The Lady from Tel Aviv

by Raba'i al-Madhoun

  One day, about three months after Ahmad Dahman’s death, Walid’s grandfather, Nimr, asked Walid to accompany him when he went to the market to buy some tobacco. He told his grandson that the local farmers sold a wide variety at half the price the stuff went for in shops. He also told him he liked to mix different kinds together in ways that the cigarette factories could not manage. He beamed and bragged that his blend was as good as Rothmans and Kent and Craven A—maybe even better. He swore that his blend was better than the local brand Si Salem.

  The two walked down the main street. Walid listened intently as his grandfather talked about the scents and flavours of all the various kinds of cigarettes. Since tradition dictated that Walid would never light one in the presence of the patriarch, his pleasure was confined to talking about them.

  ‘Walid, my son, do you know Khamis al-Sawafiri? Khamis is the one who was doing all the stealing. I heard that he had a fight with your father over a woman from Jaffa named Sawsan al-Ghandour. They say she is a beauty. Khamis had his eye on this woman. And some say—though only God knows if it’s true—that she had her eye on your father. Khamis started to steal the stuff from the distribution centre and one of his employees pointed the finger at your father. When Khamis fired your father, he planted the sickness in your father’s heart that eventually killed him. You know what, son? I never believed for one second that my son had anything to do with this Sawsan or any other lady. I am his father and I knew him better than anyone else.’

  That is what Walid’s grandfather told him.

  The story so stunned Walid he could only stutter, ‘If I’d known, I would have killed him.’

  ‘No, son. No, Walid—let God wreak His vengeance on those who oppress others.’

  Walid looked at the cement grave. He stared at the shadows dancing on the leaves of the tree above. Here and there above the grave, small bags hung from branches. They fluttered in a breeze infused with the dankness of graveyard soil and the thirsty perfume of the desiccated wildflowers that grew here and there.

  A sudden gust flew up and the leaves of a low branch brushed against Walid’s forehead. Walid turned to look and was surprised to see a delicate handkerchief hanging in the branches. It was embroidered with a design and in colours used by lovers, and flickered coyly in the wind. Walid forgot his anger at the wind and began to listen to a nervous voice inside. Did his mother tie a handkerchief to a tree branch every time she visited the grave? Or was it Sawsan who had decorated the tree above Ahmad’s head?

  Wounded with doubt, he looked again at the grave. Did my father do that? Were he and Sawsan al-Ghandour in love? But he always used to say that my mother was the brightest flower of the Dahman girls. My mother, whose soul was torn into pieces the day he died and distributed to all the other mourners. It is horrible to think he might have been in love with someone else. True, my mother’s got a temper and a mouth as foul as a sailor’s. But she is beautiful and kindhearted. And to this day she still swears oaths on his life, as if he had never died.

  Around him, the wind whispered like a faint moan from the beyond. Walid heard a voice repeating, ‘Think about your mother, Walid.’ Walid knew it was his father’s voice.

  He recited the Fatiha and rushed out of the graveyard.

  *

  On his way back, Walid passed by Hafiz al-Batta’s shop. He bought some ballpoint pens, shampoo, toothpaste and socks—everything he would need in Cairo but knew he would not easily be able to find. He took all his purchases home and left them there, then went back out to say goodbye to his friends, starting with the three Muhammads, as he liked to call them: Muhammad, whose mother was Khadija, Muhammad al-Misriyya, whose mother was Egyptian, and Muhammad, whose family name was Samoura.

  Muhammad Khadija lived right behind Walid’s house in a cluster of homes that also housed the families who had fled the village of Beit Daras in 1948. To get there, Walid had only to head west and quickly double back at the corner.

  He knocked on the door three times. Muhammad’s mother, Khadija, called out to him from inside, ‘Come on in, Walid. It’s not like you’re a stranger.’

  Walid pushed the door open and the rusty hinge began to squeal. He walked inside and called out a greeting that was interrupted by one from Umm Muhammad: ‘Welcome, welcome! Come in, Walid!’

