Yasmine (6 page)

“How did it happen?” I asked.

“After it was all over, someone fired a shot from the Old City wall, and…” She bit her lip. I didn’t know what to say. I took out my cigarettes, but quickly put them back in my pocket. Levanah doesn’t smoke and doesn’t like it when people light up near her.

“It’s all right, you can smoke,” she said, nodding. “Did the Minister speak to you?” I said yes and thanked her, as I was pretty sure the appointment was her idea. I knew she had a lot of influence over him.

“You’ve lost weight,” she said. “Take a few days off.”

“I got the impression he wants me to start right away.”

“What’s so urgent? Will the Arabs run away?”

Two women came in and embraced her. Her face contorted as she tried not to burst into tears. When they let go I took her hand in both of mine and held it a long time.

I remembered I had no money and went to the bank, then took a taxi to Zion Square, which was packed with young soldiers and reservists standing around in groups. Some were silent, others were talking at the top of their voices, telling stories about the war. Instead of Ze’ev, the affable cashier I was used to dealing with, there was a young woman with a beehive hairdo who was busy inspecting her fingernails.

“Where is Ze’ev?”

“On the Golan Heights,” she said without looking up. Finally she noticed the line stretching behind me and asked what I wanted. The army wages weren’t in my account yet, while the mortgage payment was due. I withdrew the one hundred and seventy-three lira in the account and left.

The streets were livelier than ever. It seemed that overnight Jerusalem had acquired a whole new population. People walked around, stopped to talk to acquaintances, chatting or whispering, and the air held something new, something confused and unclear, a mixture of joy and sadness, hope and expectation, as well as the eternal Jewish question, “What’s going to happen?”

I walked down Jaffa Road towards the centre of town. The roar of pneumatic drills made the ground tremble and deafened the ears. I walked on to see the concrete wall that separated the Old City, al-Quds as they call it, from our Jerusalem, but it wasn’t there! Heavy equipment crawled on the
hilltop, smoothing over no-man’s-land. Clouds of dust settled thickly over everything, and all was noise and confusion, while hundreds of curious onlookers gathered to watch. I too stood there, hypnotised, realising that I had never imagined East Jerusalem would be opened to us.

I was eager to see it, but the way was still blocked. Someone said we should try the Mandelbaum Gate. There a crowd gathered where only the other day Jordanian soldiers and UN observers had manned the gate, now replaced by Israeli soldiers and policemen. The old sign, “Stop! Border Ahead!” lay on the barbed wire fence, which had collapsed.

I stood in line, gazing at the nearby Tourjeman post and chewing my lip, just like the last time when, nine years ago, I had crossed this border on the way to Mount Scopus. Good God, how the years had flown! I still remember the earnest expressions on the faces of my fellow squaddies.

“We’re going abroad,” Sergeant Major Efroni had said when he briefed us. To impress us with the importance of the occasion, he lit an American cigarette and launched into an emotional speech: “Going up to the Mount we’ll be driving on the road where the convoy to Hadassah Hospital was ambushed in April 1948. This was just after Abd al-Kadr al-Husseini was killed on the Qastel, and four days after the capture of the village of Deir Yassin by the Irgun and the carnage that followed. Mount Scopus was cut off, and the British governor agreed that Jewish guards could accompany the medical convoy. In the afternoon the news came that everyone in that convoy, seventy-eight men and women, had been massacred in Sheikh Jarrah. The bodies of twenty-two of them were never found. That’s the story in a nutshell,” he concluded. “We kill them and they kill us, and the world looks on as if it’s a madhouse.”

When we reached Mount Scopus, the regular outpost commander, known as the king of the mountain, showed us around the hospital, the university buildings, the national library and the pine woods. I was part of a unit of soldiers who were specialists in all sorts of things and was personally responsible for wireless communications, but we were all ostensibly hospital workers. This was army life from a different world – a bit like a prison, since there was no going in or out, but we enjoyed a very comfortable existence during the month we were there. I still remember the smell of baking bread and the excellent meals, worthy of a high-class restaurant, cooked for us by an older reservist who in civilian life was the chef of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. In fact, we were so isolated I was able to make friends with Ghadir, a shepherd girl from the other side of the border, but that’s another story.

