Yasmine (3 page)

It was ten o’clock in the morning, and a light breeze dried the sweat on his face. The sight of the snipers’ nests of the Legion and their civilian auxiliaries was reassuring. He set down the camera bag and took out a notebook. Both men looked towards the hilltop. They could hear gunfire, both near and distant, apparently aimed at the city and from it.

Then all at once the barrage intensified all around. They pressed their backs to the wall. Abu George thought a nearby minaret was being targeted, but before he could ask Abu Shawkat for its name, the little boy shrilled: “Daddy, look look, they’re shooting at Bab al-Asbat!”

Abu George held the binoculars to his eyes.

“Look left, something’s moving, a thin metal stick, probably a car antenna, with a small flag on it,” said Abu Shawkat and he began clicking away with his camera.

“I think it’s one of their armoured vehicles. But which way did it get in – through Bab al-Asbat? Impossible, it’s too narrow…” Abu George said quietly and bit his lip. Had he really seen a military vehicle there, or was he imagining things?

The firing intensified and fell like hail on the swaying antenna. What could one armoured vehicle achieve in these alleys – it was sure to be destroyed with the men inside it. How could it advance as if on an open highway?

“There! There it is!” the little boy shrieked. The imagined armoured vehicle became real as it emerged from an alley and moved towards the Haram al-Sharif. The men looked at each other speechlessly. Abu Shawkat stopped snapping pictures.

“Baba, are these the Jews?” the child asked. “Baba, why don’t you answer?”

“It seems so,” said the father in a low voice.

“Where are our soldiers?”

“They’re firing from all sides,” the father said.

“Then why don’t the Jews stop?”

The half-track turned left to the entrance gate of the Haram al-Sharif. A black motorcycle lay in its path. Maybe it’s a
booby-trap
,
inshallah
, that will blow up in front of them and stop their advance, Abu George thought. But the vehicle did not stop, it rolled over the motorbike and moved on.

Now Abu George saw a Jewish officer, tall and broadshouldered, rise from the armoured turret to look at the golden dome in front. “Allah, where are you?” Abu George cried silently, looking at the sky. He prayed that the snipers placed on every roof would destroy the intruder. Why don’t they hit the arrogant officer standing so upright in the turret? But nothing deterred him or the vehicles which followed him up the path to the holy shrines.

“Baba, why don’t our soldiers kill them?” the little boy asked. “What will happen now?”

Abu George looked at the child and thought he should have been spared the sight, just as he should have spared his daughter Yasmine, who was about the same age at the time, the flight from Talbieh. Thanks be to Allah that Yasmine could not see what was happening before his eyes at this moment. For the past five years he had urged her to return, but fortunately she had not. What would she see here now – the army of the Jews? What a horror!

“Allah will break their necks,” Abu Shawkat whispered. “Is there no force that can stop them?”

“Stop, baba, stop! Let’s go back!”

When the third of the Jews’ vehicles drove past, one of its soldiers was shot dead by the King’s snipers. “Die, dog! You and all your army!” the photographer shouted.

“
Yallah, yallah
! Go on! Bang bang bang!” the child shouted, clapping his hands. The shooting continued, bringing down more Jewish soldiers.

“
Yallah, idbah al-yahud
, slaughter the Jews!
Idbah, idbah
!” Abu Shawkat screamed, but the convoy went on.

Abu George lowered the binoculars. Who were these Jews? – dog’s spawn,
owlad iblis
, sons of devils,
afareet
, demons! They know no pity and nothing can stop them. His father said once that the Jews were like stinging ants, no exterminator can stop them spreading. Donkeys’ sons, how dare they enter Islam’s holy of holies! What nerve! Don’t they know the entire Muslim world will fight back? Monsters, there’s no God in their hearts. That was how they raided our villages in ’48, drove us out of Talbieh and brought the
Nakba
, the catastrophe, upon us, and how they joined the French and the English and attacked Egypt in ’56. All our troubles come from them. How is it that they can bring the war into our homes, our lands, assaulting, invading, conquering. Hypocrites! Defence forces they call their army. They launch wars and call them defensive, may their homes be destroyed! What’s their secret? Pathetic refugees whom nobody wanted, a humble minority, frightened, without dignity or shame, then all at once they’re dominating and humiliating. Where did they get the strength? And we, descendants of the desert warriors, bold and mighty conquerors, builders of the greatest medieval empire, creators of a magnificent culture – how did the wheel turn?

“Abu George, what’s going on here? Where is Allah, where is the Legion, where are Hussein and Nasser and the Arab states and Russia? Where?” Abu Shawkat wailed. “
Ya rab el-alamin
, Lord of the Universe, what will happen to us? Wasn’t one
Nakba
enough? The land is gone and so is our honour!”

