Balcony on the Moon Page 8
Upon seeing me, Mother slaps me across the face. Many hours pass before the prints of her fingers leave my cheek. But I argue with her: “You work all day at home and you do not get paid. I am not going to have the same life as yours.”
The next day, I do the same: run away in the morning and come back in the late afternoon. Father says that they will have to lock me up in the house. But I escape again and go to the factory. I hear more stories from Nahla. I dream of reincarnating as a free person.
Suddenly my parents give up trying to make me stay at home and surprise me by agreeing that I can work. “As long as you stay away from boys and men,” they insist.
“I promise.”
We get paid at the end of the week, and I buy some of the family necessities and put them on the table with a note written in large letters: For my father: Only now am I beginning to know what you feel when you work for pay, and how much it takes for you to feed and support a family of nine people. I also tell him that he is handsomer than Serob, the co-owner of Tako. Father smiles as he slowly reads the note. He then repeats out loud what I wrote to Mother.
* * *
My days begin to have a rhythm: waking up early with the birds, going to the factory, listening to gossip and the hum of machines, watching trucks come to take full boxes of tissue to city stores, seeing machines break down, a worker almost getting cut by belts breaking suddenly, and having a lot of time to hum songs and think. I realize that what the workers say about our low wages is right, and I understand their whispers about the need to form a workers’ union. But for me, the payment I get is much more than the cash.
* * *
One week when we are standing in line to get our wages, everyone is cheerful, anticipating the weekend. We are chattering, including the older man, whom Nahla mentioned has many children and works overtime to feed them. He is speaking louder than all of us. Once in a while, this man helps me when he sees me struggling to carry a big box. He calls me ya binti, my daughter.
The secretary appears in her office, holding everyone’s pay. She sits behind a glass panel that separates us from her. We receive our cash payments through an arched mouse-hole-size opening in the lower part of the panel. She asks that we stop talking and stand in a straight line.
The old man does not stop speaking right away. Impatient, she insults him. Dangling the money from her hand, she orders that he stand in line quietly. Her eyes become big like an owl’s and her cheeks are red in anger. He complies.
Never before did I think I would ever feel the fury I am now feeling as the old man stands looking at the ground in shame. She spoke to him in a degrading way, violating article 5 of the Declaration of Human Rights.
I watch the secretary and the man. When it is his turn, she gives him his money slowly, making him keep his hand open longer than the other workers.
When he leaves and it is my turn, I ask the secretary for an apology to the man and all of us. “We are here to work, not be humiliated. We get enough humiliation from living under harsh military rule.”
She stares at me in disbelief. Everyone in the line is so quiet that the traffic outside on the road is suddenly audible. The tension, if increased one more bit, might shatter the glass wall between us.
She puts my pay in front of me. “Take it,” she grunts.
“Not until you apologize to this man and to all of us.” I stare back at her.
Vahan appears in the room behind the secretary to ask what is going on. She turns her back to us and speaks to him in a low voice. When she faces the workers again she says, “I will not apologize to anyone!”
I am hoping that Vahan will say something to her or to us. He does not. He also does not ask any of us to explain our side of what happened.
Looking at me, then at all of the workers, he has no expression on his face, and he quickly disappears. So I announce, “I quit!” I leave my pay behind, and walk out of the factory alone. I wonder what my teacher Ustaz Khaled would say if he saw what just happened.
I do not tell my parents about quitting the job. I continue to go out early every day, looking for new work. After a week I have found nothing. So I go to the public library every day to write letters to my pen pals to see what they are doing during their summer vacations. I also discover many books I have never heard of. One day I open the English-Arabic dictionary randomly to a page and take the first word I see, start, to be a key word about my future. Start whispers to me to never hold back when one action ends and a new one must be taken.
A driver from the Tako factory comes to my home and brings me my pay, saying that everyone wants me to come back, the owners and the workers. But he mentions nothing about the secretary and the old man. So I decide that by going back and acting as though earning a wage is more important than my dignity, every moment at the factory would be unbearable for me. I would be violating my own rights. I still want to find another job. But suddenly life at home changes in ways that make being home as exciting as going to work. The world comes to us instead of us going to the world.
Chocolate
Mother has convinced Father to buy a black-and-white television set and make payments over a year. Our lives change from the first minute the TV is delivered to the small table covered with a special embroidered cloth in the corner of the room prepared for it. Another knit cloth sits on the side for covering the screen and protecting it from dust when it’s not in use.
The delivery man explains there are two channels broadcast from Jordan: channel two, in Arabic, and channel six, in English. There are four hours of Arabic programming every evening, but on Friday there are special shows during the day. There is also an Israeli channel in Hebrew that airs a nightly newscast in Arabic and a weekly Arabic sitcom.
We gather on the floor around the TV to watch the Arabic channel. At six p.m., the entertainment begins, with many Disney cartoons. Woody Woodpecker sounds like a wonderful typewriter that I wish I could have. Next are Popeye, Abbott and Costello, Scooby-Doo, and finally Mickey Mouse. The cartoons are subtitled in Arabic, but I do not look because I want to learn more English.
