Free Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

tobacco of his olive-wood pipe. We had meager possessions and scarce necessities. I never knew a playground nor swam in the ocean, but my childhood was magical, enchanted by poetry and the dawn. I have never known a place as safe as his embrace, my head nestled in the arch of his neck and stalwart shoulders. I have never known a more tender time than the dawn, coming with the smell of honey apple tobacco and the dazzling words of Abu-Hayyan, Khalil Gibran, al-Maarri, Rumi. I did not always understand what they wrote, but their verses were hypnotic and lyrical. Through them, I felt my father’s passions, his losses, his heartaches, and his loves. He passed all of that to me. This great gift from Baba was something no one could take away. And decades later, in the bleak early hours of a Pennsylvania February, the words of Gibran’s haunting rhythms and the memory of Baba’s soft baritone would be my only thread of solace.

NINE

    June in the Kitchen Hole

    1967

    THEN CAME JUNE OF 1967. The hot month of pretty things and no school. I was meandering in the abandon of childhood, one month before my twelfth birthday.
    Not to be outdone by Lamya, our friend with a monkey’s capacity for cartwheels and flips, Huda and I had resolved to execute the perfect somersault. We were practicing in the soft clearing near the peach orchard, west of Jenin.
    “You call that a cartwheel?”
    “Let’s see you try, Amal!”
    I did and landed flat on my back.
    “Pathetic,” Huda snickered.
    “Oh God!” I moaned. “My leg! I’m really hurt.”
    “Get up . . . come on. I know you’re pretending.” Huda’s voice spiked with concern. “Amal. Amal. Oh, my God!”
    I erupted with laughter and Huda’s alarm turned to irritation.
    “That’s not funny, Amal!” she yelled. “Anyway, you still can’t even do a cartwheel, much less a somersault.” She knew how to make me stop laughing.
    “Neither can you!”
    “I’m not the one trying to outdo Lamya.”
    It was true. Huda just liked to play, but with me, everything was a competition.
    “Want to practice again later?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Let’s go climb Old Lady.”
    Old Lady was a fifteen-hundred-year-old olive tree with serpentine arms that twisted into the air like Samson’s locks bursting from the center of a grazing pasture. Fruit dangled from hundreds of knobby little twigs on an enormous misshapen trunk, which was also a resting spot for local shepherds.
    Baba once told me that no one owned Old Lady. “This old girl was here long before any of us, and she’ll be here long after we’re gone. How can you own that, habibti?”
    I loved it when my father called me habibti, my beloved.
    “No one can own a tree,” he continued. “It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”
    I asked Huda what she thought Baba meant.
    “Your baba always says strange stuff. Haj Salem says he reads too much. Yesterday I heard Haj Salem tell your brother to go pull your father’s nose out of his books and drag him to the Beit Jawad coffeehouse to smoke a hooka with him and Ammo Jack O’Malley.”
    Ammo Jack was a heavyset man with a cluttered laugh that seemed to rumble from untuned bass chords in his big heart. He had a full head of white hair, usually rumpled and unbarbered. His equally thick facial hair was yellow-stained by a long liaison with Lucky Strikes and occasional hooka pipes. His UN job was to administer the schools and clinics and he rarely visited his office, choosing instead the hooka-puffing company of Haj Salem at Beit Jawad’s.

    We climbed Old Lady’s back, swung and dangled from her limbs, balanced on her neck, and finally rested on her belly, where her trunk split into three main branches.
    “Is there anything left of the nail polish?” Huda asked, inspecting the chipped red paint