Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  Shaul doubted whether Mahmoud Dahman would accede to their request and guarantee them protection together, for he recalled a conversation he had had with The Remainer on the eve of the outbreak of the June 1967 War. In broken Arabic, Shaul had asked him, “If you win the war, my friend, and occupy the country, will you hide me in your house, Adon Dahman, and protect me from the revenge of the Arabs?”

  “Come on, neighbor . . . ,” Mahmoud had replied, in a reassuring tone. “What’s this talk? I’ll divorce Husniya three times before I abandon you, and if anyone gets near you, I’ll finish him off with these two hands of mine!” And he had clasped his thumbs and index fingers together, drawing the rest of his fingers around them like he was strangling someone.

  The Remainer had recalled that the Arabs, even united, had not won the 1948 War or any war since, and that there was a considerable possibility that they would lose the war that was about to break out. He had turned to Shaul and asked him, “Okay, and what about you, Adon Shaul, what will you do with us if you win the war?”

  Shaul had coughed, ignoring the polite response, and had exclaimed, “Congratulations to us!”

  So now he turned to his wife, and rebuked her with feeling. “Adon Dahman won’t hide us in his house!”

  Aviva begged him. “Okay, Shaul, ask those four German soldiers to fire on you, my love. Try death for my sake, just once in your life. It’s really essential for a German to kill you for you to gain a share in the Holocaust like me.”

  In his house, The Remainer heard Aviva’s ravings, which continued faintly on the other side of the wall: “I don’t want to die tonight. I don’t want to die again. One death is enough. I don’t want to . . . .”

  Those members of our family who had not gone back to sleep heard the sound of a door being slammed just before dawn, and Shaul’s voice cursing Aviva and her life, repeating that he wouldn’t be coming back home again.

  And indeed Shaul never returned to the house after that morning. Even when Aviva finally died for real several years later, and her death was reported to him by his sons, Ilan and Yuri, Shaul contented himself with simply asking for God’s mercy on her. He then asked them if the government would continue to pay compensation for their deceased mother as a survivor of the Holocaust or not.

  “I am her true legal heir. I own her past and all that has followed from it, good and bad,” he said.

  As for The Remainer, he sympathized with Aviva after Shaul left her and her two sons stopped visiting; after Ilan married and settled in Ramat Gan, he no longer came regularly to visit Aviva at home, while Yuri opened a lawyer’s office in Jerusalem and was busy with his clients’ cases.

  The Remainer now went more often to Aviva’s house, and started spending more time with her than previously. That annoyed Husniya, who was not enthusiastic about establishing relations with the Jews who lived in their quarter.

  She once said in front of him, “Can it be right that these houses, equipped with a stand for a poker on the top of the stove, should be taken by people who’ve come from overseas, while their owners lie in camps among sandstorms and live their whole lives as refugees? Who could put up with such injustice, oh Lord?”

  Then she burst out laughing and said to him, “Do you know, Abu Filastin, I was the first one to get to know Afifa? She was complaining to me, slagging off the Absentees’ Property Administration, from whom she rented the house. She told me that when she’d first looked around the house, she hadn’t seen much furniture in it. I said that the furniture had been stolen. She told me, with no shame or embarrassment, that the kerosene stove that the owners of the house had left behind was all messed up. It reminded her of the eyes of her husband, Shaul, each one looking in a different direction, because the flames came out of the top in two different directions. What’s more, she hadn’t found a poker to clean it out. She was hysterical. She went and sat on the bed in the bedroom, and found that it had rusted and become loose. She went out of her mind, and cursed the owners of the house who had fled before they could repair the bed on which they slept. She couldn’t think how she and Shaul would be able to sleep on it. ‘Curse them! Shame on them!’ she shouted in Arabic—these two expressions being ones the old rascal had learned from me.”

  “Rabia’s right, Umm Filastin,” commented the Remainer. “The Palestinians are tramps, gypsies—only a few are genuine, they’ve no breeding or shame. They fled the country and left behind them a jumble of furniture, cookers with no kerosene in them—and no pokers, either!”

