Yasmine (22 page)

“Iran?” Mother said excitedly. “A Thousand and One Nights!”

“In Iran too they passed me from hand to hand like a parcel. Finally they took me into a cheap inn and told me to open the door only if I heard two knocks, then nothing, then two more knocks. What can I say? A regular spy story. Near midnight I heard the knocks and someone said, ‘Shalom’ in Hebrew, then in our Jewish-Iraqi Arabic, ‘Don’t be afraid, you’re in good hands.’ The contact gave me men’s clothes and we went to the airport, I don’t know where it was, and we flew to Tehran. There
he gave me a case of documents and said, ‘You’re flying to Israel – safe journey!’ And here I am.”

“
Ya Allah
, blessed be His name!” said Mother. “Abu Kabi, tomorrow morning take your brother to the synagogue to say the
HaGomel
.”

After the meal Hizkel took off his shoes and sat cross-legged on the bed with the glass of arrack in his hand.

“How is our communist cousin, Selim Effendi?” he asked.

“Charcoal on his face, he and his communism,” replied Father. “Have you heard about Khruschev’s speech? The millions killed by Stalin?”

Hizkel nodded.

“All kinds of things happened to him. I don’t know what he’s doing nowadays.”

“He’s opened an import-export agency dealing with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” I said.

“Exchanged the Communist Manifesto for dinars,” Father chuckled.

“But Abu Saleh el-Hibaz, who saved his life, was hanged!” said Hizkel bitterly.

“That’s how it is,” sighed Father.

“What about your dream of growing rice in Israel?”

Father remained silent and rolled the beads of his
masbahah
.

“We’ll see what they’ve got for me in the Ministry of Defence,” said Hizkel.

At midnight I left and drove home, tired and dispirited.

The next day, though he was still visibly tired, Hizkel was excited about his forthcoming visit to the Ministry of Defence. His eyes were red, and Mother put her prescription drops in his eyes.

Father wanted to come along – “Let’s have no more
separation!” – but as soon as we left Jerusalem he fell asleep and started to snore. Hizkel looked at the landscape and said nothing, then he also fell asleep.

I escorted him to Mr Katz’s office in the government complex and after their meeting, which did not take long, I took Father and Hizkel, who used to be a well-known journalist, to the café of the Press Association in Tel Aviv. I thought he’d want to tell us about his meeting with Katz, but he remained silent, frowning, and we didn’t press him.

From there we drove to Aliyah Street to buy clothes at the shop of Father’s old friend Abu Yusef, an Iraqi Jew who spoke Hebrew in the classical, prayer-book manner. Abu Yusef clothed the three of us from head to foot, gave us a large discount and blessed Hizkel.

“You’ve spent a lot of money on me, brother,” said Hizkel on the way to the car.

“I’ve got it all written down, and when you start working you’ll repay it with compound interest,” Father joked. Then he turned serious and finally asked, “What happened to your leg?”

“They crushed my knee, the Iraqi Bureau of Investigations.”

“We’ll take you to Hadassah, maybe something can be done,” I suggested.

“It’s irreparable.”

We had lunch in the Hatikvah Market in south Tel Aviv. I phoned Aliza to find out what was happening in East Jerusalem, and called Levanah to hear about the western city. I asked to speak to the Minister and thanked him for his effort. “Blessed be He who unshackles the captives,” said my socialist Minister. “Look after your unshackled captive. The Arabs of East Jerusalem will not run away, and if you need anything don’t hesitate to ask.” It made me feel better.

“What did they offer you in the Ministry of Defence?” Father asked Hizkel over steaming chai after a light meal.

“Nothing.”

“So why did they ask you to come in?”

“No idea. They asked about the Ba’ath party, not that there was much I could tell them, and they asked what the political prisoners are saying and the communists, and if there are revolutionary cells. A waste of time. I thought they would ask about the movement, about those who sacrificed their lives, about Abu Saleh, may he rest in peace. They didn’t.”

“The past is dead,” Father concluded gloomily.

On the way back Father said, as if getting a painful weight off his chest, “It still tears my heart that I had to abandon you and Rashel.”

Hizkel compressed his lips, shifted in his seat and stared out of the window. “Could you have saved me, or her?”

