In the middle of the list was the name of his friend, Fuad Murad. Murad was already dead! And his own name was listed, with a photograph—Hassan Hammad was a wanted man. The photograph was two years old and showed him clean-shaven. He touched his beard and rose to leave. He found his driver relieving himself against a tree, and at the sight of him felt another spasm of panic. The driver had made a poor choice of tree and was struggling to avoid the splatters as his piss cascaded down the knots, and while he was occupied Hassan made a quick decision. He mounted the driver’s seat and whipped the horses into action, ignoring the yelps of confusion behind him.
He crossed the Litani River by a crumbling bridge, only letting the horses stop to drink on the other side. From there he drove east, away from Beirut but otherwise in no particular direction. Whenever he saw a village he took a circuitous route—he could not risk being noticed as the only stranger in the souq that day.
After an hour and a half of eastward meandering he came upon a Turkish soldier alone by the side of the road, his ankles white with dust. The soldier stood and hailed Hassan. Gold buttons shone down his front, and a bayonet glinted by his side. His large moustache was waxed in the Ottoman style and a box of oranges lay on the ground by his chair. Hassan stopped the horses and dismounted, and the soldier demanded in accented Arabic to see some identifying papers. His eyes narrowed, taking in Haj Hassan’s attire.
“Is this your carriage?”
“Yes,” said Haj Hassan. He continued, in fluent Turkish: “I’m looking for a place to eat, do you know of anywhere nearby?”
Apparently delighted by Hassan’s flawless Turkish, the soldier clapped his arm and offered him an orange. Haj Hassan accepted and began to peel it; the zest spat at his dust-covered hands. The soldier added the rind to a small pile in the box, and as they each ate a segment Haj Hassan decided it was necessary to damp any suspicions he had already aroused. He told the soldier that he had in fact set out with a driver, intending to visit his family in Beirut. But when he asked to stop at a caravanserai, the driver had robbed him and escaped. Taking pity, a kind old shopkeeper lent him this carriage, on oath that he would return it.
“I have no papers, nothing,” he added, watching the soldier’s face for a reaction.
“My lodgings are nearby,” replied the soldier. “And I have a telegraph machine, if you would like to send a message to your family.”
Hassan hesitated. The man might appear trustworthy, but he was still a Turk. And if he had guessed Hassan was on the run he might be hoping for a reward. Hassan considered his options. He could run fast. He would leave one of the horses unharnessed in case he needed to flee.
The soldier led him to a small hut downhill from the road, above which the zigzag of telegraph wires swung gently in the wind. As the soldier entered, Hassan unbuckled the tugs from one of his horses and fastened the saddle strap with a length of rope to the carriage frame, presented a handful of seed to the big lips, and rubbed the warm muzzle. Inside, the soldier was already boiling water on the stove. In the corner stood a table covered in electrical equipment: an upright box resembling a radio, its sides crowded with differently sized knobs and copper tubes; another box beyond covered in more knobs, with coils and armatures bracketed to every perpendicular plane and gleaming.
“Do you know how to use it?”
Hassan said nothing. The soldier laughed.
“Don’t worry. Write down what you want to say and I will send it for you. Please.”
Hassan accepted a piece of paper and wrote an elliptical message in Turkish. It was not for his wife, however: it was addressed to his friend Haj Taher Kamal.
The soldier sat and began to tap it out on the transmission key. The water boiled and the coffee frothed; Hassan turned off the flame.
“Now we just have to wait for a reply. There are clean cups over there.”
The hut had only one chair, the one by the machine, and the soldier insisted that Hassan take it while he leaned against the wall. Between long spells of silence Hassan asked the soldier trivial questions about his post, cautious of their divergent roles in this game of empire, of any question that might shine the torch on the barrier between them. An hour passed, and the possibility dawned on Hassan that the soldier had counted on Hassan’s not knowing Morse code, and had in that tapping pattern actually communicated his own message to his superiors, who might appear at any moment to arrest him. Perhaps there was still time to escape. He thought of the horse. On the other hand, if the soldier did turn out to be honest and had indeed sent the message to Haj Taher, Hassan would miss the reply. He eyed the route he would take past the soldier to the front door and sat erect, fingers flexed for the rope.
