The Lady from Tel Aviv

by Raba'i al-Madhoun

  Suddenly, a black man in his twenties appears. He looks like a Falasha. I imagine his family emigrating from Ethiopia as part of the airlift between 1984 and 1991. Maybe via Sudan, part of the secret deal with Numeiri. I really don’t want him to sit next to me. I do not want to spend these next five hours sitting next to someone like him, with the two of us poring over every moment of Middle Eastern history together. The guy walks by, and I begin to relax.

  The next one up in the line slowly creeping toward the back is an old lady. If this woman sits next to me, it won’t be any fun at all. But, at the same time, it won’t be so annoy—

  My thoughts are interrupted by shouts from among the seats on the other aisle. ‘Rotza leshevet po, Ima!’ A little girl’s voice shrieks, ‘I want to sit here, Mama!’ I cannot see the girl from where I am sitting, nor the mother, who tries to explain to the girl that the seat she wants is not hers. ‘Ze lo hakiseh shelakh!’ The girl screeches out over and over, ‘But I want to sit here, but I want to sit here!’ I now can hear two small fists pounding on a seat, as she bawls, ‘Rotza leshevet! Rotza leshevet!’

  As the stewardess tries to resolve the problem, I go back to watching the passengers as they shuffle by. Some I hope will sit next to me. Some I hope will not. I imagine that I am the one who decides who will sit where, what they should look like, and even what opinions they are allowed and not allowed to have.

  A woman in her sixties appears, walks toward me, then walks past. A young North African man reads the seat numbers above my head and makes me nervous. Then he walks on, making way for a large man in his fifties. Another man approaches, panting and out of breath, like he is lugging around a body that belongs to someone else. He is carrying a black book and putting on a pair of thick glasses. I watch him carefully as he sits down in the seat directly across the aisle from me in the middle row. When I realize what sort of book he is reading, I say to myself, Please God, don’t let him stomp his feet when he reads!

  A seventy-year-old woman comes up and stops right next to me, but she does not look up at the seat numbers overhead. Suddenly a beautiful blonde appears right behind her. Her arrival makes me reconsider the calculations I have been making.

  I hope she sits next to me. The words repeat in my mind like a mantra. I couldn’t care less about the kinds of questions she is probably going to toss at me. Flinging my fear to the wind, I decide I am ready to go to hell itself, as long as I get to sit next to her.

  I struggle to get a better look at the woman and notice that she is desperate to find her seat and is not going to wait for the old lady to clear the aisle. She is in such a hurry that she leans over the old lady. Like a lover late for an assignation, she murmurs, ‘Excuse me, sir—is this row 19?’

  ‘Yes, miss. No one is sitting in A. Is that what you’re looking for?’

  The old lady walks past and the aisle opens up to reveal a pair of bare legs. She is not wearing much on top either. She is courteous when she asks to squeeze by me. My seatmate. Lucky you, Walid!

  I stand up to let her through, not yet believing my good fortune. This blonde is going to be my companion through the depths of the night. She will drift off beside me and I will wake her up at dawn so we can watch the sunrise together. I will even exchange pleasantries in Hebrew with her, if she wants. ‘Boker tov, adona!’ … ‘Boker tov, adon!’

  Why is this woman in such a hurry to sit down? Did they seat her next to me deliberately?

  The more I think about it, the more paranoid it makes me. At the check-in desk, the attendant took my passport and looked at it. She did not even attempt to disguise her uneasiness. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she told me. ‘There’s been a mistake with your reservation. The plane is overbooked.’

  ‘How is that my problem? I made my reservation three weeks ago.’ That’s all I actually said, even though what I really wanted to tell her was that I had been waiting decades to take this trip. I never had the chance to say this because she immediately began to tell me how sorry she was. British Airways would assume all responsibility. She would try to find a prompt solution for my problem. I should relax and not worry, if they could not find me a seat on this plane, they would find me one on the next flight.

  ‘When would that be?’

  ‘Sorry. We will let you know as soon as we have more information.’

