Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  My father found out what had happened, and when I got back he shouted angrily in my face, “Are you mad or just stubborn, to hit the lad on the head with a stone and draw blood? It’s a good thing you didn’t kill him and get us into real trouble!”

  “I’m not crazy or weak-minded, father,” I replied. “You’ve told me a thousand times not to put up with anyone who insults you—and if anyone lifts a finger against me, then break it. And once you even said to cut it off! Well, Adil insulted us both.”

  “You idiot, I just meant that if someone crosses you, you shouldn’t put up with it. Insult him, curse him, call him names, damn all his ancestors. You can slap him in the face, punch him in the chest, spit in his face, humiliate him, and wipe the ground with him—but don’t put a hole in his head!”

  “What have I done wrong? Do you want me to get beaten up by the children of the quarter?”

  “Get out, you idiot! I don’t want to see your face, you donkey!”

  I ran away into our quarter, which was now half in darkness. From there I slipped into my maternal grandmother’s house, which was near Lydda station. I spent the night there and told her everything.

  In the morning, my grandmother prayed that I would find guidance, and advised me to go back home and apologize to my father, but I put off going until just before noon; I was lucky, for I didn’t find anyone at home. I stole some money from my mother’s drawer and took a taxi to Gaza, where I spent two days with Fayiz, my cousin.

  Finally, I went back to Ramla, weighed down by a mountain of fears inside me. I was afraid of my father’s reaction—he would certainly never forgive me. I crept into the house like a thief, one step at a time, with Fayiz creeping behind me, adding his fear to mine. I stopped and asked him to lead the way.

  My father swallowed hard when his eyes fell on Fayiz. He smiled as wide as his lips would go. I followed Fayiz in and shut the door behind me. You’re in luck, Abu Fils, I said to myself. Yes, I really was in luck, for Fayiz’s unexpected appearance on the scene changed my father so much that he was like a different person; Fayiz made up for my father not seeing his brother, uncle Awni. Fayiz was a miniature reproduction of his father, and he made my own father forget our neighbors’ son Adil, his open head, the wound that hadn’t healed yet, and the way I had left the house and stolen money from my mother.

  I smiled at this outcome. It was I who had brought Fayiz to see his uncle, who was delighted. He sniffed at him, searching for the smell of his brother in him. Here was my opportunity.

  “Look, I’ve brought you my cousin Fayiz, in the flesh!” I said to my father, with considerable pride and satisfaction.

  My father hugged and sniffed Fayiz again and again, until I called out in jest, “That’s enough, father, Fayiz really smells horrible! Leave him, let his mother heat some water for him to wash.”

  My father’s tear-filled eyes blinked, as he replied to me with an affectionate threat, “Go inside, you scoundrel, and watch you don’t do it again or you’ll break up the family. I’ll forgive you this time for the sake of your cousin, but next time I’ll hang you from the ceiling by your ankles if you wound another child. Understood?”

  Then he looked again at Fayiz, searching in his face for his brother, who had been destroyed by my grandmother Safiya and the slander of the quarter.

  Tired now, I put the pages to one side, and went to sleep thinking about Jinin’s stories, The Remainer, and Jaffa, which we would visit the next morning.

  5

  Jerusalem

  In the early afternoon, crowds of people poured onto Sultan Suleiman Street from all the side roads, alone or in groups, distributing themselves among their destinations and livelihoods. Some surged like waves of the faithful as they poured toward the Damascus Gate. I saw Jerusalem celebrating the noise of the cars, and the carts of the street sellers as they marketed their wares with their traditional musical cries, and the shouts of the drivers’ assistants as they gathered passengers from the doors of wide, spacious depots, herding them into the buses that would take them to the cities and villages they wanted to go to.

  We crept forward. We passed a frail man who relied on his faith to compensate for his size. He was sitting under an olive tree, which was not enough to protect him from the advancing afternoon sun. He shouted at Julie and told her off: “Cover your head, woman!” But Julie didn’t understand what he’d said, and took no notice. If she had understood, she would simply have said something that the frail man wouldn’t have understood: “That’s funny, what’s it got to do with him?” When Julie didn’t turn toward him or pay any attention to his rebuke, however, the man supposed that Julie was ignoring him, so he repeated his shouts and his reproaches: “Curse the man who brought you up, and the one who keeps you in his house!”

