Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

After speaking to Frank she called her boss. She got through to him on his cell phone.

  “Michel?”

  “Ah, so you will lower yourself to return my calls! I’ve sent you two e-mails and left you four voice messages . . .”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve been going from one place to another . . .”

  “Marian, I can’t give you any more time. No one understands why you are still in Palestine. Look, it’s happened to all of us at one time or another—you go to a place to write a report and you end up getting involved in that place’s problems . . . It makes us lose perspective. Here in the office there are already people saying that your report won’t be worth anything.”

  “I suppose it was Eleanor who said that. It’s typical of her to insult other people’s work,” Marian said angrily.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I’m finishing up here, I really am now. I think I will come back to Brussels next week.”

  “Another week! Are you mad?”

  “No, Michel, I am doing my job. It’s not easy, I promise you that.”

  “Well, I think it’s very easy. You have gone to find out what we all know already: The settlement policy is a piece of shit. The Israelis are taking what little land the Palestinians still have left. It is a policy based on faits accomplis. They go to a place, build on it, send their colonists, and then insist that the incorporation of the site into Israel is inevitable. Shall I keep talking?”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “No? I hope the Jews aren’t turning your head. They’re very good at propaganda. If they can convert you to their cause, then we’re all lost.”

  “I am trying to carry out a professional and objective study. No one has converted me to his cause. All I want to do is describe reality and show the points of view of different people. That’s the right thing to do, no?”

  “The only right thing to do is to get your work done on schedule without misspending the money that has been pledged. We cannot let you carry on there. You have gone over budget. Ah! One more thing: Admin asked me why you were staying at the American Colony. Aren’t there any cheap hotels in Jerusalem?”

  “The American Colony is in the Palestinian zone, it’s where the leaders of the Palestinians meet, and the European Union peace negotiators . . .”

  “Yes, but they’re not on a budget, and we are. It’s alright, Marian, come back, but I’m not going to keep on covering for you. One more week, not a day more.”

  She spent the following two days finishing off with the interviews she had organized in Ramallah and Bethlehem. After talking to the Palestinian leaders she felt extremely disheartened. As disheartened as she did when she spoke to the Israeli leaders.

  Any external observer would have said that the only solution was for there to be two states coexisting. There was no other option.

  She couldn’t help but admire the Palestinians. She had good reason to do so, but for her the main cause was their firmness and willingness to sacrifice to defend their stolen rights. They had not given up on them, they were still expecting justice.

  She did not go back to Ezekiel’s house until three days later. Hanna, Ezekiel’s granddaughter, met her with an enormous smile. The young woman seemed to have overcome her reticence and was now willing to be friendly.

  “I’ve left some food ready just in case your conversation runs long.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”

  “No trouble, a salad, some hummus, and a chicken stew. So you don’t have to worry about anything apart from talking.”

  After the young woman left them alone, Marian felt Ezekiel scrutinizing her.

  “Well, it’s your turn,” he said.

  “It’s not going to be easy, in the end it means telling the end of a story that really belongs to you. They are events that you took part in, or that concern you.”

  “It’s important for me that you tell me the Ziad family’s version. I suppose you can have no doubt about what the Ziads mean to me. I’m sure that they will have told you the whole truth, but the truth at times is multifaceted.”

  “The truth is the truth,” Marian said, trying to hide her annoyance.

  “No, it isn’t. The truth is surrounded by other elements, made up of the stuff that we live from moment to moment. For example, it is the truth that Jerusalem is a holy city for Muslims and Christians. But many centuries before it belonged to one group or the other, as well as being the capital of our kingdom, it was a holy city for the Jews. Now we fight over it. My truth is as tangible as that of the Ziads. But let’s not argue. I’m listening.”

  Wädi Ziad had decided to become a teacher. He had not stopped thinking about this as he had fought alongside the British in the Egyptian sands, facing Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

  He hated violence and there he was, a gun in his hand, shooting. “I know why I’m fighting,” he said in his more depressed moments. He had to tell himself this several times in order to continue firing his gun.

  The first time he saw the bodies of other soldiers like him he felt nauseated, even though they were dressed in German uniforms. He thought that maybe one of them had been the victim of his gunfire.

  He was surprised to have survived the skirmishes and battles in which he fought. He did not fool himself. One day the dead man was a German soldier, but the next day it could just as easily be him. So he spent the war expecting the moment when a bullet would go through his chest and steal his life away. It didn’t happen, so he went back to Palestine with his superiors’ congratulations, and an official mention for the bravery he had shown in the field.

  He had gotten to know the British right down to the marrow. It’s difficult not to know people with whom one risks one’s life. He admired their determination, and that they knew what they were fighting for and what they wanted. “If the Arabs were capable of being united in this way . . . ,” he said to himself. But when he got home he was scolded by a number of his friends for having fought alongside the British, who were, they said, nothing more than a group of colonialists who only defended their own interests.

  But the war had been different. It had not been difficult for him to choose a side. Hitler seemed to him to be an evil little man. Wädi would never have risked his life for a man like him. He was sure that Hitler had no other aim than to turn Palestine into a German colony. Also, Wädi did not hate the Jews.

