Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  Suddenly, the man straightened up and his back left the wall. He started to read my face with something like recognition. As if he knew me. I’d never seen him before, nor had I seen the elegant woman who was accompanying him. But perhaps he did know me. I thought of asking him, then hesitated, for he suddenly looked away. Then he put his hand into his bag and took out an Arabic newspaper. Perhaps he was also a Palestinian, summoned like me for an interrogation for that reason alone. His position would be worse if he was a real Palestinian.

  The man opened the newspaper, and disappeared behind its pages. The face of Amjad Nasir peeped out at me from the photograph that hung over his weekly column, Fresh Air, on the back page. So it was al-Quds al-Arabi.

  I still couldn’t place the man’s face, and started to ask Julie in a whisper if she had seen him on the plane, or even at some other time, but suddenly another female security officer appeared, slender where the last one had been heavy, putting an end to my whispering as it began.

  She gestured to the man with the newspaper. He stood up and followed her, leaving his paper on the seat. The woman who was with him caught up, and the three of them disappeared inside the room. The officer then shut the door.

  He’ll doubtless now be interrogated with questions that will shortly be repeated to me, I thought. I turned over all the possibilities, and went through all the questions—old and new—that awaited me, including the questions that my American neighbor on the plane had put to me. He had constantly repeated the name of Israel, rather than using ‘there’: “Is this your first visit to Israel? Why are you visiting Israel? Do you have relations in Israel? Where will you stay in Israel? How long will you stay in Israel?” Then, and this was more important: “Will you visit the territories?” Which territories? The administered territories. The disputed territories. As if our ‘territories’ didn’t have a name! “Do you have a Palestinian Authority identity card? A passport issued by them? Number of your identity card?” These were all personal effects that it was forbidden to smuggle into the country.

  *

  I had answered questions like these again after we’d landed, when Julie and I were lined up in a short queue, fed by passengers who rushed along in the hope of a speedy passage through passport inspection. I gave our two passports to a female security officer in her twenties, with a face that seemed slightly too small to contain all her features, so that they almost spilled out of it. The officer asked me the same questions that had been put to twenty other travelers. When I realized that she was bored with her questions, and perhaps with my answers, and was about to stamp the passports, I asked her not to, but to put the entry visas on separate pieces of paper instead.

  She eyed me with obvious disgust, then let her tongue loose on me:

  “Why don’t you want an Israeli stamp in your passports?”

  “Apologies, madam, but that would hinder our travel throughout the whole region.”

  “Wait there!” she said, waving us away from the window with her fist, which she used like a remote control. We moved away in silence.

  The official with the backside arrived.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Dahman, follow me, please,” she said. So Julie and I had followed her to the ‘Restriction of Entry Procedures’ room, where we now were.

  While we waited for the couple to emerge from the room—dignity in tatters from their questioning—I decided to leaf through al-Quds al-Arabi.

  I took the newspaper from the seat opposite and returned to my place. Julie had paid no attention to any of this. Since we had sat down, she hadn’t lifted her eyes from Ahdaf Soueif’s novel.

  I opened the newspaper surreptitiously, and flicked through its pages. On the second half of the second culture page, my attention was caught by an article titled, “Don’t Believe Them: After Forty Years They Haven’t Forgotten Me.” The name of the author gave me a jolt: Rabai al-Madhoun.

  Oh my God! I thought to myself. The familiar name was sparking various dormant connections in my mind. I started to read the article:

  “Wait for a bit,” the officer at Cairo International Airport had said. We waited. He raised his head toward my wife, who was standing behind me, then handed her her passport. “Welcome, madam, have a good stay in Cairo!”

  Then, abandoning his politeness, he turned to me, and reverted to the traditional security service lexicon: “Okay, sir, please come with us for a moment.”

  I swallowed my feelings. “It will be a pleasure.”

  The officer asked an employee standing in front of him—a detective like him, of course—to do a computer search for me in the security files. Some minutes later (I was still standing and blocking the queue of passengers waiting their turn behind me), the employee concluded his search with a public confirmation:

  “Wanted, sir!”

  The word, which appeared before my eyes at the top of an extremely official piece of paper like a ten-meter-wide banner carried by an army of detectives, sounded more like “Waaaaanted!”

  Yes, I was wanted by State Security, the highest security authority in the land. I, who had come with my wife to lay our heads for five nights in the bosom of the Mother of the World, and to tour the country and its river . . . I was wanted by the highest authority in the land. Yes, indeed, O joy! O happiness! Forty years after being imprisoned and deported from Egypt for political reasons that had never bowed my head, the Egyptian security officials had still not forgotten me. Here they were, explaining to me how technological developments had enabled them to transfer my records—with the lists in their old records now covered in ancient national dust—to clean computer files. Now I was wanted digitally.

