Knowing this, you will appreciate that, in objecting to my talking of things that are of no interest to you but are to me, you are simply being stubborn.
With feigned casualness, I accepted the invitation to dinner. Another blonde joined us outside the café, a Dutch girl, lost and wan. “I’m a backpacker,” she said with a shrug. The freed man couldn’t join—he had to return home to his wife.
“See you next weekend,” he said to me, and I nodded.
In his novel in four volumes, Leg over Leg, otherwise known as
The Turtle in the Tree
concerning
The Fāriyāq
What Manner of Creature Might He Be
otherwise entitled
Days, Months, and Years
spent in
Critical Examination
of
The Arabs
and
Their Non-Arab Peers
by
The Humble Dependent on His Lord the Provider
Fāris ibn Yūsuf al-Shidyāq
published in four volumes in the year 1855 (Gregorian), Al-Shidyaq writes:
Do I hear someone objecting here and asking: “What is the point of this banal tale?”
We walked down the slope to the border between Al-Masyoon and Ein-Menjed. Rami with the scars bought a white plucked chicken from the butcher, the neck like a nailless thumb, and Alexia bought eggplants for soaking up the oil, and I bought yogurt to clean our mouths.
His name was everywhere before I even saw him. Salah, Sallih, Sully, Slah. It was his apartment we had returned to, where we chopped the onion and fried the black-skinned slices of eggplant until they were rigid with oil and crisped some cauliflower brown and dripping—Rami had learned to cook in prison, he said—and the man whose name was everywhere was away that evening at a talk within forty-eight borders (Israel, in other words). He would be back later, they said, you’ll meet him. Sal, Sale, Sole. Rami turned the maqluba and said that if you carry your anger in your heart, you are still in prison. They do not suffer if you are angry! Only we suffer if we are angry. Anger is a prison we carry around with us. The ultimate freedom is in forgiveness.
Finally, at nearly a quarter to one, the master of the two-bedroom apartment permanently registered on Couchsurfing.com—I need this, this life, you know? he would say in explanation some days later, rubbing his fingers together as if he were touching this life—came in through the front door, laconic and slouching, teeth and eyeballs nicotine yellow, a woman behind. Laughing, they were laughing: Sal’s permit had expired at midnight, so he pretended to talk on the phone in the backseat while the young English woman—Jewish, North London—drove through the checkpoint playing Israeli music. The two of them still reeling with the thrill, she gasped, “I can’t believe I did that! I’ve never done anything against the law before!” She had big dangly earrings. She used to work in Cape Town, she would tell me later. That she’d had an affair there, with a married man.
Immediately Sal did not like me. Because, it seemed, of where I came from. All of us smoking on the balcony—Ah, you are from Nablus? pointing at me with the cigarette. High people. Very … sophisticated.
Rami started telling us about the way they passed messages in the prisons. How they were always being moved from prison to prison to stop them from organizing, how they organized anyway through their coding system, how the guards all knew, it was one big game, how they, the prisoners, put paper inside plastic and melted it into a seal “like this” (a folding gesture) until they could swallow the message whole without digesting it. Yanni, we are more organized in the prison than out of it! How sometimes the guards forced you to eat laxatives to shit it out fast, how, if you succeeded, you passed the plastic-covered notes with your lips to visitors—Salih said he did it once with his mother; she was so nervous giving the message, she leaned into the booth and kissed him on the mouth.
When we went back inside, Sal plugged his iPad into the socket. He turned on a YouTube video of Leonard Cohen playing “So Long, Marianne.”
“I am older than I look,” he said to me, leaning on the kitchen counter and running a hand through his mass of black curly hair. Then he laughed, with disdain, and asked me my age. I found him childlike in his forthrightness. My answer was a lie, just two or three years off. I would find out later he had lied also, and made himself younger for me.
His scorn was the same each time I saw him after that, and always because of where I came from. We are not high people like you, he would say, or something along those lines.
One day he changed.
“I want to use you,” he said.
It was late morning, windy and bright, and we had alighted in Jerusalem from the Qalandia bus.
