It set in early, this feeling of being lost. I can’t pin it down to a month or a year. As far as I can tell, I have always been puzzled with the world around me. You’d think that with 1,300 years of history backing me up I would have known who I was. I didn’t. From the moment I was cognizant about the world, everything was a riddle, now dark and foreboding, now as luminous as a Sufi song. How could it have been otherwise in a place where the prosaic sights of barbed wire were juxtaposed with the myth-shrouded mount of Solomon, Omar, and Mohammed, or where Christ’s Garden Tomb was opposite the main bus station? In some ways, growing up in Jerusalem was like being in a fairy tale invaded by Detroit and modern armies, though its magical quality remained, and the dangers merely added to the mysteries of a city I feel I belong to.
Out of the large window of my bedroom I could see the spires and crosses towering over the Notre Dame Pontifical Institute, just opposite the New Gate. I could also look down on a shoot-to-kill zone that separated the Jews from the Arabs. It was a good perch from which to spy on the other side. From street level it wasn’t so easy to peer into enemy territory because the Jordanians had built a high wall to separate the two sides. Cousin Zaki (for some reason my father and uncle both chose the same name for their sons) told me that Israeli snipers used to take random shots at people, seeing them as plastic ducks in a shooting gallery. To disrupt this macabre game, the Jordanians had erected an unsightly concrete barrier.
Our house bordered what UN and security negotiators had inelegantly dubbed No Man’s Land, an expanse of wasteland between our section of East Jerusalem and Mea Shearim, a neighborhood inhabited by the religious Haredim (literally “the Awestruck Ones.”) Between the back of our garden wall and the State of Israel were: one lonesome, semi-destroyed and bullet riddled cement structure; a UN observation and border-crossing station; and scattered rocks and thistles growing among the odd land mine. There was also a grapevine that had managed to survive all the fighting. In springtime I used to stare for hours at the vine’s new leaves, and in the fall I watched the juicy grapes grow big.
The wall at the end of the garden defined for me the beginning of a forbidden territory. For this reason it intrigued me, as did the men with the long wizard’s beards whose black coats and dangling curly side locks I could make out from my bedroom window.
Hardly a day would go by when I didn’t spy into the streets beyond No Man’s Land. Sometimes I saw strange-looking buses and vehicles plying their way along the narrow streets. Sometimes a knot of black-clad men appeared from behind a corner and walked a short distance along a narrow street before disappearing again around another corner. Sometimes the bearded creatures looked back at me. It was almost like being in a dream.
Hearing about all their fiendish acts and then staring over at the other side stirred my imagination. What did I know of the Other Side? People who lived in the city before the war told me about the elegant shops on Jaffa Road, the Gary Cooper Westerns at the Edison Cinema, the villas in the old neighborhoods, and how from the hills to the west you could see the Mediterranean. (Our section of Jerusalem backed up to dust and desert.) What about the people? I concluded that they must be super-evil beings to have given the Arabs such short shrift.
Fed no doubt by the steady stream of adventure books I was filling my head with, I imagined that one of these long-bearded phantoms could actually be inhabiting the trunk of a large pepper tree just outside the front door of our house. Plainly I had to be on guard! Each morning, as I successfully dashed past the tree on my way to school, I felt that I had managed to foil the efforts of a dark claw reaching out from inside the trunk and snatching me into nothingness.
In 1959, my sisters Munira and Saedah were in high school. Both liked to draw and both hobnobbed with the children of diplomats and UN officials. Zaki was already reading and writing like a scholar; he won one academic prize after the next, read avidly, wrote poetry, and was popular with the girls at the Schmidt Girls’ College, down the road. I was in grade school at St. George’s School. With my siblings occupied with their various pursuits, I began to make forays into the surrounding streets. I was gaining in confidence, for the dreaded villain in the pepper tree had never managed to snag me. The world seemed safe enough for me to venture out and discover a landscape more magical than that of Sinbad the Sailor and beautiful Sheherazade.
