Ishmael's Oranges

by Claire Hajaj

  Over dinner they talked about the family. Tony had recently taken a job at his father’s law offices. He showed Jude a picture of a young paralegal he was interested in, a Jewish intern from Switzerland. Her face beamed out of the image, all white teeth and rich brown hair.

  She felt oddly deceived by Tony. He talked like a rebel but he’d slipped into his father’s life like a hand into a silken glove. You joined your father’s company, you’ll marry this Bec from Switzerland and you’ll move to Regent’s Park and set your table with crystal. And you’ll go to Shul and wear the yarmulke and host your own Passovers with that twinkle in your eye that says it’s all a joke to you. But it isn’t a joke. It’s you, it’s who you are and who you always have been.

  At last they took their coffee over to the soft leather sofa, and Jude knew that the moment had come. So she told him, in halting words, what she had come to say.

  It was easier than she’d imagined. He was an Israeli and a British citizen, nothing like the dangerous men of Uncle Max’s nightmares. He had many Jewish friends, in Israel and here. He was destined for great things, one of the best students in his class. He understood more about Jews than most English goyim ever could. He spoke Hebrew. And he loved her. He loved her more than anything, and she loved him.

  Tony sat as still as stone in his chair, until she’d finished. After the first silence fell, he put his head to one side and looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Jude waited, her throat tightening.

  Finally he asked, ‘So what about Jack and Dora? I take it you haven’t told them?’ She shook her head, looking down at her hands. He blew air out of his mouth in a slow whistle. ‘I’m not sure they’re going to go for all this Israeli citizen stuff,’ he told her, his voice measured and steady. ‘You know they think Max is one step above a savage anyway. What does middle-class England want with Israel?’ Judith felt a little block of hope slide out from underneath her.

  ‘So what do you suggest, then?’ she said, keeping her voice calm. ‘I have to tell them something.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘Tell them he’s Jewish.’

  ‘I can’t tell them that!’ Jude was horrified.

  ‘Why not? He’s Israeli. He knows Hebrew. He’s a Semite. According to you, he’s virtually Moses.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Tony. They’d know. And he’d know, too. He’d think I was ashamed of him.’

  ‘Aren’t you? You come here like you’re coming to an execution. You want me to – what? Give you a blessing? I’m not a Rebbe, you know.’ He gave her a weak smile.

  ‘I wanted you to help me break the news to my parents. To…’ she hesitated. ‘To help me figure out what to do. I just want to help them understand him like I do. I know it’s going to be hard.’

  ‘Hard.’ Tony leaned back into the cushions and cupped his chin in his hands. ‘Darling Jude, you have no idea how hard this is going to be. Never mind Jack and Dora. It’s you I’m thinking about, little one. It’s going to be impossible, I promise you. You want my advice. Wait a while before you tell anyone else. Just wait, until you’re sure.’

  ‘Why should I wait?’ Jude was angry now, getting to her feet in agitation and walking to the other end of the sofa. Outside, the lights of darkening London shone dazzling in through the window. ‘I know I’m never going to marry a Jew, Tony. Never. I tried for Dad, for you all, but I never met a single person I even liked, never mind loved. Now I have, and he happens to be an Arab. Too bad for you, and Jack and Dora, but why shouldn’t it be good for me? Why shouldn’t he be as good for me as that Swiss girl of yours and her rich father?’

  She saw Tony flinch. He stood up too, set his coffee down and walked over to the bookcase – the communist manifesto, as Alex liked to call it. A signed picture of Sunderland FC was framed above it, one of Tony’s most treasured possessions. Jude wanted to apologize, to rage at him. You’re supposed to be on my side. Tell me this is going to be okay. Help me make it good.

  He took a breath. ‘I always hated Hebrew school too,’ he said. ‘You know, the droning Rebbes with their greasy yarmulkes going on about the destiny of the Jewish people. Whole weekends lost to Jewish destiny! When I could have been at the football.’ He gave an exaggerated shudder, and Jude smiled despite herself.

  ‘Most of that stuff seemed psychopathic to me, the kind of thing people would get locked up for if they did it in Newcastle. Do you remember the foundation story, not the Moses one – the first one?’

