Jerusalem Stands Alone

by Mahmoud Shukair

  He kisses her feet for a week, then Meryl disappears again.

  He keeps looking for her, eager to kiss her ivory and silver feet.

  The Jilbāb

  SHE MAKES COFFEE, pouring me a cup and one for herself. I drink my coffee quietly as she stares at me lying in bed, until she says, “Do you have a date with a new poem today?” I reply sharply that I don’t.

  She doesn’t like my abrupt answer. I ask her, “Did you remove your jilbāb on one of your trips?”

  “Which jilbāb?”

  “The one you used to wear at your parents’ house.”

  “I had a jilbāb but I didn’t wear it at my parents’ house.”

  I stared at her a moment longer, then said, “Rabab, why are you lying to me?”

  “I’m not lying to you.”

  We return to sipping our coffee. Hands bring the small cups up and bring them back down, while in her mind and mine, exclamation marks are being drawn and redrawn.

  And the jilbāb that Rabab says she didn’t wear is hanging somewhere.

  The Man

  I’M TAKING A WALK with Rabab when we see him. As we follow him, Rabab wonders if he’s the doppelgänger, but I say he’s Saladin, and that we’ve been transported to the Ayyubid era.

  We see him going through the Damascus Gate and then descending the stairs in the market with three men trailing him. His sword hangs from his waist to his ankle.

  It’s summer and the market is steeped in lantern light. The man strides with a firm step around the men standing outside one of the stores swapping stories, one telling of the daughter of a foreigner who ran away with a local merchant. Everyone stands there wordlessly for a moment after he finishes telling his story before comments and debates erupt. The women sit outside a house listening to the men’s conversations, and lean against each other to whisper intimately.

  Silence dominates the city soon after, and the stars glimmer. The moon is absent from the sky.

  Saladin enters al-Aqsa Square and dismisses the guards with a wave of his hand. He sits alone and contemplates all that the city has undergone, as well as what is yet to come, while the city talks for weeks about the girl who ran away with one of the local merchants.

  An Arrest

  I KNOW NOTHING of his secret affairs. We sit chatting and drinking coffee one evening in Café Groppi on Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent Street. He says he was summoned for questioning one day and stood there shaking, hands damp as a wet cloth.

  I pity his weakness and wonder how it’s served him in his life. After a long conversation, he asks me about the soon-to-be-evacuated house in the Old City. He asks what we can do to get out of the situation we’re in. I suggest he join the protest we’ll have in a few days, and his face goes pale.

  The day after the protest, officers and soldiers surround my house and take me to a hellhole where they place me under arrest for three months.

  A detective with a shiny bald head bombards me with one question after another. Ghazal is there. He isn’t there in person, but he’s there.

  Thirst

  SHE WAKES UP with a fright and rushes to turn the light on. He rouses, rubbing his eyes, and looks at her. “What’s wrong with you, woman?”

  She says, “I saw him tiptoe through the front door, careful not to wake us up. I saw him. He went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a water bottle. My dear boy! He was so thirsty! He’s seen some hard times in that foreign land. He must be very hungry. I’m going to make him some food.”

  “Sleep, woman. Don’t be silly. Only God knows where he is now.”

  “I’ll make him some food and then go back sleep. He might still come during the night or early in the morning.”

  She puts on her lilac robe and goes into the kitchen. Abd el-Razzaq pulls the sheets over his head and tries to sleep.

  Rejection

  HE SAYS, “I kept trying to help, but then I got tired of it. I suggested he marry the butcher’s daughter, but he refused. He said the same thing he always does, that evil is everywhere and that he will not get married in such a world as this.”

  She says, “I visited the butcher and met his daughter and examined her up close. How pretty she is, God bless her. She has a strong firm body and thighs like marble. Her teeth are little pearls and her hair comes down to her waist. God bless her, she’s perfect!”

  She describes her to Abd el-Rahman, hoping to persuade him to marry her. He says evil is everywhere, so he will not get married, and that, more than anything, he misses his brother.

  God help him, Abd el-Rahman refuses to listen. And when he’s finished praying, he asks forgiveness for his mother and father, for they don’t know how to please him.

  Stairs

  THE MARKET is sloped like a ladder leaning against a wall. They walk up the stairs together, up one hundred steps before he stops. She says, “How many stairs left?” He answers, “Four hundred.” She asks, “Are you in a hurry?” He says no. So Suzanne pulls her friend down to sit and says, “Let’s rest a little before we walk up the remaining four hundred steps.”

  The Spice Traders Market

  SHE WALKS through the Spice Traders Market and I walk alongside her. She’s been out of prison for only two days, so I take her to buy whatever she wants.

  The market is quiet and smells of spices and peppers and herbs. She buys black cumin, cinnamon, ground pepper, ginger, and oud, and other things she has read about in an old book about our ancestors. She looks at me tenderly now. I stand beside her, an obedient child.

  We go home and the delicious scents cling to us for days and weeks. Rabab transforms into Scheherazade at night and burns incense in our bedroom, saying the sweetest words to me.