  Then she stood up and walked away. The whole time she was away, my passport and boarding pass sat on the desk.

  A young male attendant came and sat down in her place. He flipped through the pages of my passport, then put it back down and began to help others. Whatever the problem was, it was mine and mine alone.

  The first attendant came back and whispered some words in the ear of her co-worker. The man giggled, then the two of them went back to doing their work.

  What happened while I was checking in? Did someone in the back room arrange to have this particular woman sit in the seat next to me?

  These doubts and suspicions begin to drive me crazy. There is nothing in this world as disturbing to me as my own thoughts. My seatmate is a honeytrap. I will be under surveillance every minute I am with her on this flight. I am sure she has been well trained in how to gather information from subjects like me. And after we land, other agents will step in and take her place.

  What a load of crap—why do I listen to these thoughts? They are ridiculous. I am not important in the slightest. Why would Mossad want to keep tabs on me? I am neither a Naguib Mahfouz nor a Palestinian politico from one of the factions. I am not even an activist whose pacifism would be troubling to anybody. I am just a harmless journalist, like hundreds of others.

  But what if someone made a mistake? Like what happened to that Moroccan busboy, Ahmed Bouchiki, killed in Norway by a Mossad team who thought he was a Palestinian operative. Bouchiki’s murder was a case of mistaken identity. With me, there will be no such mistake. I am a passenger on a plane. As soon as we land, I will walk straight to airport security on my own two feet. There, they will not be able to make a mistake—not even an honest one—even if they wanted to. There’s nothing false about my citizenship or my papers. The worst they can do is detain me.

  The thought calms me. For a few seconds at least. Then I notice I am looking straight down at the chiselled legs of my seatmate as she squeezes into her seat. The bare skin seems to wink back at me. A reasonable dread comes over me when I imagine that my seatmate’s politics could well be Likud, maybe even to the right of Sharon himself.

  Just thinking about all this gets me down. I wish I could be rid of all these thoughts passing through my mind. It is just a plane ride.

  2

  The plane takes off. My homecoming jerks into motion as the engines roar with thunder and the aircraft shakes terribly as it ploughs through the air. The whole cabin is silent until the captain announces that the plane has reached a cruising altitude of almost thirty thousand feet.

  When the seatbelt sign goes off, I hear a wave of clicking sounds and sighs of relief. One of the stewards welcomes the passengers on board, and it occurs to me that it is not so different from the recorded announcements you hear on the London Underground: ‘Now leaving this station! Next stop, that station! This train terminates at …’ It is just as easy to ignore this announcement as it is in the tube. And then I am thinking about my mother. She is sleeping but not sleeping as morning creeps slowly toward her. I am sure she is in bed, but I also know that tonight she cannot sleep.

  A year after my father died, my father’s sister, Sofia, told her, ‘Listen Umm Walid, my girl. Your husband, God have mercy on his soul, has been dead for a year now. You’re still young and pretty and—’

  ‘Don’t say another word, cousin! After Abu Walid, I can never marry again.’ My father’s sister swallowed the rest of her words. After that, she never brought up the subject of marriage again.

  My mother was young when my father died, not even thirty. She was tall and slim. Her skin was light, and her cheeks were as red as apples. Her button nose was just
as small as it was on the day she was born. And her lips were delicate. Even more striking than her beautiful face was her rebellious black hair—no headscarf could ever contain it.

  My aunt was not the only one to bring up the subject. My father’s father, Nimr, could not stand the thought of my beautiful mother remaining a widow either. Together, the two of them would worry about what people might say if she never remarried. But my mother would not give up her attachment to my father. My grandfather told my mother one evening, ‘Listen, daughter: Ahmad was my son. He was the apple of my eye. He was as dear to me as he was to you—even more so. But what happened happened, and by God’s decree. And who am I to reject God’s wisdom? Besides, you’re still young and—’

  My mother interrupted her father-in-law with a severity he’d never witnessed before. ‘Say no more, please. I’m neither young nor old. I’ve got a boy who’s becoming a man, and a girl. And I want to raise them. I said it when Ahmad died. And I said it again after a year had passed. And now I am repeating it to your face so you never ask me again: Abu Walid, you are gone, but there will be no other man for me.’ And with this, she closed the file on an idea whose very premise pained her sense of dignity. Sure enough, my mother never remarried. She lived only for my sister and me.

