As the car made its way along the road, Julie fell quiet, her attention captured by the stunning scenery on either side of the car.
Salman broke the silence.
“Hey, guess what? A short time ago, I saw a man coming out of the airport with a woman who seemed to be his wife, and I thought he looked like the writer Rabai al-Madhoun. Do you know him?”
“No, though I’ve read things he’s written.”
“Well, back at the airport I saw the two of them appear with a pale, stocky young man with a black moustache. I saw them go off in the direction of the parking area.”
“You know, you’ve reminded me of something that happened earlier. There was a man detained with us at the airport. He was reading a newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi. When they called him and his wife for questioning, he left the paper on the seat. I picked it up, started leafing through it, and found an article by al-Madhoun, which I read. But it may be that the man was just someone reading the paper, nothing more, and al-Madhoun’s article was just a coincidence.”
“Or maybe the man was al-Madhoun . . . ,” he said.
“Not impossible,” I said. “But do you know al-Madhoun well, or do you just think it looked like him?”
“Like you, I don’t know him personally, but I’ve read some things about him and I’ve seen photos of him in the papers.”
Then he glanced in the car’s mirror and spoke to Julie:
“What’s up, Jolly, my dear? Why don’t you say something?”
“Oh, I like this Jolly. I’ll call you Sorry in return!”
I chuckled, and Salman laughed so loud that his voice verged on the edge of a roar, which he held for a few seconds. Julie met his eye in the mirror, saw the happiness on his face, and went on:
“I’m happy with what I’m seeing—mountains, greenery—even without al-Madhoun or his wife.”
During the week that had preceded our visit to the country, Julie had changed. When I’d suggested to her the idea of traveling a couple of months earlier, she’d refused on principle: “I don’t want to see Israelis and I don’t want to meet them,” she had said.
Now, she was simply ignoring the existence of Israelis and keeping them out of the picture. Instead, she loaded her memory with scenes of the country where she had been born but lived far away from.
“I can’t believe I’m in Palestine. If it weren’t for Mama’s instructions, I’d never have seen this country. Thanks for having us, Salman.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“I want to see Acre.”
“Don’t worry! You’ll tour the whole country, have your fill of Acre, and take a little of it with you when you leave.”
“I’ll pick up plenty of souvenirs,” she replied.
The car continued to climb up and down the forested hills. It took us into our past, which was still present here, where the ground was like the front of a peasant dress—decorated with thyme, tumble thistle, plums, the shepherd’s staff, lilies, gazelle horn, wheat ears, every type of saffron, and mountain lupines. That’s not to mention the holm oak, carob, all sorts of mastic, terebinth, Christ’s thorn, willows, medlars, and plane trees that adorned the slopes. The fragrances of the plants were carried on the breeze, inviting wanderers and passersby to gather their leaves.
Trees rushed past, and the car sped on toward Jerusalem. History rushed past. At the edge of what had been the village of Deir Yassin, my senses froze, imposing on me a bitter silence. Deir Yassin, I thought, the massacre that changed history, and sketched the harsh face of the nakba of 1948. It’s the black hole that the Israelis don’t know how to deal with, in the view of Eitan Bronstein.
“Eitan Bronstein,” I murmured to myself aloud. Salman heard me.
“Who’s Bronstein?” he asked me.
“The leftist Israeli who founded the Zokhrot organization. You know, they try to tell the story that the Jews don’t want people to hear. Bronstein thinks that the massacre of Deir Yassin defined the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs. When I read that, I recalled that the Holocaust Museum isn’t far from Deir Yassin.”
“You’re determined to visit the Holocaust Museum, then, like you told me?” he asked.
“I’ll try. I want to see Deir Yassin from there. I want to see how the victims see their victims.”
We fell silent.