In our limited free time we were offered educational courses by the team of experts from the National Library and the hospital, academics who maintained the laboratories and facilities of the Hebrew University on the Mount. I especially enjoyed the lectures on the history of Jerusalem by Professor Meir Shadmi, the renowned scholar of Islam and an amiable elderly man with a Ben-Gurion-style mane, a boyish grin and prominent teeth. Being a child of the mass immigration of the 1950s, without any formal education, I was self-concious about knowing so little. By day I had worked for a living and at night I attended a school for working boys. It was thanks to the school and its dedicated teachers that I was able to matriculate, but my general knowledge was inevitably as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Now Shadmi, this eloquent professor, a modest, friendly scholar, happily shared his vast knowledge with anyone who took an interest. Till then I had known next to nothing
about Jerusalem. In Baghdad my mother had told us some stories, but they were naive and nostalgic tales that could not instil in me the sense of the city’s holiness, the way it is felt by a religious Jew who prays to it three times a day, or by one who grows up in its alleyways.

That time on Mount Scopus – Jebel Sacobos in Arabic – Shadmi talked about Jerusalem as a poet speaks of his beloved. He told us that her stones are singing, that she is bathed in a soft, caressing golden light. He described the great Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, the foundation stone from which Mohammed rose to heaven on his steed al-Burak, and of course the Temple Mount’s history, and our holy Western Wall, and the numerous synagogues and famous religious schools. But after lavishing praise on the ancient city through the ages, he concluded on a sober note: “Here were born the spiritual creations of the prophets and sages, kings and poets, who lived in Jerusalem and endowed it with extraordinary grace, and made it into a messianic city which, like a magnet, draws the madmen of this world and its would-be saviours, and everyone prays and their prayers are not answered, and they call on the Messiah and he does not come.”

With the help of the field-glasses of the Intelligence unit on the roof of the hospital, he showed us the city within the walls. I saw houses crushed together, balcony touching balcony, roof adjoining roof, like an overturned sieve sheltering the city, pierced here and there by minarets and church steeples, interspersed by some green plumes – the few unruly trees and bushes that dared to reach for the sunlight while their roots pushed through the stony soil – and the whole crammed, in suffocating proximity, into less than one square mile.

I soon became used to the small sounds and rustles, the amazing rural calm, which was broken at dawn and four more times in the course of the day by the summons of the muezzin. I walked around and discovered the eastern flank of the mountain facing the mountains of Edom and the Dead Sea. When I woke up early I watched the peach-coloured glow of the rising sun over the mountains of Edom, and when the air was very clear the water of the Dead Sea was a brilliant turquoise, like a field of gems. I grew deeply attached to the landscape, the slopes and the gullies, the way I had discovered the beauty of the Jezreel Valley and Mount Tabor when I was a boy in the kibbutz.

Professor Shadmi was a fount of wisdom. More than once I had received a whole lecture in response to a routine comment, such as, “It’s a pity the Old City is in Jordanian hands.”

“But my dear Nuri, what matters is the essence, not the vessel. Even if we agree that the Temple Mount is the centre, the heart, that everyone wants, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, we still have to consider what is the essence, the core of the place. Do you know the story of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai? No? Well, he was the youngest disciple of Old Hillel, who regarded him when he was still a youth as the greatest of them all, and dubbed him ‘a father of wisdom for the generations’. Before the downfall, during the siege of Jerusalem, Ben Zakkai was one of the leaders of the Sanhedrin, which occupied a hall in the Temple. While the Zealots wanted to fight to the last, come what may, Ben Zakkai realised that they could not possibly defeat the Romans, and he chose survival and the preservation of the spiritual centre. With the help of his disciples he slipped out of the besieged city to go to the Roman commander Vespasian, and said to him, ‘Give me Yavneh and its Sages.’
According to tradition, Vespasian agreed because Rabbi Yohanan foretold that he would become emperor, and shortly after this a messenger arrived from Rome to inform him of it. You ask why Yavneh? Well, my friend, you should know that Yavneh was the seat of the Sages and Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who wanted to ensure the survival of Judaism, installed the Sanhedrin there and made it the spiritual centre that preserved the future of the People of Israel. That is why I say, what matters is the essence. That is what preserved our people, not the stones, not the holy site; after all, no one knows when or even if it will ever be within our reach. Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai believed that it did not matter who ruled over the stones and the Mount. If he had given in to the Zealots, we wouldn’t be here today.”

