All the Rivers

by Dorit Rabinyan

  But when he gets home and stands in the garden knee-high in weeds, he decides to clean up a bit before hanging the hammock, even if it’s just removing the rotting fruit from the ground. He recognizes an apple tree, a pomegranate tree, and perhaps a mandarin tree. That’s a lemon, and that must be cherry, and they’re all dusty and neglected. The few fruits that haven’t dropped are shrivelling on the branches, pecked at by birds. The rest roll around cracked and worm-eaten under his shoes. What used to be a small vine arbour is now wizened and mouldy. Behind the arbour is a pit covered with a rusty sheet of metal. When he removes the stones weighing it down, he finds a cache of tools: an upside-down wheelbarrow on top of two rakes, a hoe, a shovel, a pickaxe and pitchfork, ancient pruning shears and a pair of gardening gloves.

  He spends the whole day weeding, and another day pruning the trees. He uproots the couch grass and thistles with a hoe, pushing the wheelbarrow back and forth as it fills up with debris. These are the early days of July. Summer this year is relatively temperate and the hot khamsin winds haven’t started yet, but the air is dry and dense, and he works all morning in the sun. At almost eleven, his whole body sweaty and cheeks flushed, he takes off his undershirt and wipes his armpits and neck with it. He drinks water from a bottle, then puts the undershirt on his head and ties it around the back of his neck like a pirate bandana. He keeps working bare-chested, wearing shorts and his unrecognizable dusty running shoes. By midday his arms ache and his gloved hands are red and burning. He washes his face and hands at the spigot. In the kitchen he downs three glasses of Coke, grabs a pitta and a piece of cheese, then walks out the front gate to the neighbours’ house. An oversized rose bush, almost a tree, entwines its velvet red roses among the myrtle hedge in front of the house. He knocks on the door. The neighbour asks him in for coffee and biscuits and gives him a tour of her beautiful garden. Half an hour later Hilmi leaves with an electric saw and a hammer, carrying a ladder and extension cable on his shoulder.

  His labour exposes a dismally arid plot of land. But after he tills and turns the ground and floods it with water, dark soft clods of earth begin to fall apart under the pitchfork’s tines, and all sorts of bugs and worms crawl out, snails and beetles that blink at the sunlight. The intoxicating smell of loose earth seeps into his nostrils as the sun sets and the shadows grow long. The seven trees seem to breathe sighs of relief when he goes from one to the next with the hose and fills up the drainage wells he has dug around the trunks.

  The next day he buys a big sack of fertilizer and some pesticide. The nursery owner says he knew Mrs Fayed from back when he was a young boy selling flowers at the intersection. He recommends a fly trap and netting against birds. Practically dizzy with excitement, Hilmi fills up six cardboard boxes with potted flowers, vegetable seedlings and herbs. He asks to use the phone and calls Shadi to come and pick him up. While he waits, he gets the idea to build a rockery as a hiding place for little creatures. He imagines a round pond with water plants, toads croaking at night, dragonflies.

  The neighbour had given him a glass jar full of dirty grey liquid – a pungent mixture of soap water, black pepper and garlic cloves – and he follows her instructions to mix a few spoons in a bucket of water and spray the branch stumps in the vine arbour every morning. Upon her advice, he fills a pot with vinegar, a handful of salt and tobacco crumbled from two cigarettes, and sprays this concoction on the blighted foliage of the lemon and cherry trees, and rids the apple trees of its aphids. In the south-western corner he prepares vegetable beds and a spiral of beds for herbs. He plants wormwood and zaatar, sage and mint, with rosemary bushes all around. Here and there he adds pink petunias, a few white chrysanthemums, yellow sunflowers, red geraniums. He sets stones between them, and also builds a scarecrow: two planks nailed together in a cross shape, wearing a faded T-shirt and a necklace of pine cones. He sticks it in the vegetable plot with its profile to the wadi, adds an oil-paint smile and an upside-down bucket on its head.

  With the mulberry branches pruned and the cluster of wild bushes removed from the stone wall, the south side of the garden looks out onto the whole wadi. His eyes are drawn again and again to the open landscape, never getting their fill. He takes in the rooftops in the village downhill, the date palms, the steeples of St George Church on one side and the Greek Orthodox church on the other, and the ruins of the ancient city of Jifneh. More rooftops and courtyards and houses, more green treetops and cascades of bougainvillea in red, yellow and hot pink. Further on, groves of olive trees, peach trees and vineyards.

