Yasmine (37 page)

Nuri my love,

By the time you receive this letter I’ll be in Paris. I’m disappointed with myself and ashamed that I didn’t have the strength to tell you face to face that I’d decided to go away. It turns out our dream journey was in fact a farewell trip.

I didn’t intend it to be like this. On the contrary, I tried to remove the obstacles in my heart. I’m trying, in the middle of this mental turmoil, to reconstruct things, to figure them out. One thing is clear to me – you stole my soul. Steal is not a nice word, but I haven’t got another. With the persistence of an ant you succeeded in blunting my fears, awakening my curiosity, melting my resistance, seducing me – a plot for a true romance.

You took me back to the scenes of my childhood, to the YMCA, where my parents met and where I got to know Edna Mazursky, my dear friend and perhaps my only friend, a place which still holds familiar smells and even has good coffee…You took me back to the Edison cinema, a site of nostalgia for me, and the Smadar cinema which stands near our old home among the picturesque Templar houses. You fed me falafel in
Mahaneh Yehuda. I stood there with you in the crush, tehina dripping on my dress, wondering what it is that binds together distant people, uniting in a shared pleasure.

My dear conqueror! With your shy, sly courting, with silky caresses, you got me to peer surreptitiously at the gate of Al-Hurriyeh, waiting endlessly for you to turn up. In a certain sense you won me with your weakness – like Azme, who was the only man in my life until then. I’ve told you almost nothing about him. When he died I shut myself in my room, scratched the walls and licked the whitewash. I was sure I’d never again get close to another man. Until you appeared – a twin soul rising from the chaos of our defeat.

I looked forward to our journey. I wanted to be with you, just the two of us in a small room, in one bed, to breathe your smell and feel your warmth and search for a little opening of hope. I wanted you for a long time, once I even came to your room, but you were afraid and didn’t want to take me, pretended to be stupid, as if you didn’t understand what a woman wants when she comes to a man’s room.

My beloved, the trip to the kibbutz was also a journey of farewell to my old dream of tearing you, the Jews, out of this place. In the cemetery in the Galilee I saw the tombstones that tell your stories. I saw that you too are buried in this soil, alongside those who “drowned in the lake while hauling
sea-sand
” and the one who “died of yellow fever”, and I understood that you also belong in this place and I knew how complicated it would be to uproot you. I realised that the past can never be undone. I envied the shrewdness with which the pioneers planted themselves in this place, thrusting their roots deep into the ground.

A year ago I returned to this land and almost as soon as I got
off the plane I had to go through one of your army checkpoints. The day before yesterday I had to go through it again. Everything is closed off to me. What kind of a future awaits me, even with you, if I give up my identity?

I couldn’t escape from myself even if I wanted to. To you I’m Yasmine, but beyond that I’m an Arab woman in the Jews’ country. How naive I was to think that I could fit in with this country which was once my home. I never told you about the blow that opened my eyes as to who I am in this place. A while back, after I’d worked as a volunteer in the youth village for almost ten months, I went to the director and asked to become a regular employee. “Ah Mademoiselle Yasmine, so you would like to work for us?” he said, as if till then I’d been working in Somalia. “You’re a good and dedicated worker and I’ll be happy to have you stay with us…” He kept me coming and going for a couple of weeks, then announced, “Mademoiselle Yasmine, I’m sorry, it can’t be done. I mean, what will the parents of our pupils say if they find out that you’re…” He was careful not to say “Arab”, as if it was an obscenity, or a crime that must be concealed. He also omitted to mention that the problem didn’t exist so long as I was a volunteer.

I know that not everyone is like him, but even the best of you, unconsciously, unintentionally, look down on us, as if you’re doing us a kindness. It’s a permanent insult to live in a country where you don’t belong, as a second-class citizen, if not lower than that.

Your father and my father are two parts of a broken branch. My father tried to walk on hot coals, to preserve himself without hurting you and without being injured and robbed, but he failed, defeated on all sides. It breaks my heart to see that he’s become bowed and ailing with a mysterious illness. I can
see how hard he’s trying all the time to hold on to life, to behave as if it’s “business as usual”, while everything slips through his fingers and he increasingly loses the will to keep going. He even wants to break up his newspaper partnership with Abu Nabil. The occupation has damaged a wonderful man of goodwill and made him sick and pain-ridden, a stranger in his own country. Now Abu Nabil will inherit everything.

