Qissat (9 page)

I moved a bit so I could unstick my trousers from my arse. I wanted a shower so badly. Then the guard was back. He puts his head into the car and reads out Tawfeeq’s name and returns his passport to him. The guard inhales before reading out my name, the long one, which he does respectfully, as though it’s a holy message.

‘Binti,’
says Dad. My daughter. The head reappears at the window. He has a bum fluff moustache and ivory teeth like a horse. He checks out my hair before pointing at my nose.

‘What’s that?’ he sounds so desert, so raw. Tawfeeq had stuck a Band Aid plaster over my nose stud.

‘A Chinese cure,’ says Tawfeeq. ‘For arthritis. Of the nose. Chinese.’ The guard stands up. There are more sounds in the heavy, guttural accent, lots of
dddaad dddaad.
Arabic, the language of that unique consonant
dddaad.
A hand throws the passport into my father’s lap and then the same hand waves us lazily through.

‘Arthritis?’ Dad only speaks when the checkpoint has disappeared into a mirage behind us. ‘Arthritis of the nose,
ya zalame,
my man, anywhere but the nose. And you a doctor, Tawfeeq!’

‘Of the nose,’ Dad is still giggling on and off a day later when we get to Amman. White buildings are pegged in all over the hills like tombstones.

‘Do you know I have never been to Amman?’ Tawfeeq hits the steering wheel as we drive into the capital and see open shops.

‘Well, welcome. Welcome,’ says Dad. ‘The world’s biggest refugee camp, all made out of limestone.’

‘Is there a Vuitton shop here?’ asks Tawfeeq.

It takes Dad three calls to find Mama. She had rented a place in North London and the phone was shared on a corridor. She sounded unnerved to hear us – I had not expected her to sound so phased, ‘You don’t know what it has been like! I heard nothing from you. We had no news. The news on the TV here is exaggerating everything and making it all sound so awful. I have been glued to the TV. Such lies! Such distortion! Such double standards! I thought you could be dead. You don’t know…’ I spoke to her and then Dad arranged to call her later and I heard him talk with her for a long time with the voice he used for his child patients whilst I pretended to be asleep in the hotel room as the blue neon flashed through the window onto my face. I heard him laugh with her and say ‘Of the nose!’ again and again.

The pages of the diary run blank after that. They are wrinkled with the pressure of words, and the lapse of time. I look back at the last entry.

03.08.90 15:23 Bustanji watering lawn with a watering can.
Waleed waiting in the car.

We heard about Bustanji and Waleed months later. I watched the news by then, all of it, I saw the Palestinian intifada and I saw the build-up to war with all its muscle and propaganda and hypocrisy and as Dad and Mama got angry I felt it with them too. And I squirmed too when I saw the footage of Yasser Arafat kissing Saddam Hussein replayed again and again because I understood by then what this would mean for all of us.

We heard about Bustanji and Waleed after the war was over; after liberation had occurred in all its glory and retreating troops had been strafe-bombed along the Mutla’a ridge road near the desert where we had tried to have family picnics. We heard about them after ancient Iraqi cities had been bombed, scud missiles had fallen on Tel Aviv and the sky above Kuwait had billowed oil clouds for weeks.

We heard about Bustanji and Waleed after Dad’s family had been told to leave, had had their residency withdrawn, and their belongings loaded into trucks, together with several hundreds of thousands of others. We heard about Bustanji and Waleed after the endless number of days where, after long-distance telephone calls we sat together imagining Dad’s family moving into unemployment in Amman with their Italian urchin paintings, their photos of my grandfather in a fez, their crocheted tissue paper holders and their miniature Domes of the Rock.

We heard about Bustanji and Waleed from Tawfeeq. Tawfeeq had returned to Kuwait on his French passport and had told Dad after he reported on the looting of our house. I had heard Dad tell Mama from outside their room,

‘They took Waleed.’

‘Bustanji’s son? But why?’

