House of Many Tongues
Page 4
Shimon: All right. I’ll buy it, I’ll buy it. Just shut up already. We need to get started.
Abu Dalo: Why are you negotiating with me? Why not just have me arrested?
Shimon: I’m writing this book for my son.
Abu Dalo: So why don’t you just write this book yourself?
Shimon: I’m about to give you half this house and you’re asking why?
SHIMON pulls out the Mauser.
Abu Dalo: Not this again.
Shimon: I want you to call her “Golda.” She’s going to help us write. Aren’t you, Golda?
He puts it menacingly onto the table.
Abu Dalo: Well. Now that we’ve settled things I feel a whole lot better. Shall we?
Shimon: Title: The General and His Son: The Story of a Nation. How is that?
Abu Dalo: Arrogant as hell.
Shimon: Perfect. (ABU DALO types.)
“The General was born the child of German… something or others.”
Abu Dalo: Intellectuals?
Shimon: Whatever. “His father, a psychotherapist. His mother, a lousy poet. His parents lived in Berlin where they held saloons every Thursday afternoon—”
Abu Dalo: Salons—
Shimon: “—entertaining the crème of the crème of European art. Writers from Moscow. Maya…” something or other.
Abu Dalo: Mayakovsky.
Shimon: Fuck it, I can’t remember the other names. Make something up.
Abu Dalo: Proust. I like Proust.
Shimon: Whoever. “There were painters from Paris. Academics from London. Some guy named Bertolt Brecht came by and created a drink called the Rottweiler. Coffee, American bourbon and a dash of gasoline.”
I make none of this up.
“For years, his parents were the centre of artistic and intellectual bullshit.”
Abu Dalo: Bullshit?
Shimon: “It was his parents’ intelligence, after all, that led them to their fates. In 1943, the General’s parents were tragically escorted to the gas chambers.”
Abu Dalo: Uh huh.
Shimon: “While the General, at the age of two, was hidden beneath a convent. And by war’s end he saw everything as… Well. Dark.” How do you like that?
Abu Dalo: You should consider publishing this. The Holocaust sells.
Shimon: Of course it sells. It’s an original story.
It’s not every day six million people are systematically slaughtered.
“The General couldn’t speak until age six.
He ended up in a displaced persons camp in southern Germany. It was there he had to choose his fate: learn how to read or how to fix an engine. He chose the engine. Survival. His legacy. What he gave to a son.”
Abu Dalo: You can’t read? (a beat) And so you can’t write then? (a beat) Well. Things are becoming a little clearer now.
Shimon: You’ll be my eyes.
Abu Dalo: How the hell do you live without being able to read?
Shimon: I live with my hands.
Abu Dalo: But street signs and can labels. The basics.
Shimon: I manage just fine.
Abu Dalo: Who’s ever heard of a general who can’t read or write?
Shimon: I got by just fine.
Abu Dalo: Why didn’t you ever learn?
Shimon: I just said. The engine or the book. It was one or the other.
Abu Dalo: People have been known to do both.
Shimon: Not me. I was chosen not to read or write. That was my fate. Words slip off my eyes like water off a stone.
Abu Dalo: Who are you? Really.
Shimon: Aren’t we going to find that out?
Abu Dalo: Is this book going to be about the truth?
Shimon: Yes.
Abu Dalo: Then you have to tell me the truth.
Shimon: All right.
Abu Dalo: (typing) “The General had a natural inclination toward fixing things, and thus made those around him stronger.”
Shimon: Yes.
Abu Dalo: “While the Holocaust rendered him an atheist, the General became a believer thanks to the vision he had of the house.”
Shimon: True.
Abu Dalo: “A twist of fate brought us his co-biographer: the Palestinian.”
Shimon: Good.
Abu Dalo: “Illiterate and compassionate, the General has a deep-seated need to understand the enemy. To fix all problems. To maintain the engine of his country.”
Shimon: “It was in that spirit the Palestinian and Jew forged a bond. Brought together by circumstance, fate, destiny.”
SHIMON picks up the gun and starts to polish it.
Abu Dalo: “This is a story, told from one man to his enemy. And from his enemy to the world.”
Shimon: Introduction.
Scene 8
The same day. ALEX’s bedroom. Reading.
Alex: “As my father’s generation was so focused on fighting for this land, on war as the only solution to dealing with our enemies, of pushing forward, hard against them, into land, we, as followers of the Cunnilingus Manifesto, hereby renounce the act of copulation in favour of ten years strict cunnilingual training. It is possible that at the end of this process we may return to an era that would involve penetration. This thesis–antithesis line of progression is otherwise known as cunnilingual materialism.”
Rivka: Alex, we need to be quiet. Your dad can’t know I’m here.
Alex: What was my dad like when he was younger?
