Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  Then he would turn and walk off, to be swallowed up by the airport.

  As for her real husband Basim, she said—with some reluctant satisfaction—that he had been working for some time as a teacher in Birzeit University, and that he was in good shape. But he had refused to settle in Jaffa. Before moving to live in Ramallah, he told her that his love was in Jaffa, but his dreams were in Birzeit. And she told him that her love was in Birzeit, but her dreams were the dreams of a Jaffan.

  She said nothing for a moment, but seemed unhappy with her silence, and quickly broke it to say, “Ever since Basim left here, our marriage has become a sort of ‘transit’: sometimes he comes to me, and sometimes I go to him. Our whole life has become a ‘take away.’”

  During lunch, I was busy removing a small, slender fishbone from my fish when the restaurant manager, Abu Zaki, came up to me, and whispered that he had left a table reserved in a nice corner of the restaurant, which he would not allow anyone to sit at. He said it was for an exiled Palestinian writer, a mutual friend on Facebook, and that it would stay waiting for him until he was able to come to the country and visit the restaurant. Abu Zaki had given instructions to all the restaurant staff to change the tablecloth every day, and to put a new bunch of roses on the table. I stopped what I was doing, and listened, astonished, to what the man was saying. He confirmed that the table would continue to wait for its rightful occupant until he and his staff saw him in the restaurant, sitting there and looking at the sea. Abu Zaki would then send a group of fishermen into the open sea, and prepare appetizers for him until the fishermen brought back fish worthy of his return.

  Amid Julie and Jinin’s astonished gasps, which could be heard through the whole restaurant, I showered him with sarcastic looks, and accused him jokingly of acting the fool. Abu Zaki grabbed me by the right arm and pulled me up. I left the table, and had hardly taken two paces when Julie caught up with me, followed by Jinin. The man led us to a table by the restaurant window, which looked over the merrily clashing waves. I stood with the two women beside Abu Zaki, looking incredulously at a table, in the middle of which was a vase holding a bunch of roses, with a white, pyramid-shaped piece of porcelain in front of it. With confused emotions, we read what was written on it in English, Arabic, and Hebrew: ‘Reserved for the Palestinian writer Khaled Issa.’

  I asked a waiter in the restaurant to take a group photo on my cellphone of us all around Khaled Issa’s table, which he did. Then I quickly published it on my Facebook page, as we all returned to our table and finished our lunch. When we had finished eating, I cried in a voice that reached Khaled Issa in Sweden, but was heard by no one else.

  I turned to Jinin, who was drinking her coffee, and asked her where she actually lived, having now discovered that the place in the old Jaffa Citadel was just a house for her in her novel, and that the real occupier was a foreigner called Mark Rosenblum. She said that she lived in a rented apartment in Jaffa Street, which she said was next to the sea. The apartment was a reasonable size, and got the sun most of the day, on its east side in the morning, and the west side in the evening. It had a balcony, which overlooked a back street, and was shaded by the leaves of an enormous tree. She said that because of this she had started to live in two streets and belong to two neighborhoods—she would watch the pedestrians in the morning from the window to the east, and spend happy evenings on the balcony overlooking the sea.

  I had enough time left before our train back to Haifa for me to ask my postponed questions about Filastini Tays—especially the scene that left the reader in suspense, when The Remainer went out from his house carrying two signs on which he had stuck two pictures, one of the massacres at Deir Yassin, and the other of the massacres that the Jews had suffered in Kiev. At the time, he had told Husniya that he would be going to Rabin Square (formerly known as Kings of Israel Square, until the right-wing extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995), which made his wife’s heart quiver like the stalks of mulukhiyeh between her fingers, as Jinin had put it in her novel.

  Jinin put her cup of coffee to one side, and began.

  “I’ll tell you first,” she said, “about my father, Mahmoud Dahman, whose story has been with you since you were a small child, Walid, as you told me the first time we met in your house in London. Then we’ll talk about the scene you referred to in the novel.

