Miral (8 page)

Nadia had returned to the Tel Aviv nightclub where she had worked as a belly dancer before her arrest. It seemed to her to be the only place where she had really been herself. And notwithstanding her three pregnancies and some added years, within a few weeks she was once again the club's main attraction. She was still very alluring, maybe even more so than before, but hers had become the beauty of melancholy, like a lovely city built in a soulless place.

When Jamal found out that Nadia had returned to her former life, he thought that perhaps he should have been less tolerant with her and that his mistake had been to allow her too much freedom.

Nadia found a way out. For once it seemed so clear. She felt light, and the moment she realized it she had, for the first time, a sensation she recognized as joy: she could spare herself and those she loved a life that was only trouble.

 

The police found Nadia's body on the beach at Jaffa. Her face was disfigured and her position unnatural. She looked as though she had been trying to reach the sea; her arms were flung out ahead of her, and the waves were licking her hands. High tide was rolling in. One hour more, and the waters of the sea would have swallowed her body up again, as it had swallowed her father's. The authorities called her case a suicide, but neither her husband nor anyone else who knew her well believed that. Nadia had never given up, not even when she was thirteen and her stepfather stole her future. Perhaps she had been the victim of an accident. They refused to let themselves believe it was suicide, the last terrible chapter in a life lived far outside the norms of her time and country.

Jamal decided that his daughters needed to grow up in a serene environment, where they would be in the company of other little girls. Above all, he wanted them to grow up far away from the disturbing dramas that had marked their family. And so Miral and Rania were entrusted to the care of Hind Husseini, who would bring them up in her orphanage, Dar El-Tifel.

T
he day Jamal first took them to Dar El-Tifel, autumn had not yet begun, but a thin mist enveloped the hills around the city.

He had left the bathroom door half-open and was shaving, but he wasn't whistling as he usually did. Instead he was just staring in silence at his own weary face in the mirror. He had looked like that on the morning of Nadia's funeral, a month before. As Miral silently watched her father, she saw a tear gleam on his cheek before disappearing into the white foam.

Jamal was a tall, slim man with thin lips and large black eyes. An imam at al-Aqsa Mosque, he had been born in Nigeria and was among the many emigrants from Senegal, Mali, and other Muslim countries in Africa who arrived in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate. In their neighborhood within the walls of their Old City, entered through a green iron gate, nearly all the inhabitants were of African origin. Jamal had a refined stature, a dignity that was evident in his manner, his eyes, and his gestures. He had beautiful hands with long, thin fingers. The district where they lived was more than a neighborhood; it was a genuine community in which all the children played together and relationships, even among adults, were intense and cordial. People considered themselves not merely neighbors but virtually brothers and sisters, like an extended family. Miral's father was one of the most respected people in the neighborhood, a spiritual adviser to many, a wise and patient friend.

They lived in a three-room house whose doorway was framed by fragrant jasmine and a large pomegranate tree. Inside, two steep flights of stairs led to a bright, spacious living room whose floor and walls were covered with rugs. In the middle of the room was a sofa bed where their father now slept, which faced a wooden display cabinet filled with hand-colored drinking glasses that came from all over the Middle East and had been blown by the master glassmakers of Damascus, Marrakesh, and Cairo. They were always perfectly gleaming, for Jamal dusted them every week.

The bedroom, too, was filled with Moroccan rugs and had a low bed covered with pillows. The wrought-iron lamps and colored windowpanes spread a warm light suffused with bluish and reddish tones. The bathroom, though small, had a view of the Old City and a charming mosaic of blue and green tiles. Jamal had taught Miral and Rania that green was the color of Islam, and blue the color of purity, the sky, water, and infinity. One wall was almost entirely occupied by the large sink, which was slightly cracked on one side as a result of a clumsy attempt by Miral to climb onto it a few months before her mother died.

Every time she looked at that nearly imperceptible flaw, Miral could see again, just for a moment, her mother's face.

