Ordinarily the building of a qasr was a communal affair. The whole family joined in and together they could get it built in a matter of a few days. But Ayoub did not have that sort of family. His cousins were all useless. They wanted to study and after finishing school they left to pursue their education in the United States. He couldn't see the point of it. They deserted Ramallah as if it were not their town, their home, the place where they should strike roots, get married and bring up children as their fathers and forefathers had done. They all emigrated and left him alone in Ramallah.
What did he care? He knew his own strength and was confident of his abilities. He was an only child and now did not even have his cousins around him to help. But then he was used to depending on himself. And there was his wife to do what she could. Together they would build the qasr and make it one of the finest in the area.
On the first day they thought they would return to Ramallah at dusk but they lost themselves in the work and when they stopped the sun had already gone down. If they started back now they would have to walk in the dark and this was not safe because of the possibility of being attacked by jackals on the way. So they decided to stay on their land, and sleep the night. Ayoub went and fetched water from the spring. In her zewadeh Zariefeh had brought bread, white goat cheese, onions, dry figs and raisins. They put them down and ate. They had not planned on staying the night and so had not brought any canvas to cover themselves with. But they would be all right for tonight, there was no one around, they had the hills all to themselves. Ayoub made a fire to keep the jackals away and tried to stay awake as long as possible to watch over his young wife. But eventually he succumbed to sleep. When he woke up to a dewy, cool morning he thought he was in paradise. He loved being out in the hills. His young wife was next to him, they were on their own land – not confined inside a small space with the animals but outdoors in God's open country. He examined yesterday's work and saw how well Zariefeh had cleared the small plot and how he had begun laying out the foundation of the qasr. He went off to do his morning toilet out in the open without fear of anyone watching or coming along. He fetched more water and came back to find his wife awake.
They worked hard like this for six consecutive days. It was only because Zariefeh knew what was edible in the wild that they were able to survive in the hills on the provisions they had brought with them, thinking it was only going to be a day's excursion, not a full week. They rationed the bread and found some wild asparagus, watercress and thyme. In the evenings she prepared chamomile tea from the fresh herbs she found growing in the side of the hill. They ate and drank what they could collect and managed to keep hunger away, working continuously, stopping to rest only for brief intervals.
He was too shy at first to touch her in the open, it felt so exposed. But on the third day his desire was so strong it could not be contained. The qasr already had walls a metre and a half high. He felt that inside no one would be able to see them and, anyway, the possibility that someone should happen to pass by was surely remote. He also felt more comfortable sleeping behind these walls for an animal would not be able to leap in so easily and certainly not without bringing down some of the stones, which would make enough of a racket to wake him up.
And so the qasr was built entirely from stone without any cement. It was put together so well that it has lasted for well over half a century. It had a small door. When it was first built it had only one floor. But he had expected that he might have to enlarge it when his family grew. So he designed it with enough space for internal spiral stairs along the wall. In time he added another floor, making it a majestic, palatial qasr by any account, the highest and most spacious in the whole of the Ramallah hills.
I remember hearing when I was growing up how Abu Ameen had built the qasr with his wife on their honeymoon. We had all heard how, after they finished, he could not find anyone else around to do the sakja dance in celebration of the completion of the task. So he called on his wife: 'Yalla Ya, Zariefeh.' She was a pretty woman and always wore a turban festooned with pierced Ottoman coins. She removed her turban, pulled up her thob (traditional Palestinian embroidered dress), took her husband's hand, and together they danced around their new home, until they fell to the ground with exhaustion. An expression relating to this became common in our family. When we had to do with less than what was normally required we would say: 'Yalla Ya, Zariefeh' and get whoever was there to do it. I suspect that the description of the occasion as a honeymoon came later. When the couple were married I don't believe this concept existed. Couples had no leisure time at all. They were hard-nosed people who had little to survive on. What I marvel at is that in the midst of all this drudgery, Abu Ameen found the time to indulge himself and, using the skill he had learned, carve out of stone his own a'rsh, a monument which has survived for some seventy-five years.
