She tried to amuse him with a story or two from her novel about Aviva, The Remainer’s Jewish neighbor. Jinin told her husband some amusing stories and others that were less amusing, as well as jokes that didn’t make one laugh. Basim looked at her, as he listened to his heart beating louder than the rhythm of the jokes. “Once it occurred to Aviva not to receive anyone, or let anyone visit her, not even her children. She didn’t want to see Ilan or Guy, let alone Yuri. She wrote on a piece of paper: ‘Aviva lo rotsa li-ra’ot et ehad ha-yom,’ ‘Aviva doesn’t want to see anyone today.’ But instead of hanging it on her front door, she hung it on The Remainer’s door. Her visitors that day didn’t stop banging on her front door. When The Remainer came back from work in the afternoon and saw the piece of paper and read it, he tore it off the door, ripped it up, and threw it away.” Basim didn’t laugh. Jinin went on, paying no attention to his reaction. “Do you know, Basim, that The Remainer once went to check on Aviva before he went home? He knocked on her door, and she answered from inside, telling him that she wasn’t there: ‘Aviva lo ba-bayit.’”
Basim had a grimace on his face like that on the face of a peasant whose land had not seen rain in the sowing season, a frown of misery. His face turned into furrows like those of land stricken with drought. Jinin took refuge in a deep silence, and they contented themselves with a temporary annoyance that was like a suspension of everyday relations between them. They both began to let their eyes wander over the bright stone walls that the house had been built from, counting the number of stones, before being stopped by a moment of love held in reserve, which returned them to the warmth of their realities.
Finally, a night came when Jinin realized that she had started to hate herself.
10
Jinin didn’t sleep that night. The sea matched her wakefulness, the waves tossing noisily beyond the window like heavy breathing while she lay on the bed. Basim had gone to bed before her, rolling himself up in an envelope of despair and sleeping. She had stretched out beside him, watching him breathe.
Earlier, Basim had asked her to move to Bethlehem with him. “Bethlehem is worth the whole world,” he had said. “Come with me. My family, my sisters, and anyone left from my parents’ days . . . they’re all in Bethlehem or nearby. Soon we’ll have a state, we’ll have children there, and bring them up as proper Palestinians, not half and half . . . .”
Jinin had told him to understand that she wouldn’t leave Jaffa and that it wouldn’t let her leave. She’d reminded him of what had happened to her father when he’d left Jaffa. Basim knew the story well; he knew that what had drawn her father to emigrate was the stubbornness of others. Mahmoud Dahman, who hadn’t yet turned into The Remainer, hadn’t been able to put up with his exile for any more than two months and had come back. He’d returned to marry the woman who would become Jinin’s mother. In Ramla, where he was forced to move and live, he started a branch of the Dahman family after the Israeli bulldozers had wiped out all that remained of the family in al-Majdal Asqalan. He had returned to become The Remainer in both fact and her novel.
Jinin had reminded Basim that her mother had had her in Jaffa, although he already knew it (he always laughed whenever she recalled her father’s comments on her mother: “Your mother used to pop girls and boys out one after the other, you all came out from between her legs like rabbits!” “Is it true,” Basim would ask her, “that when God gave your parents a new child, your father would exclaim, ‘One in the eye of the Jews,’ and carry on shouting until the neighbors looked out from their doors and windows and threatened him with the police?” And Jinin would laugh and reply, “True!” And her father would reply to anyone who asked him, “We produced a Palestinian in exchange for every one who emigrated and didn’t return!”).
“Bethlehem is a paradise,” he had told her.
“I’m not budging from here,” she had told him. “Jaffa belongs to me. It’s my Jaffa, just as Bethlehem is your Bethlehem. Just as you can’t bear Jaffa, I can’t stand it there, either. It’s like you came back here in a different way from me. I came back committed. Stay beside me and forget any idea of leaving. If you stay with me, nothing will drive us apart, not Ayala and not the government that’s employed her and others to make life hard for us and the other Palestinians who’ve stayed in the country!”
She’d said all that to him in a state of shock.
