Balcony on the Moon Page 5

  For three days after the death of Wafa’s mother, mourners enter and leave her house, all wearing black. Some are carrying aaseedah, the unsweetened whole-wheat meal people prepare to console those grieving a death. It is meant to be a heavy meal, to replace the strange and aching hunger for food that strikes many people when someone dies.

  When I see Wafa again, she appears to have accepted her destiny but asks that I still visit and tell her the news of the school. I am not certain whether this will make her feel sad or will help her feel connected to everyone. I mention that the auditions took place and she wants to know all about them. I tell her I got the role of a Korean girl for the pageant, and was also cast as a boy in the play about war. The lead in the play, a ninth-grade girl named Amal, who is from the volleyball team, said I would be the right choice.

  Wafa then wants to know which of our other classmates were selected and what roles they got. I tell her all that I remember.

  * * *

  Most of my time outside of school I pretend I’m on stage at a theater. Now, instead of the stairs and mattresses, I climb to a high branch of the fig tree and speak to the leaves as if they are my audience. When they shake in the wind I think they find what I say moving. The birds stop singing and look on with interest. “Now you can take a break from singing all day, sit back, and be entertained,” I tell them before I start singing to them.

  During the pageant I will wear a Korean hanbok, a dress with a big underskirt that opens like an upside-down flower. An outer skirt wraps around the dress with straps. A long cloth belt ties in the back in the shape of a butterfly and reaches the floor. I will have a jacket and a small black tulle cap with flowers on it. My costume is beautiful.

  After greeting the audience with a bow, I will tell them that I am a girl from Korea and ask them to imagine going there with me. It is in Asia like we are, but it is completely different. Detail by detail I will present Korea’s social customs, music, food, and culture. Even though I’ve never eaten rice with chopsticks and my teachers can’t tell me how it is done, my dream is to speak so well that everyone in the audience will feel Korean during my performance.

  On the day of the show, the actors gather backstage to get ready. On the wall is a big map of the world colored to identify the countries we are representing. They are all on the map—except for Palestine. Although no one speaks of this, when we happily touch the countries we are representing, we also press our fingers on the place where Palestine once was on the map, with sadness.

  We put on our costumes. We usually don’t wear makeup but are allowed to today so that we will appear dramatic on stage. Voices call asking for help with zippers or buttons or hairdos. Bobby pins are everywhere. Teachers are going from girl to girl addressing us by our country names, then listening to each of us rehearse our words.

  “Unless it’s part of the role, smiling or laughing on the stage spoils the effect of the performance,” the teacher who directs the show emphasizes for the hundredth time. I really want to smile though, because many people will have cameras. But I will do exactly what she asks.

  Finally, we are all ready. The teacher managing the stage entrance whispers: “Now.” The audience begins to clap as we enter and line up on stage. There is more clapping after each girl transports the audience to her country: Canada, Russia, Morocco, Spain, Yemen, the United States of America, Brazil, Nigeria, France, Algeria, India, Australia, and others. At the end, we shout, “We are children of the world. We wish the world would listen to children and what they have to say.” Some people in the audience shout, “Yes,” but others laugh, perhaps dismissing our message as childish.

  We all go backstage. The play will be next. A teacher recites a poem to the audience while I quickly change into my boy costume: I am a soldier who says goodbye to his mother before going to war. The teachers gather around to help me get ready.

  I put on a khaki shirt that I borrowed from my father. It reaches below my knees. One teacher is fumbling to find the buttons. Another is helping with a pair of big boots. A third is slinging a long green ruler threaded with a string over my shoulder—it is supposed to represent a gun. Then they wrap my head with the white-and-black Palestinian kufiyyah. I have never felt this much like a boy.

  Amal was cast as my mother, and she enters the stage first, wearing an old woman’s Palestinian garments. She begins by speaking to herself and pacing like a parent who is not certain what will happen to her son. The audience is silent as they listen to her.

  “Ready?” The teacher who manages the stage entrance gently puts her hand on my shoulder. I nod excitedly.

  At her signal, I take a deep breath and walk slowly on stage, my boots making a loud noise like a war drum against the wood. I look at Amal’s eyes. They are red with sorrow. I reach where she is sitting and sit beside her. We gaze at each other and then embrace.

  I begin speaking to Amal like I am one of the soldiers whose actions are reported on the news for the world to know: “Mother, it is time for me to go to battle. All I want is that we live in freedom, but freedom is never given without risking one’s life for it. Please forgive me if I do not come back.”

  I say my lines exactly as instructed by the teacher who directed the play. “Words are music,” she had said. “There are many ways to say each sentence, and each takes the listener to a different place. Not one ah different from what I taught you!”

  When I am done, the audience cheers and whistles. Then Amal touches my face and moves my scarf to the side to kiss my cheeks and say goodbye. Her eyes fill with tears that never happened during rehearsals. I am moved to great sadness with her.

  When I walk backstage I can’t stop crying. I sit in a dark corner and, with everyone else, listen to her sing of her desire to see her son live. She then begins to chant her words, repeating them over and over.