  A Chair

  I GO to the antique furniture store and find a wooden chair that’s a hundred years old. (Maybe it was made by a skilled carpenter for an Ottoman sultan.) I also find an old map, a spoon made of copper and another of silver, and coffee cups with beautiful designs. I consider a piece of embroidered colored cloth.

  I return home excited to show Rabab what I’ve bought and ask her opinion, at which she purses her lips. We talk for some time and decide that we’re happy with some of the objects (like the map). I busy myself looking for spots to put the antiques, resolved to find the perfect place to display each of them to draw our guests’ utmost admiration.

  In the evening, I sit down on the hundred-year-old wooden chair and Rabab sits next to me. I fancy myself an uncrowned sultan, Rabab my modern-day sultana.

  Coffee

  I WONDER as I’m making the coffee, “What should I do with my heart tonight?” But I can’t come up with an answer, nor is my mood cooperating. Rabab has gone out.

  As the coffee boils over and drips into the fire, I wonder again what I should do. I don’t feel like speaking or watching the news or laughing, nor am I in the mood to go out and watch the setting sun as it spreads gold across the sky. I am not in the mood for anything at all.

  Despair surrounds me, stirs in me ashen feelings of doubt and sadness.

  Eventually I raise the coffee cup to my lips. For the tenth time, I wonder what I should do tonight.

  Wardrobe

  I OPEN THE WARDROBE: dresses, blouses, underwear, pantyhose, corsets. The clothes release a fragrance, as if trying to seduce me, and I hurriedly look around. Finding no one, I continue looking for the jilbāb.

  I push the dresses aside and start sifting through the pile of underwear, pantyhose, and corsets, but I soon stop because there’s no way the jilbāb will be hidden among the underwear and pantyhose. It will have to be with the dresses. I check each dress once, twice, and even a third time, but I still can’t find the jilbāb.

  I close the door and sit down by the window, trying to recall the details of this old memory, but I can’t remember.

  Belongings

  I RETURN HOME carrying antiques: an old bag made from colorfully embroidered cloth, an antique silver ink bottle and quill, an embossed metal cup, and an oval
mirror with a copper base. I display them on the dining table as a street salesman and Rabab watches me, smiling.

  “What, why are you smiling?”

  “Soon we’re going to look like we live in Eugène Ionesco’s The New Tenant.”

  “Oh! So you’re worried we won’t have room to set a foot in this house if I keep buying antiques?”

  “How much did you buy this for?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know a thing about how much this stuff costs.”

  A certain anecdote comes to mind and I tell her, “They say that, years ago, Hodja ran into some boys playing with a dead crow. So he bought it from them and carried it home. His mother asked why he bought a dead crow and he said, ‘Because if it was alive, it wouldn’t have been worth a hundred dirham.’”

  Rabab laughs and we go on displaying the antiques—in the living room, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and by the bed. She looks at herself in the mirror by the bed and says, “I wish you would buy us another mirror like this one.” She doesn’t say another word for the rest of the night.

  Foothold

  WE’RE IN BED. Rabab is reading Eugène Ionesco’s The New Tenant and I’m reading Attar of Nishapur’s “The Conference of the Birds.” Suddenly I stop and turn to her. “Did you say ‘a foothold’ today?”

  “I did. Why?”

  “Are you really afraid that we won’t have a foothold in this house one day?”

  “Yeah. With all the antiques you bring home, soon there won’t even be room to set a foot down.”

  She gets out of bed while telling me that the weather is too warm. She stands by the window, and I think to myself how beautiful she looks, silhouetted in her nightgown. She stares vacantly at the lights coming in through the window from the settlements spreading north and south, east and west, and whispers, “I’m afraid.”

  I get up and move beside her to place a hand on her shoulder, and we stand by the window until we are too weary to stay upright.

  Souk al-Dabbagha

  WE GO TOGETHER to Souk al-Dabbagha. She tells me she wants to buy a handbag made of genuine leather, so we enter a store not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, near a small mosque only thirty feet or so long. She examines the handbags presented by the salesman, then reaches toward this and that shelf and takes down other handbags of all shapes. The salesman tells her, “I have handbags from the Ayyubid time.” She looks at him in astonishment. “Really?”

  I’m not surprised. No, I expect this reaction from her. The salesman tells her to go upstairs to the second floor to see for herself, so Rabab does. The salesman walks up after her, and I follow them upstairs.

  She spends half an hour upstairs going through the Ayyubid handbags before finally deciding on a fringed one. She lifts it over her shoulder and we walk out.

  Outside, we see a knight of Saladin wearing a copper helmet, a Yamani sword slung at his side. A woman paces beside him, delicate as a white dove. She gazes through the glass window of the handbag store of an Armenian salesman from Jerusalem who’d lived during the mandate.

  On-Screen

  SHE SAYS she saw him on TV. He had a kaffiyeh around his neck and carried a four-colored flag over his head. He was surrounded by women and men calling for the end of the occupation. She says, “I was so happy to see him, I wept. I miss my son.”

  He asks her if she’s sure it was their son.

  “I’m positive. It was Marwan.”

