A Month by the Sea (3 page)

As I tried to think of some comforting comment Abdallah, who had ambled back to the Gate, suddenly yelled and beckoned. I sprinted to join him. He was laughing and clapping and repeating ‘OK! OK!’ Hastily we shook hands before I made to step through the main Gate, being held slightly open for me by a man waving my passport. But then someone slammed the heavy mass of iron against my breasts (very painful) and I was locked out – by my old enemy, he who first said ‘No!’, the senior officer with the white uniform, lavishly gold-braided. I pointed out that the blue-uniformed man, holding my passport, had invited me in. Whereupon his senior snatched the passport and gave it to a man in civvies who drove out of sight in a shiny new limousine. He wasn’t seen again for one hour and forty minutes, during which time I’d no idea whether or
not I’d get in. Was this a bribing situation? If so, I didn’t feel like giving a present to any of these uncommonly nasty men. Now more busloads were arriving and all was in such flux one felt officials were making it up as they went along. Later we heard that
high-level
confusion had prevailed throughout the day as Egyptians and Israelis quarrelled over how best to deal with Naksa Day border demos, should they happen. Then some policy shift or softening of bureaucratic hearts allowed a dozen Gazans to trickle through. When Gulf State returnees pushed smallish bags under the
side-gate
these were quickly appropriated and loaded onto porters’ trolleys by un-uniformed louts who rushed them into a nearby building – and perhaps held them to ransom.

Meanwhile one-person dramas – like my own – were being played out on the edges of the throng. For hours I had been aware of an anxious young man – shabbily dressed, his holdall held together with string – who clung doggedly to the Gate and diffidently attempted to argue his case whenever an official came within earshot. Now his wife appeared on the other side, holding a toddler son who squealed joyously on recognising father. Moments later a junior policeman strode towards them with bad news. Father’s application to enter had been decisively rejected and mother had no right to be in this space near the Gate. Again the young man kissed his son through Rafah’s iron bars, then sobbed goodbye to his weeping wife who quickly walked away – the toddler looking over her shoulder, his arms outstretched towards his father. As the young man picked up his holdall and turned back to the pole-barrier, tears were flowing and I wanted to hug him. But such bodily contact with a female (however octogenarian) would have been inappropriate.

Back at the café, craving a strong drink, I had to choose between Coca-Cola and Nescafé made with dodgy water. The American was again being querulous, this time about his sunburn; he seemed to think the sun itself, as a hostile entity, was to blame. He planned
to return to Cairo with Abdallah. The Canadian citizen had gone, having met someone offering a cut-price tunnel walk. Everyone was hungry, the café was foodless. Abdallah remained smiley and optimistic; all my documents were in order, eventually they’d let me in. But I couldn’t persuade him to go home
before
they did so.

I pondered the true significance of those documents. Only my passport seemed of interest; the Egyptian exit permit, in theory so important, was being perversely ignored. As was the formal letter of invitation from Nabil al-Helou. Nabil and Nermeen were an elderly couple whose youngest son (a Cork University student) I had met in May at a Dublin pro-Palestine rally. Hearing of my plan to rent a room in Gaza, as I had done in Balata, he promoted his family’s spare flat and promptly made all necessary arrangements by email. Abdallah had tried to ring Nabil soon after our arrival at the Gate, hoping a foreigner’s Gazan host might be able to cut Rafah’s Gordian knot, but his cell phone wouldn’t talk to a Gaza phone.

At 3.15 a youth came running towards us waving his arms and making strange sounds which might have been ‘Dervla Murphy’ in Arabic. This time we didn’t allow ourselves to become
over-excited
– yet it was true, I really could enter through the side-gate. Having given Abdallah a grateful embrace and a very large tip I passed between two brown-uniformed men and was in Gaza – or so I thought.

With difficulty I evaded three competing trolley louts and hurried across a wide empty plaza between grassy borders, stubby palms and lines of whitewashed one-storey offices. The Gaza City bus stop must surely be close … Then the plaza narrowed and I swore and ground my few remaining teeth. A sprawling edifice, guarded by Egyptian soldiers and labelled TRAVEL HOUSE in high yellow letters, completely blocked the way ahead. I was still in Egypt, now at the mercy of immigration officers, policemen, currency clerks, customs inspectors, exit fee collectors and truculent army officers. (Those last because of Naksa Day.)