For me, our trip to the kibbutz was an exploration of your other side, of the source from which you are drawn. I saw the blend between the “son of Arabia” who adores Um Kulthoum and knows our culture, and the new Israeli, advisor to the minister-in-charge, our
wali
. I wanted to discover the roots of my anxiety, our anxiety, why we fear you and what is so special about the kibbutz, the holy of holies of Zionism, and what kind of people built this cathedral. Listening to Sonia’s accounts of their origins I felt as if something was invading my body and tearing chunks out of it. But who the hell wants to hear my story?

Sweetheart, I meant to talk about you but ended up with generalities, jumping from subject to subject. There is much I don’t understand. I started to write this letter when I got home, draft after draft, and everything became confused in my mind. I feel as if there is a lump in my throat, blocking the words, fighting my consciousness.

Our first and only night together I cried from pain and joy that I couldn’t contain, and now I’m deserting…If there is one thing that distresses me about going away – besides leaving you and the house and al-Quds – it’s the return to what awaits me in Paris: Fayez and his macho cronies. I’ve got used to your way of speaking, the gentleness with which you treated me, this hesitancy that does not head straight for the finish. It pains me
to admit that Fayez has won, but no other path is open to me.

I wanted you to be my man, my complementary other half. Two days before our trip to the kibbutz I was scared and feared the worst. I felt I was about to enter the jaws of a dragon. Perhaps the fear brought on my period ahead of time, I haemorrhaged and had piercing cramps, like the time I miscarried Azme’s baby. The morning of the trip the pains stopped and my heart filled with joy. Like a starry-eyed girl ignorant of the world, I thought only that I was going on a trip with you and that you’d take me away, for ever, to another place that would contain the two of us. I sang with your Um Kulthoum, ‘
Ya aghla min ayyami
’:

As soon as we left al-Quds I saw the thriving settlements, your passionate activity. Among us life is lived at the pace of the narghile – one leisurely lungful after another, getting stoned. What a lost opportunity! I was confident that Nasser would change the Arab world. Another youthful dream bites the dust. Now it’s all up to my generation. We’re condemned to fight till we regain what is ours.

During our few days of happiness I loved every moment of being with you, and for the first time sensed also your “
as-sumood
” your love for this soil, the sweat and blood with which you watered it. Your story and ours are more difficult than the
judgement of Solomon. Here neither side will give in and no one will be spared. You must understand, my love, I also have no other place to go.

What am I taking away with me? All of you! You cleverly instilled your ethos and myth into the Bible, into your prayers. You made them your homeland, carried them everywhere with you, like a gypsy with his violin. The Bible became your mobile homeland and your prayer-books a temple in a rucksack. Simple and brilliant. Your laden cart was emptied when you realised your dream of
al-awda
. Now everything is reversed, and we’re the wronged ones! You are Goliath and we are David, you are Pharaoh and we are in bondage. Now we shall carry our dream with us, perhaps for two thousand years, until we take back our land and our honour. How could you be so bold? Was it really the power of “no other choice”, as your Sonia said? Well, then, we also have no other choice.

Oh my Son of Arabia! When Azme died I withered like a desiccated tree, and you watered it and made it flower. I even enjoyed arguing with you about politics – in other matters there was practically nothing to squabble about…When I outgrew the suspicions that blackened my soul, I saw that we had everything in common, love and friendship and the language of body and soul, deep worries and shared anxieties and tastes.

I think about your confession that time when I went mad and smashed all your glasses, and about how you stood on the stage in the kibbutz with a shining face – how good you looked in the white shirt and black trousers – and your voice was soft and pleasant and your words wise. I wanted you, I loved you, you were my heart’s sun and tears. I feel the love that we made real, and I’ll never forget its flavour. I dreamt of leaving everything
behind to follow this love, but when you stood there on the kibbutz stage and supposedly spoke up for me and represented me, I realised that you were not mine and never would be, that you belong to your people and your country.

What do I have left? Your song, the song of Um Kulthoum:

Yasmine

Eli Amir was born in Baghdad in 1937 and, with most of the Iraqi-Jewish community, left for Israel in 1950. His earlier novel
The Dove Flyer
was published in English in 2010 and was shortlisted for the
Jewish Quarterly
/Wingate Prize 2011.
The Jewish Chronicle
wrote:

“Amir paints a throbbing, colourful picture of Baghdad with its soothsayers, rabbis, sheikhs, prostitutes, revolutionaries, Zionists and princes. But, ultimately like the wings of a dove, the dreams of all the main characters are broken as they go into exile. ‘I write to show the pain, the sorrow, the insult, of losing a homeland,’ says Amir.”

A social activist, as well as a prize-winning author, Eli Amir said in Cairo on the Arabic publication of
Yasmine
: “How can there be peace without us knowing each other?”