Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come for a review!”

  “I gave you a phone number to call. Did you?”

  “Slikha, sorry, madam, but the number was out of order.”

  Ayala made no comment but hurried away into the office opposite, leaving Jinin to fume with anger. A short time later, she came out again with a quiet smile on her face. She told Jinin to come into her office.

  “You know that the new amendments to the ‘reunion’ laws don’t allow us to grant your husband the right to work, but I’ll renew his residence permit and try my best to secure an exemption so that he can work. Come back in three months.”

  Jinin could find nothing to say. She interpreted Ayala’s promise as a sort of verbal contract, although she had no confidence in it.

  She left the building.

  The three months that Jinin had called ‘Ayala’s promise’ went by, following which she returned to the Ministry of the Interior. She waited in front of the same office door with the same tension and anxiety as the last time, as the same echo of Ayala’s shouting rang out, with disaster expected at any moment. She didn’t dare knock on the door or go in to confront the woman she regularly described to Basim as having a face like the Israeli laws on the Occupied Territories. She temporarily suspended her hatred for Ayala, and resolved to pull herself together and be brave. She knocked on the door, opened it, and went in. Ayala greeted her with an unexpected smile, and gestured to her to sit down, before surprising her with an unexpected verbal assault to compensate:

  “Yes, what’s the problem? Do you have an appointment?”

  “I came to arrange an appointment.”

  “What for, dear?”

  As if she doesn’t know! Jinin thought. “To renew the ‘reunion’ application, of course. My husband’s permit is about to expire.”

  With a controlled irritation, Ayala took several papers from a file on her desk, proceeded to help Jinin to fill in the boxes, then returned them to the file.

  “Come back with your husband in two weeks’ time, with documents to confirm your place of residence,” she said.

  Two weeks later, Jinin went back to the Ministry of the Interior, with Basim this time, and the requested documents and papers: water and electricity bills, everything to prove that she actually lived in Jaffa. Ayala received them with uncharacteristic kindness. She didn’t look at the papers and didn’t ask Basim any questions. She spared Jinin the trouble of translating her questions for him, or translating his replies, and she spared him the suffering he would endure if he had to answer her questions himself in Hebrew. He would have spat out his words like someone expelling their last breath.

  Jinin thought kindly of Ayala that day. In fact, she cursed herself for thinking badly of Ayala, and started to make excuses for her previous behavior. Jinin’s visits to Ayala’s office became more frequent, and the pair became like good, rational fellow citizens in a rational state that didn’t discriminate between its citizens.

  Then came a particularly fateful visit. Ayala confirmed Jinin’s application for an extension of Basim’s residence permit without hesitation. Jinin decided to call Basim as soon as she left Ayala’s office to tell him the news. She took advantage of the sudden state of happiness that she found herself in, and the fleeting smile on Ayala’s lips, to ask her, as she was on the point of leaving, “Can my husband now work legally?”

  Ayala’s expression changed, her smile disappearing in a sudden stroke of anger. She trembled like someone possessed by a blue ifreet (though those little devils were said to avoid possessing people in the country because it was holy). Ayala turned into a bundle of emotions sitting on a chair in an office. She screamed at Jinin, “Hamuda, ha-ishur ha-zeh hu lo ishur ‘avoda!,” “It’s not a work permit, sweetie!”

  Her shouting caught the ears of everyone in the office. Ayala threw the residence permit on the desk. Jinin took it and ran out, her ears still ringing with the shout that made a mockery of every yell she had previously heard, making them seem like whispered conversations between lovers.

  On the way home, she recalled the exasperated roar that Basim let out when the insolence of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior officials became too much to bear. Now she did the same thing, repeating what he had said: “Really, these people are the sons of sixty-six prostitutes!”

  And she continued on her way, still cursing and swearing.

