Leon Uris (39 page)

We often finished our meals with our bellies still rumbling and I thought of joining Omar and Jamil on the corpse removal job but decided to try a few more days of hanging around the Iraqi camps.

If you keep your eyes on the street day and night looking for a penny, sooner or later one will show up. My good fortune fell on me from the sky one day. Many of the casbah refugee boys hung around the Iraqi quartermaster compound, waiting for convoys of trucks to be unloaded. The soldiers on the unloading detail would pay us an odd lira or two to do their job. One or two soldiers stayed to watch us so we would not steal and the rest of them either went to sleep under a tree or to the casbah to find a whore.

It never rained in Nablus this time of year, but a freak storm had driven everyone to cover so that there were only a few dozen boys around. By the Prophet’s grace, a convoy of a dozen trucks suddenly showed up and we all had work. The soldiers assigned to the detail disappeared. The officer in charge of the convoy was of high rank—a captain—and he, too, headed into Nablus. Those detailed to keep an eye on us unloading were soon driven into the cabs of the trucks by the rain and within moments were asleep.

So here we were, emptying trucks into a warehouse with no one watching us. The only question was how much to leave for the Iraqi Army. One of the gang leaders rounded up four donkeys, loaded them to the breaking point, and fled.

I took the gamble of my life and stayed on. When the captain returned, I feigned mighty tears, then faced him with the fact that a dozen machine guns had been stolen. At first he went into a rage and tried to choke the names of the other boys out of me. I impressed upon him that even if I knew the names and we found the thieves, they could never be caught inside the casbah. Besides that, he was still responsible because his troops were supposed to have done the unloading. The captain was not very smart. His name was Umrum and he didn’t know a mule’s ass from a lemon.

Officers like Umrum usually were the sons of rich families who paid the Army for their rank. When enough wealthy families had enough sons with enough rank in the Army, their own comforts were well protected. Well, Captain Umrum had his balls twisted good. After his fury was spent, he began to weep about being ruined. At that time, I calmly showed him a way we could doctor the manifests to indicate that nothing was missing.

From then on, my family ate as well as anyone in the casbah. Because Kamal could read, write, and manipulate books, he also became employed by the Iraqi Army.

Haj Ibrahim never stopped seething over the situation of the displaced people. No family, however destitute, however poor a farmer and manager, however impoverished a widow, however gnarled a beggar, had ever missed a meal in Tabah. The institutionalized snubs of our brother Arabs all but devoured him with grief and rage.

To make matters worse, Omar and Jamil came home every night from their corpse burying job smelling so bad we could barely be under the same tent with them. They were often sick and vomited. Then they would go over the events of the day, imposing every gruesome detail of a rotted arm falling off or a family of five infants found dead in a cave or equally nauseating stories of maggots.

My father had the women patch up his robes and he made to the city hall for the purpose of an appointment with Mayor Clovis Bakshir. It was futile. The municipality was jammed from morning to night with hundreds of screaming displaced petitioners.

It is part of sunna that it was the right of even the lowest man in the realm to be able to petition a king personally. This was also Bedouin tradition. The Bakshirs of Nablus and all the other powerful figures had long refined the sunna. The petitioner was deftly moved to a minor official without authority who kept his job by magnificently, professionally lying. In Nablus no one had the chance of a two-legged camel. They wanted us out of their city, period.

Seeing my father’s frustration waiver between fits of rage and fits of despair, I decided to take a hand in the matter. I took some official Iraqi Army stationery from the desk of Captain Umrum and wrote a letter to the mayor.

Most Honorable and Noble Mayor Bakshir, I and my troops have been poised for the conquest of West Jerusalem and will complete the mission the moment the truce is ended. Therefore, I have not had the honor of paying my compliments to you personally. I understand I and my troops will be stationed in Nablus until stability is returned. Until such time as we have the pleasure of a personal meeting and long friendship, I beseech you for a small favor.

My great personal friend, Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi, Muktar of Tabah and a powerful figure in his region, is a visitor in Nablus due to the unfortunate circumstances of the war.

As long as my troops will be stationed in your city for an indefinite period in the future, I feel such favors are in order. I would be personally and eternally grateful for you to meet with him. He is a distinguished man who has great interest in present and future events.

