Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “Jeremiah wouldn’t deny you anything,” Ruth said.

  “I didn’t ask him if I could smoke, I just started smoking,” Anastasia said.

  As the women carried on talking, Miriam was smoking on the threshold and listening to the men’s conversation. Dina got up and brought her a pomegranate juice, making a sign to the others that they shouldn’t move.

  “I can’t bear them saying that we’ll end up fighting one day,” Dina whispered to Miriam.

  “Yes, that’s what they’re saying. They’re talking about Musa al-Alami. Yusuf says that Musa al-Alami has been seen on several occasions with Ben-Gurion. He knows of this via Omar, and I suppose via the good connections he has at Emir Abdullah’s court.”

  “Musa al-Alami is a fair and honest man, no one could blame him for anything when he was the public prosecutor for Palestine,” Dina replied.

  They were silent as they listened to the men speak. Yusuf breathed in the smoke from his cigar as he analyzed some of the precious pieces of information.

  “Ben-Gurion could not have had a better interlocutor than Musa al-Alami: He’s always known how to keep his distance from politicians, and because of that he can speak to everyone. The mufti listens to him, as do the leaders of Istiqlal, the Nashashibi, the Dajani, and the Jalidi: They all listen to his opinions.”

  “But al-Alami has no power to make decisions,” Mikhail interrupted. “If it all depended on him, then an agreement could be reached with Ben-Gurion. But Musa al-Alami does not represent all the Palestinians, so his conversations with our representatives are not going to get us very far.”

  “But an agreement would be good for them all,” Jeremiah said.

  “It depends on which agreement. You’ve heard Yusuf: Ben-Gurion has proposed the foundation of a federation of Middle Eastern states. He has even suggested the possibility of a shared Jewish and Arab state. In the past, Sharif Husayn has agreed with the idea of allowing the Jews to have a homeland within a greater Arab state, but things have changed, maybe too much now,” Mohammed said.

  “The past is past,” Mikhail interrupted.

  “Musa al-Alami is worried, as we are, that Jewish immigration has not stopped and that they are still buying our lands, and he is worried especially about the poverty of our peasants now that they are losing the opportunity to work as day laborers. As far as I know, al-Alami has also said to Ben-Gurion that there is no possibility of an agreement if the Zionists continue buying land. Ben-Gurion is not an easy man to deal with, and it is difficult for anyone to get him to change his mind,” Yusuf said, as he observed the reaction his words provoked in Jeremiah, Igor, and Netanel—his friends, but also Jews.

  “And the mufti? Why doesn’t he accept Ben-Gurion’s proposal?” Igor said as he looked sideways at Ben, who was climbing one of the trees, and he asked himself why Marinna was not paying more attention to the child’s misbehavior.

  “As far as I know, the mufti is interested in the proposal, but he mistrusts the Zionists; also, why do we have to give the land away? It’s ours,” Yusuf said.

  “If both sides are intransigent, then there is no possibility of agreement and we will lose everything. That’s why I don’t understand why they have passed on Ben-Gurion’s conversations with Musa al-Alami to the newspapers. The Arab Nation has given an account of even the most minute details; whoever leaked them wanted to cut off the possibility of an agreement at the root,” Mikhail said.

  Dina thought about Samuel. She would have liked to have known her old friend’s opinion. She listened to the men and said to herself that they were not being honest with one another, that in spite of saying that they were friends, they were not sharing all they thought or all they knew. Yusuf knew more than he was saying, but Mikhail was also not being entirely open now that he was working closely with Louis, and she knew that Louis was a member of the Haganah, the Jews’ secret militia. No one had told her, it was just something she knew, she had known Louis well ever since his arrival at Hope Orchard. It had not taken long for him to join Hashomer, “the watchman” who had protected the first colonies from bandit attacks. Louis was too agitated and dreamy to accept having the life of a farmer. He went from one thing to another and was a devoted follower of Ben-Gurion, the man who had turned himself into the voice and soul of the Jews who, like him, had come to Palestine.

