Ishmael's Oranges (2 page)

The next day Jaffa's mothers howled while the British soldiers crawled over the ruins. He'd watched paralysed as Mazen pulled a strip of someone's shirt from under a piece of masonry. It was white cloth, wet and stained black with blood and caked brown dirt. The smell on it was foul, and it stayed with him even when the police came to chase them
away.

Salim pulled at Mazen's shirt. ‘Please can we go? I don't like it here.' Mazen shook Salim's hand off, but he turned away all the same.
They'll become ghosts
, Mazen had told him as they carried the bodies away.
The dead can't rest without vengeance.

They made their way to Souk El Attarin, to buy sweets. The mounds of pistachio, lemon, rose and gold smelt as delicious as ever, but Salim's mouth was dry. The boys were used to fighting through the crowds to get their share. Not today, though. The souk was almost empty. The old shopkeeper looked at them with hungry eyes as they handed over pocket money.

‘Hey, Salim!'

Salim looked around in alarm; they were not supposed to be out so close to curfew.

‘Shit,' said Mazen loudly, ‘it's the
Yehuda
boy.'

‘Hi, Elia,' said Salim. ‘How's life?' He shifted, grateful the Square was empty. It was not so good to be seen with a Jew, even a local
one.

Elia was older than Mazen, fair skinned like Salim with thin arms. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and said ‘
Yani
,' the universal Arabic expression for that grey place between good and bad. ‘I was going to see my father,' he said, pointing in the direction of Souk Balasbeh, the clothes market. ‘We close early now. He doesn't like me to walk alone, with all the troubles.'

‘Who's causing the troubles?' said Mazen. ‘Your father and his friends, that's
who.'

‘He's not one of those people, Mazen,' Salim protested. He dimly remembered a time when they had been allowed to be friends. Elia's father, Isak Yashuv, was nearly an Arab. You could never tell him apart from any other Palestinian, with his dark Iraqi skin and hawk eyes above the coals of his nargile, bubbling away all day long. But Elia's mother came from outside Palestine, with the white
Jews.

This had been endlessly and furiously debated in Salim's house when a final halt was called to Elia and Salim's friendship.

‘A Jew is not a Palestinian and a Jew is not an Arab,' Abu Hassan had yelled at him, his hand hitting the table. ‘They are all bastards who came here for nothing but to rob us. You want to shame
me?'

‘For God's sake, calm down,' said his mother coldly, her high forehead smooth as glass. ‘Isak's family was fitting buttons in Souk Balasbeh before you were born. And as for his foreign wife
–
what about me, eh? Didn't you drag me to this forsaken country, like a cow in a cart?'

Salim knew that his mother and the pale Lili Yashuv had a strange kind of friendship too; when they went to collect her finest clothes from Isak's shop, Lili would talk to her in halting Arabic with a heavy accent. And his mother would smile in a way she rarely did even with the wives of the other
ay'an
.

Today, Elia looked even more miserable than usual. His family was among the tiny handful that still kept a foothold in Jaffa; the rest had moved to Tel Aviv. Their shop in the textile souk had become an open target, but Isak refused to move. ‘I won't give in to this madness,' he'd said, doggedly coming into work every day while his small stock of business dwindled.

‘My family don't want any trouble,' said Elia to Mazen. ‘We just want to work. But it's not just the Irgun causing the problems.' He jerked his head over to the south, where the
Najjada
and the Arab Liberation Army headquartered.

‘Look, Elia, I'll take you to your father now,' said Salim quickly. Mazen had a look Salim knew well, his beating face. ‘We have to get back before the curfew.'

‘Okay,
Yehuda
boys,' said Mazen, the words smeared with contempt. ‘Enjoy your walk. I'll see you when the Arab armies come.' He moved across to Elia, and bent his head towards the other boy's ear. ‘There are thousands of us, Jew. You'll see.' And he turned his back on them and ran across the Square.

‘You don't have to walk with me, Salim,' Elia said. The sky was turning dark now, slate grey clouds rolling in with the night.

