Hoarding Mabsouta

David Busis

The Maine night was lush: humid but cool. We sat around our campfire while bullfrogs croaked like rusty joints and loons sent their calls over a lake so still it glinted like iron in the moonlight.

My co-counselor and I had asked our campers—teenagers from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and other countries in the Middle East—to write the five most important things in their lives on separate strips of paper. Then we asked them to burn the strips in ascending order of importance, explaining both what the item meant to them and why they would give it up.

One by one the campers threw “friendship,” “family,” “love” and other heartwarming, if predictable, values into the fire. Mahmoud, a 15-year-old Palestinian from a refugee camp in Jenin, on the other hand, burned “the good life.” “I can give up this, good life,” he said to the group. “I don’t have good life.”
I nodded, along with the Israelis, without knowing what to think. Though there was sympathy here, it always contained a kernel of skepticism. His Middle East was suspect.
Mahmoud next gave up “security” and “freedom.” “Security and freedom,” he told us, “is unpossible. Unpossible. But peace—this is possible.” He burned “peace,” and then turned to the most important thing in his life. It was, in the words of Shadi, another camper who was helping Mahmoud with English, “the right to return to the original city.” Mahmoud nodded. “Haifa,” he explained.

I will always remember the first time I saw Mahmoud, two weeks earlier when the kids arrived at camp. It was my first summer at the Seeds of Peace camp and as an American Jew from Pittsburgh I had never been close to a Palestinian before. As the kids disembarked from the buses, the counselors played music: a pulsing, tribal rendition of the camp’s anthem song, with bongos and empty five-gallon water jugs. Most of the Palestinians getting off Mahmoud’s bus looked exhausted. They’d been traveling for 48 hours, and their bodies were telling them it was nighttime. But Mahmoud danced off the bus. He danced like there were 10 people inside of him. He danced like he was trying to fling his hands to our hands and his feet back to Jenin. I wondered who this kid in front of me was, and if he might be crazy. And then I started dancing with him.

So there we were at the campfire, thousands of miles from Beirut, Haifa and Gaza, where bombs were falling, war was raging. The fire had dwindled to embers. In the orange glow, I could see that all of my campers were looking at the ground. I noticed for the first time that night how the campers had been sitting, segregated—Palestinians with Palestinians, Israelis with Israelis. We walked back to the bunk in silence.

When we got there, though, Mahmoud grinned his puckish grin and asked, “Inti mabsouta?” “Are you happy?” using feminine words to address us as if we were girls. The phrase had become a running joke in our cabin.

“Brush your teeth, Mahmoud,” I said, walking away. That’s when he blitzed me from behind, spearing his tickling fingers into my side and shouting “Inti mabsouta, David? Inti mabsouta?” I crumpled onto my bed, weak from laughter. I had strength and size over Mahmoud, but he sacked me again and again, running before I could react.

There was a moment as I squared off against Mahmoud, his body low for the pounce, his lips snarled into a grin, and his eyes so intense that I wondered whether we were still playing. Then he dashed away again still laughing. The rest of the group chased after him like paparazzi, hooting and taking pictures.

Later that night after lights out, Mahmoud told the bunk that his happiest moment of the day was “making joy and laughter for everyone.” Then he started giggling in his bed and shouting that he was mabsouta. His mood proved contagious. Every time I quieted the kids down, he started them up again by shouting, “David, I want dollar for make funny!” When I asked him to talk in a small voice, he said, in Arabic, “Okay, so very small,” while squinting and holding up his finger and thumb like a jeweler. Finally, after everyone settled down again, he sighed and said, through Shadi, “Who has laughed like this in all the years?”

I haven’t laughed like that in all my life. In part, I was laughing out of sadness. I saw that Mahmoud had a hard life, and I understood that he hoarded joy. He hoarded it like food, because he didn’t know when he was going to get any again.