Balcony on the Moon Read online

  “You see words in a different way,” he comments. “What do they mean to you?”

  “Everything,” I reply. “The word spell does not only mean to list the letters but to cast a magic spell by saying the right words. If the reader is not affected, then the spelling is wrong even if the letters are all in the correct place.”

  “I think that we are sending a poet to the contest,” he says, laughing. “Poetry is the gift of Arabs, even if you are preparing for a contest in English.”

  As the weeks pass and it gets closer to December, when I will participate in the contest, I am ready to prove my teachers right in their confidence in me. At home, I spend every minute writing about what happened during my day as though I am being tested. Because I’ve been focusing on one project for so long, many things around me change without my noticing, including my sister, Mona, who used to ask me daily for help with her math homework. She always confuses the numbers 2 and 6, as they are the mirror image of each other in Arabic. Now she has begun to complete her assignments by herself.

  The night before the contest I push my papers aside and ask Mona how she is doing in math. She shows me a recent test with a perfect score on it, in spite of her continuing to confuse 2 and 6. As I read her solutions, I see that she has solved each problem containing either 2 or 6 twice, the first time as though the indicated number is a 2 and the second as though it is a 6. The teacher rewarded her honesty and cleverness. I embrace Mona and feel that she has an approach to solving problems that is entirely her own.

  In the morning, Mother chases me with an egg sandwich and a cup of milk. “They said on the radio protein is necessary for good thinking.”

  I arrive at school early; all the teachers are waiting for me. They ask if I have everything I need. I tell them I do, and Ustaz Khaled asks, “Tell us now, why are you going to win?”

  I reply that in addition to loving to write with all my heart, I want to honor the efforts of my teachers and the name of my school. Then I add that this is also the first time I am competing with boys, not just with girls from all-girl schools. So this is my chance to show myself and the boys and girls of all the UNRWA middle schools what a girl from Ramallah can do.

  My teachers are happy with my confidence. Sitt Afaf arranges my school uniform’s white collar around my neck and gives me her comb to take with me. “You will do much better if you look neat,” she says. She then gives me directions to the competition site, which is an hour’s walk from my school, at al-Amari refugee camp school, which has a large auditorium that can hold many contestants. “Leave now so that you will be there earlier than the other contestants,” Sitt Afaf says.

  As my schoolmates enter classes for the first period, I walk out of the gate toward al-Amari camp. Everyone on the playground waves to encourage me. I warm up my mind by describing everything I see in complete sentences, as though I am a radio announcer.

  When I arrive, the proctors are waiting. One of them asks me to choose a seat. I pick the desk closest to the door as I always do, thinking that it will be easy to escape if something bad happens.

  I examine every detail in the auditorium: the seats are far away from each other, and everything is organized for the competition, contrary to the disorganized camp scene outside the school with thousands of tin-roofed shacks squished together.

  At the front of the room stacks of notebooks and boxes of yellow pencils are ready on a table. A white screen covers the entire blackboard. In half an hour, the room fills with the contestants, each taking a desk. Then a bell rings announcing it’s ten a.m., the time to distribute the test notebooks and pencils. We must not open our notebooks or touch our pencils until instructed.

  I gaze at my yellow pencil. It reminds me of a prize I received as a first grader, a yellow pencil and a rubber ball. A teacher said then: The pencil to write with. The ball to see what resilient means: to bounce back higher.

  Finally, a proctor reveals the competition assignment: “Look at the white screen covering the chalkboard. Write about what you see. You have five minutes for questions. After that no speaking is allowed.”

  I stare at the screen. I had been thinking from the minute I arrived that the essay topic must be hidden on the blackboard underneath the screen. But there is no topic, nothing at all.

  “I do not see anything on the screen,” one contestant in the back complains. “I need to move closer to the front.” A second voice and then a third say the same thing. They are almost crying and their voices are shaking. But I am right in front of the screen and, like them, I see nothing. So I, too, am perplexed.

  The proctor tells them that there is nothing written on the screen and that it is time for us to open our notebooks and begin writing.

  I decide that if nothing is on the screen, then the assignment is about what is not visible. That seems strange since no one has ever asked such a question at school. But this is a contest and can have new things, just like tests have new questions. I remember Ustaz Khaled saying he was sure only one person could answer the riddle about the coin, and I hear him in my mind now, saying, I am sure only one person can see what is on the board. So I begin writing:

  Here on this white screen, there used to be a country made of many cities that you can count as you ride the bus. Many families lived there, but something happened and all of them lost their ability to count. They began to feel blank. They kept losing, and it was like an eraser was following them wherever they walked, erasing their steps until all that remains is this blank board.

  In this blank city in front of me, there is a girl, and this board is how she feels, blank. She has many friends who feel the same blank way. One day, today, she and her friends agree to change things. So when food is needed in the city, they draw food colors on this board. But they are worried about running out of color and being left with only the screen.

