Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  Poor Suheir was strangled by her husband. He took her four children, and no one asked him any questions. “She betrayed him,” they said, “and a woman who betrays her husband doesn’t deserve to bring up his children.” They didn’t specify how she had betrayed him, or offer any proof for it, and they didn’t relate the children to the mother who had borne them.

  The death of Hala, the virtuous nursery teacher from Nazareth whose killer remained unknown—no one even tried to look for him—woke the whole of Haifa, who marched in her funeral procession, with the children from her school at its head.

  Jinin closed Basim’s file with its terrifying stories. She sat with her eyes closed for a time before turning back to the pages of her novel.

  One morning, later than usual, The Remainer returned to the garden shed. He took two large photos from a side shelf, and placed them on a small table in front of him. He took two delicate square wooden frames from among several other things in the corner to the right and put them beside the photos. Then he took a small square cardboard box from a shelf opposite, opened it, and took out a few yellow metal pins with small round heads. He put the first photograph on the first wooden square and fastened it with four pins, then fastened the second photo on the second wooden square in exactly the same way. He nailed the two pictures to the ends of long thin pieces of wood.

  He now had two placards, which he carried over his shoulder. He shut the door of the shed and went back inside the house. He leaned the two placards against the wall in front of his office door. He pretended not to notice the presence of Husniya, who was absorbed in picking green mulukhiyeh leaves. She was aware of him, though she did not show it. He went into the office, sat down at his desk, and took a small key from his pocket, with which he opened a drawer on his right. He took out a file stuffed full of papers. He smiled. He grimaced. He laughed. He sighed. He let out a short groan of regret. He muttered. He turned the stories over in his head.

  Husniya continued stripping the mulukhiyeh leaves from their brightly colored stalks. She gathered them together in an old brown sieve to her right—she would later wash them and dry them in the sunshine. She threw the slender stalks onto a page from the al-Ittihad newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Israeli Communist party, Rakah. She peeled two onions, and threw the skins on it. She sliced the onions with a knife and chopped them finely. Then she peeled seven garlic cloves and threw the detritus on the paper as well. The newspaper articles, which brought together all of the Arabs and some of the Jews around her, acquired the smell of onions and garlic, to which was added the smell of green coriander, which Husniya chopped with the knife.

  She realized that The Remainer had been gone for a long time. She felt his absence deeply in his silence. “Abu Filastin! Abu Filastin!” she called. “Can’t we hear your voice, man?”

  The Remainer quickly shut the file and pushed it into the drawer. He shut the drawer and put his little key in his pocket. He was on the point of going out, but hesitated. He felt the key weighing down his pocket. He was afraid that he might one day take it with him to his grave. He thought for a moment, and changed his mind; he decided to leave the drawer open, to let its secrets breathe in the hearts of others. He returned the key to the drawer. His pocket now free of a heavy burden, he felt at peace. He got up from his seat and left the room, taking the two placards with him to the sitting room.

  He walked past Husniya, who took in her husband’s frame from bottom to top with suspicious eyes. She bunched her lips in the left corner of her mouth. He felt a desire to leave, and to let her dwell over her suspicions for the whole day.

  Then her lips straightened and let out these words: “As God is my witness, the thing that’s unhinged your mind, and will destroy us all with you, is that Jewish neighbor of ours that you’re so friendly with.”

  Basim tossed and turned in bed, muttering words that made no sense at all. His prattling made Jinin sad. She left The Remainer there, getting ready to go out with the two placards in his hand, pursued by Husniya’s words cursing the Jewess who had unhinged his mind, and thought about Basim, pondering their relationship since they had returned to the country together from Washington.

  4

  I came back into the country as usual on my Israeli passport via Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda, while Basim arrived on his American passport via Amman Airport in Jordan. From there, he took a taxi to al-Malik Hussein Bridge. He spent three hours waiting there, after which he was allowed to enter the West Bank. He took a second taxi to Bethlehem, and spent two days in his parents’ house before going to my parents’ house in Ramla and asking for my hand. That return was the first real event in our troubled marriage, and would remain like a strange clause inserted into its text, since from that time on we’ve been required to travel separately every time we leave the country and to return separately, to be reunited as if we were a couple recovering back from a temporary divorce imposed on us.

  A year after our marriage, Basim started to choke on the details of his daily life, which had turned into a programmed tedium. He had no right to work and no permission to do so, either. He enjoyed no form of health insurance or social security—in fact, he had none of the rights that other residents in the country enjoyed, including those immigrants who enlivened Tel Aviv and other big cities by night, while by day they invigorated the political life of the whole country. They injected into the state economy millions (some said billions) of dollars a year, all collected by the tax authorities.

  But I didn’t just leave him to his troubled thoughts, or to be squeezed by the laws of the land, because he might have decided to just leave. I continued to help him at every step, and to assure him that together we’d be able to overcome the harsh circumstances that we were living through here. All we needed was some determination and a lot of patience, until the Ministry of the Interior became tired of us and left us alone. I reminded Basim several times of the wonderful Emil Habibi. I knew that he loved ‘Abu Salam’ and everything he had said or written, right up to his last line, which he had never had a chance to give a full stop to before he’d died.