The machine started to emit a very loud clicking. Hassan jumped up in alarm and the soldier replaced him at the table, where a wheel was turning, unreeling a thin strip of paper under a gnashing gold foot into his receiving hand. When it stopped, the soldier tore off the strip, examined the marks upon it, and scrawled a note on a card.
“I have a cousin in Damascus near the citadel stop go to him stop his name is Abu al-Kheir al-Muwaqqa’ stop,” he said aloud.
He handed Hassan the transcript.
“Thank you,” said Haj Hassan. “Peace upon you.”
Hassan, lover of symmetry, fed the second horse a handful of seed before he reattached the first to the carriage. He resumed his pose of humble driver, and with a whip crack turned in the direction of Damascus.
At nightfall he reached Jupiter Gate on the southwest side of the old city. From his seat he hailed a street seller late in packing up his wares, and asked where he could find the house of Abu al-Kheir al-Muwaqqa’. The seller gave him a complex series of directions, and following them to the letter Hassan arrived at a doorway striped in pink and grey stone.
A silver-haired, thin-lipped man opened the door. He shook Haj Hassan’s hand and directed him to the stables to park the carriage.
“Welcome, please,” he said. “A friend of Haj Taher is a friend of mine.”
He led Hassan to a bedroom with a mashrabiya window where the maid was unrolling a mattress. Hassan slept deeply and woke at dawn to pray, then slept until the second call. In the hallway he found a note: the family had left early to visit a grieving relative but would return before nightfall. The maid served him eggs with sumac, and as he finished eating there was a knock at the door.
Twelve Turkish soldiers entered the house. Haj Hassan immediately introduced himself as Abu al-Kheir al-Muwaqqa’, praying silently that his beard was an adequate disguise. He had not welcomed any runaway Nabulsi, no, but he was happy to let them look through the house, and please to take a glass of lemonade. There was not enough space for all twelve to sit in the salon, so the senior personnel sat while the younger men stood around, drinking from tall glasses. Haj Hassan leaned on the windowsill and tried to adopt both the courteous manner of a host and the comfortable air of a proprietor, restraining his gaze from the many ornaments as if he had seen them thousands of times before. The men emptied their glasses. They thanked Abu al-Kheir for his time.
Haj Hassan remained a wanted man, and it became clear that he would need to remain in hiding for longer than a week. He discussed this with Abu al-Kheir and they decided he would marry the eldest daughter of the family, a plump girl named Rasha with wide-set eyes. Hassan gave one of his pocket watches as the dower—fortunately he had brought two—and promised his host in writing that he would repay any debts incurred during his time in hiding.
Months passed and Hassan’s face continued to appear weekly in the newspapers, annotated with the details of his treason and the reward for reporting his whereabouts to the authorities. Abu al-Kheir decided on an alias for him, and under the new name “Qassem Khatib” Haj Hassan grew his beard long and thick, and lived quite happily with his new wife in the house of his father-in-law. But as the months accumulated he began to miss his first wife and children, and the pool on his farm in Zawata, and the florid company of the men in t
he Nablus courtyards. And as there was no safe way to transport money from Zawata, he began to feel uneasy about his dependence on his host, with the list of promised repayments growing longer. Before the year was out, he had decided to make a return visit.
One Sunday night in the spring of 1916, after news of a Turkish victory in Kut al-Amara, Hassan donned the cotton abaya and kufiya of a farmer and rode his horse south from Damascus. He reached the outskirts of Irbid as dawn broke like an egg yolk over the Druze Mountain; in its pale light a Bedouin woman was entering a tent in the valley, and catching sight of him she gestured that he should join her. He tied his horse to a tree and entered the tent to find the women battering pestles in coffee grinders between their feet and singing a mournful song to the rhythm. The white-haired elder of the family came to greet him, and they sat together in silence through the coffee ritual. When the coffee was brewed and they had emptied their cups, Hassan asked if he might take shelter for the night. The elder prevaricated. Hassan offered what little gold he had with him in exchange for one of his daughters in marriage; the deal was struck, and Haj Hassan had his first secure home on the way to Nablus, in a valley between Irbid and the Druze Mountain.
