NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Back at the Akdeniz all the Turks were on board. They were relaxing. After the tension and the seriousness of Israel, these Turks seemed the soul of jollity. The food was Turkish, the music was “Arabesque” syncopation and Turkish movie themes. It was at a distant pier, a twenty-minute walk from Gate Five, Port of Haifa, the turnstile where we had to show our passports. For the passengers, the ship was Turkey.

  I was still reading the Trollope novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, about the fuss in an English village over an apparent impropriety. Tonight the embattled doctor was reflecting, “It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.”

  Emile Habiby had arrived back in Israel. When I telephoned him he said that he would get into his car and meet me in Haifa. I protested—no, he had jet lag. I would come to Nazareth. On my map, Nazareth was about halfway to the Sea of Galilee—about thirty-five miles, less than an hour.

  “But how will I find you?”

  “Everyone knows me. Just ask anyone, for Habiby sofer.” Sofer is writer in Hebrew.

  I found a taxi driver, Yossi Marsiano (“Like Rocky Marciano”). He was a Moroccan Jew, from the north Moroccan town of Ouezzane. He was edgy and impatient. He had a way of grinning that showed no pleasure at all, only pure hysteria. I told him Habiby’s name.

  “He’s an Arab?”

  “He’s an Israeli.”

  This was true, and more than that he was a Christian and a Palestinian as well. Yossi was confused, and for a moment it looked as though he regretted having agreed to take me. Then he told me to get into the car, and to hurry.

  “How much?”

  We agreed on one hundred and sixty shekels.

  “Get in. We go,” he said. “In, in.”

  Leaving Haifa and passing the populous bluff of Mount Carmel that dominates the city, it was impossible not to think of Habiby. He had written about those specific heights a number of times in his novel Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter (translated by Peter Theroux, 1995). One of the glimpses is fanciful, Mount Carmel as “a bull with its snout turned up, ready to lunge at a matador come to him from the land of Andalusia. He disregards him in anticipation of matadorial carelessness; if he ignores him, thebull will not give him a moment’s respite…. [But] he is as patient as the Arabs.”

  In another part of the novel, Mount Carmel is remembered by the narrator as the wilderness of his childhood, “still a virgin forest, except for its lighthouse, which was, in our eyes, closer to the stars in the heavens than to the houses of Wadi al-Nisnas…. The wild melancholy of al-Carmel took our breath away.” Returning hopefully, he sees it as it is today, a promontory covered with apartment houses and condominiums, and fenced-in mansions. It is now denuded of trees; gone are the flowering plants, the terebinth, hawthorn, fennel and paradise apple that had protected it. The old spring has dried up, and the narrator reflects on “how mountains die—how Mount Carmel is dying!”

  It is an oblique reference to the way that modern Israel has spread its new buildings over an ancient landscape, turning familiar contours into unrecognizable (and unmemorable) urban sprawl. The growth was still in progress. No sooner had Yossi and I reached the north end of Haifa than we were in a traffic jam.

  “Road fixing,” Yossi said.

  While he reassured me that this was nothing, a matter of minutes, he continued to fret. That was an Israeli paradox, a person obviously troubled and anxious saying, “No problem!” Yossi was fretful. We inched along. He banged the steering wheel in anger and became self-conscious and said in his unconvincing way, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

  I was not worried. Nazareth was not far. But to take Yossi’s mind off the traffic jam I asked him how he had come to Israel. Every Israeli had a migration story. In the 1950s, Yossi’s parents had not seen any future for themselves as a minority in the remote Moroccan town of Ouezzane, surrounded by Arabs, and so they had decided to take their small children and settle in Israel.

  On the surface, it was a back-to-the-homeland story, but where was the work? Where was the money? It was all right for Yossi’s father, who was a bank clerk, but Yossi and his brother did not discern any bright new Israeli dawn. The brother moved to Los Angeles and prospered. So much for the homeland as a refuge.

  “I went to Los Angeles to visit him,” Yossi said. “In California you can’t walk on the street. Just Mexicans walk. Everyone else drives.”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Yes! I was there! No one walks!”

