A Fool's Alphabet (14 page)

Then they looped back through Ramallah. It was empty. Figures occasionally ran along the walls, like shadows. Eventually they arrived at a settlement that Sarah had wanted them to visit. It looked at first like a defensive fortification, concrete boxes and wire netting, the kind of thing breached by the Germans in the Ardennes in 1940. There were also cheap apartment buildings, unweathered, lacking in the accretions of community life. Children buzzed around the forecourts, unaware of the millions of deaths on which the positioning of their playground was premissed. The desert sky was empty towards Jordan and north to the Lebanese border – ten minutes away by fighter jet. The settlement was like a bunkered provocation in the dense, mad air.

An armed guard let them through the gates. An older man, with a khaki shirt and a large belly, shook Sarah warmly by the hand and took them through into a building that looked like some communal centre or school. There was a circle of small chairs and a table with a slide projector. He and Sarah talked in Hebrew for a time until she remembered the others and asked him to speak English. Like most of the people they had met, he spoke fluently with a thick accent. He had been in the middle of explaining some building programme to her, but when he heard Harry was a journalist he was anxious to know about the crosswords in the various London newspapers. The papers came late, if at all, and he was
worried that his prize entries were not reaching the judges.

It was not long before a chance enquiry brought him back to the subject of survival. ‘It's not so terrible, is it, to build houses on the land we have won? I tell you, if we can have a few more years of peaceful building the question will be over for all time. Some of these Peace people in Jerusalem, some of the journalists who come, they ask me: do I hate the Arabs who live here? Of course not. Do I want to kick them out? Of course not. There are a similar number living in the Galilee and no one suggests we give that to them and stop building there. No. But I tell you, I think they should stay if they like, but since this is our country they should take citizenship of another country. Maybe Jordan. Let them live where they like, but be citizens of another country. I can't see what's wrong with that.'

A young American came in. He was introduced as Michael. He wore jeans and an army shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms under silky black hair. He was clear-eyed and restless, bouncing round from one handshake to the next. Unlike Shimon and David in Jerusalem, he looked like an athlete, a fighter.

With no prompting he told them how he had come. ‘I was in a bar in Trenton. It's near where I was raised. Why do we always end up in places like Jersey?' He laughed. ‘A few of us were talking about the war in '73. I'd been a bad student. I'd had bad grades and everything. What was I doing drinking in a bar in any case? I should have been home. We got to talking about Israel and how proud we felt of the army, what they'd done, how they'd resisted. This friend of mine Mischa said it made him want to live there and a lot of the guys said, No, it wasn't much of a place, Tel Aviv was like Florida. And Mischa said, No, he wanted to be a settler – someone who went up and made his life in the land we'd won, the land that was rightfully ours. He began to talk about the pioneers in America going West. He said it was a great American tradition, and some other guy pointed out most of us had come from Poland.'

Michael laughed again, briefly, showing even white teeth.

‘I saw the only way for me was through the Bible, through study. I started going to class properly and after a year I told my parents I felt ready. You know, I thought they'd be proud and I thought they'd be relieved because they'd never really learned to speak English properly themselves. But they were sad I was leaving. I told them it was the way of God. America was not for us with its modern ways, its lack of faith. But God is great, and he brought me here to this beautiful land. We have been weak for too long. I don't blame people like my parents. But the Jews in Eastern Europe were passive for too long, they always wanted more time to think. Now we have a duty to take this land and to keep it, because God gave it to us. To go some place there was danger, to me that was part of the pioneering spirit, too. We hear so much these days from people in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who talk about “peace” and how we should not be here in Samaria. I think we should talk to them. They're wrong, but they're not past a point where we can discuss things. I think it's a phase and I think it's coming to an end. They will see the simple truth sooner or later. Someone even mentioned the words “civil war” to me the other day. Ridiculous! They would never be that foolish. I pray for them. Did you hear that? I pray for my enemies! Maybe I'm becoming a Christian!'

He beamed at them all with the healthy certainty of faith. There was a brief pause, interrupted by Daoud clearing his throat, before the older man went to get drinks.

