Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  Walid and Julie shook hands in turn with the short man with the classic spectacles, then shook hands with his wife in a matter-of-fact way. Julie didn’t like Lynn, and had never understood her relationship with Ivana, beyond the fact that she was Byer’s wife. Lynn was mean, pretentious, and more grasping than a tabloid newspaper.

  Julie hid her shock at Lynn being there and didn’t give anything away to upset Ivana. She calculated that her mother might have done this on purpose to publicize whatever took place that evening to the whole of British society.

  Then Walid moved on, followed by Julie, and shook hands with Leah Portman, Ivana’s friend, the Jewish poetess to whom she had introduced them more than ten years previously. Although they were happy to know her, they were nervous at the presence of Kwaku, who had lived with her for years. They were both wary of developing a close friendship with him, for reasons that had some logic to them. Kwaku was a strange character, though he was nice enough—despite often seeming as obscure as a password, and as puzzling as a riddle, raising unconventional questions. That sometimes made Walid uneasy, though Julie sensed some exaggeration in his attitude and was more inclined to think that Kwaku was just nice. She thought that sitting with him once or twice a year added some enjoyment to the events of their life.

  Kwaku talked about himself in elegant language, in tones of royalty. From time to time, hints of aristocratic attitudes flitted across his face, even when he was confessing to others that he had no roots himself. Walid remembered how, during dinner together at the Suq Moroccan restaurant in Covent Garden, he had told him and Julie a murky story about his parents, the details of which were difficult to grasp. He said that he was the son of a Nigerian father—whose religion was unknown—and an Argentinian Christian mother. His father had divorced his mother when he was five years old, so she had taken him to her family in Buenos Aires. But she hadn’t put up with being single for long; she had married a Mexican immigrant, who took them both with him to New York. His new stepfather didn’t put up with Kwaku’s presence for long, however, but threw him out of the house before he was ten. He had wandered for years before settling down as a worker in a fuel station.

  Kwaku had a habit of giving away a lot of details about himself that he wasn’t obliged to relate, as when he confessed in front of Walid and Julie on another occasion that he had been born with one testicle, saying that this fact hadn’t worried Leah at all, because he didn’t need a second testicle to make love, and as for having children, she didn’t want them at all. At this point, Leah had laughed and praised his one testicle, saying that he was a rare man as a result. She had also confirmed what Kwaku had said about her not wanting children, claiming that if she’d really wanted children she would have had a whole battalion of them.

  According to Kwaku’s revelations on that occasion, he had already had six children with a former wife, though he could no longer remember when he’d married her, or where and when he’d left her, or even his reasons for doing so. Or maybe he preferred to be evasive about a family that in practice no longer belonged to him, and perhaps had never really belonged to him at all.

  But Leah loved Kwaku a lot, with his mysteriousness and his ambiguities whose complications were difficult to unravel. In fact, their first chance meeting had been as ambiguous as his personality. They were standing in a queue in front of a young check-out girl in the Sainsbury’s store in Holborn. She was in front of him, and he stared at her long, soft, blonde hair. His glances took in her shoulders, from which hung arms worthy of a dancer. Suddenly, as she stood there, Leah shuddered, and staggered backward a little. Kwaku instinctively put out his hands to catch her. In a few seconds, she was in a swoon in a pair of strong ebony arms. Her swoon didn’t cause much of a commotion, but a whisper went around those standing nearby. Kwaku asked the girl on the till for some water and a bottle of perfume. The young girl left her place behind the computer, another employee in the store ran to fetch a plastic water bottle, and a lady standing in the queue got out a bottle of perfume. She opened it, shook it a little, and some drops fell into Kwaku’s outstretched hand. He touched the perfume to Leah’s face, and she began to recover from her short fainting spell. She opened her eyes in the man’s arms, to see his face scrutinizing hers, with a smile all over it. When she was completely conscious again, and straightened up, his arms were still around her. Leah turned around as his arms dropped away from her, took a sip of water, and let out a sigh of satisfaction. The customers applauded the moving scene. Leah wished she had stayed longer in Kwaku’s arms, even if it meant fainting for longer. She was embarrassed to be wishing it. She lifted her head to look at him.

  “Thank you very much. You saved me from falling. I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “The main thing is, how are you feeling now?”

  “I’m fine, just a slight headache.”

  “An earthquake of emotions usually leaves behind an aftershock, because of its internal laws,” replied Kwaku.

  Leah smiled, and trembled slightly. As Kwaku took her back into his arms, she apologized to him for her aftershock, and then gently withdrew toward the check-out girl.

  They both made their purchases, put them in plastic bags, and paid. Leah reached the door before him, and paused. She turned around and looked at him over her shoulder. She saw him smile, and his smile awoke her whole life, cleansing it of the suspicious thoughts that had surrounded her since childhood, when her mother Jennifer had impressed upon her: “Don’t mix with strangers, Leah. Keep away from black men, Arabs, and Muslims, my dear.”

  He stretched out his hand, and Leah did not hesitate to take it. She was consciously taking him back, reproducing the moments she had lost when she’d fainted in his arms. At that moment, she felt her wall of fears collapse.