  He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and gazes all the way to the edge of the sky. A bird of prey flies low, soaring in the distance – a falcon or an eagle, it’s hard to tell from here. He has been fascinated by this creature for several days, transfixed by the quiet, elegant gliding, the brief flapping of wings, the shadow that sails over the earth and the hills, the circling in the air.

  He can smell smoke from a distance, and the aroma of grilling meat. Even though he ate not long ago – leftover kebab and stuffed cabbage his mother had made when she visited the day before, which he ate standing up straight from the pot – he feels a vague pang of hunger in his stomach. The complacent sparrow that’s been hopping around on the scarecrow’s shoulders all morning is still there. The coy smile and the eyes he painted on the scarecrow’s face are too kind, and the birds like it. Laila, the family dog, lies at the edge of the vegetable garden, mingling with the black-and-brown earth tones. Last night when his mother went back to Ramallah, she left her here. She’d barked with joy upon encountering a hedgehog in the front yard, and this morning, when Hilmi leaned over to show her a pale green praying mantis dancing up his arm, she cocked her head suspiciously.

  He gives the tomato plants a loving look. They’re still green and hard, his dozen beauties, but their cheeks are starting to blush slightly and they’re swelling from day to day. The aubergines are coming along nicely. He looks tenderly over the tendrils of pumpkin, the orange courgette flowers, the buds of red pepper, and marvels again at the sweet potato’s lovely sprawling foliage. He inserts stakes next to the young cucumber plants and ties the delicate branches up so they can take in more light and air. The beanstalk is climbing, the corn is growing quickly.

  He knows he will not enjoy the crops. He knows that in autumn, when the green pepper and cauliflower are ripe, when the pomegranate and clementine trees bear their first fruits, he will be far away in New York. In a month and a half he will leave everything and go back to Brooklyn, back to the studio, and whoever rents the house and lives here in his stead – perhaps he’ll leave them a note with instructions for watering and pest control – will be the ones to pick the apples in winter and the grapes next summer. He doesn’t care about not being here to enjoy the fruits, he claimed when his mother grumbled about all the time and energy he was investing in strangers’ land, and the money he was wasting. ‘You won’t even be here to taste it,’ she sighed, ‘isn’t it a shame to work so hard?’

  Cucumbers and sweet potatoes? Green onions? He can buy all that at the market, he explained. He can get crates full of them for next to nothing. And he doesn’t mind labouring over a plot he will soon leave, he doesn’t mind caring for a garden and trees that belong to someone else. He’s doing it for himself. He enjoys being outside in the fresh air and sunshine all day. It does him good.

  Raking, weeding, spraying. Seeing the garden rehabilitated day by day. Watching bees hover and buzz over his sunflowers, a white butterfly swirl among the Brussels sprouts. This daily contact with the land is good for him. Even sweating does him good. Since the day he started working, three weeks ago, he’s been full of energy, vitality. He has moments of satisfaction and spiritual elevation in the garden that he has only ever had when painting. It’s true that he hasn’t picked up a paintbrush or opened his portfolio since he got here, but the truth is that it’s made him happy to discover that he doesn’t need drawing or painting. He doesn’t need anything.

  He enjo
ys his body growing stronger. Feeling his back and thigh muscles, the sweet exhaustion in his limbs at the end of the day. Looking in the mirror after he showers and examining his rosy cheeks, his upper arm muscles and his chest, the deep copper tone they’ve absorbed from the sun. He enjoys eating like he never has before, with a newly healthy, manly appetite. He likes the satisfaction of an after-dinner cigarette, the taste of the hookah in the evening. He enjoys swaying in his hammock in the dark, looking out at the wadi lights. Listening to the crickets. Dozing among the trees as if he were in a perfumed bath, delighting in the damp, aromatic air, so clear at night. And in the morning, he tells me, he steps out onto the porch with his first cup of coffee, into the heavy, sleepy silence of the garden, and enjoys walking among the beds and bending over between the branches to see the beads of dew up close: they hang on the leaves with an entire rainbow of colours reflected in each drop. The movement of the wind in the foliage, the shimmering light. He gets very close and sees the entire garden, with himself smiling in it, reflected upside down – all in one drop of water.