  Jude felt lost. ‘Abraham?’

  ‘Him, yes. It’s one of the worst ones. Truly. I mean, first he marries an eighty-year-old woman and tells her she’s supposed to be a mother to a whole people. She frets herself into a frenzy because – surprise, surprise – she can’t conceive. So he has sex with a servant girl called Hagar and the two of them take the baby away from her. Then when the old woman finally has a kid of her own, what does he do? Tries to sacrifice it on the mountain, because he hears voices from God telling him to do it. What a great story! No wonder we’re so proud of it.’ He smiled again, but this time Jude had to force herself to laugh. That old guilt, the horror of rejecting daily bread everybody else finds so delicious, stirred in her stomach.

  ‘They sent her packing, that Arab girl who had the first boy. Ishmael they called him. Abraham’s original heir. Sarah was jealous and wanted all of God’s goodness for her little Isaac. So they tell us that Hagar and Ishmael went out into the desert. Just a girl and a kid, all alone in the heat, sent to their deaths by his papa like a used rag.

  ‘The Rebbes would tell you it was all part of God’s will, to make way for the chosen nation. And Ishmael had a nation of his own in the end, so no harm done, right? But I tell you, there isn’t an Arab on earth that doesn’t carry a little bit of Ishmael around with him. Who can blame them? They were always the ones to get kicked, first by God and then by everyone else. And they’ll never be finished kicking back.’

  He turned around to face her, grey in the cold reflection of the window.

  ‘Bubbellah, I can see you love this one. And if you say he loves you too, I don’t doubt it. But believe me, he’ll never forgive you.’

  ‘Forgive me for what?’ she whispered.

  He walked over to her and took her hand. ‘For being on the winning team, darling.’

  Salim waited anxiously for Jude to get back that night. He cleaned the two rooms of his flat, made stacks of sandwiches and turned on the old television he’d traded from his neighbour in exchange for some bookkeeping. He flicked from channel to channel through the hiss of the broken aerial, his stomach closed. The room reeked of washing and damp wood. Was he more worried for her or for himself? They would give her a hard time, he knew it. It was always harder for women than for men.

  Hassan had proved the truth of that. He’d called Salim a majnoon donkey, a born troublemaker, a man without pride in his people, a boy who forgot his own history. But at the back of his outraged insults was that calm certainty that all Arab men have, that their women could be tamed or dropped at will, and that any trouble they brought into a man’s life would soon blow over.

  When Jude eventually came back, she sounded cheerful and told Salim that Tony would like to meet him one day. But her face was pale and she threw herself into his arms as if he was the only boat floating in an empty sea.

  ‘Was he angry?’ Salim asked. ‘Did he say he’d talk to your parents?’ At the back of his mind the question hovered: did he turn you against me? Did he make you change your mind?

  ‘He wasn’t angry,’ she said, hugging him. ‘He was surprised. He said it would be hard for us. But we know that.’

  ‘We know that,’ he agreed, kissing her forehead. She was so small to be so brave. ‘You’re worth everything that comes. You’re the most courageous person I know.’

  ‘A mensch.’ She had tears in her eyes, but she smiled up at him. ‘That’s what my grandmother would have said. A person has to be brave before they can be worthy. I know she would have loved you, Sal. She would have s
een through all of it, seen who you really are.’

  He believed her, he had faith in her, more faith than he realized was still left inside him. She’d stood up to her family for his sake. She saw him as worth the risk.

  That summer he slaved to get the best possible mark in his finals. Jude would sit up with him late into the night, making little index cards to help him remember equations and theories. And when her head finally drooped in sleep he would lie beside her and watch her breathing, wondering at her choice. Her hair was the soft yellow of candlelight, and her skin felt like still water. He would do anything to justify her faith in him, to become the man she saw through those blue eyes. She knew he was made for better things. She knew what it was to dream of another, forbidden life.

  He tried to soften the way for her. He took tea with the sour, fascinated Ruth Michaels of the Jewish Society and even attended the local synagogue. He’d put on the yarmulke and smiled at his neighbours, and anyone would have sworn he was a Jew. Even me. And in that lofty room, filled with the rustle of lambswool suits and the rich smell of embroidery, he could almost imagine it himself. That he, Salim Al-Ishmaeli, was not really an Arab, forever predestined to hold losing cards – but one of the chosen ones, the masters, who always seemed to come out on top of the game.