When at last I reached the officer responsible for the Mandelbaum Gate he asked to see my identity card, which I didn’t have, but fortunately I had the new document I’d been given that morning by the security officer of the Ministry. “With a document like this you stood in line?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

I boarded a taxi. The driver, a man about my age with a peaked cap on his head, waited for me to tell him where we were going.

“To the military government headquarters. But first I want to drive around the city. Slowly, I want to savour the views.”

“Savour them, friend, savour and enjoy! We’ve got all the time in the world.” His throaty Sephardic voice was music to my ears. Suddenly I envied him and felt annoyed with myself for having flattened my own pronunciation in order to sound like the kibbutz-born kids.

“You were born in the Old City?” I asked.

“Can’t you hear it? Right there, within the walls.”

“You remember much?”

“How could I forget? The Golden Gate, the Tower of David, Absalom’s Tomb, the Via Dolorosa, the market…”

The street names were displayed on ceramic tiles in green, black and white, written in Arabic and English. I read them slowly, like a child. It occurred to me to check what the street name signs were like on our side. I’d never thought about it before.

“Everything’s shut. Bastards. What’s the matter, we aren’t good enough for them?” asked the driver, lighting a cigarette.

“It’s not them, it’s us. The military governor imposed a curfew,” I told him.

“Pity, I wanted to buy some electrical goods, before they learn from us and put up the prices.” We continued driving through the empty alleys. Place names and concepts I’d learned from Professor Shadmi rose to the surface of my mind.

A dead city, bands of soldiers patrolling, and suddenly the voice of my Minister in Charge came from the car radio, full of his trademark pathos: “Jerusalem, the reunified city, the capital of Israel for all eternity…”

“It seems the bullshit’s starting already,” the driver grumbled and spat out of the window. “What eternity? One bark from Washington and we’ll crawl back into the cage, like we did in ’56.”

“Where is Wadi Joz?” I asked.

“You should have said,” he replied and drove towards the Rockefeller Museum and then turned left. We saw closed workshops, heaps of junk, broken vehicles and dead engines, rubbish-strewn plots, then suddenly – crash! A hail of stones
fell on the car. I crouched low. The driver cursed. We looked around and saw no one.

“Sons of bitches, they aren’t scared!” he said and stopped.

“Keep going, keep going,” I urged him. “
Ibad an al-shar wughanilo
– avoid evil and sing for it!”

“But what’s going on?” he protested. “We just finished smashing them in the war and already they’re raising their heads!”

On the right were some wooden huts. Again, I thought of Ghadir, the pretty shepherd girl I had met on Mount Scopus nine years previosly. Perhaps she lived here?

Rubbish on the roadsides, bits of paper flying, shops and businesses shut, even the hotels were closed. Curious eyes peered at us from the windows, around the curtains. I smiled at them, then stopped. I didn’t want them to interpret the smile either as triumphal or as a greeting.

“Everything’s closed, damn their eyes. Let’s go to Salah a-Din Street, where their so-called fashionable shops are.”

“It’s just a little shopping centre,” I said when we arrived, disappointed, as if I’d expected to meet a beautiful cousin who turned out to be nothing special.

“Wait, wait, you haven’t seen anything yet. This isn’t the Old City.”

“
Madinat as-salaam
, the city of peace,” I intoned.

“What kind of
salaam
is this?” he muttered and slowed down again. “Siege, encirclement, breakthrough and liberation – again, and again, for ever and ever.”

Hundreds of Jerusalem Arabs crowded in front of the iron gate of the military governor’s HQ which had moved into the former Jordanian governor’s house on Salah a-Din Street. A woman covered from head to foot was crying “
Ibni, ibni
– my son, my son!” – her eyes full of tears. I had seen the same tears in the eyes of the lovely Rashel, the wife of my Uncle Hizkel, and recalled how she had leaned, barely breathing, on my mother when they tore her husband from her arms and dragged him away to the dungeons of Iraq’s secret service. I took a deep breath and pushed my way through the crowd, then went up to the second floor, to the office of the General’s advisor.