The leading vehicle stopped. The soldiers’ helmets looked like miniature copies of the domes of the hallowed site. The shooting stopped. Abu George could not understand why the Legionnaires had stopped firing. Idiots, go on, keep on firing, he wins who has the longest breath.

The soldiers climbed out of their vehicles. Abu George thought he was going to faint. One group walked to the balustrade of the Haram al-Sharif, overlooking the Jews’ Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, where they used to pray and weep before the gates of the ancient city were closed to them in the terrible war of ’48.

A soldier pulled a flag from his backpack, raised it and walked around the group of soldiers, then began to leap and dance ecstatically, till he stumbled. Then he walked to the top of the Jews’ Wall and wedged the flag in it.

“Baba, they stuck their flag there! They beat us!” the child wept.

The two men stared at the hated blue-and-white flag flapping before their eyes. The soldiers stood to attention and sang their anthem. A heretical idea crept into Abu George’s mind – perhaps the Ba’ath party, the Tahrir and the other nationalists were right when they insisted that the King wanted to get rid of the Palestinians…Had he really handed the West Bank over to the Jews?

Silence fell in the narrow alley adjoining the Mughrabi quarter. Only a single sound, subdued, as if from another world, a soft mournful sound arising from a dream, the sound of man face to face with himself, face to face with his Creator, pierced the stillness. Abu George had heard this before, once, many years ago, not in this place. He concentrated on the sound, trying to identify it. A ram’s horn! That’s what it was. Its
notes seemed to be carved out of his own heart, a heart scorched and howling, weeping bitterly, moaning the cry of the defeated.

Abu George’s body slumped, the bag slipped from his hand and he did not hear it hit the floor. He choked as his tears flowed freely, and he felt no shame.

I was tempted to start with
some time before the Flood,
or
before the earthquake,
but in fact it was only three weeks ago when on one warm spring evening in the middle of May 1967 I returned home late and found, pinned to the door of my one-room flat, a reservists’ call-up order. It was headed Emergency Call-Up a scary phrase that tells you to drop everything you’re doing because something else has begun. The order was to show up immediately at my unit HQ. What’s going on? Has war broken out? With whom? My head started to spin. It was midnight – how could I get there? I unlocked the door, drank some water and took down my kitbag, uniform and boots from the top of the wardrobe. I packed shaving gear, underwear, a khaki hat, a couple of books, packets of halva and crackers, and went to bed.

But I couldn’t fall asleep so turned on the radio. Cairo Radio was broadcasting a ballad sung by Um Kulthoum, which calmed my nerves somewhat – if there was an emergency over there, they’d be broadcasting nationalist marches or readings from the Quran.

When I did finally doze off my sleep was invaded by the red kestrels which had recently come here, migrants from cold lands faraway, who had built a hasty nest under the roof tiles of
the house opposite. The day before I noticed that their eggs had hatched and one of the fledglings had fallen from the eaves and died…My sleep was shattered.

I got up and made myself a Basra lemon tea, and ate some halva to sweeten the vigil. As soon as daylight broke I left the house and took two buses – one to the main bus depot and the other to the mustering station.

Most of the passengers on the southward-heading bus were reservists. I sat in the front seat and looked at the changing scenery. It came to me that this morning I hadn’t raised the window blind to look at my Orthodox neighbour. Every morning I watch her working in her kitchen or small balcony, surrounded by her young brood. I’d developed a sort of superstition that if I didn’t see her first thing in the morning the day would go badly…What nonsense, I rebuked myself.

The radio sounded six a.m. and the driver turned up the volume. Total silence fell in the bus. In a deep voice, the announcer reported that Nasser had closed the Tiran Straits and barred our shipping to the Indian Ocean. Without stopping to draw breath he went on to state that Israel regarded this move as a
casus
belli
. The scenery grew blurred. My brother Moshi must already have been called up. Fortunately Kabi was in London.

At the Bilu camp where we reported for duty, we were hastily equipped and divided into teams. We refreshed our memory of battle orders and of regulations if captured, and held practice exercises and instrument checks. We were going over the communications procedure – which I had almost forgotten – when we were summoned to the firing-range. All right, I told myself, this is serious.

My target-practice results were dismal. You’re not ready, man.
Is this the way to go to war? Fortunately Trabulsi is on my team. “But where is he?” I asked the commander. “He’s just had a son. He’ll be here,” he replied. I should have brought my transistor radio. Though what’s the point, when the news is so worrying and the commentary even more frightening. In the evening, when we had set up our tents and got ready to go to sleep, I wrote an army postcard to my parents.

The next two days were spent in further training, and the third day Trabulsi arrived, having seen his son through the
Brit
, and brought us delicacies from the circumcision festivities – bagels,
melabas
, Moroccan biscuits. We all crowded around him.

