Yasmine (19 page)

“Such meals come at a price,” said the Minister, rejecting the suggestion.

A week later I went to Al-Hurriyeh and was delighted to see Yasmine at the till. After some polite exchanges she challenged me, “You always say you’re
ibn Arab
, don’t you? So why did you turn down Father’s invitation to dinner at our house?”

“Now I can’t refuse,” I said, and she looked pleased.

In honour of the occasion I had my hair cut at Michelle’s French barber, shaved meticulously and wore my one good suit with a starched white shirt, a new tie and a matching handkerchief. I felt as if I was going to a
maayana
ceremony, when the matchmaker introduces the groom to the intended bride and her family. At the last moment I took the handkerchief out of the front pocket, in case I was seen by one of my neighbours, meaning to replace it when I reached Abu George’s house. I took the present I’d prepared, a reproduction of
The Virgin’s Spring
, by the amiable Jerusalem painter Ludwig Blum, and drove over to pick up Professor Shadmi and his wife Pe’era. I was reassured to see that he had a handkerchief in the front pocket of his grey suit jacket. Pe’era was wearing an evening dress and looked elegant and excited.

Abu George’s front gate was wide open. Pe’era admired the garden and especially the ancient olive tree which, Abu George said, was at its best this autumn. He received the Shadmis with open arms. “We can start,” he said, “now all the guests have arrived, except the senator. What can I do, his head is turning to stone.”

Seated at the table were Abu Nabil and others from the tourist office, as well as Abu Shalbayyeh, an East Jerusalem teacher and journalist. “Colonel” Amitai, Dr Dovrat, a Foreign Ministry diplomat and expert on the history of religions, and Solly Levy who’d persuaded me to move into Ahmad Shukeiry’s abandoned office – were chatting in a corner of the room. Two well-known restaurant owners from West Jerusalem were arguing volubly by the window. Abu George placed me, as the guest of honour, at the head of the table and
he sat at the opposite end. I hoped he would seat Yasmine beside me.

She entered last, wearing a floating lilac blouse that resembled a delicate wisteria blossom in the wind, and sat down next to Professor Shadmi and his wife. Well, if not beside me, at least next to my associates. Our eyes met for a moment. Abu George welcomed the guests, thanked Um George and Yasmine, and concluded with
Tfadalu
to signal the start of the meal.

First came the hors-d’oeuvres and salads –
tebouleh, baba ghanouj,
aubergines baked in
tehina
, hummus with whole chickpeas,
tehina
seasoned with lemon and chopped parsley, a salad tossed in thinned
tehina
, broad beans,
kubbeh niyyeh
, raw ground meat mixed with
burghul, warak dawali,
vine leaves stuffed with rice, Nablus
kubbeh
, stuffed vegetables, tiny pittas with ground meat, and of course a variety of pickled vegetables including cucumbers, aubergines, luubieh and okra, spicy black and green olives – altogether an aromatic and colourful spread.

The conversation was lively and flowed easily. Professor Shadmi and Dr Dovrat talked at length about ancient times, the growth of the myths around Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, as well as what united and separated the three religions.

Then the talk switched to discussion of the British Mandate, an era of which many echoes remained – and I was surprised by the change in attitudes. In its time the British Mandate was seen as rule by an alien colonial power that took over the country and held on to it, until driven out by force. Now, in retrospect they viewed the Mandate as an orderly, even enlightened, regime which had laid down social norms, implemented regulatory laws and even promoted cultural and aesthetic values – for example, the statute that all Jerusalem buildings be
faced with stone. I wondered if the Arabs would ever change their perception of us – would we be remembered as an enlightened regime that promoted progress, rather than an alien occupier?

Abu Nabil and Abu Shalbayyeh tried to divert the conversation to the present. Abu Shalbayyeh referred everyone to a series of articles he’d written, in which he called for a Palestinian state in the occupied territories.

