Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “My father told me about them,” Samuel remembered.

  “Many of them have set up home in Jerusalem, in Hebron, on the banks of the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias. Some of them dedicate their lives to God and spend their time praying and studying the Talmud, living off charity, and others have become farmers, trying to draw from the dry soil the fruits that will allow them to survive,” Benedict explained.

  Not for one moment did he lie to Samuel about the difficulties he would encounter once he got to Palestine. Not only would he have to get permission from the Turkish authorities, who were ever more reluctant to allow Jews to settle there, but he would also find out that there was a strong negative feeling among the Jews who were already settled there and who felt overwhelmed by the waves of immigrants, who said the newcomers were brothers but had different customs and languages.

  “The Turks don’t always let the Jews disembark, many have to enter via Egypt. Ah, and you’ll have to be careful about malaria, which affects the newly arrived fairly severely.”

  He described the Promised Land like a wasteland, full of dangers and hostility, where mere survival was difficult.

  “How is it possible that a sacred land like Palestine can be in such bad shape?” Samuel asked.

  “There is a decree, that dates back to when the Mamelukes expelled the Crusaders and forced them out of the Middle East forever, that the non-mountainous regions were to be left uncultivated, so that in case the Crusaders were ever tempted to return to the Holy Land, they wouldn’t find food either for themselves or for their horses. Most of the lands that belonged to the Crusaders were parceled out by the sultan to his favorites, generals or favored members of the court, who cared little about arid lands so far from Constantinople. Most were left to the fellahin, the Arab peasants. It is not difficult to buy land there, the Turks sell it freely.”

  “And all the land belongs to Turkish families?” Samuel asked.

  “In the sultan’s court there have always been, and there are still, Arabs, people who come from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine itself. They are all supported by the sultan and they are all equally indifferent to some useless lands that scarcely bring them any benefits.”

  “So, Jews should have no problem buying these lands,” Samuel insisted.

  “As you can imagine, the Jews who escape from the Russian Empire rarely do so with full pockets. They suffer great hardships. Baron Rothschild tried to help the colonists, and has even founded some agricultural colonies, and helps as much as he can with the Turkish authorities,” Benedict explained.

  Samuel asked his grandfather’s friend to recommend someone who could teach him the basics of Arabic.

  “I know it won’t be easy, but I want at least to be able to understand the people who live there.”

  Peretz introduced him to a friend who in his youth had traveled all over the Middle East and who said he knew some of the languages spoken in those distant countries.

  Samuel felt that it was an impossible task to decipher those elegant marks that they told him were the Arabic alphabet. But he managed, little by little, to learn a few phrases by which he might make himself understood.

  Marie did all she could to make Samuel stay with her. She knew that he was lost, and was keen to help him find peace within himself. But Samuel did not delay his journey because of Marie’s insistence, but rather because of his desire to learn Arabic, and the sadness that the idea of leaving Irina provoked in him.

  The young woman had made an unshakable decision to start a new life in Paris, and there was nothing that Samuel could say or do to make her come with him to Palestine.

  As Irina did not want to rely on Marie, she found a job for herself, on Marie’s recommendation, in a florist’s shop. She didn’t earn much money, but it was enough for her to pay for her own maintenance and for Mikhail’s. She helped Marie sew fur coats at night. She did not like sewing, but she felt indebted to this woman who had behaved so generously toward her.

  One morning in September, Samuel set off toward Marseilles with some letters of recommendation from Benedict Peretz to a number of Palestinian Jews. It was more than a year since he had left Saint Petersburg, and now, in the closing months of 1899, he was prepared to start a new page in his life.

  For the first time in a long while he was responsible only for himself, and he was scared about what he might find in the “Promised Land.”

  The Mediterranean was a more agitated sea than Samuel had imagined it would be, but on the last few days of the crossing the waves died down a little and the ship began slowly to approach the port of Jaffa.

  His first difficulty was getting permission to disembark from the Turkish authorities. He trusted that he would be able to smooth things over, but Benedict had told him that sometimes the customs officials kept their bribes and still wouldn’t let anyone disembark.

  “We will reach Palestine tomorrow,” the captain told him. “Be prepared to disembark at Jaffa at first light.”

  That night he couldn’t sleep. It was impossible not to think about the future that would begin the next morning. He went back over his past, remembering everything he had left behind.

  He went up on deck before dawn, filled with emotion to see the coast of Palestine. The sea seemed to be bluer and the air saltier than what he remembered from the Baltic. He was thinking about this when he was brought back to earth by a sailor shouting that he spied land.

  That word was a dream and a hope. They had reached the Promised Land.

  When the ship was just about to dock, Samuel looked down at the port and saw a man, young like him, who was holding the hand of a boy a little older than Mikhail, about seven or eight years old. They were both looking at the ship with curiosity. A few paces behind them stood a woman holding a baby in her arms, her face covered with a headscarf; a little girl clutched the folds of her skirt as if she were afraid of getting lost. The mother was heavily pregnant, and Samuel was struck by the glint in her large deep black eyes.

