Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  I laughed as my thoughts turned to a tale in which Mahmoud Dahman appeared at an untimely moment. I remembered the morning that the circumciser chased away a pigeon my eyes were fixed on, as the razor appeared like lightning in his hand and in the twinkle of an eye descended on my fresh foreskin. The head of my little penis appeared, gazing at those present and proclaiming its eternal purity, while the foreskin became just a piece of skin of no value suspended between the fingers of the circumciser. The man, who combined the shaving of heads with cutting the redundant foreskins of young children, threw it onto a small square cloth handkerchief, which he had spread out beside him. I remember that a pretty woman leaned over to my mother and whispered to her, and they laughed quietly together. Amid my confusion, my mother wrapped the handkerchief around the foreskin, which was streaked with lines of blood, while the circumciser himself was occupied with wrapping white cloth around my actual penis. My mother then handed the handkerchief to the woman, who thanked her (though she didn’t thank me, to whom both the foreskin and the penis belonged!). Then she turned around and disappeared. Subsequently, I would learn that the woman had fried my foreskin in olive oil and had eaten it that evening with half a loaf of warm bread. I reckon that she must have made love with her husband that night, before sleeping deeply, dreaming of a young boy who would come to her as a result of a pregnancy in which a foreskin had played a part.

  Anyway, on the morning of my circumcision, they laid me out on my little bed, which was spread on the floor of our only bedroom in the camp, and hovered around me, gossiping and mulling over Mahmoud Dahman’s life story. This was the first time I’d heard stories about him beyond my mother and aunt’s gossip. A lot of people cursed and swore at Mahmoud, astonished at his ability to live among the Jews. Others envied him for his ‘Israeliness,’ for which they had no equivalent. Some of them said, “A thousand times better to be dead than to emigrate, be dragged around from place to place, and be given a hard time.” With their traditional clannish attitudes, others said, “I’d swear (on pain of divorce!) that life under the Israelis is a thousand times better than life under the Egyptian military administration that made us see stars at noon. The Israelis are our enemy, and they occupied us, but the others just flogged at us nationalistic self-importance to no purpose at all!”

  Everyone praised Mahmoud’s bravery. As my mother passed around red juice to those congratulating me on a successful procedure (and the safe delivery of my penis, of course), she said, “Ben Gurion deserved the spit on his face. Mahmoud, cousin, if only you could have taken a shoe off and hit him in the face with it!” Those present muttered appreciation of what he had done, while my father, who was busily gathering up the presents, reinforced their mutterings: “Great, cousin! Ben Gurion really did deserve hitting with a shoe.” The guests asked for more to drink.

  On the evening of the circumcision day, which doesn’t happen to a penis twice, the whole camp was happy when they heard what my mother had said in the morning. The residents celebrated a happy, nationalistic day, and spent their evening basking in the small victory that Mahmoud Dahman had scored. I was still lying on my back, more concerned about the fire that had been raging in my penis ever since it had lost a redundant part. That fire didn’t subside all night.

  That was how I inherited from my mother an initial impression of Mahmoud Dahman, a hero pulled from her imagination, which took the form of The Remainer, both in nickname and in the characteristics my aunt had given him. This was before his name became well known and recognized by others in his absence; many years before Jinin borrowed his nickname and gave some of his features to the hero of her novel; and even before Mahmoud himself heard about the moniker and recognized in it the self that others had created for him.

  That happened several years later, when in June 1967 Israel completed the occupation of the remainder of Palestine that had been postponed since 1948. During these years, the character of The Remainer had crystallized in isolation from him, acquiring characteristics that were later to become his: he became a man who resembled a reality overwhelmed with emotions. His family fled from the city of al-Majdal Asqalan, pursued by bombs and bullets, fires following in their wake. The collapsing walls, the winds, and the October winter—harsh that year—roared after them, urging them to flee, while he desperately urged them to stay.

