Read Mornings in Jenin for Free Online

parched sky.
    “Stop here,” said the loudspeaker god. “Bags here. Tomorrow you come collect them. Leave everything, jewelry and money. I shoot. Understand?”
    Go. Stop. Understand? Return. Tomorrow. Safe . Yehya could hold on to some words. Yousef held onto his father. Dalia on to Ismael, whose scar was still red but healing. Perhaps there was hope. So they dropped their belongings—the golden jewelry that had weighed Dalia down on her wedding day, food, clothes, and blankets. Basima’s pruning shears. Why did I bring those? Dalia wondered.
    Darweesh stripped Fatooma of the sacks saddled on her back and laid their contents next to the gold and other valuables. “The horse! Leave the horse,” a soldier ordered. Not the loudspeaker god, but his disciple, surely.
“Please!” Darweesh had no pride left.

Fatooma was worth begging for, but the begging irritated the soldier. “Shut up!”

“Please!”

“Shut up!”

“Please.”

    The soldier fired his pistol twice. One shot between Fatooma’s eyes, on her white streak. She fell instantly dead. The other through Darweesh’s chest. His pregnant wife, Basima’s niece who had been betrothed to Hasan, shrieked, screaming by her bleeding husband as people gathered to carry Darweesh a distance away, where someone produced a jar of honey to prevent infection and bandaged him with strips of his own clothing. The bullet lodged in Darweesh’s spine, condemning him to motionlessness, to a life plagued by unsightly bedsores, a life tormented by the burden of his wife’s cheerless fate, bound to a husband who lived only from the chest up. And even from the chest up, he lived on memories of horses and wind.

    Panic rose from the shots and the birds of terror were supplanted by clouds that made Yehya hope for rain. It wasn’t the season yet, but his trees needed water. At times rain had been everything in Ein Hod, other times it was merely precious. Then he saw his son Darweesh and nothing had meaning. Rain be damned. Yehya dropped the basket from his back and began to cry for that strong boy of his, that impressive rider and beloved son.
    Dalia still hadn’t caught up. The panicked throngs had separated her from Hasan, but she could still see the top of his kaffiyeh ahead of her. He was taller than most men; she’d always liked that. God, what is happening? The clouds passed as suddenly as they came. The sun stung like a scorpion. Dust was high, cactus low, and Dalia thought of water.
    In an instant .
    One instant, six-month-old Ismael was at her chest, in her motherly arms. In the next, Ismael was gone.
    An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history. It was an infinitesimal flash of time that Dalia would revisit in her mind, over and over for many years, searching for some clue, some hint of what might have happened to her son. Even after she became lost in an eclipsed reality, she would search the fleeing crowd in her mind for Ismael.
    “Ibni! Ibni!” My son, my son, Dalia screamed, her eyes bulging in search of her son. Dust at her face, cactus at her feet. “Ibni! Ibni!” She scanned the ground, looked up, and Hasan’s tall figure was not there. “Ibni! Ibni!” Some people tried to help her but gunshots tolled and Dalia was shoved along. Is this a dream? Nothing seemed real because it was unbelievable. She looked at her arms again to be sure. Maybe he’s crawled into my thobe . She felt her chest. No Ismael . Her son was gone.
    Dalia stopped and so did time. She screamed like she hadn’t when her father burned her hand. A loud, penetrating, consuming, unworldly scream from a mother’s deepest agony. From the most profound desire to reverse time, just a few minutes. If there is a God, he heard Dalia’s wail. Hasan ran to her and searched the crowd as desperately as Dalia had. Afraid for his older child, Hasan held Yousef close as he looked for Ismael. Yousef squeezed his father tighter, afraid to speak, and the three of