by Claire Hajaj
1
Journeys
An ‘absentee’ is a Palestinian citizen [who] left his place of residence before 1 September 1948 for a place… held by forces seeking to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel… Every right an absentee had in any property shall pass automatically to the Custodian Council for Absentee Property.
Israel Absentees
Property Law, 1950
No doubt Jews aren’t a loveable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.
Neville Chamberlain,
letter, 1938
1948
‘Yallah, Salim! Farm-boy! The Jews are coming for you! They’re going to kick you out and break your skinny arse like a donkey.’
Two boys stood opposite each other on the dirt road between Jaffa’s orange groves and the sea.
One was older, burly and black haired. His chin, arms and belly rolled in chubby folds, like a lamb ready for the oven. Some day those folds would smooth into the coveted fat of the ay’an – one of the rich, the coffee drinkers with their white mansions and expensive wives. But today the excess weight was only good for bullying and sweating his way through the warm spring air.
The younger boy stood facing the darkening water with a football in his hand. He wore laced black school shoes and neat brown shorts. His white shirt was tucked carefully around his waist and buttoned up to the chin; his small, pale face was an open book, the Frères liked to tease, a page that anyone could write on.
‘Don’t call me a fellah,’ he said cautiously, turning the football around in his hands. It was never a good idea to argue with Mazen, who at nearly ten was brutishly heavy-handed.
‘Why not? You live on a farm. Your father makes you go and pick fruit, like the fellahin.’
An angry retort filled Salim’s mouth, but he swallowed it, suddenly uncertain. Hadn’t he begged to go to the groves last week? The harvest was ending, and his father’s labourers had picked the family farm – all fifteen full dunams of good orange land. Joining the harvest was supposed to be a birthday treat; he was seven now, and one day he would share the groves with Hassan and Rafan. Let me go, he’d asked, but his father said no, and to his shame Salim had wept.
‘My father pays fellahin to work, yours puts them in prison,’ he said, changing tack. Mazen’s father was one of Jaffa’s top judges, a qadi; Hassan said he stank of money. ‘If the Jews come and live in your house your father can help them lock us all up.’ Mazen grinned.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘If you ask nicely I’ll take care of you and your pretty mama. But that stupid Hassan will have to look after himself.’
He grabbed the football from Salim and turned down the path towards the sea. The younger boy followed him instinctively, empty arms swinging by his side in the falling sun.
‘The Jews aren’t coming, anyway, not while the British are here,’ Salim said, remembering suddenly what Frère Philippe had told him at St Joseph’s that morning. A scuffle broke out between two boys in the yard at playtime: one had called the other’s father a traitor for selling his dunams to the Jews. The other shouted that at least he hadn’t fled his home like a coward. They were dragged off by their ears, still hitting each other. Salim had stood by transfixed, while Mazen laughed and cheered them on. Afterwards, Frère Philippe had patted him gently on the face. ‘Don’t worry, habibi,’ he’d said over the wet thwack of the whip as the boys took their lashes. ‘All this talk of Jews and armies… not everyone is crazy for fighting, not while the British are still here and God watches over his flock.’
‘God helps those who help themselves,’ said one of the nearby Frères, darkly. ‘God better had,’ said another, ‘because the British surely won’t.’
‘You’re such a donkey, Salim,’ sneered Mazen, bringing him back to the present. ‘The British don’t care if we live or die. They want to slice this place up like an orange and give the Jews the biggest piece. But we’ll be ready for them, by God. Let them test the Najjada. I can’t wait to shoot a Jew.’
Salim could not imagine shooting anyone. He had once seen a British policeman shoot a sick dog – a stray; the sad noise it made as the bullet went in had made Salim kneel on the ground and vomit. And then there was what happened last month – the blood that ran over the bricks onto his shoes – but he would not think about that.
‘You can’t join the Najjada,’ he said, pushing his hands into his pockets and squaring his shoulders. ‘You’re just a boy. Mama says they only take men.’ Boy scouts with guns, she’d called them at the parade last week; but Salim had stretched up on his toes behind Hassan’s back to see them standing to attention in Clock Tower Square. They had tall rifles and fine grey uniforms. He knew one; Mazen’s gang called him cat’s arse because he had a deep brown pimple in the middle of his chin. They’d teased him to crying about it, but that day his eyes were bright and proud. Hassan would have joined them too – but Mohammad Nimir al-Hawari accepted no boy under fifteen.