There was no television in those years, only some radio signals from the Arab capitals and the Israeli Hebrew stations. But it would never have occurred to us to tune in to the Hebrew stations. The sound of Hebrew was just as much an anathema as the sound of the word “Israel”—we always called it “the Zionist entity” or “enemy.” Cousin Zaki, who lived down the street, was one of my playmates. Among his more grisly capers was to hunt birds with slingshots and cook them over burning leaves in his backyard. I preferred a more innocuous pastime, such as playing in the abandoned Jordanian bunkers. Another ritual Cousin Zaki and I shared was to make our way on December 25 over to Mandelbaum Gate, Jerusalem’s Checkpoint Charlie. Christmas was the only day of the year the gate was open, to allow pilgrims from the other side to attend services at the Holy Sepulcher. It was dizzying to see a hermetically shut door suddenly open.
It was just as mysterious to come to sudden dead ends. Often alone or with Zaki I walked to the shrapnel-lashed Damascus Gate and into the labyrinth of streets and alleys, and then all the way to Jaffa Gate, which had been sealed shut after the war. Did the gate lead nowhere or everywhere? Maybe both.
Other jaunts took me into the warrens of the Old City, full of smug shopkeepers with their golden pocket watches, old women hawking wares, and sweaty rooms of praying men or, if I was lucky, some whirling dervishes. The cafés resonated with the bubbling sounds of people smoking water pipes. I could spend hours skulking around the graveyards outside the Lion’s Gate, or among the sacred sites on the Noble Sanctuary, and then out again on the other side. There I entered the dense, tangled streets of the Moroccan Quarter, dating back seven hundred years to the age of the Ayyubids and Mamluks. Saladin’s son built a mosque there in 1193, and I got a thrill each time I saw it, because this was the spot where the Prophet had tethered his wondrous steed before his ascension.
To walk through the city was to journey through family history. There was the Goldsmith’s Souk, a street of shops in ruins since the great earthquake of 1927. One uncle kept his donkeys and a camel there. Then of course there was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Amid the cramped domed streets surrounding it on all sides, the church struck me as almost infinitely large, a rococo collection of every architectural fad since the Romans, with each new age having added its own mark. Nothing seems ever to have been taken away, such as the famous wooden ladder outside a second-story window. (Generations ago, it was used to haul food up to Armenian monks locked in the church by the Turks.) The church was like the closet of an eccentric relative that gets more and more cluttered as time goes on, but also more mysterious.
I remember hearing about a spot in the church that is the cosmic center of the world. When the Greeks switched religions eons ago, the center of the world shifted from Delphi to a spot in the middle of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A large urn marks the spot. Pious Muslims insist that the center is in Mecca, but as a child, I preferred the local address: a five-minute walk from my house.
Another of my favorite spots was a crack in the Rock of Golgotha that was said to be the passageway for Christ’s entry into the underworld after his crucifixion. There, in the flaming fires of Hades, he rescued the righteous souls.
For Father, possessing the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher simply was an affirmation of familial pedigree, but for others in the clan, having the key was like operating the front gate to one of the world’s great founts of legend and sacredness. It was our job to keep the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from falling into the wrong hands. Weren’t the Crusades started because of troubles at the church? Wasn’t the Crimean War ignited by a dispute between the French and Russian
s over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem? Nothing of the sort was going to happen on our watch!
As I’ve said, because of the erotic indiscretions of my great-great grandfather, the key was in the possession of a distant cousin. Each morning someone from the Joudeh family would show up at my uncle’s house shortly before four in the morning and toss a pebble at my cousin’s window. My cousin would come down, take the key, then make his way to the church. There he’d slip the foot-long skeleton key into a keyhole in a small door and tug it, and the four-inch oak door would groan and open. A priest on the other side of the door would put his head out the door, greet my cousin, and hand him a ladder. Cousin Nusseibeh would then mount the ladder to reach a second keyhole in a larger door. He’d turn the key and pull hard. “Peace,” he’d say to the priest once the door had opened. “Peace,” the priest would reply.
In 1963, after various stints as Jordanian defense minister, education minister, vice premier, and minister of development, Father accepted the king’s offer to take up the post of governor of the Jerusalem region, which at the time extended all the way down to Jericho. It was the most powerful position in the West Bank.