In ‘Passport Control’, a vast concourse, scores of travellers sat on a phalanx of metal chairs in the centre of the floor – from where they could watch their luggage, piled against the walls. I saw some familiar faces and several Gulf Staters were lamenting ‘lost’ bags. Small children slept in corners; their older siblings romped tirelessly and were the only jolly people in sight. Of course being
inside
made this a different sort of ordeal, exhausting yet free of suspense. Here everything was organised – moving very, very slowly but one could discern a pattern. The Immigration Officers processed passports in bulk, a bus-load at a time. Then names were shouted, owners went to the counter, handed over a stamp costing two Egyptian pounds (about 50 US cents) and watched it being stuck to the relevant page. I stood alone at the 20-foot-long counter and slid my passport under high brass bars, smiling ingratiatingly at an officer with a bulbous skull, a sharply pointed chin and rotten teeth. As a solo traveller, perhaps I could have my passport stamped without delay. But alas! my being a brazen lone woman obviously irritated this officer. Glancing at me spitefully, he placed the foreign passport
under
a pile of 44 Gulf-State travel documents. It was then 3.50. Ten minutes later another clerk neatly stacked all those IDs on a wire tray and took them upstairs. At 4.40 they reappeared and a third clerk spread them on a desk in a far corner and carefully copied all details into a massive Victorian-era ledger.

Meanwhile I’d been having a currency crisis. The stamp-seller (a policeman wearing a distinctive arm-band) rejected a US
one-dollar
bill. He could accept only Egyptian money – I
must
change – but not here because the currency clerk had just gone off duty. I stared at him in silent dismay, foreseeing a long night on the Travel House floor. Suddenly he relented, gave me my stamp and sent a trolley boy to wherever irregular currency changes happen. I didn’t even register that the Egyptian state now owed me fifty US cents. It was quite a moving experience to be handed two Egyptian pounds, half an hour later, by the trolley boy.

Reunited with my passport, I hurried through a long wide corridor where in the old days luggage was x-rayed. Free at last? No, not quite – at the far end, barring the exit, three men in civvies sat on a wooden bench beside a new-looking notice saying DEPARTURE FEE. No amount was specified; those officers demanded what they estimated they could get – EP 120 in my case. Another currency crisis, another youth sent off to – wherever … Now at last I could see The Border, an enormous wooden gate where a soldier glanced at IDs before passengers boarded a luxury coach, with laden trailer attached. This takes one a few miles to the EUBAM building. It surprised me that nobody cheered as we passed beneath a colourful archway saying ‘Welcome to Palestine!’ and flying the Palestinian flag.

Here all was simple and swift. A tall, polite, English-speaking PA official, his precise status unclear, took charge of the one foreign arrival, led me past the customs queue, paused for two minutes to register my passport on a computer, rang Nabil and requested a communal taxi (a
serveece
) driver to leave me on the al-Helou doorstep. My fellow-passengers spoke no English, seemed ill at ease with the lone woman and ignored me. I sat in the back between two fortyish clean-shaven men who argued incessantly with the short-bearded driver and his young friend in the front seat – long-bearded and long-robed, his turban untidy and his gesticulations uncontrolled. He was not a typical Gazan.

What little I could see of the Strip from a speeding taxi was as expected: depressing. Time has been unkind to the region. In 1500
BC
, according to a Karnak inscription, Gaza was flourishing, renowned for its rich soil and deep-water harbour. Thereafter the usual suspects came and went: Egyptians, Philistines, Canaanites, Israelites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders,
Mamluks
, Ottomans, British. Ironically, now-isolated Gaza ranked for centuries among the Near East’s most cosmopolitan cities, where travellers met en route to or from Egypt, Central Asia, East Africa,
Arabia. Always there was much fighting, trading and building; not until the twentieth century did the Strip lose its cultural and commercial significance. In the spring of 1917 the Royal Flying Corps sent SE5s to help Allenby’s troops by dropping so many 250-pound bombs that most Gazans fled. (One forgets that until 1940 Britain’s cavalry and airforce coexisted.)

The Strip’s population was less than 35,000 in 1948; after partition it rose, within months, to 170,000. In 1996 Gaza City, towards which we were now travelling, became the PA’s administrative centre, sometimes wrongly described as its ‘seat of government’. (The 1993–5 Oslo Accords did not allow Palestinians to govern themselves.) Now ‘Gaza’ has become synonymous with ‘blockade-as-punishment’ and by 2011 more than 75 per cent of families were wholly or partly dependent on food aid.

