Leon Uris (18 page)

For the first time since Ibrahim married Ramiza, my mother was very nice to him. She brushed against him, undulating slightly, touched his shoulder, and did the rest with her eyes. She made suggestive remarks like she used to before Ramiza came. She seduced my father with all the sensuality she could muster and he invited her to bed that night. The next morning Haj Ibrahim seemed a changed man. The anger against me was suddenly gone. My mother went to bed with him again that night. The next morning my father, with a magnanimous flick of the wrist, told me I could return to school.

Eventually I found out who had told my father about my going to Shemesh. It was my best friend, Izzat. He had always waited for me by the bus stop and became suspicious of the one day a week I told him not to come. Izzat saw me leaving the kibbutz. His family was like the village leper. No one had spoken to them for years. Izzat thought that he could win a reprieve for them and gain favor with my father.

It taught me a lesson: Never trust anyone, especially your best friend. I didn’t trust my brothers, particularly Kamal, who was my greatest rival. I didn’t even trust my mother even though I loved her very much. She was always scheming and using me against my father. I suppose I did trust Nada.

I only went back to Shemesh Kibbutz one more time ... but that is another story.

I
DID NOT WANT TO
be a goatherd, although there were some goats I liked. I was good friends with our yard goat, and when my father told me to help my brother Jamil slaughter her, I could not. Not only was being a goatherd the lowliest of all jobs, but I simply did not like to kill animals. Haj Ibrahim told me I must learn how to kill and he forced me on three occasions to slaughter goats. I did it because he was watching, but I ran off and vomited afterward and cried all night.

When I returned to school I was more determined than ever to become a great scholar. It was apparent that Mr. Salmi could not teach me much more. He was a poor man and had only a few books in his personal library. I devoured them quickly. I talked him into saving his newspaper for me to read after he had finished with it.

The Jews spoke their own language, called Hebrew. We spoke Arabic, of course, so when we had to deal with Jews we almost always did it in English. Neither we nor the Jews like speaking English because the British ruled the country. However, so many signs and so much business was done in English that all of us knew a little of it.

Mr. Salmi could read and write in English, but he had no books. There were a few Jews in Ramle who had businesses around the bazaar. One, Mr. Yehuda, owned a junkyard and collected and sold old newspapers and magazines. He was a friendly old man and quite unlike the Jews in the kibbutz. Mr. Yehuda spent most of the day sitting in his tiny office and reading prayer books. He would let me scour his newspapers for the Palestine
Post
, the English-language paper. I worked it out so I could spend a half hour after school reading in the junkyard before taking the bus back to Tabah. It was a wonderment, and my learning English eventually saved the life of my family. Reading the Palestine
Post
had to be kept secret from my father because it was published by the Jews.

By the third year in school I began to write quite well. Mr. Salmi encouraged me to write about my village and other things I knew of. Almost every night I wrote another new story. Some of them were in the form of poetry, like the Koran. We Arabs use poetry a great deal to express ourselves. My writings became like a diary of the daily life of Tabah and our religion and customs and sorrows. Many of the stories and thoughts I kept to myself because I could have gotten into trouble for thinking what I thought of certain people and happenings. Many of the things I write here now I learned many years later. It is very mixed up, like the Koran itself, but I would like to tell you about us. You are most welcome.

My Village of Tabah, like most Arab villages, was built on the highest ground for defensive purposes from Bedouin raids or attacks from enemy tribes.

My earliest memories of Tabah were its smells. As I walked barefoot in the dirt street, there was an ever-shifting current of aromas, of the sharp food spices, of cardamom in the coffee from the café, of incense at night.

Mostly I remembered the smells of dung. Any child of three can tell the difference between the dung of donkeys, horses, cows, goats, sheep, and dogs, all of which littered the streets, paths, and fields and only disappeared during the winter rains. Then the streets were always muddy.

