Leon Uris (16 page)

There was a percentage of girls whose hymens were elastic and did not break easily, and if such were the case the old daya, or midwife, was commissioned to break the hymen with her fingernail and then certify virginity.

The new husband, who had held nothing more delicate than a shovel or plough handle, could be rough and often leave infection. Or the daya, with her sharp, dirty fingernail, sometimes cut into the vaginal wall and caused hemorrhaging.

But this was not the fortune of Haj Ibrahim. In the morning he presented the bloody sheet to Sheik Walid Azziz, who held it up on the tip of his sword and galloped around their tents, waving it to the cheers of his people.

Haj Ibrahim accompanied Sheik Azziz and his bodyguards and slaves as they rode out ahead of the caravan as it left Tabah. The entourage stopped at a half day’s travel mark and waited for the main body to catch up. The two men found shade on the fringes of the Negev Desert, one of those incomprehensibly cruel parches of earth where only a handful of people of a distinctive breed could endure. The belt of Islam held some of the planet’s worst land, which ran from North Africa into the dismal places of the Pacific Ocean. It was that crushing part of the world where men could not beat the earth. Numbly they embraced Islam and its fatalistic outlook. Islam gave them something to grasp hold of in order to continue the struggle through life. This land bullied everyone who attempted to exist on it. So harsh, so brutalizing were the forces of nature that those people imprisoned upon it were convoluted into forming a society where cruelty was commonplace.

Brown spots and rising veins declared the age of Walid Azziz, an old desert chieftain whose hand had twisted more daggers into more bellies of enemies than the biblical Joab. Ibrahim and Azziz were men who had declared themselves leaders and proceeded to carve out mini-kingdoms. The tribe and its strongmen had always been the bulwark of Arab political structure.

Ibrahim needed information, perhaps guidance, but men even so close by blood relationship and position seldom spoke straight with one another.

‘It seems the war will soon be over,’ Ibrahim said.

Walid Azziz, who had seen it all come and go for almost ninety years, merely shrugged. They all came, they all went. Only the Bedouin was eternal.

‘Perhaps I am relieved. I’m not certain,’ Ibrahim continued. ‘I never did trust the Germans.’

Walid Azziz said nothing. Early in the war the Germans had slipped one of their agents into the Wahhabi tribe and made the Bedouin all kinds of promises if they would stage a rebellion to coordinate with the Afrika Korps when it advanced on the Canal. Walid Azziz made vague and noncommittal promises, just as he had made vague and noncommittal promises to the Turks and the Egyptians and the British, all of whom had claimed sovereignty over the brooding spaces roamed by the Bedouin.

‘I have been approached to help form a new All Palestinian Party,’ Ibrahim said, ‘and I have been asked if the Wahhabis will come in.’

‘You live like the center of a target. Villages are no good. I go to the desert. It makes no difference to me who tries to rule Palestine.’

‘But, Uncle, when the big war stops, a new one will begin here. The British will leave sooner or later. They have failed and they are very weary. We must be prepared to move in and take over Palestine.’

For a long time Walid Azziz was desert silent. ‘Donkey piss,’ he finally said. ‘You rule your village. I rule the Wahhabis. The rest is donkey piss. No two Arabs can agree on the distance from here to that tree over there. We have been on this land since the sun has been in the sky and no Arabs have ever ruled Palestine. Be careful about political alliances now.’

‘When the British leave, surely the Jews will not be able to take on the entire Arab world.’

‘Perhaps not. Of all the infidels who have come here, none is more loathsome to us than the Jew. This mission against the Jew is like the milk of life for us. And now, for the first time in hundreds of years, there may at last be someone we can beat in a war. But what then? Will the Arab nations hand over Palestine to your wonderful new political organization? Or will Syria grab the Galilee and Egypt the Negev? Will the Arab Legion go back across the Jordan River or stay on the West Bank? And what of Kaukji and the Mufti? And how will our Palestinian nationalism end? It will end as it always ends, with the personal desire of one man to gain power. Be careful of alliances,’ he repeated, ‘and be careful of conferences; they always end up in screaming matches and threats.’