  7

  Jinin sat in the Harmony Cooperative snack bar during the midday break, eating a fateera she had brought with her. She was beset by fears that the Interior Ministry would continue to refuse Basim permission to work. Several times she had told Basim that her successful work in the Habna Institute, together with his studies and researches, would help them to counter the pressure of the Israeli authorities and the attempts of the Ministry of the Interior to drive them to despair and make him leave the country voluntarily.

  It’ll never happen, that’ll never happen! she said to herself. She would be forced to leave with Basim if that happened, to preserve their marriage, and she would have to give up everything she had achieved since their return to the country. She would have to leave her job in the Institute that worked to encourage a common citizenship between the residents of the country, guaranteeing a psychological balance in confronting the current discrimination against the Arabs. The job helped her, with a large dose of imagination, to confront the complexities of life in the country. It guaranteed a reasonable income for her and Basim, which was enough for them to live comfortably.

  She cried as she imagined herself separated from Basim or the house that had united them as though Palestine had reunited its ruptured geography. Their house resembled a splendid old royal yacht, decorated with waves and fishermen, boats, and the color of the dawn, all washed by the smells of the sea. It was still during their summer siestas, and lively in the evening breeze. Like them, it looked out over the remains of the day. It watched the lights of the ships drawing nearer, like pearls on a necklace against the sleeping bosom of the night. It confirmed to them the fact of their continuing presence in the country, since it was anchored in their local memories like the Great Mosque of Jaffa, guarding their past and their present.

  For a few moments, she reflected on everything she had considered: the possibility of deserting the woman of Jaffa inside her, of going back and renewing her American exile, turning into a refugee. She was frightened, and muttered to herself, “I won’t leave. If Basim decides to leave, let him travel alone. I won’t leave what’s mine, and what I’ve built, just to give it all up for immigrants from other countries to inherit from me while I’m still alive. I’ll argue with Basim if he argues with me. I’ll leave him if he leaves me. I’ll divorce him if he divorces me.”

  A colleague of hers who was sitting at a neighboring table in the canteen laughed. Jinin noticed her putting her hand over her mouth so that no one else would notice, using her hand to wipe away any remaining emotion on her lips.

  Jinin managed to calm herself down as she convinced herself that Basim wouldn’t actually desert her. He wouldn’t leave her and flee. He wouldn’t divorce a country that he had returned to in order to settle there. Basim was a good man. Stubborn, like the hero of her novel, The Remainer, but a good man.

  Both of them were like the Jaffa sea, stormy when touched by a strange wind, then suddenly calm again. But she thought it unlikely that Basim would calm down this time and take a rational position.

  “Jinin, my life has become a computer game,” he had said to her once, at the end of an argument between them. “Winning’s no different from losing. I’m living in our country as if I were a virtual citizen. I’m there in the official registers of the Ministry of the Interior and in police stations, filed under ‘General Security,’ maybe with Mossad, God knows. But I’m not represented in the legal institutions, or the health and social security programs. Even you, Jinin, are present though absent, like every Palestinian in the country, but I’m an absent abs
entee, my darling. I’m an invitation to punish the self. A bad advert for them to distribute free to every Palestinian who’s thinking of returning home as I did. I’m like a website that can be wiped from the face of the earth with the jab of a single finger.”

  She had been hurt, and said nothing, exuding a sadness tinged with regret. Basim had taken advantage of her silence and began to deal with his personal regret under the cover of wishes: “Jinin, I wish our relationship had remained as it started off on the internet, when we first met one another. A virtual happiness that turned into reality. But today that reality has started to unravel. I’m afraid a day may come when I just disappear into the ether.”

  In the end, Basim had gathered his thoughts and had let out a sigh that summed up the pain of his whole life: “Aaaah, Jinin, aaaah, if only we could have carried on living a virtual life, like the first day we went on Messenger!”

  Now, in the snack bar, Jinin took up her handbag. She smiled at the young employee who had sniggered at her, who returned the gesture lazily over the rim of the cup of juice that she was drinking.

