The Lady from Tel Aviv Read online

  ‘Adel and Arna sit next to one another throughout the flight, each of them going over old memories in their own minds. Depressing, sad memories. Unsettling ones, haunted by feelings of fear and apprehension, curiosity and defiance.’

  Dana does not seem terribly interested in hearing much more of the tangential story—and she cuts me off. ‘Less detail, more plot, please. Does Adel meet Leila?’ She punches me on the leg and a man sitting behind us clears his throat loudly to voice his displeasure. Dana lowers her voice now, ‘Come on—cut to the chase.’

  ‘I still haven’t decided whether Adel and Leila find each other or not. I hope to figure that out while I’m in Gaza. Anyway, that’s the general idea of the novel—even though I don’t know how I should end it.’

  ‘What’s holding you back?’

  ‘Nothing. I just prefer to wait until my trip is over before I write the ending. That way I can develop the second narrative thread my wife suggested, the story of what happens during my trip and what I experience. It might give me an opportunity to talk with my novel’s hero about his future with Leila. And together we might figure out an ending that joins the two stories. I usually like to talk to my characters about the basic issues in their lives. And then there’s also the possibility that something might surprise me on the trip.’

  She looks up at the small lamp above our heads and studies it for a few moments, then turns to me and adds, ‘I’ve got an idea for the title of this novel that’s still sitting in the belly of its mother. One House, Two Shadows. What do you think?’

  ‘One House, Two Shadows. Hmm.’

  I pretend to think about her suggestion. My fingers curl around my chin like a director unconvinced by the performance of his actors. She looks at me and I continue, ‘Hmm.’

  Finally, she cuts me off midstream. ‘Listen, in this country you and me are headed to together…’ There’s a note of nervousness that makes her voice quaver. ‘In this country where you and I will separate and go our own ways, there is only one land. Only one place to live, only one house. Even so, when the sun rises over the place and casts its rays across the land, you see two shadows. Walid, you and I are two shadows thrown together in a single place. What happened to my people cast black shadows over yours. What’s happened to you makes the shadows over us darker still. We are two peoples who will never be at ease. And whenever things seem to be calming down, they get even worse.’

  ‘One house that has two shadows. It’s true. Throughout history, this land was a field for sowing shadow and light. Only in their essential opposition do light and shadow take shape and last. Look at shadow. It’s born in light, and it dies in darkness. What a strange, fragile thing: it comes to life as soon as light is born, and disappears when the light dies. Shadow is patient. It’s like Job. It bears us and perseveres when it is high noon and our footsteps crush the shadows underfoot. You don’t know Job, do you? He’s a prophet who, people believe, suffered from flesh-eating worms. Like Alexandrians, Gazans celebrate Job each year by going and swimming in the sea. They believe that Job used to go on a certain Wednesday each year to bathe himself in the sea, knowing that the saltwater would heal his burning wounds, and cleanse his body for an entire year.

  ‘You know, after marrying my father, my mother did not get pregnant for a whole year. She was a young girl. Thirteen. The women in Asdud told her to bathe in the sea on Job Wednesday. They told her to be like the Virgin Mary and give herself to the first wave that crashed over her body. They told her to sing a little song seven times to the sea while she was doing this:

  Oh Sea, Oh Wave-maker,

  Fill my belly with a little one,

  My husband will divorce me,

  If I don’t bring him a son!

  ‘You’re laughing! You’re going to laugh even more when I tell you my mother began to doubt whether the sea really had answered her prayer and made her pregnant with me. Once she tried to test her strange hypothesis, and began to tell my father, ‘You know, Abu Walid, it’s not impossible that the sea impregnated me.’ My father laughed and said: ‘You really are crazy! You believed those women—you thought you were the Virgin Mary? If the sea had impregnated you, wouldn’t Walid’s eyes be blue?’ My mother was stunned. She was holding me in her arms and looked down at my eyes, then said: “You’re right, Abu Walid. This boy’s eyes are as black as the night.” It’d make my mother and father laugh whenever they remembered that.’

