Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

patted my hand softly, maybe lovingly. Then I left her, again. Huda and I found a deck of cards in the pantry and invented games with improvised rules. Sometimes we sat silently in a corner, hypnotized by the rhythm of Mama’s murmur and the slow swaying of her body as she prayed on the floor for hours on end. We combed and braided one another’s hair and started to talk about what we had lived through. Eventually, we cried.
    Little Samer banged on the metal door. My head was already hanging out the window, and our neighbor, Samirah, hung her head from the window next to mine.
    “Amal,” Samer called to me, “Yousef is alive!”
    Samirah, her hair wild and eyes still full of sleep, asked about her brother. “What about Farook?”
    But Samer had already moved on, his little legs sprinting. By then other children from the camp had joined him, and they ran in a growing pack, like stampeding little banshees. I pulled my head inside to wake Mama, but she was already coming toward me.
    “What’s happening?”
    “Samer Haitham says Yousef is naked.”
    “What?”
    “Yousef is alive.”
    “Allaho akbar! Where is my son?”
    “I think the peach orchard.”
    “Is he with your father?” She asked the question foremost in my mind.
    Mama and I were outside in no time. Her favorite scarf was tightly wrapped on her head, its hems pouring down her shoulders. That scarf had been a present from Baba years ago when he got his first pay as a janitor at the UNRWA school for refugee boys in our camp. Now yellowed by time, it had been white with ornate stitching along its border. When Mama’s body finally caught up to her mind, which had departed the world soon after the 1967 war, I kept that scarf, and I still have it, tucked safely in a small box that holds what remains to me from my family.
    But on that fortieth day, all I wanted was to see Baba. Nothing else mattered. Nothing less would heal my wound but to lie in the safety of his embrace and hear him whisper that everything was going to be fine.
    By the time a small crowd of people started to form, it was clear that, indeed, some of the men were returning to the camp. Women started their ululating zaghareet and chanted, “Allaho akbar.” I knew Yousef was among them, but there was no mention of Baba.
    I waited in the chaotic anxiety of those endless moments before the men arrived. The longer I could not make out Baba’s figure in the distance, the greater my heart’s fear of the unbearable. With fatiguing will, I held back an urge to cry and climbed onto the flat roof of an intact building for a clear view.
    Looking out at the new landscape of hastily built Israeli watchtowers, I felt years crammed into weeks, a terrible dream with no end. The earthen taste of demise pervaded, and those days entrenched themselves in my memory as particles of bloodied dust and the putridly sweet scent of rotting life and scorched soil. We moved but went nowhere. We looked, but reality blurred our vision. We inhaled and exhaled the dust of carnage, but we were not breathing. As the crowd grew larger, I watched from the roof in the silence of my private upheaval. We were refugees, all of us. Those who had fled had become refugees once again, in another human junkyard dotting Israel’s brief history. And those of us who had remained became prisoners in Jenin.
    Now our waiting was for freedom. The original hopes to return home became pleas for elemental rights. Before, we had longed to see Haifa, Yaff a, Lydda, Lod. Now it was a mortal risk to step into the fresh air. Gone were the days of family trips to Tulkarem and Ramallah. Jerusalem, too, was gone. “They burned Jerusalem; may God burn them, too,” came a woman’s voice in a context that I no longer recall.
    Huda climbed next to me on the roof, where I stood searching the distance for Baba.

    Our terror in the kitchen hole had only strengthened the bond between Huda and me. She possessed a tenderness and loyalty that yielded to me in