‘Your mama has a woman’s brains,’ Mazen scoffed. ‘Al-Hawari is a friend of my father’s. Anyway, why would I tell you if I joined? They don’t take little donkeys like you.’
‘I’m not a donkey,’ Salim whispered, as Mazen ran ahead. Sometimes, in his wildest moments of courage, Salim imagined knocking Mazen to the ground like a fat football. But with his big fists and blistering scorn, Mazen was more terrifying than even the Jews. I hope the Jews get Mazen when they come.
The Jews are coming. That’s what the Frères whispered to each other at school. The countryside was emptying as the fighting drew near, bringing refugees to Jaffa with their dirty bags and clinging children. Salim’s father had complained to the Mayor about them – but his mother had sent packages of food for the women with babies. Salim could not understand what would make people want to sleep in Jaffa’s mosques and churches instead of in their own homes.
But today, with the sun high and the air filled with salt and oranges, it was hard to feel afraid. They chased each other along the path, racing through the scrubland and yelling into the warm rush of sea air. The ball flew towards the sea and Salim streaked ahead, breathless and exultant, scooping it before the surf could claim it. Spinning around to cheer his victory, he suddenly realized he was alone. His cheeks turned red as he spotted Mazen, grinning down at him from the top of the embankment.
‘You always fall for that one,’ he laughed. Salim hung his head to hide the shaming flush. Why do you always let him trick you, stupid? the stones on the ground seemed to say.
‘Come on, fellah,’ Mazen said, pointing to Salim’s dirty knees and sweaty face. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go to the souk.’
There were two ways to get from Al-Ajami to the souks of Jaffa’s Clock Tower Square.
The route from Salim’s house led straight through the silent inland. It passed the sun-bleached whiteness of the seaside villas, their walled gardens spilling glorious streams of red bougainvillea and the dusty tang of oranges. It turned left onto old Al-Ajami Street, where new motorcars whined past donkeys trundling loads of pomegranates and lemons. The door of Abulafia’s bakery was always open, even in the bracing winter months. Salim had waited there a hundred times, his senses scorched by the smell of pastries rising in clouds of cinnamon and allspice. His mother liked manquish, a flatbread sprinkled with thyme and sesame. He used to eat it from her hands, a little piece at a time, as they walked out into Jaffa’s old city, with its coffee shops and yellow plumes of nargile smoke.
The other way to the Square belonged to Jaffa’s boys; it was a rite of passage. As soon as a boy was old enough to walk, another would dare him to try it – crossing down over the wild beaches, braving the slippery rocks and then
inching out step by step under the ancient port wall.
Today, the sun beat down on the great crescent of the Mediterranean; the water shone gold against the black land like a ring in an African ear. Salim and Mazen jumped across the tide pools, splashing the bare-armed boys fishing for crabs. They picked their way across the jagged rocks until the port of Jaffa emerged in white, sea-stained stone.
‘Jaffa’s harbour is as old as the sea,’ Frère Philippe had taught them. ‘It was here before the Arabs or the Jews. God Himself led Japhet here, Noah’s son, in the times before time. The bones of twenty-two armies rest here. The pagans of Thebes chained their maiden sacrifice just there,’ his wrinkled hand pointed and a dozen pairs of eyes followed it. ‘There, out on the rocks that we call Andromeda, waiting for the sea monster to devour them. The Crusader king, Richard the Lionheart, lay in his sickbed on the port just there, begging Salah Al-Din for peace. The godless Emperor Napoleon camped by the lighthouse, while the plague destroyed his army and his righteous prisoners rose against him. He learned a lesson that I tell you now, mes enfants: that Jaffa is God’s beloved place, and they are cursed who come to harm it.’
Salim cherished a guilty love for the English king with the lion on his chest, even though most of the boys liked Napoleon and Salah Al-Din, champion of the faith. He imagined Richard now as he edged carefully under the yellowing harbour wall. It might have been the same for him: the sour slap of shallow waters and the bloody scent of feluccas bringing in the catch. Only the great steamships on the horizon marked the passage of centuries.