  3

  The Promised Land

  “Suddenly Ezekiel fell silent, which upset Marian. She had listened eagerly to his story. The tale of Isaac, of Samuel, of Konstantin, and of Irina, was not one that she knew. She wanted more. She wanted to know what Samuel had felt when he set foot on the Promised Land for the first time. This was not a past she knew about, how the lives of these people had threaded together with those of other men and women. But Ezekiel, Samuel’s son, had suddenly fallen silent and had brought them back to reality, that morning where they sat in a stone building on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She remembered why she had come and started to feel in control of herself once more.

  “And that is the story of my grandfather Isaac and my father Samuel,” the man concluded. “But I see that you haven’t touched your tea. It must be cold by now.”

  “I’m sorry, I was listening to you.” Marian spoke the truth.

  “If you want, I could make some more tea, or some coffee,” the man said amicably.

  “If it’s not too much trouble . . . ,” she replied. She needed time. Time to know the truth was what she needed. She wanted to know more, and she couldn’t end with the image of Samuel just about to disembark in Jaffa.

  When the telephone broke the silence once again Marian jumped. Ezekiel got up. His old bones creaked as he got to his feet.

  “Excuse me,” he said as he left the room.

  When he came back he found her very quiet and still, going through a notebook that she carried in her bag, a notebook where she had, in her cramped handwriting, taken notes on some of the characters Ezekiel Zucker had been telling her about.

  “Am I disturbing you?” he asked with a flicker of irony.

  “No, of course not. I’m just . . . Well, I’m just going through my notes. I told you that I have interviewed a number of people already, some of them Palestinians who lived here, just where your house is n
ow. And . . . Well, they have their own version of history.”

  “Of course. It couldn’t be any other way. Do you want to fit together my story and theirs?”

  “Not exactly, but . . . Well, there are two versions.”

  “Let’s do something. Tell me what they told you, and we’ll see if the facts add up. It might be interesting.”

  “Are you really interested in the Palestinian version?”

  “You’re too prejudiced. Are you going to tell me or not?”

  Marian started to read the story that she had gotten from Wädi Ziad.

  The child felt the fixed gaze of the man who stood at the prow of the ship. He too was curious about this man, all dressed in black, but he soon stopped paying him any attention in order to look at the seagulls that flew very close to where they were.

  “You too will travel on a ship like this one day,” Ahmed Ziad said to his son.

  “And where will I go? I’d rather be with you, I don’t want to go anywhere,” the boy said, grasping his father’s hand tightly.

  “You don’t want to be a doctor? Your mother and I want you to study. It would be good for you to be a doctor.”

  “To look after you if you get ill?”

  “Yes, of course, to look after me, and your mother, and your brothers and sisters, and everyone who might need it.”

  “But I like being with the goats, and helping you in the orange grove.”

  “Well, that’s what you think now, but you’ll be happy to be a doctor when you’re older. You’ll see . . .”

  “But if I have to go away in order to be a doctor, then I won’t be a doctor,” the boy said, upset at the thought of having to leave his parents.

  The man carried on walking through the port, accompanied by his family, breathing in the air of this dying month of September, an air that grew ever hotter as the day wore on.

  They had arisen at dawn to be the first to the port. Ahmed had filled his cart with the produce of his orchard, those round and flavorful oranges that he cultivated and that provided him with a part of his living. He also had a sack of olives and some other vegetables that he grew with tender care and the help of his wife, Dina.

  Ahmed was proud that his vegetables sold so well. His father had taught him how to cultivate the earth, and he had grown up in awe of the wisdom of his father, who knew when to plant seeds, how to fight against pests, and when it was best to harvest his crop.

  Ahmed loved his land almost as much as he loved Dina and his children, and he said to himself that soon they would be helping him and that a few extra pairs of hands would not go amiss. He looked in satisfaction at his wife’s round belly, which would soon give him another son, and maybe many more after that. Dina and he dreamed that one of their children would one day be a doctor, and they thought that this honor should fall to Mohammed, their firstborn. But in the meantime he was happy with the idea that Allah would bless him with good harvests that would let him pay the rent on his lands to their owner. No, that little piece of land, which he lived on and which he loved as much as his own life, was not his own. Nor was the quarry, where he worked as a foreman, cutting free huge blocks of stone that other hands would later bring to life. The farm and the quarry both belonged to a family that came from Bethlehem but that had established itself decades ago, part of it in Cairo and part of it in Constantinople, the great capital, where they served the sultan.

  The Aban family was rich, they were merchants and had a couple of ships which crisscrossed the Mediterranean with produce. Ahmed had only once seen a member of the Aban family, and this was a long time ago, when he was an adolescent and his father had announced one day over dinner that he had been told that the owner of their lands was going to come to visit them.

  When the great day came, Ahmed had gone with his father to explain everything to the grand and powerful Aban, who complained at the scarce revenue he was getting from those lands so close to the Holy City.

  Ahmed had been impressed by Saïd Aban’s clothes. His blue turban with its gold threads, his embroidered kaftan, his soft leather boots. And above all he had been impressed by his white hands, with long fingers and clean nails, so clean it was as if they had been drawn onto his fingertips.

