As Julie spoke, Walid was listening to his own thoughts. He continued to mull over the questions he had brought with him from the Akkotel Hotel that he had not been able to voice until this moment. Finally, he decided to condense them into a single question: “How was your visit to your grandfather’s house?”
“Oh, you won’t believe it.”
“Did everything go okay?”
“Better than I expected.”
As she said it, she put her hand over his on the table, and then told him the story:
“After Fatima had dropped me at the house, I went up the steps, confused and scared. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to be such a coward, especially after I’d refused to take you along with me. The important thing is that when I reached the top of the stairs, I was overcome by anxiety and fear of an unpleasant surprise. The porcelain statue was shaking in my hands. I looked for a bell, but couldn’t find one. The door, which looked as if it hadn’t been painted for decades, was old, and shabby, and full of cracks. I knocked at the door several times and waited. The door opened, and I found myself in front of a beautiful lady, who looked as if she was in her twenties, wearing a long black dress embroidered with silk, in which she looked like a work of art. Don’t laugh at me, Walid, she was a real gem. The important thing is that she smiled at me, and I smiled at her, and then she introduced herself, saying, ‘I’m Samiya!’ Before I could tell her the reason for my visit to the house, she quickly greeted me by name and said, ‘Fatima told me everything.’ Then she invited me in.
“The house was decorated inside in traditional Arab style: some old red sofas of material like carpet, with embroidered cushions scattered over them. The lady, who spoke reasonable English, quickly apologized for the décor, explaining that in just a week she’d be undertaking a renovation of the house and changing all the furniture, as she’d decided to turn it into a small guest house for tourists. It would retain its Oriental flavor, though, which tourists liked, especially Europeans in love with the magic of the East, so she’d be keeping some of the acquisitions that were there before.”
“You mean your grandfather’s furnishings are still in the house?” Walid asked.
“Not only that, the woman surprised me with something that would never have occurred to any of us. I wish Ivana had known it before she died.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Samiya will be naming the hotel after my mother, Walid. Can you believe it?”
“You’re joking!”
“Not at all, she told me so. She’ll be calling it ‘Ivana’s Guest House.’ But listen, can we please eat?”
Walid called the waiter and ordered an assortment of traditional Greek and Syrian starters for both of them, and shrimps grilled with sesame, and garlic sauce. While he talked to the waiter, Julie looked at the sea, like a soul hovering over the the water. She gathered together inside herself the various emotions that her visit to her grandfather’s house had left behind—all of which she was hiding from Walid behind this story that she had invented and was trying to believe in, so as not to shock her husband or collapse in front of him when she related it.
Julie dabbed at her eyes as the waiter went away, but Walid noticed the teardrops on her cheeks. She resumed her story, false happiness disguising her confusion.
“Samiya took my hand and led me to an iron staircase in the middle of the house. She gestured at it, saying, ‘Since your mother has told you the layout, go on up. Turn left, then follow the directions that you know already.’
“At the top of the stairs, I turned left, and my eye fell on an old wooden grandfather clock standing against the wall. My grandfather’s grandfather clock. I couldn’t believe it, I almost collapsed weeping. I lifted the statue a little over my head and placed it on top of the clock. It was as if I were looking at my mother after she had put her make-up on just before leaving the house. That image made me think about my grandfather leaving the house for the last time, hurrying toward the sea with so many other residents of Acre, under threat of bombs, thirst, and hunger, to be either swallowed up by the sea or cast into exile. And while I was wallowing in contemplation, I imagined I was hearing the dawn call to prayer in the city’s mosques, but there was no one left to pray.”
5
At Terminal 3 in Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda, the four of them—Walid, Julie, Jamil, and Luda—paused to reflect on their visit. In a few moments, Walid and Julie would leave behind them their two friends, as well as several others they had met during their ten-day trip, and the cities they had fallen in love with as if they had both been born there. During the short silence, they all exchanged looks, preparing the way for their parting, until Julie broke the silence with a proposal that astonished Walid:
“Walid, darling, what do you think about selling our house in London and coming to live in Acre?”
Walid’s face was colored by a sort of neutral surprise, to which Jamil and Luda added their own astonishment, without any of them breaking their silence. Julie took advantage of the other three’s reactions to her proposal to explain that the time had come to go back to her roots—even though she had actually been born on a British military base rather than in Abbud Square. Somehow, though, she read what was going on in Walid’s head, and quickly added that she would like to add a few new touches to the image she presented to others—the daughter of an Englishman who had been a colonizer in his youth, and of a disgraced Palestinian-Armenian mother, who had fallen in love in a moment of human weakness—that is, to rewrite her past in a way worthy of both of them.
As Julie spoke, she organized her emotions, gathered them together, and arranged them neatly in a hasty small celebration of joy. Her lips twitched with an equivalent optimism. With the movement of an adolescent turned sixty, she slipped her right arm under Walid’s left, and gently pulled it toward her, just as she had done in the days when they were engaged, squeezing his hand.
Walid listened to Julie carefully. He was surprised that she had chosen that precise moment to present her proposal, letting the torrent of desires she had pent up behind a sturdy dam of silence gush out with no constraints at a moment loaded with such tension, just as they were about to leave.
