by Claire Hajaj
‘You have to come back,’ Marc was saying. ‘Mum and Sophie want you to. I do too.’
Salim gripped the telephone. Marc. Rafan. Palestine. The Orange House. It was too much for one mind to measure. Out of nowhere a ridiculous memory surfaced, the discussion with Jude at Virginia’s all those lifetimes ago. Who could you be, she’d asked, if you didn’t mind giving up everything you are now? And he’d told her it was impossible to weigh the value of things past against the price of those things yet to come.
‘We’ll work something out,’ he told the boy at last. ‘You’re right, we should be together.’
But the words that seemed so true for Marc on the telephone later began to fester. In the days that followed, every morning brought a rush of new anger, pitiless as the rising sun. The unfairness of it all rankled. Jude had forced his hand. If he refused to return, she would say he had chosen to leave them.
‘You can’t force me to live in England,’ he told her when they discussed the arrangements. ‘But while the children are young I’ll make sure I come often to visit.’ She sounded taken aback. What did you expect? he wanted to throw at her.
He moved into a small apartment in Kuwait City and took part-time work so he could come back to see them for a few months a year. The first time he touched down at Heathrow, Jude and the children met him at the airport. They came hurtling into his arms and for a while it was like those first years of their infancy, when all they knew was love. That night he lay next to Jude in their first marriage bed, the warm smell of sweat and bare skin surrounding them, and watched her sleeping face.
By the third year of their separation, he’d moved into the spare room. And the children no longer came to the airport to meet him. Only Sophie still hugged him when he came through the door. And Marc, caught in the cruel pinch of adolescence, asked him to sign a piece of paper promising not to fight while he was there.
But the arguments came despite it all. No matter how many times he was driven to accuse her – of coldness, of betrayal, of rejection – she refused to bend. She was not sorry. She had done the right thing. In that house, everyone had a purpose. Jude had found her place teaching English, telling old stories to London’s multicoloured classrooms. Jews and Arabs and all the rest, she liked to say. Sophie was one of her eager young students. And Marc was still caught in his dreams. Soon he would join the Royal Ballet School, and leave them all behind. The brightness of their lives cast a shadow over the failures of his. He brooded on them, until the steps onto the flight to Heathrow felt covered with nails.
One day Salim came from the airport to find the house empty. Jude was not back from work. The twins’ bedrooms were dark. He stood for a moment, remembering that desolate morning in the desert four years earlier – the blank rooms, the closed doors.
Dropping his bag on the floor, he unzipped the front pocket and pulled out his picture of the Orange House. One by one, he picked every one of Jude’s photographs off their mantelpiece in the living room – carelessly arranged snaps of their family picnics in Il-Saraj, of Marc in his ballet shoes and Sophie riding. Once the shelf was bare, he settled the picture of the Orange House reverently on the dusty wood. He’d bought a new gold frame for it in Kuwait, but the shine off the rim made the photograph look even more ghostly, the faintest imprint of yellow and brown.
When Jude came back an hour later with Marc she apologized for being late.
‘I had to take Marc to the doctor for more tests,’ she said. ‘They think he needs help concentrating and keeping calm. Right, pet?’ Marc shrugged thin shoulders, his eyes downcast. ‘The teachers are stupid,’ he said. ‘Dancers aren’t supposed to be calm.’
Then the empty shelf and its lonely picture caught Marc’s fleeting eye. ‘What’s that doing there?’ he asked.
‘It’s our house in Palestine,’ Salim said. He saw Marc’s brow furrow and waited for the protests to start. But the boy just looked from the picture to his father. ‘I remember,’ was all he said.
One year later, on Salim’s forty-fifth birthday, the picture vanished. He was due to leave for Kuwait the following day. Jude was at work and Sophie was home with a cold, cheerfully helping him pack.
In the chaos of the spare bedroom he handed her clothes and she folded them with arms as sandy brown as Jaffa’s beaches. He had to remind himself that the little girl he’d once thrown in the air would soon leave secondary school, a year ahead of her peers. Her blossoming intelligence left him awed and fearful, the child of his memory drifting out of his reach.