When they’d returned from the US, she’d been certain that Basim really wanted to come back home. Where had this certainty come from? She didn’t know, but she’d been sure that he wanted to live by her side. She’d been ready to support him, to dig together with their nails to bring Palestine out to the surface of their lives. They would seek shade in the shadow of a Palestinian city. They would give it an injection of new life so that it wouldn’t be infected by the Jewish immigrants, old and new, who were changing its appearance before their eyes. Jinin had wanted them to be two palm trees on the shores of Jaffa, dropping fresh dates; two stones in its ancient Citadel, to compensate for what had been destroyed; two waves that would never tire of racing toward its shores. Fish would dance for them, and the fishermen would trill for them.
Basim was never really a refugee, Jinin thought. The idea shook her certainties. Basim was from over there, from Bethlehem, which was content to look at Jaffa from a distance. It said quite openly that it was content for them to be neighbors. Two neighbors living side by side, divided only by a nine-meter wall that fed on their land here and their land there. Sucking their waters dry and giving the settlers perfect security. Dividing what was left of the land. Bethlehem, like Ramallah, was not ashamed to repeat, “What’s past is dead and gone; we are the children of today!”
Basim wasn’t a refugee, and Jinin hadn’t reckoned on his returning there. She didn’t understand things the same way that he did. She didn’t feel as he did—returning to the country that seven million Palestinians dreamed of going back to didn’t concern him as it concerned others.
“We’ll go back to Jaffa, to live and die there,” she had decided for herself and for him. “Come with me to Bethlehem, for God’s sake, come!” he had implored her, and had used every means at his disposal to persuade her.
Now she cried for him and for herself. For their love, which had opened a path to return to the homeland, only to separate them when they’d arrived. My God, it’s ridiculous that exile should bring us together and the homeland should drive us apart! She cried alone, her tears wetting the sheets. She cried because Basim was no longer hers. Because she soon wouldn’t need a bed big enough for two. Basim was no longer on Jaffa’s side—Jaffa, which they had loved together, intertwining their lives with its features for years. She realized that this had been a dry run for Basim, a rehearsal of his return to Bethlehem, the capital of his dreams! “Come with me to Bethlehem, our house is there, and my family, and our land. . . .”
He had evidently forgotten his last visit to his birthplace, when he’d come back to her angry, cursing at his parents and all his family, telling her that they’d argued among themselves even about distributing shares in their disagreements. He’d forgotten what his brother Mahmoud had said—Mahmoud, who hadn’t called him even once since he’d returned to the country; Mahmoud, who considered his marriage to Jinin to be the mistake of a lifetime.
As for his youngest sister, Nawal, she’d never stopped being angry with her brothers, who had insisted on grabbing her share of the family’s land and house. Whenever she chided one of them, he would quote the popular song: “Nawal, my sister, my darling, today or tomorrow you’ll be married, and everything you own will go to a stranger!” As if the person she married would remain a stranger—this person, who would be their brother-in-law, and to whose children they would be uncles, would remain a stranger?
Basim, like the rest of his brothers, had forgotten the family disputes, and had remembered only that he would get an apartment in the building his father had finished putting up at the start of this year, and his share of the land that his
father had decided to distribute while still alive, so that his sons would not solve their quarrels with bullets after he had gone. Basim was content with the division, which had no guarantee attached to it.
He had told Jinin, “It’s fine, now we’ve got a guarantee for the present and the future!”
“Okay, but my present and my future—who can guarantee them, my darling?” Jinin had replied, and had reminded him, in an imploring tone, that she worked day and night for both of them. “It’s for your sake, Basim. I don’t have a present or a future without you.”
“The Jews won’t let me work,” he’d replied. “And I can’t live on your labors forever, Jinin.”
Now she screamed to herself, My God, how cruel Jaffa has become to us! Can’t it stand two Palestinians born in different places living together here?
She cried to and for herself.
She cried so much that her tears raised the overall level of sadness in the country.
