Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  “Oh, Mama!” Julie let out a wail of sympathy for her mother. She got up from her chair, and moved behind Ivana. She took her head between her hands, then bent over it tenderly and kissed it. As she returned to her place, she said, “It’s enough for me that my father and you were great lovers.”

  Ivana’s lips parted in a smile that she hadn’t displayed for a long time.

  “Forgive me, my friends,” she said. “I’ve upset us all. Perhaps my past has returned to bid me farewell.”

  She sat up straight and went on: “My friends, I invited you here today to say something else, which has nothing to do with my past or with my inheritance.” Then she turned to Byer and addressed him in a business-like tone: “Mr. Byer, we will add some further details to my will together. I will come to your office for this purpose at a time that we will agree on later.”

  Byer nodded, as Ivana calmly continued:

  “I may not live much longer. I want my body to be cremated after my death, and my funeral eulogy to be delivered to the John Lennon song ‘Imagine.’ I would like this song, which does not die as mortals die, to be the last thing my ears hear before the fire consumes them and they are turned to ash. Anyone who wants to deliver a eulogy shouldn’t speak for too long, so as not to have to make up things that aren’t among my attributes. Funeral eulogies, my dears, are usually nothing more than a recalling of the deceased, through advertised and prearranged parties, which the speakers use to wipe out the wrongs they did to the dead person during his or her lifetime. If I knew the exact time of my death, I would ask everyone who was going to mourn me to write down for me on a piece of paper what they were going to say, so that I could revise it before I passed away forever, with no questions afterward and no possibility of introducing amendments. After the end of the cremation formalities, you will scatter a handful of ashes from my body over the River Thames, which will carry them throughout the waters of the ocean. You, my dear Julie, and you, Walid, will be responsible for that.”

  Walid made no comment. Julie’s fingers did it for him. They stretched out to Ivana’s hand lying on the table and came to rest on top of it. Ivana put her other hand on top of Julie’s, and they contented themselves with exchanging glances.

  Ivana continued speaking, giving instructions that another handful of her body’s ashes should be placed in a glass jar thirty centimeters high, the color of the sea in summer, and the shape of her own body in every season: a neck of haughtiness (she raised her head); a chest of pride (she pulled herself upright in her chair, revealing the elegance of her prominent, aristocratic nose); a waist encircled by a lover’s hands (she put her two thumbs and her two forefingers together so that they formed a small circle); the belly of a virgin; and a Bedouin behind. She asked for the container to be taken to her parents’ house in Abbud Square in Old Acre. “Take part of me and all of my spirit to Acre, so that they may apologize to it quarter by quarter. Take my remains and carry them in procession where I was born, just as London will carry me in procession where I die. My friends and loved ones, one day soon I shall die. I want to be buried here and to be buried there.”

  She fell silent for a minute and the whole company shared in her silence, before turning to Julie and Walid. “If it’s too difficult a matter for some reason or other, I should be very happy for you to take half of my remains to Old Jerusalem. I know that Walid has friends there, and you may like to visit them and arrange to deposit the statue with them, or with any Palestinian family who will accept it.”

  Walid and Julie nodded their agreement. With a smile of satisfaction, Ivana added, “I want you to visit the Church of the Resurrection if you visit Jerusalem, which I think you certainly will. Pray for me, for that may purify my soul. And if things go smoothly, hold a small party with the mourners in the house that is to receive my remains. Burn sacred incense, and listen carefully to Fairuz raising the flower of cities to the highest heavens, and let her voice fill the city. I am sure I will hear it as well, because I shall be there in heaven.”

  Everyone understood Ivana’s wishes. Each in their own way, they all showed a deep understanding of what she had said. Mr. Byer was thinking of his legal role in drawing up her will in relation to her wealth and the possessions that she still had; Lynn was preoccupied with finding the best way to remember the details of Ivana’s instructions and to spread them around; Leah was thinking of the loss of a dear friend, which might happen at any moment; Kwaku was awaiting the next scene. And while Walid was thinking how careful his mother-in-law was being in arranging the rituals that would follow her death, Julie was hesitating between Ivana’s two options; she had instinctively understood that her mother was afraid that Acre would curse her in death exactly as it had cursed her in life, so she had opened another window for her soul in Jerusalem, seeking mercy.

