Leon Uris (2 page)

My two oldest sisters were eventually contracted into marriage. They married in the Wahhabi tribe but to men from distant villages. As was the custom, they went off to live in the home of their husband’s parents.

My father was only a young man, in his early twenties, when he declared himself muktar, ‘the elected one.’ His father had been muktar and when he died there was to be a new election. The sheiks of the other four clans had agreed that the eldest among them would take over the position. However, my father disagreed and the story of his courage and greatness has been told many, many times.

Ibrahim had been born five years before the turn of the century. When he became muktar he had achieved the most exalted position in the village, for he no longer had to work. In a short time, he had three sons, one remaining daughter, and a wife, all of working age. He had the best and most of the land, collected the rents, and governed six villages. He did not even wear field shoes but shoes that others wore only on the Sabbath.

My Uncle Farouk was a slave to my father. He and my father owned the village café and store together. Uncle Farouk had been a sickly child and had been left in the kitchen to die, but as the fate of Allah would have it, he was discovered by some Christian missionaries who had a nearby settlement and they nursed him to health and also taught him to read and write. He was the only truly literate person in Tabah and my father was able to use Farouk’s great powers to his personal advantage.

Ibrahim would make a perfunctory round of calls each day on his way from the house to the café, fingering his worry beads, reciting the Koran under his breath, and generally reinforcing his position. Most of the day he held court at the café, smoking his water pipe, greeting, and sincerely listening to complaints of the villagers. Mainly, he and the other men repeated stories from the past.

When my father came home each night, my mother and sister, Nada, washed his feet and he sat in an oversized chair. Just before the meal, my brothers came into the room, knelt, kissed his hand, and reported on their day’s work. Uncle Farouk or some male cousins or friends were generally invited to the meal, which was eaten while sitting on the floor, and they ate with their fingers from a common plate. Later, my mother, Nada, and I ate in the kitchen from the leftovers.

My father owned the best horse in the village, a faint remainder of our Bedouin past. My next older brother, Jamil, was responsible for grooming him. Once during each phase of the moon my father rode off to settle matters in surrounding villages. He was an extraordinary sight to behold, galloping off with his special robes flowing out behind him.

Until the day I was abruptly weaned from my mother, my life had been pleasant enough. The only child left who was near my age was my sister Nada, who was two years older. I loved her very much. We were still allowed to play together because I was in the province of the women, but I knew that the day would soon come when I would be forbidden to have a friendship with a girl, even though she was my own sister.

Nada had great brown eyes and liked to tease and hug me. To this day I can feel her fingers rubbing through my hair. She took care of me, often. All the mothers worked in the fields and if there was no old grandmother to attend the children, they had to look out for themselves.

We had no toys except what we made of sticks and yarn, and until I saw the Jewish kibbutz I did not know that things like playgrounds or toy rooms or libraries even existed. Nada had made a doll of sticks and cloth that she named Ishmael, after me, and she would pretend to nurse it against her tiny nipples. I think she had her nursing fantasy because, as a girl, she had been weaned at an early age and I still had the privilege of my mother’s breasts.

My mother continually tried to push me over the threshold into the room to join with the men, but I was in no hurry to leave the warmth and comfort of the women for a place I sensed was hostile.

M
Y FATHER TOOK AS HIS
second wife Ramiza, who was the youngest daughter of Sheik Walid Azziz, chief of the Palestinian Wahhabi Bedouin tribe. The great sheik was my father’s uncle, so his new wife was also his first cousin. She was sixteen and my father almost fifty. After their wedding my mother was allowed to return to Tabah.

I never saw my mother smile again.

My father’s bedroom had the only raised bedstead in the village. Everyone else slept on goatskin rugs or thin mats. The room that is usually built for a second wife had not been completed, so my father took Ramiza to his bed and ordered my mother to sleep in the adjoining room on the floor. There was an opening atop the door between the two rooms to allow the breezes to flow through the house, so everything that happened in the bedroom could clearly be heard in the next room.

