Yasmine (18 page)

After Michelle woke up she came into the living room in a light silk negligee, which she’d left hanging open, displaying most of her brown, suntanned body. She sat on my knee and asked, “Did you come?”

“There’s a curse hanging over me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” she protested. “What about children?” she added, sounding worried.

“There’s a certain rabbi in Safed who said he could fix it for me, but only after a proper wedding ceremony.”

At 4.30, earlier than usual, the latest baby began his morning concert. Why didn’t she pick him up and give him a nipple to suck? Maybe the little thing is screaming because he has a tummy ache and the poor mother can’t calm him down. After all, she must want to sleep too. My annoyance turned to sympathy. Looking out of my big window I saw her, my Orthodox neighbour, wearing a new light scarf. She’s younger than me and already a mother of six. Her figure has thickened with all this childbearing, but she radiates a sweet, mature and modest femininity. Perhaps it’s the effect of the scarf framing her face, her quick smile, or the full, soft body covered from head to foot. I wondered how she and her husband “commune”, as they call it. How does modesty affect the passion, the physical contact?

I like to see my Orthodox neighbour at least once a day, preferably in the morning, otherwise my routine is upset. When I return her shy little smile, she looks away as if she’s committed a sin. Sometimes I wish I could have a casual chat with her in the way of neighbours, make her laugh at a joke or a spicy story. Does she ever think about me as I think about her?

At this hour, when we both open our windows, she looks at me in silence. Maybe she’s curious to know who spent the night
with me. Once, out of consideration for her, I didn’t raise the blind in the morning. Someone had spent the night with me and we coupled joylessly – a man and a woman joining together for a night of love when there is no love between them – and I didn’t want my neighbour to see our gloomy faces after the miserable and frustrating sex we had shared. Things were different when Yardena slept at my place and we enjoyed our carnal pleasures; the blind was raised at dawn to greet the new day, and it seemed to me then that my Orthodox lady was glad to see Yardena. When I marry I’ll invite her to the wedding; it will be nice to have her accompany me on that day.

Two floors below her lives another Orthodox family, also well endowed with offspring. They multiply like the Palestinians – a birth-rate which is three times the norm among us.

The Minister didn’t want to know about the natural increase among the Palestinians, any more than he fretted about his bulging belly. I continued to show him the statistics and bombard him with forecasts. “These will become reality in our time,” I told him, but he stopped me irritably. I persisted: “Your grandchildren and my children will have to contend with this situation. My father brought me here to live in a Jewish state but at this rate it will just go on shrinking.” His bushy, greying eyebrows rose angrily and he began to pull hairs out of them. You had to see this to believe it – a senior government minister sitting in his office pulling out his eyebrows like a specialist in the removal of unwanted pubic hair. He paced up and down his office, prophesying the arrival of millions of Jews from the USSR: “They will melt the Iron Curtain and come to their historical homeland en masse, with their grandparents and babies…” His arms outstretched, he was all set to hug them.
How will they get out of there, I wondered to myself, although as it turned out, my scepticism would prove to be unfounded. The Minister dreamt of a new settlement movement in the occupied territories, like the one undertaken in the days of the British Mandate. “Our cousins,” meaning the Arabs, “will work in our enterprises, will earn good wages and will gradually come to see our presence in the territories as a blessing, and will get used to it just as they got used to the fact that Jaffa and Ramleh and Ashkelon and Acre are ours.”

I tried to cool his enthusiasm. “They have different dreams.”

“You believe they’ll lay down their lives for an ideology, as we do?”

“They’ve been doing it for more than seventy-five years.”

But he’d stopped listening to me. My boss drove me crazy. He asked for my advice but didn’t take it.

I went for my early morning walk. It was cool outside, with pleasant scents of autumn. A pale yellow light showed in a nearby house. A car drove drunkenly past, its headlights making the shadows dance. I stuck to the pavement, my eyes down and my arms swinging briskly. When I returned home
Ha’aretz
was not yet in my mailbox. The paperboys didn’t work as hard as I had, an immigrant youth of the previous generation. When I quit the kibbutz and came to Jerusalem on my own, I delivered newspapers. It was difficult to get the job and not easy to keep it. My predecessor missed one morning and was fired.