  “But your brother is happy there, right?”

  “Right. And I want to live there. I want to work, get a Green Card. But how can I, if I can’t walk on the street?”

  Impatient in the stalled traffic, he had become shrill. I decided to agree with everything he said about the United States, no matter how offensive or inaccurate it was.

  “Manhattan is better. You know that.”

  “It sure is,” I said.

  “Too many Jews in Manhattan,” Yossi said, his grammar slipping. “That is good. I talk to the Jews, they talk to me. I think, maybe I go there and get some money. Here is no money.”

  “But this is the Jewish homeland, isn’t it?”

  “No money here,” he said, smacking the steering wheel. And he started to grumble. “America is dangerous. Guns. Trouble. Why I want to go there?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Because here is bureaucracy,” Yossi snapped back. “Office. Papers. Application. Permission. ‘Hello—No, sorry, is closing, come back in two hours.’ ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ‘Come back next week.’ ‘Sorry I cannot help you.’ ‘You pay one hundred shekels.’ ‘Officer is not here now.’ ‘Where is your papers—you have no proper papers.’ This is shit!”

  It was quite a performance, and it certainly convinced me. I shut my mouth and let him fume until the traffic eased. But he was soon chattering again.

  “This Habiby sofer—he is an Arab, you say?”

  “He’s an Israeli—Christian. Born in Haifa,” I said, and resisted adding, Unlike you, Yossi.

  “More road fixing!” Yossi said.

  More traffic, a bottleneck; an hour went past, and then we were on our way, in a road that skirted a large village.

  “That is an Arab city,” Yossi said.

  “What is its name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I saw from my map that it was Shefar’am—small houses on a hillside, sprawling further, some animals grazing in the foreground; not much else.

  “No streets, no numbers, no names—like this Habiby. ‘Ask for me—ask for sofer.’ No number, no street. In Haifa you can go anywhere—too easy. Jews have numbers!”

  “I’ll try to remember that, Yossi.”

  As the obstacles increased, Yossi became shriller and in his shrillness more anti-Arab.

  “Look at the houses—not clean! The streets this way and that! No numbers!”

  The road to Nazareth became narrower, the line of traffic slower, and Nazareth itself across the desert and occupying a high hill was like a distant vision, almost a mirage. It was physically different from any other of the places I had seen in Israel, not just the style of house, but the way they were piled up, some of them leaning, the look of accumulation over the years, added rooms and windows, wall upon wall, the layers of tiled roofs. The foundations were ancient, but higher up, the third or fourth story was more recent. It was the sort of growth that was characteristic of wonderful old trees—fragile shoots on young branches that crowned a thick immovable trunk. Nazareth had that same grip on its hill—it was something venerable, with deep roots, still growing.

  People worked outside in Nazareth, too—some of them were the sort of occupations that were usually pursued in the open air in the Middle East—carpentry, wood carving, car repair; but there were men fixing televisions and painting signs, too. They were banging dents out of car fenders, and selling fruit, and stacking bricks. Unlike the indoor existence that people lived in Jewi
sh Tel Aviv or Haifa, life in Muslim Nazareth spilled into its streets.

  That was another difference between Jews and Palestinians. It annoyed Yossi.

  “You see? Just people everywhere, and not clean, and what are they doing?”

  They were working, they were sitting, they were dandling babies, they were exuding an air of possession and belonging.

  “Look over there,” Yossi said, and pointed to the east, another settlement, an extension of Nazareth, but newer, with whiter buildings and tidier roofs and emptier streets, the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit.

  “Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!” Yossi said.

  We started up a hill (“Too many cars! All these Arabs have cars!”), entered an area of twisty streets (“So dirty!”), continued to climb (“Houses have no name, no number—like Morocco Arabs”) and yelled at passersby, “Habiby—sofer!”

  The name did not ring any bells with the passersby.

