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On the Back of a Donkey by Hanna Eady I was in a different time, nuss lile, the midnight hour that the big people talked about. I had never known it before. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

On the Back of a Donkey
My grandfather and I shared the same name. Grandmother called me "Little Hanna." Grandfather was "Big Hanna." The year was 1964, I was eight, and I lived in a flat-roofed house of limestone blocks chinked with mud and plastered with mud inside and out. This was in Buqayah, or what the Israelis called "ancient Peqiin," a remote northern village of Palestinian Christians, Druze, Muslims, and Jews in the Upper Galilee Mountains. Our two churches were small stone buildings: one was an Eastern Orthodox church down by the water mill, and the other a Catholic church on top of the mountain. The Druze worshipped in private, the Muslims did not have a mosque (they were mostly refugees from 1948), and the Jews worshipped in an old temple not far from our house.

It was August, and the night was cold. My grandmother came to my bed and woke me, and I sat up and tried hard not to fall asleep once again. The previous evening I had volunteered, begged my grandfather to take me with him to the small orchard where we grew olives. Some of our trees were very old, hundreds of years old, and some were young and needed a lot of care. I got my wish. "I am up. I am up," I kept saying. I finally opened my eyes and saw nothing but the weak, flickering light of an oil lamp. It was dark and everything was still. Nothing moved except the faint shadow of my grandfather, packing. Everyone else in the house slept. All the children in the village slept, and I thought that all the children in the world slept as well. I was in a different time, nuss lile, the midnight hour that the big people talked about. I had never known it before.

In a few minutes I was dressed in worn jeans and a cotton shirt and stood outside the doorway in the dark. I held a knapsack and a large canteen wrapped in cloth soaked in cold water. Our village seemed strange. It was dark and quiet, and the air was still. The village had lost its beat, as if it were dead. My grandfather brought out the donkey, no one in Buqayah had a car, and, in those years, cars came up the narrow road once or twice a day, at most. Donkeys, however, were everywhere. Every family had at least one. Ours was himar kisrawi, a donkey from Kisra, a nearby Druze village where donkeys were well-bred, well-fed, and respected. With a weaker donkey, my grandfather would have walked and let me ride, but with a strong healthy kisrawi we both rode. My grandfather was a lean, small man, wore a thin shirt, and covered his head with a white kaffiah. I wrapped my arms around his waist and rested my face against his back to keep warm. It was two o’clock in the morning.

We left the village behind and soon were passing other donkeys carrying farmers like us, but none with a child. My grandfather recognized these men from a distance. There were few farmers from our village who traveled to the groves so early, and those who did admired one another. "That’s Abu Sharif Muhanna over there, and Abu Issa Raddi clearing under his trees, and look at Abu Yosef Abbass’s grove. You can tell he tends it every day." We reached a higher point. Grandfather looked up to the constellations in the sky and named a few. "This is Thuraya," he said, the Pleiades, "and over there is the Mizan and al-Aqrab," Libra and Scorpio, "and that, all that," he motioned across the sky, "is Darb al-Tabanat, the women who carry bales of hay on their heads leaving trails behind them," the Milky Way.

We reached the top of the mountain on a dirt track that forked to the west, and I looked down and saw New Peqiin, an Israeli town with bright lights that cut through the darkness. A strange sight. The town looked like it was on fire, or like a star had fallen on it. Light but no smoke. It was like the burning bush of Moses: it burned but was not consumed. "Don’t let the settlement fool you with its lights," my grandfather explained, "nobody is awake. They leave their electric lights on to keep their chickens awake so they’ll eat and lay a second egg." We turned east to our grove and started working.

My grandfather was a humble man, a good boss. He never rushed me. We worked till eight and then sat down to eat our breakfast of khubiz raqiqs—very thin bread dipped in olive oil, with goat cheese and black olives. In a few minutes he got up and went back to work still chewing his food. "Take your time," he said, "and when you’re done with your meal join me to finish the upper section. We’ll come back for the lower one tomorrow." I looked at my watch, "What!" I thought, "No way we can do it. I thought we were working until nine o’clock today, or maybe he just doesn’t know that it’s almost nine. I should tell him."

