Tasting the Sky: Part II: Return–Jalazone Boys' School

When we arrived at the bridge, throngs of refugees were waiting to learn their fate.

We found handfuls of intact bullets and filled our pockets with empty cartridges.

A man planted a giant pipe into the room and replenished the supply of water.

To celebrate their regained freedom, my brothers wanted to build a kite.

“Hide!” shouted Mother. We pushed our Formica cupboard up to the door and pressed against it with our bodies as the noise got closer and closer, until it was surrounding us, engulfing our home.

He called it munawarat, training for combat.

The soldiers were also conquering the territory, studying the hill in order to fight well on it, he explained.

They spoke for hours, until she finally said that she wanted to take us to the Dar El-Tifl orphanage in Jerusalem.

At Dar El-Tifl, Mother looked the head administrator in the eye and said that Father had died in the war.

The weekend following the fight, my brothers were expelled from Dar El-Tifl with no warning for having beaten up this boy and having had fights with other children.

She wondered out loud why I tore up things in the school. “Why act like unruly boys?” she asked.

We had arrived during their compulsory afternoon nap time.

When we went outside and sat in the shade of a tree, my brothers confessed they frequently got hit, often unfairly, they assured us.

“But what if I still don’t feel safe in that wretched house?” she challenged.

It also reached the plot of vegetables Father had planted in preparation for our arrival: carrots, tomatoes, parsley, zucchini, onions, eggplants, and melons. He had watered them daily. All had thrived.

Unlike the many places we had lived in since the war changed our lives, this was the place I loved. I knew the road to it, and knew where the road led to beyond it. The skin of my bare feet recognized the skin of the red earth with all its wrinkles.

At night, a giant beam of light like an endless sword scraped from one end of the sky to the other. It looked like the longest windshield wiper ever, and it whipped our house and windows. It lit our faces for seconds as it slashed through. “This is a searchlight,” my father said. “It helps soldiers monitor the area at night.”

We had become more curious than scared. What intrigued me most was how soldiers, clutching wide-open umbrellas, jumped from flying planes and landed on the ground unharmed.

When the soldiers left every evening, we searched the countless trenches they had dug, climbed the barbed-wire fences they had erected, dragged home the cardboard people that were left standing pierced everywhere with bullet holes, filled our pockets with empty bullet cartridges, and glared at the huge amounts of food the soldiers threw away.

I realized then that the Israeli soldiers had become part of our daily life. We watched them, imitated them, puzzled over their actions, and talked about them all the time. They were the source of our anxiety and our entertainment.

I worried he might fall asleep one day, lose control of his truck, have a wreck, be injured.

He would spread a tiny rug that had a drawing of a mosque on it, stand up facing in the direction of Mecca, and then bow to God, kneeling and leaning forward until his forehead touched the ground. That was the moment my brothers, sister, and I liked to jump on his back. Then he would laugh and raise his voice but never stop praying.

But I liked how the feathers on his tail stood up straight, and how his posture was proud, almost like that of a soldier—our own soldier.

We held the baby chickens with utmost care, for they were fragile—like candles in the wind.

On some Fridays, however, Mother and Father killed an adult chicken for a feast to celebrate our being together, and having survived one more week of our tumultuous life.

Father often pointed to the horizon behind our home. He said if we squinted hard enough, especially on sunny days, we could glimpse the Mediterranean Sea. It would look like a little blue line scribbled along the horizon. He spoke as though that “little blue line” were a thread of magic.

On the day Zuraiq was weaned, we begged Father to promise he would not sell him or kill him on a Friday like a chicken, or for sacrifice meat on the Eid holiday.

The thought that my brothers and I were going to be separated one more time made me anxious, but I was happy that Zuraiq would become mine alone when my brothers were in school.

She set out my brothers’ newly tailored clothes for the first school day. She also ironed their clothes, which she rarely did except on the sacred holidays. But school and learning were just as sacred to Mother.

I finished only first grade because my family could not afford the sixteen-piastre school fee the government then required. Sixteen piastres was a big sum of money during the thirties. It took some families a whole month to earn that amount.

I begged the principal to let me sit on the floor, hoping that would reduce the fee. I even offered to clean the school in exchange for being a student.

“United Nations schools don’t require fees for children of refugees,” she replied, to my brother’s great relief.

The school year progressed, and to my surprise, instead of separating me from Basel and Muhammad, it brought us closer together because they included me in their studies.

The Jalazone teachers used harsh discipline to keep their classes under control.

I memorized the names of the unkind teachers, the names of the lenient ones, the descriptions of boys who cried when hit and those whose faces “looked like monkeys eating sour grapes” as they fought to keep back their tears.

I learned more about the cruelty of Jalazone life from the infectious diseases my brothers brought home.

Mother, who had learned to give injections from a doctor in Jerusalem, took out the syringe and the needle she owned and boiled them for a long time to purify them.

But water from the Dead Sea did not eliminate the tape worms that filled my brothers’ intestines and mine.

If the soldiers came to the window, she pointed to the water room outside, just in case they were looking for water. If they continued to speak, she furrowed her brow, raised her shoulders, and gestured that she did not understand them even if she did.

The school year finally ended, and Basel and Muhammad raced home carrying their certificates. They both had passed. Mother was thrilled, and her arms fluttered like wings, reaching out to embrace them.