Ishmael's Oranges

by Claire Hajaj

  ‘I want to take the harvest,’ he said, pulling himself upright. ‘It’s my right. My turn.’

  She laughed softly. ‘So you want to be a fellah too, my clever boy?’ The words pricked him into shame, just like Mazen’s.

  ‘I’m not a fellah,’ he said hotly. ‘But they’re my trees as much as Hassan’s. And now I’m seven, it’s my turn. You and Baba promised.’

  She took his chin in her hand, fingers smooth as marble. ‘Well, effendi. There’s one thing we can thank God for. He gave you a clever mother – w’Allahi, just as clever as her son. Too clever for your Baba, anyway. We spoke tonight, after the shisha calmed him down a bit. Go downstairs tomorrow morning and kiss his hand – and you’ll have your harvest. There – that’s your birthday present, ya’eini.’

  He clutched the edge of the pillow. The surge of joy was so unexpected, seizing his breath like the slap of cold surf on the beach. His arms were around her neck, and the words Mama, Mama came into his throat but he swallowed them in case they brought tears too, like a baby.

  She held him against her. ‘Never worry, ya’eini,’ she said softly, her breath warm against his hair. But then something shifted – she disengaged his arms, pushing him back to the bed. ‘Bookra, Insha’Allah,’ she said to him, her face turning towards the door. Tomorrow, if God wills it. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said in reply, feeling the old tug in his chest.

  She leaned over to kiss his cheek, and he remembered at the last minute, in a rush of anxiety.

  ‘Mama,’ he said urgently. ‘What about the Jews coming?’

  She stopped in the doorway, framed softly against the light in the hall. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Abu Mazen was talking about it. And Mazen, and the Frères. Will it be like Deir Yassin? Why did they do that?’

  At first she did not answer, and he feared he’d angered her. When she spoke at last, the words were slow, as if she drew each one from a well.

  ‘They are all dreamers here, Salim,’ she said. ‘The Jews dream of a homeland, the Arabs of the way things were. Your father dreams of being rich. Even me.’ She sighed and looked away. ‘When dreams become more important than life, you don’t care what you have to do to grasp them.’

  He lay motionless, the pillow still tight in his hand, his chest still light with happiness. When she spoke of dreams, all he could think of was the trees in the garden.

  She turned to go, but he saw her hesitate – and her hand reached down to touch his face.

  ‘Salim, if someone calls you a farmer, don’t deny it,’ she said. ‘The fellahin are the only honest men in Palestine. They truly own this land – not the Jews and not the ay’an. They built it with their hands and sweat. They would have saved it if they could. But they were betrayed. Do you understand?’

  Salim nodded, determined not to disappoint her. In truth, her words were as bewildering as a song. They left him confused, tired and entranced.

  Her hand left his cheek and she said, ‘Sleep now.’ But Salim lay awake long after she left. Then, the day slipped from him into the well of exhaustion and his eyes fell shut.

  ‘Every Jew has a foundation story,’ Rebecca used to tell her. ‘Where they were when Israel was born. And you, Judit, are your mother’s.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be a war story.’

  ‘You are your own story, mommellah. To yourself. You can’t help what you are to other people.’

  ‘It took me days to get her out,’ Dora would say whenever the Ryhope Road Shul would start worrying over the war for the Homeland, like dogs over a bone. Her finger would shake in the air, conducting a personal symphony of woe. ‘She was late, because I was so worried sick with her uncle in the army, you know, in Jaffa and Haifa. Glued to the BBC day and night we were, with all those meshuganas, those bloody Arabs threatening to push us into the sea.’

  This was how it went on: they’d just closed up Gold’s Fashions and were driving home when Dora felt the first wave of true pain kick her like a horse. She’d grabbed Jack’s steering arm and shouted, ‘Stop you idiot, it’s coming!’

  Thirty minutes later they were staggering into the Sunderland Royal, where Dora was annotated on the obstetrician’s chart: D. Gold, elderly primigravida – NB DIFFICULT. The midwife made sure the doctor on call was sober, changed her apron and readied herself to be soothing.

  But it was all for nothing. Dora’s pains lingered, the doctor poked and prodded, but her waters did not break. Two days passed under the unflinching hospital lights before they finally decided to pull the baby out for better or worse.