The car passed through the outskirts of West Jerusalem. We spotted the top half of the Ramada Renaissance Hotel above its lower neighbors. Salman turned the car, only to be stopped by a red light. When it changed to green, it gave Salman two choices: either to turn right and swing around the hotel to look for the main entrance—or so I assumed—or else to go past the light and turn in at the next street along. He waited too long, and the light turned red again. As Salman wondered aloud about the best way to go when the signal changed, I suggested turning right toward the hotel.
The light changed. Salman took my advice—the advice of someone who had never visited Jerusalem before. He was relying on my basic Hebrew to read the traffic sign at the crossroads we had left and translate it for him so that he could keep his eyes on the road. He turned to the right. The road led under a bridge, and gradually opened up. If the car had continued onward, we would most likely have ended up outside Jerusalem completely.
“You’ve made me get lost with your rotten advice!” Salman exclaimed, slightly irritated. “Your guesswork has ruined us.”
He pulled over less than a hundred meters on to ask a man standing on the sidewalk for directions. The man started explaining. I couldn’t follow most of what he said, but one word he said in Hebrew with a distinctive rhythm made me hide a laugh with my hands: ‘istabakhta.’
As he pulled out into traffic again, Salman explained to Julie that ‘istabakhta’ meant ‘you’re in difficulties’ or ‘you’re stuck.’
We would use this word a lot throughout the ten days we would spend in the country. I would repeatedly say, “Istabakhta, and everyone knows it!” “Istabakhta, but what’s happened has happened!” or “Istabakhta, and you’d better remain nameless!”
When we finally got to the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in West Jerusalem, we were met by a girl in her twenties, with a smile like a balmy evening, enough to wipe out half the troubles of the journey. I stood there for some moments, then gave her my passport.
I was greatly relieved by the sight of this employee, who continued to smile as she started to record our personal details. She was the first Israeli I’d seen in Jerusalem who didn’t have the professional worried look of the Israeli women in the airport. Meanwhile, Julie stood at a distance from the reception desk, contemplating the décor.
Salman came up to the desk and proceeded to engage the receptionist in a jokey conversation in Hebrew. They chattered together and exchanged smiles that sometimes turned into laughter. Suddenly, Salman put a question to the girl: “So, how is Ahmad related to you?”
This question, in Arabic, changed the whole scenario, and I felt reassured about my first impression. Her name was Ni‘mat, and she was a Palestinian, like all the Ni‘mats of this country. I was greatly relieved. I felt like I was in a Palestinian hotel (despite the fact that it wasn’t Palestinian), and that this woman would smile at the next guest to the hotel as soon as he arrived. She’d ask him for his passport to record his details. She wouldn’t pause at his nationality or ask him for his religion. She wouldn’t change the shape of her smile according to the customer. This Ni‘mat made me feel relaxed, for she confirmed to me that we were still spread through the country.
I would feel even more relaxed the following morning, when we had breakfast with Salman and Aida. The staff in the restaurant would welcome us with an extra greeting: “A hundred welcomes! You have honored us!” And we would smile because we were being honored by them in turn. On the morning after that, we would be welcomed by the restaurant manager, who would chat with us warmly, while one of the waiters surprised us with an extra act of kindness, offering to bring us a selection of the tastiest
available food himself rather than making us queue up at the buffet. I personally thought he must be the owner of the restaurant, though he was only a waiter. The same thing would happen at the breakfasts we would take in the Dan Carmel Hotel in Haifa, when we visited the city some days later and stayed in the same place where the former Egyptian President, Muhammad Anwar Sadat, had stayed during his trip to Haifa in 1978. Salman would tell me the story of how Sadat had made him the first holder of an Israeli passport to secure an Egyptian entry visa, and how Salman had later become the ‘King of the Arabic Book’ and their biggest distributor in Egypt. In Beersheba, where we would spend a single night in the Leonardo Hotel, we would be welcomed by a Bedouin employee, and served an excellent breakfast by another Bedouin who supervised the restaurant staff, most of whom belonged to the Arab tribes in the region.
But that was all still to come. For now, I signed the papers for the hotel and the three of us went up to the twelfth floor, where we had adjacent rooms, to begin our journey of discovery in the country.
