But Wasim charges on without letting me interrupt: ‘— as irreversible as forty years of military control and violent oppression—’
‘No really, I’m trying to understand,’ I insist. ‘A return to the ’67 borders is irreversible in your opinion? But to go fifty-five years back, back to the history of no borders—’
He keeps ignoring me. ‘—and as I pointed out before, it’s also—’
‘—that’s not irreversible?’
‘It’s also inside Israel,’ Wasim carries on unfazed, stabbing the air with his toothpick. ‘The Israeli–Arab population’s reproductive rate is another irreversible reality.’ When Hilmi justifies the binational concept he always clings to a distant, nostalgic past, to the olive groves and water wells from the tales of 1948. But Wasim is sly, and more sober. He claims he’s willing to pay the historical price and withstand another two or three decades of occupation and suffering, because he knows that in the long term the Palestinians’ patience will pay off and their steadfast refusal to compromise will justify itself: he’ll put his faith in the Arab birth rate and wait it out. Perhaps more than his loathsome arrogance and vindictive temperament, it is his vision of this bleak future, and my fear that he may be right, which outrage me and drag me into repeatedly clashing with him.
Still he orates: ‘Reality has increasingly shown from year to year that the old-fashioned notion of two states, along the lines of the 1948 partition plan, is a solution that perhaps at one point we could have debated, but it is no longer valid today. It no longer reflects the depths of the conflict, the depths of the enmeshment, the complexities that have been created on the ground.’
Maybe I’ve had too much to drink? I gauge the wine in my glass, my second of the evening. When I take a sip and sigh sarcastically, Mahmoud raises his eyebrows curiously. ‘And that’s why it’s so simple and logical, right?’
Hilmi gingerly tries to move the wine away from me. ‘Maybe that’s not—’
I push him away. ‘Let me talk.’ I don’t care about anything at this point. Not the pathos climbing into my voice, not my uncontrollable yelling. ‘And who exactly is going to give me a guarantee of that – you?!’ I wag my finger at Wasim. ‘Are you going to guarantee that instead of defeated Zionist nationalism we won’t get triumphant, vengeful Arab nationalism, drunk on its own victory?’
Hilmi moves closer and I feel his hand slide down my back, but I don’t care about him either. Now he turns up?! It just occurred to him? He sits here like a doorknob all evening without saying a word, doesn’t even bother putting his brother in his place, abandons me in the field, and now he butts in? I fling his arm off me. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I’m asking you seriously,’ I say to Wasim, wiping away a strand of saliva with the back of my hand, ‘how can you promise me that we’re not going to just switch one oppression for another? One occupation for another?’ I pound the table insistently: ‘How can we, a democratic Jewish minority in a majority of Muslim Arabs, be sure that a catastrophe like the Holocaust won’t happen ag—’
‘Oh, here we go!’ Wasim throws his hands up and turns to Zinab: ‘How can you even contend with that?’ he complains.
‘No, no, you’re not going to—’
‘It’s really something,’ he looks at Mahmoud and corkscrews his finger into his temple, ‘the way they’re brainwashed.’
That makes me seethe. ‘Brainwashed?!’ I remind him that the state of Israel was founded after the systematic annihilation of six million Jews. ‘Founded so that we—’
‘Founded on the ruins of a people banished from its land—’
‘—so that we Jews could take control of our own destiny—’
‘—and take the opportunity to wreak havoc on the destiny of a few million Palestinians—’
The triangular Moroccan lampshades, blue and red, illuminate the cheerful women’s lavatory too. There are candles lit, gold-framed mirrors on the wall, and white rose petals scattered around the sinks, as if to evoke an intimate women’s bathing room in a fairy-tale Oriental harem.
I come out of the toilet cubicle, my hand trembling as it smooths down my dress. My shoulders droop, but those high heels I bought today – I walked into the store, tried them on, and bought them for $160 on a whim – make me feel tall and elegant. I teeter closer to the mirror: smears of mascara and black eyeliner, red nose, dishevelled hair. In the midst of all this glimmering decor, my face looks long and beaten.
