Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  I took the pages of Jinin’s novel from my small bag, wanting more than ever to get better acquainted with The Remainer. It would become clear to me that his wasn’t an inherited stubbornness, despite the view expressed by Jinin that it was a gene passed on through the Dahmans. Indeed, after he had left his first wife and daughter in Gaza, a second incident occurred in his life that confirmed this belief in everyone who knew him.

  This is what Jinin had written:

  One ordinary afternoon, their Jewish neighbor Aviva took advantage of his absence and that of his family from the house, sprayed a bottle of kerosene on their wall, and set light to it. She then started shouting, “Shoah! Shoah!” until the al-Jamal quarter in Lydda was filled with her screams. Other neighbors rushed to the fire, and one of them called the fire brigade, who came immediately and managed to put it out before it could spread. The police also came and opened an investigation, for which there was no need, since The Remainer—who, on hearing the news, had arrived from the Dahman Clothes Washing and Ironing store, which he owned—chose not to press charges. Instead, he forgave his neighbor entirely, and rejected the idea of taking her to court. “Let’s solve it the Arab way!” he said, despite the fact that the second party, the accused, was not an Arab. “Gveret Aviva is lonely and miserable,” he told the police officer in charge of investigating the incident. “No one can blame her. What she’s seen in her life, no human being should have seen, and it’s driven her mad and ruined her nerves. God help her!”

  The officer was pleased by what The Remainer had said. He appreciated his forgiveness of his fellow citizen and his sympathy with her past. “If all Arabs were like this guy, we’d have burned all those Arab homes and they’d have been quite happy!” he said in Hebrew, and everyone understood.

  The Remainer was a Communist, whose leadership was acknowledged by Lydda and Ramla, and accepted by the Arab residents as well as some of the Jews. He saw in Marxism a way for mankind to escape from the hateful evils and greed of capitalism, and for the peoples of the East to escape from Western colonialism and the social classes that depended on and cooperated with it. He believed that the philosophy of materialism was a powerful one, deserving of his admiration and acceptance. He also believed that it didn’t entail atheism, although its founders, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, had lost their way to God, introduced errors into their theory, and led their followers astray, bringing them close to the fires of hell. This was something that appealed to Husniya, The Remainer’s wife, and led her to adopt the same beliefs and philosophy as her husband.

  The Remainer believed that the materialist philosophy was deficient, and needed a real Remainer like himself—or at least someone similar—to connect it to God, as well as to mankind. So he turned to Sufism—as did Husniya later—and persuaded himself to undertake the reorientation of the philosophy in its path to God, at whose kingdom they (he and the philosophy, that is) would arrive together at the moment of revelation of a Sufism where he would be at one with the universe and its Creator.

  The Remainer liked Emil Habibi a lot. When Emil won the Israeli State Prize for Literature in 1992, and accepted it from the Prime Minister of the time, Yitzhak Shamir, at a glittering official ceremony, The Remainer was happy, and said, “Comrade Abu Salam has surpassed their writers and raised the status of Arabic literature, sitting over their heads with his legs dangling, as if he were sitting on a rock with his legs hanging over the sea. And now, of course, he’ll have some influence, after catching the biggest fish in the land, the Literature and Culture Fish. I swear by Almighty God (he was always swearing by Almighty God) that this man has raised our heads up high, higher than anything except the Israeli flag flying over all our heads.”

  Then he cried. The Remainer cried that day from too much happiness. He cried to and for Emil Habibi. Husniya saw him cry, she saw the tears of joy on his cheeks, which were the color of bereavement. She added her own tears, asking, “Do you want more, Abu Filastin?”

  Finally, The Remainer wiped away the last tears from his eyes, and replied to her, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Hassuna, my dear—keep your tears till the day they’re needed. We might need a lot of tears tomorrow.”

