Leon Uris (67 page)

I had never seen my father so distraught at the news of a death. When I took him to Maan’s funeral I literally had to hold him upright. Maan was buried in a crypt in Bethany, outside Jerusalem on the road to Jericho. It was the place where Jesus had resurrected Lazarus from the dead. Charles Maan would not be on earth, the recipient of any such miracle.

The one glimmer of hope that came from his death was when his daughter, Sister Mary Amelia, told us that a number of Christian Arab priests had vowed to take up his work and get their people out of the camps.

It was a brutally hot day. A debilitating freak reverse khamsin wind was blowing off the desert. During the funeral services my father almost fainted. He seemed too dazed to be able to return to Aqbat Jabar.

Sister Mary Amelia suggested we be put up at a hostel. It was a blessing. After a night of agony, Ibrahim seemed to have gained control of himself.

It was the Moslem Sabbath. Father felt that as long as we were in East Jerusalem we should go to the Al Aksa Mosque and pray for the soul of Charles Maan. The city was divided these days by a no-man’s-land running alongside the Jaffa Gate like a gash. Each side could look at the other, sometimes almost within touching distance.

Despite the sorrow it would bring him, my father could not resist climbing the steps up the wall at the Citadel. From here we could look over the no-man’s-land to Jewish Jerusalem, to the landmarks of the King David Hotel and the YMCA tower ... to where the Bal el Wad began just beyond Jewish Jerusalem. Tabah was only a half hour away.

‘Come on. Father,’ I pleaded. ‘This is no good.’

He let me take him by the hand and lead him down the steps. In a moment we were swept up by masses of worshipers in their white Sabbath dress pouring into the Old City through the Jaffa and Damascus gates. The narrow streets bulged with a surge of foot traffic toward the Haram esh Sharif.

Soon the golden Dome of the Rock soared above us as we ascended to the immense plaza amid thousands of the faithful. We had to wait to get to the ablution fountain for the foot-washing ritual, then inched toward Al Aksa, the mosque built in honor of the termination of Mohammed’s mythical journey from Mecca.

Thousands of pairs of shoes were neatly laid out near the entrance. We pressed for the door, now able to hear the Koran reader inside. At that moment a commotion erupted throughout the plaza. King Abdullah and his grandson, Husain, had entered the Haram esh Sharif and were making their way to the mosque!

We were in a perfect position to see them pass before us. I became entranced by the sight of his grandson, who was about my age. A vision of the Hashemiiya Palace in Amman flashed through my mind. Did the young Husain even know we were alive? What did his grandfather tell him about us? What a wonderment life must be for him.

The king’s guard forced a narrow lane through the crowd, but the people closed in, trying to see and touch him. Abdullah, who gloried in the adulation, kept shouting for his guard not to imprison him, so he could talk to his subjects. As he moved freely, chatting and shaking hands, it occurred to me that his security was badly diminished. Soon Abdullah and Husain were virtually alone in the sea of excited worshipers.

My heart thumped as they passed directly in front of Father and me. They were almost within touching distance. As they reached the door, the king turned and waved to the throng. At that instant a man stepped out of the shadow of the mosque’s interior, raised a pistol an inch from the king’s head, and fired.

I saw the bullet enter the back of his head and come out of his eye as he fell and hit the ground and his turban rolled off.

Chaos!

‘Our lord has been shot!’

The errant guard smashed forward, shooting. The Koran reader inside the mosque had not heard the shots and his voice continued to fill the inside of the building over the loudspeakers. The assassin kept firing wildly, with his bullets ricocheting off the marble floor just inside. Father and I shrank back as the king’s guard brought the killer down, almost at our feet.

‘The king is dead!’

I saw young Husain, felled and dazed, but still alive. My impulse was to reach out for him. Ibrahim grabbed me, jerked me to him, and whispered in my ear. ‘Drift back very, very slow,’ he ordered. ‘Do not get involved.

Do not break and run. We will just melt away.’

Abdullah’s death had been at the hands of a Palestinian, a Mufti gunman, and that shot triggered vicious reaction from his Bedouin subjects. He had united them and ruled them for three decades, and they remained fanatically loyal to him. Tribesmen bore in from their desert lairs in a rage of retaliation against the refugees on the Jordanian side of the river. A dozen Palestinians were seized and hanged before the gates of various refugee camps.