  They are thinking: If we raise the screen, under it we will find the blackboard and inside the board there is the night. In the night, buried, are the sadness and the dead colors of the sunrise from fights between the light of summer and the darkness of winter. If we bury the dead colors, they will feed the earth and make it grow flowers that will bring butterflies and wake up the feeling of happiness in everyone in the lost country. The blank becomes a blanket that we can sit on by the sea in one of the seasons and see everything.

  This screen is not a screen. It is a scream. I hear it loud as a cloud in winter that becomes a thundercloud. I hear its blank loud enough to write what it tells me made it blank, made it look like an eye without even one blink. I cry for it, and ink drops fall on my paper like tears.

  Finished writing, I give my notebook to the proctor. “You have half an hour left. I think you should revise!” she says. But I leave without changing a word.

  “How was the contest?” my teachers ask. I tell them the details. They find it strange and wonder how other students responded to the challenge. Everyone must wait until the contest results are announced on March 31.

  * * *

  I forget about that date as the first half of the school year is completed, and I join everyone in Ramallah in thinking about the news, which is now filled with reports, analysis, and predictions about the United States with its new president, Jimmy Carter. Because the United States supports Israel, many Palestinians believe that ending the Israeli occupation can be achieved only if a US president and the US Congress want it. Politics and hopes of freedom dominate my mind until spring comes.

  * * *

  On March 31, Ustaz Khaled stands in front of everyone gathered on the playground after recess and announces that the UNRWA educational office has released the name of the winner of the writing contest. He does not look at me or even in my direction. I am overwhelmed with the desire to know who won. But he changes the subject, talking about how girls need to be powerful and creative, while all the female teachers stand quietly behind him. Only Sitt Afaf is not there.

  Ustaz Khaled even finds a way to link his talk to the death of Abd
el Halim Hafez, the singer of love songs who died this week at age forty-seven. Millions of people walked in his funeral in Egypt. The news announced that some girls committed suicide when hearing of his passing. I held his picture and wept as though he were a relative of mine.

  “Like you, I love singers,” Ustaz Khaled says. “But to kill oneself because a singer died? What about the songs in you? We want and need people who love and give their hearts to the world, like Abdel Halim himself did.”

  I have a hard time focusing on his words and am thinking that unless our school has won, there would be no need to announce anything. Is he going to announce that we lost? Maybe all schools are required to make the announcement. Ustaz Khaled continues speaking about many topics that he seems to have saved up for this day.

  Then suddenly, he says, “It is my great pleasure to announce that our school has won first place in the first West Bank and Gaza UNRWA contest for English composition. And the winner is … Samia!”

  I look at Samia and she looks at me. Her English is good because she went to a private English-speaking school before coming here. But she did not compete. “Oh, an early April Fools’, everyone,” Ustaz Khaled says.

  He is playing as usual. Then he corrects himself: “The winner is Ibtisam.” He says it as though he has not spent dozens of hours teaching me and teasing me as he tested my knowledge.

  He raises his arm and points to where we see Sitt Afaf walking out of the main school building carrying a huge box. She hands it to Ustaz Khaled, who, with great delight, proceeds to open it and place its contents on a table prepared for this purpose.

  After he finishes taking all the things out of the box, he raises each item and shows it to everyone on the playground: colorful paper, scissors that cut zigzags, glue bottles, books, an English dictionary, notebooks, study cards, an address book, stickers, erasers, and pens and crayons that are all shiny and beautiful, sent from another country. Not even one word of Arabic is inside the box.

  When done, Ustaz Khaled puts everything back in the box and calls me to where the teachers gather to shake my hand, all of them saying: “Mabrook! Congratulations, our Ibtisam!” I look at their smiling eyes.

  “Today, other schools are envious of us,” Ustaz Khaled says.

  “Including boys’ schools?” I ask.

  “Including boys’ schools,” he says, laughing.

  Everyone applauds.

  At home, Mother goes through the box the minute I arrive, just like Ustaz Khaled did. She is so happy it is as if she has won it herself. Then she stares at me for a minute, her eyes saying something I have not seen in them before.

  “The time has come,” she begins. “I want to speak to you about something only you can help me with.”

  I listen eagerly.

  Agreement

  “You know that I left school after the sixth grade, got engaged when I was fourteen, and married at fifteen,” Mother says. Hearing this I dart an impatient look at the ceiling because I am already bored. She has mentioned this fact more times than I have heard mosque prayers and church bells in Ramallah. She ignores my look and continues: “How would you feel if you were made to leave school this year?”

  “I am horrified by the thought,” I say. “It would be worse than death.”

  “That is how I felt, and I continue to feel this terrible pain every day. You can help me change that and have a new life!”

  “Me?”

  She nods.

  “How?”

  “I have a plan. And it is extremely simple.” She lowers her voice to make it sound not only simple but simpler than a whisper. “If you teach me everything you learn in your classes—everything—down to the smallest note, then I will learn the entire curriculum.”

  “Teach you everything?” I am hardly able to imagine what that means. “But then how will you get a formal certificate?”