By this point, Jerusalem had recovered much of the life it had lost in 1948. As it had done time and time again throughout the ages, it had reasserted its role as the world capital of religious pilgrimage. The Jewish half was closed off by a wall. But since nearly all of the ancient sites were located in our half, tourists flooded in. Pope Paul VI’s historic visit in 1964 sparked a speculative building boom.
With the Zionist threat gone, centuries-old patterns reasserted themselves, and the old noble families were back on their feet. The Husseinis, Nashashibis, the Islamic scholars, and the Christian bishops now set the tone for the city. If you could ignore No Man’s Land and the refugee camps, it was as if nothing had ever happened.
The hautes and petites bourgeoisies and the merchant class were building and buying and talking about a brighter future. Jerusalem was turning into a boomtown, with Saudis spending their oil wealth there during summer vacations. My uncles on my father’s side wanted to be in on it, and so for all their talk of tradition, they razed the grandest of my grandfather’s villas to make room for a five-star hotel with one hundred rooms. Nearly overnight, the elegance of the Ottoman-era house made way for a prosaic piece of masonry.
My father had a big role in fostering the city’s economic and cultural recovery. His administration recalled the best of the British Mandate era: it was corruption-free and stood on the rule of law. Property was safe from undue meddling, pickpockets were rare, and religious fanaticism was unknown. All that was missing were the proud men in arms that any self-respecting capital had. My father did his best to conjure back to life an Arab army in the West Bank by creating a National Guard modeled on the Swiss militia. He also introduced khaki uniforms and military drills in school.
As Father’s political power increased (his brother Hazem was Jordan’s foreign minister and later the ambassador to the UN), so did the frequency of my parents’ dinner parties, which inevitably concluded with everyone retiring to the living room to talk politics.
If in the world of religion and myth—the stuff behind the pilgrimages—Jerusalem was front and center, politically it was a peaceful backwater. The convulsions elsewhere in the world only seeped into our world through the newspapers and BBC radio, or, in our case, the nightly family salon. These salons were right out of a Russian novel, where the dinner guests at a prince’s distant estate engaged in furious discussions over the fall of the Bastille, completely unaware how this far-off cataclysm, stuff of an evening debate, would eventually bring their own world crashing down.
There was plenty to talk about in the 1960s. One of the most dramatic events close to home was a spat between my father and the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, who presented Father with the Order of the Holy Sepulcher. Father declined because the award dated the family’s custodianship of the key to Saladin, whereas my father was convinced we had had it since Omar the Just.
Then came Khrushchev and Kennedy, the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the occasional guerrilla who managed to cross over into Israel for an attack. General Nasser’s rousing radio addresses always made for good after-dinner talk. Nasser had come to power in a coup against the decrepit Egyptian monarchy, and swept away the old powers with great bravado. Non-Arabs fled the country, and the Russians came in to modernize the army for the coming battle. With his saber unsheathed, the Egyptian liberator promised to restore Arab pride by defeating the Zionist Crusaders.
Mother listened to Nasser’s speeches with as much relish as she did her favorite records of Umm Kulthum. Like most refugees, she hoped that the disturbed waters of the river of history, forcefully diverted from their natural course in 1948, would soon begin flowing again in the right direction. It was just a matter of time before justice would have to be done. Hadn’t she been stripped of her homeland, her patrimony, her orange groves? Wasn’t her father’s tomb in a stranger’s backyard, uncared for, forgotten, or perhaps even dynamited? Didn’t the entire world agree that we had been grievously wronged?
My father was less sure about Nasser. I can recall the pained grimace on his face each time Nasser’s name was mentioned, as if he had eaten something disagreeable. He didn’t believe in Nasser’s Arab socialism, and he had a loathing for his demagoguery. In Father’s moral estimation, expelling from Egypt an old and established community such as the Greeks had landed Nasser in the same chauvinistic company as Ben-Gurion.