  Then Jinin left.

  8

  Jinin had dreamed of designing websites for companies and individuals. Her dream grew as she studied multimedia, and came to fulfilment when she graduated, specializing in the field of computing, website content management, and electronic journal editing. She designed a personal website, which she called jininmultimedia.com, to attract people who wanted to take advantage of the services she was offering.

  A long period elapsed before Jinin received anything useful that didn’t revolve around the senders’ wish to amuse themselves. One evening, her attention was caught by a message in which the sender asked her, in simple but elegant phrases, to design a website for him, for a company providing services in the field of economics, accounting, and business.

  Jinin sent a brief reply, asking him to supply her with further information, and details about the company and the terms he wanted to highlight for search optimization purposes. She also asked him if he had a company logo or wanted one designed.

  The information she had requested arrived in instalments, much of it vague and in need of further detail. At first, she was irritated, then suspicious. But soon she was overtaken by a normal sort of curiosity, which led her to think that the person involved was someone who wanted to correspond with her rather than wanting her to design a website for him and his business (if indeed he had a business at all). She was aware that the elegance she observed in the wording of his messages could well disguise a personality with ill intentions. She found comfort in her suspicions, and enjoyed her curiosity. Both gave her a pleasurable feeling of suspense, together with a sense of expectation.

  The exchange of emails between her and the unknown person, who used the name Basim, continued until they acquired a rhythm like a heartbeat, with set times that they awaited separately like lovers waiting at street corners, in cafés, clubs, gardens, and train stations. At the end of each virtual encounter, each of them would leave something of themselves for the other, which the other could call to mind between encounters.

  Their relationship began to acquire an emotional flavor. They began to avoid the work for which her website had been designed, gradually exposing their inner feelings. Night after night, they would check their personal accounts, stripping off their inhibitions piece by piece, like clothes, and throwing them on the bed of their desires. One night, they shed their inhibitions completely and slept together on the Messenger ‘chatter’ page. They slept with a deep happiness on a bed of passion, covering themselves in words, and waking in the morning to a joy that blessed them as a ‘virtual couple.’

  On the first morning of their virtual marriage, Jinin sent Basim an original present: the address of a website that she had set up, called Honeymoon Paradise. She gave it a slogan, ‘Love starts virtually,’ and wrote on it the details of their relationship. In one corner, she subtitled it ‘Tales of a virtual romance.’ And she laid down conditions for subscribing to, and participating in, the site.

  Basim replied to Jinin by inviting her to an urgent meeting in Washington, which ended in an agreement to return to the country together, in the first instance for each of them to visit their own relatives—he to Bethlehem in the West Bank, and she to Ramla. Afterward, Basim went to Ramla and asked Jinin’s parents for her hand in marriage. The moment they signed their contract, in an emotional display of warmth, Jinin realized that Basim was a young man who had surpassed all the white knights that had passed through her dreams. She had spent months drawing pictures of him from her imagination, but the reality of him was more beautiful than all her imagined pictures combined.

  In the end, Jinin never actually designed the website that Basim had asked for. He no longer reminded her about it, and perhaps he no longer even remembered it. But she designed for both of them a timeline for living in Jaffa, beginning with a marriage that experienced minor family problems, and ending with them in a small yacht anchored on the shore of the city, at the foot of the Citadel.

  9

  After some years of marriage, supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, and with his residency extended from time to time by Ayala, Basim changed. He was no longer the virtual man Jinin had gotten to know through the internet. And he was no longer the real man she had married.

  He talked all the time about the impossibility of staying in the country. He started to recall and feel nostalgic for his places of exile—as if he had never tired of America, from which his romance with Jinin had freed him and brought him back home. Sometimes Jinin screamed within herself: God Almighty, what is this fate? My husband’s gone stubborn as a mule again! Don’t I have enough of it with the stubbornness of the hero of my novel and the rest of my family?