  Umm Muhammad turned and disappeared back into her kitchen, where she began to make tea for them.

  Muhammad was about the same age as Walid. At first, it had been childhood games that brought the two boys together. Like his father, Hassuna Rayyan, Muhammad suffered from weak eyes—and now, like his old man, it was easy for him to remain, in good standing, a full member of the unemployed club. Muhammad had the same handsome wide eyes as his mother, only his were clouded over by the ash-grey hues of his father’s. At that time, all that kept Muhammad from being completely blind were the two speck-holes from which he peered onto a world he saw only in miniature.

  Muhammad had never been able to enrol in school. Separated from an education by two small clouds of ash, he never learned to read or write. Those clouds hung in the sky over every school he approached. Muhammad’s father knocked again and again on the gates of various schools to let the boy in, but they never opened.

  Years went by and Muhammad’s eyes narrowed and tightened until his sight began to sputter and choke. Finally one day they tasted their last gasp of light and stopped breathing. After that, Muhammad began to see things with his fingers instead. He began to recognize people by the sound of their voice and the noises they made. Walid was not imagining that when he approached—even when he did not make a sound—Muhammad would somehow sense his presence, perhaps by perceiving his scent from far off.

  Khadija was teasing her son when Walid walked in. ‘When he lost his eyes, he grew the snout of a dog. He knows your scent, Walid.’

  Muhammad stretched out both of his hands to shake both of Walid’s. They always used to greet each other this way, as if they were four and not two people. Muhammad replied, ‘The only scents I can smell from far away, Mama, are the scents of good people.’

  Each of them took a sip of their mint tea. Then they gulped down their drinks, as if they were hurrying off to another appointment, took their leave and went out.

  The two friends wandered through each alley as if they were surveyors sent to measure every corner of the neighbourhood. Walid began to fill the empty spaces with stories of his experiences in Cairo. He talked to his friend about Cairo’s dark-skinned girls with their bare legs and paper-thin skirts. Muhammad would listen entranced, filling in the details with the letters of the words.

  Walid told him about his studies, about his failure to be admitted to the archaeology department at Cairo University, and how he’d been forced to enrol in history instead.

  Ever since he was a child, Walid had been crazy about antiquities. He was in love with their mystery and the secrets they contained. He would often go to the Imam al-Shafi mosque in Gaza. He would pray as soon as he stepped foot inside, performing an extra prostration each time. Then he would sit like a pious devotee, studying the interior of the mosque, trying to glean the imprints of history from the ornaments on the ceiling and the surfaces of the pillars and walls.

  Walid would tell his stories while Muhammad listened, spellbound. To signal his astonishment at what he heard, Muhammad would say nothing more than, ‘There is no god but God!’ To express his amazement, he would shout, ‘God is great!’

  Walid told Muhammad stories about the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. He told him about his first visit to the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Cheops and how, upon entering, he had been forced to bend over as he scrambled along a low passageway lit by electric bulbs. He told him how his feet padded softly across a staircase of wood and rope.

  Walid recounted the incident in a whisper, the words streaming breathlessly from his lips. Muhammad was right there, breathlessly scampering after him. There was Walid, pulling on the rope, just as Muhammad was reaching for it in his ima
gination, his feet stretching to feel for the stairs beneath them. And the two friends climbed up and up until they reached the end of the tunnel.

  In that place, in the presence of the great Pharaoh whose embalmed life had been stolen by ancient thieves, the two friends stood up proudly and swaggered beneath the vaulted ceiling. For hours, they studied the granite sarcophagus. Together, they read the bas-reliefs and, using nothing but their intuition, began to translate the texts they found.

  Walid told Muhammad about the hieroglyphs of the Pharaohs and about the many ancient words still employed by modern Egyptians. Muhammad would repeat after him, ‘Sah. Dah. Embo. Kaa. Kukh. Bah. Mmiim. Nnuun. Ti. Ti. Ti. Nef. Rah. Rah. Nef. Rah. Ti. Ti. Nefrahtiti. Nefrehtiti. Who’s Nefretiti, Walid?’

