There is some thawing in mid-March, a certain heaviness in the air, a changing light. For about two weeks, the temperature sways indecisively and gradually climbs up to freezing. For a few optimistic mornings of sunshine and blue skies, there is a warm illusion of spring in the air. But soon afterwards, one April morning, like a bad prank on a radio show, the temperatures plummet again with treacherous speed, and by evening winter is back in full swing. On TV they show pictures of dark streets and ice storms raging on the riverbank.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says the forecaster, ‘this winter will go down in history as a long, long season.’ He turns grave and dramatically wipes the dazzling smile from his face. ‘A cold season like we’re having this year, my friends, has not been seen since the great winter of 1981.’
Behind him a chart of monthly averages on a blue screen shows numbers between 5 and 19 Fahrenheit. Lips murmuring, under the blanket, the two of us start calculating. Even Hilmi, after four years in America, still converts Fahrenheit into Celsius – deduct 32 and divide by two. We arrive at –7 to –14 Celsius. We still convert dollars into shekels to figure out how expensive something is, and it seems the only way we can truly take in the reality of these temperatures is to convert them to our home scale, where they dip far below zero. The weather provides the impeccable TV meteorologists with long stretches of screen-time and provokes joy and team spirit among old-time New Yorkers like Andrew and Joy, which to our alien eyes is unbelievably bizarre. We cannot comprehend their pride over this record-breaking white winter, which dominates the headlines and is constantly discussed, like a new celebrity. But it is a source of agony, a cause of tears and continual frustration, for us Middle Easterners, whose land is the land of hot summers and token winters – easy, almost hypothetical winters. We who travelled from the other side of the planet, from the place where the sky is almost always blue and the sun smiles three hundred days a year and snow is a rarity, a festive glimmer that lasts for a couple of days only in the mountainous regions and only every few years – to us these are months of exhausting, unsettling, intolerable coldness. To us the cold is traumatic, an alien sensation that shocks our disbelieving bodies repeatedly, and we cannot grow accustomed to it.
Winter shuffles the cards, jumbling us beyond recognition. Freezing cold, whimpering, nursing continuous colds and coughs, Hilmi and I are even more alike than we were before. In this deep, Arctic, North American cold, we are both from the East – painfully Levantine. Our temporariness in New York, the mistrust and estrangement we have often felt towards the American way of life, grow sharper in the harsh weather, exposing how diasporic we are, how alien in this part of the planet. If we had considered ourselves citizens of the world, universal spirits with no dependence on mother tongues or political borders or geographical distances, if for a moment we had felt at home here, felt a sense of belonging, of being wanted, almost tempted to believe that the possibilities in this city really were unlimited – now the dark shadow of winter reminds us with a paralysing clutch that New York is not just a state of mind, and that we are nothing but bodies with limited adaptability, not all that different from those other foreign creatures who were brought here from southern regions and housed in the Bronx Zoo – the ibex, the white oryx, the family of dromedary camels we saw one Sunday – animals that, if not for the greenhouses and controlled environments that mimic their natural habitat, would not survive this Northern winter.
We have all the right stamps in our passports, our visas are valid. But sometimes it seems this winter has been recruited by the immigration authorities, and it is as rigid and uncompromising as they are, working with that courteous but unapproachable American efficiency to banish us from the country. How provincial was our attempt to impose the Middle Eastern weather cycle on the local calendar. How naïve to wish for warmth as early as March or April, how optimistic to keep encouraging each other that spring was right around the corner, even though everything was still frozen.
Under the layers of long-johns and double pairs of trousers Hilmi wears, under my sweaters and red ski jacket, which frays and fades by the day, we shiver constantly and our teeth chatter. Like a pair of miserable junkies without a fix, we sit on our bench in the south-east corner of Washington Square Park, under the black treetops, and stare loathsomely at the skeletal snow-covered branches, then gaze with a tearful grimace at the tiny trickle of light that penetrates the sky with its murky paleness. Ever gullible, we keep going out into that fictional, deceptively brilliant sun, to sit in the cold behind the statue of Garibaldi, opposite the stone gate arching over the empty fountain, our faces turned up like blind sunflowers to the cold Northern glow. We shut our eyes in despair and tremble with longing for the sweet caress of our golden orange winter sun, the distant Mediterranean warmth in our fantasies.