  My mother told me that she had heard Mahmoud say that day, “Anyone who leaves, my friends, will not come back!” I believed what my mother said because she had heard it, and also because she was my mother. I was upset when I learned that Mahmoud had in the end been defeated. He had been carried along in the general exodus, which had poured out of every corner and every alley of al-Majdal Asqalan like a mighty river. Everyone was thrown into Gaza, and camps for the Palestinians were formed from its human silt. Next I was happy, because Mahmoud had come back. He hadn’t stayed in Gaza long, though, before he’d gone away again. He’d crept back into al-Majdal Asqalan on foot, fleeing from the Egyptian intelligence service, which had begun to be active in the Gaza Strip and which caught up with him with a charge of inciting refugees to return to their homes. The Zionist organizations hadn’t yet entered the city of al-Majdal, or divided it among their own refugees, whom they imported to be the new residents there. They hadn’t closed the border with the Gaza Strip at this point, because it hadn’t yet become a strip—there were no borders at all to close. Mahmoud had fled the nakba and those affected by it. He’d left his wife and young daughter in a camp that had been planted among the yellow, sandy hills behind a city that remained for a time quite ashamed of him, as if it were somehow carrying him on its back. It called Mahmoud and others like him ‘emigrants.’ So he had returned home, hoping that his small family would catch up to him later. Israel had then closed what had now become borders following the battle with Egyptian forces withdrawing from al-Majdal in October 1948, and the Israeli authorities had refused to allow him to bring his wife and daughter into the country.

  The whole Dahman family described Mahmoud as mad. Even his father, Sheikh Ibrahim Dahman, said, “My son is officially mad, my son, I know him, he’s gone to live with the Jews, whom no one can stand!” But he subsequently came to like the nickname that had been given—and had stuck to—his son, and started using it to refer to him. He became even more admiring when someone told him the news (originally announced in a message that Mahmoud had recorded and broadcast via the Peace and Greeting program, put out in Arabic by Israeli Radio) that his eldest son had gotten married again to another woman, from Ramla, and had established an Israeli branch of the Dahman family, leaving Sheikh Ibrahim to take responsibility for his small Gazan branch. That message changed the father’s attitude to his son, and softened both his and others’ opinion of him.

  “Now we’ve planted our feet in the country and have a branch there,” he announced to a family gathering. “It’s not just Mahmoud who has stayed—the sons and daughters he will have in the future will also remain there!”

  At that point, the head of the Dahman family asked him, “Okay, Sheikh Ibrahim, but what if the Jews get hold of him?”

  “They’ll go pop,” he replied. “Mahmoud is a thorn in the Jews’ throats!” Sheikh Ibrahim’s eyes filled with tears, for he wished he could have stayed in al-Majdal, or even in Lydda, Ramla, or somewhere else—they were all home in his view. He wished he could have been present at the births of his grandchildren there, one after the other, instead of those who had been born in the camp here, so that the family could get a bigger share of UNRWA rations.

  What Sheikh Ibrahim had said became a proverb repeated by others in the family and their children for three generations, as part of their store of oral heritage. When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, many of the Dahman family said, “The branch has been reunited with the stem.” The fugitive refugees were the stem, and The Remainer and his children were the branch. Jinin was one of the daughters of the Dahman stem that had not extended southward toward Gaza, but rather in the oppo
site direction, toward Lydda and Ramla.

  I summarized for Jinin in a few lines my impressions of that part of her novel I had read. I asked her not to leave me in suspense, but to send me the rest of it. I told her that I would soon be visiting the country with my wife. I explained that Julie wanted to get to know the Acre that the run-up to the war of 1948 had made it impossible for her to grow up in, when her parents had whisked her away to London at the age of two months. I added that she would be bringing with her some of the ashes of her mother, to place them inside what had been the house of her grandfather Manuel more than sixty years before, as instructed. I expected Jinin to be very pleased, and to be even more pleased at the news of our visit to her in Jaffa with which I concluded my short message.