‘I won't walk all the way. Maybe just a little bit. Is your mama okay?'

‘Yes, she's okay. She's afraid now. She and Papa fight a
lot.'

‘Mine too.' Salim kicked the ground in front of him. ‘Is she frightened that the Arab armies are coming to save us?' These days, the radio and Friday sermons were full of nothing
else.

Elia didn't reply, and they walked along in silence. Salim started to feel sorry for him. If he were Elia, wouldn't he fear the great Arab armies? He imagined them, rows and rows of men with their flags streaming and guns waving, just like the bedouin from the old stories.

‘You can come to our house,' he said in a rush of feeling. ‘Mama will hide you. We won't tell anyone you're Jewish. You'll be safe with
us.'

Elia raised his head sharply and Salim was suddenly frightened by his expression. ‘
Ya
Salim, I don't think we can live like we used to,' he said, slowly. ‘Mama says your people hate the Jews and will never let there be peace. So we'll fight each other, no matter what.' He shrugged his shoulders again. ‘Only God knows who will
win.'

‘The Arabs will win,' said Salim firmly. He had little affection for his father, or Abu Mazen, or for any of the other heavy men who came and went from his house. But his world was built around the smell of their cigarettes and the low hum of their conversation. It was impossible to believe that their authority might ever cease to be there, quietly ordering the universe.

‘You're just like Mazen, if you think that,' said Elia, stopping dead beside him. ‘Why didn't you go with him? He'll teach you how to shoot at my family and trash our shop, like his terrorist friends.'

Salim laughed before he could stop it; the thought of fat Mazen screaming with a pistol in his hand was too funny. But the sound seemed to hurt Elia somehow; his thin shoulders recoiled into his body like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring. Yelling, ‘
Yallah
, go on then! Go!' his arm shot out in a half-punch, half-shove, hitting Salim in the chest and pushing him against the stone
wall.

It felt like the time he was stung by a bee
–
numbness, followed by a sharp, rising pain that made Salim want to howl. Hot tears sprang to his
eyes.

‘
You
should go!' he shouted back, bunching his hands into fists. ‘Go away. This is Palestine, where the Arabs live. Go back to your own place.'

‘Jaffa
is
my place!' Elia sounded tearful. ‘But that bastard Mazen wants to throw a bomb through my window. What are we supposed to
do?'

Salim thought of the terror of Clock Tower Square, the bloody pile of broken stone and the raw screams filling the air like smoke. Mayor Heikal had spoken on the radio that night and called the Jews murderers of children, as savage as bears. Mazen and his gang had sworn revenge. On that day, across the whole of Jaffa, it was heresy to think that Jews were not devils.

But despite this, Salim still believed the world of Jews must surely be divided into the bad and the good. The bad ones lived in Tel Aviv and those vast farmlands where Arabs did not go. People said they had driven families out of their homes, invaded Haifa, Jerusalem and other Arab villages and killed in their hundreds while the British just stood by. Salim had never seen one of these nightmare Jews. But at night, they stood dark and faceless on the borders of his sleep.

But Elia's family looked much the same as everyone else in Jaffa. They worked and lived just as his family did. So how could they be enemies?

He wanted to explain some of this to Elia, but confusion tied his tongue. Instead he just stood there, eyes cast down, twisting his foot on the gravel. They were still some distance from the gates of El-Balasbeh, and it was already closing time. Elia sighed, a sound that seemed to say:
Well?
But if it was an invitation, Salim did not understand
it.

‘I have to go home now,' Salim said finally. Tomorrow, perhaps, they could put it all right. Elia nodded.

‘Okay, Salim,' he said. ‘
Ma salameh
'
–
go in peace.

As Elia walked away, Salim's stomach felt heavy
–
like small stones of worry knocking together. And then there was nothing left to do but run, past the ruin of the Square and through the shuttered streets, back towards the safety of
home.