While Walid was trying to disentangle what he had just heard, hemming and hawing as he searched for words to match his wife’s happiness and eagerness to stay in the country, she hastened to refine some of what she had said, and this also surprised him: she said that she wouldn’t be opposed to buying a piece of land in al-Majdal Asqalan, Walid’s birthplace, where they could build a house if that was what he wanted. Her eyes searched his face as she spoke.
He asked her if her proposal and its subsequent correction were serious.
“Of course, darling, of course!” she replied confidently.
What was it that had made that ambition explode in Julie, a woman with an English father and Armenian mother, born in Palestine? What had made her suddenly think of returning to live in a country she didn’t know, and which it had never occurred to Walid himself to return to permanently—even now that going back and living there had become somewhat possible—after the exile, banishment, and refugee camps that had dented his Palestinian identity since childhood? Or was it Julie’s visit to her grandfather’s house, which her mother had run away from some seventy years before? Had Ivana’s will changed her daughter? Or perhaps Acre itself had affected Julie—Ivana’s Acre, which she had abandoned in a moment of emotional rashness. Acre, with its special magic and its history, which was written in the streets, and which walked in the neighborhood alleys of its quarters and its ancient squares—its history etched in stone, which the sea thundered against day and night. Acre, with its churches, its Franciscan monastery, its mosques, its harbor, its ancient market, with Zahir al-Omar, Jazzar Ahmad Pasha, and Napoleon scorned and humiliated under its walls, Sitt Maarif its popular guide, Hummus Saeed, and the Pasha’s baths . . . .
Thinking of the baths made him stop and sigh. Oh, the baths of the Pasha
, what have they done to Julie?
Walid recalled that visit that had taken place on their first day in Acre. Julie had taken off her clothes in the ‘summer room,’ piling them up on the ground and looking at her body as she used to do when she was a teenager. Walid had watched her as she wrapped a cotton towel around her body under her armpits. She had put on wooden slippers, and walked pursued by their crunching, as if she was Ghawar al-Toshi, whom she’d never seen or gotten to know. Their echoing crunch had reverberated around the high-ceilinged room. Slipping them off, she had spread herself out face down on the wet tiles in the ‘hot room’ and had disappeared in the steam, murmuring, “Massage my whole body for me, Walid.” He hadn’t heard her because he was immersed in watching a video showing illustrated re-enacted scenes of what the baths and their rituals had been like until the nakba. It was accompanied by a commentary that talked about the periods before and after independence. In time, Julie had woken from her lovely, short-lived daydream and had started to look at the explanatory drawings that the authorities had put on light curtains to explain some facets of old-style life inside the baths. They were by the Israeli artist Tanya Slonsky.
This fact had made Walid recall Fatima al-Nasrawi’s words: “We give them accurate information free of charge, it’s better than them buying lies from the Jews for a price!”
Walid continued to turn ideas over in his head: Had Acre persuaded Julie to reclaim the half of her that had been lost as she grew up in exile? Had it convinced her to retrieve the Palestine she had inherited from her mother as pictures of a lost past? After all, they would soon be leaving the country as they had come to it, as British people who had completed a tour of Israel.
Julie hadn’t been satisfied with their visit, Walid realized. She hadn’t been satisfied with her return to the house of her grandfather. The handful of sand that Walid had scooped up with his hands on the shore two days before hadn’t been enough for her, either. He had put it in a little nylon bag and given it to her, whispering, “The smell of the country!” She had taken it with the same reverence with which she had carried half of Ivana’s ashes from London to their final resting place, but it hadn’t been enough. Presumably she also hadn’t been satisfied with the small piece of limestone she’d picked up from under a rock they’d sat on together near the Abu Christo restaurant after they’d eaten. Julie had been happy with the little piece of stone at the time; she had admired it and put it in her handbag, as the owners of several small boats moored in the harbor had watched the pair of them with typical local Israeli insouciance.
Julie had seemed sated by these little pieces of Acre, but now it appeared that she wanted more.
6
Walid was confused by Julie’s succession of emotions. He was several times brought to a standstill by the changes in his wife: a happiness that she had not displayed through the years of their long marriage; an increasing tendency to speak Arabic and use a varied vocabulary, having previously stuck to simple phrases; constantly touching the walls of houses, as well as those of public places and archaeological remains, which they visited like people visiting holy places. Julie was savoring the smells of anything in the country that was ancient, and filling her nostrils with it. Walid recalled how she had sniffed the walls of Acre the first morning they had gone from the Akkotel Hotel to the port via the eastern gate, and how she had stopped him in Jaffa to savor the salt of the sea. When they walked in the city, Julie revealed a surprising desire to smoke a joint, joking that it was like a pregnancy craving. She asked Walid to arrange for her to get high, to satisfy this postmenopausal child that would never be. They had laughed together. When he said to her, with a small touch of flirtatiousness that they implicitly both conspired in, that what she was looking for would require an adventure that might land both of them in jail, she replied, “If a piece of hashish would land us in jail, half the Arab inhabitants of Jaffa would be in prison. I’ve heard that hashish is all over the place here!”