  One evening, she teased him affectionately. They were sitting at the table for a supper of green salad with mint, and chicken breasts roasted in the oven with sliced potatoes and onions. They were eating by the window, looking out over a Jaffa evening that could not take sides with either of them.

  “You seem stubborn, Bassuma, my darling. Isn’t the stubbornness and obstinacy of The Remainer enough for me?”

  He stopped cutting his chicken breast, and rested his knife and fork on the sides of his plate. Then he spoke with feeling:

  “It’s not a question of obstinacy, Jinin. Tomorrow you’ll finish your novel, and The Remainer will become just a character like any other in a novel. You’ll be free of his obstinacy and pigheadedness, while I’ll still be as I am, suspended between heaven and earth. I’m not stubborn or pigheaded. The position we’ve gotten into has left me without an ounce of sense. Tell me what I should do!”

  He was silent for a moment. She made no comment, but waited for him to go on, which he soon did.

  “Do you want me to sell hummus and falafel? Who’ll give me a permit? And if we got one, could I compete with Abu Shakir in Jerusalem, or Abu Hasan? Or Saeed al-Akkawi? Or even Abu Khalil in Lydda? Do you want me to sweep the streets of Jaffa so I can stay in the country? But even working as a sweeper is forbidden to me! Even if the whole of Jaffa was buried under a mountain of trash, and they couldn’t find anyone to clean it up, they’d never employ me. They employ Ethiopian and Eritrean women, and women from Darfur, to clean the streets. There’s no medical provision, there’s no treatment as there is for the rest of humanity. If I get sick, I have to bear my illness till I die. It’s forbidden to travel from the airport. Whenever I want to travel abroad, I have to cross the West Bank, cross the bridge, which is steeped in people’s blood, and travel from Amman. Even driving a car is forbidden to me. Your car that’s parked outside—if you’re sick and can’t drive, we have to call a taxi to take you to the doctor, or look for one of your brothers to take you. The only thing the authorities in this country haven’t said to me is that it’s forbidden to sleep with Jinin, or if you sleep with her it’s forbidden to have children. Should I say to them, ‘Beseder, okay!’? Should I say to every Israeli—gvarim ve-
nashim, man or woman alike—‘Fine, okay, thanks!’?”

  “I have many years ahead of me, Jinin,” Basim went on, letting out a sad laugh. “You, my darling, will go on working, go on writing, while I pile up loathing, unemployment, and boredom, making of them a heap of pickles which I’ll stuff into jars.”

  She chuckled, and tried to stir Basim from his dejected animation. “So what, my darling?” she said. “It’ll give you the best headline in the best newspaper in Arabic and Hebrew: ‘Palestinian with Masters in economics and accountancy sells pickles and a pile of unemployment and laziness.’”

  “Very good, and add underneath it in smaller letters: ‘Housework’!”

  Basim and Jinin’s quarrels grew more intense as they abandoned their normal pattern: they turned into verbal battles leading them into dangerous territory, as when Basim hinted to her of his desire for a civilized separation, since it would enable him to go back on his own to Washington or New York, and would preserve Jinin’s right to choose between a suspended divorce or joining him. The hint turned into a threat, stirring a nervousness in Jinin that was steeped in unhappiness and obstinacy. Jinin herself said that stubbornness was a gene inherited from Grandfather Dahman, her family ancestor, and that it was something she in turn had passed on to the hero of her novel, The Remainer; Basim’s stubbornness was different.

  Recently, Basim had once again been recalling his American exile, flirting with it and pining for it. Jinin responded impetuously to the feelings he expressed by challenging him.

  “Do you really want that, my darling? Get up and go, then, and leave me alone!”

  Then she felt sorry for him, and made up to him in an original way; she didn’t want to try to make it up with him as she had done before. So she knelt in front of him to beg forgiveness, and presented her apology to him clothed in Japanese ritual. She turned herself into a geisha for him, like those in Tokyo.