A grave in Gaza oy-2

by Matt Beynon Rees

“I was reading one of your books this afternoon, Grandpa. The big one about ancient Egypt, with the pictures of the pyramids and the Egyptian gods.”

  “I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be allowed to bring such a book to Gaza. Hamas would object to its paganism.”

  “Exactly. Shame on you, Grandpa.”

  Omar Yussef tried to remember how old his sons had been when they developed a sense of sarcasm. He couldn’t help feeling that Nadia, at age twelve, was advanced even in this.

  “So I read in the book that Seth, who had the head of a jackal, was the god of the desert and that he made the dust storms,” Nadia said.

  “Then the jackal-headed god is hard at work in Gaza. Unlucky for the men of Gaza.”

  “I also read about men. About where men came from, according to the Egyptians.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “The god of creation was called Atum. He made everything. First, he snorted the god of air out of his nose. Then he spat the goddess of water out of his mouth. And then some others that I can’t remember, but they all came out of his body. When he looked at the result of all his work, Atum cried and each of his tears became a man to populate the world. So, you see, we all began with a god crying.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the myth. He also recalled that it started with Atum arousing himself and engendering other gods with his orgasm. He hoped that hadn’t been in the book Nadia had read.

  “What do you think of the myth?” he asked.

  “I think it makes sense. It explains why so much of life is sad and why we face so much wickedness, no matter how good we are.”

  “Perhaps Atum was crying tears of joy.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, Grandpa. But I don’t think he was, anyway.”

  “I’m glad that you’re reading about history and how ancient people understood the world. There’s much more to life than the views expressed by people in our own town and in our own time. I have other books like that one. I’ll show them to you when I get home.”

  “Grandpa, I made you a homepage.” Nadia was suddenly excited.

  “You drew something for me?”

  “What? No. For your website. I started it yesterday, after we spoke. I registered your domain name, and I wrote the text for the homepage and I posted a photo of you and I did some graphics, too.”

  “What’s a homepage?”

  “When people type in the address of your website, the homepage is the first one that will come up. Of course, I have to make other pages, so they can navigate through the site.”

  She has grown up more than I realized, Omar Yussef thought. She understands the sadness at the core of the world in the story of the Egyptian god’s tears. But she also has this technological excitement, which suggests she believes in the future. He wondered how this change in his favorite grandchild had crept up on him. Perhaps he missed other changes in the world around him, too, simply because they didn’t directly affect him. He remembered that he had been surprised when Salwa Masharawi told him her husband had been tortured. Now his surprise seemed alien to him, as though he would take it for granted that any man arrested for criticizing the government would have the soles of his feet beaten. Since that time in jail so long ago, he had spent decades building a wall of innocence around himself, but he had lost some portion of it in Gaza. Perhaps it hadn’t been innocence, after all, but blindness. He understood why the god Atum had cried when he looked on the world he had made.

  “Grandpa, is there a computer in your hotel?”

  “Yes, there’s a computer at the reception desk.”

  “Do they have internet access?”

  “I can ask them. There’s a very nice lady at reception.”

  “Write down your homepage address. It’s www.pa4d.ps. ”

  Omar Yussef wrote the web address on a piece of hotel notepaper. “What does that mean?”

  Nadia laughed. “You’ll see. You have to go and call it up on the web. Do you want to talk to Grandma?”

  “Yes, please, my darling.” Omar Yussef folded the slip of paper with the web address on it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  He pulled back the drapes on his window. The hotel drive rose twenty yards from the lobby doors to the main beach road. The haziness of the dirt-filled air was thickening into twilight. A donkey trotted along the road, pulling a cart piled with boxes of tomatoes. A string of yellow taxis followed, sounding their horns and jockeying to be the first to overtake. A detail of red-bereted soldiers leaned against the guardpost outside the chief of Military Intelligence’s home across the road. The building was a plain apartment block six stories high. Only one floor was illuminated, a sickly fluorescence glowing through the dust.

  Maryam came on the line. “Omar, dear, what did you have for lunch?”

  He felt the loneliness again, sharply. “Maryam, my life, I love you.”

  “Omar?”

  “I’ll come home soon, I promise.”

  “Omar, is something wrong?”