“You can’t imagine what’s going on in Tel Aviv,” he told us. “It’s a ghost town, the streets are empty and apparently thousands of casualties are expected. The rabbinate has prepared land for a mass grave in Independence Park, and secondary-school kids are being enlisted to dig trenches. It’s terrifying! People are running away, making macabre jokes: ‘The last one out of the airport turn off the light!’ that sort of thing…”

“Eshkol is scared shitless. He won’t do anything. We should bring back Ben-Gurion,” said Aflalo.

“Forget it!” said Trabulsi. “How long will that bunch of
old-timers
stay in power?”

“We’re stuck here on our own. That’s when you know you’re in trouble,” said Slutzky.

“Hey Nuri,” Aflalo challenged me, “you work for the government. What kind of a leader is Eshkol?”

I didn’t reply at once. I used to see the Prime Minister from time to time, going up the stairs to his office, humming little snatches of song,
ya-bam-bam
, like a kindly grandpa from an
old shtetl. The Minister in charge of his office says he’s a
Yiddishe kop
– a clever Jew, a good judge of people. And in fact once, when I accompanied him and his aides on a trip to Nazareth, I found him surprisingly astute and sensitive. But none of this shows from a distance or at a superficial glance.

“Just look at Nasser,” Aflalo went on. “Young, handsome, tall, sturdy, charismatic, a brilliant speaker. And his opposite number? Eshkol! Old, bearish, balding, with a black beret flat on his head like a pitta, his belt under his armpits, and on top of all that, he’s a lousy orator. Bugger it!”

Trabulsi laid a soothing hand on his shoulder and pulled some photos from his shirt pocket to show us the
Brit
celebration of his newborn son.

Evening fell, finding us in wistful mood. The talk turned to home, children, wives. I saw Yardena running ahead across the sands of Ashdod like a wild colt, with me in hopeless pursuit. Yardena is a ripe succulent fig, while I’m still green. In our first winter together she knitted me a fancy sweater with a zip, and I walked around the streets of Jerusalem looking like a
story-book
pre-State fighter. She taught me to eat goulash with potatoes, seasoned with spicy paprika, and for someone brought up on rice, like me, it was quite an achievement. But two weeks ago she ended our relationship. “You’ve been leading me on for three years. There’s something screwed up about you,” she flung at me on Emek Refaim Street, not far from her little flat, and stormed off, leaving me standing on the pavement, open-mouthed and sweating. I knew she wanted to get married, and once in a delirious moment I promised to do so but since then I’d been evasive about any commitment.

Now, in this parched desert, I remember her fragrance and
feel I’m dying of desire for her and going mad for a drink. Yardena detested the smell of slivowitz, to which I’m addicted, but as a special treat she would let me drink whisky. I’d massage her slender neck, her supple back, turn her over and pour the liquor into the hollow of her navel and suck it up noisily, while she giggled like an infant. Oh Yardena, Yardena, why did you discard me like an unripe fruit?

I borrowed Hermosa’s transistor and moved to one side to listen to Sawt al-Arab radio from Cairo. I turned it on in the middle of a live interview with Ahmad Shukeiry, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

“Isra’il,” he mocked, “your head is made of wax, so why are you walking in the sun?”

“Throw them in the sea! Throw the Jews into the sea!” screamed the interviewer, Ahmad Said, Nasser’s loyal spokesman. But why is Egypt behaving like this? There’s a whole desert between us. “Go on, Jews, pack your belongings and leave!” Said commanded in a different tone, a thick, warm and actually quite pleasant voice. I didn’t know which was scarier, his screams or the quiet injunction.

I turned off the radio and on my way back a nagging thought occurred to me, again: why weren’t we destined to live somewhere else, a safe, quiet place, far from this turbulent, crazy country? What did we need all this for?

Once, when I was a child, I heard an old man talking about reincarnation. He said that when the soul leaves the dead person’s body it circulates around the family until it settles in a new baby. I was named after my uncle, my mother’s brother, Nuri Elias Nasekh, who died before he was thirty. Perhaps my time has come, and the soul that I inherited from him will soon
leave me too. I’m not far from thirty. I said this to Trabulsi, only half in jest. He sensed the fear behind it and took me straight to

Slutzky, our amateur palm reader, to read my fortune. Slutzky rattled on at length about my character, my career, the women in my life, a great love that will appear and end with heartbreak, but said nothing about death. When I steeled myself to ask about it, he pointed to my life-line – long and clearly delineated. Then Trabulsi and Aflalo asked about their life-lines, and he told them they had nice firm ones too. Time would show that he was both right and wrong, but I mustn’t anticipate.

