About the Night (43 page)

His mother prepared russet potatoes in olive oil and lemon, and she watched him eat in the hopes that he would clean his plate as he had done as a child. Her eyes tried to comprehend what had happened to him the previous evening, and it made him wish she were a little more thickheaded and a little less clever. Nasreen entered the room carrying a tea tray she had found in the living room. Elias noted that her hands were nimble and strong, and there was something confident about the way she held the tray and placed it on the table in silence. He thought that if she held on to their married life in such a fashion, he might be able to let himself fall apart from time to time as he had done at the wedding.

Elias had no desire to eat. His mother plied him with tea made from fennel seeds and peppergrass, which she had once told him enhanced virility. In his current shamefaced half-dead state, he thought he would have preferred a sleeping potion or hallucinogen. Nasreen sat cross-legged on the couch, humming like a child entertaining herself while the adults sat nearby. Elias noticed that her smile broadened with his mother’s efforts at getting him on his feet, a smile that told him she wished to learn from her mother-in-law exactly how to do it.

The pain Elias felt did not go away in the days following the wedding, nor did the alcohol haze dissipate. He found it difficult to gaze into the eyes of his bride or flash her an earnest smile. It suited him that they were still living at his parents’ home; it would be several weeks before they could move into the apartment that had been prepared for them alongside his parents’.

His mother saw that he could not find his place and sensed that it was not the wedding night but the fact of the wedding itself that troubled him.

“Try to forget what you know about love,” Nadira told him without preamble, “whatever you’ve read about or heard about or perhaps experienced. This is something different, plain and without luster. Think of it as a dancer who trains his body daily; if he fails to do so one day or two, then his body will respond accordingly—feebly—and will forget everything it learned. That’s what marriage is like,” she said. “One day and then another, one thin layer covering another until you’ve created something strong. And then, between the days of routine and the moments of grace, a certain feeling, a sentiment, can grow. If you let it, it will grow like a plant and turn into love, the kind that is woven over years and years. That is what you need to aspire to, the place where love thrives for years. Are you listening, Elias?” she asked. “I can see that your mind is wandering.”

“I’m listening, I’m listening,” he said, trying to sound obedient. Whenever he repeated his words twice he was commemorating Lila to himself, as she was the first to note this tendency in him: “Eat, eat,” he would tell her, or “Look, look.” It added emphasis and a certain Middle Eastern flavor shared by both Jews and Arabs in their respective languages.

His mother asked, “And when is a marriage successful?”

He had the feeling she was about to provide the answer, the very answer that people the world over were searching for. And he was right.

“When the wife loves the husband,” Nadira told him. “Not just loves him, but is crazy about him! Only then.”

“Why?” Elias asked, dubious.

“The wife carries the burden of the marriage on her shoulders,” his mother said. “Her husband, herself, both of them, their covenant, and everything else that gets added over the years. And all that is very, very heavy. It is in her power to keep the marriage alive and thriving, but also to drive it to the brink of crisis and back again. For whatever reason, men have not taken this role upon themselves. Perhaps they are not capable. Now, as you know, every empty space, every abyss created in nature fills itself, and this one is filled by women out of a sense of responsibility and maybe also the will to control. It’s a simple matter, really, but in case you haven’t understood, I’ll explain it: your wife must be happy, satisfied, fulfilled, and impassioned, and then the burden of marriage will not be heavy for her. She’ll be prepared to take it upon herself for better and for worse until the very day that one of you shuts your eyes for good.”

That is what Elias’s mother told him several weeks after the wedding.

But the thought of growing old beside Nasreen frightened him. Suddenly, life seemed too long, with endless hills to climb, one range of mountains after another, most of them hidden. At the end of the day—every day—it was he who would have to climb into bed beside Nasreen. She may have chosen him or been chosen for him, but he had never pretended to believe that his own heart had chosen her.

Now, over a distance of years and in the wake of having children and enduring wars, he thought that his mother was wrong. It can happen, he told himself: his mother could be mistaken. She was indeed an expert on plants and climbers and earth and fertilizer, and even on human beings, but with regard to his marriage, it had the same chance as parched Africa being inundated with clean, fresh water. Love never blossomed between Elias and Nasreen; perhaps her theory did not hold in cases where the man is still in thrall to another woman.