  He tells me that when his mother came to visit she stayed all evening. She filled his fridge with groceries from the market and made pots full of stuffed cabbage leaves and lamb kebabs and rice with pine nuts. Laila sprawled at his feet and watched him eat. Then his sister Sana came and the three of them sat on the porch. They peeled fruit and drank coffee and munched on sunflower seeds. And every time a breeze came up from the wadi, they interrupted their chatter, leaned back with loud sighs, and praised the good air. At some point Sana commented: ‘Why don’t you stay? You can’t get this kind of air in America. Stay here in Jifneh.’ He smiled at her, smiled at the dark garden, and admitted that every so often he did amuse himself with the idea of postponing his flight and staying on a few more months to spend the autumn in Jifneh.

  chapter 31

  He wakes up to the sound of Laila barking. She slept in his bed again, curled up at his feet, her snout burrowing into her tail. Now, in the morning light, she hears the gate hinges squeak and then footsteps on the path, and she leaps up and runs to the door. Through the barks, Hilmi recognizes Marwan’s voice sweet-talking the dog from the other side of the door, and Shadi’s voice on the phone. They were both here last night, he remembers as he starts to awaken; they wanted to take him to a party. He takes a few deep breaths and stretches out, and silently gives thanks when they open the balcony door and put an end to the barking.

  He opens his eyes, slowly gets out of bed, and pulls his boxers on. Ten fifteen? He stares at the alarm clock. Was he really asleep for ten hours? He staggers to the bathroom, scratching his head, still amazed at how late it is. Standing at the toilet he remembers the can of beer he drank last night after Marwan and Shadi left. Still stunned by being awake, and by the depth of the luxuriously long sleep knocked into him by that one beer, he moves lazily across the living room with measured steps, putting his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light.

  He finds them in the shade of the mulberry tree. Shadi is lounging in the hammock, smoking a cigarette and staring at his phone as usual. Marwan stands with his back to Hilmi, aiming his DV-8 camera over the stone wall to capture the wadi’s landscape.

  They’ve both grown up and changed so much since Hilmi was last here. When he came back from Baghdad in ’99, Marwan was barely twenty and hadn’t started film school yet. Shadi was still in high school, living with his parents in Hebron. In the four years since, they have grown taller and become young men. Marwan does wedding photography and endlessly revises a screenplay he’s written. Shadi has a driver’s licence and an Audi, and he’s had a steady girlfriend for two years. Even though Hilmi’s been back for two months now, he is still surprised by how smart and articulate his little brother and nephew are, so knowledgeable and full of life. He is impressed by Shadi’s good looks and self-assured charisma, and by Marwan’s sensitivity, serenity and wisdom. They both look so beautiful and healthy and tall.

  Yet in some ways they are still the little kids who trailed around after him and worshipped him even though he was only a few years older: they do not leave his side now either. Full of curiosity and questions, they dance around him, interrogate him, greedily swallow up his New York stories. They come calling all the time, wanting to take him to town and march him around proudly. Yesterday, after they gave up and left, they partied on some rooftop until four in the morning, and now they’re here again. Their faces are pale from lack of sleep, but they’re already up and concocting a new adventure.

  They tell Hilmi about a guy they know from Kalandiya, a taxi driver who is the brother of a friend of a friend, who was at the party yesterday. They’re excited, finishing each other’s sentences. The guy is driving into Israel today, he’s leaving Kalandiya at around eleven, in less than an hour, and he has to be in Tel Aviv by the afternoon to deliver something. They’ve already talked to him on the phone and he’s agreed to take them and bring them back in the evening. He has room for four people. He wanted four hundred shekels, but they talked him down to three hundred. He has a permit to get through the checkpoint, but for them he said he’d take a route that circumvents the soldiers, no problem. And if they want, he’ll pick them up in Jifneh at eleven and drive through Surda, over the hills.

  Hilmi has heard about that roundabout route that avoids the Kalandiya checkpoint, a long tedious road that van drivers started using recently to avoid the roadblock hassles. It’s a road travelled by construction workers, men who leave in the middle of the night to find work in Israel in the morning, people prohibited from crossing over, people who have no choice. He’s seen the orange vans careening past Jifneh on the road to Birzeit, loaded with passengers and goods.