But I have to pull myself together. I take a deep breath, and run water into my hands. The bright red nail polish, the manicure I got after getting my hair styled at the salon, the elegant shoes – they all mock me now. Look at what came of all this effort to impress them, to be liked by his brothers and friends. I lean in and try to wipe away the greasy grey smudges from my eyes, and the irritated red from my cheeks and eyelids. The tissue crumples in my hand, sullied with make-up. Who was I trying to charm if not Hilmi himself? I wanted him to see me through their eyes as a beautiful woman. I wanted him to be proud of me. I tried so hard to be likeable, to be lovely and charming, and I ended up an angry, stubborn, weepy embarrassment. I comb my fingers through my hair a few times and try to ward off a new surge of tears. I throw the tissue in the waste bin and grab another one.
The bathroom door opens, letting in a buzz of activity, stainless steel dishes being washed in the kitchen.
‘Liat?’ It’s Zinab, her eyes wide with worry. She hesitates at the doorway. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks cautiously.
I look down and nod at the floor. ‘Yes,’ I mutter into the balled-up tissue. ‘Thanks.’ Stop it, stop it, I tell the pounding pulse in my temples and the salty tears. Get a hold of yourself, don’t start again.
‘Are you sure?’
But this is a different crying. Not the proud, infuriated sob that erupted when I stood up in the middle of Wasim’s speech. Not the break-all-the-rules protest cry that I gave when I pushed back my chair in disgust and ran to the bathroom. Now it’s a different cry, small and hurt, trembling inside me, surging up in my lungs. I want to throw myself into Zinab’s arms, fall on her neck and sob, let out all my tension and my anger at Wasim, all the frustration that has mounted inside me, and the shame. How pathetic! How did I get drawn into that? I will sob about Hilmi, too, about my disappointment in him. How could he let his brother talk to me like that without coming to my defence? I will fall on Zinab and offload this wave of sadness that suddenly defeats me – sadness over us, over them, over this whole shitty situation.
I nod vigorously, holding on to what’s left of my dignity and my injured pride, without looking at her. ‘I’m all right.’
‘OK, then…’
She seems about to leave, but her footsteps come closer. ‘I thought you might need this,’ she says surprisingly, and puts my handbag on the marble counter. ‘But I see you’ve made do.’ Her eyes smile when they meet mine. They soften.
‘Thank you, Zinab.’
‘You look fine,’ she promises.
‘Thanks.’
For a moment I think perhaps the hug will actually happen and we’ll fall into each other’s arms, united in tentative female comradeship – I remember the roast chicken and sweet-potato fritters. I want to grab her hand, which pats my shoulder encouragingly, and I want to kiss it and cry and thank her, but she is already pulling away.
*
I didn’t see Wasim again after that evening in Tribeca. He spent six more days in New York with Hilmi, and I didn’t see Hilmi either. For the first time since we’d met three months earlier, I was without him. We didn’t meet or talk on the phone until his brother went back to Berlin.
He told me that on the first night Wasim slept on the couch in his studio, and then he had a backache and moved into Hilmi’s bed with him. Mahmoud was at a hotel in Chelsea. They walked around the city together, went to the Empire State Building, planned to sail to the Statue of Liberty but it was closed so they took the ferry to Staten Island.
I had left the res
taurant without saying goodbye to him. After Zinab left the bathroom, I slipped out, hailed a cab and went home. Hilmi said Zinab saw me leave, but when he got up to look for me, she told him to let me be.
They stayed until 1.30 a.m., and I made Hilmi tell me what had happened. After I left the table in tears, Wasim said I was spoiled and narcissistic, stubborn and in love with my national victim identity just as all Israelis were, and that he’d met my type on campus in Berlin. Hilmi also reported that Zinab told Wasim she thought he’d gone too far in his attack on me.
‘Didn’t you say anything?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Not a word?’
‘I said maybe Zinab was right and that he could have—’
‘Maybe?’
‘I said he was a little rough on you, OK? What did you want me to tell him?’
I didn’t answer.
‘He’s my brother, Bazi. He was my guest, I hadn’t seen him in four years.’
We both sat in silence.
‘Wasim can be a bit of an idiot and a schmuck sometimes, but he’s…’
‘He’s your brother.’
‘Yes.’
