The Wanting (32 page)

I
WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS
my confusion.

I’m here. I’m there. I’m nowhere at all.

And then suddenly I am in my father’s house. And—impossible!

Is that Guttman? Guttman? In my own bed? Breathing the air of my very father and sisters as if he might suck the memory of my life from every corner of existence?

Can I describe this situation? Can I comprehend it? Have I descended not to earth but to Hell?

I have flown from the southern desert across the Judean Highlands; rising up from the Dead Sea, I have traversed the great cities of Dimona, Be’er Sheva, Arad, and circled the myriad towns and villages, the Bedouin encampments, the army bases without number, some so secret even the soldiers don’t know where they are. I have encompassed in my vision all this ancient landscape stretching east to what they call Jordan and west to Sinai and the lip of the Mediterranean and south to the Gulf of Aqaba and north to the ripe Golan, but for what? To find Guttman in my bed? At the center of all my travails lies Guttman, dreaming?

Is he dying? I perceive, through the grace of Allah, that he is not willfully avoiding the water that lies a few inches from his right hand. He simply no longer comprehends that he is thirsty. Dehydration occurred in the first minutes he was exposed to the searing heat, and acute dehydration within, perhaps, two hours, some long moments before he became stuck in the crevice, argued with the sunbird, and witnessed the death of the ibex. He has by now cycled through the phases of headache, blurred vision, dislocation,
and hydrophobia. He cannot recognize the very idea of thirst. Half a liter of water would save him, but he cannot abide the idea of it. He is confident in his body; indeed, he has a clarity of mind he has never before experienced. No longer exposed to the sun, he will survive much longer. But not ultimately, unless he himself takes hold of the water my father offers him. Do I pity Roman Guttman? I must ask him: Roman Guttman, did you think of the blistering sun when you foolishly turned your car toward Bethlehem instead of heading home to your little city in the Philistine plains? No. You did not consider the consequences of turning east instead of north, of ignoring the warnings of your own brother-soldiers, of trekking into the desert without your bottle of water, your hat, or your knife. And did you take into account the ramifications of your actions on others? For instance, on the ibex, for whom, had you not climbed that rock in search of birdsong, things might have gone differently, or for the white leopard who must now live with his murderous deed. And did you think of the young daughter, who even now must be weeping into the folds of her handkerchief, and did you think of, did you think at all of my father and my sisters and the pain of Beit Ibrahim?

He can’t even see me, though here I am! How can I teach him anything? He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound emerges. Perhaps he thinks he is trying to explain his life. Roman Guttman—no one is around to hear! Even I cannot hear you! Only Allah can hear, only He, and He is far, far from this place.

In the outer room sits my father, his head in his hands, swaying under the melody of his sighs. My sister Marya and my sister Hanadi busy themselves with sidelong glances. Beyond the walls of the house a crowd is forming of my old friends and neighbors. A speech I discern coalesces in the minds of Issak Al-Daya and Abdullah Saad, the headmen of our local PLO. They are contemplating their tactics, a delicate matter, even for them. For they cannot intuit my father’s wishes. Is it vengeance he seeks? Or is he an angel of mercy?

•    •    •

I, too, had days of doubt and foreboding.

In the hours before I donned the white robe of purity and posed with my Kalashnikov and Qur’an, again and again I demanded: Who is this God of such dark power that every calamity that befalls you is already inscribed by Him in the Book of Decrees? They told me the Prophet says,
Act, for each of you will find easy that for which he was made
. But I asked, is this what I was made for? What, do you think it is a light thing? The great weight of the belt even now pulls my soul earthward. Perhaps for others it was not so; they say most smile at that moment and the ascent to Heaven is swift; they say most have already ascended long before that day, and for them all is pleasure. They live not for this world, but for the next! Yet in the days and weeks of prayer and preparation I had nothing but feet and stomach, smell and touch. The hand of life had descended upon me, and I could not unburden myself of its desires. It hung on me with as great a weight as the belt, greater even, more oppressive, more terrifying.
Do not fear the unknown
, they told me, and we said the confession,
There is no God but Allah.…