  Now Dana and I are laughing about it too. She turns to me and, searching for the blackness of the night in my eyes, says: ‘You people have some strange traditions.’

  ‘Dana, our country is bursting with history and languages and war, magic and facts and fables, prophets and saints and liars and sinners. And together, all these things have created a great human tradition. On top of this, they’ve also created a long chain of catastrophe and ruin. I do like the title you’re proposing for my novel. I thank you for giving it to me. It turns out you’re a novelist too.’

  ‘And you’re a philosopher. By the way, if I ever marry and can’t get pregnant, I’ll head to the sea in Tel Aviv on a Wednesday, just like your mother did. I’ll swim in the sea in the early morning and again at sunset so I can have twins. But let’s talk about you, not your book.’

  ‘OK. I’ve lived in London for about eleven years. I hate violence in any form.’ If I were in charge of recruiting for Mossad, I would reject Dana without a second thought, even though clearly she’d have no problem getting the enemy to fall for her.

  ‘I love life and people and peace. But tell me—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If I asked you to send me something you’ve written, would you? Would you send some of your writing to an Israeli woman you met on a plane?’

  ‘Only if you admit—’

  But before I can tell her what I want, we are interrupted by a stewardess. ‘Would either of you like a glass of water?’

  We answer with one voice: ‘Thanks.’ And then we forget what it was we were talking about, and our confessions hang in the air like unspoken confusion.

  I take a pen and piece of paper out of my trouser pocket, and ask her to write down her email address. She does not hesitate. I take the paper from her hand and rip off the bottom corner. I write my email address on it and give it to her. She looks at the paper for a bit, then stuffs it into her little bag. ‘I’d love to look at something you’ve written, and we can write to each other. We might even become friends. Who knows?’

  ‘Good—I’ll send you some of what I’ve translated into English.’

  ‘I promise to write to you, to make sure you arrive in Gaza safely.’

  I put the paper back in my pocket. I have no idea whether I really will send her anything, or whether she will really follow through on her promise to write. But in any case, when I go back to writing One House, Two Shadows, it will be with a completely different pulse.

  This seems like a natural place to end the conversation for a while, but I decide instead to return to the story she had begun to tell, the story that had begun, in fact, with her weeping.

  ‘Dana, if I may ask, you said you had come to London because of your Ukrainian boyfriend. I’m curious: does that mean he moved back?’

  She exhales before picking up the story. ‘Remember that Lebanese restaurant on Edgware Road? The recommendation from Dani’s Arab friend?’

  ‘“Dani” …?’

  ‘Yes. It was the name I gave him when he moved to Israel. “Daniel”.’

  ‘“Dani and Dana” …?’ I muse.

  She continues: ‘So, Dani’s classmate. They had long conversations about Dani’s decision to become an Israeli. He told him: “You’ll be another number in the annals of Jewish immigration to Palestine, but you’ll never be more than a second-class citizen no matter what you do. You’ll be given a house easier than you know. Probably in a settlement built on Palestinian land. You’ll do your service in the Israeli army, and only if you’re killed or badly wounded will your service come to
an end. If you come out all right, you’ll remain in the reserves for ever, waiting to be called up for the next war. You’ll be thrown into a fight that’s not yours at all, or that hasn’t been yours until now, at least. Perhaps you’ll kill someone or become someone’s jailer. Maybe you’ll refuse to serve and become a conscientious objector. My friend, making aliya is a package deal. You can’t choose this or that part and leave the rest behind. You buy it all, you can’t haggle, and you can’t pay for it in instalments.”’

  I nod, and say, ‘If I was his classmate, I would say the same.’

  ‘And what about me?’ she asks.

  I don’t reply, and she finishes the story: ‘Anyway, you’re just repeating what he said to me after he had been in Israel for some time, that everything his friend had said was true. He said he was sorry, that our relationship had been based on a deceptive contract. “You brought me to Tel Aviv, to a land I’d never belong to,” he said. “You found yourself a lover immigrant. And I went with you, and with you I got Israel. But the deal’s off now. I’m cancelling it. I have to go.” And he left.’