Hilmi phoned me at around noon the day after the dinner and left a message. He sounded as if he’d just woken up. He said he hoped I’d got home safely. Then he waited a minute for me to pick up, and said he’d call again in the evening. I deliberately worked late at the library that day and had dinner out on my own. When he called the next day and asked, ‘Bazi, are you there?’ I kept staring at the answering machine, listening to his pleading silence, and I didn’t answer. At night I wrote him a short e-mail asking him to stop calling and leave me in peace. ‘We’ll talk after he leaves,’ I added, to which he replied the next morning with one word: Beseder.
For the first couple of days I kept up a silent argument with him: How could he have sat there like an idiot? How could he not put Wasim in his place when he saw where it was going? How could he not come to my defence? I got teary-eyed and furious every time I remembered the episode. But as the week wore on and the phone calls stopped, and I spent my evenings watching TV alone on the couch, I developed a better understanding of what had happened that night. I realized that he wanted to get back at me. He wanted me to feel the way he did. It was like he was saying: Since the day I’ve known you, you’ve been loyal to your parents and your family, to your tribe, above all else, and now here I am surrounded by my people. At the moment of truth he came down on the side of his true primary identity. He abandoned me and stood by his brothers. When the time came, he became one of them. Just as I had.
Footnotes
1 Occupation.
2 The Zionist army.
chapter 22
In mid-February, before Wasim’s visit, the winter reaches its apex. A massive blizzard travels from the ocean and pummels the East Coast. It starts on the morning of Presidents’ Day and continues unabated for four days and nights. All five hundred miles from DC to Boston are buried in snow. Entire cities paralysed. Trees and utility poles downed. Universities and schools closed. Almost all national and international airports are shut. Thousands are injured, forty-two people are killed.
On Monday morning a state of emergency is declared. The wind roars. Raging snow and clouds of fog obscure the windows. Outside, the temperature hovers in the low teens, with winds of over thirty miles an hour. Trains and buses stop running. On the highways, bridges and tunnels, maximum speeds are reduced to twenty-five miles an hour. La Guardia shuts down. At Newark and JFK all take-offs are suspended until further notice. Homeless shelters are at full capacity, with more and more people knocking on their doors. Thousands of city employees work shifts around the clock to clear the snow, moving through the streets in an army of heavy machinery, snowploughs, trucks and ice-cutters, emptying heaps of snow into the rivers. At a press conference on Wednesday evening, with scenes of the frozen lake in Central Park behind him, Mayor Bloomberg announces that the blizzard will cost the city $20 million.
Hilmi wakes me on Thursday at eight and announces in a very hoarse, sleepy voice that he thinks the storm has passed.
‘Khalas al’tagawul,’ he says once we’re at the door with our coats on, and translates while we wait for the lift: ‘Curfew’s over.’
We leave the building, walk from Ninth Street to Fifth Avenue, and the first thing that hits us is the depths of this new silence. It looks like a frozen white wasteland, a barren wilderness enveloped in gloomy mist. The streets are empty, sprawling ahead in an infinite expanse of iciness. Here and there, between mounds of snow, stores open hesitantly, a pharmacy lights up, a figure loaded with grocery bags falters down the pavement. We turn left onto Sixth Avenue and spot a few more pedestrians. Some, like us, step onto the street, which has been scattered with salt. Others tread along the slippery, scalloped pavement, wading through snow as the city workers shovel. We see them at work next to the basketball courts on West Fourth Street, and again in their yellow coats and huge hoods at the end of Jones Street. The sound of salt crunching under our feet accompanies us all the way to the little garden at Sheridan Square, where the skeletal trees, benches, stone statues and everything else are under a gloomy shadow. We walk down towards the Hudson River, to the pier at the end of Christopher Street.
The frozen river is silver and smooth, a sea of glass beneath a low ceiling of sky, grey from one edge to the other. A cold mist hovers over huge slabs of ice floating in the water. Through the mist, on the other bank, the dim lights of Jersey City’s buildings twinkle. Far away in the folds of cloud, the Statue of Liberty hides.
A few tourist boats are moored at the pier, weary, rusty, little waves slapping against their sides. I lean forward over the wooden railing and Hilmi wraps his arms around me from behind. I listen to the wind. It shifts the blocks of ice slightly, blowing them back and forth in the water. I can hear them creak and sigh as they slide into each other.
About two hours later, at Astor Place station, we take the escalator up to the ground floor. Here too, I walk ahead and Hilmi stands behind, one step below me. I feel invigorated by our long walk along the river and the burst of fresh air after being shut up in the apartment for four days. But Hilmi is tired.
