Michelle led us along the village paths. She walked like a panther, supple and strong. Through her thin skirt her buttocks were clearly visible, round and firm, and being a lifelong admirer of women’s behinds I couldn’t take my eyes off hers. When the hawk-eyed Yasmine caught me staring at Michelle’s rear, I blushed and grinned like an idiot.
When we entered the dining hall Michelle took me aside and whispered, “If we hadn’t gone into the classrooms, I’d have thought she was an iceberg. She’s very intelligent as well as beautiful. And what eyes!”
“Where are you from?” I inquired.
“From Paris,” she smiled, examining my features. Losing my usual shyness, I smiled right back into her eyes.
“Would you like to join the children for lunch?” the director asked, looking at Yasmine. She thanked him but refused.
“Miss Hilmi, you’re welcome to come here any time. You won’t need me, Doctor Michelle will be available.” With this he left us and went back to his office.
Michelle walked with us to the car, shook Abu George’s hand, then gave Yasmine a hug and parted from her in a friendly way. I stood back a little and waited for her.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked, feeling my face growing hot.
“We have to see what she wants,” she said seriously.
“We should talk,” I stated, hoping to see her again.
“I’m off to Paris this week. My mother is ill. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks and then we’ll see.” And she walked away.
*
“
Shukran
, thanks, Nuri. It was an interesting visit, and the children are very appealing,” said Abu George when I got into the car. Yasmine was silent.
“What’s your impression?” I asked.
“They’re professional,” she replied, and withdrew back into herself.
Abu George wanted to drive into Kiryat Yovel, to look at the housing that appeared from a distance like a bunch of toy bricks, and he was impressed by the construction work in progress and the public buildings in the lively neighbourhood.
“Take me home, please, Father,” Yasmine said.
“Why don’t we go through Talbieh?” he suggested. Yasmine froze. “Just for a quick glimpse,” he added. She looked at him, with an air of cold indifference. “We’ll just take a look,” he almost pleaded.
A few minutes later we were in Talbieh. Abu George stopped by the Sherover villa and stepped out of the car, leaving the engine running. Next door was their house, looking proud and handsome, as if time had stopped for it. Good Jerusalem stone, tubzeh-cut, always retains its freshness. The only sound was the rustling of the palm fronds in the wind, the young palm tree had grown tall and slim, like a boy turning into a man.
Abu George approached the house slowly. I watched him examining the carved doorway, the joint of the wall and the lintel, where there was a bit of cracked plaster. “Here we had a ceramic tile with the inscription ‘Hilmi House’, in Arabic and English. Where has it gone?” He patted the door. “My father carved this door and the windows with his own hands, it was the last work he did himself. He put in so much love.”
Hilmi House stood on the corner, a two-storey residence set
in a large garden, unfenced, as if inviting visitors. At first glance there was nothing very special about it, just a handsome, pleasant house, made for people to live in, not to impress others. My eyes were drawn to the polished front door and to the round terrace with a balustrade of stone pillars on the upper floor.
Yasmine didn’t approach and didn’t say anything. She stood some distance away, immobile, her eyes on the house of her birth.
Abu George turned around, his face flushed, and got into the car. I looked at the nearby Sherover villa, its facade decorated with colourful mosaics and with a thick screen of trees around it, their tops rising above the high stone wall. A splendid villa indeed, but not a liveable house like its plain neighbour.
“You have built a lot, an awful lot. When did you have the time?” asked Abu George as we moved on. “My father,
Allah yirhamo
, may he rest in peace, was a timber merchant. He made as a toy for Yasmine a model of our house in wooden blocks. He enjoyed seeing her taking it apart and building it all over again, from the ground up.” He glanced tenderly at his daughter, who was sitting beside him chilly and distant, spurning the encounter with her childhood home.
“This is where Yasmine was born,” he went on. “A Jewish woman delivered her, Mrs Breilovsky, the best midwife in Jerusalem.”
“Me and Kabi, my older brother, were nursed by our Muslim neighbour, Hairiyya, and my mother nursed her son Ismail,” I said.
“Those were the days,” he said.
“They aren’t taking good care of the house,” Yasmine said.
“Do you think they’ll let us go in?” Abu George asked.