  “Just two days before his death, I traveled to Amman to attend the wedding of Asdud, the daughter of my sister Bisan, and I brought back with me a video of the wedding for him to watch. He hadn’t been able to travel to take part in it or celebrate the wedding of his granddaughter, because his illness had been getting worse. Despite being unable to sit on the sofa to watch the television for more than a quarter of an hour, he watched the whole video, which took a full hour to show. He smiled as he pointed at all the relatives who were at the wedding. Suddenly, he recalled Ghazza, and asked me, ‘Why didn’t Ghazza attend her niece’s wedding? She went to visit Gaza, so she could have traveled from Dammam to Amman to attend the wedding!’

  “‘Ghazza didn’t know the date of the wedding, Father,’ I replied, ‘because your granddaughter’s fiancé postponed it twice. Then Ghazza went straight to Gaza, and she couldn’t get out, either via the Rafah crossing or by the Beit Hanun crossing. Ghazza was lost in Gaza, Father.’

  “He shook his head and said, with a sorrow that was to be the last sorrow of his life, ‘I wish I hadn’t left Ghazza in Gaza the year of the nakba. I wish I’d brought her out with me, her and her mother.’ Then he asked me to take his hand and help him get up, then take him to his room so that he could lie down on his bed.

  “His death was hard and painful for both him and me. All his children were scattered far away, inside and outside the country. Even Filastin, the eldest of us, missed the moment when our father passed from us. He’d been out since the morning, looking for work. Poor Filastin, he was in the same situation as my husband Basim, perhaps even more complicated. Whenever he found a job and submitted an application for it, he received a rejection because of his name. Once, the official told him quite openly and brazenly, ‘Come back when you’ve changed your name, my friend!’”

  Jinin wiped away the tears that had crept into her eyes, as Julie and I wiped away a cloud of sadness that had swept over our faces. Then Jinin put her hand into her bag and took out some papers. She selected one of them and said, “This is the last scene I sketched for The Remainer.” But instead of reading from the page she’d taken out, she put it to one side and said, “Let me also wrap up part of another puzzle, Walid. It’s important for my readers, in fact.”

  I listened to her without interrupting as she continued. “Do you recall when The Remainer took the two pictures, and was about to go out, but felt the heavy key in his pocket at the door, so he propped the two pictures up to one side, and went back into his room?”

  When I assured her that I did remember, she went on. “Well, my father put the key in his desk drawer. After he’d died, I passed by the desk and found the drawer unlocked. I pulled it open and found in it a notebook of his memoirs. On top was a piece of paper on which was written: ‘Let everyone read them.’ I understood. I became preoccupied with publishing the memoirs of my real father. Your friend, Salman Jabir in Haifa, is going to publish them for me.”

  Then she turned to Julie to apologize to her, and said, “I shall have to read the scene relating to the end of the novel in Arabic, so I hope Walid can summarize it for you later in English.” Julie nodded in agreement, and I did the same. So Jinin proceeded to read:

  The Remainer went out, carrying the two signs, and headed in the direction of Rabin Square. When he reached it, he stood with the two signs held up in his hands, next to the speakers’ platform. There were more than half a million Israelis in the square, holding a rally to celebrate the victory of an extremist right-wing party in the parliamentary elections. Then, in a clumsy challenge to a group of madmen, he started singing the Internationale.

  Suddenly,
a shot rang out. The demonstrators pushed each other, shouting in alarm: Aravim, Aravim! Shout was piled on shout as they rushed in all directions. At that moment, The Remainer fell to the ground, his blood covering two shattered wooden signs by his side.

  Mahmoud Dahman died, the man who was my father and who played his own part in this novel. The cleverest man I knew in my life, and the stubbornest Palestinian in the book. A man who refused to leave the country in 1948, both in reality and in these pages, despite the fires, destruction, death, fear, and murder, which were as widespread as a reckless autumn storm come to harvest everything. He died under the feet of Israelis stampeding with fear, because of an illusion on which their parties and politicians, left and right alike, had been living. He died proclaiming to them, in sound and image, a humanity free from any blemishes that men themselves might attach to it.