The Al-Ishmaeli house was known as
Beit Al-Shamouti
, the Orange House. A thick wall of shamouti orange trees flickered darkly behind the bars of its iron gate, spring blossoms swelling on their boughs. Over summer, they would turn from small lemon buds into globes of Jaffa's gold. Then the air would fill with a bruised sweetness as they were crushed into juices or sliced and sprinkled with sugar and rosewater. Across Jaffa, others would be wrapped in paper and packed into steamships, destined for lands Salim had only dreamed
of.

The neighbours whispered, too, that without his fifteen
dunams
of orange land south of the city the thick-lipped Saeed Al-Ishmaeli
–
Abu Hassan to his friends
–
would be lucky to afford a shed in his own back garden. That was the other reason for the house's nickname.

As he walked back home through the darkening streets, Salim brooded over Elia and Mazen. They'd all been friends once. But last year everything changed.

Frère Philippe had tried to explain it at school. Palestine was to be divided up between the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews would get the northern coast, the Galilee and the southern desert. The Palestinians got the fertile west bank of the Jordan and the green hills before Lebanon, as well as the southern port of Gaza. Jerusalem was given to the whole world. Because Jaffa was in the Palestinian part, by law, the Jews could not take it. Salim had looked at his teacher in amazement. Who were the people doing all this giving and taking of homes?

The thought of anyone taking his own trees made his skin prickle.
Fellah!
How dare Mazen call him a peasant? Peasants were dirty and poor, with rough hands and bad teeth. They worked the land, but never owned it.
I am a landowner's son. It's my right to pick the harvest.

When he visited the fields last week, he'd not been allowed to take any fruit. Salim was too young, Abu Hassan said
–
by which he meant
too disobedient
. Harvest is a job for a man, not a child, he'd proclaimed.

Instead it was always Hassan who went. It suited Abu Hassan to parade his eldest boy up and down the lanes of trees like a real
effendi
–
‘As if he was heir to something important and not just a few acres of dirt,' his mother had said. Salim was too complicated a case for a man who loved income, idleness and coffee in that order, who bought Jaffa's newspaper
Filastin
just to keep folded by the living room table.

This is why Mazen's jibe hurt so. It was his way of saying ‘My father is a clever and important man who understands things. Your father may have a bit of money, but he has the brains of a
fellah
. So when the fighting comes your family will be out in the cold.'

Turning the handle of the back gate, Salim slipped inside the garden. The trees looked sleepy in the dusk, the air between them still flushed with the sun's warmth.

He liked to count them as he walked the path towards the porch. Each had a story: this lopsided one lost its branches in a famous winter storm and now stood like a beggar at the gate, reaching out to guests with one plaintive arm. This one was a bully, pushing its branches into all the others while its roots bubbled up out of the earth like a sea monster.

Then there were the three smallest trees planted for the three sons: Hassan's first, then Salim's and then Rafan's just last
year.

Hassan's tree was a good height for its age, tall enough to shelter under, with thick roots. It had matured early and Hassan was only five when he started taking its fruit. Salim could not recall a year without the ritual of holding his elder brother's woven basket and breathing in the bitterness of freshly plucked oranges.

Salim's tree had been fruiting for a year now. But his father had not let him take the fruit during this harvest, to teach him a lesson in obedience. Orange farmers plant trees when their sons are born, the
fellahin
said. But they only grow sweet when the boys are ready to become
men.

Perhaps that was why you're so little
, he thought sadly, stroking its bark. It was only three years younger than Hassan's but less than half the height. The tree leaned westwards into the sunset, its branches like hands clambering up the wall to escape.

The stunting of Salim's tree was a kitchen joke in the Al-Ishmaeli household. Hassan found it particularly funny. ‘I hope your balls grow bigger than your oranges, Salim,' he used to say. ‘Or you might turn into a woman after all.' His mother blamed it on the wrong ground. It was stony by the gate and lacked the morning sunshine. But she never mocked him for loving it. He touched the fresh cut on the trunk made that week, the memory of tiptoeing into the garden by candlelight together, to mark his seventh-year height on the tree and eat sweets under the stars.