 

The day Jamal took his two daughters to the orphanage, he woke up earlier than usual. As he gazed down from his bedroom window at the deserted street still illuminated by the uncertain light of streetlamps and the houses with full clotheslines and windowsills crowded with pots of geraniums, the first call to prayer reached his ears from the minaret of the mosque across the way.

Jamal was attached to his girls in different ways. While Miral had conducted herself like a little adult since her mother's death, continuing to get the highest grades in school, Rania seemed more in need of protection. Whenever Rania couldn't sleep, she would go into the living room, where Jamal had made his bed since the death of his wife, and put her arms around him. Only in this way, lying silently beside her father, could the child manage to fall asleep.

But Miral worried Jamal, as well, because she seemed to be afflicted by a deep anxiety. The night before he took them to the orphanage, she woke up bathed in sweat and told him that she had dreamed about her mother again. In her dream she found herself in a tree whose leaves were moving in a gentle wind. She had resolved to keep climbing all the way to the top. Rania was watching her from the ground, smiling and holding her hands up above her head. Her father was sitting on the grass, smoking, and their mother was walking toward the river. With all her might, Miral tightened her legs around the tree trunk and dug her fingers into its rough bark, which scratched her. She climbed until she reached the topmost branch. Then suddenly the wind stopped blowing and everything became silent. Miral looked and smiled at her father, who waved back to her. She could see her sister joyously hopping around the garden, but she was upset because she could no longer see her mother, not along the river or anywhere else.

Jamal tried to console her, saying that it was normal to have bad dreams after losing someone you loved so much. Miral gave him a look that was difficult to fathom, but it was as if his response had not satisfied her and he needed to offer some further explanation. He attributed it to her fear of losing the memory of her mother's features.

His decision to place them at Dar El-Tifel had been difficult and, above all, painful; he would never have wished to be separated from his daughters, especially now that his Nadia was gone. But precisely because of her death, and because his family name was still tainted by his sister's attempted attack a few years earlier, he preferred to have the five-year-old Miral and four-year-old Rania brought up in a more protective environment. He had long known Hind and had personally brought her several children who had been abandoned outside the mosque. Now he was bringing her his own daughters. Hind suggested to him that the school could become a second home for the girls. With this in mind, they decided it would be best to change the girls' family name, and Miral and Rania Shaheen became Miral and Rania Halabi.

T
hat morning Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods were teeming with the usual preparations in the souk. A muffled clamor filled Jamal's head as he set out with his daughters, carrying in his right hand a small suitcase with the girls' personal belongings. Rania clutched his little finger on that side as she walked along, and Miral held on to his left hand. Their father stopped at a stall to buy caramels for them. He knew he would visit them almost every week, but even so, he was uneasy. The children tasted the candy's sweetness. It mingled with the bitterness of departure.

Miral looked around as they began walking. Apart from the vendors in the souk, there seemed to be no one on the streets. After a few steps, however, a flood of neighbors appeared at windows, and children who had been their playmates on sunny afternoons greeted them along the way with flowers and even more candy. Miral sensed that she wouldn't be going home anytime soon. Her father had always managed to avoid answering the question of when she and Rania would return, and Miral had never insisted very much, partly because she didn't want to alarm her sister. Ever since their mother died, Miral had looked upon Rania with different eyes: although Miral was only a year older, she felt that it was her duty to protect her little sister.

After they had walked all the way across the Old City, they stopped at Jafar's, the oldest confectioner's shop in Jerusalem. There they ate a
knafeh
in silence. This pastry, made from a mixture of cheese, butter, durum wheat, and pistachios that had been softened and sweetened with syrup, reminded Miral of the happiest moments of her life, when she and her mother would go to Jafar's shop to pick up
knafeh
for the whole family.

Outside the walls of the Old City, they found themselves standing before an iron gate, on which Miral read, somewhat unsteadily, the words
DAR EL-TIFEL, JERUSALEM, 1948
.

Proceeding through a shady garden, they reached a long drive lined with pine trees. Beyond it was a clearing, and farther on they could glimpse three buildings. “They're decorated in Mudejar style,” Jamal told his girls, never missing an opportunity to teach them something new about the historical or artistic tradition of their heritage.

