The Book of Disappearance

by Ibtisam Azem

  Both of you burst out laughing. And the nitwits never dared set foot near you again. You said you saw her eyes well up. When you told me the story you said, “Where was our prophet Jesus, and his mother born anyway? Shame on these people. That’s not the type of religion I learned from my folks. These idiots now claim to know God more than we do? They are Godless. There weren’t any problems, not even between us and the Jews like there are today. The problems started with the Zionists. This is what my father told me. Your mother’s grandpa, he was a partner with a Jewish man named Zico. And they were friends. But when the Zionists came, they kicked most people out, slaughtered them, and took everything. They ruined it and sat on top of it, as the saying goes, grandson.”

  I feel tired . . . always. I don’t know why. Is this what you felt as the years piled on? I asked you once, when I was little, if you were scared of the soldiers, police, or of Jews, Ashkenazis in particular? You said, “No one is scary grandson. And if you are ever scared of someone, just imagine them naked, and see how most people have disgusting bodies and they look funny when they are running naked.” Then you laughed heartily.

  It was slightly funny, but this trick didn’t appeal to me. Maybe because I was forced to undress many times. You remember the first time I went abroad, to France? They interrogated me for a long time at the airport, and they weren’t satisfied with a regular search. They took me to a room and left me in my underpants. I could smell the breath of the person searching me. His device made all kinds of noises as it roamed around my body. That was the first time I thought of my own skin itself as clothing. Otherwise he wouldn’t have used that device on my skin, searching for something beneath. I started to sweat and you know how much I hate that. I couldn’t smell my body or my own odor anymore. I was sweating like a broken water pipe.

  White, white as snow, is what I felt when I was naked behind the curtain in that room. Not pure snow, but snow mixed with wet sand. There was frost coming out of the security personnel’s bodies while I was sweating. We had nothing in common at that moment except our animal instincts, separated by soft gloves. Gloves touching my body as if I were nothing. A mere sheep being offered . . .

  I tried to see our city, Jaffa, your city and mine, the way you saw it. I tried to walk and talk to houses and trees as if I had known them long before. As if they were your old neighbors. I would greet them and would clean the street if I saw a stray piece of paper. This is our city and these are our streets, you often said. You always picked up a piece of paper if you saw one. Do you remember when I unwrapped a piece of chocolate you bought and threw away the paper? Remember how angry you were when I, still a child back then, insisted that it was good, because it was the Jewish neighborhood? Their streets were clean and ours dirty, so why not litter their street? You said that if I loved Jaffa I must look out for it, even if it’s in their hands. Their neighborhoods were still part of our city even if we weren’t living in them. I didn’t understand what you meant back then. But I did later.

  Cities are stories and I only remember what I myself lived, or fragments from your stories and what you lived, but they are truncated. I remember their stories very well. The ones I learned in school, heard on TV, and read and wrote in order to pass exams. I had to tell their stories to pass in school and college. That’s why I remember them like I remember my ID number. I know it by heart and can recite it any minute. I memorized their stories and their white dreams about this place so as to pass exams. But I carved my stories, yours, and those of others who are like us, inside me. We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin. We inherit the sound of laughter just as we inherit the sound of tears. Your memory pains me.

  They say that my laugh resembles yours, but not my mother’s. Was mother’s laugh like her father’s? Poor mother. All that she knows about her father is that he left. After they opened the borders with Egypt, she mustered all her energy and went to Cairo to see him. He had gone there after leaving Beirut. But he died a week before she arrived. She met her half-brothers and half-sisters there, but she didn’t feel they were her siblings. Some of them had the same eye color as her, but they spoke with an Egyptian accent. She was upset they didn’t speak her Jaffan dialect, even though their mother was from Jaffa. Maybe she was jealous of them, because they got to grow up with a mother and a father, while she was raised fatherless. She didn’t say much more about that visit. The father who was displaced from Jaffa before she was born died before she could see him. She came back sad and crestfallen. When I asked her once about her date of birth, she said she didn’t like to think of it because it was the year of the nakba.