  Omar Yussef’s eyes stung. He thought it might be a good idea to cry out all the dust from the storm. He felt ready for it. His room was cold and he imagined himself imprisoned in it, far from home. You know what it’s like to be shut away, terrified and alone, he thought. He was nauseous and he feared ruining everything that night by nervously throwing up his meal at Professor Maki’s dining table. He breathed deeply and fought to visualize his wife’s face. “I had a good lunch at the home of a friend.”

  “Good. Don’t let Magnus take you to a restaurant. They cut corners with their recipes.”

  “I’m eating at the home of a-a friend tonight, too.”

  “Did Nadia tell you about your homepage?”

  “Yes, did you see it?”

  “No, she won’t show it to anyone until you’ve approved it.”

  “She’s very clever.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No, I’m proud. I should get ready for dinner now, Maryam.”

  “Go ahead. Everyone is fine here, may Allah be thanked.”

  He hesitated. “You’re my whole life.”

  Maryam laughed. “Omar, are you going to start singing me old songs? Allah bless you, darling.”

  Omar Yussef hung up. Three jeeps halted at the home of General Moussa Husseini across the street. He assumed they were changing the guard shift, but the men at the gate remained at their posts and the jeeps didn’t leave. Instead, they formed a cordon around the entrance. The soldiers in the jeeps jumped from the rear of their vehicles and jogged through the door of the apartment building. On every floor, the lights came on. Then they all went out at once.

  Omar Yussef turned off his lamp and watched Husseini’s house. Nothing happened. He waited. Perhaps it had been only a routine bolstering of the guard. This might have been how they always prepared for the onset of night. Except that tonight there’s a dust storm, he thought. The darkness will be doubled.

  Chapter 9

  Ataxi dropped Omar Yussef on Emile Zola Street at seven-thirty. He rested his hand against the smooth bark of a tall sycamore and coughed. Dirt gusted through the air. With the falling darkness, the thick dust storm turned Omar Yussef’s vision into a monochrome blur. The branches of the tree danced above him, jousting with the tricolor behind the wall of the French Cultural Center. The metal loopholes in the flag scratched rhythmically against its pole.

  The wind came from behind him, caught his white hair and blew his little combover into his eyes. He moved carefully. Even here, in Gaza City’s most expensive district, the sidewalk was uneven. He caught his toe on a protruding brick, forced out of its place in the diamond pattern underfoot by the roots of another old sycamore, and stumbled. With relief, he came to a gate and found a buzzer. Next to it, scribbled on the whitewashed wall, was the name Maki.

  Beyond the tall garden wall, the wind abated. Omar Yussef fixed his hair with a plastic comb from his shirt’s breast pocket. He rubbed his shoes on the back of his trousers to clean away the
dirt. The garden was lush and tropical. Omar Yussef wondered if Maki might be to blame for Gaza’s water shortage, the grass was so thick and the spiky feet of the date palms were swamped by so many low fern bushes. The path to the house was short, but it wound around a fountain of molded concrete and turquoise tile. A large plastic doe peered from behind a bush next to the bubbling water. Omar Yussef pressed his palm to her snout and stroked her head as he passed.

  The plain mahogany door opened as Omar Yussef came up the steps to the porch. A tiny maid in a brown nylon housecoat held it for him and greeted him in deferential, whispered English. She was narrow and straight and bony, almost like a little girl. Omar Yussef assumed from her look and accent that Maki had shipped her in from India or Sri Lanka. Omar Yussef thanked her and looked around. He had never seen such luxury in the home of a Palestinian. The floors were a milky brown marble polished to shine like the surface of a summer lake. At the center of the room, there was a brilliant chandelier so large that the last Shah might have thought it ostentatious, and a dining table and chairs not less sparkling than the floor. For a small girl, the maid put in a lot of elbow work.

  “Professor Adnan will be with you soon, sir,” she said. “May I bring you a drink?”

  “Thank you. Soda water, please.”

  The table was laid with two dinner settings of shimmeringly expensive silverware and crystal. Mentally, Omar Yussef set a place at the table for Eyad Masharawi and reminded himself that he must think carefully over every stage of his conversation tonight. Masharawi’s freedom depended upon it.

  The maid brought him his soda water and disappeared. The glass shook in his hand.

