In an Antique Land (40 page)

Piling the photographs together, he put them away again, rearranging his suitcase in the process. I could tell from the way he did it that packing his suitcase had become a habit with him.

‘I made a mistake,' he said at last, shutting the suitcase. ‘I thought a degree would help me, so I went to college. It was an exciting time and I learnt so much, but at the end of it, look, what am I doing? I'm a construction worker. I wasted time by going to college; I missed the best opportunities.'

And as a measure of his folly, there was the example of his brother Mohammad, who had planned his future better.
Mohammad was a year younger than Jabir, but he looked older, being taller and more heavily built. Unlike Jabir, he had never taken an interest in his studies and had barely managed to get through school; the thought of going to college had never entered his mind. Instead, he did his National Service as soon as possible, and then apprenticed himself to a carpenter in a nearby village. After spending a few months in acquiring the rudiments of the trade, he got himself a job in Jordan—that was at a time when jobs were still easy to get. He'd been in Jordan ever since, making good money. Recently he had written to say that he was coming home for a while—there was a chance that he might be able to get a job in Italy soon and he wanted to make arrangements for his future.

Jabir broke off there, his lips tightly pursed. He wouldn't say any more but the rest was clear enough: Mohammad wanted to get married before going off again. He had probably saved enough money to buy a house or an apartment—in Damanhour perhaps, or somewhere else—so he was now in a position to make a good marriage and set up house. In all likelihood, the only reason he had waited so long was because Jabir was older, and therefore entitled, by custom, to marry first. But, of course, Jabir had no savings and no means of buying an apartment of his own. And without one he wouldn't be able to marry someone compatible, a girl with a college education—instead he would have to marry a cousin from Lataifa, and live with his family, with no place to call his own. That was why it was imperative for him to find a job as soon as possible; time was running out—Mohammad had waited long enough, and no one would blame him now if he went ahead and got married. He had more than done his duty by custom.

In some part of his mind, Jabir was probably entirely in
sympathy with his brother's predicament, yet if Mohammad were to be the first to marry, it would be a public announcement of his own failure. I had only to look at Jabir's face to know that if that happened he would be utterly crushed, destroyed.

Turning his back on me, Jabir busied himself with his suitcase, repacking it yet again, as though to satisfy a craving. ‘I'll be going back to Iraq soon,' he said, in a voice that was barely audible.

I couldn't see his face but I knew he was near tears.

T
HE RETURN TO
Aden, undertaken with such gladness of spirit, was to bring nothing but tragedy to Ben Yiju.
Such were the misfortunes that befell him there that within three years or so he uprooted himself once again. It was to Egypt that he now moved, and shortly after his arrival there, he tried once more to establish direct communication with his brother Yusuf, in Sicily.

The letter he wrote on this occasion was a long one, like the last, but his mood and his circumstances were greatly changed and the nostalgic exuberance that had seized him upon his return to Aden had now yielded to a resigned and brokenhearted melancholy. Writing to his brother now, he felt compelled to provide him with an account of some of the events that had befallen him since he last wrote, in 1149.

‘
I wrote a letter to you a while ago,' Ben Yiju told Yusuf. ‘It reached Mubashshir, but he did not care to deliver it to you: [instead] he arrived in Aden [himself].'

But Mubashshir's visit, so long awaited, had not turned out as Ben Yiju had expected: ‘I
did all that was in my power for him and more, but he dealt me a ruinous blow. The events would take too long to explain, O my brother …' A couple of lines scribbled in the margin provides a hint of what had passed between them. In the course of his stay in Aden, Mubashshir had defrauded his brother of a huge sum of money: As for Mubashshir, he is nothing but a lazy man; malevolent in spirit. I gave him whatever he asked for, and in return he dealt me a ruinous blow. The price of my
deeds was a thousand dînârs …'

Yet, painful as it was, the discovery of his brother's dishonesty was a small matter compared to the weight of Ben Yiju's other misfortunes: in the meantime he had also suffered the loss of his first child, the son born of his union with Ashu, to whom he had given
the joyful name Surur.

The surviving copy of the letter still contains a part of the passage in which Ben Yiju tells Yusuf of his son's death. He had once had, he writes,
two children like sprigs of sweet basil …'—but here the sentence breaks off, for the letter has been badly damaged over the centuries. The little that remains of the passage is punctuated with a bizarrely expressive succession of silences, as though time had somehow contrived to provide the perfect parentheses for Ben Yiju's grief by changing the scansion of his prose. It reads:

It was partly because of this daughter, Sitt al-Dâr, that Ben Yiju was now writing to his brother; he had been separated from her for prolonged periods over the last several years, and
her future was now his most pressing
concern.

Soon after moving to Aden,
Ben Yiju had transferred his base out of that city and into the highlands of the interior, to a city called Dhû Jibia, which served as one of the principal seats of the ruling Zuray'id dynasty. For about three years afterwards he had lived mostly in the Yemeni mountains while his daughter remained in Aden, in the custody of his old and faithful friend Khalaf ibn Ishaq, living in his house as a member of his family.

The reasons for Ben Yiju's move are not entirely clear, but the loss of his son must have played a part in inducing him to leave Aden. In any event, he was already living in the mountains when he received news of yet another loss, just a couple of years after his arrival in Aden.