She was lecturing him now. ‘Don’t you get tired of all this going back and forth?’ she said, draping a shirt into the suitcase. ‘Whatever happened to the plan to move back here for good?’
‘You’d soon get tired of me if I did,’ he said lightly, but she flicked him a questioning glance.
‘Is that the best excuse you can come up with?’
He looked away from her. It confounded him that despite her Arab colouring she was still Jude in essence – the same stubborn steadfastness. ‘You don’t understand, Sophie.’
‘That you and Mum have problems? That Marc is difficult? I grew up in this family too, you know. I remember.’
‘You only remember what you want to,’ he said, feeling defensive. ‘Or what your mother told you. It’s not always the truth.’
‘You blame us for wanting to come back here. You always have.’ Salim knew she was right even as he opened his mouth to protest. ‘We just wanted a place to settle down and be happy. You of all people should understand. I mean, after all those family stories about people running from one place to another – you, Uncle Rafan, Mum’s family. Maybe you didn’t have a choice about it then – but now we do.’
‘That’s what you think,’ he said automatically. She rolled her eyes, took the shirt into her hands and started back into the bedroom. As she disappeared, she called back, ‘Dad, did you already pack the picture? I couldn’t see it.’
He turned to the mantelpiece, alarmed. Jude’s pictures were back – restored after another fierce argument. But in the centre was a hollow space where the Orange House usually stood.
Panic flooded him. Jude must have finally thrown it away. How could she? Ripping through the dustbins, and then the cupboards in her room, he tasted the sourness of fear. His picture was nowhere to be found.
In desperation, he pushed open the door to Marc’s room. The bed was neat and the wall papered with images of male dancers, their bodies arched in hidden pain.
On the table lay the pills Marc was supposed to take when he got what he called his angry headaches. Jude had insisted after the Royal Ballet sent a warning letter: Marc had tried to start a fire in the car park – next to a car owned by a teacher with whom he was at odds.
Beside the bottle was the Orange House, lying out of its frame. Next to it lay another photograph, a replica of Salim’s blown up to twice its normal size. But this one had been defaced, Salim saw with horror. Marc had drawn other pictures over it in bold colours. Jude and Sophie stood by his tree with books in their arms. Marc was next to them in a dancer’s pose, coloured with a red tutu and gold ballet shoes. On the edge stood Salim holding an orange. A Star of David was painted over the door, above the heads of Jude and Sophie. Marc’s fingers pointed up to it, and another stretched out to his father.
As Salim lifted it in astonishment, he heard the click of the door. He turned to see Marc framed in the door with his ballet gear, poised like a bird ready to flee.
‘I was making it for your birthday,’ the boy said eventually. ‘It’s better than looking at that old picture all the time. You should have a picture of us to take with you.’
Salim held out the photograph. ‘You put a Star of David on my house.’ Marc rubbed his forehead and cast his head down, his foot tracing a jagged path on the floor.
‘Sort of. But that’s not what it means.’
‘What? What do you think it means?’ Salim’s relief at finding his precious picture was draining away, turning
to anger.
‘I thought you’d understand!’ Marc threw back, defiant. ‘It’s all of us and the house together. You said it was our house. That means Mum too, and the star’s for her.’
‘And what about you?’ Salim saw fear enter Marc’s blue eyes. He pointed to the boy in the tutu. ‘Do you want to be Jewish, like those boys at your school? Is that why you dressed yourself like this? To remind me you can’t be an Arab? You think I’d let a Jew inherit anything of mine?’
‘I’m not a Jew. I’m just a dancer.’
‘There are no Arab ballet dancers, Marc.’
‘Then I’ll be the first.’
Salim looked down at Marc’s picture, the pointed toes and girl’s dress, and felt rage subside into anxious pity.
‘No, you won’t,’ he said. Better he understand quickly, before it’s too late. ‘You’re not like the English boys in your class. You’re an Al-Ishmaeli, even if you don’t want to be. You can look like them and act like them. And they’ll accept you as long as I pay the fees. But you’ll never be one of them. That’s the reason there are no other Arabs at your ballet school, Marc. They know better than to try.’ Marc had started wiping his eyes.