“You could be useful to us. You know, another type of Palestinian, another story. You are white. And you have that accent.”
I am allegedly descended from Ibn Battuta. Otherwise known as: Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah Il-lawati A-Tanji ibn Battuta. A Sunni Berber, a great traveler through Dar al-Islam. In the year 1355 by the Gregorian calendar, Ibn Battuta visited Nablus, a Palestinian valley town in Greater Syria, where, among other things, he had sex with a local woman. That woman gave birth to a boy. She named him Kamal, “Perfection,” and there starts the family tree between the olive branches and the dusty earth skin.
Nablus is like Sidon but more so
writes Battuta in his Rihla, otherwise known as “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling.”
and the melons are of excellent quality. It is a Little Damascus, full of trees and streams, and full of olives.
Sal came from the village of Hizma. To most people the name Hizma now refers to one of the checkpoints to Jerusalem by which a red-roofed settlement stretches out over the plain. Sal’s father had been an olive farmer. He died, said Sal, of a heart attack the day the wall rose over his grove and they could not complete the harvest.
He liked to speak to me in Classical Arabic. It was what I understood best; I hadn’t mastered the dialect. O Lady, O Moon, he would say, ya qam-ra-tun jameel-a-tun, Ya Fattah.
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq tries to explain the oddities of words in the Classical Arabic language that are similar in meaning and also similar in lexical association:
Thus, among the characteristic associations of the letter ḥ, for example, are amplitude and expansiveness, as in the words ibtiḥaḥ (“affluence and abundance”), badāḥ (“broad tract of land”), barāḥ (“broad uncultivated tract of land”), abṭaḥ (“wide watercourse”), iblindāḥ (“widening out (of a place)”), jaḥḥ (“leveling out (of a thing)”), raḥraḥ (“wide and spread out”).
In my defense, I never did say he could use me.
Soon after that trip to Jerusalem, we started walking together in the evenings. At first Rami joined us, and then when Rami went back to Bethlehem to deal with his divorce it was just me and Sal. Every night we walked, and for hours; I walked myself to sleep, until I could barely take another step. Just through the neighborhoods, in circles. In Ramallah, as in other Palestinian cities, nothing is perpendicular. Walking, you are always confronted with hills: the land comes up at you.
Look at this beautiful view of the sea, said Sal, gesturing from where we sat on our pile of rubble out at the piles of garbage ahead, trenched between the earth-colored high-rises. Half of them empty, ugly shells, black sky visible through the gaps in the concrete. It was a joke: every few days we put our trash in the Dumpster on the road, and then some guy came and tipped it between the buildings. What was the difference? I heard once there was trouble in al-Bireh, the trash was spilling in, there was no space—what was needed, perhaps, was to erect a wall. A wall between us and it.
murtadaḥ (“scope, freedom”), rawḥ (“breeze”), tarakkuḥ (“spaciousness”), tasṭīḥ (“roof laying”), masfūḥ (“spreading (of water)”), masmaḥ (“ample room”) as in the saying “Keep thou to the truth, for it is ample room, i.e., space,
” sāḥah (“courtyard”), insiyāḥ (“bigness of belly”), shudḥah (“roominess”), sharḥ (“laying open”).
“How come I tell you these things?” said Sal. We were sitting on the roof of the American Colony Hotel, having a beer. He had just given a talk to a group of Australian Jews about forgiveness, and I had spent my day with a historian in the Old City.
So there was this guy, a really cute guy, with a great ass, who was new in his cell.
“Where was he from?” I asked.
Sal’s eyes widened. “Oh my gad,” laughing, surprised, “he was from Nablus!” He slapped the table. “I can’t believe it. Wallah, but he was soo cute, wallah, you won’t believe. And it happened, shway shway yanni. I’m not gay, you know that, right?” And he laughed and ran a finger through his hair, and twizzled a curl at the base of his skull. His fingernails so yellow. “And then we slept in the same bed—you know we have these beds with two levels—”
“Bunk beds.”
“—yes, and he was on the bottom and I was on the top. And then one night, he came up to my bed and—yanni we hid each other with the blanket, and we had a paper and he drew a picture … and … you know, like this.” Laughter.