Rivka: He was fearless. Had so much energy he couldn’t sit still. But he always said you were the best thing that happened to him. You calmed him right down.
Alex: So he was a good general?
Rivka: One of the best.
Alex: Was he a good man?
Rivka: Of course. He took care of you. He raised you by himself.
Alex: You ever live with someone for years, but realize at a certain point that you don’t actually know who they are?
Rivka: Sure. That’s what being in a family’s all about.
Alex: I don’t know my father at all. He talks about the army all the time, his achievements and successes, yet he has no medals. He remembers entire vistas where battles were fought, down to the exact stone, and yet there are no pictures. He talks about the buddies he fought with, but none of them ever drop by. None of it adds up.
Rivka: Your father’s a strange man. I mean, he’s a survivor, you know?
Alex: Why did he leave the army at such an early age?
Rivka: To take care of you, of course.
Alex: Right. (writing)
Rivka: What are you writing?
Alex: None of your business.
Rivka: What’s wrong?
Alex: What’s wrong is that everything is becoming so much more clear.
You. My father. You’re in on this together. Hiding things from me.
Rivka: I hide nothing from you.
Alex: Of course you do.
Rivka: What are you writing?
Alex: It’s not important.
Rivka: Read it to me.
Alex: (a beat) Okay. On one condition: you say yes.
Rivka: Yes what?
Alex: Yes, I’ll let Alex practise his cunnilingus—
Rivka: Are you trying to blackmail me into having sex with you?
Alex: I don’t want sex, Rivka. I want to give you cunnilingus.
Rivka: (a beat) They’re sending me to Hebron next week. I’ll be working the checkpoint.
Alex: Well, have fun protecting whacked-out settlers and shooting at little kids who throw stones.
Rivka: I believe in this. It’s my duty. It’s my choice. Tell me what you wrote, Alex.
Alex: Chapter Three:
“No legionnaires of the Cunnilingus Manifesto may join the armed forces of any nation, nor will they bear arms, condoms or parachutes.”
Rivka: You have to do your service.
Alex: I can refuse. I’ll just say I’m not Israeli.
Rivka: Don’t be an idiot. Of course you’re I
sraeli.
Alex: I floated down the river in a basket. Come here. I want to practise my cunnilingual materialism.
Rivka: Alex. What the fuck’s gotten into you?
Alex: I’m trying to get deeper into this. You know. Trying to figure out what this manifesto is really about.
Rivka: It’s about being fifteen. Whatever. (a beat) Why don’t you just hold me?
Alex: Hold you?
Rivka: We can lie on your bed. And you can hold me.
Alex: Why on earth would I do that?
Rivka: (a beat) Did you hear that Ilan Ramon—
Alex: Not interested. It’s the wrong science, Rivka. I don’t care about outer space anymore.
Rivka: But you love him. He went up in the shuttle today.
Alex: Ilan Ramon was so fourteen.
Fifteen is the dawn of a whole new age.
Goodbye Rivka.
Exit RIVKA. ALEX opens up the ammunitions box and starts to read from its contents.
The Camel: Today the astronaut Ilan Ramon boarded the space shuttle Columbia
and left everything behind:
Fig trees, toilets, manifestos, checkpoints—
this messy world full of messy humans.
Truth is, sometimes you gotta get away—
perspective is important when it comes to situations as complex as the Middle East.
Who is right and who is wrong? Who does this house belong to?
What are we to make of the history of these men?
Ilan Ramon has to go so far to get perspective he’s gone all the way to outer space.
There he is—I can see him. He is the hope of a nation.
He’s a light unto nations.
He’s up there, listening to a universe without promises.
Maybe he can even hear the sound of peace.
Scene 9
A few days later. ABU DALO sitting at the typewriter. SHIMON drinking beer.
Abu Dalo: “And the land speaks in the language of our forefathers.”
Shimon: Read that passage over to me again.
Abu Dalo: “1988. The Jordan–Israel border.
The day was like any other in the West Bank. Past the Palestinian farmers and their olive trees, the Jewish settlers and their melodic prayers. Here you can see the rocky hillsides, the rushing waters of the Jordan River. Here the air is clear, the sun is gold, and the land speaks in the language of our forefathers.”
Shimon: Oh yes. I like that.
ABU DALO typing.
Abu Dalo: “Dusk was coming in like a sail. The General took heart in the darkness, in the shadows thick like leaves—”
Shimon: Okay, okay, enough poetry—
Enter ALEX.
Abu Dalo: “When, all of a sudden, a basket came drifting by—”
Shimon: That’s right, a basket—no bigger than my leg—
Abu Dalo: “No bigger than our hero’s thigh—”
Shimon: What the fuck, I said.
