On the Hills of God (17 page)

Were those days gone forever? Yousif thought. All signs pointed to a drastic change. He looked at Isaac, wondering what he was thinking.

“In Jerusalem,” the doctor said, reaching for a piece of white cheese, “there used to be a tradition among Jews and Muslims. Children of both faiths who were born on the same day were breastfed by both mothers. And they used to take this relationship very seriously. They exchanged gifts and so on.”

“But in the late twenties,” Moshe explained, “that was the first thing the Zionists stopped. They didn’t want the two communities to mingle.”

The conversation centered on the past as though memories were balsam to their wounds. They recalled the good and bad times in Ardallah. In the old days, however, bad times had always been borne in stride. Now survival was at stake. Like a man digging and sifting through his tangled life to find himself, Moshe recalled his father’s emigration to Palestine.

Again, Yousif was the interrogator. “Where did he come from?”

“Originally my family came out of Spain,” Moshe reminisced, putting his fork down and reaching for a pack of cigarettes. “They migrated to Turkey during the Inquisition.”

The women began to clear the table and Moshe sent his son Alex for an ashtray.

“But the Sultan who ruled at the time,” Moshe continued, “was no less cruel than the Spanish Catholics. He killed at whim.”

“Only Jews?” Isaac asked, chewing.

“Oh, no,” Moshe said. “He killed anybody he didn’t like or who happened to disagree with him. But I guess he had a special hatred for Jews because he killed a great number of them. One boatload of Jewish immigrants would be slaughtered on arrival, another would be left alone.”

“It depended on how the Sultan felt that day,” the doctor added.

“More or less,” Moshe agreed. “My family happened to be among the lucky ones. Whether or not our luck will continue remains to be seen.”

“It’s dangerous for us, too,” Yousif said. “Wouldn’t you say, Father?”

The doctor leaned on his elbow, nodding. “It bodes ill for all of us.”

The room relapsed into silence.

“The trouble is,” Yousif said, crossing his arms, “nothing is being done to stop the disaster from happening.”

All those in the room looked at him, surprised.

“It’s true,” Yousif added. “Ordinary people like us are abdicating their power.”

“What power?” his father asked incredulously. “This country is not independent. You know that. It hasn’t been for centuries. Real power is in the hands of foreigners: first the Turks, then the British, then—who knows! There’s no autonomy in sight for Palestine.”

“It’s about time there should be,” Yousif argued.

“Fine,” his father agreed, “but first let’s get the British out and stop the partition plan from being implemented.
Then
we can talk about self-government, maybe even democracy.”

“I disagree,” Yousif said. “People must assert themselves
now
and become involved
now,
otherwise it will be too late to save the country.”

Curious silence fell all over them.

“What do you have in mind?” Moshe said, puffing on his cigarette.

“Moderate Arabs and Jews,” Yousif began, “should band together and let their voices be heard.”

“How? By shouting it from the highest steeple?” his father asked.

“Not exactly. But something like that.”

“It won’t work.”

“How do you know it won’t work? Here we are six months away from war and all we do is worry.”

Yousif realized that he knew nothing about theories and ideologies and political machinations. Yet from the depth of his soul he was convinced that the Arabs and Jews who had been friendly neighbors for centuries would
not
want to disrupt their lives and see their country in shreds.

The doctor seemed deep in thought. “I admire your zeal,” he said, holding a glass of water. “But you’re very young, and I’m afraid it’s more complex than you think.”

Yousif was not ready to be dismissed. “By myself I can do nothing,” he explained, pushing his dirty plate away. “One hand cannot clap, I know that much. But two hands can clap. Thousands of hands can create a roar. All of us together can prevent the chopping up of our country.”

The two fathers exchanged glances, their brows lifted.