  She continued listening closely to what Mikhail said. Miriam was lighting another cigarette, and she, too, was silent and listened to the men, trying to guess from their words what might await them in the future.

  Mikhail said that Ben-Gurion had also met with the head of the Istiqlal, but without doing anything more than talk.

  “It is important to talk, we should never stop talking. If the Arabs and the Jews make the effort to listen to one another, to put themselves in each other’s skin, then things will be easier,” Igor said.

  The men agreed, and even Dina thought to herself that this must be true. Igor had always seemed a sensible boy. Marinna had done well to marry him. He was a good husband and a good father, always looking after Ben, his only son. Even Mohammed could not overlook Igor’s good qualities. He said that he was a just man who never neglected anything that the quarry workers needed. He had won the confidence of the Arab workers because he made no distinction between them and the Jews. Mohammed said that Jeremiah would not have allowed such distinctions anyway, but it was clear that Igor was naturally an egalitarian.

  Mohammed and Igor were not friends, however. Marinna always stood between them. Dina did not deceive herself about this. Mohammed and Marinna had given each other up, but they had never stopped loving each other. Marinna was a faithful wife and Mohammed treated Salma well, but neither Igor nor Salma had managed to block out the traces of the other person in each of their partner’s lives. Sometimes, on days such as these, Dina thought she could sense a certain spark in the glances they exchanged.

  She sighed with relief when she saw Mohammed offering Igor a match. And she herself felt the desire to smoke at that moment. She would gladly have asked Miriam for one of her aromatic cigarettes, but then she remembered Ahmed, her dear husband. They belonged to another generation, one in which there was no space for other customs. No, Ahmed would not have allowed her to smoke, and if she started to smoke now, in spite of everything, she would make her son Mohammed ashamed. She pushed the thought aside, she felt too old to break with tradition. She wouldn’t have liked it if her daughter Aya started smoking. Moshe’s voice brought her back to reality.

  “I don’t think that Ben-Gurion is naïve, and if he really is proposing what you say, then he has made a mistake. It’s not possible to have a shared state, and much less possible for us to find ourselves a home in an Arab confederation. We will have to fight, why fool ourselves, and there is no other solution, it’s you or us.”

  Moshe’s words upset the other men. Dina hated him for saying them. Moshe was the only Jew she feared. Why had they let him come to Hope Orchard? He was so different from Samuel, from Igor, from Jeremiah, from how Jacob and Ariel had been, from how Louis was . . . He was even different from the impulsive Mikhail.

  “No one says that it will be easy, but why does it have to be impossible? You used to be a Bolshevik, didn’t the communists say that all men were equal? My father died because he believed in that idea. Tell me, why is it impossible for Arab workers and Jewish workers to live together?” It was hard for Mikhail to hold back the anger that Moshe’s words had provoked in him. He, too, did not like this man.

  “Different interests, a different culture, a different religion . . . Do you need more reasons?” Moshe replied, raising his voice.

  “Do you think that the solution is to destroy everything that’s not the same as you? Do you really think that you, the Jews, can destroy the Arabs, or that we can destroy the Jews? Only a fool would think something like that.” Mohammed tried to repress the indignation he felt.

 
“I agree with Mohammed. Moshe, you are a fool and men like you are a danger to the rest of us. You have learned nothing from living here. I think that my mother, just like Kassia and Samuel, were wrong to allow you to come to live at Hope Orchard.” Igor’s words were an attack on Moshe.

  Dina noticed how Miriam was trembling, and then realized that she, too, was shaking.

  “Are you telling me that you prefer the Arabs to the Jews?” Moshe asked Igor defiantly.

  “I’m saying that men like you can only bring trouble. As for what you ask, I can only say that I was taught not to judge men by where they were born, nor by the God they prayed to, nor by what they knew. I judge them by what they have in their hearts, and I don’t like what’s in yours. Don’t offend us again, or you will have to leave Hope Orchard.” Igor’s voice was so firm that no one dared speak.

  Moshe got up without saying anything, and looked at them all with contempt. Then he went to find his wife. Eva was with the other women and he told her that they were leaving.

