The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  ‘Let me ask you, then, simply, which of the fool upstairs or the fool from the restaurant who is even now talking to the police do you think is the more dangerous? Since I am, as you say, in your debt?’

  The older man looked at her without changing his expression, but his finger stopped tapping on his glass of water. They both noticed that an acrid smell of spray paint had crept into the room. So, Mahfouz was about his work, back in the truck garage. Soon, the white taxi would be a red saloon and he would fill the back seat with boxes of badly printed Turkish brochures – leather shoes without feet in them, as if their owners had gone to pray, or to their graves.

  Philippe smiled at her, which did not mean he was feeling happy or friendly. He sniffed the chemical air that was coming from the truck garage. ‘So, you see, how good we are, you and I, things proceed as they should.’ Then he gestured with his eyebrows and chin towards the grey wig that was still on her head – yes, he had caught her out; with the fuss about the food writer she had forgotten to take it off.

  She could not stop herself, she quickly put her hand up to her hair – the person she felt then was not who she was – she touched, for a moment only, a fool, the same one Philippe had pointed to mockingly with his chin. Philippe stood up carefully with a little grunt and dropped the cellphone into his shirt pocket. ‘I will clean, up there,’ he said, and went towards the stairs.

  All right. Of course it was unusual that he would do that, a man who made things proceed as they should. But he did not expect her to do it, that was part of his meaning. So, what was she to do? She sat with an image of her father’s cousin George Habash’s old fingers hesitating over the backgammon board. But not hesitating for long, ever. No, not hesitating – thinking. Seeing the whole board. Seeing all the time the game would take. Its past, its present moment, its future.

  Upstairs in the bathroom Philippe was sluicing the food writer’s vomit into the lavatory with the shower hose. She reached up and took the wig off her head. Thank God she was alone to do this, a kind of indecency. But then, a lightness. All this time after the restaurant she had been wearing it. It lay ridiculously on the table in front of her, like a dead cat. The sob that rose from her heavily beating heart burst out just once, a ‘Huh!’ that might have been her laughing at herself in the wig, except that a gush of tears also came out upon her cheeks. She saw again her husband Abdul Yassou jump and then sit down on the banquette, his eyes very wide, looking straight at her, while the blood suddenly poured out between the thick fingers around his neck.

  There were some paper towels on the table with the pita bread and the oil, and she took one and wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks. So, it was done. Finished. But now she had only a little time to finish the next thing. To make it happen as it should. To show Philippe the same respect he had given her – to clean up her own mess, before Antun arrived in the morning to see if they had taken his difficult situation into consideration and secured his future.

  When did this catastrophe begin? She held an ache under her eye between her fingers. It seemed to reside in the little bag there. Perhaps now was a good time to begin to ask, rather, when might it stop?

  But then, it seemed to her that this question about a beginning and an end was also like the question of the food writer upstairs – he who had begun by running away into a circumstance whose end was also at once certain and like a dream. This she understood. This at once reminded her. Every July in Amman as the weather began to get hotter and the hamseen winds continued intermittently to drive people into mad rages, Oum Musa her father’s mother, rest her soul, used to bring down a box from the big mother-of-pearl inlaid Syrian cabinet in the hallway of the house. Or rather, she required her son to bring it down. The box resided in its own compartment, which Oum Musa approached, wailing, while her assembled grandchildren watched already knowing what was going to happen. But first the maid would have swabbed the hamseen dust from the hallway floor and covered the dining room table with an embroidered cloth for the box to sit on. Afterwards, in acknowledgement of the grandmother’s emotion, and also that of her son and daughter-in-law – who were of course always present, having reserved the day in July for this commemoration – there would be tea with some lunch, and then Oum Musa would retire for her siesta which, on this day, would last until evening. And then, as the heat of the day thickened towards sunset, while the imams began to echo each other from the city’s mosques, the old woman would ascend to the roof of the house on Jebel Ashrafieh and sit facing the dusty red haze of the setting sun to the west, in the direction of Lydda, of al-Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, when Palestinians were first driven into exile by the Israelis. She wore the embroidered dress with the fine needle-work bodice from her own wedding outfit, and a headscarf of Nazareth lace with birds and flowers.