Looking back, Walid realized that he had missed what was happening. For example, he had taken no notice of Julie’s behavior on the second day of their visit, taking a stroll in the town and getting to know a lot of its details, when with Jamil and Luda they had met Roma al-Arusi in the only house remaining in the Dahman quarter of al-Majdal Asqalan.
But he recalled it now.
7
Jamil stopped his silver Subaru behind the remains of the old vegetable market in al-Majdal Asqalan. Once out of the car, the four of us—myself, Julie, Jamil, and Luda—dispersed in different directions. For myself, I started to search for a house with the flavor of the past, my parents’ house that had seen and celebrated my birth—was it here, or there, or perhaps there? With tears in my eyes, I searched for my early childhood among the rubble of the city, but didn’t find it. I cried for myself and my childhood, and for some time my emotions took over.
Finally, I took my cellphone out of my pocket and called my mother, tears still in my voice. I spoke to her with words washed in tears.
“Hello!”
“Greetings. Who’s that speaking? You sound like Walid. Walid? Greetings, a thousand thanks to God for your safety, my dear! Where are you?”
“How are you? I’m in al-Majdal.”
“Ah! Really? When did you get there? That means God is pleased with you, my dear. By God, going to al-Majdal is like a pilgrimage to Mecca ten times over! Where in al-Majdal, and what are you doing?”
“In the square in front of the mosque, beside the old market.”
“Blessings on Muhammad, the best of messengers and prophets! If you are my son, Walid, and I am your mother, kiss the walls of the mosque for me, and if you don’t find a wall, look for a stone—look for a stone and kiss that. And don’t forget to go into the mosque if some of it still exists, and pray two rak‘as. I know you don’t pray. You don’t want to pray, that’s okay for you, you’re free not to, it’s between you and your Lord, only pray for your mother, it’ll bring you a reward. One prayer in Palestine is worth a thousand at home, even in the camp mosque. What do you think?”
“Mother, do you remember where you lived before you emigrated? Do you remember our house?”
“How on earth could I forget it? Heaven forbid that I should forget the house I was married and conceived you in. Curse the Jews who took it away from us!”
“And where is our house?”
“If you’re standing in front of the mosque, as you say you are, and are facing it, then our house will be straight behind you. Up, up a bit, in Ras al-Talaa. Turn around, turn behind you, you’ll see it. God is your helper, the first house in Ras al-Talaa.”
Behind me was some ground stripped of its features by American Caterpillar trucks. A few garbage bins had been placed at the edge near the old market. What my mother had described to me was now just barren land, and it was difficult to be sure that houses had ever stood on it.
I went back to looking bitterly at the remains of the great mosque built by the Mamluk emir Sayf al-Din Sallar in 1300. At its left corner, a minaret stood like an old lighthouse deserted by the ships; its domes looked like pale knitted skullcaps, their wool worn away with time. I crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, and stood in front of an entrance, above which was a sign: Khan Asqalan Museum. On either side of it were some small shops and a restaurant, a mis‘adah, in front of which was an area of thick green cloth awnings and some chairs. Oh my God! How could I pray two rak‘as and dedicate them to my mother in a mosque that had turned into a museum and a bar?
Deep inside me, I gave a scream that no one else could hear, and turned around to wipe the whole scene away. My gaze wandered over a long street, which ended in some houses that had once had two stories; their lower parts still bore the traces of what had once been on top of them. To the left of the street, in the background, were three palm trees. Long ago, my aunt had stood there, waiting for me beside them, picking me up, taking my little hand in her own, and picking some dates.
The house had had a
n upper story, a second floor to which my mother took me once, carrying me on her shoulders when I was still small enough for her to do so. She took me up some marble stairs, which led into a tiled open area in front of two rooms. My head brushed against clusters of red dates. My aunt wasn’t here. My aunt was there. My aunt wasn’t there. My aunt had died in Khan Younis, in a house on the edge of a refugee camp. But I had found no trace of her when I’d visited the ancient graves in the town some years before; not even a letter of her name remained on the tombstones.
“There’s a blue sign over there!” Luda shouted in broken Arabic. “Come on, poshli, let’s go and see what’s written on it.”
Luda’s call brought us all together in front of a house, the front of which resembled a tatty shoe. Luda stood looking at the sign as if she were looking at herself in an old dull mirror whose mercury had peeled off. She tried to translate for us the Hebrew written on it, but her Arabic deserted her. When she tried in English, Jamil wouldn’t let her continue. He teasingly asked her to keep her tongue for some other speech. She did, apologizing in Arabic, English, and Russian.
Then Jamil went up to the sign, and we listened as he conveyed its meaning to us in his fluent Arabic:
Arusi’s House
This house is the last major private house to be found in the Dahman quarter, which was named after a family that lived there. The house is an example of distinctive Arab houses. It was constructed with a square called a hawsh in the middle of it, which is a basic feature of Arab houses. It is usually surrounded by bedrooms, and most of the daily household chores are conducted there. The distinctive feature of this house is that it still preserves the simple, traditional methods that the Arab residents relied on in their lives.
Fractured Destinies Page 4