As I was growing up I heard a lot about the romanticized life of Abu Ameen – six months at home, six months in the hills. It was the subject of much talk. I never thought any of it was real. In my mind it was just family myth, folklore.
I also heard derogatory talk of the terrible time my family had when they stayed in his house. Naturally I only heard my parents' side of the story; how they took exception to the way Abu Ameen's family ate and behaved towards each other. But now I can imagine how he must have suffered. My family were judgemental, arrogant and proud of their education and status. They looked down on Abu Ameen and his family. 'What has he made of himself?' they would ask accusingly. 'Nothing, nothing at all. He was but a stonemason who sat under a rough canopy day in day out, pecking at stone.'
It was true that at first Abu Ameen barely made enough money to survive and raise his large family. But after 1948, when Ramallah was swamped with refugees from the coastal towns in what became Israel, his fortunes changed. There was need for more housing and so Abu Ameen had more work. This meant that he was able to go less often on his sarhat to Harrasha and the place was neglected. All he could manage was to take care of the grapevines and the olive trees, doing the essential work of pruning and ploughing around their trunks in autumn after the harvest.
Then in 1955 disaster struck. The vines were afflicted by the deadly grape phylloxera, for which there was then no known cure. The only way to stop its spread would have been to cut down all the vines in the way of the spread of the disease. But the farmers did not know this at the time; nor was anyone prepared to sacrifice his precious vines to save the whole crop. Everyone lost. The disease first hit the vines in the northern wadis, near Abu Ameen's land, then spread southward and eastward towards the town. In the course of a few years all the grapes that had made the hills around Ramallah green in spring and throughout the summer were gone. Only the hardy olive trees remained, seemingly eternal, planted in the midst of terraces that now had nothing else growing on them.
Abu Ameen looked with anger and despair at what was happening but did not have the means to put it right. After all his grapes died that summer he planned on putting in new seedlings during the next winter's planting season, but by the autumn of that year he had been afflicted by a stroke that left him lame and unable to farm. The dead vines in other plots were not replaced either, because many of the landowners were absent. They had emigrated in search of work to the Gulf or the United States and those who stayed had lost the hardiness which enabled the older generation to toil for little financial reward in the dry and stony hills of Ramallah.
I can barely remember the hills when the grapes draped their terrace walls. The custom was not to raise the stem of the vine off the ground but to lay it over the stone wall so that in summer the terraces became covered in green. Walking in the hills one can still see some of these stems, now charcoal black like amputated limbs strewn over the terrace stones. I must have been five years old when the process of their destruction by disease began. The house where I grew up overlooked the hills but I must have blocked out the memory of the shrivelling diseased vines. I remember my father regularly insisting that the
best grapes were from the Ramallah hills. Everyone agreed.
When I was growing up, the hills for most of the year turned into dry, wild and distant places entangled with thistles and weeds, unvisited except by the shepherd boy with his sheep and goats. Shrubs grew everywhere unchecked. The terraces needed rehabilitation, parts of them having collapsed. The soil eroded as the retaining walls crumbled. Stones covered everything, washed over the soil where Abu Ameen and others used to plant. Many of the paths where he used to drive his mule were obliterated; left without cleaning, many springs had become clogged. The wadis now dried up long before the summer had even begun. The hills were an abandoned land and evidence of their neglect was apparent everywhere.
But in spring they were once again transformed with swathes of purple flax that could be glimpsed from afar, criss-crossed by different patterns of blue from the bugloss, clover and miniature iris like wafts of colour painted with a wide brush. In the early morning, as the droplets of dew clung to the delicate petals of the wild flowers catching the sunlight, the valleys seemed to glitter in a kaleidoscope of colour.