  I recall some stories from your memory. The stories I read, heard, or the ones you/I made up, when you were tired. The most striking stories are the ones we make up. They are the most astounding and horrifying. What we live is truncated. Even what I lived is truncated in my memory. As if my memory is a glass house, full of cracks that are like wrinkles, but it’s still standing. We can see through it, but something is muddled. “Muddled” doesn’t mean a hazy view, or that both points of view are equal. These are the lies of those who write in the white books that we are forced to read. It is muddled because the pain is too great for us to endure memory. So we store it in a black box inside our heads and hearts, but it pains us and gnaws at us from within. And we rust, day after day. Yes, rust. I wonder at times why I feel all this sadness. Where does it come from? I realize soon thereafter: your memory is a burden that pains me. I feel so lonely in Jaffa.

  I met Ariel today, but we didn’t stay up late. Just before midnight, I told him that I had to leave because I was going to Jerusalem the next day for work. I don’t know why I wanted to leave. Maybe I was bored, or wasn’t interested in recalling that time when we first met. When I heard myself speaking Hebrew to Ariel, I felt as if the voice coming out of my vocal cords was not mine. It just comes out, and speaks Hebrew on my behalf, while I am there inside myself looking and not knowing what I was doing to it, and to myself. I cannot stand this voice any longer. I felt estranged from myself. This is not the first time I have had this feeling. But it was so intense and overwhelming this time. I can’t take it any longer, and am running out of patience with them. But how many times have I said this before? I say it and it doesn’t matter whether I speak calmly or scream, they only see themselves. They hear, but they don’t listen. Is Ariel really any different from the rest?

  I hear tumult outside. I’m thinking of you a lot tonight. Tata? Are you here? I called your name, but you didn’t answer. Maybe I’m at fault for not seeing you. Perhaps I should look more carefully. I went back in and closed the balcony door. I had gone out to call you. You used to say that the best thing about city apartments and houses is their balconies. I’m listening to one of your favorite songs now, Um Kulthum’s “Do You Still Remember?” I feel so cold, as if it’s mid-December. White cold. White, like pure snow that will soon be sullied. White, like this white city.

  I wish you were here. Missing you is like a rose of thorns.

  17

  Alaa

  Nadeen came by yesterday to take me to Haifa to visit some friends. Nadeen, Abu Hasan’s daughter, who was my classmate at the Frères school. When we finished the baccalaureate final exams, her folks decided to marry her off to her cousin. Do you remember when she came crying and begging you to convince them to postpone the marriage until after she finished college? She’d been accepted to Tel Aviv University and wanted to study there. You said that her father had gone crazy. You asked him why he’d sent her to the Frères if he didn’t want her to go to college? But he was stubborn, and no one knew what got into him, and why he wanted her to get married so young.

  On her wedding night, right after the party, the military intelligence came and took her husband. It looked like a prearranged deal. There were many rumors that he had made a deal with them to arrest him after the wedding. That’s what people said. But it didn’t make sense. Since when do the intelligence wait for someone? The
y placed him in security detention and she asked for a divorce, because he’d made a deal with the intelligence, and didn’t even tell her he was politically active. He refused at first, but she got the divorce eventually. I’m not sure if what was said is true. I doubt it. Perhaps he was imprisoned for some civil offense, but his family claimed it was for political reasons. I don’t know. The whole story doesn’t hang well. I never asked her about the wedding. There were rumors about her, too. She disappeared for a period of time and we didn’t know where she had gone. I loved her laugh, but she kept everyone around her at a distance. As if everyone, including her family, had betrayed her. She used to visit and we’d go out, or drink something. But she never liked to go out in Jaffa and preferred Haifa.