  Jack called Judith’s arrival ‘the Miracle of Steady Driving’. Dora, on the other hand, blamed it on an act of God – a sign that her daughter’s birth was, in some way, a catastrophe narrowly avoided. It was the price of her middle-class entry into the great theatre of Jewish suffering – a forty-eight-hour labour that reduced her to yelling ‘For God’s sake, get it out of me!’ There was enough blood and ripped flesh for a battlefield and at the end a tiny, limp girl born struggling for oxygen just as the new State of Israel was drawing its first breath.

  Judith was installed in a bedroom already occupied by Gertie, a shadowy presence of sixteen. ‘Not your blood sister,’ Grandma Rebecca explained once, ‘but one of God’s people all the same.’ Her first memories were of Gertie, lying beside her at night and weeping. The music of that crying spread over her childhood like a pale blue stream, creeping into her dreams and filling them with sorrow. Then one day she found a picture under Gertie’s pillow: a different family – two stiff girls with the same solemn look, holding a baby boy in their arms. A note on the back read: Gertrude, Esther und Daniel Kraus, Wien 1939.

  Judith’s birth certificate, filled out in Jack’s shaky hand, read: Judit Rebecca Gold. Dora had insisted on the Judit. This was her own mother’s name, an early war death in Budapest still violently mourned. Dora’s youth had been filled with Judits; it never occurred to her how the name might wear outside the clannish walls of Sunderland Judaism, in a sturdy English classroom filled with Charlottes and Victorias. And she would have been horrified to learn of the treacherous h her daughter stealthily added to the end soon after her fifth birthday.

  ‘It sounds funny, Bubby,’ Judith said to Rebecca during the walk back from kindergarten, hanging her pale blonde head. ‘They laugh at me. Why can’t I have another one? Will you ask Mummy for me?’

  ‘Oh mommellah,’ Rebecca said, her freckled hand stroking the white, chubby one. ‘One day when you’re older, you can choose your own name, just like Papa did, and I did too. But when we’re little we have to have the names our parents give us. They’re our baby names, they show that our mamas and papas love us so much and hold us close to their hearts.’

  ‘But why did she choose such a funny name? Your name isn’t funny. Tony doesn’t have a funny name either.’ Anthony, her wealthy teenage cousin, was much envied and talked about in the Gold household.

  ‘Your mama called you after her mama, because she loves you as much as her mama loved her. That’s how we remember the people we love, by keeping them alive in our children. That’s why your papa gave you my name too, so that when I’m gone you can remember me and keep a little piece of me alive.’

  Judith shivered and drew her grandmother’s warm hand next to her cheek. A pet budgie had died in their class the week before. She had watched in tears while the teacher scooped up the tiny bright body, its red legs curled into withered little stalks on the soiled cage floor.

  ‘Don’t die, Bubby,’ she said very seriously. ‘I want you here.’ How would life be without her grandmother’s easy voice, her warm red hair and soft lap to sit on?

  Rebecca was as much a part of her as her name. Rebecca was the shriek of the gulls above Ryhope Road, the air scrubbed and raw as a kitchen sink, the distant moan of the shipyards. She was the grimy churn of the sea at Roker beach, the roar and grind of the docks – the sounds she called the heartbeat of the north. Sometimes, when the great tankers sailed up the Wear and
stirred the waters into foamy life, Rebecca would take her down to the banks. And Judith would be lifted, safe in her arms, to hear the cheers of the crowds and wave her pocket handkerchief at the shining vastness of steel.

  Sometimes Judith wondered why their family seemed so thin and small compared to the other Jewish clans at Shul every Saturday. They never felt like a clan even together – even on the family days out at Roker beach. There, Dora would sit motionless on the deckchair behind her sunglasses, while Jack fanned himself with the Sunderland Echo and Shipping Gazette. Gertie stayed under the umbrella, fully clothed, and Judith would sit alone with her bucket and spade – desperate to paddle but afraid of the waves.

  Rebecca explained it like this.

