Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat

Author:Ibtisam Barakat
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-05-16T21:00:00+00:00

On the first day of June, Father stood at Dar El-Tifl’s gate holding hands with my brothers. He had picked them up earlier. We all rode back home together, Father singing loudly as he drove. “Wait until you see your house,” he kept telling us. His voice was full of smiles. But Mother was quiet.

When we arrived we found a house different from the one we had left. A brick wall concealed the front window. It connected to the sides of the house and made an extra outside room. Grapevines spread on wire to create a roof and block the summer sun. Water now reached the kitchen through a hose with a nozzle that opened and closed with a simple twist. It also reached the plot of vegetables Father had planted in preparation for our arrival: carrots, tomatoes, parsley, zucchini, onions, eggplants, and melons. He had watered them daily. All had thrived. The watermelons were the size of gum balls. In a few weeks they would be larger than soccer balls.

Two geranium pots stood by the entrance. Mother crushed the leaves between her fingers, breathed in the fragrance, and smiled. I stuck the round red petals on my toenails so they looked like Mother’s painted nails during the Eid holiday celebration.

Father had also built a shed on the left side of the house. The promised goat was inside it; we heard her bleating. We raced to the shed to look at her. She was large and had banana-shaped horns. Her eyes were the shape of peanuts, and her hair was brown with apricot-blond streaks. She was a Shameyyah goat, he boasted. That meant she was imported from Syria. “She can bear baby goats twice a year if fed well,” he said. The goat’s belly already held a baby that would soon be born.

Father put his arm around Mother’s shoulders, and we all walked to the backyard overlooking the valley. He pointed to the stone person I had built for him before I left for Dar El-Tifl. I jumped into his arms and let him carry me.

We sat on the red earth, talking and laughing, the setting sun a bonfire before us. My father picked up tiny pebbles and flung them into the distance, just like he always used to do.

My heart knew that this was my true home. Unlike the many places we had lived in since the war changed our lives, this was the place I loved. I knew the road to it, and knew where the road led to beyond it. The skin of my bare feet recognized the skin of the red earth with all its wrinkles. The thornbushes often pricked me, but I knew how to pull out the thorns. And I liked to walk around the miniature pyramidlike mounds of fresh earth dug out by the moles. I knew the weak-sighted moles were there even if I had never seen them.

Night in this place filled me with fear, but that fear ended in the morning and I got used to the rhythm of fear coming to my heart and leaving it.

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