“Mudejar style,” Miral and Rania repeated solemnly in unison, their voices sad and serious. Not far off, they saw a lawn where some little girls were playing volleyball.

A middle-aged woman wearing a white suit came toward them, smiling cordially. Her gray hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and there was a thin coat of pink lipstick on her lips. She greeted Jamal affectionately and then turned to the girls, stroked their faces, and told them that they could join the other children playing.

Miral reached out to take Rania's hand, but her sister was clinging to her father's arm and wouldn't let go, afraid she would never see him again. She stood frozen at his side, silently pouting. Jamal then took both daughters by the hand to the lawn where the other girls were playing, assuring them that he wasn't leaving right away and had to have a little talk with Hind. Rania stared at her father with suspicious eyes for a moment, but in the end she followed her sister. Out of the corner of her eye, Miral saw her father walking away and then turning to look at them, eyes bright with tears. She had never seen him so miserable. Jamal waved to them, but by then Rania was playing and didn't notice. A soccer ball landed in front of Miral, and she simply stared at it, wishing she could kick it back and somehow return to the days when her mother was there and they all were still together.

 

The school's oldest building, located on the highest point of the hill, overlooking the Old City, housed the classrooms and the administrative offices, including Hind's, a simple room with antique furniture dating back to the period of the British Mandate. On the other side of the playing field stood a more modern building that was built with Sheikh Muhammad bin Jassim Sabah's money and used as a dormitory. At that time, there were already two thousand girls. There, as in the classrooms, Hind had decided that the youngest girls would be assigned to the first floor, where they would live in rooms containing six beds each. The older girls were on the second floor, in rooms with four beds. Finally, the top floor provided single rooms for a few girls in their final year and for the teachers who lived on campus. On the opposite end of the small field was the gymnasium and a little farther down the hill, surrounded by a park, was Hind's residence. As she was getting older, Hind decided that she would move back to one of her grandfather's oldest buildings and would use it as her home. Its spacious terrace looked out over the city, and its white stone walls were almost completely covered with ivy.

That first evening, after dinner in the large cafeteria, a thin teacher with sad eyes accompanied Miral, Rania, and four other little girls to their room. Rania had left her food untouched and never let go of Miral's hand.

Miral noticed that the older girls helped the little ones change into their nightgowns and told them fairy tales to lull them to sleep. Those stories, however, tended to be about other orphans, like themselves. Oliver Twist was a favorite. As Rania listened to one of them, the tears she'd held back all day began to run down her cheeks. Her sister put her to bed, but Rania kept weeping, saying between sobs that they'd lost their mother but she didn't know why they had to lose their father, too.

Miral moved her bed closer to her sister's. As long as they were together, she told Rania, everything would be all right. Then she caressed her little sister's hair and face until she went to sleep. The four other little girls had pushed their beds together, too, making one big bed where they all slept, in that way exorcizing their feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Only Miral couldn't sleep. She thought again about her father walking away down the tree-lined drive and about the stories the older girls had told that evening—sad stories that were perhaps true, just like the story of her own mother, who used to be happy and then one day stopped smiling and disappeared.

 

While Miral adapted quickly to her new situation at Dar El-Tifel, the same could not be said of her sister. Rania was taciturn and wanted always to be with Miral. After the first night, the other girls joined their beds to the sisters' beds and all six of them slept together, clinging to one another. Such gestures of affection were a means of compensating for the lack of physical contact with their mothers.

The relationship between Miral and Rania had always been intense and was a refuge that helped them to get through moments of despondency. Rania depended on Miral, and Miral sometimes felt suffocated by this constant pressure from her little sister, but with each passing day, she realized more clearly how lucky she was to have a sister nearby and a father who came to visit every week. Some of the other girls were completely alone.