  Like The Remainer, Husniya loved Emil Habibi and the Communists. She was invigorated by the lives of the comrades. She used to say that stories about a comrade smelled like the sweat of peasants in the harvest season. She could smell their scent in a statement, or a poster, or a news item in the al-Ittihad newspaper. She used to say, “If it weren’t for them, what happened to us in our country would have had neither color nor flavor!” She was constantly reading Abu Salam’s writings, and never missed an opportunity to follow what ‘Juhayna’ wrote, but since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the dispersal of the local comrades she had used the newspaper after reading it for things that would soil it, like a believer going against her faith.

  One day, Husniya surprised The Remainer by saying, “Abu Filastin, after you stuffed my head with Abu Salam’s ideas, I’ve used the al-Ittihad newspaper to clean the windows!”

  At first, The Remainer was shocked by Husniya’s words. If Husniya had said that in front of him only a few years ago, he would have ripped the windows from the walls and dashed them to pieces. Now, though, the matter really raised serious questions for him. Why is it that the pages of the al-Ittihad newspaper clean the windows when our comrades’ ideas and essays have never cleaned the minds of the people in our country? he wondered. Then he cried, “Clean the glass of your windows with the Communists’ ideas! Marxism is a better cleaner!”

  He liked this outburst, which he considered an ideological plea for help. For the first and last time in his life, he wished that the sea would disappear and the country turn to desert, that a wind would arrive from every direction, laden with all sorts of dust—including both the local nuclear dust, which would probably come from the Dimona reactor in the Negev, as well as that imported from even more arid deserts—to deposit its load on the windows of all the houses, old and new, that the state had claimed as ‘absentee properties.’

  The Remainer smiled as he whispered to himself, “This is a wind that will raise the sales of our party’s newspaper to the skies!”

  Then he repeated, “Marxism is a better cleaner!”

  The Remainer gave a loud laugh, then cursed the state of the Left in the country with tears in his eyes. Husniya repeated her previous question: “Can I help you with a tear or two, Abu Filastin? For God’s sake, take two drops for yourself, man! I’ve got enough for any disaster. I’ve been collecting tears since 1948!”

  2

  Aviva Dies Twice

  Aviva, our next-door neighbor, died. She died one night in our presence. She had a nervous attack, the second in a week. This time it caught her early: it came before dawn broke, like a warning, announcing to us that sleep was forbidden, and encouraging us to be on our guard. Most of us reacted to our neighbor’s shouts and started awake. Some of us slept through it, then woke to an unexpected after-attack. We all tossed and turned to the interrupted rhythm of Aviva’s shouts, then some of us, including me, went back to sleep.

  The Remainer—who sometimes leads our awakening, and who always gives the call to wake while taking his breakfast—said that as the night went on he was half awake, half asleep, his anxiety divided between carefully balanced expressions: he would pity Aviva a little, and would curse her a little. He would blame himself for coming back to the country, then curse his luck and blame it for the choice he had made for himself and his family—a repressive, stifling neighborhood that made it difficult to breathe. On the one side, there was a Jewish woman inhabited by her past, the horrifying details of which she regularly doled out to us—as if the large share of the nakba we’d had to suffer wasn’t enough, so she had to give us an extra portion of a past that had no connection with us. And on the other side, there was Hilmi Matar, our Palestinian neighbor from Lydda, an unpleasant and irritating hashish addict, whose proximity increased our misfor
tune.

  That extraordinary night, the details of which were lost amid Aviva’s cries, our neighbor heard the voices of soldiers whispering to one another. As subsequently related by my father on the basis of a subsidiary complaint of Aviva’s husband, Shaul Shamir, our neighbor saw in her dreams a large placard before her eyes, which she proceeded to read, as follows: “To the people of the city of Kiev and neighboring regions. You must attend at eight o’clock in the morning on Monday 29 September, at Dorohozhytska Street near the Jewish Cemetery, with your money, documents, and all valuables and heavy clothing in your possession. The punishment for anyone who does not comply will be death.”