“You’re the General’s advisor?” I was amazed. Aharon Amitai, a former classmate, was sitting behind the desk.

“
Ahlan wasahlan
, Nuri,” he greeted me and stood up.

“
Ahlan wasahlan
to you,” I replied. “This is a surprise.” The room was richly furnished – massive leather armchairs, a conference corner, a huge dark desk, a bright carpet on the floor. On the wall hung an impressive photograph of the Old City as seen from the Mount of Olives.

“The General says to bring you up to speed,” he at once began to brief me, in his typical businesslike way, on military and civilian matters, hierarchies, power relations and interests, and
all in great detail. It was evident that in a matter of days he’d built up a whole network of acquaintances and sources and collaborators from among the locals. When he finished the survey he carefully collected together the papers on his desk, locked them in a safe and took me over to field security, to provide me with permits to enter the cities of the West Bank and various closed sectors, including military camps. When everything was done he said, “Come on, let’s get something to eat and I’ll introduce you to an interesting man.”

Amitai was a few years older than me. At university he had been an outstanding student, and spoke fluent Arabic without a foreign accent. He used to take course notes on large cards and leave as soon as the lesson ended, never wasting time on idle chitchat. One girl in our class, Beanstalk we called her, was crazy about him and went out of her way to attract his attention, but never managed to get even a smile out of him. He and I became friendly only in the third year, when I organised a small group of students to help kids in the poor neighbourhood of Musrara to prepare for the State Aptitude Test. Beanstalk, who followed him everywhere, laid an ambush for him there too, worked with him, and eventually got him. Amitai continued his university studies and was the first of our year to obtain a doctorate. He joined the academic staff and was considered highly promising. Now he and I left the grounds of the military government HQ and went to a nearby restaurant. Al-Hurriyeh – Liberty – said the sign over the door.

“It’s not a bad place. Belongs to Abu George, a Christian from a well-off family originally from Bethlehem. He’s a journalist with political awareness. He’s also the chairman of the tourist industry association.”

A pair of colourful canaries chirped in a cage near the
entrance. A diminutive man was busy buffing the unoccupied tables and chairs and a pungent smell of polish hung in the air. We went through the empty restaurant into an attractive garden, where rose bushes bordered a lawn, and at the back stood a spreading pomegranate tree full of red buds that would ripen into sweet fruit by the end of the summer. A sprinkler freshened the hot air with flying showers of cool water.

A handsome, fair-skinned man in his fifties came to our table. It was Abu George. “
Ahlan, bil-colonel
,” he said to Amitai and shook his hand. Amitai introduced me by my grand new title, and Abu George gave me a feeble handshake. In his white jacket and black bow tie he reminded me of Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
. When he left us to order our lunch Amitai said, “This is where you and I must make each other look big and important.”

“Why did he call you colonel?”

“They gave me that title the day I started here. They think I’m from the Intelligence Services.”

In keeping with his new image as a secret service man, Amitai told me what he’d managed to find out about our host. Abu George, originally Ibrahim Hilmi, was born in the last days of the Ottoman empire. He had told my friend that when he was a child he saw General Allenby entering Jerusalem after the conquest, and described how the victorious General dismounted from his horse at the Jaffa Gate and entered the holy city on foot, humbly, to show respect. His maternal uncle had been killed in that war and the family did not know where he was buried. When he grew up he took this uncle’s name, Abu George, and had been known by it ever since. He had only one child, a daughter named Yasmine.

A corpulent waiter, dressed in finery like the serving staff at
the King David Hotel, brought us hummus and tehina, shishlik and a salad seasoned in olive oil, which immediately transported me to my childhood. The pitta bread was thicker than ours and its flour tastier, the hummus denser and more satisfying, not ground smooth as we tend to do it. But best of all was the tehina full of finely-chopped parsley and the right amount of salt and lemon.

“I apologise, we have no new fresh supplies. This is all that’s left,” said Abu George.

“Blessings on your hands,” I said in a friendly tone. He nodded slightly and left.

“His employees follow him through thick and thin,” Amitai went on. “He pays them well, contributes to their children’s education, helps with medical costs. Like our old-time socialists…”

Abu George returned and sat down at the corner of our table. A pair of pigeons landed on the window sill, and their cooing blended with the silence that dominated the lovely garden.