  We kept going. Sunshine turned to twilight. Dusk gathered. The dust of Nazareth was reflected in car headlights and people and animals wandered in the road (“Arabs!”). The lights did not help; their glare made it harder for us to see, and finally in the interior of the upper town, instead of illuminating the road the lights blinded us.

  “Haifa is not like this! Look at Arab streets!”

  He was ranting and it seemed we were truly lost when he asked a man and woman where Habiby lived and they said in a Scottish accent that they had only been in Nazareth for two days and had no idea.

  “Forget it. Let’s go back to Haifa. We’ll never find the house.”

  “You must find your friend!” Yossi screamed, making a U-turn in the dark. “And I must smoke a cigarette!” He was very upset. He screamed again incoherently. He was saying, “Don’t worry!”

  The only lighted doorway on this street was a bakery. A man in flour-dusted overalls stood holding a squeeze bag of frosting and was using its nozzle to decorate some jam tarts. He had not heard of Habiby, but he said in Arabic, “Why don’t we call him and ask him directions?” He did so. The street was not far, he explained. He sat down and smacked some flour out of a shallow cardboard box and turned it over. Very slowly, he sketched a map on the bottom of the box. Then he handed this box to Yossi, and off we went, higher, almost to the top of the hill of old Nazareth.

  Emile Habiby’s house was large and rambling, set among others on a steep hillside, filled with people, mostly women and children, all of them Habiby. The author had three daughters and ten grandchildren; his first great-grandchild had just arrived.

  He sat, the patriarch, surrounded by this energetic family. He was seventy-three, stocky, even bull-like, with a heavy sculptured head and a raspy voice and a booming laugh. He had the build of a Mediterranean fisherman—he had worked on a fishing boat out of Haifa for many years; but he was also one of Israel’s intellectuals. He had published a number of novels, among them The Secret Life of Saeed and Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter, and he had won several literary prizes, the Order of Palestine in 1991 and the year before that the Jerusalem Medal. Two previous recipients of the Jerusalem Medal were so outraged at the fact that the prize had been awarded to an Arab that these thinkers (who had been singled out for their contribution to humanity) returned their medals in disgust. The absurdity was much enjoyed by Habiby, whose novels are excursions into the fantastic.

  I had encouraged Yossi to come in with me and, welcomed, given a cigarette, he sat calming himself in this Palestinian household, a great nest of Habibys. Cups of coffee appeared and pastries and small children. In the kitchen other children were being fed, and the Habiby women were talking and laughing. I was moved as much by the size and complexity of the family as by its harmony.

  And at last Yossi was smiling a real smile. In spite of all of his abuse and his shrieking, we had arrived, and he was happily smoking and we were receiving the best welcome imaginable, with food and compliments and solicitous questions.

  There were pictures of Jesus on the wall, and portraits of the Madonna and Child. It was a reminder that this was a Christian family, and such pictures could not have been more appropriate since Nazareth was the home of Mary and Joseph. The Basilica of the Annunciation had been built over the house of St. Anne, and even Joseph’s workshop had been discovered and excavated in Nazareth, and there it was for all the world to see, the workshop of the best-known carpenter in Christendom.

  “It’s good of you to come all this way,” Habiby said. “Though you know I would have come to Haifa to see you.”

  “Yes. But I found the trip out here interesting,” I said. Especially when Yossi had pointed to the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit and howled, “Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!”

  We talked about the tension since the massacre in Hebron. Habiby had written an article in The New York Times about it in which he had said, “One cannot go on pretending that nothing has changed,” and that the error many Israeli leaders and politicians had made was in refusing “to tell their people that they must reach out to the Palestinians; they have nobody else to rely on in the long run.” He was encouraged by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s condemnation of the assassin Goldstein.

  What had happened afterwards had been inevitable, since both sides vowed retribution. But his view was that both Palestinians and Israelis had a duty “to stand up to our own extremists.”

  “There is an old Arab saying,” Habiby said, “that the Jews celebrate their feasts around gardens, the Christians around kitchens, and the Muslims around graveyards.”

  A peace conference was going on at that moment in Casablanca, to which Yitzhak Rabin had been invited. I asked Habiby what he thought of the Israeli prime minister’s contribution.

