by Ibtisam Azem
Daphna, a thirty-five-year-old teacher from Ramat Aviv, said, “It’s difficult to believe that the Palestinians have disappeared without us having a hand in the matter. The problem now is what can we, as residents, do? We don’t have enough information to pressure the government.” Daron, a guard at a huge mall on Dezingoff, said he is overjoyed because the problem that is called “Palestinians” has resolved itself. He added, “At last we have gotten rid of those black snakes.” The majority are silent and awaiting instructions. But I sensed relief among many that there is no proof so far that the IDF is involved in the disappearance.
In a few hours, this exceptional country will enter a new phase in its miraculous history. A history that started with a miracle and is now being fortified by another.
Ariel reviewed the article more than once as usual and changed a few sentences. He felt odd that he was so relieved, but didn’t dwell on it.
45
Ariel
There was a lot of chatter on the radio. He called his mother to check on her and see how things were in Haifa. “Ima, Ariel . . . Tov. I’m not sure if you’re already in Haifa, or on your way there? Call me as soon as you get this. Miss you.”
He went back to the notebook he’d left on the table next to the sofa early that morning. He picked it up and sat in bed, resting his back on the puffy pillows. He craved some red wine. He put the notebook aside and got up and went to the kitchen. He looked in Alaa’s cabinets and found a Californian cabernet. There was a wine opener was in one of the small drawers. He opened another cabinet and took out one of the big glasses Alaa was fond of buying. He went back to the bedroom and put both bottle and glass on the nightstand. He took off his shoes, got his laptop, and lay down. He took the red notebook into his lap. The radio kept him company. He created a new file on his laptop, named it “Chronicle of Pre-Disappearance,” and began selecting excerpts from Alaa’s notebook to translate to Hebrew. He thought they could be part of a book he will write and publish on the disappearance of the Palestinians.
46
Alaa
I couldn’t sleep. It’s six in the morning. I think of you a lot. Actually, in the beginning, when I lay down on the sofa in the living room, listening to the radio and looking out of the window, I didn’t think of you a lot. But then I saw the old sewing machine you used to work on and live off until a few years before your death. Mother used to be angry with you. She would say that our situation was good and my father’s work secured a life better than most of those around us. But you refused to give up sewing and be dependent on your son-in-law. I asked you once why you never stopped sewing. Was there something more than just not wanting to depend on my father? You said you felt you were like family to all those brides. That women used to come to you for help because their families were forced to leave and they stayed, together with their husbands, with those who stole the country. You often said “they” without mentioning who they were. You told me about Abla, our neighbor, who came knocking on your door when she was still fifteen. She ran barefoot, crying and saying that her father had come back home drunk. She begged you to go with her so that he wouldn’t fight with her mother. Her mother had no family or relatives of her own in Jaffa. She didn’t know to whom she could turn. You were her family. You went with her and spent the night at their house so her parents wouldn’t fight. It is for the sake of these people and for your own that you kept on sewing. Survivors are the loneliest. Despite all the stories, it’s difficult at times for me to imagine what you felt those first days after the nakba. When the extent of the damage left by the flood became clear. That is how I imagine the scene. A scene that has yet to end.
Survivors are the loneliest. Yesterday I read that one of Jaffa’s names is “The Stranger’s Mother.” Maybe that is the reason the city spat us out. Because we are no longer strangers in it. Perhaps we will return to it now because we have become strangers to it while in it or outside. Do inanimate objects have a memory? Do the things around us have a memory? Does the sewing machine have a memory? Does it remember your feet, tears, fears, and the long hours you spent behind it? Does it remember the stories of the brides and the women who came to you to sew their dresses and who told you their stories?
I miss you a lot and I miss my father. Father committed suicide. Yes, suicide. We didn’t tell anyone, because it was shameful and haram. But I have stopped lying. When someone asked me about him recently, I said that he committed suicide. At first I said he “passed away” and he offered his condolences. I was silent for twenty seconds that felt like ten minutes, then I said it. He said it’s unbecoming of me to say that about him. I laughed and told him it’s the truth. Do you know what he said to me? “God help everybody.”
I miss you. Missing you is like a rose of thorns.
47
Ariel
The sun had set and night awakened. Ariel woke up when the music outside got louder. He looked at his cell phone. It was ten thirty. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom to wash his face. He came back to bed and gulped the rest of the wine. He pressed the button to listen to Uncle Itzik’s voicemail.
“Shalom Ariel. Itzik here. Call me when you get this, or early in the morning. I have some important news. A scoop for you.”
Ariel called him, but his phone was turned off. He didn’t leave a message. He’ll call him again. Jonathan said that they were expecting an analytical piece from him at the newspaper by six in the morning, New York time. His mother called to let him know she’s fine. There were other calls from friends in the country and from abroad. Everyone wants to make sure he’s safe.
He went out to the balcony. The platforms and decorations were in place and flags everywhere. What if the Palestinians return before 3 a.m., he thought? What if they return before the deadline we set for them? What if they didn’t adhere to our times and chose the time themselves?
