by Rula Jebreal
The school’s oldest building, located on the highest point of the hill, overlooking the Old City, housed the classrooms and the administrative offices, including Hind’s, a simple room with antique furniture dating back to the period of the British Mandate. On the other side of the playing field stood a more modern building that was built with Sheikh Muhammad bin Jassim Sabah’s money and used as a dormitory. At that time, there were already two thousand girls. There, as in the classrooms, Hind had decided that the youngest girls would be assigned to the first floor, where they would live in rooms containing six beds each. The older girls were on the second floor, in rooms with four beds. Finally, the top floor provided single rooms for a few girls in their final year and for the teachers who lived on campus. On the opposite end of the small field was the gymnasium and a little farther down the hill, surrounded by a park, was Hind’s residence. As she was getting older, Hind decided that she would move back to one of her grandfather’s oldest buildings and would use it as her home. Its spacious terrace looked out over the city, and its white stone walls were almost completely covered with ivy.
That first evening, after dinner in the large cafeteria, a thin teacher with sad eyes accompanied Miral, Rania, and four other little girls to their room. Rania had left her food untouched and never let go of Miral’s hand.
Miral noticed that the older girls helped the little ones change into their nightgowns and told them fairy tales to lull them to sleep. Those stories, however, tended to be about other orphans, like themselves. Oliver Twist was a favorite. As Rania listened to one of them, the tears she’d held back all day began to run down her cheeks. Her sister put her to bed, but Rania kept weeping, saying between sobs that they’d lost their mother but she didn’t know why they had to lose their father, too.
Miral moved her bed closer to her sister’s. As long as they were together, she told Rania, everything would be all right. Then she caressed her little sister’s hair and face until she went to sleep. The four other little girls had pushed their beds together, too, making one big bed where they all slept, in that way exorcizing their feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Only Miral couldn’t sleep. She thought again about her father walking away down the tree-lined drive and about the stories the older girls had told that evening—sad stories that were perhaps true, just like the story of her own mother, who used to be happy and then one day stopped smiling and disappeared.
While Miral adapted quickly to her new situation at Dar El-Tifel, the same could not be said of her sister. Rania was taciturn and wanted always to be with Miral. After the first night, the other girls joined their beds to the sisters’ beds and all six of them slept together, clinging to one another. Such gestures of affection were a means of compensating for the lack of physical contact with their mothers.
The relationship between Miral and Rania had always been intense and was a refuge that helped them to get through moments of despondency. Rania depended on Miral, and Miral sometimes felt suffocated by this constant pressure from her little sister, but with each passing day, she realized more clearly how lucky she was to have a sister nearby and a father who came to visit every week. Some of the other girls were completely alone.
The girls with the worst problems were those who knew nothing of their origins, who had not only no relatives but also no idea of who their parents might have been or where they were born. These girls were the gloomiest but also the most aggressive: sometimes physically violent in the schoolyard unable to accept a simple defeat, usually quarreling over things of no importance. Unable to resign themselves to the uncertainty of their past, to live with questions destined to remain unanswered, they tormented themselves and others.
The school had a custom that every evening before going to bed the students would tell one another stories. Most of the girls maintained that their stories were purely fictional or based on the experiences of their friends, but in many cases Miral could detect, in the veil of anguish that settled over their eyes as they spoke, that the stories were their own. Thus she discovered that Lamá, age ten, had been found by the mufti of Jerusalem as an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying at the door of the mosque. Other girls had been picked up while wandering alone in burning villages, staring wideeyed into space. Such girls usually turned out to be the most motivated in the school, inspired to affirm an identity for themselves. During the first month, Miral became accustomed to the sound of the alarm clock, which would ring at six in the morning, and she would slowly get up, go over to the window, and pull the curtain aside. Rubbing her eyes, she would gaze at the Old City: the top half of its walls lit up by the rays of the sun, the bottom half still in shadow, and the low houses packed so densely that they hid the streets that separated them. She would search out her house, which was near the mosque, but her view was blocked by a minaret. She thought about her father, still asleep in his bed, or awake like her, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, wondering why things had turned out this way. In the background, the Mount of Olives, majestic and reassuring, seemed to protect the city; she imagined the city seen from above, looking like one motionless and magnificent ruin.
Gradually Miral grew accustomed to life at the school and to the constant presence of her sister, who followed her everywhere. Hind allowed them to sleep in the same room for the first year, but in the following years, even when they slept in different rooms, Rania would continue to depend on Miral for many things. When the eleven o’clock bell sounded, signaling the day’s first recess, Rania would go out to the playground and sit on the bench under a big cedar. In the meantime, Miral would buy their lunch from the woman who came to the school every day with a basket loaded with sandwiches, flatbreads, fruits, and desserts, and then go join her sister. Filling the maternal role, Miral would feed Rania, who despite being younger had a more robust build and therefore looked to be the older of the two.
For their first few months at Dar El-Tifel, Rania did not speak to anyone else, and the teachers were often obliged to call Miral if they wanted to coax a few words from her sister’s mouth.
After the summer vacation, the previous year’s scene was repeated. The difference was that this time Miral and Rania knew perfectly well where their father was taking them. That morning Miral was excited; she knew she was going to leave kindergarten behind and enter the first grade, and that seemed like a major accomplishment. Above all, she couldn’t wait to put on her new uniform and change rooms. As soon as they reached the school, she rushed to the seamstress’s room; a long line had already formed outside the door. The seamstress took each girl’s measurements and altered their uniforms.
Early that afternoon, Miral received her white blouse, green jumper, red cardigan, and black shoes. With great solemnity, she slipped out of her shorts and took off her favorite blue cotton T-shirt. Then she slowly put on her uniform and polished her shoes, which were already on her feet, before proudly admiring her reflection in the mirror and going to show herself to Rania.
The two sisters were no longer assigned to the same room, which made Rania feel uneasy. She envied Miral’s uniform and complained that she had to wait another whole year before she could have one of her own. Nevertheless, the headmistress and the other teachers found Rania to be much less melancholy than she had been the year before. Jamal waited until Miral’s uniform was ready, and when she came out wearing it, he took a photograph of the two girls, with Hind standing in the center.
That was the year Miral’s fascination with history began. Maisa, a short, stout woman with thick eyeglasses and disheveled curly hair, would narrate the horrors of the French Revolution or the Lebanese Civil War as if she were reading from novels or fairy tales. The entire class held its breath during her lectures, waiting to see how the story would turn out. Nobody spoke a word as Maisa, pacing in front of the classroom, unrolled maps and pointed out distant cities or displayed photographs of leaders and bloody battles. She rarely used the name Palestine, speaking more often about the ummah, the great pan-Arab nation; a
bout the Egyptian president Nasser; and about the Ottoman Empire. Miral distilled a basic principle from her teacher’s explanations—that history is always written by the winners.
3
Twice 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 a
nd 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.