2
Haifa
On the international road to ‘The Bride of Carmel,’ Jamil took me away from my contemplation of a place that no longer looked like it did, back to our friendship in Moscow in the middle of the 1970s. At that time, he, Ludmilla, and I had formed a troika, more important to us than the one that dominated the Kremlin in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat at the time of comrade Leonid Brezhnev.
Jamil made this comparison as we drove. Ludmilla had a smile on her lips, like a comma between phrases, inviting reflection. Jamil’s comments forced me to reflect on our collective romantic partnership.
I was a student with Jamil in a school that graduated Communist Party cadres. We had come from different places to participate, with others, in trying to find a solution for our country, which we dreamed would one day reunite us. He had been born in Palestine, and had stayed there. He came to Moscow as part of a group attached to the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah), which included a number of Jews. I was born there, too, but I hadn’t stayed. I became a Gazan who didn’t even retain his Gazan identity, but fled in the course of the national struggle, dragged along by events wherever the men moved who carried guns and raised banners (sometimes light, sometimes heavy) to flutter in the breeze, settling down wherever they settled in the hopes of freedom and return—though I never returned and neither did they.
That is how I came to know Jamil, a Palestinian in Israel, a half-citizen in a democracy that had no relevance for him, and which didn’t pay him any attention except at election times. And he came to know me, a Palestinian exiled in God’s vast land. Some years later, I married Julie, a British citizen, half-English and half-Armenian, and Jamil married the Russian Luda, who left Moscow and moved with him to Haifa after he had completed his course at the Party school. After their marriage, she became an Israeli with full citizenship.
In the car, I turned to Jamil.
“Jamilov!”
He looked over. “Da, tovarishch, yes, comrade!”
“What did your family say when you returned to Haifa with Luda?”
The question didn’t surprise him. It surprised Luda, though, who leaned forward and started to play with his bald pate, wondering what he would say.
“You’ve reminded me of that day,” he replied, as he surrendered to the fingers sliding over his head. “My grandfather, God rest his soul, was still alive. When I told him about it, he looked at me, and teased me, his eyes worn out with suffering. He took the cigarette that was in his hand, stubbed it nervously in the ashtray, and said to me, “Look here, you should be ashamed of yourself. Does the country need Russians so much that you have to go and bring back a Russian girl, and a Jewish one at that?”
His grandfather’s stance made me laugh. I was surprised that Luda was Jewish. It had never occurred to me, though I wouldn’t really have attached any importance to it; in a secular society, officially at least, no one asks about anyone else’s religion or attaches any importance to it. The last vestiges of Russian believers generally buried their God in their hearts and kept him hidden, fearful of government militia men. All three of us belonged to a group that didn’t ask.
“I’ve never been a Jew in my life,” Luda protested. Julie laughed, then addressed Luda in a whisper loud enough for us all to hear:
“I like what you say, Luda, because we both speak Arabic like Egyptian koshari.”
We all chuckled, then Jamil proceeded to wind up his conversation with his grandfather.
“I said to my grandfather, ‘Sir, God prolong your life, Luda isn’t a Jew. Luda’s a Communist, just like me! And you know we—’ Then he interrupted me in a sarcastic, jokey way and said, ‘Shame on you both. You’re like the man who came to paint kohl on someone and blinded her. You needed an extra member for your Communist Party, so you went and added to the number of Jews in Haifa?!’”
Luda was the Party school librarian. Jamil and I used to call the library ‘Ludi Malenki Grad’—‘Luda’s Little City,’ that is. It was home to thousands of philosophical, historical, and economics books, and a lot of classical Russian novels, and other literary works. Luda spent some of her working hours wandering the streets of her ‘city,’ busily rearranging them after the school students had returned the books they had borrowed. Otherwise, she would be sitting at her desk. We both fell in love with Luda’s city of culture at the same time, and allocated pet names to the different sections of the library: this was Karl Marx quarter, where his books lived; and this was the suburb of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I would sometimes jokingly advise a comrade who was looking for a book called What is Political Economy?, “Go to Rosa Luxemburg Alley in the Political Economy quarter!” To someone else, who couldn’t find a book by Friedrich Engels, I might say, “Go to such-and-such a lane and you’ll find it, it’s not very far from Marx Street, just before Lenin Lane.” Jamil would argue with me and protest: “Don’t take advice from Walidov . . . he’ll get you lost, comrade, and you’ll end up in an ideological hell!”