“Let’s start now,” Yousif resumed. “Let’s stage hunger strikes. Exercise civil disobedience. Let’s charter a plane and fly a hundred children to the United Nations. Let the world hear it from the mouths of these children: that the decent, average citizens of this country, both Arabs and Jews, don’t wish to have their country divided. “

“Behold! A sage!” said Moshe, forcing a smile. Then turning to the doctor, he added, “I think we have another Gandhi.”

The two fathers seemed desperate for a bright moment. A tremor of shock swept through Yousif as he heard them chuckle. In that chuckle he could hear the crack of doom.

“Why not another Gandhi?” Isaac said, defending his friend. “Yousif has good ideas. Don’t make fun of him.”

“I apologize, Yousif.” Moshe said, still smiling.

“Gandhi himself was once a teenager,” Isaac said. “And he was foresighted enough to take on mighty Britain.”

The doctor shook his head, struck a match, and applied it to his pipe. “Not in his teens,” he said, his pipe clenched between his teeth.

“I wasn’t suggesting . . .” Yousif huffed.

“In any case,” the doctor continued, “there’s no turning around now.”

“Father!” Yousif protested. “Will you stop being such a pessimist?”

Genuine concern flickered on the doctor’s face. “The die is cast, son, believe me.”

The telephone rang, cutting the silence like a razor blade. Yousif started to answer it, but the doctor said it was for him.

Momentarily, they heard the doctor speaking to the mayor again. “All right. I’ll be there.”

The doctor returned to the dining room, his coat in hand. It had stopped raining but his wife was standing behind him, ready to hand him an umbrella.

“Feel at home,” the doctor said, buttoning himself. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Moshe expelled his breath. “We’ve caused you too much trouble.”

“Had the shoe been on the other foot,” the doctor said, “you would’ve done the same for us.”

Yousif walked his father to the door. A gust of cold December wind blew in, yet he knew it was going to be a hot winter.

Yasmin and Fatima were busy changing the bed sheets and making last-minute arrangements for the Sha’lans’ comfort.

“Come on, Alex,” Isaac said. “Time to go to bed.”

“Promise you won’t leave us,” Alex whimpered.

“I promise,” Isaac assured him.

“But you will leave us,” Leah said, sniffling. “I know you will.”

“I promise I won’t.”

For several minutes, Yousif and the parents sat in thickening gloom, expecting another danger to spring at them.

“Strange,” Sarah seemed to remember, brushing back her hair. “Didn’t the neighbors hear the shots? I baked bread with Imm Ribhi this afternoon. You’d think she or her husband would ask if any of us got hurt.”

“Maybe their windows were closed,” Moshe said through lips that seemed glued together.

“My God!” his wife exclaimed. “They live next door. They’d have to be deaf not to have heard. Have we come to this?”

A Jew, Yousif reflected, was supposed to be wily, crafty, even cunning. So the story went. Instead, the two human beings who sat in his living room were no more capable of scheming than were his parents. Moshe had his fingers spread on his knees, and Sarah was massaging the back of her neck. In the next room their children were frightened to death. At that moment, he felt particularly proud of what his father was doing on their behalf.

“What are we going to do, Moshe?” Sarah asked, hugging a pillow.

“I don’t know,” her husband answered, gritting his teeth. “We’ll have to wait and see. We might have to move out.”

“Out where?” she demanded.

“Just out,” Moshe told her. “The world is wide. There must be room for us somewhere.”

“We’ve been here for years, Moshe. We belong here.”

“So do the Arabs.”

“There’s room for both of us. Don’t you think, Yousif?”

“Of course,” Yousif answered.

“Unfortunately,” Moshe said, “it’s not up to you two.”

Their uneasiness deepened. Yousif could only imagine what was going on in their minds. Sarah got up and moved to the sofa and sat next to Yousif, the small white handkerchief in her nervous hand fluttering. “You’re a sensible young man. Tell us. What would you do if you were in our place?”

Yousif recoiled from the question.

“Nothing makes sense anymore,” he finally said, wishing he had a better answer. “Maybe in the future . . .”

“Future? I’m talking about right now.”