  But The Remainer didn’t actually die. I rebelled against my closing scene of the novel you have read, a probable scene of death, in the light of the rise to power of the Israeli right, and the rapid drift of the country toward the extreme right and the hatred of everything Arab. The Remainer arose from his presumed death, picked up his two signs, and left the square, which had ended its celebration of an angry rightist inferno. He walked away from the torn placards that those taking part had left behind—together with their cigarette stubs, empty cartons, and shards of drinks bottles—in the biggest Israeli square in the country, and departed.

  The Remainer walked back with his two signs that no one had looked at. He walked on, accompanied by a voice that repeated the Internationale with him and promised him that they would return together:

  So, comrades, come rally,

  And the last fight let us face,

  The Internationale unites the human race!

  “My God, Jinin, what a beautiful, fantastic ending!” I cried, and Julie, who had been watching the emotions cross my face, cheered along with me.

  9

  The Tenth Day

  Walid and Julie completed their travel formalities in Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda. Before sitting down at a table in the spacious circular departure lounge, waiting to be called for boarding via Terminal 3, Gate C-9, Walid ordered two cups of coffee for himself and Julie, and the pair of them sat there sipping them, mulling over the events of the preceding nine days. The tenth and final day of their trip would be complete when they arrived in London in the evening.

  Walid Ahmad Dahman

  Against the background of the footsteps of the Ethiopian girls who worked in the airport, Walid came to himself, to ask Julie jokingly, “Shall we buy a piece of land in the Dahman quarter that was originally ours?” In his heart, he thought it unlikely that the Amidar Israel National Housing company would sell him land that most Jews considered a gift from a god they’d appointed as director of a company selling land and real estate that belonged to Palestinians in exile. But his heart also acknowledged that Julie’s suggestion both disturbed him and aroused his curiosity, prompting him to pose several perplexing questions. Should he return after this visit as a tourist, to go from time to time to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, the Misrad Hapnim—like his relative Jinin, who although she had an Israeli passport, had struggled for years on behalf of her husband, Basim, to secure a residence permit in his own country? Would Walid apply for residence permits for himself and his wife in his own country? Where would they live? In Acre, which was no more than some fragments of recollections of old facts that Julie had gathered from her mother’s dreams and of present realities from their visit that they were now bringing to a close? Or in his birthplace of al-Majdal Asqalan, where he had opened his eyes after emerging from his mother’s womb, then perforce had closed them again and not set eyes on the place again for sixty-two years—to find it just the fragments of a city that had five thousand years ago been the flower of the cities of the Canaanites? What about Haifa, the mere mention of whose name was enough to drive every Palestinian mad? Haifa, at whose waters Salman had gazed from the window of the Kalamaris Restaurant, suspended in the air, and had seen it reposing calmly in its bay, the waves of the sea washing the feet of Mount Carmel. Wasn’t it Haifa that had made him madly shout its name, until the eyes of all those present were fixed on him and on us? “Woe, woe for this land, I don’t know how we lost it!” And several people in the restaurant, men and women alike, replied with one voice, until the mountain shuddered, and cried with them: “Woe, woe, and a hundred woes!” Haifa, with the Baha’i gardens hanging over its chest like bunches of joy; with the Arab cafés and restaurants adorning the chest of Abu Nuwas Street in the German quarter, letting Fairuz, Umm Kulthum, Halim, Amr Diab, Nancy Ajram, and the lovers of the evening and Arab entertainment, old and new, wander among their midst; Haifa, which blew the mind, even when Hezbollah shelled it and one of their rockets hit the building of al-Ittihad, the Haifa newspaper, and another rocket killed four of its Palestinian sons.

