Dina was there, with her children Mohammed and Aya, with her brother Hassan, with her nephews Salah and Jaled, and her son-in-law Yusuf. Some of the men from the quarry had come as well. Yossi Yonah, Abraham’s son, was there. He had gone alone, in spite of his mother Rachel’s protests. The Yonah family had close ties to the Ziads, and Rachel had stayed at home, crying, with her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter Yasmin. Yossi had been inflexible: he would not allow his old mother to see Ahmed’s execution.
Samuel, Jacob, and Ariel had come as well, but they exchanged no more than a couple of words with Mohammed.
The condemned men came with their hands tied, Cemal Pasha’s guards made them walk quickly by pushing them along.
Ahmed looked for his family and when he saw Dina and his children he could scarcely keep back his tears. They shouldn’t be there, he thought, they shouldn’t see their father die in such a manner. But he knew that nothing in the world would have stopped Dina from being there during his last moments. He was comforted to see Yusuf standing next to Aya. He looked at them, trying to show with his gaze the infinite amount of love he bore for them. Aya, his little Aya, the light of his life. Mohammed, his well-educated son, in whom all his hopes were placed. And Dina, his dear wife, always well-meaning. He would have liked to be the one to comfort them, to say that he did not want to die, but that if it were Allah’s will then he was happy to die for a good cause.
He still wondered who could have betrayed him, who out of all these men he considered his friends had pointed the finger at him. He looked one by one at the other men who were to be hanged. Some of them were from the quarry, good men, people whom he had convinced to join in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Had they been naïve? Even stupid? But he wanted no bitter thoughts during his last minutes of life. Suddenly he saw Samuel and could not help smiling. It wasn’t strange for him to be here, he had been sure that Samuel would come, that he would be there with him at this moment. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and both of them knew what each man wanted to say. They knew each other well.
The hangman put the nooses around the necks of the condemned men. While he did so they heard sounds of anguish from the crowd, Dina’s voice, Aya’s.
Why did the hangman take so long? Why didn’t he put an end to this once and for all? This moment seemed useless and eternal to Ahmed. He wondered if he would go to paradise. He had thought he might, ever since he was a child, but now . . . Suddenly, the noose tightened so strongly round his neck that his existence came to an end.
Mohammed held his mother’s arm as she cried and struggled, trying to get close to her husband’s inert corpse. She couldn’t do it. Cemal Pasha liked the hanged men to stay there for several hours as a warning to Arab nationalists.
Aya fainted, and Yusuf had to pick her up and get her away from the crowd to protect her.
Dina refused to go home, she wanted to stay there until they gave her Ahmed’s body, and neither Mohammed nor her brother Hassan were able to convince her to change her mind.
“I will stay here, I won’t go until I can bring him with me,” she said through her tears.
In the face of his mother’s determination, Mohammed gave in. He knew her well, and he knew that she would stay for as long as it took, whether hours or days.
Ahmed’s body was displayed at the Damascus Gate for a whole day. It was only later that Mohammed found out that it had taken an intervention from Omar to get them to return the body.
Although Cemal Pasha liked that the great families of Jerusalem knew who was in charge, and for this reason almost never limited his cruelty, he listened every now and then to appeals for clemency. The Salem family was rich and influential, so Cemal Pasha decided to show his magnanimity and order the body to be cut down from where it hung next to those of other rascals. But a gesture of this nature had to be accompanied by one that caused terror, and so he enjoyed a lengthy interrogation of Omar, whom he mistrusted and even thought might be a traitor, given his interest in the executed conspirator.
Omar held his fury in check at this humiliation, in having to beg for Ahmed’s corpse from this scoundrel. It was the least he owed the Ziad family.
Dina did not rest until Ahmed’s body was safely laid in the ground, until she herself and Zaida had washed and prepared the body. Mohammed had wanted to do it, but Dina refused. She didn’t care what the law said.
Yusuf took Aya away after Ahmed had been buried. He had been part of the pain and the disgrace of the Ziad family, but now they had to move on. He was one of the sharif’s men, and his job was to be where he could be useful. He left Aya with his mother in Amman, on the other side of the Jordan River. His family would look after her. They had had no chance to be alone together, and he had not looked for one. He knew that Aya would not be his until the wound from her father’s death had healed.
A few days had to go by before Mohammed felt strong enough to go to Hope Orchard. He owed them an explanation. Samuel had been his father’s friend, he knew how much affection they had felt for each other. But he still had thought it necessary to sort out their problems as a family. It was now up to him to make decisions. And the first decision had been: revenge.
Mohammed thought he would be able to find out the name of the traitor from Ahmed’s group who had spoken about them to the police. Ahmed had been hanged along with other quarrymen and farmers, so he had to search among those who had not been touched by the police. There were five of them.