The days are short and dark. Daylight is little more than a pale grey flicker of continual dusk that fades in the afternoon. Terrifying leaden skies sprawl like a low ceiling above the trees, and a dirty fog mingles with the whiteness that covers everything.
‘I can’t take it any more,’ Hilmi moans. Desperation wrinkles his eyelids, extinguishing his gaze. ‘It’s just…’ He looks around at all the orphaned benches. I can clearly see the sigh that escapes his lips – a pale white shred of mist. ‘Our winters,’ he finally says, ‘are so comfortable.’ He falls silent again, blinking as he searches for the right word. ‘So…’
My right hand is in his left the whole time, both buried in his pocket together – his brown fleece glove, my faded green leather one – and our ten fingers press and squeeze each other when I finish his sentence with a tremble: ‘Human.’
‘Yes.’ His head plunges with relief into my shoulder. ‘So human.’ After a few minutes he murmurs, almost to himself: ‘Maybe it isn’t about the land at all?’
I shiver in his lap. ‘Which land?’
‘What Jews and Arabs have been fighting over all these years,’ he continues with his eyes closed and a bitter little smile on his lips. ‘Maybe all this war is actually about the sun?’ He seems amazed, whispering now. ‘Imagine, a war for the sun. What a thing…’
One evening we left his place in Brooklyn with a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine and set off for Andrew’s birthday party. The party was at his new girlfriend Kimberly’s place, a little rooftop apartment with sloped ceilings at the edge of State Street. It was crowded and warm, with good food and great music. When we got ready to leave at 2 a.m., the party was still going strong. Friends clustered in the kitchen and along the hallway, dancers filled the space between the bedroom and living room. With drunken hugs, kisses and shoulder slaps, we said goodbye to Andrew and Kimberly and the others, bundled up and stepped out into the snowy silence.
Our faces were flushed, ears ringing. As we began to walk we could still hear a muffled roar echoing down from the party to the street, and looking up at the top-floor window we saw outlined figures dancing under a disco globe. Snowflakes dived softly around us, lit up for an instant under the street lamps before vanishing into the silent darkness of front yards. The bass lines still reverberated in our ears, cocooning our heads in a downy mass that silenced the outside world. Our feet, still light from dancing, sensed the vibrations coming up through the pavements as they carried us down Court Street and along the shuttered stores and restaurants of Atlantic Avenue. We stopped to buy coffee at the Starbucks outside Borough Hall station. Warming our hands on the paper cups, we climbed up the steep marble steps to the columned vestibule and sat looking out at the icy garden, its fountain frozen in mid-stream, and waited for the three o’clock local train to take us to Hilmi’s.
I began to talk about home, sailing away on an indulgent wave of nostalgia. I’d talked about Israel before, complained endlessly about how much I missed home, but there had always been a certain trepidation and a trace of guilt holding me back from saying more. Now, fuelled by alcohol, I spoke freely, unapologetically, and did not feel the need to justify myself or mention the oc
cupation or the conflict even once.
Snowflakes floated silently around us and plunged into the dark, but we had journeyed to the other, lighter, side of the world – me to the green open fields of my childhood in Hod Hasharon, Hilmi to the wadis of olives and pine trees where he spent his Hebron youth. I told him about the orchards near our house, with orange and lemon and clementine trees, and how we used to trek through the fields of Magdiel to visit friends in the village of Ramot Hashavaim, or to the swimming pool in Neveh Yerek. He told me about the tall calcite hills around his mother’s house in Ramallah: ‘They look like waves,’ he said, spreading his arms out, ‘like a still sea of hills.’ And about the long days he spent sitting under a big mulberry tree drawing the landscape.
