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.
Two days later, my father was released from detention. They’d picked him up at a roadblock on his way to a demonstration in Taiyiba. They’d searched the car and found the fliers. With the stubble on his cheeks, he looked very different. Grandma hugged him and kept on crying. “When will you learn, yamma, ya habibi?”
Cap Guns
I’d always known there would be a war. When I was little, my brothers and I dug trenches in the grove of fruit trees behind our house. We dug with our hands, which were small. We couldn’t dig very deep, because pretty soon we hit ground that was too hard, and our attempts to soften it with water didn’t help. We wanted to dig large trenches around the entire house, so we could hide there when the shooting started. Trenches that we could stand up straight in, and only Grandma and Father and Mother would have to bend over. We filled plastic bags with sand and stacked them to form a wall, just the way Grandma said they did in the war, but the bags didn’t last. They fell apart within days.
Once Father took us up to another village, Ya‘bad, to meet some people who worked with him in the packinghouse. They had a car with a green license plate, and Father said that was how the Jews marked them. The war in Ya‘bad was very real, not like the one in Grandma’s stories. There were bullet holes in the walls of Father’s friends’ homes. It really scared me, because it had never occurred to me that a bullet could actually make a hole through the wall and get inside the house. They had green iron doors with holes you could look through and see the living room.
Father said it wouldn’t happen to us, because we were different. We believed him, because the people in Ya‘bad talked differently, and also because our doors were made of wood.
Sometimes Father and Mother would load the four of us in the backseat, and we’d make the trip almost as far as Ya‘bad, and then we’d go back home without seeing our friends. Halfway there, Father would turn around, swear, and say that we couldn’t get through to Ya‘bad that day because of a roadblock. He’d say that the people in Ya‘bad and their children were heroes. They weren’t spineless nothings like us.
My brothers and I were constantly playing war games. We’d be at it every day. At first, we used swords — I mean sticks — like in the movies about the wars of the Prophet Mohammed. I was Hamzah, the Prophet’s uncle. He was very strong in the movies, and he had a sword with two blades. He would fight against ten infidels at once and kill them all. My older brother was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and my two younger brothers were the khalifs Omar and Utman, the Prophet’s deputies. Nobody could be the Prophet Mohammed. Grandma said if we did that we would go right to hell. They never showed the Prophet Mohammed in the movies either, only his camel and a halo of light above.
Later we started using pistols, like in the film by Omar el-Mukhtar in Libya and the one about Jamila Bukhird in Algiers. On ‘id el-fitr and ‘id el-adha, my father always took us to Tulkarm to buy us pistols. No child in our village had pistols as beautiful as ours: made of iron, almost real. Before the holiday, when our grocery store still sold cap guns, we’d play the real thing. When we ran out of ammunition, we’d shout “Bang, bang!” but whoever did the shooting had to pull the trigger too. Otherwise it didn’t count and you weren’t dead.
When we were growing up, Father would bring us Rambo and commando movies, and that’s when we moved to heavy artillery. Our war games went out of the house and into the grove, spreading over the whole neighborhood. My older brother was the commander of one group, and I took the other. He never won, unless he cheated or unless one of the soldiers in my group abandoned his post and went off to pee.
When we were older we shifted to automatic weapons, big guns made of wood with a magazine and a trigger and a piece of string for slinging the weapon across your shoulder. We made everything ourselves. First we called all the guns Bren, a word we’d taken from Grandma’s stories. But after watching Azit the Paratrooper Dog we started calling them Uzi. There was one that could shoot down seven Arabs at once, and my father got all worked up and told us it was an M-16 and could shoot sixty bullets a second. After that, no matter what weapon we had, we’d call it an M-16, even though none of us could shout bang sixty times in a second. So we switched from bang to brrrrr. I called my group Fedayeen and my older brother called his group Fedayeen too, because Father had always told us the Fedayeen were the best.
One day Father shouted to us to come home. We were in the middle of a game, and I was just about to kill my older brother, but Father shouted so loud we had no choice. We got the two younger ones from their positions and scurried home, because if Father lost it he was capable of hitting us. When we got home, he turned the volume up on the TV till it couldn’t go any higher. Mother was crying, and my grandmother, who never cried, sounded like she was about to cry too.
“Look,” my father ordered us, and kept saying, “Yal‘an Allah, yal‘an Rabhoom, yal‘an rab Allah who made them.” Grandma tore at her clothing and keened. My older brother and I were relieved nobody had hit us; we thought Father must have brought home a new film he wanted us to see. The next day we went back to our war games. My brother called his group Sabra and I called mine Chatilla.
Scouts
Once, I got up on a stage in a kaffiyeh. I must have been in the third grade at the time. A man with an accent showed up at school with my father. Father left, and the man with the accent took me in his car to a house I’d never seen before. A pretty house, big, with enormous sofas and lots of potted plants and plastic flowers. He took out a piece of paper with sentences in Arabic that I didn’t understand and said I’d be opening the Jafra Festival that evening. He asked me to memorize the sentences and taught me how to make the V-sign with my fingers.
That night they put the kaffiyeh on me and placed me up on a stage with some musicians. I recited my lines, which had lots of references to wattan (homeland) in them. My voice was shaking, and I was very stiff. I’d never seen so many people, all looking at me and listening to me. When I finished, I walked off the stage with my fingers in a V, and everyone applauded. My father was waiting for me backstage, and he smiled as I ran toward him to hide. The man with the accent smiled too and told me something I couldn’t make out. Father said I was good.