I did not go inside for the washing, though it was definitely my place to be there. They had wrapped Fadi in the kafan, and brought him out on a wooden board. I stood off to one side as they covered him with flags, black, red, green, the colors of Fatah and Palestine, a photo of Arafat at his head. Though in life Fadi spat on Arafat, in death the leader’s smiling face was pasted to his shroud. Then there were prayers:
O Allah! Forgive those of us that are alive and those of us that are dead; those of us that are present and those of us who are absent; those of us who are young and those of us who are grown into adults, our males and our females. O Allah! Whomsoever of us You keep alive, let him live as a follower of Islam, and whomsoever You cause to die, let him die as a believer
. As always I began to feel sick. I looked around, and there, in the
far corner, in her mother’s arms, eyes closed, tearless, yet weeping all the same, Nadirah. The mullah folded his hands, and my Fadi was hefted like a refrigerator upon the shoulders of the men. I should have been among them, but I could not seem to get there; my feet simply wouldn’t carry me. My father glared at me: Don’t be so sad! Be proud! But he himself wept like some old Bedouin. “He was my pride and joy,” he sobbed.

They gathered in a great crowd. Checkered headbands and kaffiahs, black masks, green scarves all paraded down Hebron Street. I was swept along, drowning. What did I see? The sky occluded with fists. The bier adorned with oaths. Fadi was to be buried here in Jabal, not in our village. “He died here,” my father had said to me, “that is the law.” Thousands came out for this funeral. Who were these people? Those of our khamulah seemed lost among them, retreating before the onslaught of strangers and famous sheiks. Finally, I tried to push through the ocean of screaming boys and men, but they refused to part for me. Who do you think you are? someone said. Stop pushing! And when we arrived at the burial place, I was still far back, just one of the numberless mourners.

I closed my eyes. Again, I saw Fadi setting the stone in his sling, turning toward me.…

“Amir!”

It was my father. He reached through the crowd with his willowy arm and grasped my childish hand in his oil-stained fingers. He slapped my face. “What are you doing back here? Come on!”

My father threw up his arms again, and the folds of people opened before him.

I was now in the circle of our family, our khamulah having congealed around the gravesite. The body in its white sheath was lowered into the grave, and Nadirah, in spite of all custom, in spite of the mullah’s outraged objections, in spite even of the Prophet’s proscription, had come to the grave site. Worse still, she now knelt over it, unafraid to watch as they laid the stones upon her husband. Brazenly she drizzled a handful of dirt upon him and then, without a word, floated back into the crowd, carried on the wings of her enormous, invisible sorrow.

I had never seen her dressed in the jilbab before. Gone were the jeans and polos and the sweaters that might have suggested to me the actual form of paradise in this or any other life. This new Nadirah I did not know; redesigned by grief, her hair and neck obscured by the hijab, her face a moon shining from a dark, remote, and heartless scarf, her eyes and lips as dry as the well that had always sat unused in the ruins above my village. The crowd bleated like a herd of goats desperate to be milked, and Nadirah was gathered up within it, swallowed and held tight. Now I understood. I would never see her again. I would never see either of them again.

The years after that passed in a kind of dream.

I sat with my father watching television. I no longer cared much about school. And as for stories? My throat was stopped up and nothing came out but a kind of bark. I went every day to my father’s shop. I worked on whatever car was there, but in time there were no more cars. These were the days of intifada. Let’s face it, I told my father, no Jews, no cars.

So the shop was closed, and my father and I watched television.

My mother hinted many times that I should be out there throwing stones. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. I told her that everyone who throws stones ends up in jail. “Not everyone,” she replied.