  A lot of his best friends were Jews. He had grown up alongside Hope Orchard and felt a sincere affection for everyone who lived there. He smiled when he remembered Ezekiel, the little boy who followed him everywhere out of gratitude for saving his life. He had never regretted earning the scars that covered his face, but he knew their effect on the people who looked at him.

  He didn’t tell his father when he would be coming home. He saw his mother in the distance, watering the flowers. He smiled. Salma was very protective of her little patch of land and grew medicinal herbs there as well as flowers. He was not surprised that his mother suddenly got to her feet and turned, her hands shading her eyes, to look at the horizon. Salma had not yet seen him but she could sense her son’s presence. It took her a few minutes to locate him, but then she saw him and shouted out his name. How they had missed each other! In the war, in the moments of depression, of fear, of weariness, he had thought of his mother, of the moment when she would take him in her arms once again.

  His mother cried to see him, and his father held his emotions back as best he could. Wädi felt strongly the absence of his sister Naima. He did not say so to his father, but he was upset to see his sister married. Perhaps they should have waited until his return, or else have given her the chance to choose her husband. He knew that Târeq was a good man, his father would never have let Naima go with anyone who was not, but even so . . . He would have liked Naima to be there for the moment of his return from the war; he imagined her laughing, slap
ping him on the back, asking him about all that he had been through. But Naima had obligations now; she had given birth to her first child.

  “She will come as soon as she knows you are here,” Mohammed said, aware of his son’s mild disappointment at his sister’s absence.

  “Târeq looks after her as if she were a jewel,” Salma assured him.

  His mother told him that Naima and Târeq had their own home, where Naima was the queen. Some women suffer in silence when they need to live with their mother-in-law. Not everyone had the luck that had come Salma’s way, to find in Dina a second mother rather than a mother-in-law.

  Salma had kept his room just as he had left it. He found his shirts clean and folded in the drawers of the old commode. And the sheets smelled of lavender, the same lavender that Salma herself grew.

  It was hard for him to go to sleep the first night. The soft bed was odd after the nights spent sleeping out in the open. He had gotten used to the cots they used in the army, even though he had never stopped missing his own bed while he was in Egypt.

  His mother went with him to Hope Orchard, which he thought sad because of the absence of Ezekiel and Ben. Miriam was older and Marinna was thinner than she should be. The two women worked from dawn to dusk in the orchard. Igor was still at the quarry, and barely found time to lend them a hand. It was sad for Wädi to see the place sunk in silence.

  Louis, they told him, spent more time in Tel Aviv than in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel and Ben had still not returned, even though the war had ended a few months earlier.

  Wädi offered to help the women in his free time, but he didn’t know how much free time he would have, because he had decided to start work as a teacher as soon as possible. He had trained for it before the war.

  “Yusuf can help you,” Mohammed said.

  “Father, I don’t want to owe anyone any favors,” Wädi replied.

  “He’s your uncle, he’s married to my sister Aya. If he helps you, you won’t owe anybody anything,” Mohammed insisted.

  “I would like to try to do it myself. I will go see my old teachers, they’ll know how to help me.”

  Mohammed agreed. He was proud of his son’s attitude. Even so, he would tell Yusuf that Wädi was looking for work. He would do it on Friday. Salma had invited Aya to come and have a family dinner with them, along with Hassan and Layla and their son Jaled, and Naima and Târeq. It was good to have a family, Mohammed thought, for all the disagreements he had with his Uncle Hassan and his brother-in-law Yusuf. He was annoyed by how little trust they had between them. They had been on good terms with the mufti during the war. He had tended to reproach them for this, reminding them that he had a son fighting the Germans.

  Wädi was happy to see his cousin Rami again. Aya’s oldest son was a year older than him and they had been inseparable as children. He thought that his cousin Noor was as pretty and shy as she had been when she was a child.

  “I’m glad that you have come back in time for Noor’s wedding,” Aya said as she hugged him.

  Noor looked down at the ground, embarrassed. There were only a few days to go before she was wed, and for all that she tried to feel happy about it, she could not. She shuddered to think that she would have to leave her house to go with an unknown man to live on the other side of the Jordan. Aya, her mother, had told her that she had suffered the same experience. But her mother had been lucky and had not had to spend much time in her mother-in-law’s house. This was not to be the case for her. The man they had chosen for her lived in the heart of Amman, and was a loyal servant of Emir Abdullah.

  Yusuf had convinced Aya that Emad would be a good husband. His father had been one of Yusuf’s own comrades-in-arms in the war against the Turks, he was a Bedouin and his family had been loyal to the Hashemites for centuries.

  Salma was roasting a lamb, and Aya and Noor and Naima helped her as they talked about the wedding. Layla was resting next to them. She had grown so fat that she could hardly move; also, now that she was old, she dozed most of the time without paying any attention to the people who surrounded her.

  The men drank pomegranate juice and smoked the Egyptian cigarettes that Mohammed liked so much and that Wädi had brought him as a present from Egypt. As always, they were talking about the future of Palestine.