The second home was established by another marriage, this time to a farmer’s daughter in a village south of Safad. The third, by marrying the daughter of his cousin’s friend in Jenin.
By the time Haj Hassan returned to his first wife in Zawata, therefore, he had already acquired four more. He stayed at home for a month, tending to his farm and arguing with the fellahin over the return from the crops. When the month had passed he travelled back to visit his other wives, to sleep, dine, and give them money, en route to Damascus and the house of Abu al-Kheir.
Over the next year and a half Haj Hassan made two more covert journeys between Damascus and Nablus, visiting each wife and collecting the money from the farm. In Nablus, rumours continued as to his whereabouts, and whether he was alive or dead. Then in the winter of 1917, while Hassan was en route to Zawata, the Ottomans lost Jerusalem to the British. Hassan had only reached Jenin when his cousins brought him news that the Turks had retreated to Nablus and were establishing their new stronghold for northern Palestine inside the walls of her old city. Hassan turned back up the road by which he had come, went straight to Damascus, and did not renew his attempt to return. A year passed before the British finally ousted the Turks and seized Nablus. But only when Jamal Basha had fled to Europe did Hassan deem it safe to make a public return to his home in Zawata, where he was immediately recognised as a hero.
The year was 1918, and his cousin Nimr was the new mayor of Nablus.
* *
At the Ottomans’ overthrow, the streets of Jerusalem had flooded with revellers, and the citizens danced and whistled and cut down the telegraph wires to take home as trophies. But in Nablus the reaction was quite different. There the crowds gathered outside the municipal hospital, that symbol of Nablus’s modernity, not to support but to protest the British capture of Jerusalem, and the Nabulsis had chanted their way to the temporary Turkish encampment to display their fervent displeasure. Although the city was a centre of Arab nationalism, her citizens still feared the defeat of the Empire. The known was better than the unknown, they said uneasily; the Ottomans had been bad, but who wasn’t in a time of war? And besides, in those Turkish garrisons their sons were half the soldiers. And in addition Balfour had made his declaration: Nablus guessed what the British had planned for them, and they were afraid.
Somewhat out of character, Haj Nimr decided to host a party in celebration of his cousin’s return, to which he invited the city’s leading men. Haj Nimr was a religious man, and had been a shari’a court judge before he became mayor. The only parties he ever hosted were gatherings of the learned on the second floor of his house, where the men sat in a circle to drink tea and discuss scripture. While it was not unheard of for an alem to be a sociable man, Haj Nimr was not known for attending parties either; at the announcement of this gathering, therefore, his daughters became very excited, even though they would not be allowed to attend. His wife, Widad, arranged for extra help, including her sister-in-law’s two maids and manservant. Yellow irises from the garden were arranged in diamonds on the tabletops. Huge plates were laid out of stuffed things—courgettes and vine leaves and aubergines—heaped on piles of baked tomatoes slipping from their skins. The best maker of kunafe in the old city was hired, and he set up his equipment in the kitchen to ensure the cheese was perfectly hot at serving time.
Nimr invited Haj Hassan to take coffee with his family before the party started. This was an event his daughters and his wife were allowed to attend. Hassan wore his best cravat and his shiniest pair of Damascene shoes and rode his horse from Zawata into Nablus at midday.
Set back from the road, the triple-arched windows of Haj Nimr Hammad’s house were visible over the high stone wall. Passing through the gate, Hassan climbed the steps alongside a chain of trellises wound with vines. He reached the triple-arched doorway, and ascending the pyramid of steps before the entrance, turned the handle and entered the vast hall with its enormous vaulted canopy, full of light.