We went on in silence but when we entered the house the mood changed. Mother had come back from the Old City with a hamsa and other amulets for good luck and against the evil eye, gave some to each of us and kept some for Kabi, Efraim, Moshi and the grandchildren. She had also bought fresh roasted coffee, which filled the house with its aroma, dried figs, dates and white raspberries. We opened our packages and showed her the clothes we bought at Abu Yusef’s. “Wonderful!” she congratulated us. “Why didn’t you buy more?” Then she turned beaming to Hizkel and asked what housing and what sort of work they had offered him.

“You mean they offered you nothing?” she said, astonished by his vague replies.

“They told me to go to the Jewish Agency, the Ministry of
Absorption. I didn’t understand it all…They wrote it down for me.” He showed us a piece of paper.

“Charcoal on their faces! Is that the way to treat a ‘prisoner of Zion’? Next time I’ll go with you!”

“You take care of your uncle, son. You lived in a kibbutz, you understand the way they think,” Father said, handing Hizkel over to me. He had said the same when he decided to move from the immigrant camp in Pardes Hanna to Jerusalem.

“Soon,” Mother added, “we’ll all celebrate together, please God. Phone Kabi, Moshi and Efraim, and don’t forget Sandra!”

About a week after I met Ghadir in the street she came to my office. Hesitant, her eyes lowered, she stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a grey gown that reached her ankles, with a white scarf on her head, and holding a large wicker basket.

“Sit down,
ya
Ghadir, welcome!”

She perched on the edge of the chair, glancing at me and around the office – a place so far removed from the fields of Jebel Sacobos, Mount Scopus, where we had met nine years before. I was delighted to see this now mature young woman, who was as lovely as she had been then, if not more so, and was curious to find out what had brought her to me.

“
Mabruk
, may you succeed!” she greeted me and took from her basket a bunch of Bedouin pittas wrapped in a white cloth, and laid them on the table with some salt beside them, the way they are offered to guests at the gate of a city. To this dish she added a bottle of olive oil and some za’atar in a twist of paper.

Her humble offering touched me. “Blessing on your hands,” I said, and to please her I fetched a plate from the kitchen, took one of the fresh pittas, dribbled olive oil on it, sprinkled it with salt and za’atar, and chewed it with loud lip-smacking noises. She smiled at me with her gleaming teeth:

“You eat like a born son of Arabia!”

“What will you have, coffee, tea, cola?”

“You serve me? Impossible! I’ll get it.”

“You’re my guest. It would be shameful if you made the coffee in my office.”

“You don’t have someone to make you coffee, like they do in the Ministry of the Interior?”

“I do, but she’s left already. Why did you mention the Ministry of the Interior? Does it have to do with the problem you haven’t told me about yet?” Guessing that she felt uncomfortable bringing me her troubles, I raised the subject first.

“I have problems, and don’t know what to do anymore,” she said, looking at me. “I told you that in the end they married me to a cousin from Amman, Issam. He’s all salt through and through, not a grain of sugar. But what can I do? I can’t leave him, that’s how it is among us. Now things are difficult. A few days before the war he went to Amman to see his family, and now he can’t come back and insists that I must go to him. What will I do in Amman with just him and his family? We don’t even have children, Allah didn’t want us to. Here at least I’m in my own home with my mother, but there I’ll be like a dead woman. He should come back here – it’s how we planned it, that he would go, see his family and come back. We didn’t know there would be a war and al-Quds would be separated from Amman.”

“Have you applied for family reunification at the Ministry of the Interior?”

“Every day they say come tomorrow. You know Mr Haramati?”

“Yes, I’ll talk to him. First give me all the details.”

“I thought you’d want them so I brought our documents,” she said and produced a bundle of creased papers from the pocket of her gown.

When I’d copied all the necessary information she said, “I’m afraid. I’m terribly afraid of him. He’s a strange man, capable of anything. It’s not a simple matter. Issam is religious, a Sufi, like my father, and they have some strange customs. One night I followed them in secret, I wanted to see what they did in their ceremonies. And what did I see? Issam and my father and all the men there standing in a circle, holding on to each other, their eyes shut, singing and dancing, jumping up and down like the billy goats in my flock.” She smiled faintly. “Suddenly they went crazy, started shaking themselves like maniacs, tossing their heads from side to side and shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ and foaming at the mouth…”

“
Allahu akbar, allahu akbar
!” the muezzin calling the evening prayer broke into the quiet office, startling Ghadir. For a moment I too felt that the muezzin’s call was an angry admonition from another world, like a deluge of stones falling from the sky on unruly mortals.

“Don’t worry,” I said, walking her to the door. “I’ll talk to Haramati.”