  ‘You come from a family of mensches,’ she said, using the Yiddish word that means a worthy and righteous man. Her fingers traced the gold Star of David always hanging around her neck – a wedding gift. ‘That’s not true for everyone round here, mommellah. Your grandpa and I, God rest him, had three wonderful boys. Each of them did something good with his life. Your Uncle Max is fighting to build our homeland in Israel. Uncle Alex is giving some of all the money he makes to help poor and sick people. And Jacob, your papa, well – he and your mama thought they could not have children, so they took Gertrude in when she was a little girl just like you, saving her from the Camps. And they are keeping me in my old age, too.

  ‘So you see, God sent them you as a reward. And He sent work for each of my other sons – more important than raising big families. Don’t be sad about it. It’s a mitzvah, a blessing for us.’

  Her cousin Tony had a different perspective.

  ‘Dad says that Max is crazy,’ he said, through a mouthful of rum and raisin ice-cream, during a visit up from London. ‘Mad as a fruitbat, living in the desert, growing melons and shooting at the natives. St Max of Zion, we call him. As for my Dad, maybe old Grandma has to tell herself that he’s some Jewish Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the schmucks.’ He grinned and ruffled Judith’s yellow hair. ‘Frankly I think your Pop is the only normal one in the family. So cheer up, bubbellah. You’ll probably be normal as normal too.’

  War children shouldn’t grow up to be normal, Judith remembered thinking. They’re supposed to be heroes. Mensches. That was how the story ended for Dora, the Sunderland version of the great Foundation of Israel and Judit Gold. St Max came back from the fighting after the Yishuv was safe, when the five foreign Arab armies had been routed and half the local Arabs had vanished with them. ‘He told me that at the minute, the very minute she was born, Ben-Gurion was raising the flag.’ Max had presented Dora with a dirty blue patch of fabric embroidered with a six-pointed star, as a birth gift. ‘He wore it when he signed up, and it went with him from Jaffa to Yerushalayem,’ she’d say. ‘Something to remind Judit of all the sacrifices our generation made.’ But Judith had only seen Max’s star once in her lifetime. She’d spied it, a ragged square hidden away in Dora’s make-up case like an old schmatter. ‘Your brother might be dining with the righteous,’ she heard her mother say to Jack in an unguarded moment, ‘but he’s not exactly money in the bank.’

  Judith had touched it lightly, as if it might hurt. It was torn around the edges and it smelt strange, a hot, red smell like dust. It was nothing like the sky-blue flag she’d seen on television; this blue was wounded, grey as the Wear at high tide, and the stains on it were dark as blood.

  Salim awoke to the sound of an explosion.

  It was a deep, piercing boom that dragged him up from the depths of sleep like a loud knock on the door. He sat up, confused; his room was dark and he could still smell his mother’s perfume.

  Outside the inky sky was fading into dawn. Hassan’s bed was unmade and empty. In the silence he could hear his own breath.

  Then it came again, a giant crash that rocked the walls and sent dust spiralling from the ceiling.

  He leapt up in terror. What’s happening? Where is everyone? Have they left me? He clutched the blanket to himself, as the tears started to come.

  The open bedroom door suddenly looked threatening, a black hole leading out into the unknown. Then another explosion hit. This time instinct drove him to his feet.

  As he raced down the stairs he felt a third boom nearly knock him off his feet. The front door was open and a grey light streamed into the house.

  Then he saw them – his mother, father and Hassan standing outside in the orange garden. They were still in their nightclothes, and Hassan was barefoot. Rafan cried in his mother’s arms, his face red as a bruise over her shoulder.

  Above them the pre-dawn sky was split with white shocks, like lightning strikes. Each blast sent bright needles of light through the leaves of the orange trees. Thick flags of smoke drifted out to sea.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he pleaded, ashes in his mouth. Even Hassan looked terrified, clutching his father’s hand like a baby.

  ‘Mortars,’ Abu Hassan replied, without looking down. A high whistling followed his words, before an explosion made the ground tremble. ‘They want to drive us out with bombs and then kill what’s left.’

  Salim looked at his mother. She stood still as stone, eyes fixed on the sea. Behind their heads, a hint of milky light warned of an imminent sunrise.

