Leon Uris (17 page)

If Tabah had a placid and resigned attitude about the Jews, Mr. Salmi didn’t. Since most of our time in school was spent learning the Koran, Mr. Salmi usually ended up with a tirade about what the Zionists had done to destroy Palestine and why we must hate them. When Mr. Salmi got going on the Jews, his large Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his skinny neck and his face often turned purple and the veins stuck out on his bald head and his voice rose to a shrill shriek.

‘Mohammed is the final and ultimate prophet. He alone is the Messenger of Allah. All other religions are therefore null and void. The nonbelievers are infidels, always to be suspected and eventually to be destroyed. The Jews in particular are in a never-ending plot to destroy Islam through heresy, subversion, and cunning ill will. The Koran tells us that. Jesus was a Moslem and Allah saved him from the Jews. It is in the Koran. One day, when Judaism and Christianity and all the other religions of nonbelievers have been destroyed and all their followers have been burned on the Day of the Fire, then Islam will rule the world. Mohammed makes that very clear. Mohammed also commands every Moslem to the sacred duty of devoting his life to these beliefs.’

We came to learn that Mr. Salmi was a secret member of the Moslem Brotherhood, which had been formed in Egypt and which killed anyone who opposed them. They were everyone’s enemy, even Moslems’.

Mr. Salmi was the first to infuse into me the impurity of all religions except Islam. When Mohammed began preaching in Mecca in the seventh century, wealthy Jews inhabited the peninsula. Surely, Mohammed thought, the Jews, particularly those in Medina, would flock to him and recognize his claim as the final and ultimate prophet and would accept Islam as their new faith. They didn’t accept Mohammed, just as they hadn’t accepted Jesus, but kept right on practicing their heathen faith.

This outraged Mohammed, who put a curse on them forever. The Koran is filled with dozens of Mohammed’s sermons about Jewish treachery. Mr. Salmi always ended the school day with a reading from part of a particular surah from the Koran berating the Jews. His bony fingers quickly licked the pages until he came to a marked place and his eyes lit up as he read with rancor.

It didn’t take us long to get the idea from Mr. Salmi what the Jews were up to and why Mohammed detested them.

Surah 2, the second chapter, explains how it was really the Moslems who delivered the Jews from Pharaoh and how the Moslems divided the sea for the Jews to escape to Egypt and how the Moslems made the appointment for Moses to go up into the mountain for forty days and how the Moslems gave the Law to the Jews on Sinai and allowed them to become the People of the Book.

‘From the very beginning,’ Mr. Salmi said, ‘the Jews lied when they said they discovered the Law and wrote the Bible. They lied when they said Abraham was a Jew. He was a Moslem.’

The Christians were also nonbelievers, but we didn’t have to hate them as much as the Jews. Jesus had been sent to earth by the Moslems and had been saved by Allah. Jesus became a prophet of Islam. We do not believe that Allah has any children with a human likeness and Jesus was not the Son of God, as the Christians claim. Therefore, the Christians also lied about Jesus and were also in for terrible punishments, for they, too, failed to recognize Mohammed as the final Messenger of Allah.

Early in the year, when Surah 3 was read, many of us were curious. One boy asked Mr. Salmi how Abraham could be a Moslem more than two thousand years before Mohammed founded the religion. The beads of perspiration leaped through Mr. Salmi’s skin, wetting his entire head. Mr. Salmi’s answer to that question was ten strokes with the blackboard pointer across the boy’s ass.

Sometimes, when we sat in the yard, we tried to figure out Mohammed’s message. We became confused over dates and names and many things did not match up. The Koran seemed very mixed up about the Virgin Mary, having her born several hundred years before Jesus, but I wasn’t about to risk Mr. Salmi’s pointer to ask.

Besides, it was useless to ask. Unless a man were a holy man or a great scholar, the Koran was impossible to follow.

Surah 3, verses 114 to 116, warns the true believers, that is, us Moslems, against befriending Jews because they are disloyal and how Jews are happy when evil befalls the true believer.

Surah 7 warns that Jews cannot sleep at night because of the vengeance that the Moslems will take out on them because of their plot against Allah.