It hurt Yousif to say what he was thinking. “Would you consider . . .”

“What?” she interrupted, with a flicker of veiled suspicion.

“. . . going away? At least until the hostilities blow over.”

“Go where?” she asked, her eyes focused on him.

Yousif felt awful, and wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. “I only meant . . .”

“You meant well, I know,” she told him, touching his hand. “But these are not hostilities. This is war—declared or undeclared, I don’t care. It could drag on for months.”

She put her head in her hands and began to sob.

“Shhhh,” Moshe said, moving next to her and putting his arm around her waist. “The children might hear you, remember?”

With a lump in his throat, Yousif turned his head away as he saw Moshe taste the salt of his wife’s tears.

The following evening, Yousif stood on the western veranda and tried to start the brazier. But as soon as he added several new pieces of charcoal, doused them all with kerosene, and struck a light—it started to drizzle. It took six matches to get the fire going. For the next fifteen minutes, he fanned the brazier with a piece of cardboard. Then he spent another five minutes waiting for the smell to go away before he could take the
kanoon
inside.

All the while, Yousif tightened the wool scarf around his neck, listened to the rising wind, and thought about Isaac and his family, who had gone home that morning to repair their house. He doubted that they would be harassed again, now that his father had persuaded the mayor and the entire city council to look after them. But who could tell what would happen down the road? Would they end up leaving Ardallah? Where would they go? And for how long?

He carried the
kanoon
inside and handed it to Fatima at the door. Then he turned toward the kitchen. He was so hungry he couldn’t wait for his father to come home for supper. He took the lid off the pot on the stove and sampled a few steaming grape leaves.

The dinner table was set as soon as the doctor arrived, dripping wet. It was unusual for him to come home so late, but it seemed he had had a rough day and he looked gloomy. His wife helped him take off his black top coat. She reminded him that he owned two umbrellas and should always keep one in the office and one at home. Her husband did not seem to hear her. On his way to the dining room, the doctor complained about a house-call he had made shortly after five o’clock on a dying baby.

“Fools!” he muttered, spreading the linen napkin in his lap. “The baby had pneumonia. And what do you think they did? Instead of rushing him to a hospital, they resorted to old wives’ remedies. Instead of giving him medicine, they applied a hot rod to the baby’s body and burned holes in his flesh. Imagine that!”

Yousif had heard of such remedies, especially in the case of adults who desperately needed some kind of relief from back pain or wanted to drain some puss buried deep in their legs. Oddly enough, such primitive methods had been known to work. But placing a red-hot piece of metal on a baby’s flesh was cruel beyond explanation. Yousif was shocked. Who had the heart to do such a thing!

“Well, did you save the baby?” Yousif asked, his hands clutching the edge of the table.

“Unfortunately, no,” the doctor replied. “They called me much too late. But I gave them a piece of my mind.”

“What good would that do?” Yousif grumbled.

“It might stop other fools from making the same mistake,” his father answered, pushing his plate away from him.

Yasmin poured red homemade wine into her husband’s glass. “Their thinking will change after you build the hospital,” she said.

“Sometimes I wonder,” her husband said, tasting the wine.

They ate in silence, except for the wind blowing outside and some heavy rain tapping on the window.

After dinner, the doctor retired to the living room, having first asked his son to prepare him a
nergileh
. Without hesitation, Yousif walked to the kitchen where the
nergileh
was sitting on a marble counter between the sink and the dish cabinet.

The
nergileh
consisted of three main parts: a two-foot flask which he half-filled with water; a four- or five-foot tube, at the end of which was attached a mouth piece; and a metallic “head” on which the tobacco and burning charcoal would be placed. When the smoker pulled, the smoke traveled through the water and was purified of nicotine long before reaching the lips. The leisure with which the
nergileh
was smoked appealed to him, and the gurgling sound it produced as the water bubbled inside the flask was pleasant to his ears. He had been raised listening to that sound and had learned the ritual of preparing the apparatus for his father at the age of ten.