He took a deep breath and sighed. He went back inside, headed to the kitchen, and poured water in a big glass. He took in the place around him. The apartment needs a coat of paint. He went back to bed and turned on some jazz on his laptop and kept the news on in the background. He looked at the screen and went over the notes he’d jotted down, and some of the sentences he had translated. He poured some more wine and sipped it. He logged into his Twitter account to read what news agencies and international newspapers, including Arab and Israeli, were tweeting. He scrolled through tens of tweets. Nothing new. Most of them start out with “breaking” but soon thereafter are refuted or turn out to be sensationalist chatter to attract readers. He looked at his watch anxiously. He created a new file on his laptop and started a to-do list for the coming few days. Then he went back to read Alaa’s notebook and take notes.
48
Alaa
I sit down and miss you. But today, for the first time, I smiled when I was missing you. Only because I remembered why I loved you more than anyone else. Do you know why? Because you loved life and never lost hope. You learned to love Jaffa even when it was cruel and you taught me that love. You used to say that Jaffans are sea people and merchants. They acclimate no matter where they go or stay, like shore people. You were alone in Jaffa, but you loved it like you loved a man madly. You wouldn’t stop loving no matter what. I sit in the small courtyard in your house. I have repaired it and painted it. I didn’t get a permit from the municipality. We’ll see how they react. I watered your jasmines. Their scent is all around. Like you, jasmines love the night. The moon is so full and big tonight. It’s about to take up the whole sky. I don’t know why I feel so happy today. As if I’ve rediscovered Jaffa, or learned to love it again. I walk and see its beauty. I don’t forget you, but I see its beauty. I don’t forget its memory, but, nevertheless, I see its beauty. I remembered that sentence you repeated so often: “Oh my, Jaffa is so beautiful and Palestine is so beautiful! Very beautiful and it’s not lost.
“That year is gone. But we are still here, grandson. Look how beautiful these jasmines are! Rights are never lost as long as
one demands them.” I hope you are right. Who knows? But, yes, Jaffa is so beautiful.
I brought a bottle of local arak. It’s lethal. Don’t be upset that am drinking arak in your house. I’m listening to that Um Kulthum song you loved so much. Do you remember? “Far from you . . .” I long for you as I listen to it, and longing is love. Here’s to you and to Palestine. Oh, how beautiful is Palestine.
49
Ariel
He was translating some of what Alaa had written when he heard a rattle outside. He didn’t pay any attention to it at first. It’s probably a homeless man scavenging the trash, or a cat. But it was a stubborn rattle. He stopped writing, turned down the music and the radio, and went out to the balcony. He looked at the adjacent buildings, the street, and looked down at the trash bins. Everything was quiet, as if in a state of anticipation. Only two hours left till 3 a.m. He went back in to the living room through the other door in the balcony. He touched the wall looking for the light switch to turn it on. He scanned the room, walked through the apartment, and looked behind the doors. Perhaps a mouse had gotten inside? But there was no trace of anything anywhere. The rattle subsided and then disappeared. As if it were a whisper. He went back to bed. As soon as he started reading Alaa’s notebook, he heard a whisper. He went out to the balcony again looking for the source. Then he went to the door and looked through the keyhole before opening it and craning his head. He turned on the stair light. He looked in all directions. Nothing.
He locked the door it and went back to bed. He remembered his English grandmother who always complained about hearing whispers at night. He looked at his phone. It was 2 a.m. He stretched out on the bed and looked at the to-do list. He has to change the apartment’s door lock. He wrote that down and underlined it. The next day was a public holiday, but shops will probably be open. Even if the locksmith isn’t open, he’ll call the owner and ask him to come and change the lock. Changing the door lock. He has to change the door lock. That sentence was pecking his dream. He fell asleep before the clock struck three in the morning.
The red notebook is still open.
THE END
Afterword
The loneliness of the Palestinian [in Israel] . . . is the greatest loneliness of all.
—Anton Shammas, Arabesque
The Book of Disappearance is a novel about the Palestinians who survived the nakba of 1948 and remained in Palestine. They did not become refugees, like those who are still scattered in a vast diaspora and in refugee camps in Palestine itself and in neighboring countries. Those who survived inside Palestine live(d) (under military rule until 1966) as second-class citizens in the state of Israel. The author herself is a descendant of those survivors. One branch of her family was forced out of their home in Jaffa and were internally displaced. Her short stories and novels (Sifr al-Ikhtifa’; The Book of Disappearance is her second) are informed by imagination, of course, but by living memories and visceral personal experiences too.
