The camera nods up and down. It follows Omar into a modest, middle-class, light-filled living room. A modern sofa set, television screen, potted plants, curtains, a computer area, with decorative objects and adornments in an Arab style: copper samovar and tray, traditional embroidery, arabesques on the wall, a hookah. We glimpse the view through the window when the camera flits past, blinded by the sunlight: a wide open landscape of hills, calcite terraces and blue sky.
A female singing voice grows louder: Arabic pop music comes from the kitchen. Three young women are visible there among pots and pans steaming on top of the stove. One chops onions, her eyes watering, narrowed as if in suspicion. The second is slightly chubby, looking up curiously from the refrigerator’s entrails. And the third holds a nappied baby over her shoulder and pats his bottom.
‘Marwan’s making a film for Hilmi,’ Omar’s voice rings out in the background. ‘To send to America.’
The woman tearfully chopping onions is Widad, the eldest of Hilmi’s sisters. She smiles shyly at the knife in her hand, embarrassed by the camera. The second is Amal, Omar’s wife, who looks up at the camera and smooths her wavy hair back charmingly. The third, the baby’s mother, is Farha, Hilmi’s cousin, whose eyes wander back and forth from Amal to Widad.
And here come four, five, six children, bursting into the picture with screeches and cheers: Farha’s daughter, Omar and Amal’s twins, Widad’s son and daughters. They surround Marwan, waving and tugging at his sleeve, then pull him away.
Yesterday Hilmi and I watched the movie together twice. Excited and laughing, savouring the faces on the screen, he introduced me to each of his brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, amazed at how much the kids had grown. Bouncing the DVD remote in his hand, he froze the picture every so often, then rewound and replayed while translating for me, laughing and explaining the jokes.
Now that he’s left and I’m at home on my own, I watch them for the third time – Omar, Widad, the twins – seeing Hilmi in them. The living room fills with their voices, with their Arabic. That profile, that tone of voice – I recognize the speech pattern, the hand gestures. I keep encountering traces of Hilmi’s smile dancing here and there. Alone now, I am free to remember the faces I guessed at for his older brothers, and for his mother, whom I had pictured as a rigid, stern-faced religious woman under a black hijab. I am free to consider the thoughts I silenced yesterday, the things I did not want to remember when Hilmi was here next to me. Free to see the real appearance of that apartment in Ramallah, which I had painted in my mind’s eye as dark and shadowy and unfurnished, a place where they lived strange and menacing lives, or so I had imagined for those four terrifying days last month when my period was late.
The nervous dread that I might be pregnant. The panic, the sleepless nights when I finally grasped that I was really mixed up with him now, entangled with questions of abortion, of life and death. The fear that our private little secret love, which came free of charge and asked for so little, was getting out of control. This hidden affair that had no connection with the future, with the reality of my life at home, would all blow up and there would be a scandal. I didn’t tell Hilmi about being late, about the nightmare scenarios running through my head. I avoided him with all sorts of excuses. I worked until late at night, prayed for any backache, any cramp, and every time I went to the bathroom I walked out bitterly disappointed. At nights I saw myself in some faceless house in Ramallah with his family. I pictured myself living there with them, a Jewish woman who had crossed over. I pictured the baby, I saw my whole destiny overturned. I remembered again the No. 4 jitney, years ago, with the screaming radio commercial: ‘Daughters of Israel! Lost Souls!’ And the driver clucking: ‘God help them.’ And the woman sitting in front of me: ‘Now the poor girl is languishing over in Nablus with two kids. She barely has any teeth left.’ I saw my parents crying, mourning for me. I imagined my grandmother.
*
‘Ah, Yama!’ he had cried suddenly, and turned up the volume. ‘That’s my mother.’
A tall, strong woman in her sixties with a straight back and broad shoulders appeared from one of the rooms. She wore a black djellaba and her hair was gathered under a white headscarf. Her complexion was a shiny, flushed bronze, with deep wrinkles. And her eyes were Hilmi’s: light brown, tired, innocent.