  Jinin soon emailed me a file containing the rest of her novel, except for the final chapter, which she proposed to give me when we met, either in printed form or else in the form of a verbal summary. She said my opinion of what I’d read had reassured her considerably, though it had also surprised her. She told me that from now on she would be preparing herself for possible confrontations with her readers.

  I printed out as much of the novel as Jinin had sent, and put it in the small bag that usually stayed on my shoulder when I was traveling.

  Then I wrote back to Jinin to thank her, expressing interest in The Remainer and his personality as an actual father, and also in her novel. I told her that I would follow his progress through her novel closely. Most likely that would be during my visit to the country, while Julie would be busy reading Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun, which she’d told me she would take with her, and which she’d started reading some days before. For my part, I might be able to read some more chapters of Filastini Tays. I left the subject of the final chapter of the novel to our anticipated meeting, as she had suggested.

  At the end of my email, I suggested to Jinin that we should meet at eleven o’clock on the following Monday—four days later—in Dina’s Café in Jaffa.

  13

  A Warm Day in Montreal

  I had gotten to know Jinin six years previously, during a short stopover she’d made in London on her way to New York. I entertained her for dinner at home on that occasion, in the absence of my wife Julie, who was abroad. News of Mahmoud had been interrupted when exile had cut me off from the homeland and torn me apart. During the evening, Jinin took me back to some of what I had been searching for during my childhood about The Remainer, although she wasn’t able to give much detail to many of the stories.

  We were next brought together at an evening gathering (to which Julie was unable to accompany me) at the wedding party of the beautiful Lara, the daughter of our relative Zakariya Dahman, in Montreal, Canada. I accepted Zakariya’s invitation immediately, although I had never met him before and didn’t know much about him, except that he was a relative of ours who had been in Kuwait, where we had a lot of family.

  A few hours before leaving London, I received a message from Jinin conveying to me some good impressions of Zakariya and his family, though there was also some disturbing information.

  Jinin informed me that Zakariya had worked as a teacher in Kuwait until the First Gulf War in 1991. In August of the same year, Kuwait had been liberated from the Iraqi occupation, which had lasted seven months. “Then,” she wrote, “Kuwait liberated itself from Zakariya in a moment of strategic national impetuosity, in which it dispensed with his services, along with those of 300,000 other Palestinians who had upheld it as a second homeland for decades. Kuwait made them take responsibility for a tactical error that their political leaders had made, and expelled them.” Zakariya took his wife, his two sons, Khalid and Husam, and his only daughter, Lara, and traveled as an outcast from his Kuwaiti past (which he had loved), weighed down with all the complexities of that stage of his life, to settle in Montreal, the capital of the province of Quebec.

  Jinin stressed to me in her email that Zakariya, unlike many other migrants, refugees, and exiles, liked his choice a lot. He had never regretted the fifteen years he had so far spent in Montreal. He had never struck his cheeks, cursed his black times, or complained about his exile. Instead, he had hastened to build a new life for himself and for the members of his family.

  Zakariya and his family had learned French, and with the money he had saved from his long years of working in Kuwait, he had opened a restaurant serving Palestinian food, which he called ‘la cuisine palestinienne’. With the help and expertise of his Palestinian wife, he’d brought to Montreal maqluba from Gaza, West Bank musakhkhan, Bedouin mansaf, and Palestinian maftul. For his speciality dish, the ‘Zikodish’, he singled out warm Montreal evenings. This was a dish of fish and rice, to which was added some seafood, in what some of his customers regarded as a sort of ‘Palestinian paella’, by analogy with its Spanish counterpart.

  Abu Khalid, as he liked to be called, was content with his delicious meals and resisted the temptation to sell hummus and falafel, leaving that to his Palestinian neighbor, Saeed Darawisha. Saeed had come to Canada as a refugee from the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon. For several years, Saeed’s dishes graced Montreal’s mornings, while Zakariya’s dishes enlivened its evenings, adorning its late-night parties every weekend.

