Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  Dina looked at Netanel, the old pharmacist, who now looked older than he had the previous day. He could not be consoled, because it would take time and money to build a new laboratory.

  “We’ll have to write to Samuel, he needs to come back,” Dina said.

  “Yes, we shall. Also, he has to know what happened to Ezekiel.” Louis’s voice showed the tiredness that had built up during the fight against the flames.

  “Dina, Mohammed . . . we are in your debt. If you had not helped us . . .” Kassia burst into tears, but the tears did not stop her from speaking. “Your son Wädi is a brave boy, if it weren’t for him, then Ezekiel would be dead by now . . . ,” she said, speaking to Mohammed.

  Ezekiel left the hospital three weeks later, leaving Wädi still fighting for his life. The doctors assured them that he would win the battle, but at times it seemed that he might not.

  Ezekiel remembered that he had slipped as he was walking toward the door, and that he had hit his head, that he had fallen on the floor because he couldn’t see anything, and for all that he shouted, no one seemed to hear his voice. It was only Wädi who heard him when he came into the house, which had been entirely on fire.

  Louis hired a bricklayer to help them build a new house. They worked day and night to put a roof over their heads. By the end of the summer they had two buildings where they could all sleep. The laboratory was still in ruins.

  “I’m sorry, Netanel, we’ll wait for Samuel to come; he will decide what to do.”

  Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs died in clashes with the British.

  Louis’s meeting with Omar was a failure. Louis had always thought of Omar Salem as a moderate man, in spite of knowing that he sympathized with Grand Mufti al-Husseini, but this time there was no room for doubt.

  “We will resist as much as it takes until the English concede to our demands. They have to stop Jewish immigration.”

  “What they have to stop is violence against the Jews,” Louis replied.

  Omar shrugged his shoulders. He did not like attacks like those carried out against Hope Orchard or against the Edison cinema in Jerusalem a few days earlier. But this did not seem to him to be an opportune moment to publicly reject them. Not yet. He was well aware that the most important thing at the moment was for the Palestinian Arabs to appear united in the face of the British. Divisions would have sapped their strength.

  “The British will not take this lying down,” Louis warned him.

  “Do you think we haven’t seen the troops they are sending to Palestine? But simply adding more men will not win them this battle,” Omar assured him.

  “No, they won’t win it just with soldiers, they will win it with the help of people who you think are your allies.”

  Omar did not understand Louis’s enigmatic warning until October 1936, when the leaders of a number of Arab states made a general call to their “Palestinian brothers” to call off the general strike. How could the Palestinian Arabs not heed the petitions of the Sauds of Arabia, the king of Iraq, Abdullah of Transjordan, the emir of Yemen?

  It was the Arab Higher Committee that decided to heed the petition. The Palestinian Arabs seemed prepared to carry on with their sacrifice for as long as was necessary, but their leaders opted once again for a new agreement with Britain.

  “You have to go talk to Jeremiah,” Salma advised her husband.

  But Mohammed did not feel able to go to the quarry. He knew that his position there had been taken by Moshe. Jeremiah resolved the question by coming to his house one day with Igor.

  “When are you going to come back to work?” he asked after they had greeted each other.

  Mohammed was silent and didn’t know what to say.

  “The strike is now over and there is a backlog of work at the quarry. I have spoken with Igor, and we need you.”

  Dina and Salma looked gratefully at Jeremiah. Later on, Mohammed confessed his surprise at the Jew’s gesture to his mother.

  “They are our friends, but they feel they owe you a debt as well. Your son suffered the most in this attack. They lost their houses and their orchards, you were about to lose your son,” Dina said.

  “They don’t owe me anything,” Mohammed replied.

  “There are debts that can never be fully repaid, and Wädi’s scars for saving Ezekiel are one of them. They will always feel a debt to you and to your sons,” Dina said.

  Wädi was by now almost entirely recovered; the fire had left deep scars on his body, but the worst were on his face. These marks would be with him for the rest of his life.

  Ezekiel followed him everywhere. Wädi was his hero, he owed him his life, and after Miriam he was the person the child most admired, even more than his sister Dalida or his father. Samuel had become a distant memory to him.

  Wädi’s scars hurt Mohammed. He wanted to cry when he saw his son’s face covered with swollen red lines, and ever since the night of the fire he had sworn that the people responsible for this tragedy would pay the price.

  Mohammed took advantage of the invitation to visit extended by his mother to her brother Hassan and his wife Layla, as well as their son Jaled, to ask his uncle about who might have started the fire. Not only did his uncle know most of the leaders of the insurgents, but he also knew a surprising amount about their plans.

  “Uncle, you have to tell me who was responsible for what happened to Wädi.”

  “You know I am very sorry about what happened at Hope Orchard, they are my friends as well as yours. No one wanted to hurt them, it was a terrible mistake that a torch accidently got thrown on the laboratory roof . . . The only thing they wanted to do was burn a few trees. They never wanted to hurt anyone.” Hassan felt uncomfortable in the face of his nephew’s fixed stare.

