The Lady from Tel Aviv

by Raba'i al-Madhoun

  Born in al-Majdal, Asqalan, Palestine in 1945, Raba’i al-Madhoun is one of the Arab world’s rising literary stars. His other works include The Idiot of Khan Younis and The Taste of Separation. The Lady from Tel Aviv is a bestseller in the Arab world. He is an editor at the leading Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-awsat.

  Elliott Colla is a prominent translator of modern Arabic fiction, including novels by Ibrahim al-Koni, Ibrahim Aslan and Idris Ali. He currently teaches Arabic literature at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

  The Lady from Tel Aviv

  Raba’i al-Madhoun

  Translated from Arabic by Elliott Colla

  This novel is dedicated to my wife Sana. And to its characters, Walid Dahman and his mother Amina, Adel El-Bashity and Nasreddine, who lived with us for a full three years.

  Prologue

  Tomorrow morning Walid Dahman arrives in Gaza. His mother cannot believe the news. She thinks it is just a rumour or legend. Or a fable, like the story of Palestinians returning to their homeland one day.

  Each morning she asks herself, ‘Will my son come back home before I die? Will I have the chance to tell him all those things I was keeping from him? What will he tell me?’

  She has asked herself those questions over and over for thirty-eight years. She listens as the wind whispers the words back to her. She murmurs her disappointments to herself while folding them in the wrinkles and creases of her bedclothes. These are the misgivings she goes to sleep with in the evening. These are the questions she wakes to in the morning. When Walid called from London, she could barely hear him say, ‘Mama, I’m coming to Khan Yunis. I’m coming home.’ She could not believe it. She did not believe it. Her words ramble on feverishly, and then suddenly, trembling, she blurts out, ‘Son—what in heaven’s name could be bringing you back here after all these years?’

  Walid gets in about 9 am. His visit is no longer just an idea or possibility. No—he bought his ticket to Tel Aviv. He even chose a flight with an arrival time that would get him there in time to eat breakfast with his mother. For thirty-eight years she has been making breakfast and setting it out for me every morning. And now the time has finally come to eat it with her.

  He lugs a large suitcase in his right hand, a bag hangs from his left shoulder. He puts his British passport in the shirt pocket right over his heart. He closes the door behind him and begins his journey.

  Walid is meeting his mother in an apartment he has never set foot in before. They call it ‘the last bachelor pad’. It is a two-bedroom place on the fourth floor. They have made up the room on the street-side for his stay. They put a wooden bed and a wide couch in his room, along with a simple desk where Walid will sit for hours. In the morning, he will surf news sites, skim his email and reply to some of the messages in his inbox. He will also resume work on Homeland of Shadows. So many of the details of the book—his fourth novel—hang on how this trip goes.

  Something that Walid does not know: in the morning he will rise to the light of a hand-me-down sun that has passed through the Jewish settlement of Nisanit. Gradually he will come to understand this strange phenomenon for what it is, and will do what everyone else does with it. In his dreams, he will wash out the sun. He will do his best to wash away all the shadows of possibility so that the sun stays clean all day long. Yes, as the sun begins to venture off once more into the night, the settlers from Dugit will steal it again. They will grab the sun just before it melts, out there, into the folds of the horizon. When that happens, Walid, like everyone else, will feel the light as it breaks out there, beyond the distant line of barbed wire, outposts and observation towers. When the sun returns again the next morning, it will be wearing clothes cast off by others.

  Among the other things that Walid does not know: the last bachelor pad on the fourth floor of the apartment building sits just below the roof, which houses a small poultry farm. His maternal cousin, Nasreddine Dahman, constructed the apartment building during the economic boom of the seventies. In those days, Israel purchased Gazan lives by the year and in bulk. It bought bronzed Gazan forearms licked by the noonday sun and stroked by the salty Mediterranean breeze. In this way, a river of pure Gazan sweat flowed into Israel, irrigating the agricultural sector, mixing into the cement of settlements, and washing the dirty streets clean. That river of sweat was even blended into exquisite cocktails and, some said, used to distil drinking water.