  The confrontation had left them uncomfortable. Dina did not realize that she was talking aloud, but everyone heard her.

  “I don’t know how they put up with him! If I could I’d throw him out of here.”

  “Mother!” Mohammed was shocked at Dina’s words.

  “I think the same. If it were up to me, Moshe and Eva would leave tonight,” Miriam said, siding with Dina.

  The two women went back inside, leaving the men to continue their conversation.

  Louis arrived the next morning, when dawn had scarcely broken. He drove an old van and woke them all up by sounding the horn.

  Dina had gotten up a while back to make breakfast. She didn’t want her grandchildren Rami and Noor to leave without having had a bowl of milk.

  “But what are you doing here at this hour?” Dina asked Louis.

  “I want to do my bit in helping Aya move. I think that all the bags will fit in this truck,” Louis replied with a laugh.

  “We expected you last night,” Dina said.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t come. I was in the north. But here I am, and I’ll be more useful with the truck this morning than I would have been drinking and eating last night.”

  It was in this truck, with Louis at the wheel, that Aya said goodbye to Hope Orchard with tears in her eyes. This would always be her home, for all that her future was now in that whitewashed house at the entry to Deir Yassin. She would spend her life raising her children and getting used to being the lady of the house. Yusuf still loved her and she was loyal to him, but she had stopped fooling herself years ago. She had married this good man when she was very young, and she had thought herself in love with him. But the passing of the years made her understand that love must be something different from what she felt for Yusuf. It was the same as what had happened with Marinna and Igor. But at least Marinna knew what love was, as she had been in love with Mohammed ever since she was a child.

  Her friendship with Marinna remained unchanged, although some of her new neighbors at Deir Yassin judged her for being friends with a Jew.

  Every day the conflicts between the two communities grew more serious, and there was always someone with a grievance. Her neighbors did not realize that Marinna was like a big sister for Aya, and that she loved her without question.

  Yusuf was waiting impatiently for Omar Salem. He had become his right-hand man, although he helped not so much with his multiple commercial interests as with his political intrigues.

  Allah had blessed him with seven children, but Omar preferred to keep them away from politics. Although he wanted the British to leave Palestine, he had not hesitated to send his sons to the most prestigious British universities.

  On this morning in April 1936 Yusuf had a lot of news to pass on to Omar. The night before, he had casually met with one of Grand Mufti al-Husseini’s lieutenants, and he had told him that they were preparing “something big.”

  On the night of April 15, a group of young Palestinian Arabs had attacked some Jews on the highway from Nablus to Tulkarem, leaving several of them dead. On April 19, another group had attacked Jewish workers at the port of Jaffa, and by the following day sixteen were dead.

  All the most significant Palestinian figures had by then finished preparations for surprising the British and the Jews with a general strike, which would soon be placed under the direction of the newly established Arab Higher Committee. But the strike, the mufti’s man had said, had only been a part of what was going to happen. The British would learn that they were nothing without the Arabs, they would see this when the Arabs did not come to work and their administration was paralyzed. The Jews would suffer the consequences as well, as all commercial and labor relations with them would come to a halt, too. The Arabs would also use force to attack them. Yes, everyone would learn whose land this was.

  The news that Yusuf brought Omar was not news to him. Two days before, he had dined with other significant figures among the Jerusalem Arabs. He had agreed that what was needed now was a display of force, although he had expressed his disgust for what had happened to the Jews in Jaffa. Until this point the Haganah had limited itself to self-defense, but what if they decided to exact retributions now, an eye for an eye? Omar was a man whose code of honor came from the battlefield, and he hated to see uncontrolled violence.

  “Your brother-in-law Mohammed should join the strike. It would be unforgivable for him not to respect the decision of the Arab Higher Committee.”

  “My brother-in-law is as patriotic as the next man,” Yusuf replied, without wishing to commit himself any more than that.

  “I know that Mohammed is loyal to our cause, it could not be otherwise, he is the son of a martyr, now that Allah has my good friend Ahmed in paradise, but how can he be loyal to his people and at the same time loyal to his Jewish friends? He has to choose.”