  When Julie and I caught up with Salman and Aida, who had already gone down the few steps in front of the Damascus Gate and had almost reached the gate itself, the Jerusalem I remembered had deserted me, remaining only in the school books that had introduced it to me. I stood like the others, astonished, in front of the great gate, ready to enter the heart of the city amid the glances of three Israeli soldiers and the watchful protection of their weapons.

  I thought back to our arrival at the foot of the Mount of Olives. After parking, we had left the place together and moved a little away, leaving our two wives to finish a private conversation they hadn’t had time for on the drive from the Ramada Renaissance Hotel. Salman had turned to me, his finger pointing off to the side.

  “This is the tomb of the prophet Zechariah, peace be upon him.”

  “Peace be upon him,” I repeated, then asked him about the olives, whose name the hill bore. But Salman didn’t answer. I looked around for the sacred trees, but I could find nothing but hundreds of Jewish graves, which it seemed had swallowed up the olives of the mountain.

  I looked again at where Salman had pointed a few moments before. There were actually two tombs. I had read about them in the course of my intensive studies on Jerusalem in the weeks before Julie and I had come to the country: one belonged to the prophet Hizr and dated from the second century BC, the time of the Second Temple (though no one has yet discovered the first Temple). It sat in a massive face of rock, with three Greek-style pillars at the front of it, and no place for a body—though it was big enough for people to believe it was a tomb. According to Christian belief, it was the place where the Messiah appeared to his disciple, Saint James.

  The second tomb, the one that Salman had pointed at, was that of the prophet Zechariah. “Peace be upon you, Prophet!” I repeated again as I contemplated the tomb: a monument carved from the solid rock, topped with a pyramid. I climbed the three steps that led up to it. Its outer edges were decorated with pharaonic designs. As for the pillars, I was struck by the cocktail of history and civilizations that I saw there, and would see in most of the buildings and streets in the Old City: Greek, Byzantine, Roman, Egyptian pharaonic, Arab, and Islamic.

  But that was all ancient history, and in the clear light of the present, the soldiers of the Occupation drew my focus. I saw no more prophets in the city. I had come back hoping to find answers in the City of Peace, to find out what they had done for it from the time they had settled there to the time they had left, but they were long gone.

  At the entrance to the Khan al-Zeit market, we were met by some peasant women from the villages around Hebron. As usual, they had come surreptitiously by the back roads, away from the Israeli military roadblocks. They’d smuggled themselves in, with their smells of mint, thyme, and other greenery, away from the eyes and noses of the soldiers, and now scattered their wares wherever they went in the city. As we crossed it, the market appeared to be decorated with peasant women, who were in turn decorated with their clothes, and their clothes with local silk. Women who looked like my mother squatted in cramped spaces in front of bundles of vegetables and soon became a familiar part of the attractive scene.

  We passed by the women. We were joined by several
other smells, which wandered with us along a street in which there was more scope for wonder than for visitors’ feet. As I tried to take in the details of the place, Salman busied himself explaining the things that held my attention. Julie and Aida were absorbed in contemplating the nuts, herbs, and spices, discussing which were best, what they were all used for, and what Julie could take back with her to London.

  “This is Jaafar’s, my friend!” Salman told me. “Didn’t I tell you to remind me we should eat kunafa there? Of course, you’ve forgotten!” he went on, pouring scorn on my weak memory. We all slipped in between the crowds of bodies and the sound of the kunafa knife touching the bottom of the large tray in a succession of beats, as it counted the number of customers.

  “How many trays of kunafa do you make a day, my friend?” I asked the swarthy young man, his muscles taut from using the knife.

  “On a Friday like today, a couple of hundred. People finish praying, have a bite or two to eat, then come to us to enjoy the kunafa,” he answered between the knife-beats, which only stopped when one tray was exchanged for another.