  “What is there in Jaffa except fish restaurants and those stores in the old city the Israelis took over and turned into art studios? They fool the world trying to show American Jews and rich Russians that they’ve renovated and built the city. Fuck these bastards and enough already. I can’t stand Jaffa any longer. I can’t go out there. It hurts. And I can’t stand going to these fish restaurants and hearing the owners blabber in Hebrew. I swear sometimes I can’t tell who is an Arab and who is a Jew. For the love of God, let’s get away from Jaffa. Haifa is much better.”

  “You’re overdoing it,” I used to tell her. But I had no objection to going to Haifa. There is no city like it. Coming from a Jaffan, that’s high praise. The sea has a different face there. Would you have objected had you heard me say this about Haifa? Anyway, where was I? Yes, I was visiting my folks and I went to the flea market. I was looking for an old chair to go along with the 1970s green set in the guest room. It’s still in our house. My mother didn’t want to throw it away. It wasn’t really used since we, as you know, never sat in the guest room that often. I was looking for a chair from that period. I thought I’d send it to be refurbished along with the whole set. When I passed by stores in the flea market I would see very old furniture, from the 1940s. I used to wonder whether it was old and refurbished, or looted from the houses of those who were forced to flee? I sometimes have an intense feeling of anger and bitterness when I walk in Jaffa. I feel am on the cusp of madness. And I wonder how you were able to stay in Jaffa without going mad yourself.

  I stood before a big oval mirror with wood lining topped by an engraving in the shape of a bunch of grapes. The storeowner had probably repainted it recently. I remembered you as I looked at myself in the mirror. The beauty mark on my right cheek is the same as the one you had. My mother had it, too, but on her left cheek. I looked at my hoary curly hair. My eyes look tired and have black circles around them. Is it true that my eyes have the same color as my grandfather’s? Why didn’t you say that they were blue like my mother’s? Why were you so cruel to her? As if depriving her of the pleasure of having me look like her. Why did you always remind her of the man who left when she was still in your womb?

  I remembered the story about the mirror and curtains.

  You told me that what pained you the most were the mirror and the curtains you left behind in your house. You didn’t retrieve them when you went back, even though you stayed in Jaffa? They kicked you out of al-Manshiyye, but you stayed in Jaffa. They took you from your homes and crammed you in other houses in Ajami and surrounded you with barbed wire. I remembered your story about the mirror. You were too shy when you were married. He took your hand and you both stood before the mirror. He told you, “Look into the mirror and see how gorgeous you are. Don’t be shy.” Then he started to touch you and caress your body right there in front of the mirror. That’s what you said, and it stayed with me. Mother went crazy when she heard you talk about sex so explicitly in my presence. Maybe she was angered by something else too. That you were talking about the father she never got to know. How sweet and loving he was, but not to her. She got upset whenever you cracked one of your lewd jokes. You and I laughed a lot and you told her that she was too uptight. “Jaffans like to joke around and to live life,” you’d say. You were baffled that she was like that. “She’s so backward. I swear. She harps on shame and manners so often, one would think she’s the mother and am her daughter.” Then you sighed and didn’t say much afterward. You felt tired and asked me to go with you to your house, which was a fifteen-minute walk away. That was before you moved to live with us the last six months.

  “Iskandar Awad,” I used to repeat whenever I went through Razyal Street, the name that had occupied Iskandar Awad Street. After they uprooted the street’s name, they gave it a number. They replaced street names with numbers. They kept the names that had remained naked, then they dressed them up in foreign names. I try to remind myself out loud of the names of streets, houses, and people who live here . . . still live here. Even if they are now in Beirut, Amman, or any other place. I know their tales and problems. I know who got married and who didn’t. How you all spent your holidays, the orchards, and Prophet Rubin festivities. I never understood who this Rubin was, and why you stopped celebrating his feast? “So what if Israel came? Why would you stop celebrating him?” I asked you once when I was young. God. I realize now how cruel our questions can be sometimes.