“How are things?” Amitai asked.

“Hard. Hard…What more can I say?” replied Abu George glumly.

“All the same, tell us.”

“What’s to talk about? In ’48 you drove me out of Talbieh. I escaped to al-Quds. Now you’ve invaded this place too. Where should I run to now?” His expression showed how severely recent events had devastated him, leaving him stunned and perplexed.

“And now what?” Amitai pressed him.

“Now? We wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“
Ana maref
, what do I know? For the king, for Nasser, for
America, for Allah,” he said despairingly, took a
masbahah
, a string of worry beads, from his pocket and began to run it through his fingers.

“But the issue is between you and us, brother,” Amitai said impatiently. “Not with America or Russia.”

Abu George took a deep breath, closed his eyes and considered. Then he said quietly, “You’ll be out of here in two, three weeks, just like you quit the Sinai in ’56.”

Amitai dismissed the prediction with a shake of his head, lit his pipe and puffed on it, exhaling smoke-rings. The
smartly-liveried
waiter brought iced water and fragrant Arab coffee. My watch showed a quarter past one. I’d arranged to meet Sandra at three to go to Ashkelon to visit Kabi at the hospital.

“You’re Iraqi, aren’t you?” Abu George said to me and poured me a cup of coffee.

I nodded.

“Your Arabic is a mixture.”

“Like life,” I smiled.

“Thirty years ago, when I was a student at Beirut University, I knew an Iraqi Jew by the name of Somekh. He was planning to open a psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, something very advanced,” he said and offered me a cigarette from his packet of Imperials.

“They’re as good as American cigarettes,” he assured me. The Virginia tobacco was aromatic and very strong. I coughed and my head spun, but I continued to smoke it out of politeness. For the next round I offered him one of my Ascot cigarettes. He inhaled a couple of times then said, “Too dry,” and put it out. He became silent, withdrawn, not at all like a traditional Arab host.

“How much do we owe you, my friend?” I asked.

“
Mush mumken
, out of the question!” he said, startled out of his reverie. “You don’t want to insult me.”

“Narghile?” the waiter offered, Amitai nodded, and the two of us lounged beside the hubble-bubble like lords in their ancestral home. Unused to smoking a narghile, I inhaled too deeply, the water gurgled in the glass jar and I choked and spluttered. Abu George watched me and for the first time a little smile appeared on his face. In the empty restaurant the sound of bubbling water was like a distant melody, and I must have dozed off, because suddenly I was in a desert sandstorm, buffeted by a blinding wind while shells whistled around me. I woke up in alarm to see a big man standing before me, moustachioed and smiling.

“Meet Abu Nabil,” Amitai said. “He’s Abu George’s partner in the
al-Wattan
newspaper, and the senior editor.”

“You should add the former,” said the newcomer when we shook hands.

“What happened, you split up?”

“God forbid, not at all! But, since you closed them all down, there isn’t a paper any more. Why didn’t you at least leave us the newspaper?” Abu Nabil protested. “Let me tell you frankly,” he went on, “before the war when I wanted to feel good I listened to Sawt al-Arab, to hear about Nasser’s glorious exploits. When I wanted to know the truth I listened to your Arabic service. And when I wanted to get away from both Nasser and you, I’d go to my desk in the newspaper’s office. Now I’ve got nothing left.”

“What are you afraid of?” Abu George asked us. “An egg doesn’t break a stone, as we say.”

“Allow us to let off steam, it’s to your advantage, ‘Colonel,’ if only to get the orders of your military government published,”
Abu Nabil whispered like a confidential advisor, twirling the ends of his thick moustache. There was something attractively theatrical about his gestures.

“
Shwai-shwai
, not so fast, give us a chance to get organised,” Amitai protested.

“You must be joking,” Abu Nabil winked. “You are not Levantines like us. You are Westerners. With you everything is planned well in advance.”

“The liberation of Jerusalem wasn’t planned.”

“
Mush ma’qul
, inconceivable. You conquered us at lightning speed,” Abu George said and began to cough.

“That’s what happens in war – there are always surprises,” Amitai responded evasively. We stood up and said goodbye with the usual courtesies.

Having been assured of my future co-operation, Amitai accompanied me to the corner of Omar Street, where Sandra was waiting for me beside her car.