  As I breathed a reluctant sigh of admiration at the Egyptian security apparatus, which had remembered me after forty years, I reprimanded the fraternal Syrian security units, which quickly forgot their most important operations. I had been visited just before midnight on 10 August 1976 by a unit of ‘Protectors of the Homeland’ made up of fourteen armed security men led by an officer. The unit had raided my apartment, number 54 in building 6, Baghdad Street, in the ‘Beating Heart of Arabism,’ Damascus. They had killed my companion, Wajih, 19 years old, who was living with me, throwing his body from the fifth floor. They subjected me to torture that lasted for a full week. Then they forgot me, leaving me, for several weeks, with the shadow of Wajih falling from the window of my dark room to the foot of the building, until I left Syria altogether. I recorded all the details in my book The Taste of Separation: Three Palestinian Generations Remembered.

  My wife left the airport for the center of Cairo, and it was decided to send me back to London on the first plane. A policeman led me to some side offices, then to a prison cell a little further inside, where he threw me into a group of young detainees. And what detainees!

  During my happy stay in the cell, I was privileged to meet a Bahraini wanted by the international police; another, a Pakistani who had arrived at Cairo Airport without a passport; and a third, a hashish smuggler just like his prototypes in old Egyptian films. There was a fourth, a man who claimed to be Lebanese, and who spoke with the accent of a Sunni from the Basta quarter of Beirut—like the Beiruti Abul Abd, the well-known Lebanese popular character—though our friend spoke it with an Egyptian twang. This obvious undercover policeman behaved like someone renting the cell, and sometimes like the general manager, administering it by virtue of his long residence, or so it appeared. To emphasize that, he marked himself out by using a worn-out mattress, which stank of damp and which he spread out in the left-hand corner opposite the door. The others envied him for it. A fifth resident of this restroom for important personalities joined us at midnight—a Palestinian from Gaza, who had arrived from Libya with the intention of returning to the Strip via the Rafah crossing point. There were hundreds of people returning, and the Egyptian authorities had reduced the daily quota of buses permitted to transport people to Rafah. For some reason, which was never revealed, it wasn’t permitted for the lucky returnee to stay in a hotel unt
il he was able to travel, so he found himself a guest of the authorities, just like me.

  That December night, I slept on a cold floor that was infused with the smell of decay. I was covered by a double layer of nervousness and tension, which gave me recurrent nightmares throughout the night—a night full of foreboding and anger. I gathered myself together in a mass of national humiliation and insult, in a plastic chair that had once been white. I shivered for a while and slept a little. I woke up from a nightmare, the voice of a policeman still humiliating me with a clumsy apology: “Excuse me, doctor . . . .”

  During the twenty-four hours I spent in detention, I was subjected to two rounds of interrogation, in a room where an officer with the rank of colonel in the State Security apparatus sat behind a desk. If I had been in his place, I would have been embarrassed by the requirements of my job.

  I was astonished at what I read in the newspaper, as if borders were just borders, ports were ports, and airports airports for a Palestinian. I would stop the owner of this paper as soon as he emerged from the interrogation room, and ask him about himself. What was his connection, if any, to the author of the article? I hesitated before doing so.

  The door of the room opened, and the man appeared at the door with his wife, smiles on their faces. He turned toward me, then looked at the chair opposite, where he and his wife had been sitting a short time ago. When I offered him back the newspaper, he said, “Keep it, if you like!” then hurried toward the exit with his wife.

  I was called by name from inside the room by what sounded like the voice of a woman, though it was hard to be sure. I got up from my seat and went into the room. Julie stayed where she was, for she hadn’t been called, and might not be subject to any interrogation.

  Inside the featureless room, a female officer from Internal Security—Shin Bet—in her midthirties was sitting at a low desk. She reminded me of my aunt in the 1950s, sitting behind an old hand-operated Singer sewing machine, creating underwear from a piece of spare cloth.

  The officer waved her hand to indicate that I should sit down on a small chair beside her, which I did. Without turning toward me, she asked me the purpose of my visit, and I replied to her.

  The woman with the heavy bottom returned and stood behind her colleague, who continued to interrogate me. I guess that she might be there to suggest questions additional to those that had been prepared for me.

  “What’s the name of your father, and where does he live?”

  I told her that he had been a permanent resident in the old Khan Younis graveyard since I was thirteen, leaving her to calculate how many years had passed since his premature death.

  “What’s the name of your mother?”

  I gave her her full name, and informed her that she lived in a house in the Khan Younis camp in the Gaza Strip, because I knew she would ask me that next. So as not to give her the chance to put the question that would certainly follow, I quickly added, “But I don’t know the location of my mother’s house.”

  “What’s the number of her personal identity card?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your mother’s full name again?”

  I repeated the three parts of my mother’s name, which I’d already provided, pronouncing the letters extra carefully this time so that she wouldn’t have to ask a third time.

  She turned the computer screen toward me, and there was my mother, staring out at me, as I surrendered quietly to my situation. I had known her for more than five decades, remembering her as being weak and helpless as a chick, scared of a sparrow standing on the edge of the tiled roof of our house and chirping at her—but here she glared like a hawk.

  I imagined her shouting at the officer, “You’ll turn into a monkey, God willing! What is this lack of shame, what is this meanness? My son’s not a foreigner. This is his country, and he’s coming back to stay for a few days. Why do you have to come down and question him like this? Is he a thief or a murderer? God damn you all and the day when you came to the country!”