  “My son nearly died in the flames,” Mohammed insisted.

  “Wädi is a brave and loyal boy who risked his life to save Ezekiel, but you know very well that none of us would ever lift a hand against our family. Everyone knows that you are the son of Ahmed Ziad, a hero, an example to all the younger generation, an example to me.”

  “My husband would never have taken part in anything like this . . . Throwing torches into an orchard . . . No, my husband would not have done it, so don’t you dare insinuate, dear brother, that Ahmed would have participated in any similar act of villainy.” Dina felt offended by her brother’s words.

  “Come on, Dina, what do you know about it! The ones who threw the torch had no intention of hurting anyone, it is just a way to prolong the struggle.”

  “Burning houses and farms!” Dina shouted.

  “What should we do? Do you think we are not being pushed aside on our own land? Come on, Sister, if we don’t stand up to them then they’ll take what little we have left,” Hassan replied.

  “I want to talk to the people who did this, help me,” Mohammed said to his uncle again.

  “I won’t help you, I can’t, I know you too well and what you want is revenge for what was a tragic accident.”

  “You think it was a tragic accident that scarred my son’s face? No, this is not the right way to fight. I went on strike, and put at risk a good salary, put at risk my means of supporting my family. I want the British to leave as much as anyone, just as my father wanted to get rid of the Turks. I know which side I’m on, but I also know how to fight. I fought against the Turks with your son Jaled, and your older son Salah, whom I hope is now with Allah. Salah lost his life fighting like a soldier against other soldiers. It is an honor to die like that, but I would never attack my enemies by burning their farms at night, by putting their children in danger. This will never be my way of fighting.”

  “My cousin is right.” Jaled, who had kept silent all this while, dared to speak up against his father.

  Hassan looked angrily at him. He didn’t like contradiction, even if it came from within his own family.

&n
bsp; “Your cousin is talking like a father, not like a soldier. What should I have done when they killed my oldest son? I have not stopped grieving for your brother Salah, not for one single day, and neither has your mother, who nearly went mad because of it. When I sent you off to fight in the sharif’s armies, I knew that you could lose, that war was like that.”

  “Are we at war?” Mohammed asked bitterly.

  “We cannot allow even one more Jewish farm!” Hassan exploded.

  “I will not take part in actions against unarmed farmers! I will not!” Mohammed shouted.

  “Unarmed? You know they have weapons, didn’t you know that Louis is in the Haganah? They have their own army, an army without barracks, without uniforms, but an army nonetheless.”

  The women listened in silence, worried about how violently the men were talking. Hassan left without telling his nephew who the people were who had attacked Hope Orchard.

  The next day, Jaled arranged to bump into his cousin Mohammed. They walked along for a while smoking Egyptian cigars, the ones that Jeremiah gave Mohammed every now and then.

  Jaled respected his father, but he felt an obligation to Mohammed. They had fought cheek by jowl in Faisal’s armies. They knew what killing and dying meant, some of their comrades-in-arms had died next to them, and they had shot other men and robbed them of their lives.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that the people who burned Hope Orchard were some brothers who live near Jerusalem, a mile or so from the Damascus Gate. Their house has two fig trees in front of it. They are loyal to the mufti.”

  “Thank you Jaled, I am in your debt.”

  “My father is fond of you, but he doesn’t want there to be confrontations between the Arabs. It was difficult enough to get the major families to support the general strike.”

  “I understand your father. He has his reasons and I have mine. When I see my son’s face then anger takes hold of me.”

  “I can’t come with you, my father would never forgive me.”

  “And I’m not asking you to come. There are things in this life that one needs to do oneself.”

  Mohammed said nothing to anyone, not even to Salma, his wife, about what he was planning to do. He waited until Friday, and then went out when night fell.

  Dina and Salma asked him where he was going, and he said he was going to see some other men.

  Wrapped in the shadows of night, with a can of gasoline in his hand, he walked along the city wall and faced the desert wind, which blew strongly that night. He walked a few miles until he reached the farmhouse Jaled had spoken of. The house was surrounded by olive trees. There was a corral next to it, where several goats were peacefully ruminating.

  Careful to make no noise, he poured the gasoline over the trees. Then he came closer to the house and made his presence known.

  An elderly man opened the door and Mohammed could see that inside were an elderly woman and two young men, one of them must have been no older than sixteen, the same age as his son Wädi, and the other was around twenty.

  “Allah be praised, what do you want?” the man asked.

  “Come out of your house with your wife and your children,” Mohammed ordered him.

  “What? Why do we have to come out?”

  The young men came toward the door, and their faces showed surprise and defiance.

  “Come out if you want to live,” he said, and as he said this he lit a wad of cotton soaked in gasoline that he had hidden on his person, and threw it toward the trees. As if lightning had struck, the sky lit up for a few seconds, then everything started to burn.

  The family came out of the house, shouting and threatening Mohammed, and the young men faced up to Mohammed and the older one tried to knock him down. But Mohammed did not give him time to do so, and put a knife to his throat as he pulled out the pistol he was carrying in his waistband. The young man became still. He thought he was in the hands of a madman.