The very next day I went to Haramati’s office on Nablus Street. I knew him from joint meetings where he gave the impression of being a bundle of nerves. He chain-smoked, holding the cigarette between his yellowed third and fourth fingers, sucking on it till the embers scorched the skin. He had worked for years in the census bureau, and got his present job because he was a native of the Old City and spoke Arabic. Overnight he turned from an insignificant clerk into a powerful man able to decide people’s fates.

The open space in front of his office, which I had passed many times before on my tours of East Jerusalem was, as usual,
packed with people. Long lines had been waiting for hours, preoccupied and tense like people awaiting surgery. How would they come out of the encounter with the man who dominated this office? With or without a future life? Would he relieve their distress, or break them?

The daily presence of so many people had turned the open space into a market, the background music provided by the cries of various vendors, individually or in chorus. They sold pretzels with sesame and za’atar, a tamarind drink chilled with ice cubes, fresh pittas and sweet pastries, the usual fare of Arab streets. One curly-headed boy peddled Israeli ice-lollies, calling tirelessly in a sweet high voice, “
Kartiv, Kartiv
…” I pushed through the crowd to reach the door.

“No more numbers,” said the usher at the door.

“I’m here to see Mr Haramati,” I replied in Arabic and gave my name and title.

To my surprise, Haramati received me affably, like an old friend. He talked volubly and was keen to stress how deeply he was touched by the woes of the local population.

“We’re honoured, Mr Imari! Welcome, welcome! You’ve seen what is going on outside – terrible! The crowding and the pressure, people waiting. So many of them need help, I swear my heart aches for them! We’re doing our best for them, that’s what we’re here for, aren’t we, Mr Imari? But how much can we do, and and with all these problems, my head is bursting,” he declared and lit another cigarette.

“I’m aware you’re in a very difficult and demanding position, Mr Haramati, so I came along to learn from your experience,” I said to flatter him, and felt we were duelling with compliments in the time-honoured local tradition.

“Will you have coffee?”

“Many thanks…I came about a particular case, to ask you to see if anything can be done to help.” I put Ghadir’s and Issam’s details on his desk.

“Certainly, certainly, anything I can do. If you came in person it must be important,” he said and buzzed for his secretary, who came in. He glanced at the paper I had put before him. “Make a note of these details, look up the case file and let me know how matters stand. This is Mr Imari’s particular case, you understand?”

When I gave him my hand in parting he said, “Won’t you come with me to the Jewish Quarter? I’m going to the Hurvah Synagogue. The Sephardi Community Board has asked me to see if and how it can be restored.”

“Why not?” I replied. “Let me just tell my secretary that I’ll be late.”

When we came out of the building people rushed at him with questions, appeals and entreaties, and he responded with a smile and sweet talk, much the way he received me. But when we got into the taxi he grumbled, “They jump on me and make my life a misery, who can stand them?” The words and tone contradicted his extravagant show of kindness, but I said nothing.

The taxi entered the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, into the Omar Ibn el-Khatab square, on to the Armenian Quarter and stopped at his request near Zion Gate where we got out and walked to the Jewish Quarter. Construction work was in progress, clouds of blinding dust swirled in the air, and I regretted coming along. We headed for the Hurvah Synagogue which was also known as “The Ruin Synagogue” of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Hassid, and on the way he told me its history, from the fifteenth century to the arrival of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Hassid in 1699, to the present time.

“You’re amazingly knowledgeable,” I said.

“Don’t forget I was born and raised in the Jewish Quarter,” Haramati said. “During the War of Independence the Jordanian Legion blew up the Hurvah Synagogue. Typical. Doesn’t the Book of Genesis say of Ishmael, ‘He will be a wild man, his hand will be against every man and every man’s hand will be against him.’? You think they’ve changed?”

His question hung in the air, unanswered.

“Remember what Haramati tells you, a seventh generation child of the Old City: our cousins the Ishmaelites murdered, exiled and kidnapped our brothers, they erased the settlements they seized, not even sparing synagogues and cemeteries and ritual baths, and did not allow a single Jew to remain. Their hour will come.”

He looked around him and his face became grim. “This is where they murdered my father. Every time I come here my heart breaks all over again. God Almighty, they even turned the Stambouli Synagogue into a stable. And after all they have done, our Minister of Defence – before my very eyes – hands over the keys of the Temple Mount to the Mufti! What for? So they can go on inciting hatred against us and stop us from entering? What a monstrous scene! The day that Moshe Dayan met the Mufti I couldn’t work, I couldn’t continue to serve the malefactors, our sworn enemies. What was Dayan afraid of? Did we not capture the site with the blood of our sons? Ever since that damnable day I have lain awake at night. My heart tells me that this is the end, that we lost even though we won.” Then he walked up to a cold-drinks kiosk, gulped down a bottle of soda water, and lit a cigarette.