  Over there, beyond the horizon of the earth but not beyond that of her memory, on a small hill above the wide plain of Lydda in the neighbourhood around the Orthodox church, was the white-stone house built by her son when he married. It shared an old wall with a house of his wife’s family and also a well of good water and an old garden. In the little garden were two orange trees and a grapevine whose trunk was the thickness of a girl’s waist – yes, insisted the grandmother, the very thickness of her own waist when she first entered the house of her own marriage not so far away in Ramla. The front door of her son’s wedding house was made of iron and came from an old house of her husband’s family in Ramla. Her own brothers and their cousins, her son’s uncles, brought it to Lydda on a wagon when her son’s house was finished. The priest who had married them blessed it with holy water, and then walked into the house through the iron door, sprinkling water down the hallway and with smoking lubbān from the church’s great swinging thurible. In the keystone above the iron door was a finely chiselled Mar Jiryis so that Saint George might protect the house, God willing. The new walls were inset with deep windows which, on the ground floor, had decorative bars of fine iron-work on the outside. This was a large house with four rooms upstairs and four down, an outhouse, a bathhouse with a copper for heating water, and a cookhouse with a brick oven used also by the neighbours – a larger house than most of those around it, which was noticed and respected, thank God, because the families were prosperous and also because her son was a dentist to the wealthy as far away as Jaffa and Haifa, as well as the owner of orange orchards and of trade interests in the port of Jaffa.

  So went the dirge of Hawwa’s grandmother on the rooftop while her daughter-in-law hovered with a towel moistened with water and eau-de-cologne. Afterwards, when the sun had set and the sky emptied of darting swallows, the grandmother would go to mass and light candles for Saint George to remember that it was his Mar Jiryis above the door of the house in Lydda.

  Even as a little girl, Hawwa saw that her father allowed her grandmother precedence in all of this – but after she died the box was no longer taken down from the Syrian chest, though it still resided there. Because, her father said, we have to occupy the present with as much determination as the Israeli Moishe Dayan’s Lehi occupied Lydda and Ramla – may those Lehi rot in hell – and not sit waiting for any Arab to save us. And especially not those fedayeen fools who think that by blowing themselves up in Israeli minefields they will change what fate is already designing for them. Even the Maronite Phalangi, those Kataeb, are better than those fools of fedayeen though most of them are crooks and the sons of crooks and the enemies of Palestine. Over this he argued bitterly with her brothers and also especially with his cousin George Habash.

  But not, she remembered, with the young businessman Abdul Yassou when he came to live in their house as a guest from Beirut when the war started there in 1975, the son of his old friend and business partner in Lydda, because Abdul Yassou was busy cultivating the good will of her father and being careful how he looked at her, because she was only sixteen years old at that time when the Lebanon war started, while he was a grown man.

  And later, it had to be said, her father quar
relled with her, his own daughter, though she thought that in his heart he might have been proud of her spirit, which he showed in indirect ways by boasting of her success to others so that word of it reached her in the form of their jealous spite.

  But this ‘spirit’ that her father secretly loved was not entirely her own nor, certainly, that of her friends both French and Arab at the medical school in Paris who fancied themselves to be fedayeen because they wore keffiyeh and espoused armed resistance while amusing themselves in the charming open spaces of the Buttes Chaumont. It was also the spirit of her grandmother, and she had quarrelled with her father partly because her memory of her grandmother’s litany of white-stone houses, iron doors, the carved Mar Jiryis, keys, orange trees, grapevines, marriages and wedding embroideries was so strong she could not distinguish what she truly remembered from what she had been told. Because of course al-Nakba happened ten years before she was born. But because it was told over and over, it was as though she truly remembered the house in Lydda with a grapevine whose trunk was the thickness of a newly married girl’s waist, and an iron door from the time of the Ottomans or even from before the time when Napoleon besieged Jaffa, for the love of God, when her grandmother told of an ancestor who had interceded with Napoleon on behalf of the town’s Muslims. Or even, if her grandmother was to be believed, from the time of the Crusades.

