Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  I muttered my agreement, although it would mean I’d miss the delicious breakfast served by the hotel.

  Jinin put her glass down on the table beside her. She ruffled her thick, flowing hair with all ten fingers. I watched her rearrange her hair over her shoulders and change the image she’d arrived with only a few minutes before.

  “You’ll rival the bride tonight, Jinin!”

  “Umm . . . should I be flirting with my cousin?” she mumbled, and moved away from me. She took all her youthfulness with her, and threw herself into a group of young people who were absorbed in dancing in the middle of the hall. I stood watching Jinin swinging her hips around with the lightness of an ear of wheat caught by a light breeze. I contented myself with a second glass of wine, as I watched the words of Stevie Wonder work on the bodies of the dancers: “I just called to say I love you . . . .”

  In the Van Houtte Café, I sat with Jinin at a square cane table in the front left corner, flanked by a low wall of flowers that extended along the front of the café and enclosed three other similar tables, giving Van Houtte the feel of a high-class Parisian pavement café. The French hadn’t just brought the elegance of their buildings to the cities of this province, they had brought their cafés with them and deposited them on their sidewalks. I let my eyes wander along the street in front of us for a few moments, enjoying the morning. Passersby and their conversations were scattered around us like the masses of flowers that surrounded the place.

  I ate the piece of cake I had ordered, with a pleasure that rivaled Jinin’s, who had started to umm and ahh as she ate her own. When she had finished, she wiped her hands and lips, and drank the rest of her cup of coffee. There were no grounds left at the bottom worth reading. Then she picked up the thread of what Zakariya had been saying when she’d interrupted him in a moment of caution made necessary by the situation the night before.

  She explained that Khalid, the eldest son, had been born in Kuwait City, but since his childhood had dreamed of visiting Gaza and of getting to know the city and his family there. This was despite the fact that all he knew about Gaza came from the odd comment made by his father. Many years later, the opportunity came to him, when he received a letter from the Palestinian Khabar agency in Jerusalem, offering him a job as an English-language correspondent in Gaza. They stressed to him their need for someone who had lived in the West and had a foreign nationality that would help him travel anywhere freely.

  Zakariya vigorously resisted the idea. Khalid was his eldest son, who had given him the name Abu Khalid, the name by which people usually called him. Zakariya was afraid of the tense situation in Gaza, which he described as confused. He never stopped saying that Gaza lived in the hand of a devil who was continually calling people out to fight. But the dispute ended in a compromise, namely that Khalid should work in the agency headquarters in Jerusalem and forget the subject of Gaza. Khalid accepted the compromise, which the agency also did not oppose, so he moved to Jerusalem, where he made the acquaintance of his colleagues in the Sheikh Jarrah office. They all welcomed him, and considered him an important key to cooperative relations with the Canadian media as well.

  One day, three months after he had arrived in the country, the Khabar agency commissioned Khalid to cover a protest march against the racist Separation Wall, south of Bethlehem, in which a number of foreign activists were taking part. There was a clash between the protesters and the Occupation authorities, in which Khalid found himself caught up. He was arrested and jailed for two weeks, at the end of which he was released on condition that he left Jerusalem. Khalid’s old dream awoke again: he asked for a transfer to Gaza, to work as a reporter for the agency there, and his request was accepted.

  In Gaza, Khalid rediscovered his Dahmani roots. He became the Canadian son of the family, which welcomed him with great joy. But the family’s happiness was short-lived. Khalid was killed in an Israeli air raid on the outskirts of Beit Hanun while he was doing his job, less than three months after his transfer to Gaza. Zakariya was grief-stricken, as was the rest of the family, which had lost nine martyrs in the Second Intifada. But Khalid’s death was the most painful for everyone. The others had had proper funeral processions, even when these took place during Israeli aerial bombing raids. But Khalid’s parents and siblings were not able to get to Gaza to oversee his funeral. The Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv intervened with the Israelis to protest the death of their citizen Khalid Zakariya Dahman, and informed his father that they were prepared to transport his son’s body to Montreal. When Zakariya received this communication from the authorities in Montreal, he wailed aloud, as if his son had been killed twice: “My son returned to Palestine and was martyred there, and now you want me to bury him in Canada as an exile!” He informed the relevant authorities that he had decided to bury his son in his own land among his own family. So Khalid was buried in the Jabalia graveyard in the absence of his parents.