11
Eventually, Jinin went back to continue with her novel. Dawn had broken through the window that looked out over the little harbor. The boats were still snoozing on the surface of the water, and the waves showed no inclination to disturb them. Jinin stretched her arms out in the air, drawing in her exhaustion and the whole pressure of the night.
“I have to make some progress before I go to bed!” she whispered, then pushed her back firmly against the chair and left it there. She picked up where she had left off, with Husniya castigating The Remainer, who was standing in the doorway, about the Jewish woman who was going to destroy them.
The Remainer looked back without saying anything. He was on the point of going out. Husniya stopped him for a second time, his left foot already across the threshold. “May God preserve you, Abu Filastin, and grant you long life, you keep on going out, but not this time, man! No more of this going out and messing up your face!”
He stepped out. “I’m going to Tel Aviv,” he replied from outside. “I’m going! We’re in a democratic country, and I’m free to do what I like. If they don’t like it, I’ll go and stand in the middle of Kings of Israel Square, and turn it upside-down!”
“Oh, do whatever you like,” he heard her say. “But don’t be stupid. I’ve said what I’ve got to say, and you’re a free man.”
“Take care of the children!”
The Remainer closed the door behind him and departed, leaving Husniya’s heart trembling like the stalks of mulukhiyeh that were still between her fingers.
Jinin’s fingers started to shake. She was tired from her dealings with Basim. She stopped her revision, saving the part of the novel she had been working on in a file that she called ‘Filastini Tays.’
She opened her email browser, and selected Walid Dahman’s address.
She attached the file.
Then she wrote a message:
Dear Walid,
Attached is a file containing most of my new novel Filastini Tays. I’d be grateful if you could look through it and let me have any comments. I’ll send you the rest later.
Sea breezes and love from Jaffa,
Jinin
She hit ‘Send,’ then turned off the computer, and went to bed. She lay down beside Basim, and went to sleep with a feeling of oppression as the new day began.
12
I was pleased by Jinin’s choice of Filastini Tays as the title of her novel, but I was vaguely shocked by the opening paragraph.
My father is stubborn. Even my mother said, “Your father is stubborn.” We all laughed in our own way. My mother ignored our laughter and went on. “He left your sister with her mother in Gaza when she was two months old and went back to the country.” She fell silent. Then she pursed her lips and pushed them forward a little. We heard a sound that put an end to our laughter; my mother held the index finger of her right hand upright over her pursed lips, like a school teacher: “Hsssss . . . .” Then we heard the sound of my father’s footsteps and the noise of the key in his hand, struggling with the door lock.
I found Jinin’s language transparent, open, and challenging, sometimes impetuous, a bit like her, in fact. As for her hero, The Remainer, he suggested several questions to me. Was The Remainer in Jinin’s novel actually her father, Mahmoud Ibrahim Dahman? Did Jinin derive the character from him, or import his biography into her novel? Whatever the answer, I believed that Jinin was playing with The Remainer’s secrets, just as she played with the character of Mahmoud Dahman, who had crept into my unconsciousness via other people’s stories when I was a child.
“That’s it, cousin! Mahmoud’s become an Israeli!” my cousin said to my mother in my innocent presence. I hated her for saying it, and I hated Mahmoud as well. I wished I could take revenge on both of them. By boycotting my aunt, for example—by not visiting her; by not greeting her if I met her in a lane in the camp, even if she was coming back from the hajj; by not reciting the Fatiha over her soul when she died. And when I grew up, by joining my own freedom fighter, the Egyptian officer Mustafa Hafiz. I would sneak into Ramla, abduct Mahmoud, and persuade him to return with me to Gaza, telling him firmly, “Your place is here, cousin, not with the Jews!”