The outside of Abu Ameen's house in Ramallah had that fusty smell of laundry water spilt in the outside alley. In the small stone house with the thick walls, at the centre of the old town, with its large bell-shaped clay pot for keeping cool the drinking water which we called El Zeer, Abu and Um Ameen raised seven children, six boys and one girl. None were interested in education; nor did their parents encourage them. What their father desired for his children was that they would take up farming. But this was not to be. None of them were the least bit interested in even visiting Harrasha let alone farming it. They were all heavy smokers and found the walk there too arduous.
With ten people in that small two-room house, Abu Ameen's elderly mother included, Harrasha became even more important in the life of Abu Ameen. Every morning he emerged from the house feeling drowsy, close to being asphyxiated from the carbon monoxide fumes of the charcoal they burned on the small metal qanoon inside the house to keep warm. The toilet was outside the house and during cold winter nights the animals were brought inside and slept in the downstairs area. It was confined, stuffy and noisy. His cheeks would be flushed, his head so heavy that he would be surprised by the fresh air. He claimed he suffered headaches from the continuous chatter of the women. He could hardly wait for the end of winter so he could be out again in the hills, sleeping on the roof of his qasr under the starry night sky, waking up in the morning with his clothes wet from dew. It was the silence that he craved most of all. That unique silence of the hills where you could hear the slithering of a snake in the undergrowth.
He also looked forward to being away from the children. It was difficult to get them to work. All they wanted was to smoke and enjoy themselves. They didn't care about the land. They had a considerable plot behind the house, which he believed could be cultivated and turned into a paradise. But they were too lazy to do it. Out there in the hills he was oblivious to all his problems. He would not bother anyone; nor would there be anyone to bother him. If he did not wash and he smelled, no one would be around to complain. He would sleep and snore and no one could hear him and be annoyed. Nor did he have to put up with the snoring of the other members of his family or the animals. He didn't have to tell anyone what to do and fight with them if they didn't do it. There was no one to have to cajole, scold or argue with. Life on his own, with only the obedient mule around, was blissful.
All winter long he would wait for the weather to get warmer, planning what he was going to accomplish in the spring when he went off to the hills. As soon as winter ended he loaded his mule with a zewadeh of provisions and rode away.
Once he got to his land he felt his year was beginning. His wasn't a large plot, but still there was much to be done and many rocks to clear.
This season he had big plans for his stay in the hills. First the essential jobs, the pruning and the ploughing; then he was going to make home improvements. He had in mind to carve a chair out of the rock that stood next to the door and was too big to remove. He wanted to turn it into the most comfortable seat possible, well proportioned with a good support to the lower back and with solid armrests, a real throne worthy of a king where he could sit alone after his work was done. Master of his own world, alone, happy and satisfied.
He worked constantly the entire day chiselling away at the rock. The chips flew all around him, the dust from the stone made his clothes, face and hair white like an old man's. He had a great capacity for work and he knew the material so well that every one of his blows was effective in shaping the rock the way he had planned. It was late in the afternoon when he finished. The sun was already setting and the wind had started up. He rested his weary body on the rock chair and was satisfied that it had all the right proportions, just as he had hoped. He looked around him and saw the beautiful qasr that he and his wife had built and the terracing of the land in front of it that was now finished and he felt that his happiness was complete.
Sometimes in the town he had his doubts about the way his life had proceeded. These were especially strong when his cousin Saleem visited from Jaffa. In Harrasha he looked forward to his cousin's visits, but not when he came to Ramallah in winter. Then Saleem would be wearing a three-piece suit and wire-rimmed spectacles, and smoking a pipe. Abu Ameen believed it was too much reading that had spoiled his cousin's eyes. He himself had eyes like a hawk and never needed to wear glasses. Saleem now considered himself a Yaffawi (someone who comes from Jaffa). He even owned a hotel in the city, the Continental. He read big books in English but didn't stop complaining about the Engleez. He sat awkwardly on one of the low chairs while the rest of them sat on the floor around him. He looked as though he was presiding over everyone, as if he were a judge also here in the humble house. He never talked about how Abu Ameen had not moved from the village where he began his life, never even leaving the house where he was born, but his silence said it all. It was as though he was constantly saying: 'Look at me. I have made something of myself, left Ramallah, got educated. And you are still ignorant, wearing your qumbaz, looking like your father. You're no improvement whatsoever.'
