She let out a shrill shriek of joy.
“What’s this about, Auntie?” I’d asked her. “Who are you screeching for?”
“Hasn’t Walid returned from exile?” she’d replied, and everyone in Abu Hatim’s house had laughed.
When we got back to Jamil’s house, his mother began to tell her favorite story, which Jamil said she told only to favored guests. It was a true story, which no defect in the hard disk could confuse or influence the details of.
“When I still lived in the house that the Jews took in ’48, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam used to pray among the people. It was he who taught the neighbors to pray, he taught us all. He would stand in front, and we would be behind. We, the women, were always at the back. He taught them to pray. I was in the Islamic school. I saw his daughter Maymana at school. I was five or six years old. Once she was wearing black. I asked her, ‘Maymana, why are you wearing black?’ She said to me, ‘Say: I wish the Jews were dead.’ So I repeated, ‘I wish the Jews were dead.’ ‘Say: I wish the British were dead.’ ‘I wish the British were dead,’ I replied. I repeated whatever she said. I was young. Whatever she said to me, I would say as well. Later, I asked her, ‘Why did you say, I wish the Jews and British were dead?’ She was a strong girl. ‘Because they killed my father,’ she told me, without a single tear falling from her eyes.”
Umm Jamil fell silent and wiped the tears from her eyes with the edge of her white kerchief. Jamil continued with the story of Maymana—the daughter of Sheikh al-Qassam—as she grew older, and her name grew with her: ‘daughter of the Martyr al-Qassam.’ He told how, with extraordinary bravery, she had stood up in the first Arab women’s conference to be held for Palestine in 1938. She was the women’s delegations’ spokeswoman. She praised her heroic father, and with her head raised to the heavens said, “Praise be to God, not once but twice, who has honored me with the martyrdom of my father, strengthened me through his death, and not shamed me through the humiliation of my homeland and the surrender of my nation.”
Umm Jamil picked up the thread again:
“It was dreadful, they killed him and took him away in a karra, a cart pulled by a donkey. They took him right away and buried him. They killed him, al-Qassam, in Haifa. I saw his body with my own eyes, laid out on the cart. The whole of Haifa got drunk then.”
At the end of our evening—which lasted until just before midnight—Julie and I retired to the bedroom that our hosts had allocated us. Umm Jamil’s stories had helped keep us awake, and now I couldn’t sleep, for I remembered our appointment with Jinin in Jaffa. I took Jinin’s pages out of my little bag, sat down at a table in the room, and started to read a new chapter of Filastini Tays, to the whisper of the waves in the sea nearby. Julie, who was exhausted from our travels, was unable to stay awake and dozed off instantly.
That morning in Gaza, Mahmoud Dahman rested his head on the edge of his mother’s grave, which he had found after a long absence. He stretched his legs out in front of him. He looked at the dewdrops gathering on the edge of the grave, and on the leaves of the fig tree his grandfather had planted long before Mahmoud’s father had planted him in his mother’s belly. He and his siblings had called their grandfather’s tree Mas‘ud. It had an enormous trunk, twisted like his grandfather’s emaciated body in his last days, when he was scarcely alive.
After he had asked seven times for God’s mercy on him, and his sons and their mother had done the same, Mahmoud’s father had described his own father and enumerated his virtues, saying:
“He prayed the dawn prayer under the fig tree so as to be close to heaven, only separated from it by the twigs and branches of a blessed tree mentioned in the Noble Quran. When he had finished his last prostration, and bowed down, and repeated his salaams—‘Peace be upon you and the mercy of God . . . Peace be upon you and the mercy of God’—he got up, with the remains of prayer in his mouth, and his lips drew near to the fruit on the tree. He ate like someone eating figs in heaven. He used to water his tree with olive oil and manure it with thyme. He would smell their scents in the green figs, whose color was bright as the summer dawn, and his chest would open wide as the gate of divine mercy. ‘Thyme is blessed, my children!’ he would say. And anyone who heard him would repeat after him, ‘Praise be to God, who has made for us in this world figs, and olives, and thyme.’ And I would add to the prayer: ‘And bread from the oven, father.’ And my father would laugh.”
*
Mahmoud wiped his face with his hands, steeped in dew and memories. He recited the Fatiha for his mother’s soul, his head still resting on the side of her grave. His lifelong dream had been to rest his head on her shoulder, strong as the concrete of her tomb, but he had been too afraid. He had loved her a lot, but had been scared of her, too. Safiya had been strong. She’d had black eyes, hawk-like and angry for no reason by day, while in the darkness of the night they’d been like owl’s eyes as they watched everyone sleeping. She’d had a Roman nose, like the noses of the ancient statues of that empire.
In their youth, Mahmoud and his brother Awni were often rude about their mother in her absence. They often agreed