Out of breath and sweaty from my brisk walk, I climbed the stairs, waited at my door and rang the bell. Sometimes I dreamt that a woman would be waiting for me inside, would open the door with a warm smile, hug me and thaw all the fears and
anguish in my soul. Why didn’t I get married? Of my class only Sultan and I were still unmarried. He was working on his doctorate, but what was my excuse?

I went to the office early to sort through my heaped in-tray. There were classified letters, invitations to various events, analyses by self-styled experts, appeals for help. I read the letters marked Classified first, placed some of them in the safe and left the rest, which were so designated merely from the sender’s sense of self-importance, to be filed. Invitations I chucked in the waste-paper basket. Since starting this job I received invitations to every ceremony, opening night and exhibition. At first I felt flattered and went along, until I discovered that people turned up just to see and be seen, and in reality, to share the communal experience of boredom.

The other letters I spread on the desk like goods on a market stall. I glanced at the headings and set aside the “scholarly surveys”, written by frustrated historians and the various would-be experts who infest the government service. If I didn’t know that my Minister loved these things, I’d never have written any. For myself, I’m satisfied with basic facts, numbers and other data of essential significance. You soon find out that even the best-founded evaluations end up on the rubbish heap.

Finally I got down to the correspondence that really interested me – personal letters, requests and complaints from ordinary members of the Arab community. Their handwriting was sometimes hard to read; some wrote illiterate Arabic, others wrote in the elaborate high language of Arabic tradition, and a few opened with unctuous flattery. I could tell they were following the adage, “Kiss the hand you dare not bite, and pray that it break!” Many of the complaints were about the
prevention of family reunification, difficulty in obtaining various permits, expropriation of lands and structures. Unfortunately I was no expert on civil rights, land and immigration laws, or the status of absentees. It was necessary to bone up on these subjects as soon as possible.

One letter written in tiny handwriting caught my eye. It was from a widow who was searching for her son, missing since the end of the fighting. I put her letter aside with others whose writers I meant to invite to come and see me. I wanted to find ways to make a real difference, and I also wanted to show them that we were human beings. In the past we had been the victims of the Gentiles, but now unless we were careful we could become our own victims. One of the last letters I looked at was a friendly note from Abu George asking me to get in touch.

My secretary Aliza wouldn’t be in before eight, so I propped my feet up on the desk, detached myself from the matters at hand, and let my thoughts drift. My job meant that I had to submit to the dictates of my Minister’s politics, and in fact there is something comfortable about obeying someone who knows what must be done. The trouble was that occasionally I thought he was wrong, and I myself was still groping and searching for the right way and wasn’t immune from errors. I disliked his patronising attitude towards the Arab population, and felt uneasy when he indulged in his grand, pathos-filled visions while refusing to face reality. I wasn’t willing to view the Arabs as “our cousins who will work for us”, as inferior people without ideology and dreams. I wanted to help this post–occupation population as if they were regular immigrants, destined to be our neighbours for the rest of our lives. East Jerusalem was a new experience even for people who were born there, like Haramati of the Ministry of the Interior and Harish from the
Ministry of Religious Affairs, and how much more so for me, the youngest of the group, so it meant I had to be doubly careful. For now I was able to carry out my duties in my own way, but what if a time came when I was unable to do so?

Instead of imposing my ideas, I looked for relationships based on trust, on seeking out the local leadership and cooperating with it. I devoted a lot of time and energy getting to know the prominent families – Khalidi, Husseini, Asali, Budeiry, Ansari, Afifi, Nusseibeh, Barakat and others – and studied their histories in the records of the Sharia courts. When we met they were pleased to find that I knew something about them and their families and by degrees they opened up to me. Then I studied the Christian families – Salameh, Atallah, Jamal, Faraj and others – and learned which of them had always lived in Jerusalem and which settled recently, who were ancient Jerusalemites and who had originally come from Hebron. Some had Jewish friends from the time of the British Mandate who helped steer them through our bureaucratic maze. But I also spared no efforts to help the ordinary people, to act as a mediator, to represent and listen to them, to understand and feel their frustrations, and hoped that we would be able to live together. Building up trust is like weaving a complex tapestry which demands knowledge and subtlety, and there was still a long way to go.

