Jifna by me

"Jifna," I thought to myself before saying out loud the name of this village located in the West Bank. We had been driving for an hour now from Afula, headed back to Beer Sheva. "We" were eight students doing a family rotation in the rural parts of northern Israel, which included Bedouin towns, the town of Afula, Kibutzes, a community clinic around Tiberias, and other community clinics around the Jezreel valley. My classmates were playing a game, whereby they thought of cities' and countries' names that started with J and ended with A. Names such as Java, Jaffa, Jakrata and Jamaica were already mentioned as the silence fell in the van. I searched my memory for more names, looking at the face of the driver in the bus mirror. His name was Abed, he was Bedouin from the town of Hura, in the south of Israel, near Beer Sheva.

Though I grew up in the city of Jerusalem, I spent parts of my childhood in Jifna because my cousins would come every summer from the States. Their father was from Jifna, and like many inhabitants of the village, he had inherited land from his family. His mother, Fatmeh, a woman in her 60s, was taking care of the land, of the harvests of olives, figs, lemons and almonds yearly as her son was away. Her husband passed away many years ago, leaving her with five young children to raise. Her son, my uncle, was a family doctor, practicing in the States.

Fatmeh always wore a traditional Palestinian dress, long and covered with embroidery. Her head was always covered with a white scarf. Around 5:30 in the morning, as I would be tossing and turning in bed next to my cousin on the second flour of the building where they lived, Fatmeh's voice and the rooster's became associated in my mind with having to get up, for a new day was here, and not a minute could be wasted. When evening came, there would be no more electricity, and it would be time to sit at the balcony, prepare dinner near the light, and chat.

Fatmeh held a respectable place in her community, having worked hard to raise her five children by herself. As I would accompany her and my cousins to run errands, to call people to fix things round the house and to help with the harvest, I saw the respect with which people of the village welcomed her. With her son the only doctor in town, many people would stop by, bringing in their prescriptions and their complaints to see him. She approved of the visits, seeing them as the duty of her son to the inhabitants.

The story had it that Fatmeh took my cousin, Fahed, when he was 8 years old to the fields she owned. She showed him the borders of the land. And according to oral tradition and a woman who was illiterate and hence could not entrust what is dear to her to paper and pen, only my cousin knew what his family owned. I had always wished that I had a grandmother from a village, whose power, influence, character and land ownership were recognized.Across one street from Jifna, on top of a hill, lied a Palestinian refugee camp called El-Jalzoon. Sometimes, some children from Jifna and I would go and play in the street between the refugee camp and the village with the children from the camp. The houses in the camp were cramped, and vehicles carefully and very skillfully passed through to reach Jifna.Walking down another street at the entrance of jifna and Fatmeh's house lead to Tabash restaurant, the church, the grocery store, the cemetery and the school. The owners of the restaurant were Fatmmeh's cousins, the priest baptized my uncle and his children, the sellers always wrote down what I owned them under Fatmeh's name, the cemetery was covered with grass and not well kept, and my cousins went to school during the summer when they would come to visit.

Twenty years later, with Fatmeh's children all highly educated and living abroad, my mother told me that Fatmeh had been found dead in her house at the age of 80, possibly due to a heart attack. Her neighbors missed her after not seeing her for a few days. Her son, the doctor, was not able to travel in time for the burial, and it was I who attended, and could say that I, unfortunately, had a family member buried in the cemetery in Jifna.

Whenever I go to the cemetery to visit her grave, I am reminded of the walk she took my cousin, Fahed, on, and showed him the limits of the lands she owned, and then I realize that I, too, have my own land, whose borders and limits I know. With the birth of my cousins in Jifna, our childhood years spent there, and with the death of Fatmeh, I found my own Jifna in people's families and life events, marking the limits of my land that I don’t trust to papers."Jifna," I said out loud in the bus. "It is the name of a village in the West Bank," I explained. The silence in the van was gone. My classmates chose to move to another letter of a city beginning with K and ending with A. I didn’t search for a name of a village or a city in my memory anymore, but rather for faces of a native American old woman I had sat with in her Navajo village, of a Bedouin woman called Um Salem, of a Russian grandmother called Anna, and of an Ethiopian grandmother, hoping that I would, then, remember the name of their villages, and join my classmates in the game of names again.