Free Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat Page A

that I no longer knew whether it was a good or a bad thing for a house to have them.
    She also tried to stop us from playing war. But we liked our pretend wars. We imitated the soldiers, pointing our fingers or pointing bananas, spoons, or slippers at one another and making the sounds of shooting. Acting injured, we swayed and landed on our backs. We pretended we were dead for a moment, got up, and started the sounds of make-believe shooting again.
    Mother did not seem to be mad at the soldiers who were shooting real bullets. Instead, she was mad at us! She cried when we talked back to her and shouted that we wanted a place outside to play. She cried while she nursed Maha, changed our clothes, and cooked our meals. If I asked her why she was crying, she would impatiently say it was onion that made her cry, even if she had no onions near her.
    She had told me over and over that crying led to blindness. Did Mother want to become blind and not see the world outside our window? She seemed so anxious and sad. Then in the beginning of December, she made up her mind that she no longer wanted to live in a house that had become a prison.
    â€œI’ll go anywhere as long as it is far away from here,” she told Father. He became angry. They spoke for hours, until
she finally said that she wanted to take us to the Dar El-Tifl orphanage in Jerusalem.
    â€œOrphanage?” Father exclaimed. “Our children are not orphans!”
    â€œBut you cannot protect them,” Mother shot back.
    Father pounded the wall. “They are not orphans. They are not orphans,” he kept saying as he watched us gather our belongings.
    I did not want to leave. I wanted to see my father every day and hold his big hand every chance I got. There would be no treats, no back rides, no truck rides, and no after-dinner stories about treasures without him.
    I did not want to say he was dead. So I decided that if someone asked about him I would say I didn’t know where he was. “Ask Mother,” I would say. Before we left, I built a stone person, a qantara , behind our house and told Dad that it was to remind him that I loved him each time he saw it.
    At Dar El-Tifl, Mother looked the head administrator in the eye and said that Father had died in the war. The words made me ill. My father had become a secret.
    We were admitted to the orphanage. In exchange, Mother would live on-site, care for infant orphans, and help staff a demanding night shift. During the day, she attended classes or studied. Mother’s dream was to become more and more educated. It hardly mattered what she studied, as long as she was learning.
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    Winter came, and the cold at Dar El-Tifl dug deep into my flesh and lingered below my ragged clothes. It left me and
all the other children trembling, coughing, and crying for warmth, our noses red. Now I felt as though I had lost both of my parents, for I hardly saw my mother.
    Nights at Dar El-Tifl were scary and long. Shadows of blankets, beds, and clothes looked like monsters. And to move meant to attract their attention. I wet my bed every night rather than leave it and cross the dimly lit yellow hallways to the bathroom. Wetting the bed warmed me up for a few moments, then kept me shivering until the morning. Many other children wet their beds, too, and every morning the bedrooms smelled like a barn and the sheets piled up like mountains in the laundry room.
    Daily, we ate three small meals. After we had brought our empty plates back to the kitchen window, we were still hungry. We exchanged glances and sighs. There were no second helpings, and there was nothing to eat in between. Each meal was served at a set time. If you missed it, you had to fill your growling belly with water until the next meal. I ate the food that was given to me, not because I liked it but because our teachers were monitoring our every move. The exception was the falafel balls and sesame bread, which were served for breakfast once a week and