  I said to him once: “Let us learn from the mu‘allim (like many people in the country, we called Emil the mu‘allim), who died content to have stayed in Haifa.” On his instructions, his tomb was engraved ‘Staying in Haifa.’ This epitaph became a beacon for those who had emigrated, those who had not been able to bear the burdens of staying here for long, and those who wanted to return here in order to remain.

  Just before we came back last time, I told him of the conversation I had had with Walid Dahman, my writer relative who lived in London, and whose words I much admired, and even quoted. I admired them so much that I didn’t hide the fact that I had been influenced by his style, or deny the fingerprints that Walid had left on writings of mine that I’d asked him to review. “Listen, my darling Basim,” I said, “I won’t hide anything from you. I spoke to Walid frankly on the telephone more than once about our problems, and about the tragedy of Palestinians who hold an Israeli passport and have married outside the country, or even in the West Bank or Gaza. . . .”

  Before I could finish what I was saying, he cut me off, saying, “Jinin, why don’t you just leave the country to them, and escape? One day, the Jews will leave. And if they go, Israel will no longer be Israel. Israel is just a passing phase in the history of Palestine, Jinin.”

  I tried to explain what Walid had said to me, but suddenly he shouted provocatively, “My darling, Walid is living quite happily abroad! If he loves this country so much and is prepared to live as we do, let him honor us by coming to live here with his wife, and let them try it! Come on, forget about Walid. Listen to me, why don’t we go and live in Bethlehem? Or isn’t Bethlehem Palestine?”

  “Go on, then, Basim, go! I won’t be mad with you,” I replied, with a sort of controlled fury. “You can have a contented life with your family in Bethlehem, but I’d lose my whole livelihood and with it everything I’ve gained through the sweat of my brow over the y
ears—what about my healthcare, and all my social security? And on top of all that, I’d lose the perseverance of sixty years of my family’s life, during which they’ve put up with more than most people could bear so as not to emigrate and leave the country to the Jews. And more importantly than all of that, I don’t want to lose you and I don’t want you to lose me!”

  “We’ve gone back to the same old song—you don’t want to lose me and I don’t want to lose you, but one of us will have to give way. We either lose here or we lose there. Okay, why don’t we go back to America? Wouldn’t that be easier for us both? America means a nationality and rights that are broader and fuller than anywhere around here.”

  I didn’t despair. I calmed myself, took a deep breath, and stood up to the first signs of his desire to retreat:

  “No, Basim, no! Now that our homeland has called us back, and we’ve returned, why should we go back to America? I needed New York and you needed Washington when we were university students, but now we don’t need either of them, my darling. Let’s stay in Jaffa. I won’t leave Jaffa again, it’s where I was born. People dream of returning to Jaffa! Go and read what your friend Khaled Issa wrote on Facebook: the Palestinian who’ll turn to stone is the one who has to spend the rest of his life in Sweden. His dream is to sit on the shore in Jaffa and drink a cup of coffee, even just once, slurping it as if he’s actually drinking well-being, as he soaks his feet in the sea. We have Jaffa, its Citadel, its shore, its sea, its sky. We kick against the government, and poke our fingers in its eyes. We have a graveyard—when one of us dies, we bury him there. We have the whole country, Basim, and you want us to desert it and go back to America? Let’s stay here, my darling. Look at the Jews; when one of them dies abroad, they bring his corpse and bury it in a country that he’s never even seen. Let’s stay here, Basim, it’s better for us to live and die in our own country, one we know.”

  Basim listened to what I had to say till the end without comment. He was racked by two contradictory desires, though he calmed down slightly, even if only for a moment, when I again whispered in his ears those most beautiful of words, which I reserved for him alone: “Goodnight, Basim, may your morning be in Jaffa!”

  The love of Jaffa cleansed him. I didn’t realize at that moment that everything he had said was just a pool of emotions that he had been draining for some time. He smiled, expressing his delight in the expression. He used it to wash away his fears and nervousness whenever he needed. He whispered it back to me, still trying to convince himself of the necessity of staying. “Goodnight, my Jinin, may your morning be in Jaffa.”

  From that point on, I made Jaffa live in his dreams, from time to time taking him on a tour through the rest of the country. Despite that, he continued to be afraid of waking one morning and finding Jaffa swallowed up by waves of fundamentalist Jews, who were invading the city in their thousands every year, or finding that it was his exile that greeted him in the morning and accompanied him on his sometimes hesitant tours of the country, while he sought the right to reside in his own country from the strangers who had occupied it.

  5

  After that tense episode, which overshadowed our lives for some time, Basim tried to deal with his situation with greater flexibility. He tried in various ways to kill the enforced unemployment that the Israeli Ministry of the Interior had imposed on him. He occupied himself by preparing economic and sociological reports and studies, which he thought both useful and important, and which also provided us with some additional income. I encouraged him in that; I liked his work, and I thought it might persuade him to stay in the country and give up the idea of emigrating.