Back in the car, negotiating the rocky driveway back to the road, Daoud said, ‘I think you guys should see Nablus.'

‘What happens there?' said Pietro.

‘It's the Palestinian stronghold in the West Bank,' said Sarah. ‘It's an awful place.'

Daoud laughed. ‘It's beautiful. I have friends there.'

‘Would we be welcome?' said Pietro.

‘Of course,' said Daoud. ‘They are decent people. You
mustn't believe everything these others tell you.' He jerked his head back in the direction of the settlement.

They drove on through the empty roads of Samaria. Pietro found that his first impression of the bone-white hills of Judaea had been corrected or altered. There was after all something desirable in this barren land, particularly when you thought of the yearning with which it had been regarded by poor people in the
shtetl
of Eastern Europe, or by pressed and persecuted immigrants in the big cities of America. When a man lay down to sleep with his wife in the ghetto in Warsaw, had he dreamed of a promised land that would look like this? Perhaps when his body ached with the work of the city he had thought of a whitewashed house with a vineyard, a little grove with fruit trees, animals; a tiled roof, a shady tree, bougainvillaea, and grandchildren running in to be caressed and petted at his knee. How his soul must have longed for it, under the hammer of city labour, broken, beaten, among hard buildings in a foreign land.

The detested author of the magazine article had pointed out another irony: that the olive trees, the fig trees, the cultivation of the land, the trailing trellises of grapes, the sheep on the hills, the gentle flow of water through tiled cisterns, the essence of the landscape that had so inflamed the early Zionists could best be summed up in one word: Arab. In the occupation of Samaria, the Jews had built with pre-stressed concrete, steel and plastic tiles; in taking possession, they had built over their loved biblical landscape so that the promised land was, by some further irony, withheld from them in the moment of fulfilment, as it had been withheld from Moses.

To a foreigner, a Gentile, the land looked neither especially Arab nor Jewish nor promised. More than anything else, it looked frightening: the object of too much desire.

It was a cloudy day in Nablus. The people went about their business overlooked by a large hill whose massive physical indifference made their swarming lives look aimless. Pietro
took photographs. Here it was impossible for the camera not to be full of people; yet the men and women added a particular force to the images of place, because part of the reason for their existence was simply to be there. What they did was less important than the fact that they did it there, in that spot, and by their occupation laid claim to it.

It was a close, grey afternoon. They went into a café and a waiter brought them tea with mint and sugar. A table of four elderly men played backgammon. The town seemed mortally depressed, slouched in torpor. Yet in the streets there was the anxious and frenetic activity that accompanies poverty. Young men ran and shouted in the alleys; women elbowed their way through the crowds. The result of these contrasting moods – the languor with the activity, the passionate sense of possession in a place that no one could be proud of – was a sense of threat. The missing factor in the equation could have been violence.

Two men came in and greeted Daoud. They sat down at the same table and after cursory introductions fell into conversation.

‘That doesn't sound like Hebrew,' said Sarah.

Daoud broke off. ‘You're right. It's Arabic. Excuse me. I'd forgotten for a moment.'

He said something to the two men and they talked in a mixture of Hebrew, Arabic and English. Daoud was the only one who understood everything. It seemed to amuse him. His eyes narrowed as if in amusement at some grand joke that none of the others was quite equipped to understand.

‘My friend here,' he said, touching one of the men on the arm, ‘says he would like you to know that he and most of his friends concede that the Jews have a rightful claim to live in Israel. He says his dream is that there should be one state in which people live together peacefully, like brothers, but given what is happening here in Nablus, with terrorist bombs, and what has happened elsewhere he thinks this is not likely. So he says there must be two states, one for each of the two peoples. He says he regrets very much that many Jews think
his people are not worth considering, that they think of them as . . . dirt. But he says the Palestinians and the Jews are similar peoples and they must work out their destiny together. It is like a difficult marriage. You would not have chosen this partner, but you are stuck with her. You can fight for ever, or you can decide to live in peace. He does not like it, but he has accepted it.'