  Wiping away a tear, I imagined that we talked:

  You come home, Walid, and you don’t visit your mother?

  I was embarrassed for my mother and for my country.

  Not this time, mother. Leave it till next time.

  I won’t live for ever, Walid. Then she implored me: It’s only a little way, my son. Move your feet and come to Gaza!

  Are you inviting me to the blockade, mother?

  May evil be far from you, my darling! Stay away, and spare yourself trouble until our Lord brings it to an end.

  In my mind, I gave her some words to help her to sleep at night and to greet her in the morning. I told her to keep my words under her pillow. I asked her to carry on with this ritual until we met one day, when Gaza again became the Gaza I had known.

  For a brief moment, I joked cheekily with the officer as I thanked her: “Toda, gvirti, thanks for the reunion!”

  She made no comment, so I went on: “In the 1950s, you let us meet through a radio program called Peace and Greetings; after the 1967 War, through committees of the International Red Cross; and now by computer.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked in English.

  “Sorry, I was just . . . talking to my mother.”

  “Beseder, okay, Mister Dahman.”

  So saying, she handed my passport to her colleague, who went out, dragging her backside, apparently reluctant to take it with her. Accompanied by Julie—who had by now shut her novel and put it in her handbag—I tagged along behind her to the other end of the hall, where she asked us to wait again.

  This time, we did not have long to wait. The same officer came back a few minutes later, with a short-term professional smile on her lips.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Dahman, have a good trip. Shalom!” she said, struggling to keep her smile until the end of her task.

  I took the two passports from her hand, flipped through them, and found inside each one an entry visa on a separate piece of paper. I took Julie’s hand, and we walked together happily to the baggage conveyor belt, where we collected our two cases and left.

  Fourth Movement

  Two Possibilities

  To Haifa

  Julie and I went out, each dragging our own suitcase. Our eyes were fixed on the people waiting at Exit Gate number 2. In the distance, which began to shrink as we smiled with happiness, our host, Jamil Hamdan, appeared with his wife Ludmilla, both waving at us. We waved back at them, with smiles that reached them before we did, while the leaves of a palm tree outside waved at us through the glass façade behind them, as if some breeze had told it we’d arrived.

  To Jerusalem

  Julie and I went out, each dragging our own suitcase. Our eyes were fixed on the people waiting at Exit Gate number 2. In the distance, which began to shrink as we smiled with happiness, our host, Salman Jabir, appeared, waving at us. We waved back at him, with smiles that reached him before we did, while the leaves of a palm tree outside waved at us through the glass façade behind him, as if some breeze had told it we’d arrived.

  1

  Jerusalem

  Salman apologized on behalf of his wife, Aida, who hadn’t come with him to the airport to meet us. He said she was busy with an appointment with her supervisor for the Master’s thesis she was preparing, but she’d promised to stop work at a suitable time and come to the Ramada Renaissance Hotel, where we would be staying, before we arrived. So she would definitely be waiting for us.

  Salman’s car started off, with me beside him, and Julie in the back seat. We took a mountain road that passed through pine and green cypress trees, while my eyes scanned the low hills and small forests, searching for villages that had remained in my memory.

  We chatted the whole way, sometimes with a sense of wonder, and sometimes with bewilderment, like tourists visiting a country for the first time.

  I talked with Salman about our plans for travel in the country, and about visiting Jerusalem, Acre, and Haifa, where he lived. About my mother-in-law, Ivana
, and her instructions to place her ashes—which we had brought with us inside an elegant porcelain statue—in her family home in Acre, or else deposit them with a Palestinian family who lived in Jerusalem.

  Salman looked over at me.

  “You know, you’re in real luck! Tonight we’ll be spending the evening with Dr. Fahmy al-Khatib and his wife at the Nafura Restaurant in Bab al-Khalil in Jerusalem. Fahmy was a friend of Omar, from an old Miqdasi family in Sheikh Jarrah. I studied with the doctor in the Hebrew University. But life led us in two different directions that had nothing to do with each other. He went into medicine, while I said goodbye to everything I’d studied and went into publishing. By the way, his wife Nada is also a doctor, a pediatrician, and she’s opened a clinic at home. The important thing is that Fahmy and Nada are great fans of your writing, and when he heard that you were coming to the country, and I’d be bringing you to Jerusalem, he insisted on inviting us all to supper. Let me consult him on the subject of the late Ivana.”

  I was surprised by what Salman said, as well as by Dr. Fahmy’s invitation. But before I could reply, he hurriedly asked, “By the way, how come they let you bring human ashes through the airport?”

  I answered him with carefully chosen words: “The matter’s not very complicated. It required Ivana’s death certificate, and we got a health certificate from an institution that specializes in procedures of this sort, saying that the ashes were free of bacteria and the like.”

  Salman nodded his head, as I returned to his previous topic: “It will be a splendid evening. And any help would be appreciated enormously.”

  I summed up for Julie what Salman had said, and she exclaimed in English, “Wow, amazing. Salman, you’re our new best friend!”