  I much admired the study he had completed about family violence and the murder of women in the Lydda, Ramla, and Jaffa areas, even though I was frightened by the stories he discussed, which he had collected from houses that had purged their dishonor through crimes that were even more dishonorable. I’d told him that the Jews called the Jawarish quarter ‘the Arabs’ honor laundry,’ but I just couldn’t believe that a family from Ramla could kill thirteen of its young women in less than ten years. But I came to believe it when it was confirmed by the documents that Basim had assembled, and the testimony of dozens of men accused of these crimes, and even some female victims who had managed to escape the fates of the others. I started to fear for any Palestinian girl who I happened to meet on the road in the company of a boy. I started to dread the poor girl turning into a ‘scandal’ that they would need to cleanse their honor of. With the increase in the number of honor killings, and the inability of Basim’s research to keep pace with the number of victims, I channeled my fears into my novel. I was afraid that my characters might join the nearest national honor laundry.

  My lip pen slipped between my fingers, and a red line appeared in the mirror along my lower lip, twisting onto my left cheek. I wiped it with a tissue.

  I gathered my thoughts and examined my reactions to the honor laundries scattered throughout the country. I finished my make-up, put my make-up implements back in my little handbag, and then slung it over my left shoulder, as usual.

  I put my right hand, which was trembling, on the door handle, but I was pulled up short by a question that had been bothering me since the previous night, and decided to ask it so that it wouldn’t nag me for the whole day.

  I turned toward Basim. My hand was still on the door handle. I was waiting for it to stop shaking so that I could turn the handle. Basim noticed me. He put the screwdriver on the table in front of him, and pushed away the fan that he was busy repairing. But I didn’t have the courage to put the question to him. Instead, to hide my confusion about myself and the characters in my novel, I asked, “Do you want anything from outside, Basim?”

  He gave me a look of surprise, clearly having expected a different question.

  “I want you to find out for me what’s happened in the Ministry of the Interior.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “it’s good you’ve reminded me. I’ve got an appointment with Ayala in two days’ time.”

  I turned the door handle with a hand that was still shaking, opened the door, and went out.

  6

  Jinin arrived at the Misrad Hapnim (Israeli Ministry of the Interior) building in Tel Aviv, located at 125 Menachem Begin Street, at around nine in the morning. It had taken her more than twenty-five minutes, eight minutes more than she had expected, because of the heavy traffic. A number of Africans—most of them Sudanese—who were seeking asylum, or trying to renew work permits, were scattered over the steps of the building, which rose far higher than their hopes of staying in the country. These people usually arrived at the Ministry of the Interior at dawn to secure places for themselves among the waiting crowd outside, whose numbers continued to grow until the Ministry started work on security reviews and renewing residence and work permits. Between sixty and seventy temporary work permits were renewed each day, valid for just three months and capable of being canceled at any time with no reason being given.

  Jinin put her foot on the first step. An officer in his twenties emerged from the building, his kippah clinging to the back of his head with difficulty. He was carrying a sheaf of documents like someone carrying a worry. He turned to one side, and a large section of the people scattered on the steps hurriedly gathered around him. He stopped at the bottom, and fiddled with the documents in his hands. A thin young man emerged from the crowd and stood behind the officer, his right hand clinging to the iron rail behind the space reserved for motorcycles, while he tried desperately to identify his own document among those the officer was flicking through. There was a general sense of expectation, like the announcement of secondary school examination results. Suddenly, the young man turned toward Jinin. He watched her approaching for some seconds, then greeted her with a wave of his free hand. She grinned at him encouragingly. This was Mawalu, a young man from South Sudan who had worked with his wife Tara for a short period as cleaners in the Harmony Cooperative (Ha-Havanah) where Jinin worked. She wished him suc
cess in his mission without speaking to him.

  Jinin continued climbing the few steps in front of the building. She registered some of the reactions of those hovering around the officer and some of the unhappiness of their expectations. She stopped in front of the main entrance, and turned to look back. The officer was gathering up his papers. Some of the Sudanese were leaving happy, while others dragged their despair and frustration with them. They would be forced to endure another humiliating wait to renew their papers. They would wake up at dawn the following day for that purpose. Jinin didn’t see Mawalu, and reckoned he must have renewed his residence permit successfully. If so, she was happy for him.

  Inside, Jinin went up to the second floor. She immediately headed for the office for ‘reunion’ applications. She could hear Ayala’s voice—this was the official to whom her application had been referred—ringing out tensely inside. It seemed to be lacking the element of shouting that had stuck in her memory from the first time she’d gone for a review and had asked to meet her to renew Basim’s residence permit. The memory had never left her on subsequent visits, as the Israeli civil servant began to take an interest in the details of her married life, broadcasting them to the ears of the other officials in the section in her booming voice.

  Suddenly, Ayala emerged from her office and noticed Jinin. She stopped, turned sharply toward her, and shouted, “Att Jin . . . ?”

  “Ken, ani Jinin!” replied Jinin before she could finish the question, sparing her the need to articulate the two last letters of her name, which would raise her blood pressure even further.