  A week after finals, Salim took Jude back to Finsbury Park, ‘the scene of the crime’, as he called it. Summer had burst through the bareness he remembered; the dark green was now soft and the trees a remote rustling of leaves. He spread out a picnic of cheese sandwiches and early season strawberries on the lawn and she presented him with a bottle of champagne. When she brushed his hair from his forehead he could see the July sunlight shining through drops on her lips, and when she pushed her mouth onto his he could taste it, a mix of sour and sweet.

  Two plastic cups later she told him again how proud she was of him, beautiful in her sincerity. He jumped on the moment. He’d been planning it for days, and had waited all morning for this opportunity to confront her.

  Despite her promise, Jude had still not told her parents about them. To her family, he didn’t exist. Her pride in him was only a half-truth, a self-deception – otherwise why the secrecy? Her face fell as he spoke, the words tumbling out of him.

  ‘You’ll feel better after you tell them,’ he argued. ‘They deserve to know. What are you waiting for?’

  He saw her blue eyes shift towards the trees, like birds startled into flight. ‘I will tell them, but it has to be the right time,’ she floundered, nonsensically defensive. ‘I need Tony to help me, and he’s been away in Geneva all summer.’ Then came the counter. ‘You haven’t even told your sister. Or your mother.’

  ‘My mother hasn’t seen me in more than ten years,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t care if I’m alive or dead. And my sister hasn’t seen me in nearly as long. They’re not part of my life now.’

  ‘You told me about that letter your brother sent you. From Lebanon. She does want to see you, you said. She wrote to you. Why don’t you go and see them? It might make you feel better.’ A child’s ploy, easy to see through but hard to deflect.

  ‘Why are we talking about my family and Lebanon? This is about your family in Sunderland, the people you don’t want to know you’re living with an Arab.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Sal.’

  ‘No, not for God’s sake. For our sake, Jude. Isn’t there something special here? Something worth the risk?’

  ‘Worth shouting from the rooftops,’ she said, but her face was troubled.

  ‘So? What are you afraid of?’ She shook her head, her hand coming up to touch his cheek. Nothing, the gesture said. But he felt a deep disquiet as he watched her hand fall from his face, retreating to pull at the two gold chains twisted around her neck.

  Finally, Salim arranged a coffee with Hassan. It was his last attempt to manipulate her innate sense of fairness, to play on her strongly knotted strings of guilt.

  In truth he had been almost as reluctant to get Jude and Hassan together as Jude was to make that long-dreaded phone call to Sunderland. Hassan was an unvarnished Arab, proud to be so, rejecting the English niceties Salim had been so keen to learn. How would he appear to a sheltered Jewish girl whose idea of foreign exoticism was the Parisian Left Bank?

  They met at Hassan’s house on a Sunday afternoon. Hassan’s wife had cooked a greasy feast: cooked soft rolled cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice, chicken on a bed of oily potatoes, imitations of manquish pastries full of heavy English lamb, and a rich dessert of kanafi, buttered vermicelli swimming on top of a bed of sugared white cheese.

  They sat on the old, brown twin sofas while Hassan smoked and Salim sipped his beer. Salim could see Jude looking around at the strangeness of the house. Like other Arabs, Hassan and Shireen preferred electricity to sunlight inside their living room. The curtains were partially drawn and the daylight gave way to the glare of cheap ceiling lights. A spicy, greasy smell came from the kitchen, mingling with the ashy haze of cigarettes. Bronze plates and wall hangings with hadiths from the Qur’an were placed around plastic flower arrangements. The desperate thought came – this is not her world.

  Perhaps Hassan sensed his thoughts. Whether or not, he became increasingly irritable and irritating. First, he started berating Salim for not going back to the Middle East after graduating. ‘You have no gratitude,’ he scoffed. ‘Tareq and Nadia put you through university, and you can’t even give them five minutes. And what about Rafan? He says you never wrote back to him. Is that what brothers do?’