  “You know, Abul Silm,” I whispered in Salman’s ear, “Israel could go through a thousand right-wing or left-wing governments, sane or crazy, and Jerusalem would still smell of sesame cake, kunafa, and thyme. And it would still be decorated with peasant women. God knows, the Jews have only been a short time in this city!”

  “Shut up, or the poet Munir Tabrani may hear you. The other day I read an article saying that he’d been at an evening with the novelist Rabai al-Madhoun—the writer we were talking about on the way from the airport—in the Abu Salma Hall in Nazareth. Our friend al-Madhoun, it seems, had finished off two plates of hummus, followed by two plates of kunafa, drank a jug of water, then got excited, and started to make a speech: ‘We’ve got hummus, we’ve got kunafa from its home in Nablus. We’ve got our clothes, we’ve got the stitching of the decorations and the silk, and the rainbows on the chests of the peasant women. We have the whole of Jerusalem, and the souls of the prophets who left their sites on the Rock for people to fight over. So long as the women of our sacred countryside continue to bring their vegetables, their thyme, their basil, and their smells for us to savor in Khan al-Zeit and the ancient alleys, nothing will remain but our own history, our history that is ours . . .’

  “Munir stood up in the middle of the hall and shouted at al-Madhoun, ‘Forget your hummus, forget your kunafa, the Jews have taken the whole country, and you’re talking to me about hummus and thyme. Give us a break, man!’”

  We laughed together. “You know,” Salman went on, “Jerusalem would be nothing without Abu Shakir’s and Abu Hasan’s hummus. What would Jerusalem be worth without Salah al-Din Street and Bab al-Wad, and the Jaffa Gate, and all the gates that take people to their places of faith? If it didn’t have all this, it wouldn’t have the al-Aqsa mosque or the Dome of the Rock, the Christian quarter, the Church of the Resurrection, the Western Wall, the Khan al-Zeit Market, al-Khallaya, or the clever merchants who came to Jerusalem in bygone times and preserved its markets and commerce. That’s without getting into politics and mentioning Orient House, the National Hotel, or the al-Hakawati Theater. Could Jerusalem be Jerusalem if it wasn’t for all this, man—and above all, its mountains, its history, its walls, wars, and peace? Although, between ourselves, the City of Peace has never known peace!”

  After saying all this, he drank a little water from his glass, at the same time swallowing the remains of his speech. One sentence, though, remained on his tongue: “Don’t forget our appointment with Dr. Fahmy al-Khatib, like you forgot to remind me of Jaafar’s kunafa!”

  “We’ve still got two hours,” I replied.

  “Don’t forget, either,” exclaimed Julie, “that we have to see the Church of the Resurrection, to say a prayer and for me to buy some incense.”

  “Yes, dear, to say a prayer and buy some incense,” echoed Salman, imitating Julie’s accent. So we all left, and made for the Church of the Resurrection.

  The four of us wandered along the ancient alleyways, accompanied by the past—like friends across a long period of history—until we reached one of Jerusalem’s great landmarks: the Church of the Resurrection. We stopped in the courtyard in front of it, before a place that brings together Christians from all over the world—though as soon as they get inside it, they divide it up.

  Julie made the sign of the cross over her chest and wept. She started her prayers for Ivana’s soul before she’d even crossed the threshold into the purity of the church.

  Salman said that he and Aida had visited the church many times, and they went off to wander around the neighborhood. I started to contemplate the church, the key to which had been entrusted to a Muslim Palestinian family, as the various Christian sects could not agree among themselves. Wajih Nusseibeh opened and closed the doors of the church every day. Muslims had also guarded it in a tradition handed down since AD 638, when the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab had entrusted the key to Abdallah ibn Nusseibeh al-Maziniya, after receiving it from the Patriarch Sophronius, together with the keys to the city of Jerusalem itself. The Christian sects agreed to leave this task in the hands of two Muslim families, the Judahs and the Nusseibehs. The first kept the key to the church secure, and the second opened the door. This wise arrangement solved the problems that arose between the sects—as in the summer of 2002, when a Coptic priest had moved his seat from the agreed place, into the shade. The Ethiopians regarded this as a hostile act of aggression, and a fight broke out, which resulted in eleven people being injured.