‘You’re lying,’ the boy said, his eyes down. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’
‘Once you said I told you the truth,’ Salim said, dropping the picture and moving forward to grip Marc’s shoulders. ‘I’m telling you now. It won’t work.’ His throat constricted, and he tossed Marc’s creation on the floor. ‘A white Arab in a dress – you’re probably just a joke to them. And you’ll fail every time, like I did, if you keep pretending to be something you’re not.’
‘I know who I am!’ Marc shouted.
‘Who then?’ Salim was yelling too. ‘Tell me! Not Arab, not Jew. Not man, not woman. So who?’
The echoing silence was shocking. Marc’s eyes were red as they found his. His son whispered, ‘I know who I am.’ And suddenly he wrenched away, a blur of white, leaving nothing behind but the echo of the slammed front door.
School was out that summer’s afternoon, and the twins were home. Salim sat in Jude’s lounge on a soft, cream armchair, a new, unsigned contract in his hand. An American construction company in Kuwait needed an accountant for a year. The title was ‘Financial Assistant’. Each page seemed to laugh at him as he turned it. I was a Managing Director once, he wanted to scream back.
Jude had replaced the brown spiral carpet with apricot, and the walls were a grassy green. The late afternoon sun played across the furniture. It could almost have been an orchard – a very English one, full of light summer fruits and berries and the song of birds.
Sophie was sitting at the table cutting something out of the newspaper. Jude was busy in the kitchen; the door was open and as he looked up he heard the click of her heels and saw a flash of legs. For the first time in many months he remembered she was still a beautiful woman.
Then Sophie was walking over to him, holding something out. ‘Here, Dad,’ she’d said. ‘It’s a story from The Times. About Jaffa.’
He took it from her hand and scanned it. Something only The Times would cover, a piece about how the Jews and the Arabs were finally working together to save the old city. There was a black and white picture of the Clock Tower halfway down the article. For an instant he was back in the Square – remembering its grandeur before the days of blood, rubble and decay.
He pushed it back at her, saying, ‘Very interesting.’ Her face fell, and he felt a sharp tug of guilt. But then, as Jude walked back into the room, he was flooded with a new idea.
‘Why don’t you go?’ he asked his daughter. ‘Your exams are finished. You should pay a visit. Aunt Nadia and Uncle Tareq will look after you. You can see for yourself what all this is about.’ He indicated the limp newspaper cutting she held in her hand.
It was just one movement that undid him – the brief second when Sophie spun her brown head to the side and looked at Jude with her eyebrows raised.
Marc walked into the room just as Sophie was saying carefully, ‘That might be great! Could I bring a friend? I promised to go away with the girls this summer.’
‘Marc,’ Salim said, ignoring her. ‘Why don’t you go to Jaffa with Sophie this summer?’ Marc turned to Sophie with a puzzled frown. Salim saw her give her brother a wink, as she said, ‘Come on, Markey, it’ll be fun!’
Marc’s eyes did not meet his. They’d barely spoken since that afternoon in his bedroom. When he’d arrived back, Salim had found Marc’s picture waiting on the spare room bed – cut into neat shreds.
‘I’ve got auditions this summer at the School,’ the boy muttered. ‘I can’t make any plans.’
‘If they won’t wait for you a week or two, they’re not interested in you,’ Salim said, feeling the familiar clench of his jaw. ‘Or are you just making excuses?’
Marc flushed as Jude put a restraining hand on his arm.
‘That’s not how it works!’ he spat, and Salim could almost see the wires of tension stringing Marc’s thin body together. ‘Do you have any idea how hard you have to slog to make it as a dancer? If I miss the auditions, that’s it for me.’
‘You don’t think your history is important?’ Salim stood up, the contract pages scattering on the floor.
‘That’s not what I said. Why do you always twist everything?’
‘Because the only reason I’m not in Jaffa right now is for you, Marc. Remember? When your mother ran away with you – and you begged me to come back?’