We would laugh and make others laugh—a short-lived diversion from our normally dry diet of ideology.
Jamil and I would go to the library almost every day, to borrow the books needed for the academic and political papers we were required to write. We were nothing but a pair of lying hypocrites, both equally devoted to our lying, and loving it. Of all the comrades in our groups, we were the least concerned with expanding our knowledge of materialist and historical philosophies. We were each searching in Luda’s world for the woman of our dreams, despite the fact that women were scattered like flowers in the restaurant and cafeteria. Their beauty defeated the ideology that had done away with the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, in February 1917, and had removed the government of Alexander Kerensky in October of the same year. The doors of relations between the sexes were open to all desires, from a first look to sex in the food stores attached to the school restaurant, or anywhere where the secret could be kept, even if just till the next day. Despite that, Jamil and I pursued the same woman, who was beautiful and elegant, despite the poverty and backwardness of fashion in the country, which was governed by a boycott of everything that was a capitalist product. Luda, the object of our desire, distributed her feelings between us in installments. Each of us felt he received more looks from her than the other was getting, and that the meanings of her words were closer to his own desires than to the desires of the other. As a result, we loved her together in secret, disguised by a public friendship. As soon as we finished lunch, which began at one o’clock with the discipline of a military mess, we would slip along together or separately to Luda’s Little City.
After some months of intense study, tiredness became an additional factor, imposed on us by the daily grind of pursuing sources for the studies we were preparing, as well as by the very monotony of life inside the school. We would take our exhaustion with us to the library. In Luda’s office, there were two long, wide couches, which became temporary beds for secret siestas. I wo
uld sometimes go there, pretending to want to study, while in practice I would be watching Luda moving around the library stacks. I sacrificed a restful siesta in my room in the student accommodations for fear that Jamil might be alone with Luda.
One mild summer’s afternoon, I went to the library as usual, and headed straight for Luda’s office. I didn’t find Jamil there, and was happy. He didn’t get here before me, then! Luda, however, greeted me with her smile (a substitute for the kisses I didn’t get), immediately excused herself, and went out to work among the books. I was left alone, so I went to sleep, hoping to meet her in a dream; but instead I dreamed that Jamil appeared, carrying a thick stick and pursuing me down strange streets.
The three of us carried on like that, until a day arrived when a field trip to Leningrad had been arranged, during which we were to visit an agricultural kolkhoz near the city. It so happened that the trip was a shared one between the Israeli and Palestinian groups, even though we went in separate buses.
Just before leaving, Jamil and Luda stood near the door of the bus that was to transport the Israeli group, whispering quietly to each other, until the time came to move off. Luda planted two kisses on Jamil’s cheeks as he got onto the bus. Then she ran over to our bus, which had stopped behind the first one. I had already taken my seat. She came up to the bus window I was sitting beside. We whispered to each other for a time, until the noise of the engine got too loud, followed by the voice of our guide shouting, “We’re going now, comrades!” Luda hurriedly gave me two kisses, the same as Jamil had got, through the glass of the window.
On our last day in Leningrad, gripped in the heat and humidity rising from the Neva River as it meandered along its channels, Jamil and I made a tour of the city that lasted several hours, ending up in a large gift store. “Let’s take a look,” we said together at the entrance, then parted. We were separated by hidden desires, which sent us in different directions among the articles in the store. None of them caught my fancy, but eventually I found some plastic roses of various colors, chose a white one, and paid for it.
Fractured Destinies Page 15