  Since he doesn’t say anything, Marwan and Shadi point to the wadi and describe the route, making big excitable movements: ‘You go north to Birzeit, turn east before the bridge, then south, down through El Bireh, until you get to the south side of the Kalandiya checkpoint, you drive around it and hook up with the main road.’

  ‘An hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes’ detour,’ Shadi says. ‘Hour and a half tops.’

  Marwan glances at Hilmi and adds: ‘If everything goes well.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it go well?’ Shadi raises his eyebrows at Marwan and waves his mobile phone. Lots of people take the detour every day, he explains, and everyone says the army turns a blind eye. At Kalandiya the soldiers themselves shoo people away to the alternative route. Just the day before yesterday, when he went to pick up his mother at the checkpoint, he heard soldiers yelling: Surda, rukh min Surda! And he saw them with their fucking bulldozers turning over the land, because pretty soon that lousy wall is going to go through here, and then there won’t be any way to get out.

  Hilmi pictures the taxi driving down the road from a bird’seye view, a falcon or an eagle soaring above: it’s just a dark spot approaching Jifneh from around the bend. He sees it drive past the villages of Surda and Abu Kash, and past the settlements. He sees the concrete blocks and the minarets on one side, the glimmering villas and red-tiled roofs on the other. He sees the grey military structure spiked with antennas that towers up next to Beit El, and army jeeps patrolling the road. He sees the taxi wind in and out of sight, rattling along shepherd’s paths and dusty dirt roads, and the bird’s shadow moving across the hills – and for a long, silent minute, still half asleep, staring and listening and blinking, he keeps stroking the back of Laila’s neck as she sits curled up in his lap.

  ‘Let’s go to Jaffa, Hilmi, to the sea!’

  ‘He’ll take us to the sea!’

  Laila jumps off, infected by their excitement, and barks happily: To the sea! To the sea!

  Underneath his sleepiness, Hilmi’s thoughts become serious, weighing the dangers lurking on this sort of journey. His heart pounds in his throat: Bazi. He has to call Bazi.

  chapter 32

  The last time we talked was Tuesday. I know you remember the date because it was Omar’s birthday, 12 August
. Omar and Amal went out to see friends in the evening and you babysat their kids. You gobbled up home-made popsicles with them and reheated corn on the cob. You spent some time on the PlayStation, then played tag and had a pillow fight. At around 10.30, when you came back from the bathroom, still breathless from playing so hard and ready for more – ready to devour them, hug and kiss and crush them, suffocate them with the outbursts of love you’ve been getting recently, love of their sweetness and smallness, their rowdy laughter – you found Nour and Amir both fast asleep, their heads drooping and mouths gaping.

  One by one you carried them to their beds, covered them with sheets, and switched off the light. Then you went back to the living room and turned off the TV. On the kitchen table you found the cordless phone. You took your cigarettes and lighter out of your back pocket and stepped onto the balcony and dialled my number. High up on the ninth floor, facing the darkness with the phone against your ear, you looked out at the hotel roof with its name blazoned in bright lights and flags waving on either side of the doorway.

  You listened to the tones getting longer and longer, waiting for me to answer. You looked far out to the glimmering lights at the edge of the open expanse. Perhaps you pictured me there among the distant Tel Aviv skyscrapers. You gazed at the twinkling sky and imagined you could hear my phone ringing. Feeling happy, you exhaled and smiled at the ribbon of smoke, eager to tell me about it as soon as I picked up.

  You heard echoes of pounding music. I must have sounded muffled, with a commotion of chatter, and at first I had trouble hearing you. Eventually you practically yelled: ‘It’s Hilmi! Hilmi!’ as if you were calling from the balcony to some distant, invisible Hilmi on the other side. I finally recognized your voice and sounded surprised, suddenly happy, but not relieved. You picked up the tension in my voice when I switched to English. You tried to say you would call back later, but I couldn’t understand, and I yelled hoarsely that I couldn’t hear anything and asked you to wait. You heard me move through a thunder of music and voices, already regretting your insistence. You heard breathing close to the mouthpiece as I walked, and you regretted not hanging up. Because even when the noise died down and gave way to a muffled sound of streets and cars, my voice was still blurry, as if I were straining to overcome a disturbance.