  “I heard from Omar that the Haganah is not so strongly opposed to the Irgun since the war ended. They have even decided to join forces against the British,” Yusuf explained.

  “And is that good or bad?” Wädi asked.

  “They want the British to allow the European Jews who were freed from the camps to come to Palestine, but the British refuse to relax their policies. Even so, the Jewish Agency is still chartering ships to bring surviving Jews over here. Also, the Jews have an ally in the American president, Harry Truman, who has pressured the Allies to allow at least one hundred thousand Jews to come over to Palestine,” Yusuf said to his nephew.

  “So Truman is a Zionist,” Mohammed said, more of a statement than a question. He was always surprised by the excellent information that Yusuf was able to lay his hands on.

  “They say that he is a great scholar of the Bible, and for him there is no doubt that this land belongs to the Jews,” Yusuf assented.

  “There’s another commission in Palestine. One of those that the Europeans like so much, to decide what to do with things that are not theirs. The British have set it up in order not to upset President Truman,” Jaled explained to Wädi.

  Mohammed listened to his cousin carefully. Jaled was a mild man like himself. They had fought together in Faisal’s armies when both of them dreamed of an Arab homeland. He knew of his bravery and his loyalty, and over the years he had come to trust his good judgment as well. Although Jaled tried to avoid any arguments with his father, it was no secret that they had differing opinions. Hassan, Mohammed’s uncle, was a strong supporter of Mufti al-Husseini, while his son Jaled had maintained a strategic distance.

  “In any case, in spite of pressure from the Americans, the British are not going to make things easy for the Jewish Agency. It was a setback for the Jews that Winston Churchill lost the elections. The new prime minister, the socialist Clement Attlee, is not moved by the fates of the Jews who survived the camps. Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, is inflexible with old Weizmann,” Yusuf added.

  “Which is further evidence of just how naïve it is to trust anything politicians say. The Labour Party came out in favor of the Jews, but now that they are in charge they have changed their minds and their policy,” Wädi mused.

  “You are right, my son, which is why I always say what my father said before me—we have to follow our conscience so that whatever happens we will not be disappointed. Imagine how many Jews thought that they would be better treated once the Labour Party came into power, and who have now been betrayed,” Mohammed said.

  “It does help our cause, though.” Hassan smiled at what he considered an obvious point.

  “We would be stupid if we thought that the British would do anything more than what was good for them. Let’s not make the same mistake as the Jews have made,” Rami said.

  “My cousin is right. Our future will be what we are capable of making it, but without expecting anything at all from the British. I have fought alongside them and I know how they think, and although lots of their officers feel sympathetic toward us, they obey their government with a single voice and put the good of their country above all personal considerations,” Wädi added.

  They ate and talked until late into the night, enjoying this family reunion to which there had been added a new member, Târeq, Naima’s husband.

  It was difficult for Wädi to accept that his sister had married this man, who listened to them all but made very little contribution to the conversation. He did not know if Târeq was discreet or calculating, but he would have liked to have heard the man venture an opinion.

  Naima seemed t
o be calm, he tried to see a sign of unhappiness in her eyes but there was none. His sister had become a mother, carefully looking after her child. Amr looked like Naima, which filled him with satisfaction.

  “We’re getting left behind,” Rami said with a smile.

  “Yes, you’re right. I look at my sister and it is difficult for me to imagine her as a wife and a mother, but that is what she is.”

  “The same thing happens to me with Noor, she will always be a little girl to me, but my sister will be getting married in a couple of days, and just like yours will soon have a little child in her arms. Our parents are old, and it is up to us now to fight for the future.”

  Rami was right, Wädi thought as he looked at his father. Mohammed’s hair was shot through with grey, and his eyes showed how tired he was with the passing of the years. Age had not beaten him, however. He was still a man who was loyal to his ideals and to his friends, without caring what the consequences of that loyalty might be.

  His father had spoken to him of the breach that was growing ever wider between the Arabs and the Jews.

  “I would like to see Ben and Ezekiel . . . They were our best friends,” Wädi said to Rami.

  “Yes, we are cousins and we lived together for a good part of our childhood, but they are like family as well. I think that Ezekiel will come back to Jerusalem; as for Ben, I don’t know, I think that he’ll be upset when he finds out that Naima has married. He was always in love with her,” Rami replied.

  “You realized?” Wädi asked in surprise.

  “There are some things you have to be blind not to see . . . ,” Rami replied.

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  They fell silent. Neither of them dared to say out loud that before Ben, Marinna and Igor’s son, had fallen in love with Naima, they had often seen Mohammed looking at Marinna and Marinna looking back in the same lovesick way.

  Rami said nothing, because he knew he would have offended Wädi. Wädi was grateful for his cousin’s silence. When he was a child, he had not understood the intensity of these gazes, which so upset Igor, Marinna’s husband, and which froze Salma’s smile dead on her face. But he had never heard his mother say a word of reproach to his father. In fact, he never remembered his parents having argued. Even so, when he had become a man, he understood that the shared looks were nothing more than the echo of a love that could not be.