‘That’s fucking rich, blaming me!’ Marc yelled, his face livid. ‘You ditched us in Kuwait! You told me I wasn’t a real man! You said I would be a failure! So why should I go to fucking Jaffa?’ He stepped closer to his father, hands balled into fists at his side. For one second, Salim realized in amazement that this boy was trying to deliver a man’s challenge.
He heard Jude cry somewhere in the background, ‘No, Marc!’ But it was Sophie who stepped between them, her arms raised, saying, ‘Stop it, both of you. Please. Please.’
Salim pulled her out of the way. That was the moment he thought Marc might actually hit him. But as the seconds passed he saw the boy’s courage fail him as he’d known it would, saw the fear pushing rage out of those pale blue eyes. His son’s stance altered, his weight shifted nervously towards the back foot. Salim’s head was reeling; no blow could have been more powerful than the force of his hurt and disappointment.
He heard Marc clear his throat and say, coldly, ‘I don’t know why you keep on about that stupid house. It’s not like it even belongs to you any more.’
It doesn’t belong to you any more. Suddenly he realized the insanity of it. It had all been for nothing, the visits and the compromises. He’d lost his family years ago.
He tore up the new contract with the American firm that same night. When Jude came in and found him packing his bags, she said, ‘But you’re not going back to Kuwait today?’
‘Not to Kuwait,’ he’d told her. ‘To Palestine.’
At the last minute, as he opened the door, Marc came charging out of his bedroom. He looked wild, his face white.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, his voice coming in harsh pants. Jude was standing at the back of the room, her arms helplessly by her side. The Star of David was lying on her chest wrapped around the Arabic chain he’d given her when they met. She made an effort to wear it when he was around. Looking straight past Marc, Salim pointed at her neck.
‘You should take one of those off,’ he said, hearing the venom in his voice.
She looked back, her face calm but weary. ‘They’re both part of me,’ was her quiet reply. He shook his head. Marc opened his mouth, but nothing came out. And then there was nothing left to do but close the door.
Jaffa
His homecoming started at the end of the long Mediterranean summer.
Standing on Nadia’s balcony looking west, the music of evening drifted up from the street. The song of the mosque, str
eet hawkers and car engines mingled with the scratch and wail of a record spinning on her ancient turntable. Fingers of shadow crept from the lofty Jewish settlement of Nazareth Illit down over the old city and the long slopes of the Galilee. Once, only the hills and the sky had stood above this refuge. Watch out, you monkey, Nadia used to say. Up here, Allah has an unobstructed view.
Now Salim could hear her calling him inside. She didn’t like him sitting alone out here. Brooding, she called it. But he wasn’t brooding. He was planning.
‘It’s nearly dinner time, ya Salim,’ she sang. ‘The food will get cold.’
‘One minute,’ he called back. Tareq’s voice filtered through the kitchen, shouting down the telephone in Hebrew. The deeds to the Orange House were spread out in front of him.
Nadia’s music troubled him. It was the same song he’d heard in the car that day in Beirut – the green time of his youth when he’d chosen to follow his love. But, like so many other things, that had turned out to be a false hope.
At dinner, Nadia spooned thick helpings of spiced cabbage and lamb onto their plates. Tareq lectured Salim about what Hassan had called ‘this crazy scheme of yours’.
‘What I am trying to tell you, Salim, like I said before,’ Tareq’s glasses were misty and the once black hair white at the temples, ‘taking back Arab property is a very complicated thing. People don’t win these cases against the State. And the process is agonizing.’ Tareq shook his head, took off his glasses and wiped them on the corner of his jacket. ‘Agonizing.’ He looked straight at Salim with his small eyes and kind face.
‘It seems very simple to me,’ Salim said. The table was piled high with papers, including records of other property cases Tareq had pinched from a connection at the Magistrates’ Court. ‘The Jews bought our house from a man who did not own it. A child could see that the deeds were faked. It was an outright fraud. They owe us. There are precedents for this – I’ve read about them.’ Since he’d left Jude and Marc standing at the door, he’d read about little else.