Aliza arrived at eight on the dot, and after we had discussed her assignments for the day I thought I’d see Abu George at Al-Hurriyeh instead of phoning him. Perhaps Yasmine would be there too. I found him giving instructions to his staff, but when he saw me he hurried over and hugged me so tight that I almost blushed.

“
Mabruk, ya akhi
!” he congratulated me. “You succeeded in persuading Yasmine. She starts working at the youth village next week –
inshallah
, now she’ll stay with us. Um George is weeping for joy. We want to invite you to dinner at the Intercontinental or the Al-Wattani hotel. Which do you prefer?”

“Many thanks, but neither one nor the other.”

“Why?”

“Invitations have to be returned, don’t they? And I’m an official with a modest salary, I can’t afford such hospitality.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t understand. “
Yaani
, you mean this is
bartil
, a bribe, unless you repay me? These are our courtesies, as you very well know.”

I shook my head firmly.

“All right, so come to dinner at our house.”

“An invitation must be returned,” I repeated the unwritten law. “And I’m a bachelor living in a one-room flat and can’t invite you back.”

He gave up and fell silent.

“What about you, how is your health?” I asked.

“Fortunately, having Yasmine here is giving me strength to cope with all our troubles. The Israeli flag is flying over my head, our Fatah think I’m a collaborator, your
mukhabarat
suspect me of being a Fatah agent, the army doesn’t listen to anybody and has just expropriated buildings of mine in Ramallah and Nablus. Now, on top of everything, my friend Nuri, who helped me with Yasmine, the apple of my eye, is too conscientious to dine at my house. What’s wrong with my invitation?” He broke into one of his frenetic coughing fits. “Maybe I’ll go to Paris, there’s a well-known Armenian doctor there.”

“What is the matter with you, my friend? We moved mountains to persuade Yasmine to stay here and now you want to go there?” I protested, taking the liberty of interfering in his private affairs. “You refuse to let a Jewish doctor treat you? That’s more Abu Nabil’s style.”

“You’re more right than you know. Now Abu Nabil is refusing to accept advertising from Jews. I tell him it’s business, not politics, but he won’t budge.”

“Have you talked to the ‘Colonel’ about the houses in Nablus and Ramallah?”

“He’s busy. Since he started working with the Minister of Defence there’s no getting hold of him. And he doesn’t come to the restaurant the way he used to.”

I asked him if he would agree to meet my Minister, which would give my boss a chance to hear about the problems and difficulties in the Arab community. “Would that hurt your standing, or be interpreted as collaboration, God forbid? Tell me honestly, we’re like brothers.”

“They say, ‘One who is wet is not afraid of the rain.’ Since I’m accused of all kinds of things anyway…”

I set off on one of my periodic tours of the government offices in East Jerusalem. The long lines stretching outside the local offices of the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Social Security and even the Post Office were distressing to see. But people waited patiently, didn’t grumble, probably didn’t dare to protest aloud. Additional staff at these offices would make their life easier, so why wasn’t it done? I should raise this matter, I thought, though carefully so as not to offend my colleagues.

The desert wind blew at my back and when I returned, hot and sweaty, to my office I found Aliza waiting for me
impatiently. “The list of calls and the post are on your desk!” she announced and left. Aliza was like the flowers planted by the Labour Federation – opening at eight and closing at three. Sometimes I wished I had a more flexible secretary.

I phoned Amitai’s unlisted number. “Abu George is upset – he has a problem. Could you talk to him?”

“I know, Nuri, but unfortunately nothing can be done about it. I checked. His buildings are in a vital strategic location which the army needs. He’ll get reasonable compensation.”

“He doesn’t want any compensation, he just wants to keep his property.”

“Nuri, we’re in an ongoing struggle for survival, and it’s hard on everybody.”

I put down the receiver with a heavy heart and started reading an analysis by Harish from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, in preparation for a meeting with Mutran Krachi. Halfway through I phoned my Minister and suggested that he might invite Abu George to his office, or even meet him at his restaurant. I knew that he didn’t like meeting people from East Jerusalem and had no interest in getting to know them, let alone in learning their language or touring the Arab towns and villages. Nevertheless I kept trying to involve him in their lives and to introduce him to those who held key positions in the Arab community, thus giving them the feeling that their issues were being addressed by the Israeli leadership.