Those of us who represented the authorities naturally avoided discussing the current situation. Abu George did the same, choosing to speak about Professor Shadmi’s great concordance project at the Givat Ram campus, and the ancient manuscripts which were kept at the National Library. I worried that Abu Nabil would again make sly digs at the professor, but this time the crude mockery was replaced by a friendly spirit and obvious respect. He mentioned the recent discovery of centuries-old Hebrew Bibles, and of course offered to use his connections to enable “our Abu Mehammed”, aka Professor Shadmi, to examine them himself.

The next course consisted of a steaming roast lamb, served up on an enormous tray. A waiter carved the meat skilfully with a large knife, then removed the lamb’s tongue and laid it on a bed of chopped parsley on a plate in front of the host. Abu George rose, came up to me with the plate, sliced off a piece of the tongue and said, “Nuri, my brother, it is our custom that the host feeds the guest of honour the tongue of the lamb,” and he fed me the slice with his own hands.

I was unfamiliar with the custom and for a moment felt that the piece of tongue was going to stick in my throat, but seeing the joy on my host’s face I suppressed all my reservations. Just take it easy, I said to myself, you’re a guest and this is an honour.
Yasmine’s eyes were on me, twinkling mischievously, and I swallowed the meat as if passing a test, and felt a hot blush rising to my face.

Abu George went back to his seat and the waiters served everyone slices of roast lamb, Pe’era trying in vain to make the professor keep to his diet. The final course was fruit, including figs and watermelon, followed by sweet pastries and black coffee.

At midnight, when we got up to leave, Professor Shadmi said to our host, “My dear Abu George, I’m supposed to visit Bir Zeit University soon, and I don’t want to go there empty-handed. Would you be so kind as to help me choose an appropriate gift for my hosts there? Perhaps an ancient pottery jar?”

“But of course! What wouldn’t we do for Abu Mehammed?”

Yasmine’s mischievous grin at the dinner party was succeeded a few days later by a fit of rage. The next time we met at Al-Hurriyeh my attempts at a pleasant chat failed, and our exchange grew so heated it became a quarrel. She called me “the occupier with the fine soul”, and Moshe Dayan “the Casanova of wars”, even arguing that Um Kulthoum was “an Israeli agent whose songs are designed to dope the masses”. I was offended by such words as “enemy”, “occupier”, “dispossession”, then annoyed at myself for giving so much weight to her anger, for making efforts to soften her rancour, and for being naive enough to quote to her Hamutal Bar-Yosef’s poem, “Palestine”:

“Whose narrow bed is it?” Yasmine raged at me. “If the title were Israel I’d understand, but to call such a poem Palestine!”

“Now I don’t understand anything, neither you nor the poem.”

“Let me tell you a parable, then maybe you’ll understand. A man set out on his donkey. On the road he saw a weary straggler. He took pity on him and offered to take him on his donkey. They rode together a while, then the straggler said, ‘What a fine donkey – it carries both of us so well.’ ‘Thank you,’ said the man. ‘I try to take good care of it.’ They rode a while longer, and the straggler said, ‘Oh this really is a splendid donkey!’ ‘Thanks!’ said the man. ‘I make sure to feed it well and let it rest sufficiently, and it serves me accordingly.’ They rode a bit longer, and the straggler said, ‘Our donkey deserves all praise.’ The donkey’s owner stopped and said, ‘That’s enough, sir. Please get off the donkey.’ ‘But why?’ asked the straggler. ‘Because you have started calling it our donkey, and I’d rather you leave now, before you start calling it your donkey.’”

“A fine parable indeed, very apt…Now, instead of exchanging fables and labels, let’s change the subject, all right? Michelle told me you’re starting to work with her tomorrow.”

“You and Michelle,” she said with a sneer. “Like a pair of pincers trying to close on me.”

“Sometimes I get the impression that you think I’m a devil who’s out to harm you.”

