Yasmine (25 page)

Asaliya brought out all the documents she had in the house. I copied the names from the documents, with the dates of birth and identity numbers, and also wrote down all the details she could recall about their family. “In Jaffa there are not many left. Karim visits them sometimes.”

Fathiya and Asaliya hugged each other in silence for a long time, two hardworking women who had known much pain, and found a little relief and comfort for a couple of hours. “Come to see us – al-Quds is not far,” Fathiya said, and walked to the car with a stooping gait.

We were supposed to return to Jerusalem via Jaffa, which Fathiya and Ghadir had longed for years to see, but it was getting late. I was wondering how to tell them that we had
better postpone that visit for another day, but Fathiya beat me to it:

“
Ya
Nuri, may Allah grant you a long life. Let's leave Yaffa for another day.” Her expression was desperate, her eyes overflowing. “Forgive me,” she apologised. “I am crying for my life. Why was I born in this time?”

“I promise I shall take you to Yaffa.”

We returned to Jerusalem in silence, feeling burdened. Evening was falling. When we reached the Rockefeller Museum, Ghadir said, “Drop us here. We'll walk the rest of the way.”

“Why? I can take you home. Your mother is tired.”

“No,
ya ibni
,” said Fathiya. “My husband may be home by now. We don't want any trouble.”

“You’re looking for justice?” said Mother.

“Mother, thirty lira for a dunam of land? You refused to sell the house in Baghdad, didn’t you? Have you forgotten how angry you were at the price the Muslims offered for it?”

“True, I didn’t want to sell them the house for pennies, damn their eyes. Better they should steal it than for me to sell it to them!”

“It’s the same here. What’s the difference?”

“How can you make that comparison,
ibni
? Even if we had sold, what could we have done with the money? Could we take it with us? No chance. They froze our property and bank accounts and drove us out, so why should I care about their feelings? Have you forgotten how they stripped us and searched our bodies at the airport? They even took our shoes apart, to check that we weren’t smuggling gold.”

“Yes, Mother, but here we’re in charge and we can show justice.”

“You’re looking for justice – when did they ever show justice to us? Our ancestors settled in Iraq during the Babylonian Exile, a thousand years before Mohammed was born. Did it stop them from expelling us? Wasn’t that an outrage? Justice, he wants!”

“Why did we have to build a Jewish town on their land, in front of their faces? Do we have to spit in their eyes?”

“Are you defending them?”

“I want to defend us, our morality. We are supposed to be a special people, a light unto the nations, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know what being a special people means, but I can see that you want the Arabs to dominate the Galilee and Israel and turn us into refugees all over again!”

“Um Kabi,” Father intervened, “our son is right.”

“What, are you too a defender of Islam now? They threw us out like dogs!” she ranted at Father, furious to hear him siding with me.

“Mother, enough of Baghdad. We’re in Israel now, not over there, and we’re stronger than all the Arab states put together.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear! But I’m still afraid,
ibni
. Anybody who’s had the experience that Jews had will always be afraid. You want to help them, treat them honourably. Wonderful! What world are you living in? Did they treat us honourably?”

“We are not them,” said Father. “And where it is truly necessary to take from them, at least give them decent compensation, without any deviousness.”

“It won’t do any good, whatever we do they’ll hate us. They don’t know how to live with others, it’s in their religion,” Mother told him and turned to me. “
Ibni
, why do you go to their villages, isn’t it dangerous? You can’t trust them.”

“Mother, we have to solve their problems, help them, maybe in the end they’ll get used to living with us.”

“It’s good that he’s looking at things with his own eyes,” said Father. “And good that he’s helping this Arab woman. Isn’t she a human being?”

“Whatever I say, he says the opposite. You see?”

When Mother complains to me about Father I can sense a row flaring up. Time to deflect it before it starts. “Where’s Hizkel?”

“At Efraim’s in the kibbutz. He’ll be there all week.”