  “I should kill you and your brother, but I won’t do it out of respect for myself. I don’t kill defenseless families. But you will pay for what you did.”

  The old man tried to attack Mohammed with his cane, but Mohammed managed to avoid him. The woman cried and shouted as she saw the fire taking control of their orchard and their olive trees, making the goats flee in terror from the flames that threatened to get into their enclosure.

  “I’ll let you live, but if I ever see you again, you will regret it.”

  He walked away, walking backwards, covering them with his pistol. He disappeared into the shadows of the night, and then he ran as he heard the cries for help behind him.

  As he went home he felt at peace.

  Omar Salem was furious. He walked from one side of his office to the other as he spoke to Mohammed and Yusuf.

  “But how dare you attack a family that was loyal to the mufti? Do you want us all to kill each other?”

  Yusuf seemed worried, but Mohammed was completely calm. He was not afraid of Omar Salem, he didn’t care about his wealth or his power. When Omar finished reprimanding him, Mohammed started to speak.

  “I don’t approve of attacking defenseless people. If we have to fight against the Jews, let us do so openly, let’s meet them face to face, not burn their houses and put their children in danger.”

  “We don’t want them to feel at ease, we don’t want them to think that this is their land . . . ,” Yusuf started to say.

  But Omar cut him off, furious at what Mohammed had said.

  “You dare question the mufti’s orders! You! Your father would be ashamed of you.”

  Mohammed tensed, and looked at Omar Salem with such anger in his eyes that the other man backed away.

  “Don’t ascribe unworthy notions to my father. He would never have agreed with the idea of burning houses or farms. If he were here, he would applaud what I have done.”

  “How dare you think that you can mete out justice! Who do you think you are!” Omar said angrily.

  “I’m not meting out justice, all I want to do is live in peace with myself. There are times in life when the only way to save yourself is by dying, or killing; I saved my honor on this occasion, and so your friends are still alive. But I assure you that every morning, when I look at my son Wädi’s face, I regret having let them live.”

  Mohammed was thinking not only of Wädi, but also of Marinna. He still remembered the anguish he had felt when he had thought she was caught amid the flames. How could he forgive the people who were nearly responsible for taking away from him the people he loved most in the world, Marinna and his oldest son?

  The trust between Mohammed and Omar was broken forever that day. Omar knew that Mohammed would follow his conscience, and that he wouldn’t obey any order he didn’t believe in, and this meant that he couldn’t fully be trusted.

  Later, when Yusuf went to see his brother-in-law, he spoke of how worried he was.

  “Omar has always shown special friendliness toward you,” he said reproachfully.

  “I have always been friendly toward him, or do you think that he is worth more than I am?”

  “You cannot stand against the mufti.”

  “I will stand against anything I do not believe in. I respect the mufti, but I do not belong to him.”

  The two brothers-in-law spoke for a long while without coming to any agreement.

  The British police came to Mohammed’s house. They suspected that the fire at the Jerusalem farm had something to do with the fire at Hope Orchard. Someone had whispered into a listening ear that Mohammed had had something to do with both events. The police took him away to interrogate him, but Mohammed was firm and assured them that he knew nothing about what had happened. They detained him for a few days, but then released him for lack of proof.

  Dina spoke to her son.

  “Haven’t we suffered enough? You didn’t hav
e to . . .”

  But he wouldn’t let her continue.

  “Mother, I have done nothing to be ashamed of. In any case, let me decide this with my conscience.”

  “You have two sons and a wife, think about them, Mohammed.”

  “There are things that I do for them, and things that I do for myself.”

  Salma didn’t dare scold her husband, although she was worried about what might happen to him.

  It was during these days that everyone’s routine was shocked by Samuel’s sudden arrival. Miriam told Dina that Samuel was about to arrive in Palestine, and that he had two childhood friends with him.

  “I’m going to ask him for a divorce, Dina, I want you to be the first to know, I know how fond you are of Samuel.”

  “Why don’t you wait and talk to him? Maybe there is still a possible solution . . .”

  “The only thing that has passed between us this year is a few letters. Samuel has been very expansive about what is happening in Europe, and scarcely asks about what is happening here. He didn’t want to have children, I did; so although he loves Dalida and Ezekiel, he doesn’t feel very close to them. He’s coming because he thinks he should, especially after what happened to Ezekiel, but also because he wants a divorce, just as I do. I’m sure of it.”

  Dina loved Miriam and felt very close to her even though she was younger.

  “Samuel and I are nearly seventy now, and Miriam has only just passed fifty, but it’s like she has lived much more than us. She looks so sad . . . ,” Dina thought.

  Samuel arrived shortly after the British government sent Lord Peel to Palestine as the chairman of a commission of inquiry into the situation there.

  “When the English don’t know what to do, they set up a commission of inquiry,” Mohammed complained.

  “And who knows what they will think of now?” Dina said worriedly.