In 1151 Ben Yiju's old friend and one-time mentor, Madmun ibn Bundar, died in Aden. Ben Yiju was to read of his death in a letter from a correspondent: ‘
The news reached your exalted honour's slave, of the death of the lord and owner Ma
mûn … the stalwart pillar, Nagîd of the land of Yemen, Prince of the communities, Crown of the Choirs …' To Ben Yiju the news of Madmun's death must have come as a terrible blow: among his few surviving pieces of verse is a Hebrew poem, composed in memory of his friend.

In some ways, however, Ben Yiju evidently found a good deal of fulfilment in his new home in the Yemeni highlands.
Such documentation as there is on this period of his life suggests that he enjoyed a position of some prominence within the Jewish communities of the interior, and he may even have been appointed to serve as a judge.
Yet there must also have been many anxieties attendant on living in that relatively inaccessible region: his correspondence shows that he was greatly concerned about the safety of the roadways, for instance, which is hardly
surprising considering that he was separated from his only surviving child by a wide stretch of difficult terrain, in a divided and war-torn land.

An extraordinary dilemma was to result from Ben Yiju's long separation from his daughter. His friend Khalaf, whose house she was living in, eventually approached him with a proposal of marriage for her, on behalf of one of his sons. The documents provide no indication of what her wishes in the matter were, but it is more than likely of course that Khalaf was acting with her consent; it is even possible that it was the young couple themselves who had prevailed upon him to speak to Ben Yiju about a betrothal, expecting that the request could hardly be refused when it came from a friend of such long standing.

But close though Ben Yiju was to his friends in Aden, he stood apart from them in one respect: their family origins, unlike his own, lay in the region of Iraq. The matter need not have made a difference had Ben Yiju chosen to ignore it, for
such marriages were commonplace within their circle. But in the event Ben Yiju chose to disregard his long-standing association with Khalaf and his family: almost as though he were seeking to disown a part of his own past, he now decided that he could not let his daughter marry a ‘foreigner'.
Instead, he began to dream again of reaffirming his bonds with his family in the accepted fashion of the Middle East, by marrying her to her cousin, his brother Yusuf's eldest son, Surur.

In his letter to his brother he explained the matter thus:

But in a culture where marital negotiations can cast the whole weight of a family's honour upon the scales of public judgement, the refusal of a proposal from an old friend, of distinguished lineage, cannot have been a simple matter. It is probably not a coincidence therefore that the Geniza contains no record of any further communication between Ben Yiju and his friends in Aden. His rejection of Khalaf's offer may well have led to an irreversible break with him and his kinsmen, including Yusuf ibn Abraham: indeed, it may even have been the immediate cause of his departure.

Thus it was on a note of real urgency that Ben Yiju wrote to his brother upon arriving in Egypt. He had been told, he said, that Yusuf had a son, Surur, who is learned in the Torah', and if he were to send him now to Egypt, to marry his daughter, he would have all his goods—‘
and we will rejoice in her and in him, and we will wed them …' For Ben Yiju everything now hung on a quick response from his brother. ‘
Address your letters to me in Egypt, insha'allâh,' he exhorted Yusuf, ‘let there be a letter in the hands of your son, Surûr.'

Indeed, beset by grief, disillusionment and misfortune, Ben Yiju now
had no recourse other than his brother and his nephews. To the two couriers who were to carry his letter to Sicily he entrusted a confession of quiet despair.

‘Sulîmân and Abraham will tell you of the state I am in,' Ben Yiju wrote. ‘I am sick at heart.'

I
COULD HAVE
found Nabeel's house myself of course, but in the end I was grateful to the children who insisted on leading me there: on my own I would have been reluctant to knock on the doors of the structure that stood there now. The mud-walled rooms I so well remembered were gone and in their place stood the unfinished shell of a large new bungalow.

The door was opened by Nabeel's sister-in-law, Fawzia. She clapped her hands to her head, laughing, when she saw me outside. The first thing she said was: ‘Nabeel's not here—he's not in the village, he's gone to Iraq.'

Then, collecting herself, she ushered me in and after putting a tea-kettle on the stove, she sat me down and told me the story of how Nabeel had left for Iraq. His father, old Idris the watchman, had died the year after I left, and his wife had not long outlived him. Nabeel had been away from the village on both occasions. He was in the army then, and he hadn't been able to return in time to see them before they died. On her deathbed his mother had called out for him, over and over again—he had always been her favourite and she had long dreamed of dancing at his wedding. On both occasions Nabeel had come down for a quick visit, to attend the ceremonies; he did not say much, either time, but it was easy to see that he had been profoundly affected.

His best friend, Fawzia's brother Isma‘il, had long been urging him to apply for a passport so he could work in Iraq after finishing his National Service. Nabeel was not particularly receptive to the idea at first: he had always wanted a job in a government office, a respectable clerical job, and he knew that in Iraq he would probably end up doing manual labour of some
kind. But the death of his parents changed his mind. He put in an application for a passport, and in 1986, soon after finishing his time in the army, he left for Iraq with Isma‘il.

Things had turned out well for him in Iraq; within a few months he had found a job as an assistant in a photographer's shop in Baghdad. It didn't pay as much as Isma‘il's job, in construction, but it was a fortune compared to what he would have earned in Egypt.

Besides it was exactly the kind of job that Nabeel wanted. ‘You know him,' Fawzia said, laughing. ‘He always wanted a job where he wouldn't have to get his hands dirty.'

There was a telephone where he worked, she said, and the man who owned the shop didn't mind him receiving calls every now and again. ‘We'll give you the number,' she told me. “Ali's got it written down somewhere; he'll find it for you when he gets back.'