  The young Aviva raced along a side road, which led to Babi Yar, paved with human bones. The sky was raining down weightless, naked people, who fluttered like butterflies as soon as their feet touched the ground. She felt her body. Her fingers sank into her naked flesh. In vain, she tried to hide her private parts. She fell into a ditch. A lot of mud and bodies fell on top of her. She got up and ran again. She fell into another ditch, on top of bodies still warm. She lifted her head and saw four soldiers pointing the barrels of their rifles in her direction, ready to fire. Still asleep, she shouted deliriously, “My Shaul!,” the name of her husband. Then she woke up, and continued her delirious prattle while awake. The soldiers she had seen were like the other soldiers who had climbed onto the wall that adjoined and ran parallel to our own house wall. This was the same wall that Aviva had previously sprayed with kerosene and set fire to. The soldiers, with their enormous frames, leaped into the courtyard of the house, took up position at the door of her bedroom, and shut it. Aviva let out a cry like never before. Shaul woke up, as did everyone in our house, to hear her shouting, “Germans, Shaul, Germans!” She continued to hallucinate for some time. She then started to hiss like a snake slithering over the sand on a hot summer’s day, until she collapsed completely.

  “There’ll be no more attacks to disturb you after today, Shaul!” he murmured to himself. After a short silence, he went on: “Or will Aviva add her suffering to your suffering, for you to lament your fate together?”

  Shaul gradually realized that Aviva’s silence was something new, and that he hadn’t experienced anything like it in the whole of their life together.

  “Aviva has diiiiiied!” he screamed.

  Shaul Shamir—who had taken part in four wars against the Arabs, and had completed his years in the reserve—turned his mind to arranging a funeral befitting his wife. He ignored, temporarily at least, his jealousy at the fact that his late wife had been one of the best-known survivors of the massacre of the Jews that had taken place in the Babi Yar valley, in Kiev, Ukraine, during the events of 29 and 30 September 1941.

  Shaul put aside all his differences with Aviva and resolved at least to be loyal to her in her death. He thought of her funeral and what it would require. He thought of the kind of flowers he would bring to it. He thought of where Aviva should be buried, and of what he would say in the funeral address he’d deliver in front of the government officials, delegates from the Jewish Agency, and rabbis of her sect, who would all come to bid her farewell. Shaul thought it likely that the German Chancellor, whose country was eager to be at the forefront of those participating in all such occasions, would be there to offer condolences for those Jews who had died and for those who had lived on in torment.

  Shaul took all of this into account in his musings. With considerable pride, he designed a splendid funeral worthy of the deceased, hoping that the local Arabs would not be denied the opportunity to participate in it—especially as it might well have an international dimension, and if that happened, it would not be right for their Arab neighbors to be absent. Shaul expected that the current President of the US would take part, though he doubted the participation of former Presidents who had changed their attitudes of support for Israel after leaving the seat of power. Shaul wasn’t too worried about that, for he recalled that Israel would compensate for their absence by the presence of leaders of states that had signed peace agreements with Israel or had even secured some forms of agreement without the need for any signing. He was quite convinced—believing as he did that everyone was either a neighbor or a neighbor of a neighbor—that mourning was a duty, and that death did not distinguish between people.

  Shaul had confidence in his own judgments. He decided to anticipate all the formalities, and to invite Mahmoud Dahman—he didn’t know that the others called him The Remainer—to take part in the funeral. At the end of the day, he told himself, Mahmoud’s our neighbor, he’s one of us, he’s our neighbor and an Israeli like us.

  So he contacted Mahmoud and invited him.

  The Remainer thanked Shaul profusely for even thinking of inviting him to take part in Aviva’s funeral, because he was actually extremely sad about Aviva. The Remainer joked with him, “Do you know, Shaul, I shall miss Aviva (by God, she wasn’t worthy of you!). As soon as I come back from the funeral, my children—especially Filastin—will ask me: ‘Daddy, now who’s going to keep us awake half the night and disturb our sleep, as Israel disturbs the sleep of the whole region?’ Don’t blame me for saying this, neighbor! As for Jinin, you know her, Jinin’s my daughter, she’ll ask questions out of turn, she’ll say to me in complete surprise: ‘Daddy, who’s going to spray kerosene on the wall of our house and set it alight? I missed it last time!’”