But now in the hills all such doubt vanished. He was sure of himself, sure that he was as happy as any man could be. Why should he exchange his comfortable qumbaz for a restrictive Western suit? Any time he wanted to relieve himself he just found a stone, and there were plenty of them around. He would squat raising his garment and do it. No need for the fuss which his cousin would have to go through with his long trousers and jacket. The air was constantly circulating between his legs. He could feel it; it was nourishing and refreshing. Why would anyone want to wrap oneself in a garment that would keep him hot all summer? Just to look like the Engleez? What does he care about them? What are they to him anyway?
How far he felt from everything objectionable. The Engleez never came here. He would have the entire six months in the hills and never see a single one of them. Why would they come? They were not interested in these hills. They are not for them. They lived in cities, they wouldn't be able to manage here. They were too refined, delicate, spoiled. His cousin was becoming like them; he had even begun to speak like them, hardly moving his lips. And instead of rolling his own cigarettes he was constantly busy with his pipe, taking it out of his mouth, putting it back in, pushing it to the corner of his mouth as he looked sideways, as though he was calculating, judging.
While Abu Ameen was involved in his own affairs, cultivating his orchard, oblivious to the rest of the world, the worst war in human history was taking place. The Nazis were massacring the Jews and the gypsies and the calls for a Jewish state were growing stronger. Saleem, who was an avid reader of the papers, local and international, had already formulated his own opinions on world affairs. He also had his own predictions about the dismal future of Palestine. The iron determination of the Zionists coupled with Palestine's ineffective local leadership alarmed him.
When they happened to discuss these matt
ers Abu Ameen argued strongly that this was none of his business. None of these affairs meant anything to his family because they were from Ramallah. He saw his life as beginning and ending in a place where no one ever encountered Jews or saw any of their much-talked-about settlements. His cousin was bringing ruin on his head by meddling in what was none of his business.
Here in these hills, sitting on his throne, he was emperor, the unrivalled king. He thought of his cousin travelling to America, of his bragging about how he camped out on the deck of the ship. Oh, how often he heard him repeat this story. The others in his household loved to hear him tell it and would ask him to repeat it every time he visited. What's the big deal in sleeping on the deck and having to work in the galley to pay for his fare? He sleeps out in the open all summer long and no one thinks much of it; how is it different to sleep on the deck of the ship? And yet to be on the open sea. Not to be able to see any land for months, how strange it must be. No, it was not for him, not for him.
He belonged here, why pretend otherwise? This was his home, where he would remain until his dying day. This was his world and it was a world he preferred to any other.
Abu Ameen was able to look out on the hills that remained unchanged throughout his life except for the disappearance of the grapevines. He could not have been aware how fortunate he was to have had the security and comfort of seeing the same unaltered view of the hills. I was born among hills that looked more or less as they did during the last years of Abu Ameen's life. But throughout my adult life I had the misfortune of witnessing their constant transformation. I first learned of the Israeli government's settlement plans through the research I did for the human rights organization, Al Haq, that I co-directed. What I read was cause enough for concern. But, I wondered, would it really be possible to implement these plans? Could our hills, unchanged for centuries, become home within a matter of a few years for around 100,000 Jewish settlers who claim a divine right to them, who ultimately want to drive us away? The hills which had provided the setting for tranquil walks where I felt more freedom than I did anywhere else in the world would eventually become confining, endangered areas and a source of constant anxiety.
Palestinian Walks Page 4