Now, he crumbled a handful of tobacco in both hands and turned on the faucet and let the water run over his hands, squeezing the tobacco and watching the water turn into a yellow stream. He then piled up the tobacco on top of the “head” and proceeded to smooth it into the shape of an egg. Normally he would have started a few chips of charcoal a bit earlier so that they would be ready when he was through soaking and sculpting the tobacco. But because it was winter and every day someone prepared the
kanoon,
he had counted on using a few pieces of charcoal from the brazier to place on top of the
nergileh
.

His father was sitting in his favorite armchair next to the radio console, his belt characteristically loosened and the top of his pants unbuttoned as if from over-eating. In his hand was an old book of poetry, which Yousif knew was that of Al-Ma’arri, for the doctor was an avid admirer of this great eleventh-century mystic. To his father’s left was a huge bookcase full of Arabic and English books, mostly history and literature. The radio was on low. A new song was being introduced. Yousif could tell from the announcer’s hard “g” that the dials were set on Cairo.

Yousif placed the
nergileh
on the floor and handed him the mouthpiece at the end of the long cord.

“Thank you,” said his father, putting the book aside. He then bent down and picked up a couple of small well-kindled pieces of charcoal from the
kanoon
and put them on top of the tobacco. He pulled on the tube with great satisfaction.

“I know you’ve read some of Al-Ma’arri’s poetry in school,” his father said, picking up the book again, “but you should take time and read all of it. He is really a great poet. And a remarkable man as well—so unaffected and so wise. To him matter was worthless, but reason and conscience were important. He placed these two attributes above tradition and authority.”

The last thing Yousif wanted to hear now was a lecture on poetry or virtues. The political convulsion of the moment was a lot more pressing. He even looked at all the books behind his father and doubted their usefulness. Apparently all the poets and artists and thinkers had not taught man to live with his fellow man. His father, he felt, should be more involved with what was going on at present instead of wasting his time reading what one blind man had written nine centuries earlier.

“How do you compare him to Omar Khayyam?” Yousif asked out of politeness.

“No comparison,” his father said. “Khayyam was a hedonist. Al-Ma’arri was the very opposite. He was a poet of austerity, of total abstinence. A true Sufist. He was a hermit, but a man of conviction. Listen to this:

The body which gives you during life a form

Is but the vase: be not deceived my soul.

Cheap is the bowl thou storest honey in,

But precious for the contents of the bowl.

“Don’t you think his resignation is a form of bitterness?” Yousif asked, looking at his watch and anxious to hear the latest news.

“Bitterness?” the doctor reflected. “I don’t think so. I’m sure he was hurt and disappointed when he first lost his eyesight, but I can’t believe he was bitter. Bitterness is the quality of the small. Al-Ma’arri was a much grander man. For one thing he believed our fates are pre-determined. He did not judge, and he didn’t complain. Such attributes were alien to his nature.”

Luckily for Yousif the song on the radio stopped, and there was the usual fanfare announcing the news. Topping the broadcast was a report of Arabs having killed six Jews in Tel Aviv late that afternoon in retaliation for the attacks on Khayyat Street in Haifa the day before in which four Arabs had been mutilated.

Yousif glanced at his father, who, out of sadness, closed the book of poetry and set it aside. For ten minutes they listened in total quiet.

“The cycle of violence has begun,” his father said, drawing on his
nergileh
.

Yousif was sitting by the half-moon window, his face turned toward the hills. “What a shame,” he said. “Could your poet have guessed that the Holy Land would see more wars than anywhere else?”

His father looked at him reproachfully. “My poet?” he asked.

“Yes, your poet.”

“There would be no wars, son,” the doctor digressed, expending smoke from his mouth, “if man were not so foolish as to think he actually owns this earth.”

“Jamal calls our land the hills of God.”

His father shifted the burning charcoal with the brass tongs. “Every generation must learn for itself. It’s like discovering fire all over again.”