  “Now that you ask,” she says, smiling broadly, “al-Urduneyyah, the Jordanian Secondary School. It’s a private high school in al-Bireh that offers classes starting with the tenth grade, and nontraditional students can study in class or at home. I need you to help me bridge the distance from where I left off through the end of ninth grade. Then I can enroll in high school classes at al-Urduneyyah. If I pass the supervised exams of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, then I can sit for the comprehensive Tawjihi exams and get my high school diploma.”

  I am following Mother’s every word, realizing how ambitious her plan is. Al-Bireh is the twin city of Ramallah, and to walk there from where we live in Ein Musbah would take an hour each way. And Mother left school over twenty years ago and now has seven children. For her to accomplish what she is describing will require so much effort. Whether or not she can do it, we will only discover over time. We do not know any women in our family, or in the many neighborhoods where we have lived, who have done this.

  “I will be the first married woman with children in our family to go to high school,” she says.

  Being first to do something is one of Mother’s special pleasures in life. The Presto pressure cooker sitting in our kitchen is one example. When it first appeared on the market, most of her friends and relatives did not buy it because they worried it might explode and harm them. But Mother said she had to have one. “Nobody who is afraid to take a risk can accomplish anything,” she said. When she cooked the first meal in it she ordered all of us to stay outside the house just in case something went wrong. We watched her cook through the window. The meal was ready in thirty minutes instead of the usual two hours.

  “What do you say?” She taps my shoulder. “Ready for the adventure?”

  I am thinking about how this can be accomplished, imagining running home from school to begin another shift, skipping all extracurricular activities. On some days, like all mothers, she will be mad at something for reasons I do not understand. She could also refuse to do homework and I would not be able to do anything about it. I would not be able to throw chalk from the back of the room, like Ustaz Khaled does in my classroom, and then say: Mom, your brain, use it or lose it. I am thinking and I don’t know what to say, wondering if I am being asked to carry a mountain.

  She rushes to convince me. “From day to day it will become easier,” she says. “I will study hard.”

  Suddenly, she does not need to explain any further. My decision is made. I am committed to teaching her as much as I am committed to my own studies. “Mother, I will help you achieve your dream in every way I can.”

  “May Allah bless you the number of stars at night and the number of words in books,” she says.

  Starting my new job without delay, I tell her that she can begin studying this year’s notes, and as we discover gaps in her knowledge, we can review and study materials from previous years. She agrees.

  I pull out a notebook that I do not need for the next day and hand it to her. “Begin with history,” I instruct. “Here are all the notes. Stay away from the World Wars for a while, and especially the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which England and France divided the Middle East between them. That will make you angry and perhaps not want to read more.

  “Review the pages about the Abbasid era, when Arabs enjoyed a glorious civilization and had the mind-set you have now. They saw no limits! Or read anything you like, because if you are inspired by a story you will remember it. You may like stories about Saladin and the liberation of Jerusalem from the Crusaders around nine hundred years ago.”

  * * *

  The following week, curious about al-Urduneyyah school, I ask at the public library and discover that it is mainly for Palestinian men who were imprisoned for political reasons and then released, those who must work and study at the same time, or those with difficult circumstances that prevent them from being in regular schools requiring daily attendance. The women students at al-Urduneyyah are so few they could be counted at a glance.

  But mainly I wonder what Father will do when Mother goes to study with men, contrary to the common social norms that prefer
separation between boys and girls and men and women. When I ask Mother about this, she says not to mention al-Urduneyyah to Father. “For now we can say that I plan to go back to school without specifying which one. When it is time to tell him about al-Urduneyyah, Allah will help me find the right words to explain that a co-ed school is my only available option.” I agree with her that now nothing matters other than bringing her to the level of the materials I am studying.

  As I teach her I begin to see that she learns faster than I had expected, and she responds with unbending determination, making her dream part of everything she does: while cooking, cutting up the onions and frying them, as they sizzle in the pan, she reads a passage. She adds salt to the soup and names the longest river in the world. She goes outside to hang a shirt on the clothesline and says the equation “Speed equals distance divided by time.” She increases her speed and shortens the distance and time between her current situation and her dream. She sweeps the floor and imagines that the tile squares are countries. She lists ten countries in Europe and their capital cities. When she sees a boot she says, “This is the map of Italy.” She cleans the windows and spells a word in English. Her books have oil smudges, water and soup stains, and little sprinkles of spices. She uses a dried orange peel as a bookmark.

  She covers the walls of her and Father’s bedroom with pieces of paper big and small, all hanging from Scotch tape. That saves her the few minutes she would need to find something she has written down in a notebook. Her eyes are always going to one spot on the wall or another as she memorizes. When she’s done with one subject, she changes the papers.

  Father gazes at all the notes. Sometimes he becomes curious about a word or two and asks me to explain their meanings, which I try to do by simplifying the concepts and making them relevant to his own experiences.

  At night, she has a book under her pillow and a book in her handbag, which rests on the bed next to her. A third one is open between her hands. She reads it in the bright light of a lamp and adjusts her body from side to side when her muscles are cramped from being in the same position. She sleeps on hard questions so that she can think through them in dream time. Father’s snoring no longer bothers her.