  ‘Is it what brothers do to be silent for ten years?’ Salim shot back, heat rising into his face. ‘After one letter you want me to go running to Lebanon. I’m too busy for this nonsense.’

  Hassan poked his finger at Jude, a sneer on his face. He had been drinking, Salim saw. ‘This big man here, he never forgets an insult, believe me. He can’t let anything go. You’ll see. Not even with his own family. He’s too proud for us. I hope he doesn’t get too proud for his English family too.’

  ‘Leave her be, Hassan,’ Salim said, in Arabic. He could tell the effort of speaking in English all the time was affronting his brother, making him more provocative.

  ‘Why, then?’ Hassan said, refusing to switch from English. ‘She comes to my house, she’s a grown woman. Let her hear the truth, why not?’

  ‘Sal wants to go back to see his family,’ Jude said quickly. Her expression said, all too plainly, how could this man and mine be brothers? ‘But he has a new job starting in a few weeks. When he’s settled, maybe we’ll go together?’ The last words were framed as a question. He caught her eyes, and she smiled. Salim was startled. Did she think he was going to the Middle East with her?

  ‘You and he are going to Palestine together?’ Hassan said, his eyes widening. ‘Ya Salim, what have you been telling this girl? Doesn’t she watch the news?’

  Salim felt like pebbles were rumbling under his feet, the beginning of the avalanche. ‘Stop it, Hassan.’

  ‘No,’ said Hassan, his voice rising. ‘You want to do this thing together, this peace and love thing? In England, okay. In Palestine there’s no peace, no love. If you go together, you won’t get flowers, you’ll get stones. How can Salim take a Jew back to his family? I’m sorry, but you’re crazy, both of you.’

  He saw Jude go white, and set her half-tasted cup of Turkish coffee down on the glass table. Her mouth, usually so gentle, narrowed into a hard, thin line.

  ‘Sal and I both belong there,’ she said, her voice trembling with anger he’d rarely sensed in her. ‘We both have family there. Not everyone throws stones, only the people who want to fight more than they want anything else.’

  ‘You don’t belong there,’ Hassan said flatly. ‘The Zionists think God gave them my house, but it isn’t written in the Qur’an or any other book I know. Salim said you weren’t a Zionist but what does he know? I say, scratch a Jew and you get Ben-Gurion.’

  Jude got to her feet. Salim saw that she was near tears and hating herself
for it. He was on his feet too, saying, ‘Jude, come on, sit down,’ grasping her with one hand and Hassan with another.

  ‘I think we should go home now,’ she said, her voice cracking. Hassan threw his hands up in the air and said, in a more subdued voice, to Shireen, ‘Someone has to tell them, yani.’

  Salim could have punched him, could have screamed retaliations at him, but it was too late. As he got Jude’s coat and tried to make light of it with small talk, he knew a deeper damage had already been done.

  The journey from London’s suburban south-east to its busy north-west was achingly long and slow. At Piccadilly Circus, Jude’s patience ran out. She told Salim she was going back to her room in the student halls, and she would see him later. His protests were weak. They both wanted to be alone.

  She walked through Soho as if she was dreaming, past dark avenues of sex shops and young faces with wildly coloured hair falling over thin shoulders. She pushed through a crowd of them as they laughed, breathing in clouds of smoke from the stub ends of their thin cigarettes and the fruity smell of beer splashing on her shoes. Different songs floated through the evening air in a faint dissonance, arms of sound grasping at her as she went by. It was late summer and the skies were still emptying like a glass of water, preparing for a pale and star-strewn darkness to set in.

  She was still trembling, from the scorn she’d heard in Hassan’s voice and the hateful wave of anger she’d felt breaking over her. The scorching bitterness of the Turkish coffee lingered in her mouth, a strong, overpowering taste that mocked her weak palate. She remembered looking up at Hassan from the blackness of the cup and seeing the same colour in his eyes.

  She should not blame Salim for his brother, and yet in that moment she felt angry with him – angry he was an Arab, angry he’d pursued her in the first place, furious with herself for becoming so entwined with him that she could not imagine letting go. Is this how our lives will be? Resentment from all sides, no place to call home?