As I was leaving I thought it was a pity Hizkel wasn’t there. His presence calmed them, or at least restrained them. The tension between them had been high ever since we left Iraq. They were always arguing, it didn’t matter about what.

When we first came to Israel Father dreamed of growing rice. He thought that the Hula Valley was the perfect place for it, and he saw himself as a visionary and entrepreneur of a new agricultural enterprise. He was full of strength and confidence, but bureaucracy gradually wore him down. Disappointment consumed him the way rust corrodes iron. What made it worse was that he had to work as a road builder to support his family. His body shrank, and when he put on one of his smart suits from Iraq he looked like a scarecrow. In the evening, after an exhausting day’s work, he would shower and slip out to the café, so we were left without a father. He did not cuddle us or hug us, did not encourage or support us, did not comfort us or fill us with hope, as he once had. He was broken, like the central pole of our tent in the immigrant camp in the winter storms of 1951.

Mother found herself without a shoulder to lean on or an ear to hear her pain. She took charge of the family, traipsed around the immigrant camp market to buy damaged vegetables on the cheap, and made pathetic attempts to grow tomatoes, onions and parsley in the sandy soil. She contrived to produce something out of nothing, and protected her children like a
wounded lioness. On rare occasions she tried to cheer Father up, to tell him that the future was still before him, despite the present failure, and would repeat the old Iraqi saying, “When you fall, be a man.” She urged him to postpone his dream until his brother Hizkel was released and joined him in Israel, saying that together they could take on the clueless officials. But whatever she said only hurt him more. In Baghdad she submitted to his will and followed him to Israel, but once here she discovered her own strength and stood up for herself. She rebelled against tradition and went out to work. Father, feeling like a lion whose teeth have been drawn, disliked the change in her and did not see it as the fulfilment of her potential but as a symptom of his own decline. Her new activities struck him like a slap in his face, as though she were saying, “You are not a man, you can’t support your family.” No matter what Mother did to try to patch things up between them, Father wrapped himself in a thick blanket of silence and could not be mollified.

He is so hard on her, I thought on my way out. He doesn’t emerge from his shell, takes offence at everything she says, like a little boy. Strange how an intelligent and open-minded man can be so sullen and unmovable around his wife.

In the morning I arrived early at the Ministry. Levanah was already there, alone in the office. “What good wind has blown you here so early?” she asked.

“Homesickness,” I replied with a smile.

“I wish! Can I invite you to coffee? The Minister won’t be here until eight, so we have a little time.” In the cafeteria she took a seat at a side table and I went to fetch the coffee.

“What’s bothering you, Nuri?” she asked point-blank.

“Tell me,” I replied with a question, “were you here when the lands of Karmiel were expropriated?”

“No, I was still in the army. You need information?”

“Yes indeed.” I told her all about Ghadir and her family’s tribulations.

We returned to the Minister’s office and I shut myself in the spokesman’s room and read classified papers in preparation for the periodic report to the Minister. Barely an hour had passed when Levanah came in with a big and bulky envelope. “Here, I got what you need.”

“You’re amazing!” To show my gratitude, I slipped out to the Knesset garden and picked a rose, which I laid on her desk.

I opened the envelope as soon as I entered my office in Sheikh
Jarrah and looked through the papers but couldn’t get a clear picture; a lot of detailed information phrased in legalese only confused me. I decided to examine them at leisure, and also to consult my old friend Solly Levy at the Lands Office. I put the documents aside and picked up the American newspapers which were regularly delivered to the office.

In the
Washington
Post the face of my neighbour, Senator Antoine, appeared alongside an interview that was seething with hatred and denunciation. Not exactly a kindly old man, I thought. My Minister should see this, take a closer look at the more extreme attitudes among the Palestinians and get a whiff of reality.

Since I was due to see him that evening, I went to the military government headquarters for a current assessment and a chat with casual colleagues, a way of keeping us all better updated. There I ran into Shamluk and told him what I had just read in the
Washington Post.