  ‘Did you meet him after that?’

  ‘Actually, I came to London to convince him to return, to me at least if not to Israel. But it was a “mission impossible”. The young Communist was still living inside him. Dani came to London a few years after perestroika, when his Jewishness awakened. He searched for himself in London, without success. He fell in love with me, and agreed to join me in Israel in the hope he might find his true self. I don’t blame him. He was not born there, his memories are not from there.’

  ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ I say. ‘But Dani did the right thing.’ At this she looks away, then down, then out the window. ‘Listen, Dana,’ I continue, ‘if this land was promised to the Jewish people by your God, as lots of Jewish people say and even believe, what about the Arabs’ God? If God exists, He must belong to everyone. He must be just and fair and wise. There’s no way God would take the land away from one people in order to give it to another. No God would ever do that. No God would ever don the uniform of a settler and send armies out to kill and oppress. God would never do such a thing, because if He did it would mean He had stooped to our level. I’m sure Dani had reached this conclusion through his experience.’

  ‘I had similar experience to Dani’s. Should I leave, too?’

  I’m not sure what she means by this, but after a few moments’ silence, without really agreeing to, we stop talking. Dana picks up her small headset and covers her ears. She turns off the overhead lamp, and puts her seat back as far as it will go. She adjusts how she is sitting and sinks into the backrest. I realize she wants a bit of rest, some respite from the conversation that remains wide awake in the depths of the night. I follow suit and soon we are both asleep.

  At the first moments of dawn, our eyes open to the flashing seatbelts light, and the sound of the stewardess announcing that our plane is preparing to land.

  The plane shudders over the sea. The water appears to rush at us as if it were trying to cover our wheels. Then scattered palm trees begin to throw themselves at us just before the plane shakes one last time as it hits the runway. The aircraft finally begins to slow down like a person trying to catch their breath after a long run. It pivots on the runway and heads toward the gates where it will rest, exhausted after its journey.

  4

  So this is Palestine. Fifty-seven years after the Nakba I experienced as a child. I have carried the Catastrophe inside me ever since Asdud fell. And now, here I am returning, searching for a piece of Palestinian soil to kiss. But there’s nothing here to kiss but a tiled corridor and a terminal hall filled with throngs of passengers. They mill around in front of the passport control booths and pretend they are queuing up.

  I take my place in a line and an image comes into my mind—this is right where Leah Portman stood more than two years ago. Or maybe she stood over there. My eyes search for footprints, even though I know there are none. I met Leah at a literary event at the School of Oriental and African Studies more than a year ago, when she gave a talk about her first visit to Israel and Palestine. About three months ago I called her and told her I was thinking about visiting Israel on my way to Palestine.

  ‘I’ll be there at the same time,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m going to visit my sister who lives in Israel.’ I proposed that we travel together, and she was enthusiastic, ‘Great idea, let’s do it.’

  I suddenly expanded my invitation, ‘Would you take me to Israel and be my friend and translator? I’ll take you to Gaza to meet my mother.’ Would I have really done that? I can picture myself, introducing her to my mother and the rest of my family, ‘This is Leah, Leah Portman, a Jewish woman from Britain who’s a friend of mine.’ They would go insane! First of all, they would absolutely refuse to accept that we were just friends—platonic friends. Then they’d start to beat the drums of scandal against me, their so-called relative, who after so many years, comes back home with a woman who is neither wife nor cousin. I can already hear what my cousins would say, ‘He comes back with this woman in tow, but that’s not all. Noo! He comes with a Jewish woman!’ And then the women would start to chime:

  Leah, Leah, little girl,

  Blondie, blondie, German curls!

  Forty years he’s been away,

  With a Jew he’s back today!

  My mother would join right in, crying out, ‘What shame! You left and returned in shame, you’re going out and doing who knows what with whom! Go send her home before they kill her and get you too.’

