Balcony on the Moon by Ibtisam Barakat

Author:Ibtisam Barakat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Agreement

“You know that I left school after the sixth grade, got engaged when I was fourteen, and married at fifteen,” Mother says. Hearing this I dart an impatient look at the ceiling because I am already bored. She has mentioned this fact more times than I have heard mosque prayers and church bells in Ramallah. She ignores my look and continues: “How would you feel if you were made to leave school this year?”

“I am horrified by the thought,” I say. “It would be worse than death.”

“That is how I felt, and I continue to feel this terrible pain every day. You can help me change that and have a new life!”

“Me?”

She nods.

“How?”

“I have a plan. And it is extremely simple.” She lowers her voice to make it sound not only simple but simpler than a whisper. “If you teach me everything you learn in your classes—everything—down to the smallest note, then I will learn the entire curriculum.”

“Teach you everything?” I am hardly able to imagine what that means. “But then how will you get a formal certificate?”

“Now that you ask,” she says, smiling broadly, “al-Urduneyyah, the Jordanian Secondary School. It’s a private high school in al-Bireh that offers classes starting with the tenth grade, and nontraditional students can study in class or at home. I need you to help me bridge the distance from where I left off through the end of ninth grade. Then I can enroll in high school classes at al-Urduneyyah. If I pass the supervised exams of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, then I can sit for the comprehensive Tawjihi exams and get my high school diploma.”

I am following Mother’s every word, realizing how ambitious her plan is. Al-Bireh is the twin city of Ramallah, and to walk there from where we live in Ein Musbah would take an hour each way. And Mother left school over twenty years ago and now has seven children. For her to accomplish what she is describing will require so much effort. Whether or not she can do it, we will only discover over time. We do not know any women in our family, or in the many neighborhoods where we have lived, who have done this.

“I will be the first married woman with children in our family to go to high school,” she says.

Being first to do something is one of Mother’s special pleasures in life. The Presto pressure cooker sitting in our kitchen is one example. When it first appeared on the market, most of her friends and relatives did not buy it because they worried it might explode and harm them. But Mother said she had to have one. “Nobody who is afraid to take a risk can accomplish anything,” she said. When she cooked the first meal in it she ordered all of us to stay outside the house just in case something went wrong. We watched her cook through the window. The meal was ready in thirty minutes instead of the usual two hours.

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