  Saïd Aban was a rich man who knew nothing about how the peasants suffered to draw the best fruits from the soil. Ahmed looked at his father’s hands, strong and calloused, with long twisted fingers, white with quarry-dust and brown with dirt. His hands were not much different, and soon he would have the same callouses as his father.

  He didn’t remember everything that was said, but he did recall that the saïd had insisted that his father be more productive, as he was going to raise the rent on his land, and that if his father could not pay then maybe the saïd would have to find another tenant. The price that the stone from the quarry fetched was also unsatisfying, and the saïd said that he was thinking of selling the whole business.

  They returned home in silence. His father was worried by the threat, and Ahmed felt a strong hatred for this man who dared to claim the fruits of a land he did not cultivate himself. What did the saïd know about pests, or storms, or the ravages of drought?

  But his father did not want to complain in front of his son or his other children, although that night Ahmed heard him talking in whispers to his mother.

  Now Ahmed worked these lands with his brother-in-law Hassan, Dina’s brother. All of Ahmed’s siblings had married, the two oldest lived with their families in Hebron, and the two youngest girls had married a couple of local guys who were expert quarrymen. And he thought it was a blessing not to have to share these lands with another family, because they wouldn’t have been able to satisfy the demands of Saïd Aban.

  He loved this land, halfway between Jerusalem and the Judean desert. Every evening, when the sun was just about to disappear, he would go out to the threshold of his house and look into the distance, at the Holy City on the horizon.

  Ahmed loved the land that gave him sustenance, but more than that he loved Jerusalem. He didn’t think there could be a better city in the whole world, not even Damascus or Cairo. Jerusalem had been the site chosen by Mohammed for his final ascension into heaven. And he felt proud to be able to pray in the Dome of the Rock, treading the same soil as had been trodden by the Prophet.

  That morning Ahmed looked at the French ship as it docked, but he was really waiting for the saïd’s ship to appear on the horizon, a beautiful schooner that ran all over the coast of the ocean, gathering goods that would then be sold in Cairo and Damascus and other cities that Ahmed had not even heard of.

  Ahmed had to give his accounts to Ali, the man sent every year by Ibrahim, the son of the saïd he remembered from his childhood. Ali, his servant, was an elderly Egyptian who bought and sold produce in the name of his master, and who was responsible for collecting the rent on that little piece of Palestinian land.

  “There, Father, look to the left! There is Saïd Aban’s boat!” Mohammed shouted, pointing to a shadow that sketched itself on the horizon.

  “I don’t see anything . . . Where?” Ahmed asked, trying to find the ship with his gaze.

  He had to wait a good long while for the schooner to become a reality, closing in on the coast and skimming over the waves until reaching the port of Jaffa.

  Meanwhile, Ahmed had had the time to answer the questions posed him by a young man who had just gotten off the French merchant ship. He was of medium height, thin, with dark blond hair and faded blue-grey eyes. He was modestly dressed and smiling.

  The young man asked Ahmed how he could get to Jerusalem.

  Ahmed explained to him the best way to get to the Holy City. It was not hard for the two of them to understand each other because the stranger spoke a language that was not entirely unknown to Ahmed. Groups of Jews had begun to gather on the coast of Palestine and they all spoke this strange language which Ahmed had hea
rd was called “Yiddish.” Also, the foreigner muttered some kind of French that was trying to sound like Arabic. He recommended a hotel to him where all the foreigners who came to Jaffa ended up staying, especially the Englishmen.

  It seemed he was making himself understood, because the stranger asked him where he could find him again in case he couldn’t find his way to Jerusalem.

  Ahmed had a long day ahead of him. He had to wait for the schooner to reach port, then he would have to look for Ali and find a quiet place nearby where they, along with the other tenants, could give their accounts to the envoy of Saïd Ibrahim Aban.

  That night they would stay in the house of one of Dina’s cousins and the next day they would go home with their empty cart and a little money made by selling their produce in the Jaffa market.

  “Is he a Jew?” Mohammed asked as he watched the man walk away.

  “I think so. Poor fellow, he seems a bit lost, I hope they don’t rob him on the road.”

  Ahmed left his family and Dina at her cousin’s house. He knew that they would be safe there, and while he was finalizing his accounts with Ali they would go to the market, would gossip and laugh and, as before, make something special for dinner. Dina’s cousin was a spectacular cook.

  Ali greeted the tenants coldly, as if to remind them that he was the representative of Saïd Ibrahim Aban.

  The men were all nervous, scared of making mistakes. Some of them smoothed their clothes, others twisted their hands together, one swayed from side to side, another seemed to be talking through his teeth. They were all impatient to hear from Ali’s lips that the saïd was willing to keep renting them their lands, so that they could at least for the time being keep their homes.

  They knew that the Aban family had a large house in Cairo, not far from the Nile, and that they had another one in Constantinople. This was where their good fortune sprang from—their ancestors had dedicated themselves body and soul to the sultan.