The next day the bodies were cut down, carried into Amman, and dragged behind galloping horses. Arms and legs were severed and tossed to a wild crowd. The torsos of the corpses were kicked, spat upon, and stabbed.

When this had been done, the lust was still not satisfied. The Bedouin formed up to storm into the camps. At last the Jordanian prime minister, a Palestinian, convinced the Legion that it had to prevent a monumental massacre. Much against their will, they surrounded the major camps and the cities of Amman, Salt, Suweilih, and Madaba to protect the Palestinians.

When the king was laid to rest on a hillside outside Amman, a Cairo journalist at the funeral noted that in the past six years the Arab world in its fledgling experiences with self-government had eradicated a number of the men who had been charged to rule them. In addition to Abdullah, there was ...

Imam Yahya, the ruler of Yemen, who was murdered, as well as ...

President Husni az Ziam of Syria, and ...

Prime Minister Ahmed Maher Pasha of Egypt, who was followed in office and death by ...

Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha of Egypt, and also ...

Prime Minister Muhsen el-Barazi of Syria, and ... A prime minister of Lebanon, who had been followed in Jordan where he was visiting and riddled by bullets from a passing car, and also ...

The Commander in chief of the Syrian Army, Sami el Hennawin, and ...

Sheikh Hasan al-Banna, the leader of the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt, as well as ...

Minister Amin Osman of Egypt, and ...

An assortment of ministers, judges, police chiefs, and military commanders.

To say nothing of the dozens of unsuccessful attempts.

Iraq had four coups.

Jordan changed prime ministers on what seemed a monthly basis.

And a degenerate, corrupt, and disgusting Egyptian king was removed by an officers’ revolt, after which he fled to a life of perversions on the Riviera.

Abdullah’s son the Emir Talal ascended to the Jordanian throne. For two decades he had whiled away his life in boredom and a bitter relationship with his autocratic father. When he was crowned, the other Arab leaders praised him as an enemy of his late father and a patriot who would end British domination in that country.

Alas, King Talal was insane. He had spent half his youth in private European sanatoriums, and was returned to Jordan from a mental hospital in Switzerland to claim the throne. Talal’s tenure was short. The mad king, propped up in place by the British and the Legion, was obviously unfit to rule.

By secret agreement between the military and the Parliament, Talal was deftly removed and spirited from the country. He was to spend the rest of his life in exile, first in Egypt and then in a forlorn villa in Turkey.

Talal’s oldest son, Husain was named king under a regency. Young Husain had escaped death at Al Aksa when one of the assassin’s bullets, meant for him, glanced off the medals on his fifteen-year-old chest.

I
F THERE WAS A
time ripe for rebellion, it was at the moment of Abdullah’s death. As a reaction to Jordanian repression, riots flared throughout the West Bank camps. They were ugly and often bloody, but there was no real objective except for the relief that seemed to come from rioting.

A voice was desperately needed to rally us. I had fully expected Haj Ibrahim to step forward and unite us and provide us with leadership and direction. Instead, he lay low and slipped through the Jordanian backlash unscathed and unnoticed. My brave and noble father, the object of my worship, had been silenced. The fire in his belly had dimmed to nothingness. This came as a terrible blow and disenchantment to me.

While the Arab Legion clamped down crushing dissent, the Haj and what was left of the old leadership fended for themselves, saved their own skins. I began to hate them for their incessant whining about the exile and the return. Whatever pride and dignity they might have had was gone. They were the wronged, entitled to pity, content to live on handouts in stagnation for the injustices inflicted on them.

Now came the United Nations to take over the camps, administrators with blue eyes and golden hair. They would make our decisions for us.

The Jordanians were no longer after my father, for he had demonstrated that he had been pacified. Ibrahim still had stature from his past and recent glory from Jamil’s martyrdom, which he used to wangle a United Nations position to head a committee that was to create industry and promote agriculture in the Jericho region. He quickly got Kamal a job at the UNRWA medical supply depot. It was perfectly tailored for Kamal. He had little to do except doze in a cubbyhole most of the day with an assistant to fetch him coffee and handle any real work. Kamal, never tall in my eyes, had grown completely slovenly.