Haj Ibrahim can be contacted by his son Ishmael who awaits in your outer office.

Yours in victory.

Praise Allah!

Colonel I. J. Hakkar,

Adjutant, Nihawand Brigade,

Army of Iraq

I decorated the letter with seals and ribbons and set out for city hall. I had scribbled the ‘colonel’s’ name so it was unreadable. The Nihawand Brigade was named for the final Arab victory over the Persians in the seventh century. I knew they were in the Jerusalem area.

I pushed my way into the mob in the mayor’s outer office and every time someone objected to me moving up the line, I held up the letter and they shrank back in respect. The mayor had four clerks at four desks screaming back at the waves of petitioners. I jammed the letter in one of their faces. He took a look at the envelope and disappeared into the mayor’s office. In less than a moment, he returned and advised me that my father had an appointment at the home of Clovis Bakshir the next day.

M
Y FATHER WAS CHAGRINED
at first that I had concocted such a clever scheme to get him an appointment with Mayor Clovis Bakshir. Of course, he had to agree to the existence of the fictitious letter writer, Colonel Hakkar. Then he thought again.

‘A lie used in the proper time and place can be a piece of pure poetry,’ he assured me.

Since Kamal and I now worked regularly for the Iraqi quartermaster, that lazy and ignorant scum, Captain Umrum, we always had cigarettes to spirit home under our robes. The rich live on a gold standard. The Bedouin lives on a dung standard. In the casbah, we lived on a tobacco standard and it was better than money. Our cigarette sales put a few more pennies into the family pot. We insisted that Haj Ibrahim buy new robes for his meeting with the mayor so he would be spared the humiliation of his rags.

‘No,’ my father said defiantly. ‘Let Clovis Bakshir see what we have been reduced to. Besides, as long as I have my dagger in my belt, I am well dressed. I am sorry you will not be with me, Ishmael.’ He patted my head and left alone.

For Ibrahim, the meeting was a renewal of an old alliance. The Haj had known the family briefly during the Mufti’s revolt. From time to time, the Bakshirs had been hidden from the Mufti’s troops in Tabah and later were taken down to the Wahhabis for safekeeping. Clovis Bakshir’s welcome was sufficiently friendly and the fruit bowl well stocked but not overwhelming.

Clovis Bakshir was a small man, almost delicate, who spoke with outcroppings of his university education. He was a study in deliberate calm and smoothness. The only thing that gave away the churning in his innards was his chain-smoking and tobacco-varnished fingers.

‘Obviously, it is not possible for me to know of everyone who is in Nablus in these times. Had I realized you were here ...’

‘Your predicament is completely understood,’ Ibrahim answered. ‘We only have so many eyes and ears.’

They repaired to the cool of the veranda. One could not see the town, for the villa was in a rare wooded area. One of the underground streams surfaced nearby and continued on as a brook, with a petite waterfall just over the way. There was a café by the waterfall that was the central meeting place for the men of the Bakshir tribe. In more peaceful times, Clovis Bakshir held court by the stream.

Haj Ibrahim was puzzled and immediately suspicious to see a second man waiting on the veranda. He quickly noticed the man’s ramrod posture, sun-baked face, and immaculately trimmed and plastered moustache. He wore a Western suit of superior material and a traditional Arab headdress.

‘My good friend and confidant, Mr. Farid Zyyad. I was certain that your experiences and observations would be of great interest to him.’

As coffee was served, Haj Ibrahim had already begun to maneuver to find out the meaning of this unexpected guest. Zyyad moved himself inconspicuously out of the line of conversation, off to a side. Highly polished shoes, something rarely seen in these parts, offered another tiny clue. Whoever he was, he was upper echelon.

Clovis Bakshir lit the first of many cigarettes, which were drawn on rapturously by long, thoughtful inhalations and exhaled in thin streams, like an extension of the man himself. The ashes were never flicked and never fell but only grew agonizingly longer. ‘Of course I will do what is possible to make your stay in Nablus more comfortable,’ the Mayor said.

Haj Ibrahim nodded an acknowledgment. ‘I am not the kind of man to lead you over the desert following camel turds,’ Ibrahim said. ‘I have serious things on my mind, other than my personal condition.’

