The Pianist of Yarmouk by Aeham Ahmad

Author:Aeham Ahmad [Ahmad, Aeham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241347546
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

One day, when Samer and I were selling falafel, I saw a small, plump woman rush past. She was wearing a headscarf and a lot of make-up, and was holding her son and daughter by the hand. The three of them looked pretty, with a healthy dark skin tone. But something about them was odd. They seemed from a different time, the time before the siege. They didn’t fit here.

Two or three times, I saw the woman come by with her children. Always well-dressed and made-up, she walked in a proud, upright manner. She always came from the same direction, passing our line of customers and then turning right. I started wondering why she was wearing so much make-up and where they were going. Finally, the fourth time she appeared, she lined up for some falafel.

‘Hello, Teacher Aeham,’ she said when it was her turn. Oh, my goodness! My jaw dropped. She must have known me from before. ‘Three falafel, please.’

The children had nice clean faces and looked like perfectly normal children on a perfectly normal school day. Which made it all very strange. When she called me ‘teacher’, she reminded me that underneath all those layers of lentil dough I wasn’t just a falafel salesman.

‘Do you know me?’ I asked, smiling.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You’re Aeham, the teacher. I know you. My husband, Raed, knows you, too.’

I was bursting with curiosity. ‘Where exactly are you going every day? Why do you keep calling me “teacher”? And who is your husband?’

She told me that a professor named Abu Saussan had opened an elementary school around the corner, in the former al-Andalus Wedding Hall. The woman worked there as a teacher; her husband was the school’s technician. That’s why she was always dressed up every morning. As we were talking, I forgot to take the falafel out of the oil, completely absorbed in our conversation. I decided that I wanted to see that school.

I closed our falafel stand earlier than usual that day and went to the old wedding hall. When I knocked on its metal door, it opened a crack. I pushed it all the way open and stepped into a dark corridor. There was a generator on the floor that didn’t seem to be working, and I could hear children’s voices in the distance. I followed the voices and pushed a second door open – and found myself on the gallery level of the wedding hall. The room below me was full of children, dimly illuminated by tiny dots of light. When I came closer, I saw that they were LED lights, the kind you can find in some plastic lighters. Whoever had thought of this?

Throughout the banquet hall, bedsheets had been hung over clotheslines, dividing the room into different ‘classrooms’, with one grade on one side of the bedsheet and another grade next to it. The problem was that everyone could hear everything. Ethics classes, math classes, it was all one big mess.

In one of the makeshift classrooms, I saw a man dressed up as a clown, joking around with the kids.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.