  Better to follow the advice of the narrator in Samir El-Youssef’s novel Pentonville Road, when the narrators tells Kathy, who visits Gaza without telling anyone what her religion is, ‘If you tell them you’re a Jew, they’ll make mincemeat out of you.’

  I do not really think they would grind up Leah into kofta. No—they would not do that. Samir’s narrator exaggerates. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass lived in Gaza for a while, and she was never ground up. On the contrary, she used to hang out with President Arafat and his aides all the time—she was chummy with everybody. Besides, the Dahman family has never hurt anyone before. Most likely, my mother would welcome Leah in her usual way—with open arms. ‘We take good care of all our guests, son.’

  Leah laughed into the phone, ‘OK Walid, let’s do it. Let’s go together. I never would have imagined it.’

  She called a few days later to tell me that she would have to postpone her trip to Israel because a cultural project in Germany had suddenly come up. So now Leah is returning to Germany, the place from which her parents fled during the Second World War. Her grandparents had been killed in the camps. Her parents made it to England and settled in the Jewish neighbourhoods of north London. Leah was born in London. She was blonde, and the older she got, the more striking her Ashkenazi looks became. Her eyes were blue, and she wore a cap that hid some of her fine blonde hair. She wore loose blouses that looked like Egyptian galabiyyas, and walked like she did not care about anything. I can imagine her standing in one of these lines and saying, ‘I’m a British Jew!’ It did not matter to her that her sister was Israeli.

  Leah was anguished about the moment of her arrival, just as I am now. She wrote about the experience of arriving in Israel. ‘I was already nervous and on edge when I got there. But I was even more disturbed when people told me to bend down and kiss the ground beneath my feet. I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to do that. I’m not Israeli, and this land wasn’t promised to me. I wasn’t making aliya, nor would I ever. I was born British and I will always be British.’

  She said she did not belong to this land. It was a foreign country to her. Dana, in contrast, is coming back to her own country. She belongs here—this is home. But Adel El-Bashity and me? We used to belong to this place before they did. We belonged to the place and its history, the past and the present, story and fact, light and shadow. Is it really still our home?

  My emotions spin around as I stand in line with everyone
else. Step by step we creep forward toward the booth, and suddenly a question pops into my mind. What land will you kiss when you walk out of the airport, Walid? Will you kiss the soil even if it isn’t as red as the henna on a peasant girl’s hands? Will you kiss it even if the oil of olives no longer courses through its veins? I’m not Dana and I’m not Leah Portman. And the land I’m standing on is no longer Palestine. And the big blue sign on the wall speaks to me exactly like it speaks to any other foreigner: ‘Welcome to Ben Gurion Airport.’

  From the moment we land, I look around in astonishment. I see nothing but ordinary people. People are eating breakfast. People are sipping coffee in the beautiful little cafés carefully scattered throughout the terminal so as to entice the weary traveller to sit and stay a while. Are these ordinary people? The question belongs to Adel El-Bashity, but I re-ask it when I find myself in the same situation he was in. And then another question: why did three Japanese gunmen turn the terminal of the old Lod airport into a bloodbath in 1972? Did Palestinians really need Japanese kamikazes to launch a revolution for them? Did they want the Palestinian struggle to emulate their self-destructive example?

  Adel El-Bashity laughs cynically. ‘Turns out that the roots of Palestinian resistance go back to the kamikazes!’ And I whisper back in my protagonist’s ear, ‘Yes, but look at the contemporary grandchildren of those kamikazes, Adel—not only do they not give a damn, but they can’t even do anything right.’

  Someone starts shouting in Hebrew—one of the men wearing a broad black hat and sidelocks. A few metres away stands a woman wearing a headscarf, a dark blue blouse and a long grey skirt that goes down all the way to her black shoes. She is clutching a stroller where an infant sleeps. She tries to cut into the line, but someone else stops her. The man tries to persuade the other man to let her in, but he will not budge. They raise their voices as they argue and soon it turns into a shouting match. Eventually the woman retreats, but not before she has handed two passports to the man in the line.