A bad headache drove me to look for a quiet corner and try to calm down, so I slipped away from the racket in the tent area and sat in the shade of an old eucalyptus tree beyond the rows of tanks. I listened to the wind riffling through the leaves as if they were pages in a book of poetry, now stopping for a quiet read, now skimming fast, glancing and flitting on. The breeze made me feel better, though the headache persisted. Apparently, I was smoking too much.

I pulled off some leaves, crushed them in my hand and breathed their sharp, penetrating odour, the way Father used to. How was he feeling in the face of this imminent war, this innocent scholarly man who thought of Israel as a fragrant holy land, an earthly paradise? I remembered him sitting beside the radio, chain-smoking, listening to the BBC, to Israel Radio in Arabic and in Hebrew, to Sawt al-Arab radio stations from Baghdad, Damascus, Amman, Riyadh, reading all the newspapers and driving Mother crazy. “Why did we come here?” she would protest. “For war?”

My parents argued – about justice and about the Muslims’
Allah and the God of the Jews, about us and them and the lousy character of the Muslims, who don’t know how to compromise and always leave something unresolved, and Mother repeated for the thousandth time the story about that folklore character Juha who sold his mansion but asked to keep just one nail on the wall in his possession. The buyer agreed and thereafter Juha made his life miserable by coming to inspect his nail before dawn and in the middle of the night, on holidays and festivals, on Fridays and workdays, and the buyer never knew when Juha would show up and disrupt his life, until in the end he quit the mansion just to get some peace…“That’s the Arabs for you,” Mother would conclude. “They always leave a nail in the wall and get worked up and fight. There’s no ending with them!”

Because of the emergency call-up I hadn’t gone to say goodbye to them and though I kept writing and sending postcards, I still had had no reply. Telephone? They’d been waiting for one for the past three years. There’s a public phone near the grocery, but it’s always out of order.

On the eighth or ninth day we had a visitor – the poet and World War II partisan Abba Kovner. We sat on the ground and listened while he talked of his fears for Jewish continuity, which was again in peril. “Once more its fate is in the balance,” he declared, and though he managed not to mention the Holocaust, it hung over our heads: “What must we do when our existence is in danger? Should we confront the evil, or wait till it blows over? Once more we are alone.”

His words depressed me. I felt I didn’t have the strength to shoulder the anxieties of the Holocaust as well. Faced with Pharaoh, we didn’t need Hitler too.

Another day of inactivity and waiting. We tried to kill time by
playing backgammon, draughts and cards, and debated what more had to happen before Eshkol gave the order. At noon some of the family men were given a day’s leave – so maybe there won’t be a war after all? A group of us went to the canteen, and I asked the guy in charge to turn the radio to the Israeli Arabic-language station. “Again?” he protested, “What the hell do you want the Arabic station for? Screw them!” I explained and pleaded and finally he relented.

“President Gamal Abd el-Nasser, yesterday in Bir Gafgafa you said you would not retreat a single inch. Well, listen to these words from Israel: the Tiran Straits are an international waterway, open them up or they will be opened some other way, and an Israeli ship will pass through, flying the Israeli flag.”

The statement did not mention war, but hinted at it. Nothing about force was said, but there was an implication that force would be used. “You do not threaten Arabs, you don’t impugn their honour and you do not insult an Arab ruler!” That was the lesson I was taught by my older brother Kabi when he worked in the government information office for Arab interests, before he joined the Mossad.

“Son of a bitch!” Trabulsi burst out. “You heard Nasser? ‘If Israel wants war – welcome,
ahlan wasahlan
!’ Does he think war is a belly dance? Why don’t we take the fight to them? They should be screwed to hell!”

I look at Trabulsi and I’m filled with envy. He’s just got a new baby, a second child. As for me, I have nothing, no wife or kids, no house and no car. I haven’t even bought that
mustard-coloured
jacket, like the one my late Uncle Nuri had, which I’d always dreamed of buying. I saw one the other day in the window of OBG, the most exclusive menswear shop in town, but it was too expensive. Now I wish I’d bought it anyway.

In the evening the order came to get ready to move. It didn’t say where to. Aflalo’s face turned pale, his mouth tightened as he packed his gear and he was ready before anybody else. We boarded the trucks and travelled in darkness. My mouth was dry and my mind blank. I don’t remember how long we were on the road when we got the order to stop overnight in an abandoned orchard. “Sleep with your clothes on,” the commander said. The rumour went round that we were on the outskirts of Gaza City.

We woke up to a beautiful morning, a bright sky and the air exceptionally clear. A pleasant breeze rustled through the abandoned orchard, which breathed a green freshness. If only we could stop right here, in the beauty, the light and the wind. But at midday the word came: “Tomorrow we go to war!”