The old sheik slumped back into silence. The caravan could be seen inching against the skyline at a distance of a few miles. Horizons, it seemed, were made to showcase camels’ humps.

‘Uncle,’ Ibrahim prodded. ‘It must come down to a war between us and the Jews. It is inevitable.’

‘Yes, we must fight them,’ Azziz agreed, ‘because they are infidels and we are Moslems. No infidel can be allowed to rule one inch of land where Islam exists. However, fight the Jews very carefully.’

‘What do you mean, Uncle?’

‘All the rest of the foreigners have come to Palestine to exploit us. The Jews have come to stay. They have done well by the land. They can be trusted more than anyone else, including ourselves. In the end we will get a better deal from a Gideon Asch than from the Syrians, the Jordanians, the British, anyone. Of course, out in public, you must scream and rage about Jewish presence. However, when you pick up a gun against them, make sure your aim is bad and make sure they know you never meant to hit anything. Allah forbid I have to go back under Egyptian rule.’

The line of camels swayed toward them. The old man creaked to his feet, embraced his nephew, and mounted his horse. ‘We cannot function as nations. We never have been able to govern ourselves. Our way has always been men like you and me taking charge. Play with the Jews quietly. It is our best chance.’

He turned his mount and spurred off to join the caravan.

M
Y FATHER EMERGED FROM
the war as an imposing figure. Not only had he survived the Mufti’s rebellion, he had administered an ignoble defeat to Kaukji’s Irregulars. His burning of Tabah’s fields, catching the enemy downwind, became a legendary battle that thousands, even millions of poems have been written about.

After my father’s initial onslaughts of lust for Ramiza had been blunted, he wanted to return to the familiar comforts that my mother’s large feminine body could offer and he summoned her back to bed.

Hagar did as she was bid, for she had no choice, but she made it clear, without using words, that Haj Ibrahim would never know her again with the same passion or share pleasures they had once known.

This enraged my father. His first threats were to divorce her and cast her out permanently. For a Moslem husband to rid himself of an unwanted wife was a very simple matter. However, Haj Ibrahim was pragmatic. Although Ramiza was beautiful, she was a Bedouin girl and much cruder than village women. She was inept and clumsy in running the kitchen and performing her duties. Haj Ibrahim said that one does not throw out the old cow until the new one starts producing milk. He wanted his comforts and meals properly administered. Therefore, my mother was allowed to remain.

At the end of the war I was nine years old. With my mother’s prodding, I had approached Haj Ibrahim and convinced him to let me go to school. By learning to read and write, I could become familiar with the village records and documents and make certain Kamal and Uncle Farouk were not still cheating Father.

The school in Ramle was basic and primitive. Yet I was very proud. I was the first child from Tabah since Kamal to go to an Arab school. Uncle Farouk had been taught to read and write by Christian missionaries.

The school consisted of a single, dark bare room, peeling and chipped, with smells from the outside toilet often settling in on the hot windless days. The school yard was not much bigger than the classroom and was of hard-packed dirt. It could not be called a playground because there were no swings or slides or any sporting equipment. I did not know that these even existed until much later. Most of the time recess in the yard was spent eating our lunches, sitting huddled with our backs pressed against the wall to catch the shade. Once in a while some boys kicked a ball or played tag, but mostly we just sat in the shade of the wall or threw stones over it if we could find an old Jew passing by.

There were sixteen boys and no girls in the school, from age eight to twelve. I was the youngest but determined to be a great scholar because my alternative was the lowest job in the family, that of the goatherd. No one else wanted to learn as badly as I did, and often the other boys would fling me to the ground and beat me to try to make me stop studying so hard.

The teacher was Mr. Salmi, a skinny, nervous man with a shiny bald head and a thread of moustache. He seemed to get more pleasure in using the blackboard pointer for beating us than he did in pointing out problems. Being the son of Haj Ibrahim, I did not get nearly the number of backside strokings as the other boys, but that only made them take out more vengeance on me in the yard. Within a few months I realized I had to be able to hold my own or be beaten out of the school.