Now, many years later, he watched his father’s back as he made his way to the office, and he was overcome with emotion. During the time they spent in the cellar during the war, George spoke as he had never before spoken in his life, a torrent of words that seemed designed to imprint his grandson with everything he could teach him. He told him of an event that had taken place in 1901, when dozens of Franciscan monks were gravely injured, their cloaks bloodied in the wake of a bitter battle in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

“Against whom had they been fighting?” George asked his grandson. “Not the enemies of Christianity, the Jews or the Muslims. So who? You’ll never guess: priests from the Greek Orthodox Church, people who believe in the same God and who utter the same prayers. And what were they fighting over until blood was shed?”

Elias’s son was riveted.

“These Franciscan and Greek servants of God nearly bled themselves to death over who was to sweep the step leading into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Do you understand? Over a single stone step and who had the right to sweep it.”

George wanted to present the inanity, the foolishness, that surrounded them: the Jew who had made the atom bomb and the Americans who had used it and the Japanese who became its victims because they refused to give in and the Germans who destroyed and were destroyed. And now Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader idolized by the Arab world, who had promised a sweeping victory, yet now his soldiers could be seen, servile and vanquished, all through the Sinai desert by the thousands.

“One must always cast doubts,” George said. “Doubt armies, doubt megalomania; nothing is absolute. Nothing, that is, but the solar system and the stars and the fact that day follows night and night follows day.”

Elias watched George’s suit as it disappeared from view down the street and wondered what he really knew about his father. Was his life a happy one? Had he ever given up something he loved for another person? Had he fulfilled any of his dreams? And what were those dreams, anyway? Did George love his wife, and only her?

After a respected banker absconded with his clients’ money, George had shut himself up in his office and emerged with a plan: he would invest his money in buildings and property, assets he could see and that could not go bankrupt or flee to Jordan. Thus, to the regret of his bankers, he withdrew his money and purchased property in the western portion of Jerusalem and on the coastal plain and even some sixty acres of orchards near Jaffa. Some of these provided rental money while others merely added luster to the family. He also remodeled the family’s summer home near Jericho, increasing its worth.

This was the plan carried out by George Riani in 1946.

Two years later, nearly all the family’s assets were beyond its grasp. The city was divided: the Rianis remained on the Arab side under Jordanian control while their buildings and lands were in Israel. George believed that his property would one day be returned to him; nothing else made sense. How could so many assets be irretrievable? Elias never once saw him leaf through the bills of purchase written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

Nadira perceived this as their disaster but chose to find the good in this disaster: compared to other families, who were torn apart and lost contact with one another, their only loss was fiscal.

“It’s money we’ve lost,” she told her husband. “No one has died.”

“If only I had bought in East Jerusalem,” George replied, torturing himself.

At the conclusion of the shortest war ever fought in the region, it became clear that nearly all their assets had been wiped out. Their buildings were taken over by Jews or handed to them by the fledgling State of Israel as “absentees’ assets.” Writs of purchase were deemed worthless. Acres of Riani land were nationalized.

Munir, who was sent to report on a Riani property in the German Colony neighborhood of West Jerusalem, discovered that the building’s façade remained as it had been, while inside life was carrying on: there was laundry hanging from the clothesline, mail in the mailbox, a welcome mat, summer blankets airing on the windowsills. Another property in the Katamon neighborhood was occupied by several families. Anything that could be torn down was torn down; anything that could be made ugly was made ugly.

“They’ve destroyed the buildings’ beauty,” Munir reported angrily.

The Arab lawyer with whom George consulted said there was nothing he could do and suggested speaking with a Jewish lawyer instead. The Jewish lawyer refused the case, saying it would be impossible to win.

“You’re not the only ones,” the r
ed-haired lawyer told them. “There are some twenty thousand Arabs who, like you, lost property in West Jerusalem.”

The fledgling state stood strong and fortified with new laws, so the Arabs lined up to oppose them had about as much chance of winning as a dragonfly against a fighter jet.

The very wealthy rarely become poor even when they lose their wealth or go bankrupt, thanks to reserves they have stashed away or to miracles, connections, and resourcefulness. The Rianis, however, were divested of their assets nearly overnight. Elias thought it was worse than an earthquake, since natural disasters leave nothing behind, while in their case, the buildings and lands continued to exist but had shifted to new owners.