‘Even so far away as Nablus, we have heard of Haj Ibrahim’s notable candor,’ the mayor replied.

‘I am bitterly pained by the behavior of the people. I never believed I would live to see our great tradition of hospitality suddenly fall from honour.’

‘Nor did I,’ Clovis Bakshir agreed.

‘We are not foreigners. We are not Turks. We are not Jews,’ Ibrahim said pointedly.

‘You must understand that this entire refugee situation crashed down on us like a sudden storm and has all but drowned us.’

‘Refugee? What do you mean, refugee?’ Ibrahim said. ‘My village is less than two hours from here. I am a Palestinian in my own country among my own people. I am not a refugee!’

Clovis Bakshir remained professionally unflappable. ‘Victims of war,’ he corrected, ‘displaced on a temporary basis.’

‘I am a Palestinian and I am in Palestine,’ Ibrahim repeated.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Be it known I was forced from my village—and not by Jewish gunfire. For months the entire Arab world spoke to us with one single voice. Get out. No one had a different opinion.’

‘What other opinion could there be with this Zionist monster growing right inside our bellies?’ Clovis asked.

‘We have chairs, we have tables, we have coffee, we have men. Men can come and sit in the chairs, drink coffee at the tables and discuss the possibilities of peace. I have lived half my life next to a Jewish settlement and only occasionally found them unreasonable. Let me say in my well-known candor that the Jews have never done to me and my people what has happened in the last two months at the hands of our own brothers.’

‘Fortunately your village was not Deir Yassin.’

‘Yes. I did not permit Tabah to be used indiscriminately to draw us into such a reprisal.’

‘Perhaps, in the beginning, there were different opinions,’ Clovis Bakshir said. ‘The voices of moderation and peace were too small and too weak. The obsession of destroying the Jews swept over every town and village in the Arab world down to the smallest peasant. It was a tidal wave.’

A silence fell that was so great the sound of the small waterfall a distance away imposed itself onto the scene.

‘Mayor Bakshir. The deepest hurt of my life has been the manner in which we have been treated. Not a crust of bread, not a blanket, not a cup of water has been offered us. And Nablus is not among the least innocent in this matter.’

‘I also am painfully aware of the matter, Haj Ibrahim. This is not the normal behavior of our people. One morning we suddenly awake to find our whole population fleeing. Even though we are here in safe Arab territory, we have been terrified by events. First Kaukji came and stripped our fields. Afterward the Iraqi Army treated us very rudely. The Iraqis have fed and supplied their army largely from our crops and our shops without payment. Are we patriotic Arabs or not? they ask. Our few police cannot cope with armies. By the time the refugees ... forgive me ... the displaced persons began pouring ... flooding ... engulfing this part of Palestine, everyone here was in a state of panic.’

‘I cannot accept these excuses,’ Ibrahim retorted. ‘The behavior of our troops has been a disgrace to Arab manhood. As for me, for a quarter of a century I was the Muktar of Tabah and never once in that time did we turn a stranger from our doors.’

‘But you never woke up one morning to discover fifty thousand people camped in your square. The catastrophe was simply too great and came too quickly.’

‘What do you mean by suddenly? We have been planning this war for ten years. It did not come suddenly. Months have passed since the United Nations resolution. Month after month we have been told that we are to abandon our villages to make way for our armies. The leaders who insisted that we leave are damned well responsible to see that we were welcomed, fed, and sheltered. Every army has a staff to make preparations for war. Who prepared for us? Not a single tent city, not a single kitchen, no one even on the roads to give us directions.’

‘Long-range planning has never been one of our stronger qualities,’ Clovis Bakshir answered. ‘And no one could have calculated the extent of the catastrophe.’ Clovis Bakshir put the cigarette butt into an ashtray gently, just as it was about to nip his fingers. He lit another cigarette. ‘It is true. We were not ready.’

‘In the name of Allah, what are governments for, if not to care for their very own people?’

‘Haj Ibrahim, we have no Arab government in Palestine. The entire Arab world is not a union of nations but a collection of tribes. I have been the mayor of Nablus for ten years since my beloved brother was murdered by the Mufti’s gangsters. Look at this neighborhood. It is very beautiful, no?’