  People in the audience join her, adding their desire for life to hers, and when she’s done, everyone shouts bravo and stands up to clap. I run back on stage and hold her hand as we do a final bow.

  Mother is in the front row and she is standing, too. I am happy that I did not disappoint her. She can turn to the other women and say: That brave boy on stage is my daughter!

  At home, I am glad that I am not going to any war, and will live. But thoughts of death are hard to push away.

  I think of Wafa and imagine how it must feel when your mother dies, leaving you behind. I also wonder whether it is possible to have freedom without death and fighting. I remember the Ramadan war. All the mothers of all the soldiers who fought must have felt like Amal. The Israeli soldiers who trained outside our stone house on the hill also come to mind. Do their mothers feel the same way?

  * * *

  Toward the end of the school year, Hoda tells me that she is engaged to be married. Her wedding will be in two weeks and her honeymoon will be in Honolulu. I don’t know where that is, but Hoda says it is a place that has big flowers and no wars at all. She is happy to be getting married and leaving home.

  When I tell Mother about Hoda’s plans, she replies that Hoda will most likely not have a honeymoon. “What honey?” She shakes her head. “She will probably have a maqloobeh moon, because from day one, she will find herself having to cook the maqloobeh traditional meal, clean house from morning to evening, and then have children and raise them, even though she is a child herself.”

  I shake my head and say nothing, because Mother loves to be critical and speak as though she knows everything. I hope that Hoda will have a honey week at least.

  * * *

  I go to Hoda’s wedding to thank her for her friendship and for talking with me when I felt like an outsider in Beitunia. I also secretly want to see what Mother might have looked like and how she acted when she got married around this age.

  I find Hoda at the center of a room, wearing a white dress and sitting on a loaj, the special chair set on top of a table so all the guests can see the bride from wherever they sit or stand. People are wearing gold jewelry and new cl
othes and dancing around her and throwing candy at everyone.

  Hoda is smiling. She has a thick coating of pink powder on her cheeks, bright red lipstick, nail polish, glitter, kohl, mascara, a fake beauty mark on her cheek, henna on her hands, and very high-heeled shoes. Her hair has been arranged into big curls that fall to her shoulders, covering half of her face. She does not push the locks aside even though they hide one of her eyes. She does not want anyone to see her smiling eyes because Palestinian brides are told not to show the families of their future husbands that they are happy to leave their parents. Many brides sit on the loaj with tears in their eyes for everyone to see, showing that they come from good families—families they are not eager to leave.

  The wedding ends quickly because Hoda’s groom did not come from America to participate. She will go to him. He will meet her on the other side of the ocean, where they will have another party. Before I leave, I want to ask her if she would send me a letter or a postcard from her new home in the United States, but I know that Hoda does not like reading and writing.

  Later, looking at her empty seat in the classroom, I feel sad, but not as sad as when I discover who will be next to disappear from my world.

  Red

  It is a hot and quiet day in June during the summer vacation. I am recovering from seven stitches in my foot. The accident happened two weeks ago when I rode the tricycle meant for my younger brothers. My parents think that tricycles and bicycles are for boys only, and won’t let me and Mona ride them.

  “A girl should keep her legs together,” Mother says. When I ask her why, she does not explain the reason, so I decide that if a boy can ride a bicycle I should, too. I secretly see it as close to driving a car, which I would like to do when I grow up. So anytime I find a bicycle I try to ride it. Two weeks ago, when my brothers went down to play in the yard, I found myself alone in the house with the tricycle and I jumped for joy.

  Mother was outside, sitting under the shady fig tree. She was nursing Jamal in one arm and reading from her favorite book, Al-Ard al-Tayyebah (The Good Earth). She must have read it twenty times. I knew that once Jamal fell asleep and she became one with the book, she would not come back into the house for a long time. She would read for as long as she could, pretending to be in China amid the fields with peasants who wear conical straw hats. I wondered if she liked the book so much because their harsh world makes her life feel easier.

  So while Mother was busy, I decided to put my foot on the seat of the tricycle and push with my other foot, like a skateboard. At first, I successfully avoided all the furniture. But then, battling to not hit a cupboard filled with china in the corner of the room, I headed toward our forty-five-step staircase and rolled down. When I stopped, I had been cut by a metal edge on the tricycle that dug into my foot. I saw my skin become pink for a second, then dark purple, then red as blood poured from it.

  I remembered the day I saw my father pressing his injured thumb with his hand. I pressed on my wound with all my might and shouted for help. When Mother came, she first filled the wound with coffee grounds and bandaged it; then she filled the room with damnations. I closed my eyes and ears.

  As my stitches healed she called me hassan saby, tomboy, and kept saying, “This is the result of doing what you were told not to do.”

  I looked away and said to myself: This is the result of not having the right-size bicycle.

  Today I am better but still cannot skip, jump, or run easily. My parents and siblings are shopping in Ramallah and have left me home. I thought Muhammad was with the others, but then he enters the room. He appears unhappy.

  “Is everyone back already?” I ask.

  “I did not go with them, and I want to tell you something that you must keep to yourself.”

  “Ihkee! Speak!”

  “Biddy ashrod,” he confides. “I want to escape!”