  In his day Nasreddine was a hulk of a man. He was tall, with broad shoulders and arms that could lift anything. His hands were so rough he could rub the face off a coin with his bare fingers. When he smashed almond shells against the wall, the explosion could be heard by all eighty thousand inhabitants of the Beit Lahia and Jabalia camps.

  Nasreddine used to carry his grandfather’s goat on his shoulders. Abbas, his grandfather, had bought the animal so he could rent him out during the mating season. Tan, with honey-brown eyes, that goat had a silky red beard very much like the old man’s. Across Nasreddine’s massive shoulders, it looked like a kitten.

  Nasreddine had a handsome face and the kind of dark skin that women go crazy for. Not that Nasreddine appreciated what he had, or even realized its significance. He hated the colour of his skin and said that it was the dull hue of aubergines. Because of this, he could not stand dishes that contained that swarthy vegetable. And he despised pop songs about tawny beauties—in his mind, they were appalling jingles that only drew more attention to the bad luck of men and women born with brown skin. For roughly the same reason, he loathed Gregor Mendel. Every now and then he would rail at the geneticist, calling him an imbecile who lied and fabricated his evidence. One morning, back in high school, Nasreddine had told his biology teacher that if Mendel’s genetic theories were correct, he would have inherited his complexion from his mother and father in equal parts. If the famous Austrian’s theories were at all correct, he would have had at least something from his father—like eyes so blue the sea would envy him, or hair fairer than sandy beaches, or the coppery skin of a pomegranate. Nasreddine’s teacher laughed and his dark-skinned classmates applauded him.

  Nasreddine found employment in many trades. When the walls of apartment buildings began to go up in the Jewish settlements, it was on his back and shoulders. When Sderot and Rehoboth and Ramat Gan and Ashkelon—not to mention many other Israeli settlements, towns and cities—threw out their rubbish, Nasreddine devoted himself to hauling the stuff away. His hands planted their apple orchards and vineyards, his back heaved crates of export citrus.

  Nasreddine would disappear into Israel for a day or more—sometimes for an entire week—selling his day to Israeli taskmasters. When night descended, he would spread out his exhaustion like a mattress and pull the sheets of darkness over him as covers. Over ten years of work, he had managed to save up a few thousand dollars and this enabled him to build a single-storey house for his parents. Over the years, the sweat of his oldest sons raised that house even higher, floor by floor, to the sky. Like him, they had not been able to sell their labour on the local market, and so went elsewhere. In time, the house became a four-storey edifice that took its name from the man who had first built it. Eventually, the Nasrite Building became the envy of many others still standing and others that died, nameless, under the blades of occupation bulldozers.

  Walid knows that Nasreddine has seven children. He remembers the names of the five sons, though their identities are scattered in faces he has only ever imagined. And there are two girls who are more like constellations of letters than actual people. This hazy familiarity was a blessing—it allowed him to imagine his cousin’s children however he liked, changing their faces and personalities at will. Sometimes he imagined them dark-skinned and sometimes fair, but most often as comp
lete amalgamations. Featureless, they drifted in and out of his imagination. When he grew tired of imagining them this way, he made them out to be perfect replicas of the young Nasreddine and assigned them names at random.

  But Walid does know some things for a fact. He knows that Abdelfettah is Nasreddine’s eldest—and it is on his account that people call his cousin Abul-Abd. He knows that since birth, Abdelfettah has maintained his position at the head of the siblings list. As the first-born son, he enjoys special status with his father and, with others, a certain respect. Walid also knows that Falah occupied the junior-most rank of Nasreddine’s children. They used to call him ‘the last grape in the bunch’ until he was killed during an incident with an Israeli infantry unit. That happened three years ago on the outskirts of Beit Lahia. When Falah fell off the list, the bunch lost its last. That day the list of Nasreddine’s children was revised and Shafiq was reassigned the position of the youngest.