‘Marwan asked her if she wants to send me a message,’ he translated for me in a pleased, comforted voice. ‘So she told him: Why would I? I talked to him on the phone on Saturday.’ Then he slowly interpreted her words as he watched with glassy eyes: ‘Oh, ya khamis, my child! May Allah bless you, inshallah. May he bless you with boys. With a good wife, with a good living. May he grant you a good long life.’
She puts her hand on her chest to calm herself, and when she stops speaking and looks up sadly at the ceiling, Omar’s voice urges her to go on. A female voice off-screen, perhaps Amal’s, says, ‘Tell him how much you miss him.’
‘But he knows, ya binti,’ she replies in astonishment, and sighs. ‘You think he doesn’t know me?’
A boy cries in the background, momentarily stealing her attention. By the time her eyes look back awkwardly at the camera, the lens has zoomed in close, focusing on her face and making it much larger. ‘My heart is very-very-very-very thirsty for Hilmi to come back.’ Her voice is full of yearning, and so was Hilmi’s when he repeated in English: ‘Thirsty to breathe, to smell his smell.’ She shuts her eyes emotionally, and her lips crush against each other like her son’s do when he is agitated. ‘But Hilmi, it’s better for you there in America, my love. Better for you than here, my soul. You are slowly getting settled, building a better future for yourself. So you know what? Yallah, stay there in America, my sweet. Come back whenever you come back, don’t be in a hurry.’
I fast-forward the next scenes: the dinner table laden with stuffed vegetables and dumplings, cuts of meat and mountains of rice. More and more relatives enter, with pecks on the cheek and handshakes. I fast-forward the whole meal, and then the interviews with the nephews and nieces in a separate room, until I get to the balcony and the sunset.
A blazing globe of sun hangs halfway down the sky, flooding the scene with reddish gold, refracted briefly in the camera lens. From the ninth-floor west-facing balcony, Marwan photographs the sky spread out in soft pinks and blues from one edge to the other. He captures the pale sliver of moon and the long thread of birds sweeping slowly across the sky like a thin necklace of dark beads.
His eye moves slowly left and down to a group of buildings previously visible at the edge of the frame. ‘Western Hotel’, a neon sign announces on one rooftop. Then he goes further down and focuses on the hotel car park. A Mercedes decorated with ribbons and flowers pulls up and out step a man in a black tuxedo and a woman in a white meringue wedding dress – bride and groom. With drums and dancing and festive clothes, the guests begin to arrive. They gather around the couple and accompany them with songs and applause as they step between the cars.
The camera moves to the right again, down the wadi behind the hotel, slowly westward, caressing the landscape of soft hills. The sunset paints the hilly ranges in warm honeyed light, elongating the shadows on the slopes. And it is just as Hilmi described it once: while Marwan lingers on the play of light and shadow, the expanse of low hills climb over each other’s golden curves with wavy spots of shade swirling among them, and it looks like the sea.
The picture blurs for a moment, enveloped in a screen of haze, then sharpens again and opens up to the distance. About ten or twelve miles deep, grazing pastures come into the picture. Olive groves, stone terraces, green and brown plots of land, with pale rows of houses in between, and sparkling lights from the little villages embedded in the valley’s inclines. Hilmi recognized these places yesterday and said the names of villages and settlements which I now cannot remember. Still, I easily recognize the Arab villages by their mosques and the pale green light at the tops of the minarets, and the Jewish settlements by the gleaming, mod
ern whiteness of the rows of single-family houses. The Palestinians’ houses are in tones of grey, looking unfinished, blending into the landscape’s forms and colours, while the Jews have built tier after tier of multi-storeyed cubes with sloped red-tiled roofs.
When we got to this point in the film yesterday, I remembered Hilmi’s story about the group of settler kids who came across him and his nephews in the wadi and ran away screaming as if they’d seen a pack of wolves. He laughed so hard when I reminded him of that yesterday, even when I flattened out the Israeli ‘r’ like he did and mimicked his own impersonation in a squeaky, horrified voice: ‘Aravim! Aravim!’