At first my younger brothers, Jamal, now almost three; Najm, four; and Samer, six, are quiet while watching cartoons, mesmerized by the movement on the screen. Then they begin to shout and interact with all the characters. The first time one of their heroes is hit so hard that stars circle around his head, they worry he will die and they rush behind the television to rescue him.
When they do not find him, they say, “Where are youuu!” mimicking Scooby-Doo. We are all relieved to realize that cartoon characters do not ever die.
Soap operas follow the cartoons. They are mostly love stories about men and women who are attracted to each other but do not confess it. There is jealousy, fear, lying, detective work, dreaming, sadness, loss, revenge, and theft, as well as conflict between rich families and poor families when love crosses over economic class norms. The best soap operas are based on novels by famous Egyptian authors such as Ihsan Abdel Quddous and Naguib Mahfouz.
The nightly news airs last. It is an hour, with half of it for regular news and the other half for sports. There is not one night when we do not see the king and queen of Jordan in the first half of the broadcast.
My older brothers wait impatiently to see if the sports segment will report on international and Jordanian soccer games. The Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan have strong soccer teams and we cheer for them. My brothers also learn about the international soccer games that are replayed in their entirety on the Jordanian television on Friday.
We watch the Israeli news channel to hear about the West Bank and Gaza—mainly curfews, strikes, demonstrations, political developments, and military operations, in addition to the weather. Neither the Jordanian nor the Israeli television stations report on day-to-day Palestinian news. I wish we had even one Palestinian radio station or a Palestinian television channel.
On Friday evenings, the Jordanian television airs the most anticipated event of the week, a
two-hour Egyptian movie, when the most famous actors and actresses entertain us as we eat dinner. So we learn more of the Egyptian dialect and use the strange fun words to make jokes and to imitate the actors. We also learn that in movies there are scenes of seductive belly dancing and scenes of passionate kissing between a man and a woman. The soap operas never show that.
When the belly dancer appears, my parents say harsh words describing her as a fallen woman, but they go on watching her every move. They also tell Mona and me to look away anytime a kiss is about to happen. My brothers, because they are boys, can continue to watch. I want to take out the human rights declaration and plaster it on the television screen so they see nothing but how their discrimination is wrong.
At first, to avoid creating a problem, I turn my face away as instructed. I then begin to sit behind everyone. This way, if my parents turn to make sure that I am not looking, they will also have to miss the kissing scene. Restricting my freedom will cost them theirs for that moment.
On television, I also learn for the first time what Abdel Halim Hafez, the famous Egyptian love singer, looks like during his performances. He has an exceptionally big smile and piercing onyx eyes. His feelings well up from the depths of every sound he makes as he sings about love.
When we watch Nadia Comăneci receive perfect scores in gymnastics and win gold medals at the Montreal Olympics, Mona and I celebrate in Ramallah because even though Nadia is Romanian, she is brown-haired and looks Arab. Many girls in Ramallah are named Nadia. And like us she lives in hard political conditions imposed on her country by the Russian authorities. But Nadia wins a place in history in spite of that. Mona and I also marvel that she, like all the other gymnasts with her, appears on the screen dressed in a bathing suit in front of a large crowd. Mona nudges me and whispers: “Look! People are not angry to see a girl wearing a bathing suit in public. She is doing the splits, and everyone is cheering her agility and power. Can you believe Mother won’t let us ride a bicycle?”
On the inside of our closet, Mona and I have taped pictures of girls and women we admire. We add Nadia’s picture to remind us it is good for a girl to be daring. We put her next to a drawing of my favorite scientist, Marie Curie, and a drawing of Mona’s hero, Florence Nightingale.
I am now feeling even more confident than before that I have the right to be daring. I still want to work again before the new school year begins. So I go to Ramallah’s industrial district to apply for a job at the Silvana chocolate factory.
* * *
As I walk toward the factory, I realize that the entire building is enveloped in a thick, warm chocolate aroma. It extends to the street and over the fields, infusing the air over the other factories with a festive smell.
“Hired!” a manager says after I mention that I have previous factory experience. He does not ask why I left. He takes me inside and I can hardly believe my eyes. Everywhere I turn there is chocolate candy: extremely big bars that get cut up into smaller pieces, stacks of chocolate-filled wafers, rows of lollipops, moving conveyor belts with small pieces of foil-wrapped chocolate rushing like miniature cars, then getting dumped into a box with a pink drawing of an eagle soaring over mountains. The wrappers are gold, silver, red, yellow, and green.
“Pick a station,” the manager says. “It does not matter which.” I choose the conveyor belt carrying already wrapped pieces. My job there, he explains, is to make certain that all the pieces stay on the belt and to throw any incompletely wrapped piece into a bucket on the side. After an hour of checking every piece, I ask the woman working a few yards away from me if it is all right to taste the chocolate.
She smiles and says a cook of anything, even poison, cannot help tasting it. But not while working; eating is during lunchtime only.
“How many pieces can I have?” I ask.