I slept with my mother, folded up in her arms, my head between her breasts. When my father and Ramiza made love every night, my mother lay awake, only a few feet from them, forced to listen to them have sex, sometimes half the night long. When my father kissed Ramiza and groaned and spoke words of endearment to her, my mother’s massive body convulsed with pain. I could feel her fingers claw at me unconsciously and hear her stifled sobs and sometimes I could feel her tears. And when I wept as well, she soothed me by stroking my genitals.

After many, many nights, when my father’s initial passion for Ramiza had been spent, he invited my mother to return to his bed. But something had left my mother. She was cold to him and he could no longer arouse her. This infuriated him. In anger, he virtually cast her out of the house.

The Village of Tabah was a two-hour donkey ride to the town of Ramle and a three-hour ride to Lydda. Each town had two market days a week and the family owned a stall in the marketplace. Until my father took his new wife, my second brother, Omar, tended the stalls. Now Hagar, my mother, was ordered to Ramle and Lydda four days a week to sell our surplus produce. She started out after the morning prayer at sunrise and returned very late in the evening after dark.

Hagar was one of the two best dayas, or midwives, in the village. She was greatly respected as a keeper of the formulas of herbs and medicines. These days when she went to the village water well or the communal ovens, there was snickering behind her back and cruel insults in passing.

As in any society where women are the chattel of men, they seek the path of revenge through their sons, and my mother selected me. Four days a week I rode on the donkey cart with her to Ramle and Lydda.

It was in the stall at the Lydda bazaar that I first saw someone use an abacus, a wooden frame holding sliding beads for adding and subtracting. The man was a leather merchant, a maker and mender of harnesses, and he allowed me to enter and play in his booth. We became friends and together we fashioned an abacus like his by using prayer beads. Before I was nine I could count to infinity and became faster than the merchant in addition and subtraction.

‘Learn to count,’ my mother had been saying repeatedly.

At first I didn’t realize what she meant, but she pressed me to learn to read and write as well. The leather merchant was semiliterate and helped me greatly, but soon I surpassed him again. After a time I could read all the labels on all the crates in the entire bazaar. Then I began to learn words in the newspapers we used for wrappers.

When I was free to play at home, Hagar ordered me to count all the houses in Tabah, all the orchards, and learn who farmed each field. After that she dropped me off in the outlying villages where my father collected rents and she told me to count their houses and fields as well. A family could own or sharecrop as many as ten to fifteen separate plots scattered from one end of the village’s land to the other. With continued intermarriages, dowries of land to new brides, older people dying off, and dividing the land among many sons, it was extremely difficult to have an accurate record of who farmed what. Since most of the land was sharecropped, the farmers always tried to work an extra plot that was not accounted for or in other ways tried to cheat on their rent and taxes.

My father was barely literate himself and unable to contend with all the official documents, with their adornments of stamps and seals that spelled out boundaries, water rights, inheritances, and taxes. Uncle Farouk, who was partners with my father in the village store, the khan, and the coffeehouse, was far better able to cope with the mysteries of the documents. Farouk was also the village imam, the priest, and keeper of the official records for my father. My father didn’t fully trust him and so he sent my oldest brother, Kamal, to school in Ramle as a precaution.

When my father collected the rents, he turned them over to the great landholder Fawzi Effendi Kabir, who lived in Damascus and who visited the Palestine district once a year to collect.

My mother had always suspected that Kamal and Uncle Farouk were working together to cheat my father, who got a percentage of the Effendi’s rents as his agent.

When I had made my secret count of all the fields of the area, my mother pushed me out of the kitchen and told me to stick to my father like his shadow. At first I was fearful. Almost every time I slipped alongside him he would curse me off and other times he seized my arm and shook it or he would strike me. It was not that Ibrahim hated me or treated me any worse than he treated my brothers. Arab men can be very affectionate to their sons when they are little and dressed as girls and living with the women. But once they cross the threshold into the man’s world they are generally ignored by their fathers. The relationship from then on is centered on obedience: complete, absolute, unquestioning obedience. It is the father’s privilege. For this he allows his sons to work his fields for their living and when they take a bride, she comes into the father’s house.