Everything around us was iron and concrete, asphalt roads and stone hulks, but we were rhapsodizing about the olive trees. He spoke of the silvery tone on the backs of the leaves. ‘The silver side is what gives them that nostalgic quality,’ he explained: it was as if they were being glimpsed through a film of tears. I remarked on how the greyish green of the olive groves flattered the glorious, bridal blossoming of the almond trees at the end of winter. While he remembered the yellow scent of chrysanthemums, which for him was the smell of spring, and mentioned the red poppy blotches in a Claude Monet painting, I saw and felt the tall grass I used to walk through, the fuzzy, sticky burrs, and the dandelion fluff. We reminisced about chewing stalks of sourgrass and mallow, which we both called chubeza, and we laughed because the recollection brought the taste and smell of the fields to us in the cold New York night air.
We talked on as we went down to the station and got on the train. We compared the American autumn and spring to the fleeting, deceptive transition of the seasons back home. Our khamsins versus New York heatwaves. The surprising summer rainstorms as opposed to the warm evening breeze in Israel. Our chatter continued until the next station. We’d been sitting comfortably in an empty carriage, but then the doors opened and a few people came in and sat down. The doors slid shut, the train moved, and a silence came between us.
I see the pale reflections of our faces looking back from the dark windows. Like melancholy ghosts travelling in a parallel train, an unreal one, staring back at us silently from the glass. The tunnel walls charge backwards into the darkness, and I think back to the first time we brushed our teeth together – the hesitant meeting of our fingers touching at the tap. After I squeezed toothpaste onto my brush and dipped it in the flow of water, my left hand reached out automatically to turn off the tap and ran into his wet hand, which had reached out just as unconsciously. In the quiet that prevailed after the water stopped gurgling down the drain, one of us, perhaps Hilmi, asked: ‘Did you also grow up learning not to waste water?’ Or perhaps it was me who asked, and Hilmi who wondered: ‘You too?’ And when the only sound in the bathroom was the bristles scrubbing our teeth, I looked at him in the mirror and thought about that desert imperative so deeply ingrained in us, the obligation to save water that is instilled in anyone who grew up in a hot dry region like ours. I thought about how it was repeated to us in kindergarten and in school, until it became second nature, and how that good old-fashioned upbringing persists in us even here, in America. That similarity between us, that shared destiny, must be what they mean when they say that man is imprinted by his native landscape.
‘But what do we care about the water here?’ he said after he rinsed his mouth. He giggled and looked up at my eyes in the mirror. ‘Who’s counting anyway?’ He turned up the flow and splashed his hands around in the frothing water, squirting me and laughing his rowdy laughter. ‘Yallah, mayeh!’ he cried out: ‘Water!’
We climb up the steps at Bay Ridge Avenue station and step out into a burst of wind and sheets of snow. We stop outside a bank under the awning for a pause before trudging ahead.
‘The sea,’ he says with a disappointed look. ‘You purposely didn’t say anything about the sea.’ He squints against the wind, which suddenly sharpens its blades and lashes at us.
I turn my face back into the darkness of the bank and shiver. With a pang of conscience, I remember all the times I’ve thought about the sea lately. But every time the water comes to me in a stubborn wave, ebbing and flowing, I brush the forbidden image away from my mind and search for something else to miss.
One afternoon in Soho, on our way to meet Joy and Tomé at the Angelika cinema, we walked down Church Street and stopped in at the gallery to say hello to Mr Aggio.
Hilmi’s oil paintings adorned the wall inside – two rectangular canvases from the landscape series that Mr Aggio had bought in January. In both pictures, which at first looked almost identical, there was a river running through the middle of a ghost town submerged in the yellowish shadows of dusk. On the surface of the water, among reflections of trees and dark green grass, objects floated: an old work shoe, a comb, a cracked ceramic mug.
I knew the paintings, of course. Of the two, I preferred the one in which the street was still slightly lit and the empty feeling was not yet as menacing as in the other, where darkness was very close and the objects floating in the river were blurry and shadowy. But this was the first time I had seen the titles Hilmi had given them. I read the block letters printed above the artist, date and measurements: ‘Jindas 2’ and ‘Jindas 3’.