  Walid poured out the wine. Before Ivana could raise her glass to signal the end of her instructions with regard to her funeral and the start of the party she had promised, Walid teased her: “Do you know, the Jews believe that anyone whose body is buried in Jerusalem will be the first to be resurrected, and will be at the head of the queue of people waiting at the door to paradise on the Day of Resurrection?”

  “Then allow me the opportunity to reserve myself a place in the queue with a handful of ashes before the heavens are filled with settlers who have forced the Palestinians out in this world and want to appropriate their places in the next.”

  Everyone laughed and exchanged toasts amid the clink of glasses. With one voice they cried, “God bless Ivana!” They wished her a long life, then began attacking the food.

  It didn’t occur to any of them that the gathering that evening would be the last time they met with Ivana. She died just one week later.

  3

  Ivana passed away on a warm summer’s day. Her body was laid out in a wooden coffin, in the wedding gown she had worn at her second wedding reception, held after she and John had returned to London in May 1948 from Palestine. Ivana had kept her dress all those years, just as she had kept all the dimensions of her body, so that she might depart this world as a bride for the third and last time.

  The mourners cast their final glances on Ivana’s face in turn. When they had finished, Julie came forward and contemplated her mother’s face. Ivana’s expression was relaxed; a slight smile remained on her lips, the smile of a child dreaming for the first time, the same smile that had lit up the last picture taken of her in Acre before she had left her parents’ house. Julie closed her eyes on Ivana’s final scene.

  Soon after, the coffin was closed. As it began to move slowly down a mechanical metal conveyor belt, the voice of John Lennon rose up loud and clear. When Julie opened her eyes again, Ivana’s body had disappeared behind thick, coffee-colored curtains.

  In the evening, Walid and Julie went back home, weighed down by their emotions. He went straight into his study. He put his feelings to one side and gave himself up to writing—he had to finish a chapter of a new novel. He had promised his relative Jinin Dahman that he would let her see his progress when they met in Jaffa. Meanwhile, his wife carried on with arranging the first stages of the remainder of her mother’s will.

  Two days after the cremation, Julie collected Ivana’s ashes in two small porcelain jars as she had been instructed. She took one of them to the Ashes Into Glass company in south London, and commissioned another container, also of porcelain, in the shape of a statue with the details that Ivana had specified.

  Some days later, she went back to the same company, at a time already agreed. Peter Hopkins, the company’s skilful designer, gave her the requested porcelain container. On the belly of the statue was inscribed the phrase: “She died here . . . she died there.” Underneath, in smaller letters, was written: “London–Acre, 2012.”

  She raised her head toward Peter to thank him, tears in her eyes. The young man quickly presented her with a bracelet, which he had made himself from a mixture of Ivana’s ashes and colored molten crystal. The two halves of the b
racelet ended with the wings of a butterfly spotted with crimson dots. On the inside of the two wings had been etched the dates of Ivana’s birth and death.

  “This is for you,” said Peter.

  The young man took hold of Julie’s right wrist and slipped the bracelet over it. Her hand trembled between his fingers, but she was calmed by a vague feeling that her mother would be there with her forever.

  Julie went back home, conflicting emotions crowding her face. She put the statue on the make-up mirror stand in the bedroom. She opened the left-hand drawer of the dressing table, and took out a silver chain, hanging from which was a cross as small as her faith, which Ivana had given to her before she had died. She bent over the porcelain statue and twisted the chain several times around its neck, leaving the cross to hang over its breast. Around the statue’s hips she twisted a fine strip of one of Ivana’s colored silk scarves.

