Balcony on the Moon Read online

  As Father battles his demons, it is getting closer to the time when Mother will have the baby. Father still cannot find a job that doesn’t involve driving, so the upcoming birth adds to his worries, and rather than cheering him it makes him feel sad and burdened.

  He tells Mother that he will not borrow money from anyone to pay for the birth expenses. So he goes back to being a truck driver.

  Mother disagrees strongly, urging him to have hope that he can find work that does not put his life in danger every day.

  “Driving is my destiny,” he shouts at her.

  One night they argue so loudly that I am sure all the neighbors must hear them. Then Father turns against himself. As we watch, he takes off a shoe and hits himself repeatedly on the head with it. We look at one another in astonishment as he explains that he is punishing himself for not knowing how to solve his problems.

  Father then confesses that his soul is wrestling with him about whether to leave or stay, filling him with an anguish he cannot bear. He says that he is tortured and announces that his soul no longer wants to live in the pain of his mind and body; it wants to grab his last breath and leave forever.

  We gaze at him, not knowing what he means. But the next day he tells us.

  Despair

  “I want to die,” Father says after he comes home early from work. We are speechless as he continues. “Day and night, I worry about having an accident. And it is not because I fear death. On the contrary, I welcome its great relief.” He flings his arms high. “I am tormented about leaving all of you with no one to support or protect you in this merciless world.” He pulls the keys for the truck from his pocket and shakes them nervously. “But God, who understands that I face unbearable daily battles, and that I’m too weary to go on, will forgive me.” He turns to leave.

  Now we understand that Father is saying goodbye to us. There is complete silence in the room before we all say that we will go with him anywhere in life, in death, in the afterlife, or any other place. We run to put on our jackets and shoes.

  We are all talking at the same time. If Allah finds that Father was wrong to do this and sends him to hell, we can go there, too, as one family. We can tell Allah that we wanted to die with Father, that we prefer to go together, just as we did when we fled the stone house in the Six-Day War. But now we flee to God.

  Father shakes his head and silently walks to the truck. He is determined. Mother makes sure that everything in the apartment is neatly in place. She does not want people who will see our apartment later on to say that she was a messy housekeeper. Such words would be harsher than death for her, and would make her unhappy all the way from Ramallah to the afterlife. When she is satisfied, she wobbles out and gets into the truck next to Father. Mona helps Samer climb up, and they sit on opposite sides of Mother’s pregnant belly.

  Basel, Muhammad, and I ride on the bed of the truck. Now a strange feeling of happiness fills the world. We are going to end all our problems at once and never be separated from one another.

  As we leave the city behind, Father waves goodbye to the drivers of the cars we pass. They wave back. When Father reaches the empty winding roads where there aren’t even shepherds tending goats on the surrounding hills, he begins to speed up.

  Basel, Muhammad, and I respond by jumping up and down on the bed of the truck, which is now bouncing like a trampoline under us. We try to jump higher and higher. We lose our balance, fall down, then get up to play again. When we spot a roll of toilet paper inside a tub of tools, we unfurl it in the wind to create a long tail for the speeding truck. The toilet paper strip gets longer and longer and ripples in the wind. We sing and laugh ecstatically.

  Father starts to press harder on the gas pedal, and Mother begins to ask him to stop. “Suleiman!” She shouts father’s name. “Waqqef! Waqqef!” Stop! Stop! My parents are speaking faster than the speeding truck, and their words come out of the open windows and reach us.

  But nothing matters to Basel, Muhammad, and me. One thing is on our minds: we do not want Father to die alone and for us to be left behind. Now we are saying our prayers and letting go of the scenes behind us.

  Father continues to drive faster and faster. I think that the truck will veer off the road and be destroyed, and then the angels that know Father from helping him when he sleeps will come and pick us up and take us to heaven. The toilet paper roll has nothing left now except the cardboard piece, which we use as a microphone to magnify our final words.

  Suddenly, the truck comes to a stop. Father turns off the engine, and my parents get out and walk to a field. They continue their tense exchange of words, and their bodies speak, too, leaning and turning, their hands waving in the air. It is like they are dancing their high-pitched conversation, questions and answers, around each other.

  When they return, sweat is rolling down their faces and they are strangely quiet. Father’s face is soft, as if he had never been angry. He starts the truck and drives slowly and carefully, which is not as exciting for us as the fast driving. When we reach a small town, he parks near a falafel shop. The owner is a friend of his. He sees how exhausted Father is, so he gives us sandwiches and sodas. “On me!” he announces when Father wants to pay. Later we go home feeling closer to Father and to one another than ever before.

  “What happened?” I ask Mother the next day.

  “Because we showed him that we loved him so much, that we would die with him, it made him want to live again,” she says. “But let us forget that it ever happened.”

  Although no one speaks of that event, I continue to think about it. And I dream of a time in the future when I can work so that Father does not have to pay for my expenses, and when I have enough money, I will buy him all that he likes. He can sleep, eat, have a goat, and sing to it all day.