  In March 1967, I returned to finish my studies at the university, hoping to return with a degree in hand. My mother always thought that a Cairene girl would snatch me away from her, that I would come back holding a marriage licence instead of a diploma. But the war broke out just days after we finished our final exams. Israel occupied Gaza and Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan. And I never got to go back.

  Years later, my sister, Raja, married a relative of ours who was working for a company in Qatar, and she moved there to be with him. So our mother was left to live alone. She saw Raja and her husband once a year, when they came on their summer visit to Gaza. My mother found some consolation in that.

  Raja died last year in Qatar. She’d been sick—uterine cancer. And now my mother was doomed to live in total isolation till the end of her days, or so she thought.

  I look around. Some of the other passengers are busy reading books. Others are watching videos. Some have turned off their overhead lights and gone to sleep. Or they are pretending to sleep. Meanwhile, the jet engines roar and spit with a rhythm so soft and regular you barely notice it.

  Suddenly, the silence is broken by loud snoring. I turn and look around, to see a large man sitting in the aisle seat of the middle section in the row behind us—head on chest, his mouth a heaving hole. His lower lip trembles as he snores, in and out.

  The sound rattles my seatmate. She turns to me and asks, ‘What the hell is that?’ As if she thought I was the one making all the racket.

  ‘Snorting, coming from someone behind us.’

  ‘It’s really disgusting, whatever it is.’

  But I do not open my mouth to say another word. I just realized I said ‘snorting’ instead of ‘snoring.’ I am lost in translation. My words are embarrassed by me, and I by them. By the time I return to Khan Yunis in my mind, the snoring has stopped and my seatmate has gone back to sleep.

  ‘Abu Hatem—listen, cousin. My mother is insisting I stay with my other cousins up in Jabalia Camp. She told me they’ve fixed up a room in Shafiq’s apartment. She says the place is still completely empty apart from the room he furnished for when he gets married. Come and meet me at Beit Hanoun crossing. From there, we’ll go to Nasreddine’s building, which my mother says is not far from the crossing. That way I’ll get to see you right away and then, a few days later, I’ll come and stay with you for a couple of days in Khan Yunis before going back up to Jabalia. That way we’ll make everybody happy, including my mother.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, cousin. I spoke with your mother and reassured her, we’ll do whatever she wants. We don’t want to make her unhappy. Whatever you and she decide on is OK by me. You’ll be staying with your cousins and family. I’ll come by in the late afternoon and say hello and visit for a while and then go back home. Then I’ll come on Thursday at 5 and take you back to Khan Yunis with us. Friday morning, we’re going to slaughter a sheep in your honour and right after prayers, we’ll put on a feast you’ll never forget.’

  The sound of the stewardess drags me back from Khan Yunis. She places dinner on my table tray: a vegetable omelette, a piece of feta cheese, four black olives, a slice of tomato and assorted pickles.

  My seatmate takes notice and says, ‘Yum. Does everyone get one like that?’

  ‘Only if you’re a vegetarian.’

  I cut the omelette in half and without waiting for her to ask, I say, ‘You’re welcome to have some of mine. I’m not that hungry.’

  She smiles. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll eat whatever they bring me.’

  I dive into my food and do not repeat the invitation. When her meal arrives, she does the same.

  I finish eating and the stewardess comes by to collect the trays. She puts mine on the cart and moves on to the next row. I fold my table tray back up into the seat in front of me. A few minutes later, my seatmate finishes hers and does the same. I lean back into my seat and close my eyes.

  Some time later, I am woken by the whisper of soft sobbing. I look over at my neighbour. She has covered her head with her hands and is quietly crying. She gets a hold of herself, stops, and then bursts into tears again.

