Three Daughters: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

had married the Shihada girl, Diana, and she was very fat.
    “How could you spend the entire day learning to speak?” Her mother looked mystified.
    “Oh, we didn’t do that. Part of the day, I sat in class with the other girls.” She pulled out a book Miss Clay had allowed her to keep. “I learned to read, Mama,” she admitted shyly.
    Jamilla looked at the book with suspicion. It wasn’t unusual to speak several languages. After all, the Protestant schools taught English, the Orthodox taught Greek, and the Franciscans who came from the Levant taught French. The poorest peasant was capable of speaking beautifully accented French. But reading and writing were another matter. Those who could read and write were worlds apart.

3.
    A BOY CAME TO THE STAND TODAY.
    C hange comes slowly in most lives, but sometimes there is one decisive moment. One can point and say, “There. My life changed there.”
    Mustafa’s life changed dramatically in the autumn of 1894, when Nabiha’s brother, who was childless, gave him two acres on the northeast corner of the village. The bulk of the land was distributed on two sides of a steep hill filled with scrub brush and trees. There was no ready source of water for irrigation. The sole advantage was that the land faced south and west.
    Mustafa began clearing as large a portion as possible through the beastly September heat. From dawn to dusk, he uprooted shrubs, chopped down trees, and overturned earth. The peculiar powdery effect of lime rock and the countless stones showing on the surface looked hopeless. To make use of the slopes, Mustafa cut shelves out of the hills and saved the stones to create a ledge that would protect the terraces. He began to sleep at the site and once each day Miriam arrived with a packet of food. “Well, let’s see how far along you are today.” She regularly communicated with him in hand language, but still they were partial to the old methods of drawing and pantomime because Mustafa had come to enjoy it. She seldom saw much change in the land from day to day but she made an effort to show surprise for his accomplishments.
    Through the ordeal Mustafa ignored the lack of water much as he had ignored Jamilla’s anger in the first year of their marriage. Often, especially when she was upset, his wife spoke to him as if he could hear perfectly. “My uncle has given you a gift of nothing,” she would say and to illustrate would point her empty palms upward. It was therapeutic for her to vent her feelings and he always appeared to be listening. She also had adopted some of his physical maneuvers. She would visit the site of his garden and mimic the act of digging and shoveling and wiping sweat off her brow and becoming bent over from the strenuous labor. She would walk around in circles, holding her back and looking dazed as if the sun had scrambled her wits. Then she would shrug and throw her hands up as if to say, “For what?” At such times Mustafa would take his hand and erase the creases from her brow. He would point to his head, close to his eyes, and smile, implying he had a vision of good.
    He rented a horse and coaxed Daud, who was a fearless rider, to help him uproot the most stubborn stumps. Remembering the dark, loamy soil he had seen in Sarona, he collected his neighbors’ ashes, refuse, and animal droppings and spread the mixture over his future garden. He borrowed a team and plowed with one ox on one level and the other below, for the terraces were narrow. During this maneuver, the stick caught and wouldn’t budge. Mustafa dug out not a rock as expected, but a masonry leader that was connected to a solid masonry pool. These ancient ruined pools, originally built to catch the overflow from the springs, were often used for threshing floors. The largest of them, the Pools of Solomon, south of Bethlehem, when full, could float a battleship. The pool Mustafa found was close to Ayn Fara, a copious perennial spring that didn’t diminish in summer.