  ‘She was a queen. Nefertiti was the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaton. Her name means “the Beauty to Come.”’

  ‘You mean, she was good-looking?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Walid began to describe the Beauty to Come to his friend. With letters and words, he painted the most striking aspects of her physiognomy. Muhammad drank all this in and tucked it away in his memory. When Walid had finished telling the story of the beautiful queen, Muhammad leaned his head back and slightly to the left, as if he were searching for her in the shadows of his eyes. Then he broke into a beaming smile and shouted, ‘My God—she is so damn beautiful!’ His fingers began to draw precise sketches in the air. Before Walid’s eyes, the form of the queen began to take shape, the silhouette of a crystalline idea created in the hands of a sightless sculptor. The figure of the queen hung there in the air in front of them, and the details of her marble body began to quicken. As soon as Muhammad had formed her body with the clay of his mind, the beautiful queen began to parade right before their very eyes. As she had done at the bedside of the young king thousands of years before, she danced, offering up her nude ebony skin and fine Nubian features.

  Walid stopped in his tracks, his feet suddenly nailed to the ground. ‘Muhammad, you’re an amazing sculptor. It’s exactly like her. I promise, when I come back from Egypt, I’m going to bring you a statuette of Nefertiti. And then you can decide which is more beautiful, the queen I bring you, or the one you just made in your mind!’

  The two friends roared with laughter, delighted by their game of carving statues out of thin air.

  *

  Walid said goodbye to Muhammad Khadija and went over to the neighbourhood across the way. At the corner, he bumped into his friend, Muhammad al-Misriyya, the son of Fathiyya the Egyptian and Adnan al-Badrasawi, the neighbourhood’s most infamous chicken thief. Whenever a chicken went missing, its feathers would invariably appear the next morning just outside the front gate to their house. Adnan’s wife would have dumped them there, publicizing the fact that they had supped on borrowed fowl the night before.

  Muhammad was a shoeshine. At this hour, he usually sat on his flimsy wicker stool, right behind his case of shoe polishes, creams and dyes. He would watch the feet of passersby and study their shoes, muttering under his breath at anyone who wore sandals, even on hot summer days.

  Subhi al-Nabrisi was an old classmate of Walid’s, and Muhammad so admired the guy’s shoes that more than once he just about fell in love with them. He used to say, ‘Subhi’s shoes are really good-looking. They’re cute—like baby booties.’ In contrast, he despised a boy called Fathi al-Sinwar, and cursed the day he had come to Muhammad asking for a full-service shine. The shoes that Fathi set down on Muhammad’s box were not exactly footwear. They were more like two leaky sabots whose hulls had blown out from stern to aft.

  Muhammad left school when he turned nine, before he’d managed to complete third grade. Since that time, he had always worked shining shoes so as to add a few coins to what his father brought in working seasonally in the fields.

  Muhammad was also an epileptic. Whenever he had a fit, his mind would drift into unconsciousness while his body was gripped by convulsion. His mouth would spew mounds of frothing drool and foam would collect around his lips. Whenever this occurred, everyone instantly became an expert on epilepsy and would rush over to gawk at Muhammad’s thrashing body. Someone would invariably jab a knife into the dirt next to Muhammad’s head. The crowd of experts would then listen to the screams of the devils that inhabited Muhammad’s body. They would watch the dying demons rushing out of him, scrambling over the froth on his lips. By the time the fit was over, all traces of affliction would vanish and so too all those epilepsy experts, taking their rituals and their talismans with them. When Muhammad came to again, he would be shaken and confused. He could never understand why his lips were covered in a sticky lather, or why his clothes were dirty. He was always surprised to find that someone had tossed his little stool so far away.

  Now Walid stood over Muhammad, his right shoe resting on Muhammad’s box. Muhammad lifted his eyes and looked closely at Walid for a moment, then said ruefully, ‘Going away, my friend? I already know. I want to shine your shoes until they’re as bright as mirrors. All you’ll need to do is wear your green pinstriped suit, the kind those Egyptian broadcasters wear, and all the girls in Cairo will be chasing after you. Give me your other shoe, Walid. This time it’s on the house—in honour of your return to the university.’