"Grandfather!" I shouted, "it’s half past eight." I hoped he would pack and head home, but instead he began working faster than ever. "I know, I know," he said. "It was eight when we pulled out that big white rock just before breakfast." Grandfather never had a watch and told time by looking at the length of his shadow on the ground. The next thirty minutes would be very hot: on top of the mountain we were first to see the sun rise, but we were also first to burn. If he had been alone, Grandfather would have worked into the heat. Today, however, he had mercy. "All right, all right," he said. "Go find the donkey."

As grandfather prepared to go home, I rode the donkey alone for the first time. I knew it was a donkey not a horse, but I could pretend. Instead of saying, "Haa, haa," to him, (the order for a donkey to go), I treated him like a horse: "Diah, diah," I said. I did not poke him with a stick on his neck (like you do to a donkey) but kicked with my heels to make him go faster. I knew that my grandfather was not in a hurry, so I rode a few times around the Weld before handing my "horse" over to him. Even then, my grandfather motioned me onward. He preferred to walk. About halfway home, grandfather spotted a large rock which he used to mount the donkey. He rode in front of me until we got back to the village.

By that time the other kids were awake, and, in daylight, our village was a familiar place once again: the low, flat-roofed stone houses, the gushing spring water running by the church, and the smell of fresh baked bread. On this day nothing was changed except me. I had returned to the village with the soil of our land between my fingers. Now I was a young man. I spent the rest of the day in the shadow of my grandfather, did not play with the rest of the kids. My grandmother no longer called me "Little Hanna." Now grandfather and I were both big.

Many years later, I remember the night I rode to our orchard with grandfather. I look back and think of what I learned. Grandfather taught me to name the stars, to work the land before breakfast, to ride the donkey by myself.

Profile
Hanna Eady and I sat in the sparse, tidy living room of an apartment in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, listening to stories. We had listened for hours as various family members spoke of the recent past. The listening was arduous: the aunts, husbands, cousins, and children were Bosnian refugees speaking in Serbo-Croatian, and the stories, carefully repeated by our translator, Peter Lippman, were their horrifying memories of war. As I dutifully recorded the tales I later would weave into a play for Hanna’s New Image Theatre, I also measured my capacity—and an audience’s capacity—to grasp the lost world behind these stories.

Suddenly Hanna asked about life in Bosnia. Before the war. What did they do—the husbands and wives, sisters and brothers—on holidays? What were the customs of a traditional wedding celebration? For the first time all night a few people smiled. They took turns describing an old-fashioned wedding, ending with an elaborate tale of ill-advised romance and elopement. As the middle-aged uncle regaled the rest of the family with old and new details to enliven the story, Hanna laughed along with them. This story was beautiful and hilarious.

By asking, "What about life?" Hanna had broken the language barrier, and helped evoke a world achingly real and funny, glimpsed darkly between the fragments of war.

—S.P. Miskowski

Bio
Hanna Eady

Place of residence: Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Birthplace: Buqayah, Israel.
Day job: Executive Artistic Director at New Image Theatre.
Education: B.A. in social work, University of Haifa. B.F.A. in theatre, University of Wisconsin. M.F.A. in drama and directing, University of Washington.
Dramatic productions: Several scripts produced by New Image Theatre including Abraham’s Land (1992), which was staged with Jewish and Arab actors playing opposite parts. Seeing Double (1991).
Current projects: Sahmatah, a docudrama and theatre production on tour. A book. A CD of Middle Eastern music and Palestinian poetry.
Favorite book: The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell.
Beliefs: Baptized Eastern Greek Orthodox, practicing none. I believe in a good actor.
Instruments: Oud, Arabic keyboard, tabla (small drum used in Indian and Arabic music).

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