  Since moving to Lydda, The Remainer had never stopped encouraging Husniya to establish relationships with the Jewish neighbors in the quarter. Whenever Husniya showed some hesitation, content to have warm relations with our Christian neighbor, Umm Jurj, who lived two doors away, he told her, “We can’t live in a ghetto on our own, Husniya. In this country, we’ve always been open to the world, with hearts as wide as mankind. My dear, you don’t have to like them or treat them like relatives, just let your relationship with them be normal.”

  And as the days and years passed, Husniya changed and began to make friends among her Jewish neighbors, the first of them being Afifa, as she called her.

  3

  Dahman in Gaza

  Mahmoud Dahman usually went to the Israeli Radio building in Jerusalem once or twice a year. He recorded a message to be broadcast to his relatives in the camps in the Gaza Strip. Tall as a palm tree, and with the girth of a mature mountain olive, he would stand in the queue for the Peace and Greetings program, to talk to his family, who could not be more than fifty kilometers away from him, via a microphone that conveyed his message but returned no reply.

  “I am Mahmoud Ibrahim Dahman, nicknamed The Remainer. My peace and greetings to . . . .”

  In the airplane, I put the pages of Jinin’s novel into the pocket attached to the seat in front of me. I shut my eyes and thought.

  The Remainer hadn’t imagined his message going around camps he had never visited before, searching for a family that had been swallowed up by the Khan Younis camp—searching for one of them to come to one of the radio post offices, known as Abu Lisan, which used broadcasts instead of postage stamps. The Remainer hadn’t expected that his message would be lost without arriving, even in a public road that opened into the camp. The carrier, a café radio of which there were only four (all made by the Dutch firm Phillips, and designed in the shape of a wooden chest), broadcast songs to refugees and non-refugees at no charge, together with the noble Quran recited by Abu al-Aynayn al-Shu‘ayshi‘ or Abd al-Basit Abd al-Samad, the news, some Egyptian soaps, and Radio Israel programs.

  Neither The Remainer nor Jinin knew that the owner of the first radio, Muhammad Abu Muslim, had been a refugee from Jaffa, who had been killed with his four children in the Khan Younis massacre on the morning of 31 October 1956. The man and three-quarters of his family had perished, leaving only his wife, his daughter, the café, and the radio, together with those café regulars who remained alive after the massacre.

  The Remainer didn’t know, either, that the second radio had been in the al-Balad Café in the middle of town, or that my father, Ahmad Nimr Dahman, was until the day of his death one of the most important customers in the same café, by virtue of a rumor that had injured his pride; or that the Egyptian military governor of the city of Khan Younis was his constant companion in the café, as a way of emphasizing his humility and expressing his desire to share in the troubles of the city’s residents.

  Neither The Remainer nor Jinin knew that a third radio was in the Dirgham Café. They might have been surprised if I had told them that the café was closed and lost its customers because a popular radio station carrying women’s voices had broadcast that the owner’s daughter Ratiba—sixteen years old, with a chubby face, coffee-colored eyes, a chest that rebelled against its supports, and the distinctive Jaffa physique—was pregnant, despite not being married. Or that the man who made her belly swell was actually her father, Salim, and that, according to Hanafi radio—the ma
nagement and broadcasting of which was supervised by the women of the quarter, and which was in the middle of our quarter—he had secretly performed an abortion on his daughter, with the assistance of his wife. Thus they had removed a grandchild who would have been Salim’s son, but they never escaped the scandal.

  As for the fourth and final radio, it was in the Ottomans’ Café, the best known of the cafés and the one most crowded with lazy or out-of-work men, who were brought together by cards, glasses of tea, and narghiles around small square card tables, until sleep caught up with them after it was past midnight, and their wives had gone to bed and stopped sending their sons with warnings repeated from previous nights: “Father, Mother says to come back home—and if you don’t come, then go and fetch her from her father’s house in the morning!”

  The Ottomans’ Café radio was the loudest of the radios. When Voice of the Arabs and the commentary on the news by Ahmad Saeed were being broadcast, it was the loudest voice in the camp. It would bid us farewell with a nationalist cry which would give us a sound night of sleep: “To a bright and glorious future! To a united Arab nation!”