“First let’s find out who it belongs to…”
“What do you mean, who it belongs to?” Yasmine interrupted me.
“In our
madafeh
we had a Persian carpet,” her father recalled, “every strand a distinct colour, and together – a symphony. I’ve searched everywhere and haven’t found a carpet like it. In ’48 we left in a hurry, left everything behind, thinking we’d be back in a few days.”
“Take me home, father,” Yasmine said.
Yasmine was deep in thought and didn’t want to talk. Abu George, sensing her mood, pretended to concentrate on the road. She looked at him and smiled sadly. A gentle man, her father. Perhaps too gentle. What had happened to him lately? He was not the self-confident man she used to know. During the war his voice on the phone sounded hoarse and broken, as if some savage beast had him by the throat. Was this the reason he behaved as if he’d lost his faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause and his people’s abilities? Was this the reason he was beginning to adjust to the new reality instead of resisting it? Her stomach was upset. Perhaps she, too, was falling ill, her body revolting against the reality that was being forced upon her. Why had she given in and agreed to go to the youth village? So what if they all pressured her? She felt she was losing control of her life, and thought she should try to figure out the strange world she had fallen into since leaving Paris.
The first thing that occurred to her, for some reason, was the Jewish official. Who was that Nuri? A young man in an off-the-peg suit that was too new and already wrinkled, a cheap tie knotted carelessly, untidy hair and thick, supposedly fashionable sideburns. Her father called him
al-wastah
, the man of contacts, the mediator. She thought he was a pimp
peddling collaboration. Was he really the Minister’s influential advisor? And who was the Minister? And why was Nuri trying so hard for Father?
This was the first time she had associated with Israelis. Since her arrival she had seen them only from a distance, swarming like tireless ants over her city, gnawing at the soil that held its stones together. They struck her as low-grade, undignified conquerors – the soldier who rummaged in her underwear with clumsy fingers, the gatekeeper at the youth village who spoke broken Hebrew with a weird accent, the desiccated, tedious director, and Doctor Michelle, a ready-made Frenchwoman recently imported. Were these the new landlords? Were these the dispossessors who had overturned her life and destroyed her father’s health?
What did that Doctor Michelle mean, calling her “our new trainee”, when she herself was still wondering what she was doing there. And the director, who had the nerve to fire questions at her as though she had come to ask for a favour. She was ready to get up and leave, but her father began to cough in that nervous way and she didn’t want to upset him. It was painful to see him looking so desperately at the Jewish official. Oh, the shame of it!
The eyes of the others, watching her while the director was firing his questions, reminded her of the mocking looks of the children at the YMCA. It was in one of her first Hebrew lessons, when she was getting her letters mixed up, confusing
b
with
p
…A trivial episode, but it’s always unpleasant when people look down their noses at you.
Michelle must have sensed how she felt, because she was anxious to flatter her. An odd type, this Michelle, and funny that they should meet here. What was a French psychologist
from the same university doing in this little youth village in Jerusalem?
Stranger still was Father’s friendship with the Jewish official. He went to see him, took trips with him, even led him to Hilmi House and let him see his terrible pain over losing their home. Oh Mother of God, how her heart raced when they reached the place, how awful to see her home appearing before her like a ghost. Her father moaned, his face flushed then turned grey, as if he had been struck by a fatal illness. They shouldn’t have gone there. What demon had compelled her father to lead them to what had once been their home and had now turned into their cemetery?
She remembered scenes from the past, most vividly the whistling of bullets over the palm tree, which was shorter then and spread over her and Edna Mazursky like a big umbrella. She remembered that they had stopped playing and watched wide-eyed as bullets whizzed overhead, only half understanding that something momentous was happening. She remembered Ramzi Khir, their Protestant neighbour, running into their courtyard, his face contorted with fright, and her father’s hoarse voice calling the girls to come inside at once, then saying they had to pack a few essentials and leave.
And Edna, oh her dear sweet Edna, said nothing but ran home and a few moments later returned with her father, Mr Mazursky who, sweating and out of breath, pleaded with her father, again and again, not to leave. “Come to us, there’s plenty of room. Stay, Abu George, better a good neighbour than a distant brother!”
“I love you all too, but we’re at war, and it’s stronger than we are,” her father replied. Why hadn’t he listened?