  “They say that everyone has a twin.”

  “No, no, no! It was Marwan.”

  “Do you know what country the demonstration was in?”

  “Europe.”

  He smiles at her. “Khadija, Europe is a continent. It’s much bigger than you think.”

  He adds nothing but remains skeptical of what his wife told him, so skeptical that he sits fixed in front of the television all week, looking for his son night and day.

  Unfortunately, the demonstrations suddenly stop. He slaps his knee and thinks, “God Almighty, you’d think all the problems have finally been solved!”

  A Spoon

  EVERY EVENING, I write my daily report for the newspaper and then, in the morning, I read the paper in its entirety, starting with the obituaries and finishing with the events page. I don’t dwell on politics, in the paper or anywhere else.

  Each week, I make lunch three days and she the other three. When we sit down to eat together, one of us always takes a sheet or two of the newspaper and drapes it over the dining table like a tablecloth. We eat and look at the photographs of the actresses and singers and soccer players, and the pictures don’t move even when bones and crumbs of rice fall on them. It’s at these moments we’re most compatible.

  We fight over the silliest things, like when Rabab folds up the newspapers after lunch, just as they are. The crumbs and the bones and even my favorite spoon are still on them, and she just tosses all of it into the trash. (I only realize the spoon is missing the next day or the day after.) Because of this I’m forced to form a new bond with a new spoon of quality I neither like nor want.

  Her Little Girl

  SHE SAYS she gave birth to Asmahan in the fall (in October, to be exact), in the evening when the weather was moderate.

  Like the weather in which she was born, Asmahan is calm by nature. She’s tall and slim. She likes to listen more than speak but within her is bottled-up energy waiting to be released. She reminds me of her younger days, when she was a little girl first coming to grips with life around her.

  She says, “I raised Rabab in this house. I thought she was the last grape from the vine and I gave her so much love and affection. But Asmahan’s birth, too, brought unexpected and great joy to our home.”

  Her Grandson’s Coat

  SHE’S BUSY KNITTING a small wool sweater for a one-year-old boy. He asks as he approaches her, “What, are we expecting another baby?” She smiles and says, “Sure.”

  “Is Rabab pregnant?”

  “Rabab isn’t thinking about kids right now.”

  “Then who?”

  “It’s Marwan.”

  He remembers his son, roaming somewhere in the world. He could be alive, or he could be dead, and, if alive, he doesn’t even know if his son is married. Does he have children? His eyes darken with melancholy.

  Looking up at Khadija and the little sweater, he advises her not to tire herself making a coat for a baby that might not exist.

  Khadija disagrees and goes on knitting the tiny sweater for her grandson. She’s heard from many people that winter in Europe demands warm clothing. She’ll send her grandson the sweater somehow, unless her grandson comes home soon with his mother and father.

  Walking

  WE WALK TOGETHER from one market to the next, Rabab in an elegant dress with her hair down, I in a white button-up shirt and gray pants. Rabab watches people shop in the markets as if it’s her first time there. Occasionally her eyes glide over the myriad doors and windows of the houses. I try not to break her concentration, walking beside her as if it’s our first time together, reminiscing now and then of the city’s ancient shops.

  Two hours later she says, “Let’s go home.” We do, and on the way I imagine her composing in her mind a poem about the city. So I walk beside her in silence, trying to control my loud thoughts and keep them from intruding on the poem forming in her mind.

  Sunday

  SHE ROAMS the old alleys with a book about the history of the city in her hand, inspecting the walls and the doors of the houses with careful eyes. She likes the Ayyubid architecture evident in the long walls of a dim alley leading up to an illuminated open space, which then connects with the courtyard of a house. She stops more than once and attentively rereads the pages of her book.

  Around that time, her friend, who interns at the law office, meets up with her. They greet one another and continue wandering together. They walk up and down many flights of stairs in alleyways and markets as the church bells ring, synchronized and harmonious.

&nb
sp; Barefoot

  SHE TELLS ME when she gets tired of my jokes, “Why don’t you take off your slippers and come sit on my lap?”

  “I’m barefoot.”

  “Why don’t you sit on my lap, then?”

  “I’m going to go look for my slippers.”

  “Don’t go too far.”

  I walk too far and when I return, I find her sleeping. I sit by her feet, still barefoot.

  The City Bells

  THE CITY BELLS RING in the morning as the churches welcome worshippers. Entering the church, men and women all grow lighter—the men shedding their heavy winter coats and the women the burdens of their worries and losses.

  The bells ring loud, as if in protest. They demand we think of the trying times the city has come upon. After making their demands, the ringing gradually subsides.

  This morning, one bell broke the mold and kept on ringing until sundown.

  Khan Tankaz

  SHE SAYS she misses sleeping in the Old City and suggests we visit her parents, and is surprised when I suggest instead that we go to the time of Khan Tankaz and spend a night there.

  She packs the white nightgown embroidered with red roses, a pair of underwear, and her perfume and makeup, and I pack my grey pajamas. We pack some books and carry a suitcase, as if we’re headed to the airport.