  And the wooden box which her father would have lifted down for his mother from the inlaid Syrian cabinet and carried to the table in the dining room in the house of exile in Amman – it was always the same, throughout her childhood in that house for as long as her grandmother was alive: every year the grandmother would unlock the box, wailing, to reveal another key, a huge iron one with a long shaft. This was the key to the iron door of the white-stone house in Lydda. Also in the box were the deeds to the properties including the house and orchards. As well as the British Mandate deeds there was an old deed, unfolded every year with care along its creases that almost severed it into quarters, that had on it what she was told was the colophon of the Ottoman Sublime Porte. But more important even than that, insisted her grandmother with her hands laid flat on the old paper, so as to press it down and to feel its creases against her palms, was the thickness of the grapevine’s trunk, which was older even than Napoleon. And had been planted by the family along with the orange groves over towards Jaffa.

  So this was one ‘beginning’. And so was what felt like a memory of those people the Israelis drove out of Lydda, the catastrophe in that July of 1948 commemorated by her grandmother, when so many died of thirst and heat and grief along the road to Barfiliya. Her own memory, which of course she could not truly claim, was of a rubbled white-stone wall made blinding by sunlight, and beside it a long, ragged column of people whose strong shadows told of the terrible heat of the sun. This was a photograph she had seen. She imagined her grandmother there, though in fact the family had left some weeks before, thank God, taking the deed box with the great key so as to be able to return when the fighting stopped and prove their ownership of whatever was left.

  What kind of a ‘beginning’ and what kind of memory was this, truly? A photograph, and her grandmother’s ritual? An image of a time before her birth, of a place her grandmother had not been in? Its truth was in how it had shaped her life, or, as it might be, how she had shaped her life with it. Yes – this she understood; she did not deceive herself.

  And was the ‘end’ also in the deed box, which was still in the Amman house of her late father, now legally her older brother Habib’s house, though it was she who lived there when not in Geneva, keeping company with the old key that would unlock the past before al-Nakba and allow that past to flow into a present in which she would return with her grandmother’s memory to the white-stone house protected by Saint George on a small hill in Lydda whose iron door from perhaps before the Ottomans had by now, on the day of Abdul Yassou’s death, been closed already for sixty years?

  But of course the house was no longer there.

  It was not in the present.

  She knew this in the part of her that knew such things, which was not the same as the part that remembered the house and believed it, even though she had never seen it.

  Yes, like the present moment of the crazy food writer whose impulse had trapped her into this responsibility for a decision she did not wish to make, she was trapped between a false memory and an impossible dream. Between a beginning that was authentic in the experience of her grandmother, but then, after all, not authentic in the same degree as the experience of those who had suffered on the long road to Barfiliya or, now, in the refugee camps to which they had bequeathed their children’s children – because her grandmother and her mother and father and her older brothers had been luckier than the ones in the camps. Of course she also knew that her grandmother’s ‘performance’ was one of the reasons her father had locked the box away when the old woman died. It was time he said to move forward not in denial of the past and its curses but in order to prove that the family did not have to be always the lamenting victim of an unjust fate. As his daughter the physician, of whose success he was prouder than he showed, was indeed proving, despite her disobedient behavior.

  And the other side of the trap was the possibility of a false ending in which she jeopardised the safety of her comrades and those on whose behalf she had presumed to act in shooting her own husband, Abdul Yassou, who had first looked at her from beneath his long eyelashes with such secret but to her apparent thoughts from the other side of the table in her father’s house, where her grandmother was wailing as she unlocked the wooden box, when she, Hawwa, was a girl of sixteen whose own waist was the circumference of a grapevine in Lydda.