Throughout the Strip small ragged dark-green flags hang from electricity poles or are strung as bunting across busy streets – reminders that Hamas Rules OK. The IDF have left many speed bumps on the reasonably well-maintained roads. These explain a low accident rate despite the popular Palestinian belief that if Allah doesn’t want you to die you can get away with breaking all the rules. In Gaza City the dominant continuous sound is of motors hooting, loudly and continuously; private car ownership is rare, yet a Gazan conviction that vehicles won’t move unless fingers are kept on horns gives an aural impression of heavy traffic.

The driver’s excitable friend got off near Bureij camp, the others were delivered to apartment blocks near my destination – Rimal district, which retains many traces of poshness. Because the kind driver had been busy on his mobile, the whole adult al-Helou family stood smiling on the pavement outside their front door: Nabil and Nermeen, their married son Khalil and his wife Amal, their unmarried son Mehat. (Two other married sons have long been settled in Europe.) The al-Helous are ‘native’ Gazans, rooted on the Strip for uncountable generations. Their four-storey family
home, pleasingly Ottoman-influenced, has been divided into flats and everyone escorted me to the top floor, roomy enough for a family of six – at the other end of the comfort scale from my Balata squat on the West Bank. Astonishment was expressed because I wouldn’t be using the microwave, the washing machine or the iron. Also some relief: electricity cuts wouldn’t bother me too much. However, as in many otherwise luxurious non-Western homes, the most important mod con was missing: a bedside light.

In the elders’ flat a ‘Welcome to Gaza’ meal awaited me and at the time seemed almost embarrassingly lavish. I was to discover that all Nermeen’s meals are equally lavish and memorable. Cooking, she explained, is her main hobby. Whereupon Nabil corrected her, preferring to describe his wife’s dishes as works of art.

I was asleep before dark; it had been quite a gruelling day.

Waking at dawn, for a moment I fancied myself back in Cuba. The only sound was the brisk clip-clopping of horse traffic as farmers drove their produce to market. My bedroom window overlooked a mature olive grove and a small, surprisingly green lawn with flowery borders. Next door lived a Christian family, also ‘natives’ and lifelong friends of the al-Helous. ‘It’s sad,’ Nabil had said, ‘that by now most Christians have left Gaza.’

Soon after my return from a walk in the cool of the morning, through dreary littered streets, Atef rang – oddly, this being his first day at home. ‘Is OK I show you Gaza now? Only today I have. My father goes for long treatment to al-Shifa hospital – kidney cleaning. I leave him there, then find you living near it. At 9.30 is OK?’

By 9.30 I was waiting on the pavement, chatting to Khalil and two of his friends who chanced to be passing. When Atef flung his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks all three young men hastily turned away before I could do introductions. (Khalil
later commented that it’s easy to forget how to behave during a long exile in Westernised Cairo.) Unaware of his solecism, Atef led me around the corner to father’s car, a new Volvo imported though a tunnel and looking aggressively affluent in contrast to Gaza’s average vehicle. I would not have chosen to glean my first impressions from the cool comfort of a walnut-panelled limousine but I do believe in ‘letting things happen’. And our tour proved illuminating. My companion, home for the first time since 2002, reacted with mixed and sometimes disconcerting emotions to the many profound changes. Politically he seemed a babe in arms and when I provided current facts and figures, based on my recent homework, they didn’t really interest him.

Before switching on the engine Atef switched on a gadget
displaying
numerous pictures of his daughter Mira, then aged seven months and one week. She had, it seemed, been photographed several times a day since birth. Skirting Beach/Shatti camp we drove along wide, dismal al-Nasser Street where Israel’s blockade has killed businesses that were still alive – if only just – before the Second Intifada began in 2000. Mingling with the motor vehicles were scores of horse- and donkey-carts, most animals well-fed, the more shapely Arab horses groomed to a glossiness not usually associated with draught animals in poor communities. Atef looked puzzled when I admired the cart-drivers’ skill, and their animals’ remarkable adaptability, and the motorists’ intelligent coping with these equine rivals for space. He glared at a horse’s ear, three inches from his window, and said, ‘Soon I hope we ban these carts. They are uncivilised and wrong in a modern city. On the West Bank you don’t see this.’ He ignored my riposte that, given polar ice-caps in meltdown, animal transport is the only sensible way forward, its waste fertilising the earth instead of polluting the air.