  “My name’s Kwaku. Kwaku Wol.”

  “I’m Leah, Leah Portman. An expressionist poet.”

  “Wow, that’s exciting! I’m a guitar player. We could work together, then. We’d make a fabulous artistic duo.”

  She invited him for a cup of coffee in the Café Rouge near the supermarket. He accepted, and they walked together, carrying their plastic shopping bags to the café like old friends. When he had finished his drink, she took his cup, turned it over, and said, “If there was Arabic coffee in your cup, I could read your fortune in it.”

  Kwaku laughed and asked her, “Have you really learned to do that?”

  “Yes. I was taught it by an old Palestinian woman I met during my visit to Jerusalem two years ago. It’s just an amusing way of uncovering what is in people’s hearts.”

  Since that first meeting, Leah had opened up to Kwaku a long corridor that she strewed with her emotions, which Kwaku walked through contentedly to her heart. Every time they met, the corridor became wider, until it became a way of life that effaced all the hatred that Jennifer had inflicted on Leah’s childhood.

  Leah really surprised herself. She had never imagined, it had never occurred to her, that she would make friends with a British man like Walid, who had sown Palestine in the cells of his body and made them into pools of mint, or that she would live a real love story, the only real one in her life, with a black man like Kwaku, whom she really loved. She never asked him about his origins or his religion, or about his one testicle (which didn’t bother her), or about any of the other details she had heard from him which were the subject of gossip but never quite added up. At least, that is what she several times said in front of Walid and Julie.

  The guests didn’t stay long in the sitting room before the hostess invited everyone to make their way into the dining room. The six guests sat around the rectangular table in the middle of the room, three on each side of the table facing each other, while Ivana, as was her habit, sat at the head of the table, beside the window that looked out over the street, opposite John’s seat, which had remained empty since he died. She gazed at it for some time.

  “Where are the wine glasses, Mother?” asked Julie. Ivana apologized for her unintenti
onal lapse, and asked Julie to fetch seven glasses. Julie excused herself and went off into the kitchen, with Walid following her, pretending to be wanting to help her.

  In the kitchen, she whispered some thoughts to him that she had quickly put together.

  “Mother is planning something big, Walid.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked in a whisper.

  “It seems that it’s more than just selling a house.”

  “Listen, darling, if it’s to do with your mother’s estate and her property, leave her to deal with them as she wishes,” he said forcefully, though still in a whisper.

  “I’ve never thought about that at all, Walid,” she replied, then corrected herself with a measure of seriousness, as she put the seven ribbed glasses on a silver tray. “Oh, I remember . . .”

  She hesitated a little before finishing her sentence, raising the tray between her hands and lifting her eyes toward him: “Mother is thinking of . . .”

  Ivana’s voice interrupted her: “Come on, guys!” she called.

  Julie picked up the tray and went out, leaving the rest of her sentence between her lips. Walid took a bottle of wine from a shelf in the bar and followed her.

  Ivana welcomed her guests formally, and asked them to listen to her without interrupting. The lawyer nodded to show he understood. His wife Lynn smiled at an anticipated feast of words sufficient for gossip to fill all the remaining months of the year. Kwaku lowered his chin onto his clenched palm, watching expectantly as he waited for what Ivana would say. Julie’s green eyes were fixed on her mother’s lips, ready to pick up her words the moment they were formed. Walid contented himself with following the expectation on their faces.

  When she spoke, Ivana surprised everyone. She summoned up her distant past, relating her stories with her eyes fastened on her dead John’s seat. She made them listen to a lot that they knew already, as well as some things that they had no knowledge of. She spoke about her early youth: she had been a teenager when she had fallen in love with the young medical officer John Littlehouse, who had given his daughter Julie his surname, together with the green color of her eyes and other details that anyone who had known him while he was alive could recognize in her features, even after she had turned sixty. She turned to Julie, as if to reassure herself that John’s features were still there on her daughter’s face. As if looking at the dead man in his seat opposite her, she said that he had been a handsome man, whom it was difficult for a girl of her age to resist at that time. Then she sighed, so deeply did she miss him, and started talking about her happy memories in detail. She said that a look from John’s eyes was worth the whole blue sky of Acre, and that she had never for a moment thought about the madness of her relationship with him, in case her reason might make her lose the best love story she had ever lived. She said that from the moment she had fallen in love with John, he had no longer been for her a hated British colonizer or a medical officer, but rather the only young man who had knocked her down with his first smile. The young men of Abbud Square and the Sheikh Abdallah and Fakhura quarters, as well as her colleagues in the Terra Sancta School, would scatter their morning smiles at her feet as she walked along with the coquettishness of a teenager, showing off the power of her beauty over others, never turning to pick any of them up. She was ready to do anything to bind herself to John forever, even if a great war should break out between Great Britain and Abbud Square, engulfing all the Armenians of Acre.

  She said all this and more, but was silent about the details of the real war that had flared up at the time in St. George’s Church between the members of the Ardakian family and the residents of the quarter, which had inflamed their feelings and darkened their spirits. She didn’t tell them about her last moments in Acre, the details of which some local residents still remembered and gossiped about decades later.