“Survivors are lonely,” writes Alaa, one of the two main narrators in the novel, when he remembers his late grandmother. He, too, suffers from and has inherited a version of this immense loneliness. Because he lives in the ruins and remains of a Palestine that was. A Palestine that survived intact only in his grandmother’s memory. He, after all, was born in the state of Israel, a settler-colonial state premised on the destruction of Palestine and the negation of the existence and history of its indigenous population. More than 400 villages were destroyed and/or depopulated in 1948 and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes.1 Major Palestinian cities that were the centers of a dynamic and integrated sociocultural life were occupied and their populations forced to flee. A small percentage of those who remained were herded into fenced neighborhoods (this is what happens to the grandmother and her generation). The Israeli state erased neighborhood and street names and replaced them with new ones. Israel cannibalized Palestinian land and property.
The stories Alaa’s grandmother recounts and the characters in them inhabit a Jaffa and a Palestine Alaa struggles to recognize. The sense of acute alienation a Palestinian inside Israel feels, particularly one who knew and lived in Palestine before 1948, is poignantly crystallized in the grandmother’s statement: “I walk in the city, but it doesn’t recognize me.” The relationship with one’s surroundings is disfigured and forever severed.
There are two Jaffas, Alaa writes. “Your Jaffa resembles mine, but it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each another. You carved your names in my city and so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. We call both cities ‘Jaffa.’”
Only belatedly, and retroactively, does Alaa begin to fully understand his grandmother’s trauma and that of her generation. He begins to actively unlearn and debunk the official Zionist history he had to internalize in the educational system to pass. He preserves his grandmother’s memory and deploys it as an oral history to counter and resist Zionist history and the official narrative of the colonial state—a narrative where he is, for all intents and purposes, absent. The Palestinians who were displaced from their villages in 1948 and who were internally displaced were designated by Israeli law as “present-absentees.” Alaa removes street signs and crosses out colonial nomenclature, giving streets (back) their Palestinian names.
The central event that triggers and sustains the narrative structure of the novel is the inexplicable disappearance of all Palestinians. The effects of this event on Israelis and the spectrum of reactions and responses in the forty-eight hours that follow occupies a significant part of the novel. What the author imagines and narrates is the colonial fantasy par excellence. The most often quoted motto in Zionist discourse is, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Zionist leaders in the last century have offered variations on this theme. Golda Meir (1898–1978), who was the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, stated that “[t]here is no such thing as Palestinians.” Another prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) hoped that “Gaza would sink into the sea.” The native as a nuisance, obstacle, and threat is a typical colonial trope. But the natives’ total disappearance is as disquieting and threatening as their presence. One is reminded of Cavafy’s lines in “Waiting for the Barbarians”: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians/Those people were a kind of solution.”
The Israeli responses to the disappearance range from indignation and feelings of betrayal to relief and joy. If the religious zealots rejoice and consider the disappearance a miracle, the secular liberals, believers in the state’s secular miracles, think it is a military or intelligence operation. There is also the lone voice of the radical leftist, an endangered species.
Ariel’s mother doesn’t sing and dance to celebrate divine intervention, but she goes to Haifa to find one of those empty beautiful houses “abandoned” by the absent Palestinians. Ariel is uncomfortable with the vulgarity of the settlers who rush to occupy and consecrate the spaces vacated by Palestinians. But it doesn’t take him too long to feel at home in Alaa’s apartment. He sleeps there to wait and see, but as the state’s deadline approaches, he seems to be comfortable in his friend’s place and we can assume that he will make it his own.
The material and discursive colonization of the geographic place called Palestine continues. The nakba, “that year” as Alaa’s grandmother calls it, is still ongoing in its effects and practices. Having taken over the land and the houses and changed the names, what remains to be usurped is memory, collective and individual. But memory is the last trench and refuge, and a space that cannot be expropriated by law or force.
“The old will die and the young will forget,” is a saying attributed to David Ben Gurion (1886–1973) about how Palestinians will react to Israel. The grandmother’s death and Alaa’s longing for her compel him to start writing. He writes in his journal to recall his conversations with her, maintain the bond, and remembe
r Jaffa and Palestine. The old have died, but the young have not forgotten and will not forget—this is what Alaa demonstrates. His red notebook, like the novel’s end, remains open.
The ghosts of the dead will continue to haunt, demanding justice and recognition, and the living will write and remember.
Ariel wants to appropriate Alaa’s words and memories and claim the narrative as his own. This novel itself is another red notebook, but it has not fallen (exclusively) into Ariel’s hands. It will be open for all to read. Art here achieves one of its most powerful effects: preserving memory and defending life with beauty.
Sinan Antoon
October 2018, New York
1. For more, see Illan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (OneWorld Publications, 2006).
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist. She has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both by Dar al-Jamal (Beirut/Baghdad). She was born and raised in Taybeh, northern Jaffa, and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at Freiburg University in Germany, where she completed an MA in German and English Literature and Islamic Studies. She is senior correspondent in New York for the Arabic daily al-Araby al-Jadeed. She is currently working on an MA at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University.
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he specialized in Arabic literature. His books include I‘jaam, The Corpse Washer, The Baghdad Eucharist, and The Book of Collateral Damage. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. He is an associate professor at New York University.
