Free Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat

kite’s ball of string, steering it right and left the way my father steered a truck. Muhammad carried the kite, ran with it, then let it glide on the wind. The kite zigzagged and quickly took to the sky. We all ran, screaming encouragements to make it rise higher. It did.
    Finally my brothers let me hold the kite string for a moment. The soaring kite was heavier than I had expected. It was stronger than I was and pulled me forward. But I pulled the string back. It was a wonderful new feeling. I was thrilled to show my brothers that they had been right to
trust me to share in their games. Holding that string, I felt as though I owned a piece of the sky.
    I returned the string to Basel and continued to gaze upward. The kite held us in its spell, our heads back, mouths wide open, eyes dancing with every flicker, when suddenly we felt the earth shake under our feet and heard a strange sound. It was loud and thudding, as though someone were knocking from inside the earth. “Hazzah ardeyyah!” Basel said. “An earthquake!” We looked down at our feet but saw nothing. Then we glanced up the road. There was the source of the earth-shaking noise.
    From the mouth of the gravel road emerged a long line of Israeli soldiers. They moved in pairs, shoulder to shoulder, stomping forcefully, chanting at the top of their lungs. And they carried guns.
    Where were they going? There were no other homes on that road. Were they coming for us?
    Basel let go of the kite; he gave it to the wind, and we bolted for home.
    â€œHide!” shouted Mother. We pushed our Formica cupboard up to the door and pressed against it with our bodies as the noise got closer and closer, until it was surrounding us, engulfing our home.
    When we peeked out the window, the entire length of the road was a blur of khaki interrupted only by the white and blue of the Israeli flag. Now we could see the soldiers, and we knew that if any one of them turned his head, he could see us, too. But none did. They moved in the same direction, like one long dragon, hundreds of heads covered
with half-watermelon khaki helmets strapped under hundreds of chins, and hundreds of stomping feet, all wearing high leather boots.
    Reaching the hill, the soldiers spread out. We glued ourselves to our window to watch every move they made. They dug trenches, hid inside them, pulled up green thornbushes by the roots, put them on their helmets, raised their heads, shot in the air, hid again. A bullet came near our house; it whistled and whizzed as a stone repelled it. Land Rovers created clouds of dust while a helicopter hovered above the soldiers.
    Had the fighting started again? I put on my shoes and laced them tightly. I had just turned four, and I needed no one to tell me what to do when I heard the sounds of war.

Jerusalem
    For three weeks, we were unable to go outside our house. The soldiers came to the hill in the morning and left in the late afternoon. They set up cardboard people and fired at them for hours. The sounds of the bullets filled my mind. I could hear bullets being fired long after the soldiers were gone. I even heard bullets in my sleep.
    Mother complained that spending all day and night with us in a tiny room was giving her gray hair even though she was only twenty-four. “Gray hair? Show us,” we said. That made her even more furious. But it was our father, at forty-four, who really had gray hair, and a few white hairs, too.
    Father said white hair meant that a person was wise. His own white hairs clearly allowed him to know many things, including what the Israeli soldiers were doing around our house. He called it munawarat , training for combat. The
soldiers were also conquering the territory, studying the hill in order to fight well on it, he explained.
    But that made no difference to Mother. She was becoming more and more impatient, even hitting us if we went near the windows. Terrified of stray bullets, she complained about the windows so much