‘Why? Well, I don’t believe there was any reason as such. It wasn’t like that. It sounds like these youths were just mad at all Palestinians. It had nothing to do with anything Waleed had done. You know they felt we had been disloyal to them, that we had supported their invader, I suppose. They wanted to retaliate, like a vendetta. It seems they were armed and they drove into Hawalli and started pulling people out of their houses, mostly young men and they must have picked up Waleed when his father was out…’

‘Where? I thought you said they did not leave each other…’

‘I suppose he was out doing the gardens, but what Tawfeeq said and I am not sure how he knows this, is that apparently when he came back the boy was gone.’ I could hear my mother take in her breath. I could hear the news reports continuing on the radio behind them but this time they were not listening.

‘Of course, Abu Waleed got very anxious and no one would tell him anything. Well, no one knew anything I suppose… and so finally he went to the police. The police couldn’t help him, but decided to start asking him questions and found out that he had been in the PLO.’ I could feel them looking at each other. I could feel my mother fearing his words.

‘No!’

‘So they kept him and Tawfeeq does not know what happened after that. He just said that the hospital was contacted to collect Abu Waleed’s body.’

‘No!’

‘Abu Waleed was old. Maybe it was the stress. Maybe his heart, who knows?’

‘And Waleed?’

‘Disappeared completely. No trace of him anywhere.’

I could not hear Dad and Mama say anything else. The voice of the radio commentator stressed and intoned his excitement to the room’s tenants. But we were not listening to that anymore. I could not see my parents either, but somehow, somehow, from the other side of the door, I could feel that inside the room my father had my mother in his arms.

A special welcome

I was not yet three years old when we moved to a new house. For the first year after the move my existence was bounded by the walls of our small courtyard, and I was allowed to poke my head through the gate to steal a glance at the wide world outside only once or twice a day, depending on my luck. My little brother Basim, one year younger than me, was my inseparable companion in those days. This situation was not without its advantages: we could listen to what was happening beyond the walls of the yard without anyone ever knowing of our presence, and thus we learnt of the cruelties that the neighbourhood’s children could practise, and could devise an evil counter-plan to face them. However, we were not the only ones to prepare a strategy for the day when we would be allowed to leave the confines of the house. A gang of kids ruled the neighbourhood, and they had plans to ambush us, with the aim of forcing us to yield to their leadership.

The day of our release into the neighbourhood fell on the first Ramadan we celebrated in the new house. Our mother undertook to wash us, dress us up in matching outfits, comb our hair and proceeded to boot us out into the turmoil of the neighbourhood’s main square, where we were to sit in the sun on the blanket she had laid out for this purpose. One of the neighbourhood kids hurried to the other end of the quarter to where the teeming beehive of the Silwan Valley starts, and came back with seven other kids. He was carrying a platter with a dessert called
albalooza,
a milk pudding covered in coconut with pink icing, which he presented to us. The owner of the platter said, ‘Please be my guest.’ We did not take a slice despite the cake’s tempting appearance. He pushed the platter closer to our faces and uttered the magic words: ‘For free.’ Well, since it was for free we could not think of any reason not to take two little pieces and wolf them down guilelessly. The two little pieces of
albalooza
approached Basim’s and my mouth impatiently.

It had not escaped their resentful attention that Basim and I were clean, that we were wearing shoes, that our hair was combed, that no fluid was dripping from our noses and that we were sitting on a blanket and not on the ground. We did not have time to get acquainted with the taste of
albalooza
before the eyes of the seven children lit up, and they started to run around and sing in a tone full of malice and scorn: ‘A snack in your gizzard, in your mouth a lizard!’ and ‘If you eat a mouthful, you’ll get a dead mouse-ful!’ and ‘Swallow fast and gone is the fast!’ We had no idea what they were on about. We did not know what gizzard meant, nor what fasting was. Mother had neglected to inform us about Ramadan. She would feed us lunch in the kitchen, which was unusual, but would not explain why.

So we learnt a lesson that day. We found out whom we were dealing with. We took the decision to avenge our humiliation, and for this we had to work as a team and gain supremacy. We would have to achieve this with the power of our brains, not by physical strength or by force of numbers. We were cleverer than them because we listened to the stories of our older siblings and we knew how to repeat the tales to the children as if they were true and as if we were their heroes. In their gullibility they believed what Basim and I in tandem conjured up for them. Thus we managed with imagination, story-telling, a few suggestive gestures and intonations, and with perceptiveness, to overcome the many, and to launch a new era in the history of Azzinar quarter.