I was never without a pocketful of stones and I could throw them as straight and as hard as the meanest Shi’ite Moslem rioting in the streets. I was very good. One day, when things had gotten particularly nasty for me, I filched one of my father’s fine daggers from his armoire and hid it under my dress. That day when I was cornered in the yard, I flashed the dagger in desperation and swung it and barely scratched the face of the leader. They didn’t bother me much after that.

We had only a few textbooks. Sometimes four of us had to use one book at the same time. Our courses were limited. Mr. Salmi was amazed at how quickly I learned. Often, when Hagar came to fetch me, Mr. Salmi would pat my head and tell her I was gifted by Allah. Mr. Salmi was the second adult man to ever pat my head, because we were mostly ignored by adults. Once my father did pat my head when I proved he was being cheated by Kamal and Uncle Farouk. I can never forget the touch of Mr. Salmi’s hand. It felt very good. However, when we were alone and he patted my head, it made me very nervous because Mr. Salmi always gave me a strange look at the same time.

By the time I was nine I had memorized many surahs, or chapters, of the Koran. I practiced in all my free moments, so I could multiply and even do long division in my head without use of a pen and paper.

Aside from the Koran, there seemed to be two main topics of discussion. Out in the yard all the boys spoke about was fucking. The older boys bragged endlessly about their escapades while the younger boys listened to them in awe. I saw through them. They were making it all up. Even though I knew they were lying, I realized that it was important for them to make a manly impression. In fact, making a manly impression seemed to be the most important part of adult men as well. In Tabah, whenever I came into a group of older boys and unmarried men, all they talked about was fucking. Until I went to school all I ever heard about it was that it was dirty, dangerous, and against Allah’s will. I knew there had been feuds between our own clans for years over boys and girls who merely looked at each other with passion. Touching a girl could be the cause of a fist fight or even a murder. In the yard one day one of the boys told us how his brothers had murdered their sister because the family had suspected her of fornicating without being married and she had dishonored them. I heard that it had happened in Tabah also, before I was born.

While the glories of sex were extolled all the time in the school yard, just the opposite was told in Tabah. ‘Stay away from the girls; don’t touch a girl, don’t smile at a girl, don’t play with a girl, don’t speak to a girl except on actual village matters. The honor of the family depends on keeping your sister a virgin. The honor of your own manhood depends entirely on your wife having her virginity on the wedding night.’

It was so powerfully ingrained in us that boys and girls were absolutely frightened of one another. Yet it seemed that little else mattered to men except how many women they had slept with.

The other major topic in school was the Jews and what was called Zionism. In Tabah my Uncle Farouk was the village priest, or imam. He preached what my father told him to preach. No Sabbath sermon could ever be complete without words condemning the Jews for returning to Palestine. I did know that the Jews had murdered all the prophets and had lied about Abraham and had falsified the Bible. All of us kids knew that. Even though my father wanted nothing from the Jews, we were forced to live next to them, but we never had trouble. Hatred of Jews was not that strong in Tabah. I found out how really evil they were only after I began school.

When the Jews at Shemesh Kibbutz began to dig up antiquities in their fields, they built a museum to display them. Until then, when we found ancient potsherds, flints, and arrowheads in our own fields, we would go down to the highway and try to sell them to pilgrims and travelers on the way to Jerusalem. Once the Jews opened their museum we could sell them lots of what we found. If we found an entire broken pot, we would sell it one piece at a time, getting more and more for each new piece. The Jews spent hours putting the pot back into its original form.

Haj Ibrahim forbade any of the Tabah children from entering Shemesh Kibbutz. We were told that they sacrificed human babies and would more than likely slaughter and sacrifice us if we were caught inside their grounds. In addition to human sacrifices, the Jewish women ran around with their legs naked clear up to their sacred places and there were orgies going on all the time among people who were not even married. Every time we went to the kibbutz gate and asked for the man who ran the museum, our suppressed curiosity only made the tales of Jewish debauchery wilder.

Even so, no one of us kids was really afraid of the Jews. When we did pass or speak they were always friendly enough. What puzzled me personally was the fact that my father would mount el-Buraq and go off riding with Mr. Gideon Asch for hours. I think a lot of the attitude of letting each other alone stemmed from their friendship. When my father held court at the café I would often hear him say, ‘we will work the problem out with my good friend Gideon.’