Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa Read Free Book Online Page B

He took in a premeditated breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled into the nye at his lips, playing a new tune. It was not the sad music of waiting. Nor was it a melody of his heritage. It was a call to the earth. To Allah. To the country within him. It caught the attention of passersby, touched their hearts and made them bow their heads inexplicably. He played his nye all morning, rarely opening his eyes, brow raised. When he was finished, he went inside his tent and returned with his grooming tools—a blade, a leather strap, and a piece of broken mirror. He sat upright, anchoring his callused old feet in the dirt, breathing deeply.
    The olives are ready .
    He shaved. He twisted his mustache into two perfect upward-turning curls and fixed them in place with gum arabic sap.
    The grapes and figs have surely fallen by now and are rotting on the land .
    One garment at a time, he dressed himself in vintage dignity, putting on his best dishdashe, a jacket that was too big for his frame, and a red-checkered kaffiyeh held on his head with a twisted black egal.
    October’s rains have surely loosened the ground .
    And he walked out of his tent a proud man.
    Realizing what Yehya was up to, Haj Salem begged him to find prudence. He pleaded, “Ya Abu Hasan, I know what you’re doing. It’s November and we’re all feeling it. But it’s too dangerous. Don’t be foolish, my friend. Wahhid Allah!”
    “La ellaha ella Allah,” Yehya answered the call to proclaim Allah’s Oneness, but he would listen no more. Jack O’Malley knew better than to think Yehya could be stopped. He put his pudgy white hand on Yehya’s shoulder and in his Irish accent said, “Be careful, brother. Your chair and hooka will be waiting for you at Beit Jawad’s coffeehouse, so don’t be gone long.”
    When Hasan tried to stop him—“Yaba, please. They’ll kill you”—Yehya gazed at his son with an Arab patriarch’s unquestionable final authority. Then he turned and walked as he once had, with purpose and pride—if with a cane—up the sloping alleyway to the edge of the camp, past its boundaries, outside the limit of that eternal 1948, beyond the border into what had become Israel—into a landscape he knew better than the lines on his hands—until he finally arrived at his destination.

    Sixteen days later, Yehya returned ragged and dirty with a tangled beard and a radiant spirit. The kaffiyeh that he had worn on his head when he left now formed a bundle flung over his shoulder as he walked with a merry hunch under its weight. Yeyha had made his way back to Ein Hod, undetected by soldiers. “That terrain is in my blood!” he proclaimed. “I know every tree and every bird. The soldiers do not.”
    For days he had roamed his fields, greeting his carob and fig trees with the excitement of a man reuniting with his family. He had slept contentedly in their shade, as he had done at afternoon siesta all his life. The old well where the soldier had shot Darweesh and Fatooma was still there, and Yehya had devised a makeshift bucket tied to vines of honeysuckle areej to fetch water. He had visited his wife’s grave, where the white-streaked red roses had come back despite the destruction. He had read the Fatiha for Basima’s soul and—he swore—had spoken to her apparition.
    Almost thirty years later, and with the same curled mustache as his grandfather, Yousef would recall the yellow clay across Yehya’s teeth on the day he came back from his sixteen days in the paradise of realized nostalgia. Yehya had left the camp with stubborn solemnity, wearing his most dignified clothes, and he returned looking like a jolly beggar with as much fruit and as many olives as he could carry in his kaffiyeh, his pockets, and his hands. Despite his vagabond appearance, he came invested with euphoria and the people lifted him to heights of esteem befitting the only man among them who had outwitted a ruthless military and had done what five great nations could not