  But the radio also created a space for evening conversation, especially every Thursday evening, as we hovered outside, too young to go in. We would lean our arms on the edge of the low wall outside the café and prick up our small ears, like satellite dishes these days. Then we would listen to a new sequence from the Noah’s Ark series. Each of us would assemble an amusing collection of jokes, which we would hide in our chests, ready to be taken home as soon as the gathering finished. There, we would rebroadcast the sequence in our own words to anyone still awake, or retell it at the breakfast table in the morning to make everyone else’s whole day happy. The camps went to sleep at night happy and laughing. We continued to sail on the deck of Noah’s Ark for several years, singing the songs left behind by its captains.

  Abu Tafish took over the hearts of the refugees like love filling the hearts of virgins, as his chatter emerged from a ship of entertainment, borne on waves of imagination. This wonder ship contained a crew of sailors: Marun Ashqar, who knew by heart the Palestinian heritage of songs and poetry; and Abdullah al-Zu‘bi, Ishaq Dawud, Musa Rizq, Bahgat Maqlasha, and Muris Shimali (Abu Farid).

  The Remainer knew all of these, or had at least heard of them, and he well understood how the ignominy of history had compelled them to capture the jesting speech of the people and distribute it to the afflicted so they could reclaim a homeland of laughter and irony:

  Radio Israel invites you, dear listener, to a voyage on the deck of Noah’s Ark!

  Trin-tin-tin-tin-tin . . . tary rat-tat-tat-ta!

  Taaayib ooooh, taaayib oooohiiiy!

  “Shaalan, Shaalan.”

  “Yes, Dad!”

  “Where are you, Qarut? Abu Khalil’s coming with Andrea now. When they come, open the diwan and pretend to be busy! Always say hello, but don’t be too generous, don’t open packets of cigarettes all the time!”

  “Ah!”

  “Don’t give a cigarette to either of them until he can’t take it any more, and his moustache starts to quiver!”

  “Ah!”

  “Whenever Beijou stands up, tell him quickly that the coffee’s on the fire. Two or three times, Andrea’s been quick to get angry—he’s left the place quickly, gone home, and not drunk the coffee.”

  “Ah, okay, Dad!”

  “Only, hey, as I told you, say hello, hello, but don’t say more than that!”

  “Ah, okay. But Dad, every time you tell me that Abu Khalil and Andrea are coming, they take no notice of us and they don’t eat here. Why do you think it’ll be different this time?”

  “Oh God, are you a son of Abu Tafish? By God, if I adopted a goat, it would be more of a man than you are! This is politics.”

  “So, are you going to start dabbling in politics?”

  “No, I’m going to start dabbling in rat poison!”

  The Peace and Greetings program had disappeared before any of The Remainer’s messages arrived. No one enquired after him, or informed him of how the family had eventually fared. His father, Sheikh Ibrahim, died without fulfilling his wish to return to al-Majdal Asqalan, and without ever again sounding the call to prayer from the minaret of its mosque, as he used to do before the nakba. His brother Salih went mad and never recovered. He was sent by the Egyptian military governor in the Gaza Strip to al-Khankah in Qalyubiya. His sister Fathiya grew up and married Muhammad Sheikh. He was like the moon; the camp stayed awake by the light of his glances. But he died. He was one of two hundred and fifty young men killed by the Israeli forces after they occupied Khan Younis in the Suez War of 1956, when the Israelis reconnected the geography that they had cut in two and for the first time united the Palestinians in the Strip with those who had fled. But the reunion only lasted four months, ending with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Still, it came back with the third occupation in 1967, and endured. It became stronger than Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi’s unification of the Arab world, and far longer lasting than the Egyptian-Syrian union. Israel swallowed new Palestinian land and was unified, with the result that the Palestinians were able to wander the length and breadth of their land, which was no longer theirs, and enjoy themselves from Rafah to Ras Naqura, and from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—or, as it used to be said, from land to land and from water to water—a unity that allowed The Remainer to finally visit his relatives in Khan Younis. He was the first Israeli to be carried into the Gaza Strip, to the joy of his relations and the amazement of the neighbors.

