Yasmine (32 page)

I thought she was poking fun at me, using Hebrew to ask for a drink, but nonetheless I poured us both some kiddush wine and we toasted each other, then moved on to arrack.

“With water and a lot of ice, please!”

Half a bottle was soon gone. I brought out olives and salty cheese and anchovies from a tin, peeled some cucumbers and sprinkled them with salt, and cut brown bread into triangles.

“Forgive me, princess, this was unexpected. I did not prepare refreshments for your visit. But I do have nice music.” I put on
a tape that Kabi had recorded for me before he went to Europe, Arabic songs broadcast on the Israeli Arabic service.

“Fairuz?” she said, delighted, settled down in the big green armchair that before the war I’d sworn to throw out, tucked up her legs and sipped her arrack.

I could hardly breathe. All my life I’d longed for a tremendous passionate love, a love with an eagle’s wingspan, and here it was…

“Where are you drifting off to?” Yasmine startled me. “Hey, do we have to start arguing about politics for you to wake up?”

“We can do other things, talk about music, literature, architecture, cookery…”

“Silly!” She threw a cushion at me.

“No, really – I can cook. For example, an Iraqi thumia. You fry chopped onion in sesame oil, add two spoons of tomato paste, add little meat balls, salt and pepper, and cook till the meat is done.”

“Motor-mouth!” She threw another cushion.

“Here’s the main part – peel three cloves of garlic, add a handful of mint leaves and cook on a low flame…”

“Would you like to be the chef at Al-Hurriyeh?”

“I dreamed of you for a hundred generations…” I sang to her.

“I’m not Jerusalem…”

“Oh no, please not Jerusalem! Let’s go back to the thumia, before it gets overdone…Frozen vodka is terrific with thumia!”

“You learned that from Michelle.”

“My beauty, it’s you I’ve been longing to eat, ever since the American Colony.”

“What happened since then?”

“My hands are tied, you’re a protected person, a pledge entrusted to me by your father. It’s a matter of honour.”

“Hell, you’re not an
ibn-Arab
, as you claim – you’re an Arab through and through, squared!” She threw her arrack glass on the floor, smashing it.

Instead of asking if she’d gone mad, I went mad myself. I took all the glasses from the cupboard and pleaded, “Yasmine,
mon amour
, smash the glasses, all of them, but don’t be angry with me and please don’t speak to me in English. Speak Arabic, Hebrew, only not English!”

“
Habibi, widadi, hiami, fuadi, dalili, ruhi, albi
…” she trilled a string of Arabic endearments, poured herself another glass of arrack, climbed on to the coffee table and, when she finished the drink, she again flung the glass on the floor. Pieces of glass flew everywhere. “My dove, my lovely, my sister, do not mock me, I beg of thee,” I sang, fetching a broom and a dustpan. “We must eliminate the effects of aggression, as Nasser said, the hero of our youth. O Yasmine of my soul, who are you? A spy, a fedayeen? And how will you eliminate me – with a bullet in my heart? A knife in my back? Poison in my coffee? With fatal love?”

“That’s enough, you’re drunk.”

She looked at the floor, which was covered with shards of glass, and suddenly clutched her head and burst into tears. I brought her a glass of water and hugged her. She was trembling all over, desperate for comfort.

I set a coffee pot on the stove, but the coffee boiled over and blackened the range. I served what was left of it in glasses instead of tiny cups, and apologised for giving her Arabic coffee as if it was the usual Israeli-style milky brew.

“You keep changing, Nuri. Who are you, what are you doing with me?”

With the glass in my hand and a lot of arrack inside me I
launched into a full-scale speech. “I’m an
ibn-Arab
Jew who admires the wonders of the West. I listen to classical music in the morning and Arabic music in the evening. I’m a bird of passage wandering between two worlds, a foot here and a foot there, and sometimes my feet get mixed up.

“I’m in conflict with myself and with those who are supposed to be my brothers. Sometimes I feel close to them and sometimes they horrify me. I long for the Tigris and the palm trees and my home in Baghdad, but I’ll never go back there, never again live as a second-class citizen.

“I’m furious with you Arabs. You don’t know how to agree, how to accept the other and to compromise. Compromise is not a weakness, it is knowing how to give up in order to get more. Yasmine, you know that the Arabic language doesn’t even have a word that means compromise. There is
musawameh
and there is
hal wasat
, bargaining and interim solution, but there is no compromise.