Dung was very important for us. We not only used it to fertilize our fields, but Hagar and the village women, made large brown flat cakes of it and dried it on our roofs. It was the principal source of heat for cooking and warming our houses. Wood was scarce and gathering it was a long and tedious chore, left mainly for older women who had no families to take care of.

Every year in the springtime after the houses had dried out from the winter rains, a new layer of mud and whitewash was applied to the cottages to replace wear and mend cracks. The mud was mixed with dung to give it firmness. Extra dung was traded to the Bedouin, who did not have wood or enough of their own dung for their needs. My father and a few others in the village were wealthy enough to burn kerosene, but this was a very luxurious item.

Every house in Tabah was built along the same lines: square with flat roofs for collecting water in the rainy season and for drying out crops in the warm weather. Mr. Salmi told me it was the same look that the villages had thousands of years ago. The houses of the poor, which was most of the village, were made of mud brick, and after the annual whitewash a light blue color was used to outline windows and doors. This was to ward off the evil spirits.

The houses were very close together, for defensive purposes. There were five clans from the Wahhabi tribe in Tabah and each clan had its own section of the village and each also had a separate part of the graveyard where the men were buried. Women were buried separately.

My father and Uncle Farouk had stone houses, as did the clan heads and certain other prominent villagers like the carpenter, the potter, the sandal maker, the basket weaver, and the cloth weaver.

There was one other stone house in Tabah, which was most unusual because it was built and owned by a widow. Her name was Rahaab and she was the village seamstress. In all Arab villages everyone is expected to marry and have children. Childless couples were looked upon as tragedies. Widows were taken care of by the sons, usually the oldest, who inherited their father’s land leases and debts. Every village had some kind of widow like Rahaab who had no one to look after her, and there were always a few unmarriageables—cripples, idiots, and blind ones—and if they had no family the clan was responsible for them.

Rahaab was old and fat and toothless, but she owned a handpowered sewing machine that had come all the way from England with the name ‘Frister & Rossmann’ on it. The village women were jealous and afraid of Rahaab. It was not only that she made a good living, for her machine was going all the time, but it was rumored that she fornicated a lot. The Koran is very strict about the punishments for fornication, and those who do it are apt to go to the fire on the Day of Resurrection. My father turned a blind eye to Rahaab’s fornication because she only did it with widowers and unmarriageables.

As ugly as Rahaab was, there were always a lot of males hanging around her stone house, mostly little boys like myself. She kept a big pocket filled with sweets and we would take turns at turning the handle on the big wheel of the sewing machine. Rahaab had a certain way of tilting on her bench so that she rubbed her tits against the little boys who were spinning her wheel and it would make our pricks hard. I remember the smell of oil that came from her machine and the fact she always sang when she sewed. She was the only woman I ever heard singing except at a festive occasion. I think Rahaab was the happiest woman in Tabah. She was the only woman who was allowed to travel to Ramle by herself, without a male escort. The women gossiped, and I think with some envy, that Rahaab paid younger men in the city to sleep with her.

The stone houses were the only ones with their own outdoor toilets. Each clan had a pair of abandoned houses that were used for toilets and to throw away garbage. One house was for the men and one for the women. I was glad my house had its own toilet.

Communal life centered around the village square, with its picturesque water well and a small overflow stream. The women washed the family clothing in the stream. Next to the well was the communal bakery, partly below ground because of the ovens. The water well, stream, and ovens were the main meeting places of the women for gossip.

By the opposite side of the square was our mosque, with its own small minaret. Uncle Farouk was the priest, or imam. He was also the village barber. One of the old clan chiefs acted as muezzin and climbed to the top of the minaret each day to call us to prayer.

On the third side of the square was the café, store, and khan, all owned jointly by my father and Uncle Farouk. The khan, a two-room hostel, had one room for men and one room for women and a place to hitch camels.

The khan was always ready to receive any members of the Wahhabi tribe. All Arabs are extremely hospitable and even the poorest home had a stack of mats to put down on the floor for visiting relatives. Moreover, the khan was used during those times of the year—harvests, festivals, for the dung trade—when the cameleers came.