  One calm July morning, the officer John Littlehouse arrived in Acre in a military jeep, which took him and a companion to Old Acre, where the driver stopped in Fakhura Street near al-Hadid Tower. John got out and walked toward the Fakhura quarter. He passed quickly through several narrow, winding lanes to the Maaliq quarter, and from there to Abbud Square. He walked to within a very short distance of the fountain in the middle of the square, and put his foot on the marble base.

  Ivana was ready to leave the house of her parents, who had gone out to church in the morning. At that moment, she heard the sound of a heavy shop door being closed. She opened the front door of the house and heard Mitri, the shoe shop owner, shout: “I’d like to know who brought this Englishman here to us! What’s he doing in our quarter?”

  Ivana realized that John was early and had already arrived in the square, and that his arrival must have upset Mitri and the owners of the other shops that were open. She closed the front door and ran down the twenty steps of the staircase. She peeped around the corner of the house and surveyed the neighborhood. She saw Mitri standing in front of his shop with his face in turmoil, like someone emerging from a fight that was still unfinished. But she didn’t see John in the square as she had expected. Instead, she saw little Ata, the son of Widad Asfur, kicking a small stone and chasing it. John had left the square quickly after hearing Mitri’s shouts, sensing the man’s anger. He was hiding in the alley that led to the Sheikh Abdallah quarter. Ivana left the house and walked past Mitri, who quickly displayed his emotions in front of her, and warned her: “Tell the man who brought you up at home, the residents of the Abbud quarter will not marry off their daughters to the British—they’ve been riding the country for thirty years, holding on to our shoulders and kicking their feet. And now they have to ride our women as well?”

  Ivana hurried off without a word and soon spotted John, calling to him in English, “Hurry up, John! Let’s go, darling!”

  The young man grabbed Ivana’s hand, and they left the quarter, hurrying through the quarters of Maaliq and Fakhura to the jeep that was waiting for them, leaving Abbud Square to continue its clash of tongues on its own.

  John and Ivana were married a long way from Acre and its people. They had a small, untraditional party at a British base near Haifa, where the couple spent their wedding night amid the officers and men of the base.

  Then Ivana became pregnant, and in due course was delivered of a beautiful girl who looked like her father and whom they named Julie. In March 1948, Ivana left the country with her two-month-old daughter in her arms. She disappeared from her parents’ lives and from Abbud Square, where she had grown up. She became a mirage that visited the square on occasions to remind them of the scandal, a wind that blew somewhere else whose sound no one heard. People said, “Ivana’s in the custody of the English!” People also asked, “Wasn’t Palestine enough for them? Did they have to take its daughters as well?” As for her father, Manuel, and her mother, Alice . . . they announced that they had disowned their only daughter the day after she left the quarter.

  When 15 May 1948 came, Britain finished winding up its camps, leaving Palestine to Jewish military groups, who declared the establishment of the state of Israel. John went back to Britain, along with the other soldiers of the Empire who were withdrawing from most of the country.

  On 18 May 1948, Acre fell into the hands of Jewish forces. Antranik Ardakian, Manuel’s brother and Ivana’s paternal uncle, was killed in the last battle to defend Acre, along with a number of volunteers armed with old rifles, who gathered in the police station under the command of Ahmad Shukri Manna.

  Manuel and Alice fled to Lebanon by the coast road two days before the city fell. They stayed in a forest near the district of Furn al-Shubbak. The forest was later sold, and in 1952 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Lebanese government leased a piece of land in the region of Jisr al-Basha, where they established a camp, which bore the name of the locality. Manuel and Alice moved to the camp with more than three thousand other Palestinians, a mixture of Orthodox and Catholic Christians who had been forced to flee from Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa.

  Manu
el lived a wretched life in the Jisr al-Basha camp—a life that ended with his death two months before the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1975. He died in a state of grief for himself, for his brother Antranik, and for his daughter, all of whose attempts at a reconciliation he had refused. He didn’t reply to her letters, which continued to reach him for the first five years after their elopement. Ivana implored him at least to accept and recognize his granddaughter, Julie, but she received no reply from him. On 29 June 1976, Alice was killed during a raid by the Lebanese Phalange on the Jisr al-Basha camp, the remaining inhabitants of which were forced to leave.

  Ivana fell silent as she surrendered to an enormous wave of sadness that broke over her face. Her lips reacted with a tremor, and she clasped her hands tensely. Tears flowed from her eyes, as if stored up during the years of her loneliness since John had died. Everyone else—Byer and his wife, Leah and Kwaku, Walid and Julie—remained quiet as they contemplated her sadness, which had spilled over as her story had unfolded. She had never told it in such detail before, though it was still incomplete even now.

  Eventually, Ivana dried her face with her hands, wiping from it the pain of her past, some of which she had recalled herself, and some of which had appeared despite herself. Then she spoke in a voice thick with suffering: “If I’d just said that my parents had died without my seeing them for more than fifty years, you wouldn’t have believed me.”