Miral by Rula Jebreal Page B

fix them on a part of the wall where the plaster had come loose. Only at that moment did Nadia notice how bare the room was, how lacking in anything that might express the individuality of the person living there.
    Drawing near to her sister, looking down to meet her gaze, she realized that Tamam was hiding something. Nadia saw a sadness in her sister’s eyes that reminded her of her own state of mind during the first heady days after she left home. Suddenly a shiver came over her, a question crossed her mind: maybe their stepfather had abused Tamam, too. When Nadia asked her, the younger girl wouldn’t reply at first, but her resistance was weak and she needed to tell somebody. A few minutes later, clutching Nadia’s hands tightly in her own, Tamam admitted that their stepfather had violated her for the first time on the very day that Nadia left home.
    After visiting Tamam, Nadia walked back down the street leading to the bus station, with feelings of rage and guilt gnawing at her. Nimer had abused Tamam systematically, almost as if he were carrying out some kind of vendetta against the sister who had dared to revolt against him and go away. She walked rapidly, arms straight down at her sides, fists clenched, her whole body a contracted nerve. Her instinct urged her to run away again, even though it would be her sister she’d be running away from this time. Tamam was a reminder that neither of them would ever be free from the past they shared.
    In response to her mother’s weakness and the oppression she had submitted to, Nadia had developed an uncommon pride, becoming a beautiful, arrogant young woman who was too injured to share her sadness with anyone else. She would do that only once in her life, years later, when she would spend three months in prison for punching an Israeli woman who had insulted her because she was an Arab. It was there that she met Fatima.

PART THREE
Fatima

1
    F atima gazed up at the sky through the bars of her window. It was six-thirty in the morning, and the prison was still wrapped in a muffled, dreamlike atmosphere. There was no sound, not a single cloud, not a bird; everything seemed frozen in place.
    In half an hour, the guards would open the doors, and everything would begin again, as it did every day: the din, the words, and the continual feeling of emptiness.
    She stretched wearily on the bed, looking up at the metal mesh of the bunk above her, which had been unoccupied for several weeks. Five years had passed since her arrest, five long years in which time had become so distended that it no longer existed. For months she had been promised that she could work in a nearby hospital, but they still hadn’t called her. Bureaucratic problems, she guessed.
    She was sure they’d call sooner or later. They needed nurses, and she was well qualified.
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    The Six Days’ War of 1967 worsened the Palestinian situation. At that time, Fatima was working at the hospital in Nablus. There she cared for wounded soldiers, civilians, and children, seeing in the process things she thought no one should see in this life.
    The war had been quick but ferocious. Women and children reached the hospital in desperate condition, their faces often unrecognizable. Dying Arab soldiers were brought to the hospital as well, and in their eyes Fatima had read confusion and fear, the same emotions she had seen in the refugee camps where her aunt and her cousins lived.
    She had never forgotten the expressions on their faces, just as she could still see her parents being humiliated by Israeli soldiers every time they passed a checkpoint. They would pretend that nothing was wrong, tell her everything was normal, but she would nevertheless manage to hear the unspoken words—words of terror and of indignation at having been punished for crimes they had not committed. Freedom is one of those things that you don’t notice until you don’t have it. Fatima knew that in 1948 the Israelis