But now I am prepared for what is about to come. The picture loses focus again, melting into a glowing mist. After a moment, when the camera refocuses and looks further out, the whole screen fills with the redness of the sky and the ball of sun melting in the west, and I am amazed all over again, just as amazed as I was yesterday, scarcely able to believe it: far, far away on the horizon, grey and pale like a hazy vision, a dense urban clump emerges, towering up high. From the Ramallah balcony, Marwan’s camera clearly picks up the entire coastal plain and the Gush Dan region, the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv, right up to the sparkling blue strip of sea. And it’s all so close, so amazingly close, perhaps forty miles away: close enough to touch.
I rewind the movie and freeze the image. Astounded again, I move my gaze from north to south, south to north, travel in my mind’s eye along the Coastal Highway, old Highway 4, and reconstruct the signs for exits to Rehovot and Rishon Le’Zion, Ramle and Lod, Ben Gurion Airport, Holon, Petach Tikva, Rosh Ha’Ayin. I go back and circle the whole crowded mass of concrete in greys and blues, the complete skyline of Tel Aviv and its suburbs fading away in a haze, and I find that, like the picture on the screen, my hand gripping the remote control is also frozen.
Israel as seen by Marwan from the ninth floor in Ramallah looks like an enormous island. A towering mountain of concrete sprouting up from the sea, with buildings and skyscrapers and towers all crushed into one lump. An optical illusion, a huge megalopolis from a science fiction movie, Tel Aviv on the horizon.
The camera cuts straight to the skyscrapers. I can clearly spot the Azrieli Towers, proud and sturdy, and the edge of Migdal Shalom. I even make out the chimney of Reading Power Station, and the buildings in the army compound, the flagpole above the Ministry of Defence, the shopping centre in east Ramat Gan. Beyond the huge city swathed in the setting sun’s glow, all the while I can see the golden blue strip of sea.
With the same goose bumps I had yesterday, I am struck by thoughts of my family, my niece and nephew and all my relatives and friends out there. Where were they while Marwan filmed this sunset from Ramallah? What were they doing? It takes me back to when I was six or seven and I peeped into our kitchen one day from the window in my neighbours’ apartment. I stood there secretly watching my mother’s busy figure washing dishes, and the back of my father’s neck as he leaned over a newspaper eating watermelon, and I was transfixed by the newness of this different observation point. Now too, with that same contradictory feeling of strangeness and intimacy, of guilt and betrayal, a slightly indecent secretiveness, I cannot look away.
How strange the reversal is – seeing us from outside, looking in from the neighbours’ window, seeing ourselves from the hidden side of the mirror. To observe from here in New York what is visible to them in Ramallah. To stand in their place on the balcony, like on Mount Nebo, and to see Israel every single day, to see the Tel Aviv suburbs and our lives that proceed on the other side, self-confident, unaware, as if we had no reflection. How peculiar and how frightening to discover how much they can see.
The sun dives further down, bleeding flames into the sea. Marwan’s camera follows another flock of migrating birds on the edge of the sky, their dark thread tinged with the scarlet purple glow of the sunset. But my eyes are fixed firmly on the bottom of the screen, scanning the outline of the increasingly grey rooftops in Tel Aviv. Because although Marwan’s thoughts are with the expanse of sea and sky, only incidentally picking up the urban landscape that occasionally appears as he marvels at the birds, I cannot help but see us there. I cannot help but see Israel as it appears to its enemies.
I cannot avoid seeing my home in the cross hairs of a missile, from an artillery launch pad, through telescopic lenses of God-knows-what. I cannot avoid realizing how exposed and vulnerable everything is there, how short and intimate the distance. I am struck by the precious, bustling Israeli life we conduct on the other side, by the spectacle of prosperity, with our fleets of towers dominating the sky. The sight sends a chill down my spine again, as it did yesterday. How enviable, how infuriating, how hateful we look to them from that vantage point.
‘See? You see?!’ Hilmi gloated yesterday, excited by my surprise. ‘I told you!’
Soon after we’d met, he had insisted that on a clear day you could see the sea from his brother’s house in Ramallah. He said you could look out from the balcony on the whole expanse from the West Bank to the sea. ‘This land is tiny, Bazi, it’s so narrow,’ he said back then when I expressed doubt. ‘Forty-something miles, that’s it,’ he added, and wondered how I could insist so stubbornly on my outdated solution: ‘Where are you going to fit two countries in there?’