  The Remainer arrived at the Khan Younis camp in the summer of 1967, the year in which Israel unified the land again. One person he never found there was his divorced wife, Nadia, the young woman who had filled al-Majdal Asqalan with her shouting as she had tried to persuade him to board the refugees’ truck. Mahmoud Dahman had refused to budge, stubborn as a donkey fixing his legs to the ground, while the planes in the sky had screamed, the bombs had screamed, his daughter Ghazza had screamed in her mother’s arms, the people in the truck had screamed, the engine of the truck—which was getting ready to leave—had screamed, and his father, Sheikh Ibrahim, had screamed, “Mahmoud, my son, get up here with us, otherwise everyone will end up in a different place. If we leave one another, we’ll never meet again, my son. Tomorrow the Jews will beat you up if they find you. Listen to me, put the devil to shame and get up here with us!”

  In the end, which marked the beginning of a collective regret that would last a lifetime, The Remainer had screamed himself, before they could leave: “Father, if you leave, you’ll never come back!” Al-Majdal had reverberated with the sound of the echo, “Father, if you leave, you’ll never . . . , Father, if you leave . . . , Father, if you l . . . ,” until his voice was lost in the hubbub of voices that the truck had carried far away, taking with it the thousands who had left on that ill-omened day.

  After her divorce from The Remainer, Nadia had married Ismail Muqbil Dahman. Ismail worked as a teacher in the city of Dammam, in Saudi Arabia. His first wife had died of a swift, incurable illness, leaving him with five children, the oldest of them being Munir, who had been ten years old, and the youngest Suad, who had taken her first steps—wobbling on her little legs, laughing, falling, trying again—on the day her mother had died. “She’d have loved to have seen this,” Ismail said, making the mourners around him weep all the harder.

  “Trust in the one God, man! He has fated it, and there is no escape from it,” they consoled him; and praised Him, who alone may be praised for a disaster.

  Nadia couldn’t stay a divorced woman, gossiped about by the camp in Khan Younis and the popular news agencies. Nor could Ismail manage his own life with five children. The Dahman family brought together the widower and the divorcee. Nadia moved to Dammam with her daughter Ghazza, and took charge of bringing up Ismail’s children, who acquired another sister. Nadia and Ghazza became distant from their original family branch in Ramla, and had disappeared from The Remainer’s
life forever.

  More than sixteen years before going back to visit his family, The Remainer had recorded his voice message: “I am Mahmoud Ibrahim Dahman, nicknamed The Remainer. My peace and greetings to my dear father, Sheikh Ibrahim, my beloved mother, Imm Salih, my two brothers, Salih and Faruq, to my little sister, Fathiya, and to all the members of the Dahman family in the Gaza Strip and abroad. If you wonder about us, we are well. Be reassured!”

  I opened my eyes. I collected the pages of Jinin’s novel from the pocket in front of me, put them back in the little bag, then dozed off, and only woke when I felt Julie’s hand shaking mine just before landing.

  4

  My wife and I were led into a wide hallway in Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda by a female security official, whose heavy backside slowed our carefully measured steps behind her and doubled the time it took to get to where she asked us to wait.

  We sat together on a wide wooden bench, near a side room. The door of the room was half open, allowing us to overhear a conversation in English and Hebrew from inside, though it was difficult to make much sense of it.

  “Will we have to wait here long, darling?” asked Julie.

  “Only until we’ve been interrogated—‘investigated,’ I mean,” I replied nervously, leaning back against the wall.

  A man roughly my own age came down the hall. His face had an Arab appearance, with a dusting of troubles similar to those on my own face. He was of medium build, with a plain face. He was carrying a small black leather case, and was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, of average beauty but extreme elegance. The pair walked down the hall toward where Julie and I were waiting. The man put his case on the ground, then threw his backside onto the seat opposite us. The woman sat down beside him with more concern for her own behind. The man leaned back. Between us sat a silent tension of the sort that invites curiosity.