“Are you offended?” she asked, suddenly calmer. My eyes met hers and caressed her face. Yasmine took the jug of cold water that stood on the table and slowly filled our glasses. She looked at me clear-eyed and said, “Would you come with me tomorrow morning to that youth village of yours? It turns my stomach to think I’m going to do my final training among you people.”

The morning I was to meet up with Yasmine – and what a morning that was! – I arrived early at Al-Hurriyeh and found Abu George already there. “Today we’re going with Professor Shadmi to the antiques dealer, aren’t we?” I said.

“Of course. How could I forget our Abu Mehammed?”

“When do you want to meet?”

“We’ll leave here at eleven-thirty.”

Yasmine arrived on time, looking glamorous in an
aubergine-coloured
shirt and black jeans, but her face was tense.

“We have time for coffee?” she asked.

“We’d better get a move on. Michelle is punctual. Do you want to follow me?”

“I’ll go with you and take a taxi back.”

“I meant to stay there for a while but I’ve got a busy day today, and I also have to prepare for a meeting with your Bishop Krachi,” I said when we were in the car. “Do you know him?”

“Mutran Krachi? He helped me in the bad days after the death of my husband Azme.” She took a deep breath and her breasts rose under the purple blouse. “When you see death before you, black becomes blacker still.” She lowered her eyes and my hand, reaching out for the ignition, stopped in mid-air.

“The Mutran came to our house every day, and when he saw that I was in a state of shock and couldn’t even cry, he sat beside me and told me a story that helped me more than all the comforting and consoling phrases I got from everyone else. It’s about Abdel Wahab. Once when he was in his early twenties he was invited to sing at a celebration in Aley in Lebanon, where he was accompanied by the prince of poets, Ahmed Shawqi. While he was there he received the news that his father, whom he adored, had just died. He broke down and cried, ‘Father, Father, Father!’ Shawqi tried to calm him down, ‘I’m your father and your friend who loves you,’ but it made no difference. The Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, who was also there, tried to comfort him, but he couldn’t stop crying and wanted to call off his evening performance. Then Taha Hussein said to him, ‘Is all music joyous, is it all happiness? Is there no pain and sorrow in it? Sing to us,
ibni
, my son,’ he begged. ‘Your singing will move our hearts and we shall grieve with you,’ and thus he persuaded him. In the evening Abdel Wahab stood before his admiring audience and sang and wept and the entire audience cried with him. That’s what the Mutran told me, and I went up to my room, locked the door, listened to a record of Fairuz, and the dam holding back my tears broke.”

I felt my whole body turning to her, and wished I could embrace her.

We reached the intersection near Mount Scopus and saw pneumatic drills breaking up rocks, bulldozers shaving the stony hilltop, chewing up the rubble and laying the groundwork for a new housing development. The air smelled of dry dust.

“You people are destroying the beauty and the character of the city,” she said.

She’s right, I thought. Jerusalem was changing visibly, day by day, and I was beginning to feel nostalgic for the quiet city I’d come to as a boy when I left the kibbutz. I loved the dappled hills, the variegated neighbourhoods, the tranquillity. I’d liked to see the modest girls walking in the streets in their long skirts. Before coming here I had pictured Jerusalem as a big city, an international metropolis with a style appropriate to the sanctity of the place, and was surprised to find a small and thinly populated town. With the addition of East Jerusalem, as well as areas to the south, north and west, roads were being built, machinery was burrowing into the underbelly to install telephone lines and sewage pipes, and the city seemed to be turning away from me – as embarrassed and perplexed as a barren woman who has overnight conceived septuplets, all of them impatient to leave her womb and go their separate ways.

“There is a man in Paris,” Yasmine went on, grinning, “who hates the Eiffel Tower, yet he climbs it every day. Whenever people ask him why he does so if he hates it, he says, ‘Because it’s the only place from which you can’t see the Eiffel Tower.’ And apropos this anecdote, I think you people don’t know what you’re doing to yourselves, and how can you? The only place from which you can’t see Israel is Israel itself.”