  The low strains of a Fairuz love song drifted through the room. Amid such opulence, Omar Yussef half expected the Lebanese diva to step from behind a curtain with a string quartet.

  Instead, Professor Adnan Maki made his appearance. He came from a corridor whose entrance was disguised by a black cloisonne Chinese screen decorated with blue and red birds. He wore a loose cobalt-blue silk shirt that made him look like a movie pirate and dark linen pants. He reached his arms wide. “My dear ustaz Abu Ramiz,” he said.

  Omar Yussef advanced carefully across the marble, in case it was as slippery as it looked.

  Maki gave him three kisses on his cheeks. The smell of cologne was once again powerful. “Consider this your family and your home,” he said.

  “Your family is with you.”

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. Merciful Allah bless you.”

  “Allah bless you.”

  Maki held onto Omar Yussef’s hand and led him to the table. He pulled out a chair for him and slid it in under his guest. He glanced at the soda water. “Abu Ramiz, you are not in Hamastan any longer. The interior of this home is not even in Gaza, as far as I am concerned. It’s wherever I want it to be, and it can be a place for any enjoyments I care to arrange.”

  I’ll bet, Omar Yussef thought. Maki certainly was right that his salon didn’t look like it was in Gaza. “As I mentioned earlier, I don’t drink alcohol, Abu Nabil.”

  “Surely just one glass,” Maki said. “Your namesake, the ancient Persian poet, rhymed divine and wine. Was he not correct? Let’s toast to him.”

  “Much as I enjoy the poetry of Omar Khayyam, my health doesn’t allow me to join you in your toast, Abu Nabil,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the internal organs of his abdomen.

  Maki raised a cautious eyebrow.

  “But I don’t object to your partaking,” Omar Yussef obliged.

  Maki snapped his fingers and the maid appeared, holding a silver tray with two fingers of whisky in a crystal tumbler. Maki took it without a glance and put it away. Even as he swallowed, he spun his finger to signal that he wanted another, and sat. He looked suddenly serious and leaned forward.

  “Abu Ramiz, it’s such a pleasure to have cultured company.” He let out the groan of a man who has long suffered ignorant fools. “You can’t imagine how I’m stifled by Gaza and its provincialism. My wife can’t stand to be here longer than a few weeks. As you can see from the place settings, she’s not eating with us. No, she is eating in a far better establishment tonight. She’s in Paris.”

  The maid poured another whisky and Maki dived into the glass as if he were coming down from the high board at the beach club in the dunes north of Gaza City. He came up, shivering as he swallowed, and peered across the table with the staring wide eyes of a man swimming underwater. “We have an apartment in Paris. A pied a terre, as they say. A little place built in the seventeenth century. It’s in the Marais. You know this part of Paris? It used to be the Jewish quarter, but now it’s rather exclusive.” Maki laughed. “I like that very much, to be an occupier of the Jewish quarter. Yes, this is my small revenge for the occupation of our land in Palestine.”

  He emptied the second glass and, while his throat recovered, he wagged a finger to signal that he had a story to tell. “Some old Jews still live in our building in the Marais. I like to watch their little heart attacks when I tell them they share their staircase with a senior member of the PLO. They refuse to acknowledge me, so I just whisper Allahu akbar as I pass them on the stairs. My wife is there now, as a refugee from the dust and the heat of Gaza. The only negative thing about her absence, from her point of view, is that she will not meet you, dear brother Abu Ramiz.”

  Omar Yussef felt he was supposed to smile. He twitched his cheeks and blinked. “Your children are in Paris, too?”

  “Yes, a boy and a girl, may Allah be thanked. Both are doing graduate studies at the Sorbonne.”

  “Did they do their undergraduate degrees here at al-Azhar?”

  Maki laughed and reached forward to tap Omar Yussef’s hand, as though he were a delightfully naughty boy. “It’s a shame you don’t drink, Abu Ramiz. You’re so witty, even when you’re sober. You’d be hilarious if you would join me in a whisky. Of course they didn’t study here.”

  The maid brought a bottle of red wine and poured for Maki. Omar Yussef covered the top of his wine glass with his palm, so that she wouldn’t give him any. The crystal sounded a light, full note as his hand brushed its rim.