The doctor seemed suddenly withdrawn. On many occasions Yousif had heard his father wonder about the circumstances that shaped the course of a man’s life, the drama of one’s fate.

“Where would you like to go to school?” the doctor asked. “I mean after graduation.”

“I used to think of Columbia, where you went. Not anymore.”

“You shouldn’t let politics bother you. Columbia is a great school. On the other hand there are fine universities in this region. Why not Beirut or Cairo?”

They fell silent. The prospect of separation seemed to pull them closer to each other. Yousif had never been away from home. It was fashionable for students his age to attend foreign universities, and he had looked forward to that day. But with the impending war, he wasn’t so sure.

The doorbell sounded. They were startled by the first long buzz and the many short incessant ones that followed.

By the time Yousif got to the door, he found that his mother had opened it and his cousin Basim was already in the foyer. The door was still open and Yousif could see that the rain and wind had stopped.

“I saw your lights on and thought, Why not disturb them a little,” Basim said, kissing his uncle’s wife, who was almost his age but whom he called “auntie,” just to tease her.

“Basim,” she said, “I told you a hundred times not to scare us like this.”

“Scare you how? Why should you be scared with Yousif around. He’d look after you. Is Uncle up?”

“As if you care,” Yousif chided him, smiling.

“Of course I care,” Basim said, slapping him on the back. “You haven’t picked up any more compasses, have you?”

Yousif shook his head and followed him to the living room. Basim stopped at the magnificent
Tabriez
rug covering the floor, and hesitated to come in. He looked again at his shoes to make sure they were clean.

“Ah, Basim, welcome,” the doctor said, extending his hand.

“Good evening,” Basim said, taking long steps toward his uncle. “It’s stuffy in here.”

“Take off your coat,” the doctor said, pulling on his
nergileh
.

“No, let’s open the window,” Basim suggested, walking to the window and opening it. His eyes roamed over the town below him and at the steep road which led to the cemetery atop the opposite mountain. “It’s a hell of a night,” he said, his voice low. “No thunder, no lightning, no storm—and yet so ominous. It’s the quiet, I guess. The soft pouring of the rain. It’s almost afraid to make a noise.”

What an amazing fellow, Yousif thought, looking at Basim standing with his broad shoulders turned to them. A tall, powerful man, often capable of violence, yet sensitive enough to feel the strength of quietude. Wearing a trenchcoat with the belt fastened tightly around his waist, and pulling the two ends of a blue wool scarf around his neck, he seemed as strong as a mountain and almost as defiant. Yet, there was a slight stoop in his back, so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

“We had a meeting tonight,” Basim said, closing the window and remaining standing. He took a package of Lucky Strikes out of his deep trenchcoat pocket. “Before it was over I could feel Palestine slipping out of our hands.”

Yousif and his father held their breath. Basim lit his cigarette and sat down.

“Who’s
we?”
the doctor asked.

“A few men from the old days,” Basim answered, “but mostly new ones.”

“How many were there?” Yousif wanted to know, anxious.

“Fifteen,” Basim said, glancing at his young cousin. “We met at one of the hotels in Haifa to see what we could do.”

Yousif frowned. “Isn’t it kind of late?” he asked.

Basim’s eyes flashed. “I don’t blame you. Maybe your generation will start making fun of us.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

“That’s OK. We deserve worse. It is kind of late.”

“But you did your share,” Yousif apologized.

“Not enough. Anyway. The Zionists are determined to occupy as much of the land as they can while the British are still here. Incidents are breaking out everywhere. More than you hear on the radio or read in the newspapers. They’re bringing in a shipload a day of European Jews. Before you know it every one of these new arrivals will be carrying a gun to blast us away.”

Silence fell over them.

“We can’t wait until the Arab governments move in,” Basim continued. “By then it will be too late for sure. What they’ll be coming to save will already be lost.”

“What are you going to do then?” Yousif pressed.