  Of their own accord, the fingers of my hand reach out toward her, and then I turn to her, as if to shield her sadness from the world. Why am I doing this? No answer.

  I pat her shoulder gently. ‘Are you OK, miss? Do you need any help?’

  People try to console each other’s sadness in so many different ways. You might try to calm a colleague at work. Or even a stranger who sits down next to you on the train. You might pat their arm or back. You might even hug them. We all need to feel the touch of another person sometimes. Even if that person is a total stranger.

  But I’m not her colleague and no mere stranger. I’m the Other, aren’t I? I’m that kind of person whose being shakes her whole existence. And hers shakes mine. We’re not in a position to console each other. She’s Israeli, her accent proves it. No doubt she served in the military. Maybe she did her service in the Occupied Territories. Maybe she has shot at Palestinians. Maybe she played a role in the murder of my cousin, Falah. Maybe she has stood at checkpoints … My seatmate might be all this, or she might not.

  My mind begins to spin. I start to have second thoughts about what I am doing. But my hand still rests lightly on the woman’s shoulder, as if it belonged there.

  My seatmate wipes her tears with the back of her hand. I rush to offer her a Kleenex. She politely refuses it, saying: ‘No thank you.’

  So what? What’s the use of being so polite? She said no, and that’s that.

  Suddenly a wide smile appears on her lips and my Kleenex disappointment vanishes. I am relieved. Why? I take my hand from her shoulder and settle back into my seat. My seatmate bends over to reach something on the floor.

  ‘Would you like some?’ She takes a large chocolate bar out of her bag and offers me half.

  I ask for only one small square, but she hands me two. I thank her and devour them in two bites, mumbling as I chew: ‘Mm. This is good chocolate.’ Piece by piece, she eats the rest.

  She must be in heaven by now. There are women who receive genuine chemical pleasure from chocolate. They eat it anytime and anywhere, knowing that it will give them an endorphin high. Then there are women who eat chocolate either because they want to do without men or because they must do without men. It could be that my seatmate has just been dumped. Maybe she is missing a man who once filled her world with love. In any case, her sadness totals half a bar of chocolate, no more. Perhaps she will wipe away her sorrows now. She really does look more relaxed now than she did when she first sat down.

  ‘May I have that Kleenex after all, please?’

  I give her the same tissue she just refused—and
in doing so, her rejectionist stance is banished and so are my hard feelings.

  She gently pats the chocolate off her lips. In doing so, she wipes away the rest of her sadness. She places the tissue in the little seat pouch in front of her.

  ‘You know, your British accent is charming.’

  She glances at me from the corner of her eye before turning to look at me directly, before I have a chance to say anything.

  I laugh, making fun of myself while staring back at her. Her eyes have begun to sparkle. I finally reply, astonished, ‘My British accent?’ That’s odd. She can’t really like my English—it’s mongrel, made up of lots of odds and ends, none of which have much to do with England. Or is she trying to figure out where I’m from?

  ‘Um, I don’t know. I mean, I like the way you speak. Each letter comes out so pronounced.’

  The way I speak? Pronounced? I’ve never met anyone who liked my accent before. Is she really being sincere when she says she likes it? ‘You really like it, huh?’

  ‘Mmm.’ As she murmurs, her eyes flash with hesitation. It makes me want to go ahead and talk to her. It makes me want to carry the conversation far away from me—to talk about her and her world.

  ‘You know, when you asked me about the seat number, I was hoping it was going to be yours. I said to myself, I’d be a lucky man if this good-looking blonde sat down next to me.’

  ‘Thank you. What else were you saying to yourself?’

  She is not only attractive, she is greedy. ‘Well, I was thinking you were probably a model or an actress.’

  ‘I am an actress!’ she blurts out with a smile.

  As she opens this door onto her world, I breathe another sigh of relief. I want her to keep talking about herself, so I ask, ‘So you live in Tel Aviv?’

  ‘Yes, so do my parents.’