  A week after Ivana’s death, Julie took the second porcelain container and went with Walid to Waterloo Bridge in the center of London. A few meters before the middle of the bridge, they stopped, near a spot looking over the Royal National Theatre building. The evening was turning into night, undisturbed by rain, unruffled by wind. The South Bank area below the bridge, and all along the river as far as Westminster Bridge behind them, jostled with comings and goings of every kind, with men and women of different ages and nationalities sharing their happinesses and their griefs on the river’s wide banks. Under the bridge, outside the theatre, a musical group played the Concierto de Aranjuez by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.

  Julie leaned a little over the bridge’s black metal railing. She turned the container upside-down and shook it gently, and Ivana’s ashes scattered down to the water below, as was her wish. As the strains of Mon amour, the second movement of the concerto, rose into the air, Julie and Walid quietly repeated, “Goodbye, Ivana, goodbye.”

  4

  In Julie’s absence, Walid decided to stroll around the streets of Old Acre. He left the Akkotel Hotel and walked along Salah al-Din Street. After about forty meters, he was brought to a halt by a white cloth sign, which had been hung on the corner of the Nazareth Sweets shop on the left side of the street. On it, he read in Arabic, English, and Hebrew: “We will not move out.” He recalled what he had heard from the owner and manager of the hotel just a few minutes before:

  “Now, sir, it’s the French Jews who are attacking us. One group’s coming after another, may God be your protector, and their pockets are stuffed with money. They go all around the houses outside the wall. They offer the owners high prices, far more than you can imagine. A house that’s about to fall down is worth more than one that’s standing. There are people, Mr. Walid, ground down by poverty, who have sold their houses. And there are others who’ve sold up because they’ve had so much trouble from the fundamentalist Jews who’ve occupied houses here and there. Then there are people who don’t want to sell up, and never will. These are the real people of Acre, the people who hold onto their land, and their homes, and their identity, who will cling onto Acre’s stones with their fingernails. These are the people who stood up to the French and the others, and threw them out. We can hear their shouting when we’re in the hotel, coming up to us from the street: ‘We don’t have houses for sale!’ But there are also people who dream of the homeland. What can we say? Okay, let the Arabs who are loaded with money buy them! No one will wake up and understand, Mr. Walid, that the Jews don’t just want our houses, they want to buy them and sell off our history for nothing!”

  The sign reminded him of another, which the Shona district committee had prepared and hung up on a wall in the Old City, in Hebrew and Arabic: ‘My House Is Not For Sale.’ But it also recalled a third sign, which had been hung on the bars of a window he had passed earlier with Julie, on which had been written, again in two languages:—‘House For Sale.’

  Walid continued on his way, his head full of signs challenging other signs, and slogans contradicting each other, while the houses of Old Acre, and the five and a half thousand residents who still occupied them, waited in a queue of victims of creeping Judaization—like the five buildings in the Maaliq quarter that had been restored for the Ayalim Society and had then been taken over by Orthodox Jewish university students.

  The White Market, which no longer retained the color of its name, held little to detain him. There seemed to be nothing there except for an arched roof and the doors of shut-up stalls, so he walked past. He turned left, then branched to the right, and in less than four minutes was inside the Popular Market, standing in front of Hummus Saeed. There were some tourists gathered in front of the restaurant. They had taken over the four steps in front of the entrance, waiting their turn to get a table and blocking a third of the market path, while the boxes of vegetables and fruit belonging to the shop opposite had blocked another third, so that the shoppers and other tourists had only a slim central walkway to compete for.

  He watched some of the waiting customers standing next to the closed blue door in the façade overlooking the market, gazing through the glass at the mouths lapping up their meals. He laughed, recalling that Julie had done just the same thing when they’d come to the restaurant yesterday. She had pressed her nose against the glass curiously during their half-hour wait, until she could almost eat from the plates of those inside. When the hummus they had ordered arrived, dressed in the traditional Palestinian manner with mint, green onions, and olives, they had both torn off a piece of bread and had quickly set to work. Even before swallowing his first whole mouthful, he had exclaimed, with his usual seriousness, “This is real hummus,” while Julie had murmured her admiration: “Mmm!” As the meal progressed, they had opened up a channel on the plate for the oil to move along, like a river overflowing its banks. When they were finished, she had exclaimed, “Hummus Saeed is delicious. It’s worth the wait!”