The faint light that had lit up the wet streets of Soho when we’d come out of the subway had faded in the short time we’d spent in the gallery. The damp air, like in Hilmi’s painting, was enveloped in winter evening shadows. When we walked outside I asked him what ‘Jindas’ meant.
‘It’s our village.’ He pulled his wool hat down and glanced right and left, wondering which was east and which was west. ‘Where my family is from.’ He motioned to the right.
‘Which village?’ I moved closer, confused. ‘I thought you were from Hebron.’
As soon as I said that, I remembered all the times he’d mentioned ‘the village’ and I hadn’t understood. I remembered him telling me that when his father was a young man, the villagers used to call him ‘Mr Perfume’ because of his fondness for aftershave. And there was the way he and his brothers used to joke that every time a cool summer breeze snuck into the house, their parents would sigh deeply and say, ‘Ahh, such air!’ He’d mimic them: ‘Ahh, the village air!’
Hilmi nodded. ‘We did live in Hebron, but only from ’67, when my parents fled the refugee camp in Jericho during the war.’
Fled? Refugee camp? For some reason I thought he’d come from a well-established family, an ancient Hebronite dynasty with deep roots. I knew they’d moved from Hebron to Ramallah when he was in high school, but Jericho? I wasn’t quite sure all of a sudden – it was somewhere in the Jordan Valley, wasn’t it? I remembered driving past signs on the way to the Dead Sea. ‘So the village…’ I wondered as I looked down at the passers-bys’ feet. ‘Jend…’
‘Jindas.’
‘It’s near Jericho?’
He gave a short, surprised laugh. ‘Of course not.’ A painful shadow passed over his bemused face when he turned to me. ‘Our village was just south of Lid.’ He pronounced the name with a deliberate cadence of anticipation, as though giving me a hint. ‘Where your airport is now.’
‘Lod?’
‘OK, call it Lod.’
The paintings: I understood now. The picture of the abandoned buildings under darkening skies took on a newly troubling recognition. I understood who the items in the river belonged to, the meaning of those lost possessions floating along the current.
I knew that any more questions were superfluous. But still I had to ask. ‘So when they moved away from the village, when was that? In forty—’
‘Moved away. Right…’ His laughter shot out again, like his gaze.
‘1948?’
At night, after Joy and Tomé dropped us off at Hilmi’s and we were alone again, I asked him in the kitchen while I filled the kettle: ‘Is that the place you’d like to go back to? Would you like to live there one day, if you really
could go back?’ I turned off the tap and swivelled to face him.
‘Where, Jindas?’ he asked through a gaping yawn as he shut the refrigerator door.
‘Yes, where the village used to be.’
‘No way.’ He shrugged his shoulders before stepping out into the hallway. ‘Maybe my uncles or my older brothers would want to go back, but not me.’ His voice came from the bathroom now: ‘I already told you, Bazi. I’m going to live by the sea.’
chapter 21
The movie opens with the numbers on a screen above a lift. The camera follows the numbers as the lift descends from four, to three, two, one, till it stops on the ground floor. The doors slide open and we see the photographer reflected in the mirror. He has the same dark curly hair and long body as Hilmi, wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket, and when he moves closer to the mirror, the resolute nose and bushy eyebrows also become visible. His plump red lips slant into the same familiar smile. It’s Marwan, Hilmi’s youngest brother, using the DV-8 camera that Hilmi sent to him in Ramallah last month.
The lift goes up and stops at the ninth floor. Marwan’s footsteps click on the floor of a dark stairwell and his fist knocks on a door. The door opens. Now it’s Omar, the oldest brother, with the same broad facial structure, carved nostrils, high forehead. He’s in his mid-thirties, shorter than Marwan, with close-cropped hair and a dense, heavy body. But Hilmi’s smile flickers across his face too. Omar looks surprised to see the camera: ‘You’re already starting?’
All the Rivers Page 13