  Although Zakariya had abandoned the profession and practice of teaching, which was no longer of the same value in a city like Montreal as it was back home, he set aside two hours every week with his wife to give free Arabic lessons to people in the local Arab community, in a large room on the second floor above the restaurant, with a separate outside entrance.

  On the evening of the wedding party, Jinin introduced me to Zakariya and his wife. I shook hands with the man, with an inexplicable feeling of familiarity. Perhaps it was the warmth and curiosity of that first meeting. Perhaps it was the tie of kinship, which—despite whatever social changes and distance had done to it—still retained its power to bring us together and give warmth to our meeting. Or perhaps it was Jinin’s email and the way she had spoken of his life.

  I looked at Zakariya for a time, trying to read the details of Jinin’s message in him, trying to place him among her various words and expressions: tall, on the edge of being plump, skin the color of wheat, pleasing features that paved the way for anyone meeting him for the first time to penetrate his world freely and easily. Then I shook hands with his wife, who was at least ten years younger than him (or so I thought), with features that confirmed the wise choice Zakariya had made. I showed particular pleasure in being introduced to the mother of the bride, for whom the world would not be big enough this evening, during which she would turn into the bridegroom’s mother-in-law. Then I shook hands with Husam, Zakariya’s son, the father’s hand resting on the son’s left shoulder as he introduced him to me. “Husam’s started university this year,” he said, “and compensated me for everything that’s gone before. Husam is the man of the house, ustaz Walid, and my right arm!”

  Before I could enquire what he meant, or ask about his son Khalid—whom he hadn’t mentioned in front of me, and who was strangely absent on a night like this—Zakariya quickly started to tell me about the happy couple, his daughter Lara and Dr. Salama al-Farra. He announced, with a pride bigger than the wedding palace we were standing in, that they would spend their honeymoon on one of the Caribbean islands, then fly to Dubai to settle in Salama’s work place. Then he moved his hand from Husam’s shoulder to mine. I thought he was going to reveal something, and watched his next movements carefully: he sighed a little; he smiled nervously, like someone washing away an old care inside him with the happiness of this unforgettable evening. “I wish we could have gotten to know each other before now, ustaz Walid,” he said. “I would have introduced you to . . . .”

  Jinin quickly moved to drown out what Zakariya was about to say with a decisive interruption. “The couple have arrived, Abu Khalid, they’ve arrived!”

  Her hastily contrived eloquence drew everyone’s eyes to the hall entrance. A storm of happiness and che
ers broke out at that moment, as the beating of drums assailed our ears. Zakariya withdrew his hand from my shoulder, excusing himself. He took hold of his wife’s hand, and together they made their way through the guests toward the entrance to the hall, followed by Husam. There, the three of them disappeared into a crowd of women, who were practicing their wedding songs. I watched joy spread over the other guests’ faces.

  I felt Jinin slip her right arm under my left arm. I liked that, for it gave me the warm feeling that I needed. She stopped a waiter, took a glass of red wine from the silver tray he was carrying, and passed it to me with an encouraging smile. I took it from her hand, and she took another glass.

  “Excuse me, cousin,” she said, pulling me into a nearby corner. “I had to interrupt Abu Khalid so that he wouldn’t complete . . . tonight’s his daughter’s night, the joy of his whole life, and I don’t want him to get carried away with stories . . . .”

  “Get carried away?”

  “Oh, I mean . . . listen, forget it. I’ll tell you later. Come on, cheers! Let’s enjoy ourselves!”

  We clinked glasses. The mystery would have to wait.

  Jinin leaned her head slightly toward me so that her hair touched my shoulders, and whispered, “I had an idea to invite you to breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ll take you to the Van Houtte Café, so you can eat the best bagels in town, and drink the best coffee, too. What do you think? Shall I come by tomorrow and pick you up from the hotel, so we can go together?”