  I was saddened by the story, though I wasn’t too surprised by what had happened. By virtue of my work in the press and other media, I had seen a number of young men vanish from the family’s ranks one after the other as a result of Israeli raids that had taken place in recent months. They were relatives I had never known, for most of the victims had been born in the years of my exile after 1967. Some had died in the settling of internal political and party scores between Hamas and Fatah.

  I decided that I would visit Zakariya and his family before I left the country, to present condolences that were several years overdue. I was sorry for that, and I knew that I would be bringing up a dark chapter during an otherwise happy time. But the meeting was necessary in any event, and I also wanted to get to know Abu Khalid, and the Canadian experience, better. Jinin indicated that she would like to accompany me, which I welcomed.

  We left the Van Houtte Café at around 11 a.m. The streets passed by under our feet, as commercial establishments and restaurant signs flirted with our eyes. We were detained by the image of a charming bride in a shop selling wedding dresses. I turned toward Jinin, trying to extract her and myself from the shadow of the story of Khalid Dahman, and asked her what I should have asked her a long time ago:

  “So, Jinin, why haven’t you gotten married yet?”

  “You’ve caught me by surprise!” she replied. Then, after a calculated silence, she went on: “I’ve had five proposals, if you can believe that!”

  “Now you’ve caught me by surprise!” I replied. “As if you were Marie Munib, melting all five of their hearts!” I joked.

  She laughed. “Ha, why not? I could be proposed to twenty times. In our country, getting engaged is just marriage with a stay of execution!”

  We mulled this over for a few moments until Jinin broke the silence, saying that the first man she’d gotten to know had asked for her hand very quickly. He was in such a hurry; he must have thought she would fly away. As the day of the Quran ceremony approached, he had proposed to her parents that they should live in Nablus after the wedding. Her father, Mahmoud Dahman, had refused, and she had added her own refusal to his. So that marriage had failed before it could even begin.

  Her second fiancé was from the city of Umm al-Fahm, in the northern triangle of Palestine. “Everything about him took my breath away,” she said, but she added that immediately after the announcement of their engagement he had started to hum and buzz around her like a blue fly. He had piled it on and was far too demanding. “If you want to live with me in Umm al-Fahm,” he’d announced, “you’ll have to wear the hijab. The hijab is chastity, Jinin. The hijab is the crown on a woman’s head, preserving her honor!”

  Jinin had continued to refuse, trying to convince her suitor to accept her as she was, but without success. In the end, she had taken advantage of a visit that he paid with his parents to her parents’ house, and shouted in his face: “What do you think I am, a street girl with no honor or dignity? ‘The hijab is chastity, the hijab is purity’! Leave me alone, you . . . .” She had pulled the engagement ring from her finger and had t
hrown it in his face, adding, “If you’re so in love with the hijab, marry someone who already wears the hijab!”

  We laughed together at the story, before Jinin moved on to her third experience. Suitor number three was an American of Syrian origin, from Homs. He had asked her to renounce her Israeli nationality and to live with him in America. He’d told her in no uncertain terms: “Look, I don’t want anyone to say that I’ve married an Israeli girl and to accuse me of assimilating!”

  She had cut him out of her life, but not before telling him, “I was born in Palestine and I shall die in Palestine. Israeli nationality, as far as I’m concerned, is a matter of citizenship and rights; it’s true that it’s incomplete, but it lets me stay in my country!” He just couldn’t understand her position, so that was that.