By the time he pulled himself up onto the harbour floor, Mazen had already found a loose orange. He was dropping the pith on the ground, the yellow juice running down his chin. ‘There it is,’ he said, a chubby finger pointing north. ‘There they are.’ Across the bay, the gleaming high-rises of Tel Aviv curved up the coast as far as the eye could see.
Salim barely noticed Tel Aviv most of the time. Only the very old, the grandmothers and grandfathers of his friends, sometimes talked of a time when Jaffa was surrounded by circling dunes and Tel Aviv was just a few shells in the blowing sand. To Salim it had always been here. It was the same with the British. They had always been here too, the Commissioners and Commanders, those starched, pink-faced men. The boys called them schwee schwees, the noise that pigs make. But they were fond of the Jaffa garrison. A private called Jonno used to give Mazen and Hassan cigarettes. He’d promised that Salim could have one too, once he turned eight.
Only these days Salim felt he was seeing more of Tel Aviv and less of the British. British rule in mother Palestine ends next month, the Frères said. And then a new place called Israel will burst out of her belly, and split her in two forever. Salim had overheard Mazen’s father putting it more simply. ‘The next time you see the British will be from the deck of a ship, waving goodbye.’
‘It’s late,’ Mazen said, frowning as the call for the early evening prayer started to rise. ‘If you weren’t so slow, we’d be there by now.’
‘Let’s not go,’ Salim said suddenly. The fear that had crept up while he climbed under the wall now swept over him in a bitter wave. In the evening light his feet looked red again, red as the blood on the stones, as the sound of screaming. But Mazen just laughed and said, ‘Chickenshit baby boy.’ He wiped his mouth and grabbed Salim along by the arm into Jaffa’s narrow alleyways, as the words of the muezzins flooded the city, dissonant keening, rolling down from every quarter.
They burst into Clock Tower Square as the songs faded. Salim was panting and his arm was sore. Mazen let go, and he stood for a moment to catch his breath and calm his pounding heart. His eyes ran automatically up the Tower’s severe angles. A plaque on the wall read Sultan Abd Al-Hamdi II. They had learned about him, the great Ottoman emperor who was short of money – or perhaps of patience – and asked Jaffa’s leaders to pay for the Tower themselves. Today, there was hardly a rich man in Jaffa – Muslim, Christian or Jew – who didn’t claim to have bankrolled it.
But all that was over now. At the other end of the Square, like an ugly tumour, the ruins of the New Seray Government House lay in a shattered pile. The building itself had been blown completely open, gaping over the Square like a toothless mouth.
He crept over to the rubble. Mazen was watching a man wrapped in a keffiyeh pulling stones out of the pile.
‘I bet there are still bodies under there.’ Mazen pointed to dark red stains. ‘Or maybe arms, or legs or something. If my father had been voted Mayor instead of that idiot Heikal, he would have cleaned all this up by now. Smell that stink! Or maybe you can’t, because Hassan smells like this all the time.’
Salim felt his stomach heave. The bomb had been hiding in a truck of oranges, they’d said. The man who drove it must have looked like an Arab, but he was really one of the Irgun, the most dreaded Jews of all.
They’d heard the boom on their way to the schoolroom, and afterwards the screaming. Hassan had turned to run back, his schoolbag bouncing across his shoulders. Salim had run too, terrified to be left behind. He’d clutched at Hassan’s bag until it vanished ahead of him into a thick yellow cloud. And then the cloud was on him too, choking him with dirt, while under his feet shards of glass and stone crunched and broke, sending him sprawling to the floor. Through the ringing of his ears he’d heard sirens. Someone was screaming over and over again. Omar! Omar! He was lost in a dark well – he was drowning, he tried to call Hassan’s name but dust filled his mouth. Something large and soft was lying near his legs, leaking in slow pulses, turning his canvas shoes red under the faint returning sun. The colour had blossomed around him as he lay transfixed. Until Hassan suddenly appeared overhead, grey dust spattered over his face, his eyes white as a beaten horse. He’d hauled Salim up by his filthy shirt and dragged him home.
