The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa Read Free Book Online Page B

the next day’s meals. Within weeks of moving into a refugee’s life, she had collected her broken heart and scoured the landscape for an open plot of land where she could plant a small garden.
    Daily, the beekeeper’s widow picked the fruits of her labor for cooking, making herbal remedies, and bartering. She used her vegetables to haggle and bargain for fresh goat’s milk, which she churned into butter, heated into curds and yogurt, strained into labneh , and filtered and dried into cheese. She traded her beets, cabbage, cucumbers, and potatoes for chickens and eggs. While other women waited in their tents, burdened by shock, mud, and humiliation, immobilized by stagnant days of waiting for the next day’s newspaper, for the next ration, waiting for someone to do something, for the rain to come or the sun to set, waiting to go home to Beit Daras, the beekeeper’s widow began to suffuse the air with the smell of normality. She inspired other women to invest themselves in their makeshift dwellings and it was not long before women began to gather as they always had, to wash their laundry, gossip, roll grape leaves, sift through rice to remove rocks and rice bugs. Their husbands put up laundry lines for them and built communal kitchens and underground ovens to make bread. In the congestion of national upheaval and a collective sorrow that would deepen to the roots of history and expand through multiple generations, the refugees of Beit Daras went back to their jokes and scandals. And while they waited to go home, babies were born and weddings were planned. The tug of life’s sustaining banalities pulled them from their cots into communal spaces, where they prayed together, drank the morning’s coffee and afternoon’s tea together. The war had been a great equalizer and put everyone, no matter their family name or fortune, into the same canvas tents lined in equally spaced rows in open, shadeless fields. All the children played together and soon they all, boys and girls alike, attended school taught outdoors or in tents. The scoundrels, saints, gossips, mothers, whores, pious, communists, egoists, pleasurists, and all other ists went back to their former ways in this new, misshapen fate.
    In time, mud bricks and corrugated metal replaced the cloth tents and the refugee camps gave rise to a subculture marked by adamant pride, defiance, and an unwavering insistence on the dignity of home, no matter how long it took or how high the price. The camps would become the epicenter of one of the world’s most tangled troubles, and some of the greatest Arab poets and artists would be born from their crowded midst. And there, in the heart of national homelessness, the love and care that the beekeeper’s widow injected into every meal made her domain a source of life from which the aromas of onions, rosemary, cinnamon, cardamom, and cilantro drifted throughout the camp, provoking memory, stories, and hope. At mealtime, her place was always full of people. Neighbors, new and old friends. And of course, once a month, Mamdouh came. He would arrive self-consciously, investing great concentration and will to walk with as much symmetry and grace as he could manage. The bullet to his leg during the Naqba had hit his growth plate, stopping it from growing, while the other had stretched on several centimeters more, warping his gait and making his movements awkward. The lift he added inside one shoe helped, but it was not enough.
    The beekeeper’s widow would prepare Mamdouh’s favorite dishes using a special hashweh of her own blend of spices with rice and meat to stuff vegetables from her garden. Mamdouh most loved her koosa , stuffed zucchini in spicy tomato sauce. The time he could spend in her home on payday was as much of a reward as his earnings, not only for her flavorsome food, but because it afforded him an opportunity to see Yasmine, for it was well known, although unuttered, that he would come to ask for her hand in marriage