“Crazy old man, challenging a major power,” he said.

“You have any background on him?”

“I’ll send you some,” he promised and hurried away.

I didn’t have enough time to go out to lunch, so I bought some salami, fruit and bread in a nearby grocery and ate in my office while reading papers and formulating my report.

I’m always rattled when I have to prepare the report. Afraid of the Minister’s criticism, I struggle with the wording, write and rewrite, feeling him breathing down my neck. His Hebrew is superb, drawn from geological strata of Bible and Talmud, the Revival writers and poets, innovations made by Bialik, Mendele, Agnon, Shlonsky, Alterman…As for me, I’m an immigrant with limited command of the language.

In the car on my way to the Minister’s office, Um Kulthoum’s voice warbled out of the radio – her daily concert. Just after the war an Egyptian magazine ran a big story on her, calling her “opium for the masses”, with the accusation that her singing drugged the soldiers on the eve of battle and dulled the nation’s senses. The singer withdrew into silence and did not appear in public for several months, grieving for her people’s defeat. Recently she had emerged from her mourning to launch a campaign of recovery in support of the
rais
. She sang about heroism and the battling spirit, the greatness of the
rais
and the victory to come. She, who had never addressed her listeners directly, now made speeches about unity, called on the women of Egypt to donate their gold jewellery to the state, carried the national flag from city to city, appeared in Alexandria and Ismailia, Mansoura and Damanhur, Khartoum, Tripoli, Rabat, Amman and Damascus, even in European capitals. “We are all fedayeen, ready for self-sacrifice,” she sang, joining in Arafat’s chorus. Now her voice flowed like hot tears in the song
Inta umri
:

I stopped by at Al-Hurriyeh, but Yasmine wasn’t there. Abu George said she was holed up in the Mission library, “writing the concluding chapter of her dissertation.” I left her a note which did not disguise my disappointment.

When I reached the Minister’s office I was surprised to find Levanah. “You’re still here? From seven in the morning till seven in the evening?”

At that point she stood up and began to sing “Happy birthday!”

How could I have forgotten?

“Nuri, you’re thirty years old today. It means something!” She handed me a small package. Inside was a gold Sheaffer fountain pen, with a card, “From the Minister’s Office.”

I stood before her embarrassed and touched. Not since my bar mitzvah, not once in the past seventeen years, had anyone marked my birthday.

“The Minister will be here at any moment,” she said in her usual businesslike tone. She looked at my face and picked up her handbag to leave. So you’re going to let her leave like this?

“You’re one in a million, Levanah,” I said, hugging her.

The Minister surprised me too. “Shall we have a drink?” he said, taking a bottle of fine cognac and two glasses out of the cupboard. Interesting. He was usually very Spartan in his habits, even miserly, writing with a cheap pencil on the unused side of papers, filling the whole space, eating ordinary sandwiches from the staff cafeteria, and when he had to spend the night in Jerusalem he stayed at a modest central hotel. Now this cognac!

“To you, Nuri!” he toasted me. “Levanah told me it was your birthday today.” He drained his glass at a single gulp. “How was Karmiel?”

“The Mayor was happy to accept your proposal.”

“Good. Now we must speed up construction, fill and expand the town, settle in new immigrants. No more delays.”

“Minister, I’d like to share with you a disturbing experience I had in the village of Ghayna near Karmiel.” I repeated to him Asaliya’s story about the land expropriation. “Is it any wonder that the mood there is so hostile?”

“Young man, my advice to you is, leave it alone! What’s the point of reviving these memories? Look forward, my friend –
great enterprises lie ahead of us.” He refilled our glasses. “The Prime Minister has asked me to chair a committee to consider the future of the territories and their inhabitants and all relevant factors, including how to present the issue to the public in Israel and abroad. It’s an exciting challenge!”

