Jamal, our Hebrew teacher in grade school, never tired of telling us about the fruit pickers. We spent more time hearing him talk about fruit picking than about Hebrew. He kept yelling that we’d wind up as fruit pickers. “Like donkeys,” he’d say. “You’ll leave home at six in the morning and get back late at night.”
He happened to like me, the teacher Jamal. I was the best student in the class, and I did what I could to keep from becoming a fruit picker. But I was convinced nothing would help. My grandma had worked as a fruit picker, my father was a fruit picker, and I figured I’d become one too. I felt sorry for Father and hoped that the teacher Jamal didn’t know he worked at fruit picking too, leaving the house at 6 A.M. and returning late at night. Father had been the best student in his class too, and he had the nicest handwriting.
Unlike Father, Grandma talked a lot about her work as a fruit picker. She told us about Abu Ziad, our neighbor, who used to take the neighborhood widows in his pickup and let them off at the Mehadrin groves, where they’d alternate between picking oranges and picking pistachio nuts. She worked barefoot and liked to show us the cracked and hardened soles of her feet as proof. “Morning to night,” she always told us. “Rain or shine, day in and day out, for one shilling a day.” Grandma did all this for her children, but especially for Father, her only son, so he could study. But he destroyed it all and broke her heart. “It wasn’t the fruit picking that finished off my legs and my back, but the grief your father gave me. God bless him, I have no one in the world besides him.”
My grandmother started picking fruit after her husband was killed in the war. She was left on her own with four daughters and one son, who was two months old when he lost his father. Grandma always tells people how eagerly her husband had waited for a son, and when she tells this story she always takes the edge of her head scarf and dabs at a tear in her left eye. She was a hero in those days. When the Jews bombed Tira, she put her baby on a stack of wheat and bent over him. “I told myself it would be better if the shell hit me and not my son. As if it would have made any difference. It would probably have killed both of us anyway.”
I tried to picture my grandma younger, but I couldn’t. I always saw her as an old woman, just the way I knew her, with her faltering legs and her white dress, lying on top of that crying baby who didn’t know he had no father, and I could picture the shells falling beside her in the wheat fields of Tira, and how only by some miracle she wasn’t hurt. She gets up, grabs the baby, runs a little farther (until the plane comes back to drop some more bombs), and falls to the ground again. My grandma always says that if war breaks out we mustn’t stay inside the house because it’ll collapse on top of us. And we mustn’t turn on the light. We’d better hide among the trees.
I loved picturing the wheat fields that my grandma used to talk about. I loved picturing the baidar too, the silo, and the people gathered there like it was an important holiday, tossing the wheat in the air with their pitchforks, so the grain would fall in one heap and the chaff would fly in the wind and form a separate one.
They used to be rich once. Three camels, carrying all sorts of valuable goods, would take the wheat and the vegetables from their fields in el-Bassah back to the house. They’d paid a shilling for each camel. Grandpa and Grandma had cows and horses too, and a trained dog that always sat on the balcony, to protect the poultry from the cats, and never tried to go indoors.
My grandpa was very smart. He could read and write, and he had a nice handwriting. But the schools back then weren’t like the ones we have today. Otherwise, he would have studied medicine and become a doctor. Grandma says she could have become an engineer if they’d sent her off to study, but girls didn’t go to school in her day. We always believed her when she said this. We thought she’d have made a good engineer. And the truth is, even though she never studied anything, she was a skillful card player, could do math — addition and subtraction — and knew where each plot of land ended and the next one began.
My grandpa, who had a little mustache, like he has in the only picture of him in Grandma’s room, was a hero, a strong man who had fought against the Jews, but he died at the entrance to his own home just as he was picking some grapes. All he said was “Allah” and fell over. He’d taken a bullet. Grandma didn’t understand why he’d fallen.
“I told him, Get up, ya zalameh, come on, get up. What’s the matter with you?” She thought he was just pretending.
Grandma says Grandpa is a shahid, and there are anemones growing in the spot where he bled. She says Abu Ziad was eaten by worms when he died, but they didn’t go near my grandfather. That’s how it is: A shahid’s body doesn’t rot. It stays just the way it was.
The Aden Hafla
My father was the first person in our neighborhood to buy a VCR. It was big and heavy, made of metal. The cassettes were different back then, short and thick. When we first got it, all our relatives dropped by. They came to congratulate us and brought bags of rice and big packets of coffee, and Father would put on The Black Samurai and Amar Akbar Anthony, an Indian film starring Amitabh Bachchan, about three brothers who are separated at birth after a bad guy kills their father. They’re united in the end, and they get even with all the bad guys.
My father once brought home a movie called The Aden Hafla. We watched it over and over and over. The whole family would sit in front of the TV, watching it together. Grandma would sit closest, because her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. There were children with kaffiyehs and pistols, and musicians, and singers and poets. We knew the songs by heart. There was a little girl who sang her father a song before he went off to war, and Grandma would always wipe away a tear. Everyone would make the V-sign with their fingers before they got up to perform.
Father’s friends came specially to watch the film. They cracked sunflower seeds and peered at the screen. Father always laughed at them when they didn’t recognize someone. “What’s with you? That’s Abu-Jihad,” or “You don’t know who Mahmoud Darwish is?!” Once this friend of his thought that Al-Fakahani was the name of a grocer in Beirut, and Father made him leave.
At night he’d give the cassette to Grandma, and she’d hide it in her chicken coop. My mother couldn’t stand Grandma’s chickens, with the dirt they made, and the noise. There was a major battle between them because of those chickens, and they stopped talking to each other for a pretty long time. Me, I was all for Grandma’s chickens. One day my mother burned down the small coop with the Aden Hafla tape inside. Father got mad and stormed off to play cards.
The next day, Father didn’t come home from work. There were no phones back then, and Mother and Uncle Bashir took the Agrexco jeep and went looking for him. All my aunts arrived and started crying. I could hear them talking about fliers, about Land Day, and about detention.
Grandma spent the whole night on a straw mat under the eucalyptus trees in front of the house, crying and waiting. Mother didn’t come home either; Grandma said she was with Father but didn’t say where that was. The next day, my brothers and I stayed home from school. I sat on the mat under the tree with Grandma. She kept swaying. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she fixed them on the farthest point down the road. Whenever a car would drive up, she’d stop swaying and stiffen. She followed each car with her eyes until it had gone by, and then she’d go back to swaying and staring.
Mother wanted to cut down the eucalyptus trees outside our house. She said they made a lot of dirt, and the entrance to the house looked ugly because of them. Grandma said that cutting them down would be a disaster, because eucalyptus trees contain a wali, a holy spirit who guards the home and the village. She told us how Grandpa’s father, Sheikh Ahmad, used to stand beside the eucalyptus trees and talk with the rebels in Jaffa and in the mountains. He would warn them against the Jews, telling them where they were hiding and which route was safest.