The father must be alert too, that his sons are not cheating him, and so the tradition of paternal indifference is a way of life. In order to vent frustrations, male children have full leave to boss around all the females, even their own mothers, and they are allowed to slap around their younger brothers. By the time I was four I had already learned to order my grandmother around, and on occasion I would assert my male rights over Nada and even my mother.

The more my father ran me off, the more my mother pushed me back. I walked alongside my father so often that after a time he simply tired of my persistence and accepted my presence.

One day I summoned the courage to confront him. I told him that I had learned to count and read and write a little and that I wanted to go to school in Ramle. As the youngest son, I was due to become the goatherd in a few years and that was the lowest job in the family. He scoffed at the idea.

‘Your brother Kamal knows how to read and write. Therefore it is not necessary for you. You will tend the goat flock by your next birthday and the rest of your life is already predestined. When you take a wife someday, you will remain in my house with your own room.’

This seemed final. I drew the deepest breath I had. ‘Father, I know something,’ I blurted out.

‘What do you mean, you know something, Ishmael?’

‘Something you should also know. A reason I should go to school in Ramle.’

‘Stop playing riddles with me!’

‘There are nine hundred and sixty-two separate parcels of land in Tabah,’ I gasped out, nearly choking on my fear. ‘There are eight hundred and twenty parcels in the other five villages. These do not count the communal land that is farmed together.’

Ibrahim’s face grew somber, a hint that he was grasping my message. I controlled my trembling ... ‘In the account books that Kamal keeps, there are only nine hundred and ten listed for Tabah and eight hundred for the other villages.’

I braced myself as I watched his face grow crimson. ‘You are certain of this, Ishmael.’

‘As Allah is my judge.’

Ibrahim grunted and rocked back and forth in his large chair. He beckoned me to come close to him with a wiggle of his forefinger. I almost bit through my lip with fear. ‘What does it all add up to?’ he asked.

‘Kamal and Uncle Farouk are collecting rents for seventy-two parcels for themselves.’

Ibrahim grunted again, reached out, and patted my head. I’ll never forget it, for it was the first time he had done so since time began. He patted my face softly where he had slapped it so many times before.

‘Will you let me go to school?’

‘Yes, Ishmael. You go to school and learn. But you are never to speak about this to another living soul or I’ll cut your fingers off and boil them. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Father.’

It happened so fast I had no time to explain or even to flee. Kamal, who was nineteen, seized me from behind in the barn and flung me down, leaped on me and choked me and slammed my head against the ground.

‘You dog!’ he screamed. ‘I’ll kill you!’ I kicked as hard as I could, three times, four, five. He bellowed in pain, released me, and doubled up on his knees. I scrambled to my feet and seized a pitchfork. Kamal crawled to his feet, still doubled over, and lunged at me. I jabbed out and hit him in the chest and he screamed again, then staggered around the barn, careening off the stalls. He found another pitchfork and menaced toward me deliberately.

‘Dog!’ he hissed.

‘Kamal!’

He turned as our mother entered. ‘Do not touch Ishmael!’

‘What do you know, crazy old woman! You sow! Ibrahim does not even sleep with you!’

‘He has called me to his bed tonight,’ she said calmly. ‘I will have some interesting things to tell him.’

Kamal had never been known as much of a fighter among those of his own age and size. He had been able to defend himself only because he was the muktar’s son and could read and write. He thought it over for only an instant, then dropped the pitchfork.

‘You will never touch Ishmael again,’ my mother repeated. She took the pitchfork from my hands, looked at us, one to the other. ‘Never again,’ she repeated, then left.

‘A day will come,’ Kamal said.

‘We do not have to be enemies,’ I said. ‘There are still thirty parcels I have not told Father about. If we go in on this together, I will want half.’