Mounif, who is three years older than I, was in Class Four, and he took me with him, the linen ‘case’—containing my exercise book and one pencil — in my hand. No sooner had we separated in the school corridor and I’d entered the classroom than silent tears flowed down my cheeks. I sat down in the last seat. I felt afraid of all the children. I felt as though I was in the village guesthouse in the middle of all the grown-ups, not in the Class One classroom. When the teacher came in for the first period, I went up to him, crying, and told him, “Take me to Class Four, Sir.”
“Where?”
“To my big brother.”
“To whom?”
“To my brother Mounif.”
“Go and sit down in your seat.”
I went, still crying. The teacher left and came back with Mounif. The moment I saw him I forgot my tears and felt happy. Mounif hugged me, wiped away the tears with his fingers, and sat down close by my side.
“I want to stay with you. I don’t like this school.”
“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. We’ll go home together after the last bell.”
That is how I became a pupil in Class One at the Deir Ghassanah school.
The terrifying inspector came, of course. I ducked my head and disappeared beneath the desk, as agreed. Toward the end of the year, the inspector came again and again I dived straight under the desk and held my breath. The plan would have succeeded if the inspector hadn’t asked the children a question — I don’t remember exactly what now. Not one child raised his finger to answer and when he called on one of them to do so, he answered wrongly. I was almost dying of fury because I knew the answer but was forbidden to appear. Suddenly, I popped up from my hiding place, stretched myself to my full height, raised my hand as far as it would go, and cried out, “Me, sir! Me, sir!”
Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti was speechless.
The inspector heard my answer and said, “Bravo, my boy. Correct. But why were you underneath the desk?”
I looked at him and then at Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti standing next to him and said, “Because I’m too young.”
The children laughed and even the inspector laughed, but Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti didn’t laugh. I sat down. As soon as the inspector had gone, the teacher came back alone, called me out, and started rubbing my right ear between his finger and thumb and shaking my head from side to side.
“What have you gone and done?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Go back to your seat. I’ll handle it.”
He did handle it, though I don’t know how things were smoothed over. In any case, I continued, took the exam, and came top of the class. Abu Marwan went to my parents and congratulated my mother and father, saying, “Take good care of him. God protect him.”
“When the village stopped me from continuing my education, Abu Marwan, I couldn’t take them on. But now the education of my children has become my whole life.”
“May God punish those who were behind it. It wasn’t just you they wronged, Umm Mounif. They wronged all the girls of the village.”
Abu Marwan was the first communist in Deir Ghassanah. He held what in those days were called ‘progressive’ ideas but was a lone voice crying out in a village of massive locks, confident in its darkness, which could defeat him but which he could not defeat. My mother wasn’t ready for marriage because she was still under fourteen. She didn’t know who my father was when they mentioned his name in front of her as a possible groom. In fact, her young heart had been bewitched since she was nine by a boy, a relative of hers, who was somewhat older than she. He used to bring her nice gifts of books with colored pictures and drawings and encouraged her to go to school and made her memorize lines from old poetry. She called her attachment to him true love and never forgot it or tired of recalling it, sometimes as a love story, sometimes as a childish crush, and sometimes as a matter of admiration and need; in her lively imagination he remained a beautiful dream that had been shattered. The boy disappeared from her life the moment they engaged her to my father. He left Palestine to continue his education and returned to marry another woman; he died decades ago at an early age. An entire life has passed since these events, and now, at almost ninety, she still remembers how happy he made her childhood, even though she was a poor orphan, and tells us, often with invisible tears in her eyes, her story, down to the most precise details, as though it were happening to her now; in fact, she demands that I write it down.
She says: “It wasn’t just me they wronged. They wronged your father too. He didn’t know me and had never seen me before in his life. They said, ‘So-and-so is for so-and-so’ and that was that. It wasn’t your father’s fault. They wronged us both. Take it as my testament to you all: ‘Treat your daughters fairly.’ Nobody should impose their will on anybody else when it comes to marriage.”
She no longer wants anything from the story but the story itself, especially now that, except for her, none of the actors is still living. I hear her calling down death on those who prevented her from going to school.
“They died long ago, Mother.”
To which she replies, “I wish they could die twenty times.”
We return from the school and when we reach the square again, someone comes and tells us that lunch is ready at Umm Talal’s. Marwan al-Barghouti phones and I tell him we’re at Deir Ghassanah.
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“You’ll find a splendid lunch waiting for you.”
Tamim, as it happens, has been dreaming of eating musakhan and his hopes are not disappointed. His grandmother introduced him to musakhan in Amman, though always with the reminder that “musakhan’s different in our village” and “real musakhan is the type made in the clay oven,” meaning the musakhan of Deir Ghassanah.
We take our seats around the lunch table in the garden. A whole chicken per person on a large loaf of bread coated with olive oil and then roasted, the chicken split open down the middle, basted in oil, roasted, and then covered in sumac, with lots of minced onions fried in olive oil piled on it and on the bread. The bread has been baked on the ruzuf (hot stones the size of large walnuts) of the clay oven, covered with large quantities of fried onions and sumac, placed particularly in the hollows made in the loaf by the stones. Next to this is a bowl of buttermilk and another of finely chopped green salad as well as tahini and chili peppers. A glass of hot tea with mint or sage comes as a necessary finishing touch to an amazing meal of this type.
Anis says to Tamim jokingly, noticing how much pleasure he is taking in the food, “Don’t eat too much! You’ve still got the poetry evening and I’m afraid you’ll fall asleep.”
We go to the square.
I don’t know where the villagers have found all the plastic chairs, which they have set out in rows. Together we climb the steps to the village guesthouse.
I remind the audience of my last encounter with them, two years before in this very square, and say that tonight I am back, bringing my son with me for an evening of two poets. I read them a number of my new poems and then ask their permission to introduce Tamim to them myself.
“This young man, born in Egypt of an Egyptian mother, who has spent all his life away from you and who saw Deir Ghassanah for the first time only three hours ago, will read poems about Palestine, some written in classical Arabic and some in the Palestinian dialect, and he’ll sing country songs — the ‘ataba, mijana, and dal‘ona. If you think it was his Palestinian father who put Palestine in his heart and mind, you should know that it was his Egyptian mother, Radwa Ashour, who made it her business to nurture his Palestinian identity out of her love for Palestine, so allow me to send her a greeting from here and tell her that Tamim is now reading his poetry in the square of Deir Ghassanah.”