  *

  And what was the food writer’s present moment – this stupid, stupid Christopher Hare who looked at her with such dumb, dreaming hope of some future, God knows what, some liberation? He had run out after something – not after her, despite Philippe’s careful sarcasm. Or had run away from something, though hardly something like the Israeli butcher Dayan’s Lehi driving jeeps into Lydda with guns blazing. This Christopher Hare had been driven from a paradise that may never have existed except as a false memory, and now perhaps he wished to return to something like it, although, like her grandmother’s, his key was now useless. Or perhaps he saw a future unfolding from his actions. But what?

  Perhaps he was even stupid enough to hope that she, Hawwa Habash, held the key to his future? She heard her own grunt of dismay and derision in the empty, foul-smelling room – and at the same time felt a familiar pang of unwelcome compassion.

  She had seen an expression of stupid expectation like Christopher Hare’s on the faces of men and women in l’Hôpital Robert Debré, in the foyer of the urgences pédiatriques, when she came out in her white coat that was like a uniform of false hope and inauthentic authority, to tell them that their child’s kidneys were, indeed, sadly, failing, or that the beautiful, trembling, miniature pump in their baby’s chest was not assembled correctly, or that this long delay in uttering language was the result of a mental impairment, or that, unfortunately, there was indeed this problem of white blood cells, and so on and so forth. And in the camps that had by now become towns and cities, in Burj el-Barajneh and Ain el-Hilweh and Beddawi in Lebanon, in Dera’a and Homs and the others in Syria, in Baqa’a and Irbid and Zarqa and Jerash in Jordan, in Shu’fat, al-Arroub, Jenin on the West Bank, in Jabalia and Rafah, Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah and the rest in Gaza, in all of these and many other camps, as well as in the conference rooms of UNRWA in Gaza City and the WHO in Geneva, she had seen this same expression of absurd hope, however concealed by pride or deceit, sometimes a hope that she would be able to accomplish some kind of miracle, to repair the little trembling heart pump or provide proper food for the rickety child of the camps; at other times that she would be able to assist in the promulgation of a suitable lie, to defend the disbursements of UNRWA, for example, when they seemed to have become diminished in their passage thro
ugh the hands of men such as Abdul Yassou.

  Yes, to occupy this present moment and to act in it, leaving aside her father’s ranting about Dayan, which after all came from his broken heart. That was the necessary thing. To see the whole board with both hers and the food writer’s pieces on it. And also to make him play, because she would not consent to take his passive fate in her hands, which were already full.

  Yes, it was her father’s cousin George, that famous al-Hakim, that cunning strategist and leader, who had showed her and Philippe the trick of keeping a piece back on the tric trac board, to make the enemy hesitate and become defensive, and then to strike fast at the last minute and finish it. Slow, then fast, and always measuring the distance. Having it in your mind. ‘Uncle George’, smiling under his moustache, but with those large direct eyes of the Habash family not smiling, moving his arms and shoulders as if dancing rather than firing a gun.

  That was in the year before the events of September in 1970 in Amman that drove George and his PFLP militias from the city. Yes, she was a child then, and remembered only the rattling sound of gunfire before dawn, in June, when the fedayeen and the Bedouin began to fight, and her father and brothers ran to close all the shutters so that when dawn came it remained dark in the house, and for many days. The electricity that came and went, the smell of cooking on the small paraffin stove. And again, in the second part of the fighting, in September, when Wasfi al-Tal implemented his massacre with the tanks.

  But she also remembered, long past the time of her childhood, how it would be argued over and over, and not least at the time of al-Hakim’s funeral almost four decades later in the very city from which he and his PFLP had been driven out, whether that expulsion was because he lost the game, or whether he merely lost a battle in the longer war – whether he kept something back, as was his habit. Whether he saw that inevitable outcome in 1970, too, when his fighters were driven out of Jordan and into Lebanon, and won something in the end. As Philippe was not slow to remind her, George Habash had died an old man, in the city of his former enemy, that Bedouin Hussein; he had won the war of his own life, he had often struck swiftly during that long life, but also always, always he had held something back, a danger, a distraction, an uncertainty behind the line.