Edna, dear wise Edna, still a child, had sensed disaster. She
wept and hugged her and refused to part, as if they would never meet again. Father patted her little head, saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll be back in a week or two, when it’s all over.” And so in one moment they lost their home and peaceful beautiful Talbieh, with its spacious houses and its neighbourly relations with the Jews. Neither they nor the Mazurskys imagined that this catastrophe would hit like an avalanche, burying a world that would never return.
And now another world was collapsing before her eyes – the al-Quds of her youth. On their way home they got stuck in a traffic jam. Local labourers were working on the road and blocking the traffic. They were operating pneumatic drills, their faces like shadows. Everywhere drills and bulldozers were demolishing her city. They had even invaded Al-Hurriyeh. So many soldiers and officers and secret service men came to eat there, their very presence intimidating, their eyes stripping her, and she had to hide behind her dark glasses.
Overnight the dream of liberating their homeland vanished. How the bubble of pre-war euphoria had burst in a moment! She had anticipated returning to Hilmi House in triumph, dreamed of meeting the Jewish girls who had mocked her at the YMCA; they called her Turquisa on account of her eyes, till she pleaded with Father to buy her a pair of sunglasses, “like Soraya, the queen of Iran”. Only yesterday Nasser was calling the shots, dominating the headlines, Nasser whom she had admired since she was thirteen, collecting every photo of him she could find and every speech he gave. Why had she come back? To see the Jews celebrating? She took out her cigarettes and lit two, one for herself and one for Father, who remained silent.
You had to hand it to that official, who rejoiced in the Arab name Nuri, as if to mislead – there was no arrogance about
him. He treated Father and her with respect. She watched him when they were about to leave the youth village, when she waited in the car and the Frenchwoman was flirting with him. She saw a slender, boyish young man, listening with his head inclined. For a moment he reminded her of Azme, and a shudder went through her…Oh Lord, no, what nonsense! She passed her hand over her forehead to dispel the lunatic idea.
Her father stopped outside Al-Hurriyeh and went in to check on things. He returned with a tall, Israeli officer.
“Yasmine, meet our friend the ‘Colonel’.”
“I’m not a colonel, I’m Doctor Amitai,” he said and extended his hand.
She shook his hand but was unable to force even the shadow of a smile. “What is your speciality?” she asked, just to say something.
His answer surprised her: “Arabic language and literature.”
But she reckoned this was all part of his supposedly friendly façade. Increasingly angry, she feared that some mysterious force was driving her father, as though he was living his life in another world.
The “Colonel” turned to go to the governor’s house, and her father came back to the car.
“Father, why do you associate with them?”
“
Ya binti
, this man holds a lot of power in his hands.” Then, after a brief silence, he added, “I haven’t found anything wrong with him, at least not so far.”
“And why are you sending me to do my training among the enemy?”
“What’s wrong with doing your specialised training with Jewish children? Will it affect the quality of your research, does it require that you love the Jews?”
“They’ll soon be driven out of here.”
“I wish.”
“Father, are you helping them?”
“Shame on you,
binti
!”
“Then how is it that a senior official and the director of the youth village set aside their work and devote time to you and your daughter, and even arrange for her to be escorted by a person who just happens to speak French, and happens to have studied at the Sorbonne, and happens to have a doctorate in psychology, and just by coincidence happens to work in the place where I may do my training…Why are they doing all this? Just to honour us?”
“
Binti
, this is a big world, it doesn’t exist just to persecute us. And Nuri is like an
ibn arab
, a son of Arabia…”
“How? He’s an enemy!” she broke in.
“Yasmine, there are human beings among them too. When this war began we thought there would be another Deir Yassin, but it didn’t happen.”
“If we had won, would you have helped the enemy?”
“For now they’re here, and we must make the best of the situation.”
“What we must do is make their life a misery and drive them out.”
“Who’s going to drive them out? President Nasser? King Hussein? President Nur al-Din al-Atassi of Syria? Or perhaps Shukeiry of the PLO? They’re all big-mouths, and they are the ones who inflicted this catastrophe upon us.”
“We will drive them out, we the Palestinians.”
“Is that why you want to return to Paris?”
“I can’t stay here.”