Surah 16 shows that the Jews are corrupt because they have turned from Islam and therefore the Moslems correctly invoked punishment upon punishment on them.

From Surah 2 to the end of the Koran in Surah 114, Mohammed establishes all the rules for the believers to live by so they may join him in paradise. We all liked the way Islam declared eternal war on the nonbelievers and we all hoped to be alive when we won the war over them.

Mr. Salmi would often screech out, when his head was really dripping, that ‘in Arab lands we know how to deal with Jews and infidels. Surah 22 tells it better than anything else. Mohammed had been rebuked by the Jews of Medina and preached that “turning the cold shoulder, they, the Jews, were led astray from the way of Allah; for them is humiliation in this world and on the day of resurrection the Moslems shall cause them to taste the punishment of the burning.” ’

Once or twice before going to school I tried to ask questions about the Koran of my Uncle Farouk but was answered with a slap or, if I stayed outside of slapping range, a threat.

The only surah that most Moslems knew and understood was Surah 1, a simple prayer of seven lines. Like all the surahs, it begins with ‘In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.’ It is a prayer to Allah acknowledging him as the one having power of the Day of Judgment and beseeching the worshiper to stay on a righteous path. The rest of Islam and the Koran was left up to holy men to explain, for we had no formal priesthood.

Each day as my mother and I passed by Shemesh Kibbutz I became more and more curious. When my mother was allowed to stay at home again, my brother Omar took over the stalls at the bazaar. Omar was lazy and it was hard for me to depend on him to get me to school on time.

I was reading and writing so well that my father was beginning to see my great future value for him. I tried to inch up close to him every time I could, but Kamal was always at his side, blocking my path. But I was brave because I was becoming learned and I looked Father straight in the eye one night and asked him to be allowed to take the bus back and forth to Ramle. There was an Arab bus line, and after warning me never to ride the Jewish bus, my father agreed.

My curiosity about Shemesh Kibbutz intensified as Mr. Salmi taught us more and more about their heathenism. I could envision the terrible things going on there and often spoke to the other boys in the village about them. Although none of them had actually been inside the kibbutz, they all seemed to know everything about it.

My best friend was Izzat. He was my age, but there was a serious problem. His entire family had been ostracized by the villagers as punishment for his father’s working in a Jewish field. None of us were supposed to talk to anyone in Izzat’s family. Because we were best friends, I dared break the rule. Izzat always waited for me at the bus stop and we could take a long route back to the village so we would not be seen by the others. One day Izzat awaited my bus breathlessly and told me that he knew positively what was a true story. A married Jewish woman made love with another man. The husband found out, chopped off the lover’s head, cut open his wife’s belly, put the lover’s head inside it, and sewed it back up.

This only made me more curious. I must admit I was most curious about the women who wore short pants that showed their legs. I had never seen a woman’s legs except my mother’s. I had never seen Nada’s legs, for she wore long pantaloons down to her ankles and was as modest as the Koran admonished her to be. A dozen times a day my mother would warn Nada to keep her legs closed and tell her, ‘Shame.’ Until I was old enough to understand, I thought the word ‘shame’ was part of Nada’s name.

I found out by accident that Mr. Salmi actually went inside Shemesh Kibbutz one day every week to teach classes in Arabic to the Jews. I thought this was very strange.

For several weeks I slowly tried to convince Mr. Salmi that I could help him by teaching the younger kibbutz children simple things, like the names of trees and animals and plants in Arabic. He was teaching two classes, one to children and one to adults, and began to see the value of having me teach the children. He would have less work to do. Of course, I didn’t tell him I was forbidden to enter the kibbutz. He finally agreed to let me go with him and assist him. It meant I would have to come home after dark, but my father rarely knew where I was and I was willing to take the risk that he would never find out.

I don’t know what I expected, but I was awash with fear as we were passed through the kibbutz guard post. What I saw bewildered me. I saw for the first time so many things I had never seen before even though Tabah and Shemesh lived side by side.

I had never seen a green lawn.

I had never seen flowers that did not grow wild.

I had never seen streets without donkey or goat shit on them, even in Ramle.