I listened attentively to every word she said. I always loved this style of delivering ideas through anecdotes and parables, and she did it with the ease of an old peasant grandmother.

We passed a group of Orthodox Jewish men in black coats walking along the verge of the road. “These people we could get on with,” she said. “They have no territorial ambitions.”

“Drop the politics!”

“What can I do? Politics is in the blood, like a chronic illness. Once you catch it you can’t get it out of your system.”

“Tell me a little about the Mutran. I know nothing about him.”

“He’s a handsome man, impressive, intelligent, sharp, fancies himself and talks a lot. He’s not a narrow-minded cleric. I may ask for his help in starting a certain enterprise,” she said but did not elaborate. “Now let me ask you something. Can you explain to me how your Zionist mind works? Explain it to me as if I were an
olah hadashah
.”

“I’m the new immigrant,” I pointed out. “You’re a
Jerusalem-born
sabra.”

“Let me tell you,” she went on. “I studied Hebrew as hard as I could so as not to be different. I finished the course at the YMCA with top marks in Hebrew composition. I even got a gift – a beautiful volume of Bialik’s poetry.”

“You see the difference between us? I learned Hebrew on the street, and you learned it from our national poet.”

“You still haven’t explained to me how your Zionist mind works.”

“I want to live in peace with you and you’re forcing me to quarrel,” I said, and asked her to light me a cigarette.

She focused on my eyes with the concentration of an archer taking aim. “There’s something scary about Zionists. They’ve developed their arguments to a fine art, like that fib about historical rights. They have a gift for selling sand as if it were gold, with a kind of devilish blend of pathos and power.” She put the burning cigarette between my lips.

“We’re a small state surrounded by tens of millions who want to destroy us. Has it ever occurred to you that we might be afraid?”

“Since when does the conqueror fear the conquered, or a strong man fear a weak one?”

“All our victories have been punches into a soft cushion. One victory on your side and we’ll be in the sea. Please, give your chauffeur a break. Enough politics!”

“It’s the strong who do politics, the weak can only talk about it,” she protested.

I stopped at a kiosk in Kiryat Moshe and bought fine quality chocolate and two bottles of juice. “Here you are.”

“Chocolate? Only Sylvana, our national chocolate! Did you know that at our weddings people sing to the bride, ‘Oh little Sylvana’?”

“What a fool I am! How could I fail to connect chocolate with the national problem? May I give you a bit of advice? Don’t talk politics with Michelle.”

“What else do you expect me to do?” she replied, childishly mischievous.

“
Bonjour
Nuri,
bonjour
Yasmine!” Michelle greeted us. “How beautiful you look! This dark purple suits you well.” She immediately drew Yasmine into a discussion about fashion and clothing in a hot country, and somehow moved on from there to Simone de Beauvoir’s latest book, declaring that she couldn’t understand what a woman with such a spiritual face saw “in that ugly mug Sartre”.

Gossip about the famous couple didn’t seem to interest Yasmine very much, and she began to speak about another thinker, Franz Fanon, the black psychiatrist, who had become a guru among Third World activists as well as the Black Panther movement in the United States. I gathered from what she said that he was born in the Caribbean, studied medicine and psychiatry in France, and wrote a great deal about the impact of racism and colonialism. Yasmine was especially enthusiastic about his work,
Black Skin, White Masks
, which
dealt with his experiences as a black intellectual in a “whitened” world.

Michelle made a face, as if to say, What’s it got to do with us? I watched and listened, ignored by two opinionated women who were trying to outdo each other in awareness of the contemporary intellectual scene in Europe.

Then Michelle remembered my presence. “Coffee?”

“No thanks, I’ve got to go.”

“Shall I see you this evening?”

“Sorry, I have an appointment with Mutran Krachi,” I said, annoyed that Michelle chose to mention our date in front of Yasmine, who pretended she had heard nothing.