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Reconcilable differences : An Essay

Kids Speak Out 

Downstairs, Amina Fatoom could smell the scent fresh baked bread coming from the kitchen. She imagined her mother’s small hands as they flattened dough and kneaded it into the perfectly shaped round discs. She rose from bed and brushed her long black hair and began downstairs, the scent of the bread carrying her through the house. She unconsciously looked in her parents room to see if her father had arisen yet, but like every morning before the bed was empty-- she kept forgetting about that.

Letting her feet carry her completely on their own, Amina looked around her house for the first time in what seemed like ages. She was always coming or going these days-- when was the last time she had stayed home to help her mother bake the hobez she smelled cooking in the downstairs kitchen?

Glancing over the décor of the house like it was all brand new, she realized how much of her father still lived in the house and how much of him both she and her mother had refused to let go of since-- since the accident.

“Sabahh’il heyre, Mama,” (“Good morning, Mama”) Amina whispered in Deena Fatoom’s ear as she snatched a piece of the fresh bread and tore it into pieces, letting them melt in her mouth. Her mother continued on with the baking and pretending she didn’t notice her daughter’s sad frown as the doorbell rang and her friend, Benyamin, lured her out the front door.

“Good-bye, Mama. I’ll see you this afternoon, I promise,” she called as she left the house. After waiting a silent second for the reply she prayed would come, but knew never would, she dashed out the door, slamming it behind her.

Inside the windows rattled, and Deena Fatoom stopped working the dough and collapsed in the chair beside her, weeping uncontrollably. “Good-bye Amina, see you this afternoon,” she whispered to herself over and over again-- praying it would be true.

Amina walked down the street beside Benyamin and marveled at his braveness. The two had been friends since each was a small child. Ever since their mothers brought them to the same park so many years ago they had been inseparable. It hadn’t mattered so much then-- that was the way it always went. Things would go on for years in a way that made everyone wonder what all the fighting had ever been about and then one day something tragic happens, governments were unable to get along. That was exactly how it had happened last month.

Now, things were not the same as in their youthful sandbox days. They were both attending college and learning the hard way what their parents had always warned was true. “Things are different out there,” Benyamin’s mother would tell them. “Here in my house, in yours it does not matter quite so much, but out there, you,” she pointed to Amina, “will always be an Arab, and you son will always be a Jew.”

The harsh reality had been set in their mind then and never seemed to leave it anymore. It is not that they stopped being friends, but each was more conscious of the other. More appreciative of the special unbiased friendship they were able to have, yet also more conscious of the stares they received as they walked downtown on days like today so soon after the incident.

Wondering out loud, she glanced towards Benyamin and said, “Why are we doing this? How have we done this?”

Her mother had risen from the chair and now proceded up the stairs. It wasn’t the fact that Benyamin and Amina were friends that bothered her so much. Benyamin was a good man and he had always been around ever since Amina was a small child. Yet, since everything that had happened last month, it was so hard for her to see them together and not worry that something would happened again.

Slowly, she picked up her husbands things dusted them off gently. That was what happened last month. Dining in a restaurant, outside someone had thrown a stone and a soldier responded back with bullets. Eating inside, her husband had gotten up to see what was going on. In the crossfire a bullet had caught him and he was killed instantly.

That was why it was so hard for Deena Fatoom to look at her daughter and Benyamin together. Always when she saw them she remembered her husband’s words when the two children had first become friends, “Let them go, Deena. Everybody needs a good friend in this world. He will protect her.”

“Where was your friend that day?” Deena wondered out loud. “Why did he not protect you?”

Characteristic of the boy, really a man after all these years of friendship, he reached out toward her hand and said, “Why are we friends? Because you are you and I am me. That is all…there is no more. We’re friends. Let it alone, Minnie.”

She smiled and they walked on together down the street, Arab and Jew-- best friends.