“It sounds great! At last we’ll have clear directives.”

“We must retain the assets we hold and create facts on the ground before the Arabs recover from the shock.”

“What about East Jerusalem?”

“It will be our top priority. No need for declarations. We’ll work quietly, as in the pioneering days – another dunam of land, another goat, another building…That has always been the strength of Zionism.”

“And will the Arabs accept it?” I asked.

“The question is what we want and what we will agree to. The Arabs will adapt and forget, the way they forgot Jaffa and Majdal and Akko.”

“They haven’t forgotten,” I put in.

“Well, all right, I’m not deluding myself,” he replied. “But let’s not overstate their opposition. So the water will boil and steam, hateful articles will be published by that senator of yours and others, maybe a speech or two in front of an empty Knesset. So what? The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on. Remember, my dear Nuri, the Arabs are the same Arabs and the world is the same world.”

“I’ve made you a translation of some poems by Fadwa Toukan, the Nablus poetess, and a couple of stories by refugees in Lebanon, to show you the trends of thinking…”

“Good, very good. I noticed you have a poetic soul…”

“I translated the poems because it’s poetry that shapes their consciousness and their reality,” I persevered. “All our leaders
should read their poetry, sir, or they won’t understand them. After all, our own consciousness was shaped by Bialik, Uri-Zvi Greenberg and Alterman.”

“How can you make that comparison?”

“I make the comparison because I believe they should be treated as we would want them to treat us, and this would open the way to a true reconciliation between us.”

“It’s not as simple as you imagine in your tender heart, young man. Remember that Dayan took their religious sentiments into account, their need to preserve their culture, and gave them the Temple Mount. Did that gesture, which was unimaginably far-reaching, reconcile them to us one little bit?”

“Not everything should be seen in the short term. Perhaps when Dayan took that step he was thinking in the long term, and did it in the hope of reducing the likelihood of future wars?”

The Minister’s face showed that he did not see it that way.

“Minister, would you allow me to smoke in your room today, in honour of my birthday? The cognac has left me craving a cigarette.”

“Very well, after two thousand years of exile in the corridor, I grant you this birthday gift.”

I inhaled the smoke and said, “I’m thinking that among us people have only two or three children, whereas they have a dozen. This demographic diagnosis is keeping me awake at night…”

“I think you mean prognosis. A common mistake. But don’t worry, masses of Jews will come from the Soviet Union, and we shall need the land and the strategic space!” he declared, waving away the smoke.

“Will Brezhnev let them leave Russia? Nasser will raise hell.”

“Listen, Nuri, Jews are returning to their ancestral land, to the source of their heritage, a vast settlement movement is getting under way. How long shall we wait for the phone call from Hussein? The Arabs reject every attempt at dialogue. Maybe if they see that we are not sitting idle, they’ll make a move.”

“Their clocks do not run at the same rate as ours,” I said. “The question is, what price will we pay for settling in the territories.”

“Why are you so pessimistic, young man?”

“I’ll tell you, sir. A neighbour of mine, a Labour Party organiser who used to work in the municipality, is now a labour contractor who hires workers from the West Bank, makes a mint of money and has bought himself a fancy villa.”

“So because of a few bad weeds we must refrain from planting grass?” he said, and swung his feet onto the desk – his favourite position.

“Something warns me that there is serious trrouble ahead,” I said and took from my briefcase a summary of some vituperative polemics published by Abu Nabil. The Minister glanced through it and flung it aside.

“Young man, this is a war between two national movements. It’s not a duet in an opera. What we need is a profound belief in the justice of our cause. Fear not, recoil not!” he concluded, took a paper clip, straightened it and began to clean his nails.

“Sir, the question is how we interpret the reality, not the justice of our cause,” I said.

“Young man, as you grow older you’ll understand,” he assured me, ending our meeting.

I went out into the darkened corridor. Everyone had left, only the watchman remained, making himself tea in his cubicle.