The girls with the worst problems were those who knew nothing of their origins, who had not only no relatives but also no idea of who their parents might have been or where they were born. These girls were the gloomiest but also the most aggressive: sometimes physically violent in the schoolyard unable to accept a simple defeat, usually quarreling over things of no importance. Unable to resign themselves to the uncertainty of their past, to live with questions destined to remain unanswered, they tormented themselves and others.

The school had a custom that every evening before going to bed the students would tell one another stories. Most of the girls maintained that their stories were purely fictional or based on the experiences of their friends, but in many cases Miral could detect, in the veil of anguish that settled over their eyes as they spoke, that the stories were their own. Thus she discovered that Lamá, age ten, had been found by the mufti of Jerusalem as an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying at the door of the mosque. Other girls had been picked up while wandering alone in burning villages, staring wideeyed into space. Such girls usually turned out to be the most motivated in the school, inspired to affirm an identity for themselves. During the first month, Miral became accustomed to the sound of the alarm clock, which would ring at six in the morning, and she would slowly get up, go over to the window, and pull the curtain aside. Rubbing her eyes, she would gaze at the Old City: the top half of its walls lit up by the rays of the sun, the bottom half still in shadow, and the low houses packed so densely that they hid the streets that separated them. She would search out her house, which was near the mosque, but her view was blocked by a minaret. She thought about her father, still asleep in his bed, or awake like her, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, wondering why things had turned out this way. In the background, the Mount of Olives, majestic and reassuring, seemed to protect the city; she imagined the city seen from above, looking like one motionless and magnificent ruin.

Gradually Miral grew accustomed to life at the school and to the constant presence of her sister, who followed her everywhere. Hind allowed them to sleep in the same room for the first year, but in the following years, even when they slept in different rooms, Rania would continue to depend on Miral for many things. When the eleven o'clock bell sounded, signaling the day's first recess, Rania would go out to the playground and sit on the bench under a big cedar. In the meantime, Miral would buy their lunch from the woman who came to the school every day with a basket loaded with sandwiches, flatbreads, fruits, and desserts, and then go join her sister. Filling the maternal role, Miral would feed Rania, who despite being younger had a more robust build and therefore looked to be the older of the two.

For their first few months at Dar El-Tifel, Rania did not speak to anyone else, and the teachers were often obliged to call Miral if they wanted to coax a few words from her sister's mouth.

 

After the summer vacation, the previous year's scene was repeated. The difference was that this time Miral and Rania knew perfectly well where their father was taking them. That morning Miral was excited; she knew she was going to leave kindergarten behind and enter the first grade, and that seemed like a major accomplishment. Above all, she couldn't wait to put on her new uniform and change rooms. As soon as they reached the school, she rushed to the seamstress's room; a long line had already formed outside the door. The seamstress took each girl's measurements and altered their uniforms.

Early that afternoon, Miral received her white blouse, green jumper, red cardigan, and black shoes. With great solemnity, she slipped out of her shorts and took off her favorite blue cotton T-shirt. Then she slowly put on her uniform and polished her shoes, which were already on her feet, before proudly admiring her reflection in the mirror and going to show herself to Rania.

The two sisters were no longer assigned to the same room, which made Rania feel uneasy. She envied Miral's uniform and complained that she had to wait another whole year before she could have one of her own. Nevertheless, the headmistress and the other teachers found Rania to be much less melancholy than she had been the year before. Jamal waited until Miral's uniform was ready, and when she came out wearing it, he took a photograph of the two girls, with Hind standing in the center.

 

That was the year Miral's fascination with history began. Maisa, a short, stout woman with thick eyeglasses and disheveled curly hair, would narrate the horrors of the French Revolution or the Lebanese Civil War as if she were reading from novels or fairy tales. The entire class held its breath during her lectures, waiting to see how the story would turn out. Nobody spoke a word as Maisa, pacing in front of the classroom, unrolled maps and pointed out distant cities or displayed photographs of leaders and bloody battles. She rarely used the name Palestine, speaking more often about the
ummah
, the great pan-Arab nation; about the Egyptian president Nasser; and about the Ottoman Empire. Miral distilled a basic principle from her teacher's explanations—that history is always written by the winners.