Haj Nimr’s three children were waiting on a couch on the far side. Haj Nimr himself had already seen his cousin since his return, but he greeted him again now with four exuberant kisses as if for the first time. Nimr was tall and slender, and the thick black brows curving down the sides of his eyes were shot with grey; his eyelids hung low. Hassan was much shorter, and his cousin had to bend slightly to reach his cheek. His beard was already white, and shaved close to mark the end of exile. The tip of his nose reached down over his moustache; and though his eyebrows were high and thin, still Hassan resembled his cousin in the eyes, which like Nimr’s slanted at the outer edges, giving him a mournful appearance. Hassan bowed to the children and approached. The two eldest were girls, Fatima and Nuzha, and they leapt up to greet him; the youngest child, Burhan, sat silently.
For all his local fame and achievement Hassan was both modest and somewhat severe. His gaze did not deviate, and his presence could be unnerving for anyone who could not match his self-possession. But whenever someone quite reasonably described Hassan as aloof, another would snatch the chance to claim more intimate acquaintance and feign surprise, since on the contrary Haj Hassan was, in his own experience, a remarkably warm man, honest, and loyal.
When Nimr kissed him Hassan gave a rare laugh, and now that he was seated the family waited in silence. Nimr had heard versions of Hassan’s tale, among them several naming Russia as his site of exile, but, trusting none, he was as eager as his children to hear the truth from the man himself. Unlike his children, he concealed his enthusiasm under a sage smile and deliberate shakes of his venerated head.
After asking courteously about their schooling, Hassan gratified the children with a more interesting question:
“Almost three years and you are all just the same as I remember you—only taller and wiser and more beautiful! Do you know where I have been?”
“England!”
“Were you in Egypt?”
“Oh no—no, I was in Damascus.”
He told the story drily, using the best turns of phrase he had practised on the house of Abu al-Kheir and his own family, which now rolled off the tongue without forethought. He described the warning from Haj Taher Kamal, his journey from Nablus to Aley, and the newspaper at the inn. The boy slapped his thighs at the encounter with the affable soldier on the roadside, and slapped them harder at the lemonade offered to the soldiers who searched Abu al-Kheir’s house.
The keenest listener was Fatima, the eldest daughter. She absorbed the story without laughing, as she absorbed all the stories her brother shared of the men who were returning to Nablus with war wounds and foreign certificates. Among the returnees, she knew, was Haj Hassan’s son Yasser.
Fatima’s mother firmly believed that Yasser was a perfect match for her. She mentioned him frequently at home, though less for Fatima’s benefit than
for her father’s; although Haj Nimr adored and respected his cousin, he remained evasive on the question of his cousin’s son. Yasser was a reasonable choice, was a member of the family, had attained a high office in the Ottoman army, and was heir to most of Haj Hassan’s lands in the Jordan Valley. But Nimr prized Fatima as both his eldest girl and the more beautiful, and consequently was hoping for someone even wealthier. When they talked about Yasser he regarded Fatima from across the table, and she would blush and avert her gaze. But, confined by the demands of his new political office, Haj Nimr had neither the time nor the opportunity to seek out other suitors, and his wife continued to push for her choice. Yasser was a good man, she repeated. Fatima rather thought that at thirty-two he sounded too old for her, but since the thought of marrying anyone was terrifying, at least if he was a relative she would have more access to her family.
Haj Hassan Hammad’s land in Zawata lay in the shadow of Mount Ebal. A third of the way up the mountainside, a large perpendicular rock protruded. Near the centre of the rock was a cave, and in its western corner was another smaller adjoining cave, its entrance blocked by stone. The story went that a female Islamic saint called Sitt Salamiyeh had died in Damascus, and when she was placed in her coffin her body rose through the air and vanished, appearing in this cave through the western corner, which had miraculously opened to receive her. The rock was now a pilgrimage site where oil was burned in her honour. The floor of the cave was scattered with earthen bottles, the walls studded with lamps.
That evening, while her father entertained his guests, Fatima escaped through the kitchen garden and climbed the mountain path. When she reached the cave she removed her veil and struck a match to light one of the lamps. Shadows shook and sprang across the chamber wall. She lit two more, knelt by the tomb, and prayed to Sitt Salamiyeh that whoever she married would have a habit of kindness withindoors.
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