“And? What happened then?” I coaxed him.
He lit a cigarette. “’An jad, it’s so weird, I never tell anybody this before. Wallah, you are so strange. How do I tell you this? It’s like you … I don’t know how it is. Anyway, well, so we drew these pictures, and yanni of course we touch each other in the bed,” laughing, “and then … one day during the lunch hour—you know it’s easy to touch each other and no one will notice in the night, but you can’t fuck, yanni—so … one day during the lunch hour we went back inside—we had arranged, I said I had like a headache or something, and, in simple, we … you know, we fucked! But it was so—oh my gad it was like so much pressure, because the guard, of course—and if anybody saw us”—sharp intake of breath—“Waw, but it was really so hot.” He laughed. “And I was … you know … I was the … you know it was his ass. And then afterward he wanted to … to me, you know, to be—we call it luti, I don’t know how you say in English—but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Yanni, it’s not me, I’m not gay.” He sucked on his cigarette and smiled at me. Then he reached for my hand. “I can’t believe I told you this. And you don’t judge me. You are like no Palestinian girl I ever met.”
Among characteristic associations of the letter d are softness, smoothness, and tenderness, as in the words burakhdāh (“a smooth, limp woman”), tayd (“kindness”), tha’ad (“soft, tender plants”), tha’d (“soft dates”), mutham ’idd (“clear-faced (of a boy)”), muthamghidd (“fatty (of a kid)”), thawhad (“fat and well formed (of an adolescent boy)”), thahmad (“large and fat”), khabandāh (“fat and full (of a woman)”), khawd (“young and well formed (of a girl)”).
A sunny morning in Jaffa. The night before we had been at a party in Tel Aviv, a Hanukkah Thanksgiving with a group of left-wing American Jews (and still I was asked that age-old question, eternally on every mind: Can I ask? Do they—do they teach terrorism in the schools? No, sir, they don’t teach hate, sir, they teach life, sir. And there’s no need to teach hate) and were about to get the bus back to Jerusalem.
“What is this?” he asked me.
I hesitated. “It’s an oral contraceptive,” I said.
“What is that?”
“An oral contraceptive—you really don’t know what that is?”
“Baby, I spent half my life in prison.”
“Oh, you’re kind of old looking for twenty.”
“Quarter, whatever. What is an—oral … what?”
“It’s hormones, it stops women from getting pregnant. You have to take it every day, even if you’re not having sex.”
“What? Waw, you take it every day? Sheesh. I’m glad I’m not a woman from—from England.”
“Yes, I bet you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“That is Fluoxetine.”
He twisted his open hand palm up, that voiceless, questioning gesture understood the Arab world over to mean what? how? why? what’s going on? what’s wrong with you?
“Have you heard of Prozac?”
“No. What is it?”
“Oh, Sal, let’s talk about it another time. We need to get the bus.”
“And what’s this again?” He was teasing now, pointing at my eye.
“A contact lens.”
“I remember. Contact lens. Will you show me?”
“No.”
rakhwaddah (“soft (of a woman)”), rahādah (“softness and pliancy”), ‘ubrud (“white and soft (of a girl)”), furhud (“plump and handsome (of an adolescent boy)”), umlūd (“soft and pliable”), fulhūd (“fat and comely (of a youth)”), qurhud (“smooth, fleshy, and soft”), qishdah (“clotted cream”), ma’d (“large and fat”), murd (“boys with downy upper lips but no beards”), maghd (“smooth and fleshy”), malad (“youthfulness, softness, and wobbliness”), and so on to the end of the rubric. To these may be added, under the heading of figurative usages, such words as raghd (“generous and kindly”), sarhadah (“ease of living”), majd (“glory, generosity”), and so on.
I decided to introduce Salih to my Israeli friend. Sal spoke Hebrew, and he met with Israelis all the time—of course he was unusual in that respect, but because of that I thought it would be easy. I wanted to break down some stereotypes for her, my Israeli friend. She used the word “terrorism” liberally and said things like “Oh—why can’t our peoples just get along?”