  “Escape to where?”

  “I cannot tell you where I am going. If you don’t know where, then you won’t be able to tell Mother and Father and they won’t be able to find me.”

  “Can I tell them you’ve left?”

  “Only after I get far enough away.”

  He goes to the kitchen, stands on a tall chair, and urges me to hurry up next to him. I struggle to stand on the same chair, not wide enough for our four feet. So I stand on my strong foot and gaze between the tree branches to see the exact spot on the street where he is pointing.

  “Right there on the edge of Beitunia. Do you see where the road intersects with cars going toward Jerusalem on the right, Ramallah on the left, and coming to Beitunia in the middle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay here on the chair. It will take me twenty minutes to get there. You will be able to see me in my red jacket in the distance. When I wave to you, please wave back.”

  “Are you sure we will be able to see each other?”

  “Yes. Look at that person passing there now. If his clothes were red, you would see him much more easily.”

  “Muhammad, do you not want to be my brother anymore?”

  “I do. But you are a girl. Life for a boy is different.”

  He then mentions what happened recently when a few boys fought with him and Basel after school. When my brothers got home they said nothing. But six men related to the boys came to our house in the evening. They wouldn’t stop hitting Father, so he had to jump into the truck and drive away. The following day, he had bruises everywhere.

  My brothers could not protect Father. Basel regretted that he had not saved to buy a Swiss Army Knife, the only weapon a Palestinian is allowed to carry. If he had had it and waved it at the men to deter them, they might have left Father alone. Muhammad blamed himself.

  “I do not want to fight with anyone,” he says, “not boys or teachers or the family. I don’t even want to hear on the radio about people I do not know harming one another. Khalas, that’s it. I want a peaceful life, empty like a table that has nothing on it. I am going right now.” He zips closed his bright red jacket.

  “What if Mother and Father come home before you get to that spot, and ask me why with my injured foot I am standing on a chair?”

  “You can make up an answer!” he says as he turns to leave.

  “If you are really going to run away, take some food with you.”

  The cupboard is empty except for glass containers filled with flour, rice, and several kinds of dried beans and seeds. But there is also a sack of shelled almonds, and I fill his pocket. “Do not eat them all at once. I know you like to eat without stopping. And if you change your mind, come back. Our parents will be mad at you for a day for disappearing, then everything will be forgotten. They will be mad at me, too, because you told me and I didn’t stop you. So we both will get into trouble together.”

  Muhammad leaves in a hurry. I go to get a piece of paper and a pen from my schoolbag and rush back to the kitchen, climbing up on the chair. I look into the distance. I have no watch, and our house has no wall clock, so I count to sixty for each minute, and write down the minutes as they pass. After twenty minutes I begin to wonder if Muhammad has tricked me.

  He has played tricks many times before, including asking me to close my eyes and then slipping a lizard under my blouse. The lizard ran all over my body while I tumbled in a storm of terror and inconsolable cries until I saw it come out my sleeve and flicked it onto the rocks. But Muhammad’s voice today, his face, his eyes, and his posture as he walked away, all tell me that he is not playing a game. If he is, I will never believe him again.

  At minute thirty-two, Muhammad appears—a red dot in the late-afternoon sun. I wave frantically. He stands still and I think he waves back before walking up the street. Cars and buses come and block him for a moment, and my heart begins beating loudly until I see him again. This goes on for a few minutes until I lose him for the last time. Red, blue, green, and gray merge and bleed into the darkness of street tar, leaving me in pain as though I have just lost part of my soul. I am afraid that Muhammad is gone fo
rever.

  I get down from the chair and look around the empty apartment. I worry that Muhammad is in great danger. Mother said there are people who steal children and sell them as slaves. Soldiers might shoot at him. Bullies might hurt him. The hyenas Father told us that he feared most when he was a child might be out after dark searching for dinner.

  If I were a bird, I would fly above Muhammad and know where he is going. If I were old enough and had control over things, I would not have let him go. But I control nothing other than this secret until my parents come home and I tell them.

  When they get home and I explain about Muhammad, they don’t know what to do. It is too late to start searching. None of us sleeps that night.

  In the morning, Father goes to look for him. Day one passes. Day two follows. Muhammad does not return and Father’s searches for him produce nothing. Days three and four leave my parents talking about every possibility and Father driving to different towns, asking about him. I think of Muhammad and draw red dots on paper.

  It is now day five and our family is riding around in the truck, trying to find him. Father says we should look for Muhammad in al-khala, the mostly uninhabited areas where only a few Bedouin families live in tents. Mother agrees.

  So we drive for a long time until we see a big tent. It is pitched on land covered with green thorn bushes that have miniature tomato-red balls and pink and yellow flowers, surrounded by many hills in the distance. There are a few goats and sheep and a donkey grazing near the tent.

  Outside the tent, a Bedouin man squats next to a fire pit surrounded by stones. He appears to have no cares. Father gets out of the truck and greets him. The Bedouin responds, then stands up and offers Father a tiny cup of coffee.

  Sitting in the truck, we can only hear some of the conversation. But when the man says they will be back soon, we hear him clearly. The words fill us with excitement and hope.