  The Remainer was silent for a few seconds, then quickly reassured his neighbor:

  “Adon Shaul, don’t take any notice of what I said. Put a watermelon in your stomach, as we say. No, don’t do that, a watermelon will be too expensive for you. I sometimes say ridiculous things. Listen, I’ll reassure my daughter Jinin and everyone at home. I’ll tell them that I wish everyone was like Aviva; at least when she set fire to the house, she didn’t burn us with it! You know that most people living in this country would sooner burn us today than tomorrow.”

  The Remainer thought to himself, though, something that he wouldn’t say to any of his family—namely that Shaul’s invitation, if it was genuine, would cause a tsunami of scandal the length and breadth of the land. This was despite the fact that the length of the land had increased in 1967, with the Golan Heights at the head in the north-east and the Gaza Strip and Sinai at the foot in the south, while its breadth had increased and its belly had become bloated with the West Bank in the east. It had then quickly become pregnant, time and again, giving birth every month or two to a new settlement with new residents, and sometimes even to twins. Even so, the invitation would shock everyone.

  He also said to himself that Shaul’s invitation would confirm his position on the Holocaust (Shoah), and his respect for its victims, and his desire to remember Aviva together with the other mourners as they lowered her body into her final resting place. This unusual and solemn event would give him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first Palestinian to take part in an occasion such as this, and The Remainer hoped that other people would not challenge him.

  But what if Shaul were to ask The Remainer to say a word of condolence on this occasion, in the name of the Arabs of the country and neighboring Arabs as well? Or to recite the Kaddish prayer over the body of the departed? During her lifetime, he had been one of the closest to the departed of the likely mourners, and he had enjoyed friendly relations with her. He must have something he could say. Would he do it? Would he say words to Rabia, as he called her, for her soul to hear? Would she be comforted and thank him for them? And would she thank him for turning a blind eye to her being buried in a piece of land that used to belong to Palestinians like himself? Of course, he thought, Jews die here, and are buried here. But they also die elsewhere, and are still buried here. Can’t they just be buried wherever they’ve lived for their whole lives? Why come and share the only ‘here’ we’ve got?

  The Remainer recalled what he had read one evening in the Talmud: “The body of a Jew who has died outside Palestine, after being buried in the ground, will crawl until it reaches the
Holy Land and is united with it.”

  “Good God!” he commented. “A Palestinian refugee can’t get there dead or alive. Not crawling underground, not walking on their feet, not even falling from the sky. Palestinians crawl toward Sweden and Denmark instead.”

  He wondered whether he should accept all this, and cursed the Nazis, and their black history, and what they had done to the Jews, which was the reason for most of them being made to emigrate to the country.

  So The Remainer’s tongue lashed all the countries of Europe, as he cursed them one after the other, and sometimes collectively, because they had renounced the Jews at the time of their suffering and had committed a massive crime by helping them to emigrate to Palestine instead of absorbing them themselves. He singled out Britain for particular historical curses, then brought it all to a conclusion by asking for mercy on the soul of Aviva, his neighbor, whose life had been part and parcel of the struggle. God have mercy on you, Aviva. You took what’s ours in this world, and tomorrow you’ll ask for our share in the next.

  Meanwhile, Aviva, stretched out on her bed, was struck by a sudden longing, like a cold wind, to return to the waking world. She hoped that her return would terrify Shaul, who had paid no attention to her fears and had disregarded the possibility of her being killed by the four soldiers and their rifles. He had never even thought of hugging her to his chest and protecting her during her ravings, or of hurrying her away to safety.

  So the ‘dead’ Aviva conjured up her original shout—the one that had awakened The Remainer and the members of his family—and cried out again. This time, it had more impact on Shaul, as well as on The Remainer himself, who exclaimed from his own house, “You came back quickly, neighbor!” When she had fully returned to this world, Aviva suffered the effects of a new bout of raving, telling her husband—who was astounded by her awakening—that the pair of them had to flee immediately or else take refuge with their neighbor Adon Dahman, as they called him.