But I didn’t want to be in jail. I didn’t want to be anywhere. And I realized with a flash of terrible certainty that I didn’t care about any of it. About Palestine, about Israel, about Nadirah, about my father, about my mother, or about my sisters. As soon as I had this thought, I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

How many more years passed until that day I was sitting near the Pool of Suleiman smoking a cigarette? I don’t remember when I started to smoke, but by this time my cigarette had become my closest companion. Ab had stirred himself months before and
reopened the garage. Everybody thought because of Oslo there would surely be a Palestinian state in two weeks’ time, and tourists were pouring back into Bethlehem. My older sisters one by one were going off to Bethlehem University or getting married, and the others were still babies. My mother blithely forgot all the words she had said to me in the years of her insanity and went back to teaching school—and I was just sitting there near the Pool of Suleiman because it wasn’t too far from our town and lately I often found myself there, not really thinking of anything, just sitting. I heard in the distance some children, and for some reason this brought to mind the storytelling of Uncle Ahmad. He was long dead, just as my father had predicted, of emphysema and Parkinson’s, and his gift to me, his
Book of Tales
, was lost, I didn’t know where because I’d never bothered looking for it, but then the image of Uncle Ahmad faded and I saw in my mind my father’s garage. I’d begun working there again, mostly on Muslim cars now. Muslim cars! I laughed. And these broken-down cars reminded me for some reason of the prostitute I’d been visiting, Safa, and then the faces of one or two of the other girls, but the perfume of Safa wiped them away, and I was reminded by her perfume of the drinks I now consumed most every evening when I was done with her, and then I looked down and saw my legs dangling over the edge of the pool and this reminded me of something from so far in my past it could have been as ancient as this cistern, at least two thousand years old, and for some reason the sound of a hawk came into my ears, and the scent of cucumber filled my nostrils, and the song of goat bells filled the air, but I looked past my legs to the water, which in the light of approaching night was as dark as blood on pavement, and I thought of the water of the Nile that Mussa turned to blood and I understood that this water was not only blood; it was also flesh because I could make out the reflection of my own face and the bottom of my own feet, and the perspective made it seem that there was nothing between my feet and my face, and I thought, what is it that is between my feet and my face? And I answered, My heart.

I placed my hand upon my heart but could not feel it beating.
I listened to it in the pure vacuum of the coming night, but there was nothing to hear. And then I felt something salty and sweet sliding between my lips, and for the first time in many, many years, I recalled that I had tears.

“Amir, is it you?”

I looked up, wiping the edges of my eyes.

“It’s me, Walid!”

“What are you doing here?” I said. I knew Walid from the old days. He worked at the cultural center. Now he wore a beard and a white cap.

“I was watching you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I always admired you,” he said. “You were our poet.”

“Me?”

“Yes. A lot of us admired you. But you sort of disappeared. No one ever sees you anymore. When I noticed you here I couldn’t believe it. So I just watched for a while.”

In the distance the muezzin was calling the evening prayer.
God is most great! God is most great!

“It’s time for prayer,” Walid said.

“I don’t pray,” I told him.

“Why not?”

I shrugged.

“It will do you good,” he said. “God answers us and pulls us up.”

“Not in my case,” I said.

“How do you know that? Do you think that God can’t do anything He wants? Do you think you are so big that He can’t lift you up, too?”

“Leave it alone,” I said.

The muezzin called through his loudspeaker,
I testify there is no God but God. I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God
.

“Well,” Walid said, “I’ll pray for both of us.”

He laid out his rug.

Make haste to prayer! Make haste to prayer!

How often had I heard the adhan? I was nineteen years old, nineteen years equals six thousand nine hundred and thirty-five days, six thousand nine hundred and thirty-five days is thirty-four thousand, six hundred and seventy-five calls to prayer.

Walid was ready to begin. His face shone with some inner light, some inner conviction, some inner joy. He brought his hands up to begin his salah.

Suddenly I said to Walid, “Why should I pray if I don’t believe?”

He smiled at me. “Brother,” he said, “do first. Believe later.”

That is when I began going to the mosque, wasn’t it? Surely it was then I read of the punishments that awaited me because of the sin into which I had fallen, the torments of the grave, and so I began to perform the salah in its appointed time each day and study the Holy Qur’an in earnest and fervency and cleave to the words of Muhammad and try with all my might to glue these things to my heart so that it might start beating once again.