“I love the East, the family feeling, the good manners, the human warmth, the colours, smells, crowding, sweat, but I also detest the East for its stench, its falsehood and betrayal, blind fanaticism and cruelty, and I prefer the openness, alienation and airy distance of the West.

“I’m a Hebrew-speaking Israeli who dreams in Judeo-Arabic, my mother-tongue, my warm home.” I poured myself another glass. “In my mother-tongue and with this arrack I’m closer to you than to many of my own people. And I must tell you, my lovely, that your foolish caprice of speaking with me in English is driving me crazy. Language, Yasmine, is the key to the heart.”

I’d wanted to say all this from our first meeting, but it was only tonight, when I was drunk, that it all came pouring out. Why had I bottled it up? What was I afraid of? Yasmine did not get angry,
did not turn away from me. I think she even smiled. My eyelids became heavy. The ice-cube I sucked in the hope that it would wake me up slowly dissolved, and I drifted away on distant clouds.

When I opened my eyes she was bending over me, her small ears translucent like a baby’s, her neck smooth as silk, and her breath smelled provocatively of arrack and cigarettes. I gathered her in my arms, feeling her heart beating against mine. My hand slipped under her clothes, attracted to the destination that stopped my breath.

But how could I when she was drunk with arrack, had broken my wine glasses, wept, and didn’t know what she was doing? I wanted her when the arrack faded away, when she was sober and aware, sure of herself.

Yasmine didn’t say anything. She lay beside me in silence and I felt her looking at me. Suddenly she got up, buttoned her blouse and straightened her clothes. “Take me home,” she said.

Idiot, I said to myself. You’ve hurt her feelings. But I couldn’t help it. I drove to Sheikh Jarrah slowly, drunkenly, but by a miracle also very carefully. When we reached her house she forbade me to drive back, so I spent the night in my office.

As I lay down on Ahmad Shukeiry’s sofa, the ache in my balls forced me to confront the question, why did I not make love to her? Was it really because she was drunk? Michelle was also drunk when she dragged me to her bed. You can’t make that comparison, I told myself. Come on, don’t take the easy way out. How is it that after growing up in the kibbutz and twenty years in a Western society you’re still a primitive Easterner? Or perhaps, for all your crowing, you’re still afraid of commitment? You’d better make up your mind, or you’ll lose her the way you lost Yardena, and then you’ll spend the rest of your life mourning for what you missed.

The ringing of the telephone woke me up.

“A sweet morning to you, my love. I miss you. I want to see you opening your eyes and hear the first word you say,” Yasmine whispered.

“A bright morning to you, my sunshine,” I replied, and started a new day.

We agreed to meet in the evening, but Yasmine couldn’t wait and she showed up at my office at three o’clock. Smiling mysteriously, she said, “Come with me, those papers won’t run away.”

The mystery was solved at the entrance to the Smadar cinema in the German Colony. A matinee performance of
Jules et Jim
! I’d forgotten such things still existed.

Leaving the spring brightness outside we entered the darkened hall. Jeanne Moreau, my boyhood goddess, smiled at us from the screen, superb as ever with her wide forehead, penetrating eyes and sensuous lips. How wonderful to watch her with Yasmine beside me, her soft warm hand in mine.

“Did you know that Jeanne Moreau had a passionate affair with the homosexual Pierre Cardin?” Yasmine said when we came out into the quiet green street. “She was his first woman, and they were in Venice, at the Danielli hotel, in the room of George Sand and Alfred de Musset.”

“No one could resist her,” I said, as if to account for Cardin’s deviation from his normal habits, and pointed with a smile at Yasmine herself, implying “or you”.

“Don’t exaggerate,” she replied, smiling back.

In the twilight a pleasant breeze was blowing, soft and caressing. How this gentle mood took us after the weird night
in my room, that had left us both stunned, I could not imagine, but I didn’t try to understand it. Everything was flowing sweetly, and how good it felt to flow with it. My soul was singing. Yasmine wanted to go for a drive. In the car she took off her shoes, folded her legs under her in her favourite posture, tossed her head back and sang Jeanne Moreau’s song from the film:

We drove around the narrow streets of the German Colony, admiring the old Templar houses, then on to the still older Yemin Moshe neighbourhood, where we stopped to look at the floodlit walls of the Old City as the evening fell, munching on sandwiches we’d bought earlier. I buried my face in Yasmine’s hair, breathing in the sweet warmth of her body, the leeches of anxiety disappearing. I wanted to stop time, to make the moment last and last for ever.