But that day, Sal had spoken in the Knesset and he was exhausted. He started cracking jokes. My Israeli friend and her husband sat with their arms crossed, not touching their drinks. Oh—you say your parents are from Russia? he said. Yes! Bring all of the Russians! Ahlan wa sahlan, empty Russia and bring them to Palestine.
It may be that the ancient Arabs sought to bring a balance to certain letters or, in other words, took care to give the opposite meaning full play too, for the letter d also encompasses many words indicating hardness, strength, and force, as in ta’addud (“harshness”), ta’kīd (“asserting”), ta’yīd (“confirming”), jal’ad (“hard and strong”), jalmad (“a rock”), jamad (“ice”), hadīd (“iron”), suḥdud (“strong and rebellious”), sukhdūd (“a man of iron”), samhad (“a thing hard and dry”), tashaddud (“harshness, severity”).
When I next saw my Israeli friend, she’d Googled Salih and changed her mind.
“He’ll be a leader,” she said. “It’s amazing. I can’t believe all that stuff about him reading Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in jail—and how he taught himself English and Hebrew! Incredible. Is that what they all do in the prisons?”
He told me about the isolation, the hunger strikes, the beatings, the gassing—the onions they sniffed to keep conscious for as long as possible while the guards gassed their cells.
“You must make sure you have no cut or whatever on your body,” he said. He was describing the times they knew for sure they would be gassed—such as during hunger strikes, and on the Prophet’s birthday. “Because if you have any cut at all, it’s going to sting really, really bad.”
“My sentence was fifteen years. You know it was actually a joke, me and this other guy, he was twenty years old, and we both got our ages! Yanni, and then I was let out five years early for good behavior.”
“What was it like when you were released?” I asked him.
“It was like … my mind was buzzing. I went straight to the sea, and I stood there by the water. It was like this buzzing inside my head.”
I looked at his black curls, seeing bees.
A great blizzard came, and we were stuck in his apartment. The electricity was out all over Ramallah. I wore three pairs of trousers and two coats, and jumped up and down. The gas canister was empty, the shops were closed, we could not even make hot drinks on the stove. A neighbor had given us a candle. One for me and one for y
ou! he had said, holding the hand of his child so I would not be afraid of him. Sal and I sat beside the lit candle and laughed. Outside, the snow was thigh-deep.
Al-Shidyaq:
When I thought about the matter and looked into it in depth, I started to doubt that snow could be created by an excess of cold formed in the air. I decided that, on the contrary, it may well, in fact, be caused by the creation by excessive heat of an irritated patch on the air’s breast above the inhabitants of the Earth plus a superabundance of ire inside its guts.
The ice cut gorges in the tarmac roads. In daylight we trod slowly into town, holding each other for balance. Still, we walked.
Even before the thaw, the time came when my visa would expire. My plan was to leave via Jordan, and then reenter through the Negev border.
Sal began to worry that he would never see me again.
“I have this bad feeling. I don’t know why.”
Ibn Battuta writes:
I THEN passed on to Jerusalem, and on the road visited the tomb of Jonas, and Bethlehem the birth-place of Jesus. But, as to the mosque of Jerusalem, it is said that there is not a greater upon the face of the earth: and in sacredness, and privileges conferred, this place is the third. From Jerusalem, I paid a visit to Askelon, which was in ruins. In this place was the meshhed, famous for the head of Hosain, before it was removed to Egypt. Without Askelon is “the valley of bees,” said to be that mentioned in the Koran. I next proceeded to El Ramlah, then to Naplous, then to Eglon.
Sometimes, when Sal talked, I knew he was giving me a version of one of his speeches.
“I say—I come with the land. That’s the way I see it. You want the land, you have me. I am like the olive trees.”
From this place I proceeded to ‘Acca: in this is the tomb of Salih the prophet, which I visited. After this I arrived at the city of Tyre, which is a place wonderfully strong, being surrounded on three sides by the sea. Its harbor is one of those which have been much celebrated.
No, I wanted to say, you are not a tree.
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