  Julie walked toward the church entrance and disappeared inside. I remained alone, looking at the groups entering devoutly and emerging even more devoutly. When she reappeared, she was so exhausted by her emotions that she expressed a wish to leave the place quickly. I didn’t pursue it, but asked instead about the holy incense, and she confirmed that she had bought some. Then we turned around, to find Salman and Aida waiting for us at the corner.

  We all walked together in silence until we left by the Damascus Gate.

  *

  Salman stopped his car halfway up the hill. “This is Dr. Fahmy’s house. And there they are.”

  It was an odd scene. Fahmy and his wife were sitting at a large rectangular table set in the middle of a leafy terrace, like two people sitting on the edge of a public road. There was no sign of any house or building. In a side area were two cars which must have belonged to the couple. Salman drove his car in, parked it behind one of the other two cars, then got out. We followed him, Julie with a large bunch of roses we had bought on the way to the house, and I with the porcelain statue in my hands. We had already taken the statue out of the box it had traveled in—surrounded by pieces of sponge to protect it from breaking—and wrapped it in pretty colored paper.

  After everyone had finished shaking hands and exchanging kisses, the first thing I said was, “Where’s the house, doctor?”

  He gave a deep laugh and replied, “Underneath us, man! Surely Salman must have told you . . . .” He gestured.

  The house was perched on a slope at the bottom of the mountain. The garage was on top, and not at the bottom as usual. Residents went in through the terrace above the third floor, and then down into the body of the house.

  Nada accepted the flowers with a smile as rosy as the flowers themselves. I put the statue to one side. As we were taking our places around the table, which had been laid with bottles of wine and light nibbles, I noticed that Nada had a look of satisfaction on her face, which made her look different from the woman we’d met at supper the previous day. I felt relieved, and put out of my mind the cross look I’d seen in her eyes when Salman had broached the subject of Ivana’s ashes. I turned to Julie and saw a look of relief on her face that mirrored the relief I felt inside me.

  We made some general conversation. As we talked, we took some wine, and this and that from the nibbles. Then Julie got up from her chair and I realized that the moment was upon us, that what had been just pre
liminaries were now the real thing, and that Julie had decided to commence the third and final ritual for saying farewell to Ivana, following the cremating of her body and the scattering of half her ashes over the River Thames.

  Julie took her glass and asked the others to raise theirs. I looked at her, and I saw my mother-in-law in front of me: the same confident stance; the humble pride of a resident of Acre; the gaze that took in the others. I heard words that fondly recalled the rhythm of her mother’s words: “Friends, let us drink to the health of a woman who wanted to return home—even if only half the ashes of her body, and half a sinful spirit. We say farewell to her, ask God’s mercy upon her, and beg forgiveness for her.”

  As the expressions of mercy humbly made their way from her lips to the open air like a prayer, Julie took out a stick of incense and lit it with a match. I moved my glass and some of the plates from the table in front of me, and Nada hurried to help me. I took the statue and put it on the table. Then, like someone peeling a fruit, I slowly tore the paper in which it had been wrapped. As Ivana’s porcelain body started to emerge in front of us, Nada’s eyes grew larger, filled with a look of amazement.

  “Incredible!” she exclaimed. “Amazing, a real gem!” Then she asked to hug the statue to her breast. When I had finished removing the paper and the whole statue could be seen, I passed it to our hostess, who stood up and took it, then hugged it, and kissed it with her lips and tear-filled eyes. Nada gestured to Julie to come over to her, which she did, and the two women stood together, Nada with the statue held up between her hands, and Julie holding the lighted incense stick, which had begun to send out clouds of holy smoke. As the smell of the incense filled our chests, I went up to Fahmy without thinking, and we took positions together behind the women, while Salman and Aida stood behind us.