The next day Jaffa’s mothers howled while the British soldiers crawled over the ruins. He’d watched paralysed as Mazen pulled a strip of someone’s shirt from under a piece of masonry. It was white cloth, wet and stained black with blood and caked brown dirt. The smell on it was foul, and it stayed with him even when the police came to chase them away.
Salim pulled at Mazen’s shirt. ‘Please can we go? I don’t like it here.’ Mazen shook Salim’s hand off, but he turned away all the same. They’ll become ghosts, Mazen had told him as they carried the bodies away. The dead can’t rest without vengeance.
They made their way to Souk El Attarin, to buy sweets. The mounds of pistachio, lemon, rose and gold smelt as delicious as ever, but Salim’s mouth was dry. The boys were used to fighting through the crowds to get their share. Not today, though. The souk was almost empty. The old shopkeeper looked at them with hungry eyes as they handed over pocket money.
‘Hey, Salim!’
Salim looked around in alarm; they were not supposed to be out so close to curfew.
‘Shit,’ said Mazen loudly, ‘it’s the Yehuda boy.’
‘Hi, Elia,’ said Salim. ‘How’s life?’ He shifted, grateful the Square was empty. It was not so good to be seen with a Jew, even a local one.
Elia was older than Mazen, fair skinned like Salim with thin arms. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and said ‘Yani,’ the universal Arabic expression for that grey place between good and bad. ‘I was going to see my father,’ he said, pointing in the direction of Souk Balasbeh, the clothes market. ‘We close early now. He doesn’t like me to walk alone, with all the troubles.’
‘Who’s causing the troubles?’ said Mazen. ‘Your father and his friends, that’s who.’
‘He’s not one of those people, Mazen,’ Salim protested. He dimly remembered a time when they had been allowed to be friends. Elia’s father, Isak Yashuv, was nearly an Arab. You could never tell him apart from any other Palestinian, with his dark Iraqi skin and hawk eyes above the coals of his nargile, bubbling away all day long. But Elia’s mother came from outside Palestine, with the white Jews.
This had been endlessly and furiously debated in Salim’s house when a final h
alt was called to Elia and Salim’s friendship.
‘A Jew is not a Palestinian and a Jew is not an Arab,’ Abu Hassan had yelled at him, his hand hitting the table. ‘They are all bastards who came here for nothing but to rob us. You want to shame me?’
‘For God’s sake, calm down,’ said his mother coldly, her high forehead smooth as glass. ‘Isak’s family was fitting buttons in Souk Balasbeh before you were born. And as for his foreign wife – what about me, eh? Didn’t you drag me to this forsaken country, like a cow in a cart?’
Salim knew that his mother and the pale Lili Yashuv had a strange kind of friendship too; when they went to collect her finest clothes from Isak’s shop, Lili would talk to her in halting Arabic with a heavy accent. And his mother would smile in a way she rarely did even with the wives of the other ay’an.
Today, Elia looked even more miserable than usual. His family was among the tiny handful that still kept a foothold in Jaffa; the rest had moved to Tel Aviv. Their shop in the textile souk had become an open target, but Isak refused to move. ‘I won’t give in to this madness,’ he’d said, doggedly coming into work every day while his small stock of business dwindled.
‘My family don’t want any trouble,’ said Elia to Mazen. ‘We just want to work. But it’s not just the Irgun causing the problems.’ He jerked his head over to the south, where the Najjada and the Arab Liberation Army headquartered.
‘Look, Elia, I’ll take you to your father now,’ said Salim quickly. Mazen had a look Salim knew well, his beating face. ‘We have to get back before the curfew.’
‘Okay, Yehuda boys,’ said Mazen, the words smeared with contempt. ‘Enjoy your walk. I’ll see you when the Arab armies come.’ He moved across to Elia, and bent his head towards the other boy’s ear. ‘There are thousands of us, Jew. You’ll see.’ And he turned his back on them and ran across the Square.
‘You don’t have to walk with me, Salim,’ Elia said. The sky was turning dark now, slate grey clouds rolling in with the night.