I had never seen a real playground with all kinds of balls for the children and all kinds of things like swings and sliding boards and sandboxes.

I had never seen a swimming pool.

I had never seen a library with hundreds of books just for children.

I had never seen toys.

I had never seen a museum or a science room in a school with microscopes and magnets and burners and bottles of chemicals.

I had never seen a toilet.

I had never seen a medical clinic.

I had never seen a machine shop.

I had never seen anything like the big barn filled with tractors and tools and automatic machines that milked the cows.

I had never seen electric lights, except in the distance, out on the highway or lights from the kibbutz. I often wondered how they worked. There was a light bulb in our classroom in Ramle, but it didn’t work.

I had never seen a painting made by a human hand.

I had never been in a room in the wintertime that was really warm.

I had never seen a pond where they actually grew fish to harvest.

I saw a great chicken house that was lit up all night to confuse the chickens so they wouldn’t know day from night.

As you can well imagine, dear reader, I made myself invaluable to Mr. Salmi and by the end of the fourth visit I was teaching some of the smaller children all by myself because I wanted to keep coming back.

The Jews were very friendly. At first this made me suspicious that they were trying to lure me into a trap, but as time passed I began to trust them a little. I did keep out a sharp eye so I wouldn’t suddenly be seized by them, and I always remained within shouting distance of Mr. Salmi.

There was a Jewish girl named Hannah who had come from Syria and spoke a little Arabic she remembered from her earlier years. She became my helper in the classroom. Like Nada, Hannah was a few years older than me. The first time she took me by the hand, I pulled it back instantly and my mouth went dry. Surely someone would see her touch me and I would be killed.

Then I saw the strangest thing of all. Boys and girls, older and younger than me, held hands and played. They formed circles and danced and sang together. Often they kissed and hugged. Perhaps this was the beginning of a secret orgy? I was so astonished about all the things I saw I even forgot about the naked legs of the girls. Hannah did not seem ashamed about hers.

What was most difficult to comprehend was the way Mr. Salmi acted when he was with the Jews. He laughed and joked while he taught them. He never did that with us in Ramle.

Mr. Salmi seemed to be good friends with many of the Jews. He often patted the children on the head when they gave correct answers. I saw him embrace some Jews the same way Arab men greet each other. I even saw a Jewish woman put her arms around him once and laugh, and her husband was standing right next to them! The Jews always sent him to catch his bus with a market basket filled with vegetables, fruits, eggs, and an occasional chicken. The very next day in Ramle he would go into a rage about his hatred of the Jews.

I think my mind started going crazy with confusion. Was Shemesh Kibbutz all a trick of Satan to lure us Moslems away from being true believers? After all, our mission was to convert them or kill them. That was what the Koran said. Oh God, I wanted to ask someone. One day I caught a glimpse of Mr. Gideon Asch and longed to speak to him. I dared not, for he might tell Haj Ibrahim I was there. He was friends with my father and therefore I could not trust him. All I knew was that someone hadn’t been telling me the truth and that it was dangerous for me to learn the truth.

I became so obsessed with going to Shemesh I often dreamed about it. If the Jews did practice human sacrifices and held orgies, they did it so no one could see, and by the end of my fifth trip I began to doubt that they even did those things.

Despite the dangers, I determined to find out the truth, and that is when disaster fell. On that awful night I tried to slip through our yard into the kitchen, as I always did when I had been to the kibbutz. This night my father filled the doorway. I ducked under the first swing of his walking stick, but he caught me with the backlash in my ribs and sent me sprawling and screaming over the yard. He was atop me, immense as a giant, his feet kicking into my body, his face contorted with rage, and curses ringing off his lips.

‘I will kill you if you ever go near the Jews again! May a thousand ants infest your armpits!’

He only stopped when Hagar ran out and threw herself over me and begged for mercy. For several days I could barely move. I crawled into the kitchen near the stove and cried all day. The sky had come down on me. My father had taken me out of school.

This went on for a fortnight. Although the color of my bruises began to fade, the pain in my heart would not. I finally heard my mother confide to one of her cousins that she would have to put a stop to it or I might starve myself to death.