  Walid let him do it. After finishing his shoes, Muhammad stood up to say goodbye to his friend. Walid hugged Muhammad al-Misriyya tightly and left a silver coin on his box. Then he went off, determined to meet the last of the three Muhammads.

  *

  At nightfall, Walid met up with Muhammad Samoura just as he was returning from work. Muhammad had been a lazy tailor but was now a cop, chasing thieves through the camp.

  Walid knew that Muhammad would not pass up the opportunity to sit around and talk after work. When he got off his shift, Muhammad could be found in front of Jaber Rayyan’s little shop letting loose with heroic sagas about how he chased robbers or how he had caught some of the most wanted criminals. During the winter break, unemployed kids would spend their days and nights there, listening and retelling their own stories of unsuccessful romantic adventures.

  When Muhammad saw Walid, he left his audience and went to greet his friend. They shook hands and walked away without saying much. Muhammad had already fired off all the narrative ammunition in his clip. And Walid just wanted to get home and pack the clothes his mother had washed that morning, along with the stuff he had bought.

  Walid said farewell to Muhammad as the other went on his way toward the upper camp, behind Mustafa Hafez Elementary School. Walid hurried home.

  *

  Muhammad Samoura was the only one of his old friends that Walid had heard anything about in recent years. People said he was no longer the policeman Walid had known more than forty years ago. He had begun to receive regular promotions and moved up through the ranks. With the white armband and stripes on his right shoulder, Muhammad would strut about the streets, parading all his shiny badges and medals. When the Palestinian Authority was set up under Yasser Arafat’s leadership in May 1994, Muhammad was assigned to the Preventive Security Force, awarded the rank of second lieutenant, and given the uniform of an officer in the military. Basking in the glow of his new stars, Muhammad decided to honour his new rank in a new way. Surely two brass stars on his epaulettes meant he deserved no less than two wives.

  People said that his new, second wife was the one who shined his shoes each morning before he got out of bed. They also said that she would rub his stars with citrus rinds so they would sparkle all day long on her husband’s shoulders.

  Two years into the life of the PA, Muhammad rose to the rank of colonel, and it was President Arafat himself who pinned the new badges on his sleeves while also bestowing upon him the Legion of Honour, First Degree. Why? Because Muhammad had, with his own personal revolver, executed two men caught collaborating with Israel. It had been a daring operation, one that almost cost Muhammad his life. But that was not all. Muhammad had also rounded up a hundred card-carrying mem
bers of Islamist opposition groups. Muhammad had thrown them into Gaza Central Prison and delivered a complete list of their names to the President himself. The first thing Muhammad thought about while coming home from the promotion ceremony was that he would marry two more women. He would marry them at the same time, exactly like the first Muslims used to do. ‘A marriage,’ he thought to himself, ‘to befit my new rank, in accordance with the precepts of Sharia law.’

  His two wives—who, like any other two Palestinian factions, knew only envy, jealousy, competition and strife—formed a unity government and began to conspire against Muhammad. Unbeknownst to him, they jointly submitted a single official complaint, demanding that the PA stop ‘the wandering-eyed colonel’—which is how they referred to him—from going any further. Arafat called the colonel in and publicly reprimanded him in front of top officials and officers from all the intelligence and security agencies. Arafat raised his voice. ‘Why, Muhammad? Why? Look at me. I’m the President and leader of the nation. After spending thirty years married only to the cause, I went and married one woman. How many? One—and only one. So what makes you think you can go and marry four? You think you’re better than the rest of us? Is that what you think, Mr. Colonel?’ Then Arafat issued a decree prohibiting officers from marrying more than one woman unless they had received special dispensation from the Office of the President. Police officers and intelligence agents agreed to abide by the new regulation, as did all the other branches of the military, though their exact number has never been known by anyone. The policy took effect throughout the entirety of the national territories of the PA, that is the occupied West Bank and Gaza.