  * * *

  Soon after, Mother gives birth to my brother Najm, the fourth boy in our family. During the forty days following his birth, the special period of time for women to recover after giving birth, Grandma Fatima comes to help out often and our house fills with women bringing baby clothes, sky-blue blankets, chocolate, stories, and words of congratulations.

  We use the candy that people bring us to offer as treats to the people who come after them. Mother saves most of the baby clothes she is given unopened in the packages so she does not have to buy presents in the future when visiting friends and relatives with their own newborns.

  When the women look at me and pay the customary compliment of wishing for my marriage day, Mother firmly objects: “Why wish the unhappiness of early marriage on her?” That makes me think that Mother is not happy that she married Father when she was just fifteen. The women quickly change the subject.

  Father’s sister, Aunt Rasmeyyah, comes to visit from Jerusalem. She mentions that one of her sons wants to ask for my hand in marriage and will wait until I finish high school if necessary. Today she is only checking to see if my parents would agree. Mother lets me answer. I reply that my aunt’s son has his own two hands; why does he need mine? I need both of my hands and will not give them to anyone.

  Mother then points to me and says, “Is this an answer from someone who should be thinking of marriage? She is only eight years old, too young to even know what you mean.”

  “There is no problem in asking,” Aunt Rasmeyyah chastises. “The Prophet Muhammad married a young girl.”

  “That was over thirteen hundred years ago,” Mother shoots back. “And when your son becomes a prophet, we can reconsider.” She smiles and my aunt smiles, too, but promises to ask again in the future.

  I go to watch the men who are here to congratulate us on the birth. They sit outside with Father and speak about work, land, politics, religion, children, past and present wars, and the latest operations of armed resistance by the fedayeen. The resistance gives Father and the men hope that living under the occupation may not be forever.

  Among the guests is Father’s friend Abu Qassem. After he sees Father’s thumb, he offers him a job in his busines
s to spare him the risk of being on the road. Father agrees to try because he knows that it would please Mother.

  Abu Qassem’s business, however, is nothing more than a wooden cart a few feet long and a few feet wide. It is piled up with a myriad of random items: children’s clothes, plates, plastic cups, aluminum colanders, baby shoes, hair combs and clips, loofahs, hand mirrors, whistles, boxes of matches, batteries, and so on.

  The cart is parked every day at the edge of the main hesbeh, the farmers’ market, near the Upper Ramallah central bus station. Thousands of people come through the station every morning and afternoon on their way to and from work. Rows of vendors are parked there, and shoppers stand in lines for the carts as much as they stand in lines for the buses.

  A few weeks into the new job with Abu Qassem, Father tells us that he falls asleep at this job, too, but wakes up quickly because the buses make loud noises coming and going, and the farmers and vendors shout most of the time as they sell their goods.

  * * *

  A whole year passes like the shadow of a speeding cloud. I am almost done with the fourth grade when Mother becomes pregnant again. I am wondering if she will become like Aunt Amina, whom we’ve heard just had her eleventh girl. But Mother tells everyone this will be her last child.

  I am happy to hear this because having more boys adds to my chores. Most Palestinian families, such as ours, do not ask boys to do any housework. Girls cook, mop the floors, wash dishes, do laundry, fold the clothes, clean windows, and organize the house while the boys either run errands or have jobs outside, or play sports and spend a lot of time with their friends.

  I think my job in the family should be to do only one-sixth of the work, my exact share, and then I should be allowed to play like a boy. When I grow up and am free, I promise myself I will not wash even one dish.

  Over the past year, we had all begun to think that Father had finally found the right job, but he announces that one year of working at Abu Qassem’s cart is enough.

  “Every time I see the buses and drivers coming and going, while I am standing in one place all day arguing with old and young women about prices, the feeling of loss crushes me,” he complains. “When I drove, I felt the freedom of seeing open fields, sunrises, sunsets, wild animals, the change of seasons, forests of olive trees, groves of orange trees, and I was in constant prayer for Allah to help me with my sleeping plight. As I drove, I even forgot that the land had become contested. No one can contest the fragrance of citrus groves in Tūlkarm, or the celestial yellow of the banana groves of Jericho.”

  Abu Qassem and Father have known each other for a long time, so they part in business but remain close friends. Quickly, Father finds what he hoped for: an owner of a truck who needs a driver to deliver produce. Father can begin work in one month, and he will go all over the West Bank, to Jerusalem and many other cities again, but he cannot keep the truck in Ramallah at night. It is to be parked in the nearby town of Beitunia, where the owner of the truck lives. For that job, our family must move again. If we move to Beitunia, within a few blocks of the owner’s house, Father can keep the truck at night, too, and if he pays for the extra fuel, he can use it for the move and for other family needs.

  When I go to see Um Ibrahim for the last time, she piles up so much ice cream for me that I have to ask her to stop. She then asks if I am still sure the baby Mother is going to have will be a boy. I say that I am certain because Allah likes my father and answers his prayers or else Father would have been dead a long time ago.

  Haj Hamd Allah watches from his glass veranda as we leave for Beitunia. He has the same expression he always has when he looks at people going and coming. I am surprised that I have the same feeling I had when we left the stone house—wanting to cry on the inside because I’m losing my home, and happy that I have many memories I can take with me.