It was at the height of one of the tiresome, pointless arguments we kept getting into at the beginning of winter. Imbued with faith and fervour, we naïvely tried to persuade each other, to soften each other’s position, or destroy it. We preached and we inveigled. Again and again we waded into the same worn, futile argument and again and again ended in desperation, with lots of shouting and emotions running high. I was usually the instigator of the shouting. I would lose my temper in an instant and go berserk. Some sort of demon possessed me whenever we started talking politics. I hated it. I hated the pig-headedness, the sanctimonious fury that came over me, the hostility that made me so hot-headed. I hated the taste of losing at the end, and the frustration and bitterness that followed. The endless circular claims, the paradox that stood between us, immortal and invincible, as mocking as a force of nature.
Until one night, worn out and nerve-racked by an argument that had snowballed into a fight complete with tears and slammed doors, we decided to put an end to it and swore never to discuss politics again.
Hilmi, with his blind binational fantasies of Israelis and Palestinians living together, covering his ears and banging his head against the wall like a child – it was all or nothing with him. And me with my ancient, anaemic two-state compromise, a formula recited ad nauseam. Him with that insistent dreaminess, a bleeding-heart idealist still praying for reconciliation between the two peoples. And me insisting again, stomping my feet, waving practicality and logic in his face, pleading on behalf of the dog-eared partition agreement. How I hated his flowery 1960s transnational naïveté, his confidence that humanistic values were on his side. He was the enlightened one, the one repairing the world, the one with vision – and I was left wearing the patriotic, unsexy, Zionist, conservative cap. He was the universalist, the peace-monger who shook off archaic definitions like state and religion and follies like national flags and anthems, while I, much as I loathed being pushed into this role, was the sober pragmatist who deals with practical peace accords and technicalities like political borders and sovereignty.
I hated the ridiculous patriotic pathos that kept taking me over. I hated that every time I was faced with his radical Arab positions I had to veer to the right, squeezing in alongside my conservative parents. It angered me that, faced with his binational fervour, I found myself defending the Israeli consensus – the very same centrist opinions that outraged me when my parents espoused them at Friday night dinners. In that setting, with the weekend news on the television in the background, my sister and I used to argue with my parents, and later with Micah, who joined their side. We blamed the occupation for all our troubles, cursed the right-wing government and the settlers. But here in New York I suddenly soun
ded like them. I defended Israel, and justified its policies. Of all the people in the world, it was Hilmi whom I could not agree with about any of this, and I hated that. I could not understand how even we, with all our closeness and love, failed again and again where everyone else had failed all these years. I hated the fact that I was so full of hatred – for him, for the situation, for myself.
I tried all the familiar lines: an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel would bring so much good; the Palestinians deserved to live in dignity under their own flag and government. I said that the border that would define their freedom and independence would also redefine our own peace and security, ‘And our sanity.’ Then I insisted: ‘I want that because I’m a Zionist. Because I’m concerned for Israel, I’m worried about what’s going to happen to us if we continue this way.’ I tried good cop and I tried bad cop. I said that if our generation couldn’t reach a compromise, if we didn’t agree on clear borders now, while it was still feasible, ‘I don’t even want to think about what sort of disastrous path we’ll be on.’
Hilmi would hold his head up again and excitedly shake his mane of curls. Time after time, with a patient yet quixotic sort of fervour, he stood up and explained that it was true that there were two nations in this story, but unfortunately there was only one land, and that fact could not be altered by all the borders and fences and barriers and roadblocks in the world. ‘The land is the same land. And, Bazi, what was it you said once, remember? In the end all the rivers flow into the same sea.’
A fair division was no longer possible, he said. Not of the land and not of the water. All the water sources were intertwined and interdependent. ‘And the holy places are all concentrated and crowded into the same city.’ He repeated that the reality we were living in was already binational, just like the landscape and the sky: they belonged to both nations. ‘We’re already glued together,’ he said, tightly interlacing the fingers of both hands. ‘What can you do? We’re inseparable from you.’
All the Rivers Page 14