I remembered how annoyed my mother had been at the time. She grew angry, looked glum, and stuck her jaw out so that it looked like a duck’s beak, because my aunt wouldn’t stop repeating that Mahmoud had become an Israeli: “Mahmoud’s staying there and doesn’t want to come back!” Whenever his name was mentioned in my mother’s presence, she would refer to him as ‘The Remainer,’ then throw her tightly knit fingers into the air, like someone chasing his life story away from her. I didn’t find it strange that my mother should have become tense and insistently demanded that my aunt stop regarding The Remainer as a strange nickname or as some sort of defect. Then I remembered how—small eyes open, with a mischievous inquisitiveness—I had watched my mother when her taut nerves had relaxed a little and she had begun to berate my aunt with language that she did not often use:
“The whole family has begun to consider the name an insult, hajja! What have you done, cousin? Come on, isn’t the person who stays in the country a thousand times better than the one who emigrates and deserts it?”
My aunt was shocked. She loosened her belt and used her hands to lift her breasts, which had begun to sag toward her belly and press down on it. Then she tightened her belt again in a double knot, in which she always put her money. She left her breasts hanging down comfortably instead of slinging them over her shoulders, as I used to say to her jokingly. But my aunt didn’t say anything. What she had done with her belt must have released her from the burden of excessive emotion, or at least reassured her about the money she was hiding in the knot.
My mother took advantage of my aunt’s temporary silence and said something about Mahmoud to put an end to her heartache—which made me think that my mother had been in love with Mahmoud in her teenage years, though she hadn’t really had her fair share of adolescence, unlike other girls.
My mother had married my father ‘before her eyes were open’ in the view of her father (who would become my grandfather) and her younger brothers, all of whom I called khali (“my uncle”). They were all afraid of little Amina opening her eyes to the world. If she had been given an opportunity to do that, even for a fleeting period of adolescence, she would perhaps have picked up Mahmoud, the neighbors’ son, and put him in her heart straightaway. She and Mahmoud were relatives and neighbors, like my own father Ahmad, whose family home was next door to hers. Like other girls of her time, she had no chance to love, or to imagine a young boy sneaking into her heart from another quarter in al-Majdal Asqalan. If my mother hadn’t married my father—after a love journey that extended from the moment his father, Nimr Dahman, asked for her hand for him from her father, Khalil Dahman, until the moment she was told that the parents had agreed (a period no longer than a week)—I would have trusted my suspicions.
Finally, my mother said to my aunt: “There isn’t a Palestinian in the world who’d accept b
ecoming an Israeli, cousin, and if he did, it wouldn’t be through his own actions, desire, or inclination. Mahmoud became an Israeli despite himself, hajja, he became one despite himself. I’ll say to you quite frankly, in full view of witnesses, it’s a good thing that Mahmoud stayed there. It’s a good thing he didn’t emigrate like us, to be treated with contempt. Being treated with contempt back home, hajja, even with the Jews, is a hundred times more noble than being treated with contempt and abused here in the camps.”
My aunt was silent, because my mother had turned the nickname, which was supposed to represent a sort of defect, into something for which its owner could be envied.
Like many people, my mother had heard things said about Mahmoud Dahman, some of which could be believed and some not. She collected facts and rumors. She drew pictures of him, and of scenes that she loved, and which made her love him. She once told me that a short time after the occupation of al-Majdal Asqalan, Mahmoud had formed a union of weavers to protect their rights. He had persuaded many of the city’s residents to stay and had prevented many from emigrating. When I asked her, “What’s a workers’ union?”—I was still a child in the camp, and didn’t know anything about employment or workers, apart from cleaners and people who made concrete—she replied to me airily, “How should I know, Walid? They say that the people that worked in weaving clubbed together. They used to grimace as if they were giving up the ghost, write petitions, and defend each other. More than that, my dear, I don’t know. I never asked.”
She spoke with pride, though, about a violent confrontation that had taken place between Mahmoud and Ben Gurion at Israeli Government Headquarters after the nakba. And she praised Mahmoud’s challenge to the head of the first Israeli government, which had proclaimed the establishment of Israel on 14 May 1948. “My cousin Mahmoud,” she said, “was worth ten men, by God. He stood up to Ben Gurion and spat in his face.” My mother believed everything she was told, and embraced all the stories that praised Mahmoud Dahman and talked about his character, which had raised the status of the Dahman family back home and in the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip.
Fractured Destinies Page 9