Sarah smiled. ‘That is a very reasonable view.'

Daoud said, ‘If you doubt my translation, you can ask him to repeat it in Hebrew.'

‘Not at all.' Sarah looked embarrassed under Daoud's mocking gaze.

The older of the two Arab men lit a cigarette and asked Daoud a question in Arabic.

‘He wants to know if you have noticed about the street-cleaners,' said Daoud. ‘The garbage men, the labourers, the shit-gatherers.'

Pietro and Harry nodded. Daoud turned back to his friend.

‘And do you know why they are all Arabs?' he asked Harry.

Harry shrugged.

‘My friend says it is because his people are not permitted proper citizenship of this country, this model society.'

Sarah said, ‘Ask him why his people don't unite with their friends in Jordan or Syria.'

Daoud didn't ask him. He said, ‘It's because they must first have their own independence like any other state. They must first have their own land and their own city.'

‘You mean Jerusalem?' said Sarah.

‘Why not?'

‘Oh God.' Sarah rolled her eyes heavenward.

They were due to spend the evening in Tel Aviv, with a family who were friends of Harry's mother. As they walked back to the car, Pietro said to Sarah, ‘How come Daoud speaks Arabic so well?'

‘Because he's an Arab,' she said. ‘Couldn't you tell?'

‘It hadn't occurred to me,' said Pietro, glancing back to where Daoud was walking with Harry. ‘He told me he was a Christian yesterday.'

‘There are quite a number of Arab Christians in fact.'

‘And yet by nationality he's Israeli. Perhaps that helps him see all sides of the question.'

‘I don't think so,' said Sarah.

It was growing dark as they emerged from Nablus. Pietro thought of the good Samaritan as they drove through the rocky hills. A man had fallen among thieves in just such a place. Then he remembered that this was wrong: the Samaritan had come from here, but the robbery had been elsewhere. And the Samaritans, had they been Jews, a lost tribe? Or were they Arabs? Or Gentile? He had heard it said that the Palestinians themselves were initially Jewish, more authentically the children of Abraham than those who had remained in the faith.

They were on a narrow motorway with headlights bending towards them and the tarmac road lit by the chemical splash of sodium overhead. With the snaking red tail-lights of the cars ahead, the scene might have been from any busy highway at dusk: the rush hour from Seattle out to what its residents called the ‘burbs'; the packed
périphérique
at Lyon; the drab slip roads from Runcorn and Liverpool. The world was bounded by the red velour of the car seats, the smell of the ashtray, the lit instrument panel on the dashboard and the swish of cars passing in the opposite direction. In their moving capsules no one at this moment cared about the ownership of the terrain they crossed; their aim, like that of any traveller, was only to be somewhere else.

Back in the lobby of their hotel in Jerusalem the next day, Pietro saw a photograph which excited him more than the arguments he had heard. It showed four Israeli soldiers arriving for the first time at the Wailing Wall after the capture of East Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967. It looked quite familiar – perhaps he had seen it in a newspaper – but its
eloquence had survived. Three men stood in the foreground, close up to the camera. The photographer had knelt with his back to the Wall, facing the soldiers. One had his eyes raised beneath the rim of his helmet, looking up and to the right, his eyes scanning what he saw, but watchfully, as though still expecting resistance. On the right was a slightly older man, also helmeted, his face in shadow, unshaven, looking up and straight ahead in the passionless expression of a trained soldier. And in the middle was a younger man, fairer, perhaps not more than twenty years old, who had his helmet in his hands, as though, contrary to Jewishcustom, he had doffed it in reverence. Of the three, only he had quite given way to personal emotion, and in his face, half frowning, half turned, there was a look of concerned wonder, of excitement barely contained by the discipline of arms. The arrangement of the three figures close to the camera gave a sense of movement. It was as though they still quivered with the momentum of arrival; this was clearly the actual instant of awe and of possession. Then they would be gone, succeeded by other soldiers, whose helmets and faces were already edging into the background of the picture. Then they too would be replaced; on and on.