Two days after he had buried his father, accompanied by his cousins Jaled and Salah, he went to the houses of each of these men without warning. The first man seemed to be sincere in his profession of grief; he swore to them that he would kill the traitor with his own hands if they found out who he was. The second man also seemed affected by Ahmed’s death. It was in the third house that they found the seeds of treachery. The three men they had not yet visited were all there; when they saw the three members of Ahmed’s family they grew nervous. Mohammed accused them directly of having betrayed his father, and one of them bowed his head in shame without daring to reply, while the others shouted angrily against such an accusation. Jaled and Salah spoke to the quarrymen and told them that they had a friend who knew one of Cemal Pasha’s policemen, and that he had told them who the traitors were. They started to argue, but Mohammed had no doubt that these were the guilty men, so he took out the knife he had concealed and cut the throat of the silent man in one stroke. The other two men tried to escape, but Jaled and Salah held them back. Mohammed had no pity on them either. They left them on the floor in a pool of blood. He had avenged his father’s death, although he knew that Ahmed himself would never have countenanced revenge. But his father was no longer alive, and he, to carry on living, had to take the lives of those who had sent Ahmed to the gallows.
And whether it was because of the indifference of the police, or maybe simply because the authorities couldn’t prove anything, Mohammed was never arrested for the deaths of these men, although everyone in the quarry murmured that it must have been he who had taken revenge on them. So when he arrived at Hope Orchard, Samuel knew what had happened.
Samuel invited him to sit and eat with them. Mohammed took a moment to accept, because Marinna was there, but in the end he decided to stay, he could not run away from her forever. They ate and remembered Ahmed, everyone told some story about him, then Kassia made a sign and Marinna and Ruth left the men to themselves. They knew that Mohammed would not talk with the women present.
Looking him straight in the eyes, Samuel asked:
“Did you kill those men?”
Mohammed did not bother to deny it.
“What would you have done in my place?”
“My mother and my brother and sister were murdered when I was a child, my father was murdered when I was a man. What did I do then? Nothing, I did nothing except run away. That is what I did. Don’t think that I am proud to have le
ft Russia, for all that you ask me what I would have done.”
“You could have looked for his killers,” Mohammed replied.
“Yes, I suppose I could have stayed, I could have joined one of the groups opposed to the tsar, one of those groups that promotes violence as a way to fight injustice. But my father would not have wanted me to. He died so that I might live.”
“You know what, Samuel, there are times in life when the only way to save yourself is by dying, or killing. I have decided to save myself by taking revenge for my father, even though it cost me my own life.”
They were silent and looked at each other, understanding each other without the need to speak.
“Ahmed would not have liked anyone to die for him,” Ariel said.
Mohammed shrugged. He knew better than these men how his father was and what he would have thought, although it was true that he would never have sought revenge.
“They might arrest you, there are lots of people whispering that it was you,” Samuel said.
“And what are you going to do now?” Jacob asked.
“I will stay with my mother. But I need to work. If you could talk to Anastasia and have her employ me in the quarry . . .”
“Your father always wanted you to study, why don’t you go back to Constantinople?” Samuel wanted to know.
“And how would I pay for my studies? I cannot leave my grandmother and my mother unprotected either. They would have to go and live in my Uncle Hassan’s house and my mother would suffer. It’s not that Hassan would not look after them, or that his wife, Layla, would not behave properly, but they lived right next door. No, I will not leave my mother.”
“We could help them until you have finished your studies. Your father wanted you to become an important man,” Ariel insisted.
“Yes, he wanted me to be a doctor, but he accepted it when I began to study law, and now . . . now things will be how they have to be. Can you help me?”
“Anastasia is going to Galilee, to stay with her sister Olga and Nikolai. Do you remember Olga, Anastasia’s sister? They live on a farm with other families. She will stay with them until Jeremiah can come home. But I will speak to her and ask her to find you a job in the quarry, although . . . If you want to carry on studying, I can help you pay your way and you can pay me back later,” Samuel said, repeating Ariel’s offer.
“Thank you, but I cannot abandon my mother. Tell me, who will become foreman now?”
“Anastasia has given that job to Igor. He is very young, but he’s tireless and he has won the respect of all the quarrymen,” Ariel said, proud of his son.
“Do you want me?” Mohammed looked at Igor, who had remained silent up until that point.
“You know I do. If Anastasia agrees, we can work together.”
“I will go and see her tomorrow, she’s packing for the journey. I will go with her to Galilee,” Samuel explained.
“So you’re going, too . . .”
“No, I’m not going, I’m only accompanying her,” Samuel interrupted. “Mikhail will come with us. It’s not safe to travel alone with children. We’ll come back as soon as she’s settled in. We are going through a difficult time.”
“Yes, we are, and we have to live through it. I will get married in a few months,” Mohammed said.
They were silent without knowing what to say. It was Ariel who asked.
“You’re getting married? We didn’t know you were engaged.”
“I thought about announcing it during my sister’s wedding . . . My mother has insisted so much that I need to get married . . . When I arrived my father said that he had found me a suitable wife. He seemed happy, she’s the daughter of a friend of his, one of his friends who was hanged at the same time as him . . . I barely know her, I remember when she was a child . . . My father asked if I was willing to marry her. I said I would and I will keep my word. We will wait for at least a year, it would not be suitable if we were to marry sooner. When her uncles and brothers think the time has come, they will tell me. Meanwhile, I will get my house ready for when Salma comes.”