  “So you’re a schools inspector for the UN, Abu Ramiz?”

  “I’m on a schools inspection at the moment. Usually I’m the principal of the UNRWA Girls’ School in Dehaisha camp.”

  “Ah, the finest people are those of Dehaisha. Progressives, leftists. Not all Islamists, as they are in Gaza.”

  “Although I’m the principal, my main activity is still teaching. For three decades I’ve been a history teacher.”

  Maki threw his arms wide. “That’s my field also. Abu Ramiz, we are two historians. This is a wonderful night. Welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. We shall talk history all night and forget about the present troubles of Gaza.”

  Omar Yussef smiled, politely. Moroccan soap operas or Egyptian soccer would have been more neutral distractions. But if Maki was relaxed, perhaps he would be more inclined to help Omar Yussef with the Masharawi case.

  The maid brought a tray of mezzeh, distributing the small plates of salads and spreads in a spray across the table. Maki handed Omar Yussef a wide, flat bread with which to eat the salads and pushed each plate solicitously toward him. “Your health,” he said.

  Omar Yussef scooped a deep red paste of ground nuts, cumin and chilis onto a corner of his bread and ate it. “This really is the best mouhammara I’ve tasted in a long time,” he said.

  “These Sri Lankans know Arabic cooking better even than Arabs. However, I fear that your colleagues, the Swede and the Scot, don’t have the same feel for Arab culture. They can’t truly understand our situation here in Gaza,” Maki said. “And why not? Because they don’t understand the history. If one only knows recent politics, then everyone looks bad-the nationalists, the Islamists, the refugees, the resistance. One can’t see why Palestinians behave as they do unless first one traces the dim reaches of our history.”

  “Do you think the men in the resistance kn
ow our history?”

  “They may not have studied for a doctorate, but I believe they fight in the name of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a real historical figure, or Saladin, who personally fought for Gaza against the Crusaders.”

  “What lesson should my foreign friends draw from that?”

  “That our people were fighting invaders long before the Jews came. It has been a constant battle throughout our history.” Maki picked up an oily vine leaf, bit through to the rice wrapped inside and chased it with a hearty swig of claret. “Two thousand years before we began to reckon time from the foundation of Islam, the Pharaoh Thutmose was our first invader. The Canaanites took Gaza from the Egyptians, only for the Philistines to capture it from them. In the oldest part of our city, you can still see a ruined stone building popularly known as the very temple which Samson pulled down on the heads of the Philistines. It’s nonsense, naturally-what’s left of the building is no more than five hundred years old, but it has a place in our historic memory.”

  “The Jewish Bible says Gaza was allotted to the tribe of Judah,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Of course, but don’t mention that-a thunderbolt may come down from the skies to strike us.” Maki looked up in mock terror. “Or one of the homemade Qassam rockets that our resistance fires into Israel.”

  “You recounted these ancient invasions. But what importance do they have for the present conflict?”

  “Great importance, indeed. They’re the roots of today’s conflict. Your foreign friends look at Gaza and see what? A shithole, of course. Who can blame them? The Scot is probably from Edinburgh, the Athens of the north, as they call it. Very cultural. Maybe the other one’s from the highly organized city of Stockholm, where no one crosses the road and farts at the same time. To them, Gaza is the epitome of absolute, worthless chaos. But Gaza was a crossroads of international trade when they were still painting themselves blue to raid the next village and steal its pigs.”

  Maki took such a long drink of his claret that he was momentarily out of breath. “Look, if you read the surveys, you’d see that Swedish women have the smallest breasts, on average, in the whole world.” Maki rubbed his silk shirt in illustration. “Why? Because they don’t understand how to share life and its bounty. They’re individualists. Now Gazan women: under their robes they carry enormous breasts, big and heavy and full, like the hump of a camel.” He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes and held his palms upward as though they supported a great and sensuous weight. “This is because we’re surrounded by the desert, so we understand the value of life, of food and nourishment and community. Nature around us is harsh. We can’t look to it for easy sustenance, as they can in Sweden, with their lakes and forests. We must find nutrition in each other, in the fulsome bodies of our wives and in the feeling of belonging to a clan and in the shared struggle against the Jews. That’s the story of Gaza.”