  Following their lunch, Julie had taken Walid’s arm in her own and they had walked to the al-Jazzar mosque. When they reached the thirteen marble steps that lead up to the entrance, they walked up to the yard. As they reached the water fountain on the right of the courtyard, Julie let go of Walid’s arm and walked quickly toward the mosque, stopping by the door. From her bag she took out a colored silk scarf, with which she covered her head. She took off her shoes and left them outside, then crossed the threshold and went inside barefoot. As Walid approached the door, he saw her turning around, dancing like a Sufi carried by intoxication to a world beyond our own. He had watched her in silence, astonished. He heard her chanting. Where has she got all this from? he’d wondered. When she came out, she took the scarf off her head. Her face was glowing, like a flower whose petals had been opened by the first rays of the sun, and there were teardrops like dew running down her cheeks.

  Now, having retraced their walk, Walid stood above the entrance steps, reflecting on what had happened yesterday without believing it. How had Julie done that? Julie, who hadn’t inherited her parents’ Christianity, and who hadn’t converted to Islam when she’d married him—he hadn’t asked her to—had come out of the mosque like a saint whose faith had soaked her in belief. And when he had asked her about what she had done, she had smiled and replied, “I liked what I did! I prayed in my own way, and I was happy with my prayers.” Walid made no comment.

  He headed toward the Greek Orthodox church and stood for a moment in the square in front of it. He looked at the coffee-colored building for some time, then wandered around the port for a while. Then he headed back to the Akkotel Hotel.

  When Julie came back, Walid was standing near the semicircular reception desk, next to a pillar built—like the hotel itself—from the remains of the old Crusader wall. He had rested his elbow on top of the shining wooden counter directly opposite the hotel entrance, listening to the hotel manager telling him the story of the hotel, which had opened ten years before and had been built on the remains of a building that had been a government headquarters in the Ottoman period and a boys’ school under the British Pale
stine Mandate.

  He raised his head to catch Julie’s eye as she shut the door behind her and came down the three steps leading inside. He saw that her hands, which had been wrapped around the porcelain statue when she had left, were empty. A vague happiness spread inside him, producing an enigmatic smile. Had Fatima brought Julie back, or had she abandoned her in favor of that Swedish delegation she had spoken about? And what about the owners of the house? Had they put the porcelain statue where Ivana had instructed? Or had they just shut the door of her grandfather’s house in her face?

  Julie took his hands in hers and pulled him toward her. “Come on, Walid, come on, darling. I’m dying of hunger. Abu Christo is waiting for us. I’ll fill you in later. Come on, come on!”

  They left the hotel and hurried toward the harbor, which was no more than five minutes away on foot. In the Abu Christo restaurant, which rested against the city wall, protruding from it like a tongue gossiping with the sea, Julie chose a table at the end of a row, next to the water. She greeted the waiter, and the young man, whose skin was tanned like that of an Acre fisherman, greeted her like a tourist.

  When they were seated, Julie gestured at the wall, and said, “You know, Walid, your mother-in-law remembered everything about Acre.”

  Without pausing for him to speak, Julie went on: “Perhaps Ivana didn’t tell you much about Acre or about her past here, perhaps she didn’t tell you anything at all, but as her daughter she told me lots about her memories of the city. She told me a lot about that wall.”

  She sighed, and in her breath could be heard the sound of an ancient regret. “My mother used to say, ‘Whether its men were weak or strong, only the wall protected and defended Acre.’”

  She looked directly into his eyes like someone searching out old secrets, and the words she spoke to him were fragrant with hope: “I’d like that wall to protect our backs, Walid!” Walid made no comment. He sat in silence opposite her, as the sounds of Greek music reverberated, sending their rhythms along the shore.