Once spirited and amusing, Fatima had become drained by Aqbat Jabar. The two of them scarcely bothered to beat the flies off anymore. Kamal would grow old, follow Father’s generation into the café, play backgammon, suck on a water pipe, fantasize about the huge villa in which he had lived in Tabah, and send his children into the fedayeen to regain his freedom from the Zionist dogs.

Omar came as a surprise. He stayed most of the time in Jericho and pestered shop owners until a merchant in a small grocery store finally gave him a job. Omar enhanced the job by brewing coffee and peddling sweets to the waiting lines of vehicles at the Allenby Bridge. He ran errands for the truck drivers and finally created a job for himself at the post office.

Mail to a refugee camp was a confusing piece of business. There was no delivery. If someone was expecting a letter, he would send a child to the post office to spend long hours waiting in line for a letter that most often was not there. Omar made up a delivery route, charging a halfpenny to deliver a letter and a penny for a package. This was difficult, because the hovels were not numbered and he had to learn the vicinity of every family, clan, and tribe by heart.

Haj Ibrahim’s position with the UNRWA gave the family an inside track on rations and other benefits. With Kamal and Omar both working, our fortunes lifted. It managed to take the sting out of ‘Sabri selling our guns and running off with the money.’ Keeping the truth of that vow had become a matter of life and death between Nada and me.

For me, what was there to do? I hated the idleness. I secretly continued to give Nada lessons up on Mount Temptation. I helped Omar with his mail delivery. I hung around Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil, but he had very little work to do these days except prepare papers that were too difficult for me to work on.

I prayed to Allah mightily for something to come along—and Allah heard me! Can you imagine how elated, how ecstatic, how overjoyed I was to learn that a boy’s school was being opened in Aqbat Jabar? There were places for only three hundred students. Although there were thousands of boys of school age, I knew I would be accepted. Indeed, the students were picked from the sons of former muktars, sheiks, and now UNRWA officials.

Every Arab nation kept pet Palestinians on its payrolls, ostensibly to help its refugee brothers. In reality, they worked for the interests of the host nation. Dr. Mohammed K. Mohammed was a well-known physician who fled from Jaffa before the war during the exodus of the elite. Because there were so few learned men of consequence, we tended to venerate people such as doctors, dentists, lawyers, and teachers. The homage paid them was out of proportion to what they had really accomplished.

Dr. Mohammed K. Mohammed was an astute politician. Using his medical reputation as a springboard, he established the Palestinian Refugee Aid Society in Cairo. He smelled out the coup that changed the country’s rulers and offered his organization and himself to the new order. The ruling officers saw future benefits from him and pushed him to the forefront of the political wars, proclaiming him as the true leader of the exiles.

Despite the disasters in their war against the Jews, Egypt remained the most powerful of the Arab nations.

Its main area of influence among the Palestinians was in the Gaza Strip, a finger of land it controlled that contained over a hundred thousand refugees. However, Egypt, along with Syria and Iraq, was always on the prowl to penetrate the late King Abdullah’s territory on the West Bank.

When an American philanthropist was moved to establish the school for refugee boys in Jericho, Dr. Mohammed K. Mohammed was at the head of the line to receive his moneys. He had cleverly made his aid society an associate of UNRWA, to siphon off funds. Here was a chance for Egypt to gain a foothold.

A two-story building was erected near the highway midway between our camp and the camp at Ein es-Sultan, a bit to the north. The school was called the Wadi Bakkah, after a monumental Arab victory over the Visigoths in the year 711.

It was an open secret that Dr. Mohammed was bisexual. He had a wife and a large family tucked away in a villa in Alexandria but was generally in the company of male companions.

My people do not speak of men making love to men. It is permissible for men to be affectionate with one another in public, to kiss and to walk holding hands, but we pretend that nothing of an intimate nature goes on. Any hints of homosexuality must be suppressed. Why? There are Mohammed K. Mohammeds everywhere.

Dr. Mohammed K. Mohammed was an impressive man with a stern face, the required moustache, and a fine suit of Western clothing. He was around fifty years of age, of ordinary build, was enthusiastic, and spoke with flower in his language. The Wadi Bakkah School was a personal victory for him and he opened it with great fanfare.