  “And he will choose well.”

  “Your answers tell me nothing, Yusuf, they are the replies that you would give a prince whom you did not wish to disappoint.”

  “Speak with Mohammed, set your own mind at rest.”

  “I will. Our men will not understand that the son of a martyr might not join the strike, and they might even think of him as an enemy. Clashes between us are too frequent. The mufti does not tolerate dissent, but on this occasion his main opponents in the Nashashibi family are in agreement with the idea of the general strike, although, just as I do, they reject all violence that takes place off a battlefield.”

  They dealt with other business before he allowed Yusuf to leave.

  Omar was thoughtful. He trusted Yusuf, but he had doubts about what he truly thought.

  The Saïds, Yusuf’s family, were from the other side of the Jordan River, from Amman, which was now Abdullah’s capital. Yusuf’s father had never flagged in his loyalty to Husayn, the sharif of Mecca, the man who dreamed of an Arab empire. Yusuf had followed his example, and had fought shoulder to shoulder with Husayn’s sons and had been outstanding as first officer of Faisal’s troops, and later of those of Abdullah. But now Abdullah ruled Transjordan with the help of the British and seemed to have little desire for them to leave. His brother Faisal had been king of Iraq and had died, and his oldest son Ali had been defeated at Mecca by the Saudis. Abdullah could be happy that he had this kingdom—thanks to his astuteness, yes, but also thanks to the support of the British.

  Recently, Abdullah’s interests had not always coincided with the interests of the Palestinian Arabs, so Omar asked himself where Yusuf’s loyalties really lay. He could not forget that he was one of the few men who had remained loyal to old Husayn, and who had visited him in his Amman exile, and then a few times in Aqaba; he had even journeyed a couple of times to Cyprus, where the sharif of Mecca had become an embittered old man who had only his son Zaïd to look after him. And he had been regretful when, after his death in 1931, Husayn had not received the plaudits he
deserved.

  Omar knew that it had hurt Yusuf to see Husayn in such a situation, the great dreamer of the Arab state who had been reduced to asking Abdullah if he might be allowed to return from his exile in Cyprus. Abdullah had remained inflexible, knowing that there could be no kingdom with two kings, which was what had happened while Husayn was exiled in Amman. But he finally gave in and received his father back into the kingdom. On his return from Cyprus, Husayn was barely a shadow of what he had once been. Yusuf had been hurt to see his former leader transformed into an old and worthless man, a result of his apoplexy, and lamented when he thought of how he had been.

  “If it had not been for the sharif, we would never have freed ourselves from the Turks,” he said to his friends.

  Some of them replied that maybe this had been a great mistake. They blamed him for having put so much trust in the British, in the Christians, in order to confront people who in the final analysis believed in Allah just as much as the Arabs did. But Omar was not one of these critics. He was a committed patriot who thought that the Arabs should govern themselves, and at this moment, more than the fates of the Syrians, the Iraqis, or the Lebanese, what bothered him the most was the fate of his Palestinian brothers. He doubted, yes, he doubted that Abdullah would care about anything that was not his own little kingdom. Where did Yusuf’s heart lie?

  Mohammed did not go to the quarry. He couldn’t, although he was not happy. He went to Jeremiah’s house to say that he couldn’t work that day, and not for a long time.

  Jeremiah listened in silence and weighed his words before replying.

  “So you are going to go on strike—but not because I am a wicked boss who exploits you and your men. You know that I am fair and that you cannot blame me for anything. I accept that, but what I don’t understand is what you think you are going to achieve by doing this? The British aren’t leaving, and neither are we. I understand how worried you get when you see the Jews continue to come, but where else can the German Jews go, the ones who are fleeing Nazism? Hitler has outlawed them, if such a thing is possible. He has taken their property, they cannot work, they cannot teach, they can hardly live, and they are fleeing. Lots of them come here and will stay here, just as we Russians did fleeing the pogroms. Your strike will not stop Jewish immigration; the British will not stop it. Palestine is your homeland, I will never deny that, but it is also ours.”