  PART II

  Beitunia

  1973–1975

  Belonging

  Beitunia is profuse with apricot, plum, and pear orchards, but the only people we see on the main road are two old men sitting under a gazebo covered in grapevines in front of a shop we pass. The sign on the store says SUPERMARKET in both English and Arabic. The two men are dressed in the traditional qumbaz, the Palestinian costume that is like a woman’s dress and goes all the way to their ankles. They also wear the hatta wa egal, the traditional headdress that my father wears. They are leaning over a small table playing dice.

  One minute past them, we enter a long driveway that climbs up and up and park in front of a tall building. “An elleyyah, a summer vacation house,” Mother exclaims. “Even Haj Hamd Allah would want to live here.”

  “But the town is so empty, everyone must be on vacation,” Basel says.

  Father explains that most of the original residents of Beitunia have migrated to North and South America, and that is why we can have a spacious apartment for a low rent compared to the prices in Ramallah.

  The roof of our new house is covered with Spanish tiles that absorb the hot sunlight. The sign carved in stone above the entrance reads: AL-MULKU LE-ALLAH, all things belong to Allah, next to the date when the house was built.

  The front yard is the size of a school playground; my brothers can kick soccer balls with all their might without breaking anyone’s windows. The backyard is filled with trees like a lush small forest, including a giant fig tree with sturdy climbable branches and hundreds of fruits shaped like little money purses, promising a taste so sweet birds will compete with me for them. Father also likes fig trees, but for a different reason. For him it is because in the Qur’an God honors this timeless tree as sacred, ranking it even above the olive tree.

  Standing near the heavy iron front door of the elleyyah, I think that the house has been erected not as a summer vacation house but as a fort. The door needs a five-inch-long key to open it, and with each turn the key hitting the bolt sounds like a gunshot. Entering, we discover that separating this door from our apartment upstairs is a staircase of forty-five steps. My siblings and I instantly begin a competition jumping up and down them. But pregnant Mother must sit on the steps to rest, and then lean on the wall as she climbs. Inside the apartment, the ceilings are so high we will not be able to clean cobwebs from the corners of the rooms because we do not have a ladder tall enough to reach them.

  The many windows allow the sun to pour in like rivers of light. On the floor, the tiles are hand-painted mosaic squares of geometric shapes in green, beige, and burgundy.

  At night, because we are on the second floor, we do not have to close the windows for safety. And when the lights are out, instead of going to sleep immediately, I sit on my mattress and gaze through the windows at the moon and the stars. I remember a song called “Nehna Wel Amar Jeeran” (We are neighbors of the moon) and feel that our house is not only a neighbor of the moon but also a friend. In the basement apartment, I had missed seeing the big night sky.

  Another special advantage of this new apartment is that we are almost at the height of the Beitunia mosque’s minaret, the tall tower that makes the mosque look like a lighthouse. So when I hear the athan, the Islamic call to prayer, which is recited from the loudspeaker of every mosque’s minaret five times a day, every day of the year, the words are clear, as though recited not from across town but from the fig tree.

  I have always liked the athan because it makes me feel that I am connected to everything around me. Perhaps it is because Father prayed the athan in my right ear when I was born, exactly like I saw him do with Najm last year. He held Najm and said the words so that Najm would feel at home when hearing the athan. And each time Najm hears it, his spirit will open up for hope and learning. Father said it is a tradition in Muslim families for one of the parents or a relative to say this prayer into the ears of a newborn.

  * * *

  At the end of the summer, my parents decide that Basel and Muhammad will continue their schooling in Ramallah, but will move from the Jalazone Boys’ School to another UNRWA boys’ school closer to
Beitunia. They will take the bus back and forth every day. Mona and I will walk to Beitunia Girls’ School at the farthest end of the town. It is a combined elementary and middle school, with classes from first through ninth grade.

  I am excited about starting fifth grade because that is the year when English is compulsory in all Palestinian public schools. Every day we study English for forty-five minutes, but I study on my own for hours, always adding any new English word I learn to the Arabic sentences I speak: Ana live fee Beitunia, meaning: I live in Beitunia. Al-sama’ blue: the sky is blue. When people don’t understand the mixed languages and say, “Shoo? What?,” that is my chance to explain to them and practice my learning more and more.

  Mona and I try to speak to our new schoolmates and get to know them, but we have little in common. Many are wealthy in ways to which we cannot relate: one girl’s family owns the bus company, another girl’s family owns the house we live in and other buildings in Beitunia, and a third’s father is the mukhtar, the elder of the town. Beitunia’s school is funded by Palestinians who used to live here but now live abroad. Spacious and clean, it has everything, including a small theater.

  Most of the girls wear brand-new clothes and shoes, and they have schoolbags and school supplies from different countries, such as Canada, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil. They have money to buy treats from the school canteen. There are many different colors of chalk in our classrooms, and no one takes it home. If this were my old school, not even the colored chalk dust would stay.

  It is hard not to feel ashamed of having so little compared to my classmates. Mother notices this and tells me that money comes and goes but learning comes and makes one go forward with it. “But why doesn’t more money come to us?” I ask. She remains quiet.