Qissat Read Online Free

says, pointing at a pretty girl soldier with braces on her teeth. The soldier laughs. ‘You bitch! You can’t take my shoes, you hear me?
Walek
, they’re mine!’
    ‘I didn’t take your dirty shoes. Now get back in line and get out.’
    ‘Who took them then? I put them in your goddamn bin and now, poof!’ she clicks her fingers. ‘Gone! Where are they?’
    ‘Only
Hashem
knows, lady! Now get in line!’
    ‘Bala hashem bala khara!
Don’t give me that God shit! I want my shoes!’
    ‘Take them!’ the soldier screams, hurling the strappy sandals at her.
    The girl lifts up her glasses and examines the heels. Apparently satisfied, she slips them on and, once outside, says, ‘First my land, now my Guccis! God damn it.’
    We sit on a bench in the bright sun and search for Baba. In a little while he reappears and walks over to us with a bottle of water. I want to tell him stories about what just happened, but he says we have to be quiet in case they call our name so we can collect our bags and go. Mama hands me some cookies, which I inhale while black flies buzz around my face and eyes. All around us there are people, people hungry and tired, people waiting. Mama tries to talk to a woman next to her, but Mama’s Palestinian dialect is shabby, and the woman is a peasant. Mama tries the Egyptian dialect, and another woman tells her to keep talking ‘like a movie star’. Mama is embarrassed and stops talking altogether, which suits Baba just fine.
    When the sun is half way down in the sky, a soldier yells out our name and Baba crosses the yard and gets our bags from him. We then look for a taxi to take us to Baba’s village, Jenin, and find a van full of people who are going there too. I sit on Mama’s lap this time, and Baba takes my sleeping brother. I watch the ponies as we drive by, the olive trees, the almond trees. I notice how neat the rows of trees are, small sprinklers shooting water at them, the green army jeeps that zoom past us, Baba’s face looking like the sliced rocks in the mountains on our left. I’m so tired; I close my eyes, smell the lemony air, and bury my head in his shirt.
***
    Sitto and I sit in the kitchen in the house that my Baba built her and roll cabbage leaves with rice and meat and cumin and salt inside. Sitto looks like Baba, exactly like my Baba, except her hair is longer and she doesn’t scratch her omelets because she doesn’t have any. Her kitchen smells like farts because boiled cabbage releases the farts entrapped within the leaves by evil gassy trolls that comb the countryside. Sitto tells me the story about the two sisters, one poor and one rich. The poor one goes to the rich one’s house and the rich one’s stuffing cabbage leaves. The poor one craves some but the rich one’s a bitch and doesn’t offer her any, so she goes home and makes her own. The mayor comes to visit the poor one’s house for some reason, so she offers him cabbage and he accepts, but while she’s serving it she farts. She turns red and slaps her cheeks and wishes the earth would open up and swallow her, and it does. Underneath the earth she sees a nice town, people and carriages. She walks and bemoans her fate out loud. Suddenly she sees her fart sitting at a café drinking coffee and dressed very posh. She tells him he’s a bastard and why did he embarrass her so? He says he felt stuck inside her and wanted out. The people of the underground town harass him and tell him he needs to make it up to her, so he says, fine, every time you open your mouth gold will drip from it. She goes back up and the mayor is gone and her husband asks, where have you been wife? And she starts to explain but gold drips out of her mouth, and she becomes rich, and never wants for a thing again! And her rich bitch sister, she gets jealous and wants even more riches, so she emulates her sister and farts in front of the mayor when she has him over for stuffed cabbage and the earth swallows her up and she looks for her