We decided to go together to the Writers’ House, for a literary evening with a gifted young Israeli author who had recently caught the public imagination with his first novel. The week before I’d bought two copies of his book, one for me and one for Yasmine, which I inscribed with some lines from Bialik:

We both read the book but decided not to discuss it till we heard what the author himself had to say. He was a young man of about my age, very handsome, with fine expressive features, his eyes burning and intense. His hands were square, strong, not large, the fingers short and sturdy as a farmer’s. I knew he’d spent time on a kibbutz – perhaps milking cows had given him his powerful hands.

He spoke very eloquently in perfect sabra Hebrew, with emphatic gestures. Complete sentences, idioms and original metaphors tumbled from his mouth like a cataract. His thought was structured, crystallised, highly persuasive. By the time I had digested one polished sentence it was followed by a second, a third and a fourth, a string of colourful, glowing pearls. Where did all this abundance come from? It flowed, it ran in a mighty current, like the Tigris in winter.

We were sitting near the podium and I was leaning forwards, listening attentively, afraid to miss a word, when suddenly I felt dizzy. I leaned back and shut my eyes, covering them with my hand. Yasmine took my other hand and stroked it, not knowing what was happening to me.

When the young author finished speaking there was enthusiastic applause, and people crowded around him with copies of his novel to sign but we didn’t join the queue: Yasmine put her arm through mine and drew me outside.

“You felt unwell,” she said. “What happened?”

“His Hebrew, ya Allah! Another wonder of the world.”

“Nuri my dear,” she announced an unexpected discovery, “you can’t get away from it, you’re going to be a writer!”

“I’ll be a writer and you’ll be a fortune-teller.”

“It’s not a joke,” she said authoritatively. “It’s a simple
linguistic fact. Perhaps you’re not aware of it. Such a sensitivity to words, the way you reacted this evening, it’s a natural disease of writers, perhaps it’s part of their creative force. I know it well – my father is a poet too.”

We went into Fink’s, the old bar on King George Street, and Yasmine gave me her impressions. “The whole of that lecture I was trying to reconcile the contrast between this gifted and impressive writer and the characters in his book. He is brilliant, confident, solid. Even his complexity is solid and tangible, but his characters are airy, anguished, conflicted. They’re imaginary protagonists, without bumps or bulges, clean and smooth, without body wastes, without smells of flesh or pus. I asked myself if a Jew could write about Arabs and depict their substance, their actions and motivations, their customs and their ability to break out of them, without flattening them into stereotypes, and without exaggerating their good or bad qualities.”

“Doctor Yasmine, you’re fascinating,” I said, trying to sound playful while expressing my appreciation of her analysis. Why couldn’t I tell her she was a shrewd judge of literature, I wondered? Would I have said to a man who impressed me with his ideas and insights that he was “fascinating”?

We were sitting at the bar and two couples crowded us wanting us to move away. Normally I would have left, but not this time. I ordered two more beers, we drank them at leisure, and only then slid down from the high stools and walked to Ben Yehuda Street.

“You remember you promised to take me for a trip around the country?” she asked. “Is the promise still good?”

“
Avec plaisir, madame
. How would you like to visit my old kibbutz? I’ve been asked to give a talk there, and we can combine it with a trip.”

“A talk about what?”

“About the Israeli–Arab conflict. A few days ago an Arabist from my kibbutz, a guy called Haggai, came to my office. I took him on a tour of East Jerusalem and we had a long chat. Before he left he asked if I’d be willing to speak to the members. ‘There is a lot of interest in the Arab issue,’ as he put it. I said all right, but it’s not definite yet. He has to get approval from the kibbutz culture committee. So we have to wait for a positive reply from Haggai. There is also another problem, Yasmine,” I added. “The talk will be in the evening and the kibbutz is in the Jezreel Valley, a four-hour drive from Jerusalem. We’ll have to stay overnight.”

“That’s fine.”

“We may have to share a room.”

Did she smile, or did I imagine it?