  Of Nasreddine’s sons, only Shafiq was still a bachelor—and it is in the salon of his apartment that Walid’s mother spends most of her time, wallowing in her dread and apprehension. Like a statue of Buddha, she sits cross-legged on a small cotton mattress spread out on a cane mat. Her chin rests directly on her fist. It does not matter whether it is her left fist or her right, since in any case she shifts back and forth from one to the other. Her small head rests right on top, like a small watermelon perched on a bony stick, her elbow buried deep in a thick thigh. She remains like this for a long time and then, when her arms get stiff and tired, she rests them in her lap again.

  In this way, Umm Walid goes on hunching over herself. Her contorted poses confirm that certain details of her frame have vanished. Six years ago, when rheumatism began to occupy and settle across her lower limbs, her legs engaged in a unilateral withdrawal. Eventually, they became little more than a horizontal projection from her lower half. Her body began to shrink into itself, as the flesh and fat slowly melted into a shapeless mound around her shanks, until finally all traces of frame and figure had been erased.

  Yet Umm Walid’s body maintained a chest as wide as a threshing floor and a memory that laughed at forgetfulness. She remembers what Walid told her on the phone that morning, ‘Mama, I’m coming to Gaza to visit you.’ The words turned her world upside down.

  She remembers sharing her doubts with him, ‘Are you toying with me, Walid? My boy, are you really going to come back after all these years?’ She recalls what she remembers, and still cannot believe it. It is too astonishing to believe, so she tries to call up the scene again.

  ‘Mama, really! I’m coming to Gaza to see you.’

  ‘Anything’s possible, son,’ she says—and surrenders to the wait.

  When her nephews brought Umm Walid to their building about four months ago, she spent the first night at their father’s house, as custom would dictate. Ever since, Nasreddine’s sons have vied with one another to play host to their father’s aunt. They love her dearly as an aunt inherited from their father and as an adopted grandmother for their young ones. The young children’s maternal grandmothers had all disappeared some time ago, swallowed up somewhere amidst the closures, curfews, checkpoints, aerial bombardments and recurrent ground offensives—not to mention the chaos of the Palestinian Authority and the militias.

  Zuhdiyya, Nasreddine’s mother and their paternal grandmother, had a stroke that left her half paralysed the day her grandson Falah was killed. Now she spends what remains of her days in a bed in a corner of her son’s apartment. This woman, who used to do all the laundry for the nine people in the family by hand, now waits, with some shame and embarrassment, for the person who will someday come to wash and say prayers over her dead body. The young children only have one real grandmother now, Ruqiyya, Nasreddine’s wife. There are fourteen of them, girls and boys; the oldest is not even six, and the youngest has yet to let out his first real scream. Since there are so many of them, the kids have little chance of getting even a hug from her.

  When Umm Walid arrived it was with a warm breast broad enough to hold them all in a single loving embrace. But she changed when her legs stopped working and has now become a kind of radio whose volume and frequency are difficult to modulate. Compensating in talk and chitchat for what she has lost in terms of bipedal ambulation, nowadays she gets around mainly by way of tongue and lips and words. One day, two months after she arrived at the Nasrite Building, deluging them with informative programmes, Emad, Nasreddine’s second son, put forward the following proposal to the younger Nasrites, their wives, sons and daughters: they would implant an electronic chip in a small incision just under her tongue. The chip would help them adjust the broadcast function by remote. They could thus control the volume on their aunt in a convenient, fully civilized manner, or even turn off the torrent of words if necessary. For instance, you might want to change the channel so as to listen to Israeli bullets, aimed precisely to hit any Gazan that had the misfortune of standing in their way. (Then again, perhaps those pedestrians are the lucky ones, since at least in death they might find mercy and rest?) Or you might instead prefer to listen to the ricochets of bullets fired by true patriotic Palestinian militias, competing against one another to provide security, peace and calm? Or maybe you want to listen to something else, like the ululations of women cheering newlyweds to victory and triumph on their wedding night, as in the great conquests of times past?

  But everyone began to worry about what might happen to their aunt if she were to undergo this risky surgical operation. Emad reassured them, in the smooth confident voice of a doctor in a white lab coat, ‘Medicine has come a very long way, everyone. God willing, we can also have it inserted, free of charge, in Shafa Hospital here in Gaza. For your information, I will be there personally to supervise the procedure.’