  The thuds of the mortars were still a little way distant. They were east and north, up towards Clock Tower Square and the town centre – its hospitals, the Al-Hambra cinema with its red seats, the Mahmoudiya Mosque and the churches of St Peter and St George. But between the crashes, Salim heard other sounds closer to home: shouts and sirens, the excited barking of dogs and the squeal of tyres.

  Suddenly someone was banging on the gate; the whole Al-Ishmaeli family jumped. In her shock, his mother even did the unthinkable – grabbed Abu Hassan’s arm and clung to it. She hissed ‘Get inside’ to Hassan and Salim. Neither could move, rooted to the spot like cats watching a hound.

  ‘Abu Hassan!’ An urgent voice, a man’s voice, spoke through the metal grill. ‘Open up, for God’s sake.’

  Salim recognized the voice at once; his mother did too. ‘It’s Isak Yashuv,’ she told Abu Hassan. ‘Quick, let him in.’

  Gates were rarely locked in Jaffa, even in those days of fear. But that night Abu Hassan had decided to close the rusty bolt for the first time in years; it creaked and juddered as he fumbled to pull it open. His family stayed behind, huddled into an anxious knot.

  Isak Yashuv’s black eyes were wide with haste; his beaten old Austin was behind him, its engine running. Lili stood in the embrace of its open door, her light brown hair covered by a yellow cloth patterned with flowers. In the back seat, Elia sat bundled up beside piles of bags and clothes. His eyes caught Salim’s, and he looked away again in confusion.

  Isak was talking quickly to his parents. ‘This is the Irgun, Abu Hassan. They’re going to take Jaffa today or tomorrow. I’m worried they’ll come through our neighbourhood, so I’m taking the family out.’ Isak lived in Manshiyya, on the flimsy border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. ‘You should lock the door and don’t let any fighters use your house. Stay out of the fighting and the Irgun will stay away from you.’

  ‘So where are you going?’ asked his mother, coming up to stand by her husband.

  Isak gave her a strangely apologetic look. ‘To Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘Whatever dream we have been living is over now. Either the Irgun will get us in their attack or the Arabs will, in revenge.’

  Abu Hassan turned his head from side to side, as if the answer might materialize suddenly out of the orange trees. While he hesitated, Salim’s mother said coldly, ‘We will not run. This is our house. There are soldiers here too, let them protect us.’

  Isak raised his hands. ‘Don’t put your faith in soldiers, Umm Hassan. Thousands are already making for the port and onto ships. Arab fighters are among them. I thought Jaffa must be empty and you would be alone here. But if no one stays, who will be left to claim Jaffa after this madness is over?’ He shook his head, unable to say mor
e. Salim was astonished to see wetness on his cheek.

  Lili came up now, touching Isak lightly on the arm. In her weak Arabic she said, ‘Don’t frighten them so, Isak.’ Turning to Salim’s mother, she said, ‘Stay, if you want to keep your home. Go into the cellar and stay. I know what you think, but these people are not monsters. They just want…’ She made a gesture with her hands, before falling silent and dropping her eyes. Salim stared at her. What was she saying? What did these Jews want? There was nothing for them here. Everything here belonged to him.

  Then Lili was tugging on Isak’s sleeve and speaking to him quickly in Hebrew. He turned his head back towards the car and Elia.

  ‘We have to go now,’ he said. ‘God bless you and your family, Abu Hassan. I hope…’ but whatever he hoped was lost in another crash and rumble.

  With a last look at Salim, he urged his wife back into the car. Elia’s eyes held his as the engine roared into action and the Austin sped off towards the coast road.

  His mother turned to Abu Hassan. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she said to him. ‘Lili is right. If we go, who knows what could happen to this house? The British are still in charge here, aren’t they? Call Michael Issa!’ The Christian was hailed as one of the heroes leading the Arab Liberation Army. ‘Go to see the British. Make them do something!’ She clenched her fists in rage, Rafan wedged hiccupping under her arm, as the sky flickered and shook behind them.

  Back in their house, the long, slow Sunday morning dawned – and gradually the noise of the shelling stopped. A dull silence fell. No mosque called the morning or the noon prayers. As the heat of the day rose, so did the sound of car horns, the rumble of engines and the babble of frightened voices. Salim thought they were coming from the port. Isak Yashuv was right. The whole of Jaffa was in flight.