walked all the way across the Old City, they stopped at Jafar’s, the oldest confectioner’s shop in Jerusalem. There they ate a knafeh in silence. This pastry, made from a mixture of cheese, butter, durum wheat, and pistachios that had been softened and sweetened with syrup, reminded Miral of the happiest moments of her life, when she and her mother would go to Jafar’s shop to pick up knafeh for the wh
ole family.
Outside the walls of the Old City, they found themselves standing before an iron gate, on which Miral read, somewhat unsteadily, the words DAR EL-TIFEL, JERUSALEM, 1948.
Proceeding through a shady garden, they reached a long drive lined with pine trees. Beyond it was a clearing, and farther on they could glimpse three buildings. “They’re decorated in Mudejar style,” Jamal told his girls, never missing an opportunity to teach them something new about the historical or artistic tradition of their heritage.
“Mudejar style,” Miral and Rania repeated solemnly in unison, their voices sad and serious. Not far off, they saw a lawn where some little girls were playing volleyball.
A middle-aged woman wearing a white suit came toward them, smiling cordially. Her gray hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and there was a thin coat of pink lipstick on her lips. She greeted Jamal affectionately and then turned to the girls, stroked their faces, and told them that they could join the other children playing.
Miral reached out to take Rania’s hand, but her sister was clinging to her father’s arm and wouldn’t let go, afraid she would never see him again. She stood frozen at his side, silently pouting. Jamal then took both daughters by the hand to the lawn where the other girls were playing, assuring them that he wasn’t leaving right away and had to have a little talk with Hind. Rania stared at her father with suspicious eyes for a moment, but in the end she followed her sister. Out of the corner of her eye, Miral saw her father walking away and then turning to look at them, eyes bright with tears. She had never seen him so miserable. Jamal waved to them, but by then Rania was playing and didn’t notice. A soccer ball landed in front of Miral, and she simply stared at it, wishing she could kick it back and somehow return to the days when her mother was there and they all were still together.