Age didn’t diminish my dislike for these endless nightly political discussions, and I continued to retreat into my imagination. My father got the job as governor of Jerusalem just as I was entering high school at St. George’s. During my subsequent high school career, I remained in the thrall and shadow of Father’s unflappable self-certainty.
Too old for matchsticks, I moved on to books. There were plenty around the house, starting with Father’s library, Mother’s collection of modern fiction, my elder sisters’ books, and those borrowed from the British Council library by my brother Zaki, also an insatiable reader. My reading ran the gamut from Arabic to Western classics, though one shouldn’t get the impression that my literary habits were those of a precocious future scholar. My favorites were murder stories and mysteries and comic strips featuring such exquisite characters as Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, the Belgian Tintin, and, last but not least, the mighty Superman.
Father soon acquired a new hobby that brought us closer. He bought a farm in the Jordan Valley. Our experiences on the farm—we had tomatoes, bananas, and chickens—are among my fondest memories within the family. Thinking back on those days now, I’m certain that the ancient Roman ideal of the gentleman farmer must have inspired my father, because he wore a tweed jacket and a silk scarf each time we made the trip with the new Ford automatic. The car could barely fit through Suleiman the Magnificent’s walls, but was ideal for zipping down the old Roman road into the desiccated wadis of the Judean desert. We were usually the only private car on a road we shared with military jeeps or, far more frequently, Bedouin goats and the occasional camel.
Sometimes my family drove and I took my bicycle. I rode down, down, down to the deepest ditch in the world, all the way to the Jordan River, then over the bridge. Along the Dead Sea, I explored Ottoman ruins, monasteries, and desolate canyons. Armed with long ropes and torches, my friends and I would sometimes venture into deep tunnels and caves, imagining we would discover hidden mysteries, such as a new batch of Dead Sea Scrolls buried in the bowels of the earth.
My parents had ecumenical tastes in education. My sisters went to a French school run by nuns, then to the Schmidt Girls’ College, run by the Germans. My elder brother, Zaki, and I attended the Anglican St. George’s, down the street. The school’s proximity forced me to forgo a perk my predecessor had enjoyed: the son of the previous governor had arrived at school in a black Cadillac.
St. Ge
orge’s was for me yet another hint of Paradise. It has the look of any neo-Gothic public building at the height of the Victorian age, which in itself is a testimony to the wonderful eclecticism of Jerusalem at the time. A medieval city, Jerusalem didn’t have Gothic buildings because the Crusaders were kicked out before the Gothic age got under way. So to see the Christian Middle Ages in architecture, it was necessary to visit the most modern school in town. St. George’s was also surrounded by gardens full of flowering bushes and bougainvillea. In spring the sweet smells of jasmine and honeysuckle wafted through the classrooms.
The school combined a strong emphasis on a set canon with what you could almost call anachronistically a postmodern respect for cultural differences. A Christian institution with a split Christian/Muslim student body and staff, it had no choice but to be tolerant. In all my years in school, I never encountered the slightest whiff of ethnic or religious chauvinism. The school’s religion lessons were restricted to a weekly sermon delivered by the English headmaster in the Anglican cathedral, attached to the school. The academic standards were exacting, the teaching staff dedicated, and the expectations high, and we were taught to think of ourselves as the future elite of the country.
To my parents’ dismay, however, I showed less academic promise and less commitment to school discipline than my elder brother. I certainly betrayed no signs of special interest in the sciences or arts, and no inclination to go into engineering—a popular career choice at a time when the Aswan Dam was going up.
A favorite pastime was playing hooky to roam through the Old City, whose ancient bustling alleys seemed more enchanting than anything I could glean out of schoolbooks. I also liked soccer and playing with animals, mainly birds. My favorites were pigeons, and at one stage I had as many as two score of them living in our garden, each of whom I could describe in taxonomical detail. The pigeons would often greet me upon my return from school, and perch on my shoulders or head like a scene out of the life of St. Francis—which was only fitting for a boy who also showed no proclivity for martial pursuits. My father may have once been minister of defense, but I wasn’t the warrior type. The fact that I assiduously gave the family political salon wide berth also seemed to preclude a career in politics.
Once Upon a Country Page 8