  “He talked too much. He should have proceeded slowly,” he said.

  “You mean he was demanding too much?”

  “No. He didn’t realize where he was,” Habiby said, throwing up his hands. “He was in Morocco, not Israel. He was among Arabs. But he talks to these Arabs as though he is talking to his own people.”

  He was referring to Rabin’s manners, his characteristic bluster. “Being tough and businesslike, giving orders.”

  “That’s it. But a little politeness would have been helpful.”

  “I suppose he is feeling confident now that he has made a peace agreement with Jordan.”

  “It should still be possible for him to show some politeness,” Habiby said. “Now they are committed. But instead of all this public boasting and all the urgency, why not use a little tact?”

  Tact was a scarce commodity in Israel. Suspicion was so ingrained, and fear so common, that every sphere of life was affected, and the absence of faith and goodwill made people brusque. Israelis had struggled to arrive at this point, but life was still a struggle, and they perhaps saw, as Habiby had said, that they had no one else to rely on; the only allies Israelis would ever really have would be the Palestinians.

  “Charmless,” I said. It was a word that summed up the atmosphere of Israel for me.

  “Yes,” Habiby said, and gestured with his cigarette. “As for the peace agreement, I am not hopeful. I have doubts. But there is no going back.”

  He had written, “We, Israelis and Palestinians, are already fated to be born again as Siamese twins … true solidarity with one is contingent on true solidarity with the other. There is no alternative.”

  “What brings you to Israel?” he asked.

  “I’m just traveling around the Mediterranean. At the moment, I’m on a Turkish ship,” I said. “It’s in Haifa—leaving tomorrow.”

  “I have been traveling myself,” he said. “I must stop traveling or I’ll never write anything.”

  “I know the feeling. Monotony is the friend of the writer.”

  Yossi joined the conversation, first in English, then in Hebrew. Several times I interrupted to say that we ought to be leaving—after all, I had visited on such short notice. More food was brought. We ate. Habiby roared, describing the pompous attitude of Israeli politic
ians. Yossi nodded—yes, he agreed, it was awful.

  Later than I intended, Yossi and I left, the whole Habiby family turned out to see us off and make us promise that we would come back again.

  “You see, Arabs? The door is always open,” Yossi said in an admiring way. “We come there, the door is open. Cigarettes for me. Some food, thank you. Coffee, yes. Some more. Please, thank you. Take some extra.”

  “You like that?”

  “Oh, yes. Is good,” Yossi said. “The Arab door is always open.”

  We got lost again, but Yossi was calmer. He stopped and instead of shouting out the window he got out of the car and asked directions. A man said that he would show us the way, if we followed him. We were taken down a dark narrow road through the Balfour Forest, and then on a different route to Haifa.

  At Haifa, Yossi was reminded again of the hospitality at Nazareth.

  “We lock our doors,” he said. “Jews don’t have open doors. No pastry. No food. No coffee.”

  “What do Jews have instead of open doors?”

  “Just hello. A little talk. Then good-bye.”

  He kept driving, and he had second thoughts. He suspected that he had given me the wrong idea.

  “But sometimes an open door is bad,” he said. “You want to talk to your wife, eh? People doing—what is Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “Laughing.”

  “Yes. Laughing. It is bad. Open door can be bad. And look,” he said, and nodded at the heights of Haifa just ahead of us, Mount Carmel, the populous cliffs. “Those streets have names. Those Jews have numbers.”

  He drove me to the port. He became sentimental again. “It was nice how they served us. Food. Coffee. That was nice,” he said. “You know that man was talking politics to me?”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I told him, don’t ask me. I don’t know about politics.”

  Instead of eating on the ship I found a restaurant and spent the last of my shekels on a meal. Every meal I ate in Israel was delicious, and I had found the Israeli countryside an unexpected pleasure. The restaurant was almost empty, like the streets; like everything else in after-dark Haifa. Everyone was home, watching TV, doing schoolwork, worrying.