  Jinin had loved the fourth one as a lover ought, despite the fact that they had known each other only a short time. Sami was a handsome young man, loving and warm. He was from Nazareth.

  His father had moved there from al-Khiyam village in the south of Lebanon a few years before the nakba. He’d worked as a shoemaker in Nazareth Market (which would later become the Old Market) for many years before the city was invaded by the commercial cooperatives and people gravitated to them in the search for new, ready-made shoes. He had had three sons, who had grown up and worked in various occupations. One day, the father had decided to leave Nazareth and go back to al-Khiyam. He’d said that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in his birthplace. So he and his wife had returned to settle in al-Khiyam. Two of their sons lived and worked in Beirut, after renouncing their Israeli citizenship and reclaiming their Lebanese nationality. But Sami, the youngest son, refused to return to Lebanon and insisted on staying in Nazareth. After the family left, however, he didn’t stay in the city long, but moved to Jaffa to work as a civil servant in the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality, where Jinin got to know him on one of her visits to the town hall.

  Jinin paused, and a sudden look of pain came over her face, from which she emerged a few moments later with a deep sigh, speaking with a vague regret. “If only it had been like that!”

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  She turned to me sharply. “The story.”

  Then she took me on to the Second Intifada, which had broken out on 28 September 2000. She reminded me of the notorious incident that had taken place on 12 October of the same year, when a group of angry young men had surrounded two civilians in a Ford car driving near the Friends’ School in Ramallah, suspecting them of belonging to the Israeli special forces. A squad of Palestinian policemen had then intervened, arrested the two men, and transferred them to the nearby headquarters, but several groups of angry citizens had massed around the headquarters, attacked it, and killed the two youths.

  I didn’t understand the connection between the incident and her engagement to Sami from Nazareth, so I asked her. She stared me in the face, and replied, “Sami was one of the two men who were killed by the mob at the police headquarters. My fiancé, I mean . . . can you believe that he was . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Sami turned out not to be ‘Sami’ at all. His real name was Samuel Samhun. He was an Israeli officer in an Arab infiltration unit, who had taken on the identity of Sami years before, and had lived as Sami—outside Nazareth, of course. That’s how I got to know him, and that’s how he asked for my hand.”

  I had read of Arab impersonators and members of Mossad marrying Palestinian girls after adopting Palestinian identities, including some who had studied the Islamic religion in depth in order to perfect their roles. One of them had had children by his wife, and had forced her to convert to Judaism and conceal her past from her children.

  “And the original Sami?”

  “All I know is that he disappeared from Nazareth some months after his family left.”

  “Okay, and what’s the story of the fifth man?” I asked.

  “The first four would have to be true for there to be a fifth. Haha, did you believe it, cousin? No, these four are the heroes of short stories that I intend to write, dealing with the problems of women in the country.”

  I liked Jinin’s stories, and her deception plunged me into a sudden fit of laughter, which forced her to laugh as well. Finally, I repeated my last question, teasing her in a friendly way: “Okay, and the fifth, Jinin?”

  “The fifth will really be the first, Walid. The fifth is the real one, different entirely, although my relationship with him has so far been a virtual one. We talk through email. We spend hours in conversation, getting to know one another better. I want him to be the one to lift the hijab of happiness from my face, the one hijab that every girl likes, because it can’t conceal the happiness of the bride on her wedding night.” And she pointed to a mannequin behind the display window, showing off a wedding dress that would tempt any young girl of marriageable age. “Look how beautiful she is, veiled in white lace!”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Basim.”

  We walked on, then paused for some time in front of the entrance to the Ritz Carlton Hotel, as the late morning sunshine escorted the tourists, highlighting the details of the lovely city for them. I thanked Jinin for the delicious coffee and bagel, and for her umbrella of stories.

  Then we parted.

  Third Movement

  1

  Small Fires

  The plane took off. My neighbor in the seat to my right quickly introduced himself to me, before the fears I always feel when taking off had even subsided.