  The proposal was received with a roar of laughter, and they applauded their aunt, who would become the first woman in the Gaza Strip to be operated by remote control.

  Despite the relief Umm Walid felt at their welcome, she was still prisoner to feelings of exile and uprootedness. The further from home you go, the smaller you appear, she murmured to herself. When she whispered to herself, she did so in instalments because if you speak to yourself continuously and without interruption, you cannot take real pleasure in the words themselves. She knew her homelessness was of an honourable kind. For one thing, her exile was not extreme—it was like that of the people of Acre who were expelled not out of the city entirely, but only to its outskirts. In any case, age-old protocols stipulated that when marrying, a bride must move from her family’s home to the groom’s. Despite all this, she could be counted on to bring up ‘the story of her house’ at any point, as if it might dispel these awful feelings.

  Umm Walid’s house was, and still is, the last thing she possesses in a world whose time is about to fold up on her. She has no husband around, nor children. The only thing that has stood by her has been this home of hers. She loves it dearly and is quite possessive about it. Whenever she is alone with her home, she talks to it, reaching her fingers to the nearest wall as if to caress the features of a beloved friend. Sometimes she stretches and leans back in the tiny sitting room. That is the only position that allows her body to stretch out fully and her eyes to wander far and wide like two skiffs lost at sea. She stares up at the slanted, rickety ceiling made of thick sheets of asbestos, and she whispers a little prayer for her house. ‘May God protect you and make you strong, just as you have protected me.’ She rolls onto her side—either side, it does not matter which—and puts her ear to the ground. She listens carefully to how the house breathes. Its breath comes and goes like the soft whisper of a breeze carrying stories from beyond the hills—or is that sound the pulsing of her heart?

  She used to speak to her house all the time, complaining to it, listening to its complaints. Each night, she would dream of laying tiles across its old floor. She dreamed of painting its doors sea-blue, and its walls such a bright chalky white that on moonless nights the house would ligh
t up the entire alley. One day, she watched as her dream awoke and came true. The Nasrite boys made their aunt’s vision a reality—tiling the floor, painting the walls and its little wooden door exactly as it had been in her dream. Her house became a wedding gown. That is, until an Israeli missile threw a mourning shawl over it. The roof was thrown to the wind. Parts of the walls collapsed. Most of the sparse possessions inside went up in flames.

  Umm Walid abandoned her house for internal migration—it was the fourth such time she had done so in her life. During this time she went back to collecting all the old stories, making them into a single master narrative: ‘Our first house, where Walid was brought up, was razed by Sharon’s tanks in 1970. The Jews did that to widen the streets. They did that so they could use jeeps and armoured cars to hunt down the resistance. An Israeli shell fell on our second house during the Sharon era. I cleaned up all the rubble, shrapnel and splinters—then I rebuilt the place and plastered it. Not six months went by when an Apache helicopter fired a rocket into it. It landed right in my flour sacks. Every piece of furniture was destroyed, and a white cloud of flour filled the sky. As God is my witness, the place stood there empty, without a roof or furniture, until my brother’s sons rebuilt it for me. Abdelfettah, Emad and Shafiq put in the floor, they painted it and fixed it up. I went back to live in the house. Four months later I was sitting on the front doorstep when all of a sudden that Apache comes back. It’s hovering over us and making a racket. I say, “Lord, protect us!” Where do you think he’s going to shoot this time? No one’s around, except for a couple of Hamas twerps. One of them’s got a rifle, the other’s carrying something like a water pipe. They’re trying to hide themselves right in front of me in the alley—so I start yelling at them, “What do you think you’re doing, boys? Don’t you have any better place to go? People live here, you know—and now they’re going to shoot at us!” As soon as I say this, the missile hits. I watched myself do two somersaults through the air and land far from the house. It was God’s mercy that the missile landed inside the house, or I would have died along with those two boys. This was the fourth time that my house was destroyed by Sharon. God damn Sharon and everything to do with him—does he think my house is a military post, a training camp? Every time I build a new house, he blows it up—does he think that Hamas leaders follow me around each time I move?’