Why Abu Ahmad sleeps in the daytime

Though we risked being expelled from the neighbourhood, we had to find a solution to the Abu Ahmad Crisis. Abu Ahmad, the self-proclaimed chief of the neighbourhood, who always behaved accordingly, was an obstacle to our happiness. We had to find a way to soften his heart. At the time, he was the owner of the house my father rented for us to live in, adjoining the wall of the al-Aqsa compound, next to Ra’s al-Amood in Old Jerusalem. Abu Ahmad’s house towered over our courtyard with its many balconies and terraces, which caused him to take on the role of an omniscient deity and in that executive capacity he acquired a liking for interference in our lives. Abu Ahmad and his sons Ahmad and Mahmoud worked night shifts and consequently the father imposed a ruling on the neighbourhood that forbade children from playing in front of his house – knowing all the while that the streets of the quarter were crowded and the only space for games happened to be right in front of his house. The barrel where we fetched water to fill our balloons for water fights was in front of his house. The park with the sycamore trees, with the swing and the Grotto of Ghosts was in front of his house. Wherever we went always ended up being in front of his house. The scolding and the blame always fell on our heads: Abu Ahmad considered Basim and me to be his lowly slaves, and as far as he was concerned obedience was beyond discussion.

The question that bothered us was why does he sleep in the daytime? Why doesn’t he sleep at night like normal people and play with his friends in the daytime like the rest of us? I posed this question to my mother once and, in the midst of concentrating on the woollen sweater she was knitting, she did not give me much of an answer except for a mumbled ‘Because he wakes up at night.’ I left her to her business for a while, and then returned with the question: ‘And if he were awake in the day, would he sleep at night?’ Her answer was brief and upon hearing what she said my heart leaped with joy. I ran to the room where Basim was playing with Lego bricks and we started to hatch a plan. We let the members of our gang into the secret and waited for the great day to come.

My mother went out with four of our neighbours to visit another neighbour, Umm Jawdat. Basim and I sent out a signal to our comrades to come to our house in order to execute the plan. Its aim was to restore Abu Ahmad to his true nature that God in His wisdom had created for him. We gathered pots and spoons and all the kitchen utensils we could find to produce a loud noise. We lined up our men in formation like a battalion of scouts, and started to march in a circle around the walnut tree in the middle of our little courtyard, setting our pace to the drumming of pots and pans. The melody of a scouts’ march rose above the banging, or some discordant noise vaguely resembling that kind of musical tradition. We sang ‘Yoya’, a repetitive song we liked and which kept our spirits up to complete our worthy mission, so we gave it all our throats would permit.

We were so immersed in our task that we obviously overstepped all the lines that we had sometimes respected. This time Abu Ahmad did not come out alone: he was accompanied for the first time by his otherwise conciliatory sons. The three of them started to hurl at us all the stuff they could find on the terraces of their house, empty cans, stones – the ones that we had thrown there ourselves in the first place in revenge for Abu Ahmad’s constant shouting at us – and all the items of clothing that were hanging on the line to dry. Their reaction was a hurricane of fury and we certainly hadn’t done anything to cause them to go crazy like that. Our brothers-in-arms deserted us, and only Basim and I were left behind to receive the blows. We wanted to barricade ourselves in the house, but mother had the keys. Time was not on our side and the voices of the three men were coming closer as they descended the stairs of their house and barged into our courtyard. It was difficult to think clearly in this time of distress, but we had to choose a hiding place quickly so we ran to the small kitchen to go and tremble in there. From the voices it was clear that they had entered our house. Then suddenly our escape route opened in front of us like a miracle: the window of the kitchen gave onto the yard of Abu Ahmad, who would never think that we would escape from him by going straight to the lion’s den. We jumped out of the window despite the pain, and we ran away through the gate of Abu Ahmad’s garden to the house of Umm Jawdat. Our legs barely carried us.