“As much as you desire, one piece or a hundred,” she says, laughing. “Try everything. But you cannot take any of it home. That is the rule. Workers who do that will be fired. Nothing inside pockets, purses, or under a hat. You must buy what you want to take home.”
“What about the wrappers? I would like to wrap my books with them if I can.”
“Collect them from the pieces you eat. Perhaps you can tape them on the book covers?” she suggests.
At lunchtime I sit with pieces of every kind of candy made in the factory next to me in a brown bag. I cross my legs on the thin wooden bench in the hot sun, and in half an hour I have a little pile of empty wrappers next to me. I smooth them flat and stack them inside my notebook to take home.
My co-workers say they did the same when they first started, but they quickly learned that chocolate increases acne because of the fat in it, and creates problems with teeth because of the sugar. Chocolate, many warn me, also has the same effect as coffee on sleep.
After work, I buy a box of chocolates to take home. It contains fifty small pieces. I gather my younger brothers and have them close their eyes. I pour the box over their heads like rain. When they open their eyes they pretend that the chocolates are fish and they are swimming among them, catching one and eating it every few minutes.
Within a week, I discover that my co-workers were right in the advice they gave. I have a difficult time falling asleep, so I call it the choco-late factor. With one last piece of chocolate I could not bear to eat, I write on a big rock outside our house, using the chocolate like chalk. Ants appear from everywhere and fill the outlines of the letters.
“What’s that?” Mona asks.
“Chocol-ant, a new type font that combines chocolate and ants,” I say.
After two weeks at Silvana, I wish that the sweet smell was not there. Whenever I see chocolate I have no desire to touch it.
And then all things seem to lose their sweetness after I hear the news that the Tal al-Zaatar Camp in Lebanon fell. The surrendering of the camp led to a massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Because we are not supposed to discuss politics at the factory, I battle my sadness alone while working.
* * *
On the last day of summer vacation, I say goodbye to Silvana and prepare for school. I buy a new pair of shoes, a jacket, a schoolbag, and the books I need. I decide that I will never wear donated clothes again even if I have to wear these clothes I have just bought forever. All my books are covered with glittering thin wrappers, and I am excited about seeing Ustaz Khaled again.
“What five things did you learn this summer?” he asks.
“How to fold tissue paper. The Druze faith teaches about reincarnation. Speak up for someone else and seek justice even if it is not there. A girl can become a world champion in a way no one else has done before. And chocolate keeps you up at night.
“I also have a sixth thing,” I add. “I memorized the spelling of hundreds of new English words. I used the dictionary and cartoons on TV as my English tutors.”
“I will quiz you on them all,” he says, smiling. After that, whenever Ustaz Khaled sees me, he asks for the spelling and meaning of two or three difficult English words.
Contest
After the first month of eighth grade, there is an announcement at school about an English composition contest the UNRWA educational office will hold for all the United Nations–run refugee middle schools in the West Bank and Gaza. On the basis of our grades, my classmates Dawlat and Najwa and I qualify as candidates.
A committee is formed to evaluate the three of us and decide who will represent the school. Dawlat and I remain in the final round. “The contest will be held in the middle of December. Are you willing to work as hard as possible in the next two and a half months?” we are asked. We both say yes. All teachers at the school are invited to give their opinions about who is more likely to win.
My Arabic creative writing teacher volunteers that I am the only student she has who disputes her grades. She always gives me 23 out of 25, and I always ask her where I made a mistake that justifies subtracting two points. She never underlines anything or makes notes in the margins of my papers.<
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She replies that no one gets a perfect score in creative writing.
“Why?” I ask.
Laughing, she says that not even Taha Hussein, the famous Egyptian author known as the dean of Arabic literature, can get a perfect score. She explains that in creative arts, perfection can never be reached and there is always room to do better.
“What you are saying does not help me learn,” I protest, looking at the ground to hide my tears.
But her comment weighs in my favor even though the upcoming contest is going to be in English, not Arabic. So when the evaluation is completed, the committee determines that I will represent my school. Ustaz Khaled says this is just one step in a long journey. I must begin the work immediately.
Because this is the first contest, there is no previous winner to learn from. If there were, I would search for the address of that student’s school and mail a pen pal invitation for him or her to correspond with me.
To prepare, I must spend an hour every day after school with Sitt Afaf, an English teacher who discusses English comprehension with me, listens as I read passages from stories, and has me put English words into sentences. Accuracy is essential. And I have to speak about everything in English.
“Make the mistakes now,” she encourages. “That way I can teach you something you need. Good learners are the ones who make mistakes and correct them.”
“Why does the word believe have lie at its center?” I ask. “Should a person believe a lie?”
She looks at the word and at me. “A good question,” she praises. “Now you will remember how to spell believe by the word lie, which must not be believed.”
When Sitt Afaf is satisfied that I have made progress for the day, Ustaz Khaled takes over, asking me to build English sentences in the past, past perfect, and conditional future tenses. He introduces adjectives, adverbs, commas, semicolons, and periods. When I am tired, I say, “Could the present tense relax? It is too tense.” He smiles and I have a break.