Abu Dalo: “‘What is it before my eyes?’ He asked the heavens.”
Shimon: A baby.
Abu Dalo: “A child.”
Shimon: Alone on the river.
Abu Dalo: “Floating on the tears of his mother.”
Shimon: Oh. I like that.
Abu Dalo: “Who this boy’s mother was, what he was doing in the basket, is a mystery, one that haunts both hero and son.”
Shimon: No. There was no torment. No haunting.
Abu Dalo: Then it was a vision.
Shimon: I picked up the baby—
Abu Dalo: (typing) “While the First Intifada simmered in the universities of Ramallah and in the streets of Nablus, a miracle occurred.”
Shimon: Yes!
Abu Dalo: (typing) “The General brought life into his arms—”
Shimon: I brought him home.
I gave him a bris and raised him myself.
“Thus the General’s second vision made manifest the first: a child.
To fulfill his promise to the house, at last.”
Alex: Question. What were you doing by the Jordan River?
Shimon: I was washing my hands.
Alex: Why were they dirty?
Shimon: Work. It was hot. The air was full of dust and sweat.
Alex: What sort of work?
Shimon: I was Brigadier General of the West Bank Division. Central Command.
Alex: What does such a general do?
Shimon: He protects the land.
Alex: Can you be more specific?
ABU DALO typing.
Shimon: “The General protected Judea and Samaria,
the land given to his people, as the old prophets prophesied.
And he engaged with his enemies. Fearlessly.”
Alex: What about the normal people living in the West Bank? Were they the enemy too?
Shimon: Some were. It’s difficult to separate good from bad, foe from friend.
Alex: Were mistakes made?
Shimon: Of course mistakes were made. It’s the nature of war.
Alex: How did you feel when you saw people living in refugee camps and not homes?
Shimon: A general cannot make decisions based on a feeling.
A general must try to uphold the moral standard, objectively and precisely. He must do his job. End of chapter.
Exit SHIMON.
Alex: It’s a bit strange a former Israeli general has a Palestinian writing for him.
Abu Dalo: Your father’s a strange man. He says he can’t read or write.
Alex: Do you have any books published, Mr. Abu Dalo?
Abu Dalo: A few. I wrote them many years ago. And they’re not in your libraries.
Alex: So the books got you in trouble.
Abu Dalo: You could say that.
Alex: Hmmm. I admire that. Getting in trouble for writing something you believe in is, like, every writer’s dream.
Abu Dalo: I suppose. If you consider prison romantic.
Alex: My father’s book is totally boring.
Abu Dalo: It’s full of lies.
Alex: So why are you helping him write it? (a beat) Are you a liar too?
Abu Dalo: (sarcastically) No. Everything I say and do is one hundred percent honest.
Alex: I never lie.
Abu Dalo: Then you’re one in a million, kid.
Look, let me give you some advice: when and if you ever grow up, you’ll learn that everyone lies. It’s what being an adult is all about: pretending you’re something that you’re not. The successful ones are those who pull it off.
Alex: Yeah, well I guess my father is a pretty rotten failure then.
ALEX shows ABU DALO the ammunitions box. Opens it up to reveal its contents. ABU DALO reads the documents inside.
Abu Dalo: Where’d you get this?
Alex: I found it.
ABU DALO reads some more.
Abu Dalo: Do you realize what you have here?
Alex: I think so.
Abu Dalo: Does he know you found this?
Alex: He doesn’t have a clue.
Abu Dalo: Why are you showing this to me?
Alex: Mr. Abu Dalo, you can have this on one condition: you do something with it.
Abu Dalo: I’m going to do the only thing I can: take it to the press. I’ll humiliate him. That’s what you want, isn’t it?
Exit ALEX.
THE HOUSE enters.
It’s the only choice I have. Publish or perish. You should be all mine. You have to be all mine. It’s the only weapon I have. It’s the only thing I can do to him. I talked to my daughter Suha. She said they’d be here today.
I didn’t even recognize her voice. I thought it was Yuad I was talking to. She’s fifteen now.
The House: Tell me your first morning.
Abu Dalo: Yuad is in bed, sleeping. I get up early and sweep your floors. I make some coffee, then I clean the bathroom—
The House: I like a clean bathroom.
The House: A renovation.
Abu Dalo: What should I wear?
The House: Something clean.
Abu Dalo: I was thinking of buying Yuad a bed.
The House: A bed is like the sail of a ship.
Abu Dalo: We’ll have great dinners. We’ll sit on the bed together and read to each other.
The House: This will be an Arab house. This will be your home.
Abu Dalo: We’ll be a normal family.
Enter SUHA singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” She knocks on the door. ABU DALO opens it. Enter SUHA carrying a Ziploc bag with fleshy red bits in one hand and a pigeon in a cage in the other.