I think Haj Ibrahim kept the khan for his own vanity too. It gave him a large gathering place for clan chiefs of other villages to come to Tabah to discuss communal matters or as a room where my father could throw his fabled parties.

If the water well and ovens belonged to the women, the café belonged to the men. The radio wailed from sunup to sundown with oriental music, sermons, and news from Jerusalem and Damascus. At nighttime we could hear from as far away as Baghdad and Cairo.

On one side of the café was the village store. Women were allowed on the store side to make purchases. Before the Jews came to Palestine everything in the store was foreign: tobacco from Syria, sardines from Portugal, matches, razor blades, and sewing needles from Sweden, tinware from England. There were a few medicines such as aspirin and baking soda but, as Moslems, we did not believe too much in them. Illness was caused by evil spirits and the healing herbs and special brews were made and kept by older village women. The most important item in the store was kerosene, but few families could afford it. At Shemesh Kibbutz the Jews had a cannery and canned many of their fruits and vegetables. My father did not allow them in the store. There was a story around that they would probably sell us poisoned cans so we would all die and they would get our land.

Everyone in the village owed money or some crop to the store. My father was very liberal at letting the villagers run up a debt on the theory that ‘a man in your debt cannot call you a dog, for he is the dog and must obey.’ More than once my father used a villager’s debt to convince him to think accordingly on various questions.

The final part of the village square was a communal threshing floor. It was a favorite gathering place of younger people because it was one of the few places where boys and girls could come into proximity with one another without fear. At the threshing floor, with sheaves being unloaded and the two sexes working side by side to grind the grain, they were often almost forced to touch one another, however quickly and however slightly. It became a place of flirtations. Everything at the threshing floor had a double meaning: the casual touch, eye contact, and conversation. Because girls were not permitted to show anything of themselves except their hands and part of their face, they made their eyes do the work for them. No women in the world can say more with their eyes than Arab women.

Tabah was large enough to have its own market day every fortnight. Peddlers descended on the square by donkey cart, carrying their wares in great clay pots.

The jars and pots were works of art. Many had shapes resembling women, full-breasted or pregnant or straight and skinny.

There were mirrors, combs, and amulets to ward off jinn, the evil spirits. There were medicines and potions guaranteed to cure all ills and to make men virile. There were stacks of secondhand clothing, used shoes and harnesses, and tempting bolts of cloth.

Other peddlers repaired pots and ground knives and scissors and field tools. There were gunsmiths to repair our cache of arms. Every village had secret arms that they kept in the mosque or their ‘prophet’s tomb.’ We knew that no Arab would steal from these holy places and we knew the British would not go into a holy place to search for them.

Once a year the Armenians came with their picture machines. Each home, no matter how poor, had a few photographs. It was usually a picture of the head of the house taken in full, flowing regalia, perhaps on his wedding day. No photographs of women were allowed. One of my father’s greatest prides was his collection of many pictures that showed him in fighting or riding attire or shaking hands with some important official. There was one photograph with all of his sons.

There was another peddler who came only once a year. He had stacks of used magazines from many foreign countries. Most of them had pictures of naked women in them. My father kept his hidden in the big wardrobe closet in his bedroom, but all of us boys risked a look.

One path from the square led down to the highway and bus stop. Uncle Farouk kept a stand there that one of his sons ran. He paid the bus drivers to always stop at Tabah so he could sell the travelers a soft drink or fruits and vegetables. The children sold pieces of potsherds that the Shemesh museum didn’t buy and they sold prayer or worry beads to the Moslems and crucifixes to the Christians. They told the travelers that the arrowheads were from the battle during which Joshua asked for the sun to stand still.

Other children, who had nothing to sell or nothing better to do, ran down to the bus stop to beg. They surrounded the travelers and pulled on their clothing for attention until the people had to beat them off like flies. We had the usual number of blind, deformed, and mutilated villagers who used their horrible appearance to extort money. Haj Ibrahim did not allow any of his sons or daughters to beg, but it was impossible to stop the others.