They listened to him speak without knowing what to say. It was not the right time for simple congratulations. Mohammed looked at Jacob out of the corner of his eye, knowing how much he was suffering on Marinna’s behalf. He was suffering, too. Not just because he knew that it would hurt her when he found out that he was to be married, but also because he was still in love with her. He had never managed to stop loving her, for all that he had tried to, but now more than ever he needed to carry out his dead father’s wishes.
A week later, Mohammed was working in the quarry alongside Igor. Anastasia had given her consent to employing him as a deputy foreman. She also had affection for Ahmed and his family, and in spite of Mohammed seeming a strange person, all caught up in his own thoughts, she knew he was good inside.
Time went by, and Mohammed was ever more involved in Sharif Husayn’s cause. He hated the Turks, whom he blamed for his father’s death, so he made his brother-in-law’s cause his own. His brother-in-law, Yusuf Saïd, who was married to his dear sister Aya.
Every now and then Yusuf came to Jerusalem to meet with Omar Salem, with Hassan, and with all the men with whom he shared a dream: an Arab nation from Damascus to Beirut, from Mecca to Jerusalem.
In 1917, Sharif Husayn and the British were already working together. Each group defended its own interests, and although the British had not been clear about what they offered for the future, the sharif had no doubt that they would help them build the kingdom that would take the place of the Ottoman Empire.
“You have to come with me, Faisal will surprise you. He has won the respect of the British,” Yusuf said to Mohammed, talking about the sharif’s son.
“I can’t leave my mother and my grandmother unprotected,” he said with regret.
“But your Uncle Hassan is the oldest son of your grandmother Zaida, and it is his obligation to protect her. As for your mother, I know that your Aunt Layla is fond of her,” Yusuf insisted.
But Mohammed knew that neither Zaida nor Dina wanted to share a house with Hassan and Layla.
“I will talk to my uncle, maybe there’s a way for him to take charge of them and still let them stay in their house. That is what my father would have wished.”
“You have to join with us and fight. You can’t stay on the margins looking after two women.”
Mohammed wanted to participate. He admired Faisal, who had won the reputation of being a warrior as daring as he was intelligent.
“Are you sure of what the British have promised?” Omar Salem asked Yusuf.
“The sharif is in contact with the military headquarters in Cairo. They need us to help defeat the Turks. Sir Henry McMahon has delegated one of his officers, T. E. Lawrence, to help Faisal. Lawrence is Faisal’s adviser and the Bedouin respect him.”
Mohammed decided to speak with his Uncle Hassan. He wanted to fight.
“Uncle, I want to join my brother-in-law and fight in Faisal’s group, but I cannot go away and leave my mother and Zaida without the protection of a man.”
“My mother and my sister are welcome in my house. You know that well. My wife is fond of them and my sons respect them. You can go in peace.”
But this was not what Mohammed wanted, and he spent a long time trying to convince his uncle to allow the two women to live in their own house under Hassan’s protection. Hassan resisted. Mohammed made him see that the two houses were only a couple of meters apart, and that it would be as if they were living together.
In the end Hassan accepted this proposal, although he didn’t like it much. He knew that Layla would scold him for being so soft in the face of his obligations toward his mother and his sister. But he had already given his promise to his nephew, so this was how things would be done.
Mohammed did not leave by himself, his cousins Salah and Jaled went
with him. They were young and they wanted to fight to establish their own country.
Hassan carried on going to Omar Salem’s house, where he was always able to get some news about how the war was going, and of the fight between the sharif’s men and the Turks. In June 1917 they celebrated the great success of Faisal’s troops in Aqaba, the Red Sea town where they had taken the Turks by surprise. News of the victory spread across the desert sands. It was no small success, and Faisal, after conquering the port, placed it in the hands of the British, who needed time to unload men and weapons in order to reinforce General Edmund Allenby’s position.
“Allenby will take Jerusalem,” Omar Salem assured Hassan, “and from here he will go to Damascus, you’ll see. We’ll soon be free of the Turks.”
“Allah be praised,” Hassan replied.
“Your sons and your nephew have survived the battle. They say that they are strong men who do not fear to look death in the face. You should be pleased.”
Hassan went to see his mother and his sister Dina every day, and that night he went with his heart lighter than normal.
“I am coming from Omar’s house, we should be pleased, our sons have fought and been victorious in Aqaba. They have been truly brave.”
“When are they coming back?” Zaida asked, as she cared little about the battle and wanted only to see her three grandsons back again.
“The war is not yet over, they need to keep fighting.”
“I don’t want them to kill my son,” Dina said, defying Hassan’s gaze.
“Who wants to lose a son? Don’t you think that Layla and I are suffering from Salah and Jaled’s absence? But if we want a homeland then we will have to fight. We need to be proud of their sacrifice.”
“The Turks have taken my husband, I only wish the worst for them, but not at the cost of my son’s life. Why don’t they come see us?”
Hassan tried to explain the glorious gesture their sons were making, but Dina and Zaida, just like Layla, wanted nothing more than to have them back and safe.
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