  “Call me Edward. I’m an American from Dallas. You’ll certainly have heard of it. I work in a tractor and bulldozer company in Jerusalem. In fact, I specialize in servicing the famous Caterpillar trucks, you must have heard of them!”

  Ha, had I heard of them?

  “Of course, of course,” I muttered to him.

  Enormous, efficient American bulldozers, capable of changing the geography of the West Bank and Gaza completely. They’d played a part in erecting the ethnic wall. They’d destroyed and swept away hundreds of Palestinian houses and other dwellings. And didn’t your bulldozers, the Israelis’ favorites, kill your fellow citizen, Rachel Corrie, on 16 March 2003?

  What was a man like this really doing in Jerusalem? And what might he be sweeping away in addition to what we knew about?

  My neighbor, who seemed relaxed, didn’t disturb my musings as he waited for me to introduce myself. But I was under no compulsion to do so.

  The man finally broke his silence, and started a rapid rhythmical chatter, like a barber in a Palestinian refugee camp. He wasted half an hour of the time I had set aside to read more of Jinin’s novel, Filastini Tays. I was supposed to have finished reading the rest of what I had of it by the time we met in Jaffa. He chattered on without asking my permission or making any effort to find out whether I wanted to listen to him.

  He plied me with unwelcome questions. He enquired in the most precise detail about my journey and my marriage. He was like a bulldozer which didn’t pause between uprooting an olive tree and destroying a house somewhere else in Palestinian territory. In the end, I told him that my wife and I were on a short visit to the country, during which we would stay as guests in the house of a friend of ours.

  Instead of shutting him up, my words encouraged him to continue his questions. With a burning curiosity that aroused my suspicion, he asked me if I was an Israeli. He asked me if I was a Jew. He asked me if I had Israeli friends. He asked me if I was visiting Israel for the first time. He asked me if I had visited Jerusalem before. He asked me if I would be visiting the holy places, and offered me platitudes about them. He asked me whether I had friends there. He asked me whether I had visited Haifa before. He asked me whether I had visited the house of my host in particular, or knew his address. Did the house have balconies for sitting out on summer evenings? Like someone divulging a secret, he said, “You Mediterraneans like balconies and sitting out after your siestas. I envy you your lazy afternoons!”

&nb
sp; He fell silent, and I pointed out to him that he could learn the popular afternoon laziness prevalent in the country for free. He nodded, and then continued his enquiries: “Does your friend’s house look out over Mount Carmel or over the sea?”

  This strange American will tag along with us when we walk off the plane after landing, I said to myself. Then we’ll be forced to introduce him to our host as soon as we walk through the exit door where he’s waiting for us in the airport.

  I might well have replied rudely, “And what’s it got to do with you, man? Just leave me alone!” Instead, I said with a feigned English politeness, “I’m not sure, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I’ll walk around Haifa a bit, stroll on the shore for a little, visit the old Arab quarters, and climb Mount Carmel—Mount Carmel, in whose arms the city has slept since it first appeared, stretching its legs out to the sea and wetting its feet in the wa-a-ater!”

  I yawned the last word with my eyes shut, before I closed my mouth over a curse that was trying to come out.

  My neighbor made no comment and put no further questions to me after that, as if he had been struck by a sort of verbal paralysis. He didn’t even yawn, suspecting he might pay the price.

  I woke up from my pretend sleep after a few minutes. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my neighbor looking at me, having now begun a pointless chat with a young Jew with two sidelocks dangling in front of his ears. From what I could hear of their conversation, I understood that the young man was a university student, American like him, and that he was visiting Jerusalem for purely religious reasons.

  Julie was continuing to read Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun. She must by now be immersed in the details of Asya’s relationship with Saif. She had told me about it two days before: since her marriage to Saif three years before, Asya had had no sexual relations with him, but had been in love with Gerald, who compensated for Saif’s coldness in bed, leaving her with a thirsty spirit that she watered from time to time with what remained of her husband’s love.