I turn back to him. ‘You know what we need now?’ The one-step advantage has our heads at equal heights. ‘But I mean really, positively need?’ I pucker my lips and rub my hands together.
He gives me a glazed, dusty look. ‘Well…’
I find the feeble questioning of his lips attractive.
‘Well, what?’ he asks again.
I kiss him softly, patiently insisting until his lips acquiesce. He responds sleepily. His eyes are still shut when I open mine. His face looks faded, drained, as though the kiss exhausted him.
I love him so much, and I tremble suddenly with compassion for him. He’s been looking so vulnerable recently, weakened and depressed by the cold, exhausted by work and the interminable winter. He looks fragile and forlorn, like a waif. He’s lost at least ten pounds since we met, and it shows in his pale, unshaven face, the sunken cheeks, the dark shadows under his eyes, especially when he wears that beanie. It makes him look so Arab.
‘Sahleb.’ I lean in between his eyes as they slowly, wearily open, and flutter another kiss on his face. ‘Sahleb is what will warm us up now,’ I declare, and turn back to the landing.
He furrows his brow and steps off the escalator. ‘Sahleb?’ Now he’s taller than me again.
I link my arm with his. ‘There’s an Egyptian restaurant around here, isn’t there? Next to Tower Records on Lafayette.’
‘That’s what you call it?’ He twists his face, mocking my Israeli accent: ‘Sahleb?’
‘Then what is it called?’ I take advantage of the signs of life to fire him up a bit. I give his waist a teasing pinch and rub up against him. ‘Hey?’
‘Sakhlab,’ he stresses reproachfully in his deep, guttural voice. ‘Say it properly.’ He runs his subway card through the turnstile machine.
I slide my card too, producing a beep. ‘Sakhlab,’ I copy him, mimicking the masculine tone and the severity in his voice. ‘Sakh-lab.’
He flashes me a hint of a smile and flutters his eyelids as if in annoyance. ‘Close enough.’
At night I burst out of sleep abruptly, my eyes open blindly in the dark. The voiceless cry that escaped my lips still echoes inside me like a scream. My heart pounds in my chest, in my ears, in my temples. It takes a few seconds to regain my sense of reality. Only when I detect the murmuring and groans from under the blanket do I suddenly realize that what shocked me out of sleep was not my dream but Hilmi, folded up here next to me, his head buried in the blanket, talking in his sleep. His face is strained and he shakes his head as if he’s arguing with someone.
This isn’t the first time. I’ve heard him before, muttering an unintelligible series of syllables in Arabic in the middle of the night, sometimes even laughing. But now his speech is feverish. He grunts and stops, spits out words in harsh, defiant, teeth-gritting Arabic, then pushes back with a pained grimace. His forehead is wrinkled with worry or shame or insult. I lean over his face. Beneath his angrily furrowed brow, through the delicate skin of his eyelids, I can see his eyes darting anxiously back and forth.
I caress his neck softly, slowly. ‘Shhhh… Everything’s OK,’ I whisper, calming the storm. ‘Everything’s OK.’
His face looks beaten and miserable. I keep watching him a moment longer, my hand rising and falling on his chest, observing his breaths as they grow longer and deeper. After a quick glance at the alarm clock – 3.40 a.m. – I sink back into my pillow with a heavy sigh.
I lie on my back with my eyes open. It’s raining outside. Drops slide down the window and their shadows are projected on the ceiling. I think about how to tell him in the morning. (‘What was it, Hilmi? What were you dreaming? Do you remember?’) I wonder how to tell him that he was grunting and murmuring so much at night that his nightmarish voice penetrated my sleep and shocked me awake. I hear myself saying that it must have been his emotional Arabic, the Arabic words that entered my ears as something dangerous (‘At first I thought I was dreaming’) and I wonder what he will say. How will he respond to learning that even his close, intimate voice, his beloved voice, becomes strange and threatening, blood-curdling, in the dark? What will he say when I tell him it took me a long time to fall asleep again? That I lay in the dark staring at the ceiling and thought about how we’re not really as alone as we would like to believe. Even in this huge city, far from home (‘even in this room, in this bed’) it isn’t just the two of us lying here.
All the Rivers Page 16