  Luda, Jamil, Aida, Salman, Julie, and Walid himself—Haifa really did drive everyone crazy!

  10

  Julie Littlehouse

  As she sipped her coffee, she took herself to task for hiding the truth of what had happened in her grandfather Manuel Ardakian’s house when she went to place the ashes of her mother there. She recalled the details of the bitter episode, and rehearsed to herself how she might relate them. She would need to decide whether to put it all in front of Walid as soon as the plane took off, or else deny it so that her heart would remain at peace forever.

  “When I reached the tenth step on the iron staircase that led up to the house, I stopped. I looked behind me. Fatima was still there, waiting for me at the bottom of the staircase. I went up step by step to the sound of the church bells ringing a strange, funereal peal. I kept going up until I reached the final step. I stood directly opposite the front door. The church bells stopped ringing. I felt their silence strangling me. I heard my heartbeats. I was nervous and afraid. I turned around again and noticed Fatima hit the air with her fist, then walk away. I understood her gesture. I turned around and banged on the door with my fist.

  “After a few seconds, the old, two-paneled door opened, and I found myself confronted by a woman, apparently in her fifties, blocking it with her arms. I explained to her briefly, in English, the purpose of my visit. She said something that I didn’t understand in reply, though I could feel the impact of her sharp tone. Then a man appeared behind her, at least ten years older than her, wearing thick glasses. He said something to her that sounded like a question. I looked from one to the other, imploring either of them to let me understand something of what they were saying, but without success. For a few moments, I was overcome by embarrassment, fear, and tension. The woman let her arms fall from the two edges of the door and stepped back a little. The man moved forward. He took her place and asked me in broken English what I wanted. I explained to him the purpose of my visit. When he understood, he jerked back and said first in Hebrew, ‘Lo, lo, lo, lo!,’ then in English, ‘No, no, no, no!’ as he refused my request.

  “‘Please, sir, the soul of my mother will never disturb you,’ I begged him. ‘Listen to me. She is listening to us now.’

  “‘Lo, lo, lo, lo!’

  “The man looked at the glass container like someone looking at an evil spirit that’s emerged from the darkness, wanting to drive it away. ‘We do not accept strangers in our house,’ he shouted. ‘Go on, go on, go away!’

  “I didn’t go away. My feet were nailed to the threshold of the door, almost against my will. The man rushed toward me, threw himself on me, and snatched the statue from my hands. He hurled it over my head and slammed the door hard in my face. The statue flew several meters up in the air, then fell. I heard the sound of it smashing on the staircase. I covered my mouth with my hands to stifle a scream from inside me as my body shook. The church bells started to sound again. I watched the ashes of my mother rise into space in small, scattered clouds, which disappeared in the city sky. I stared around me like a madwoman as I went
down the steps, then went back up again, until I chanced upon the silver chain lying on one of the steps, half of it hanging over the edge, covered with my mother’s ashes. I picked it up and quickly left.”

  Julie put down her empty coffee cup on the table. She closed her eyes for a few moments to listen to her inner voice, which was like a beating of her conscience. What will I gain if I tell this story to Walid? she wondered. Ivana wanted part of her body to return after her death, whether it stayed in a beautiful porcelain statue that looked like her—as she had dreamed before she died—or was scattered in the air of the city, and dispersed in its various quarters, as actually happened. And after it left Usfur Square, it could well have turned into a cloud, carried along by a light breeze, which would take it to every part of the country. In the end, Ivana returned to Acre.

  That comforted her. She smiled to herself, then turned her smile to Walid, and asked him, “Did you think about my suggestion?”

  Walid put his cup of coffee on the table. He looked into Julie’s eyes for a few seconds, and was about to say something, but was interrupted by an announcement: Terminal 3, Gate C-9 was now open for passengers on British Airways flight number 559 to London.

  The couple picked up their hand baggage, and held each other’s hand. Walid turned to Julie and said, “I think it’s a good idea.”