I could understand Haramati’s emotional outburst. I too had been astounded that day when the Minister of Defence made his historic tour of the Temple Mount, shortly after the liberation of the Western Wall.

“Colonel” Amitai and I were in an army jeep following the car that was taking Dayan to meet the Mufti of Jerusalem. Everything happened very fast. Dayan stepped out of the car and was immediately mobbed by officers, aides, reporters and photographers, as if he were a divine being. He tried but failed to extricate himself from the close ring of his entourage and the cameras in order to speak to the local people. I was also disappointed that on my very first visit to the Temple Mount I was unable to see anything.

Suddenly Amitai and I found ourselves sitting within the inner circle. To our amazement the Minister sat down crosslegged and the Mufti of Jerusalem sat beside him. We did the same. The Minister opened with some Arabic pleasantries, then continued in Hebrew, and Amitai acted as an interpreter for the two men.

I was extremely uneasy. Just a few yards away, on the nearby steps of the mosque, King Abdullah, grandfather of King Hussein, had been assassinated fifteen years before. What if someone tried to assassinate the Minister? They said he was a totally fearless man who sometimes risked his life for no good reason. It was utterly insane to sit cross-legged on the floor near the Moslem shrines, surrounded by Arabs whose world had just collapsed on them, with the smell of their dead still hanging in the air. It seemed as if nobody was thinking of the danger, least of all the Minister himself.

I examined the face that was recognised all over the world – fine features, a reddish-brown complexion, a big bald head, a
careless grin on his face, and the famous black eye patch. Was that the secret of his charm? So many stories were told about him. It was said that hidden under the patch was a black hole and constant, searing pain. They said he was impatient and short-tempered, but here there was no sign of it. He was charming, grinning like a boy, attracting all eyes.

Anxiety upset my concentration. Relax, calm down, I told myself. Are you taking the security of Israel upon yourself? You think the army and the Shin Bet and the police are asleep? Don’t worry, take it easy the way he does and listen.

The Mufti of Jerusalem spoke calmly, raised issues, Amitai interpreted and the Minister dealt with them on the spot, like Haroun al-Rashid who walked about the marketplace and judged the people there and then. Dayan stated that he wanted the Arabs of Israel to come and worship on Fridays at the Temple Mount shrines from which they had been cut off for two decades, beginning the very next Friday. The regional commander glanced quizzically at the chief of operations.

“And the Arabs of the West Bank?” the Mufti asked.

“They will be welcome too.”

“And who will be in charge of the mosques?” the Mufti asked, encouraged by the gesture.

“Your people,” Dayan replied impassively.

The Mufti raised his head, looked left and right, and passed his hand over his face as if to hide his expression of smug satisfaction.

Mr Harish of the Ministry of Religious Affairs appeared to have turned to stone.

The excitement was overwhelming: I thought I could hear the wings of history beating overhead, could see its heroes, hear their breathing. Generations to come would remember this
event, I thought, and here I was in the middle of it all, hearing every sound, capable of writing the chronicle of this time.

Dayan stood up and everyone followed. “From now on, stay close to me,” he said to Amitai, and I envied him.

I left the Temple Mount feeling both elated and uncertain. Had the Minister been too hasty in his historic decision? The rumour had spread through the Old City and Muslims began to dance and shout for joy, blocking the narrow alleys. I felt lonely in the midst of the happy commotion, as if I’d been defeated in battle.

I hurried to report to my boss on the scene I had just witnessed. The Minister was shocked, but before he could launch into one of his analyses, Levanah came in and said I had been summoned to the Mayor’s office for an urgent meeting.

More than twenty people crowded into Teddy Kollek’s office to discuss the imminent opening of the Temple Mount for prayers. I had long before learned that such meetings were simply a managerial ploy, intended to foster the illusion that the management mattered. The really important decisions were taken privately by individuals: Ben-Gurion consulted and listened to various views, but in the end decided on his own, sometimes collapsing under the burden; Eshkol also took difficult decisions and developed his best ideas when alone, mainly by consulting himself while shaving; now the Minister of Defence had taken a unilateral decision to turn the Temple Mount over to the Mufti.