  I was cruel when I was young. I didn’t get much of what you used to say. I never appreciated the Jaffa you spoke of. I thought you were exaggerating. Otherwise why did they leave? I know they were kicked out, but sometimes it seems that words cannot convey the cruelty of what took place. I didn’t understand. Only later did I comprehend what it meant when you said, “Bullets were flying over our heads, darling. To stay was like committing suicide. It was terrifying and it all happened in a flash. God have mercy on our loved ones, the dead and the living. That’s enough darling. My heart aches.”

  I told you once that, with you, I felt that I was living the world of your Jaffa before “that year.” I live in an entire world above, or beneath (it doesn’t matter) the city we live in. You didn’t like me saying that Jaffa was buried beneath Jaffa. You said that Jaffa will always be Jaffa. It exists everywhere around us. We just have to look to see. You said that you could hear voices and wedding celebrations with music and drums at night. Mother said you were crazy. “Only you, and those who don’t hear the drums at night, are crazy,” you said to anyone who doubted your words. You drove me crazy talking about al-Manshiyye and even Tel Aviv. You said you used to go to Allenby Street to buy cloth for brides. You were a seamstress and that is what saved you from the claws of poverty.

  You said you cried a lot when you went back and rang the bell of your house in al-Manshiyye after they’d forced you to leave it and go to Ajami. One day you snuck away with your father to retrieve the guest room curtains. You never explained how you managed to sneak away. “We went,” you said. I never asked how you were able to do that when you were still under military rule. You told your father that you’d crocheted those curtains with your blind sister, Sumayya, and hung them before she, your mother, brother, and Ruben left Palestine. They all tried to save their lives and were hoping that your father could convince you to leave and you would return later. He didn’t want to leave you by yourself, especially since your husband had been displaced to Beirut.

  There was a woman living there, in your own home, and she recognized you. She knew that you were the owner without you saying a single word. You sat in your house and she offered you coffee. You were embarrassed to ask for the curtains. She said the curtains were beautiful and she’d never seen crocheted curtains before. You didn’t comment. You left with your father and felt that you had betrayed Sumayya. Your father didn’t say anything either. He remained silent as if tongue-tied. And he died soon thereafter. He went mad and then died. He was demented and then died. How can I describe his condition? You described it differently each time. He left you and mother alone. He was demented, as if he couldn’t bear staying in Jaffa without becoming demented. I still imagine you walking together, greeting strangers in your city, and smiling so that he would be reassured that all was well. Why am I telling you, again, what
you already told me? Perhaps I am writing out of fear, and against forgetfulness. I write to remember, and to remind, so as memories are not erased. Memory is my last lifeline.

  What am I saying to you? How can I describe what I feel? I feel intense loneliness. I’m orphaned without you. My mother was never more than a caring woman, but I forgot that she was my mother. My father was way too busy with work. Sometimes I am so sad I cannot cry. Is that what you meant when you said, “Tears have dried up in Jaffa”? I wish you had stayed longer and never left us.

  Where are we? Oh, yes, I was telling you about Nadeen, our neighbor, and how I survived death. I was standing before that mirror at the flea market in Jaffa, imagining that intimate moment with you and the grandfather I never knew. Memories, mine and yours, flash suddenly. I was smiling, as if I had seen you in the mirror, when I heard a voice calling my name. It was Nadeen. You liked her joie de vivre and sense of humor. We hugged. She had a slender body and smelled good always. She told me that she’d finished college, and was working as a teacher in al-Lid, but she didn’t want to stay there, because the situation was horrible.

  “Things are so tough here in Jaffa, I never thought there could be worse. But it’s much worse over there. I just can’t go on. Students boast that their fathers are drug dealers. One of them even brought a gun to school, and the principal didn’t do anything. Can you believe that? They are drowning in drugs and a form of tribalism that has nothing to do with old Bedouin values, or their city life. It’s a hodgepodge and the state leaves it as is so that they keep wallowing in drugs, crime, and being lost. They don’t need to do anything, or bother with these youth, because they’re already lost. It’s hopeless.”