Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  Haytham’s face betrayed him. ‘Marriage is a problem,’ he said. Several of the women turned in their seats, answering him in murmurs or declarations of dissent, and there was a ripple of emotion. But Haytham showed no pleasure at eliciting this response, as he would have done on other occasions. He raised his eyebrows slightly, as if he was baffled that others could dispute what he had said. I asked him to explain. ‘It means responsibility,’ he said, ‘and other people having a claim on you all of the time.’

  The students were starting to get the hang of having a debate in class. To begin with, they had been keen for me to tell them the right answer. For example, Guy de Maupassant’s story, ‘Country Living’, had seemed ideal for class discussion. The story is about two poor families, who are offered a chance to have one of their children adopted by a rich and childless couple. One family accepts and is shunned by the community as a consequence. But the adopted son returns at the end and is grateful. Marah was adamant that the parents were right to let their child be adopted. She asked her classmates to imagine that the story was about a Palestinian family letting their child live in a Gulf state. Others were equally sure that the other poor family was right to keep their child. They hastily dismissed one another’s arguments, expecting me to choose a side. ‘The real moral here is not to have children,’ Tariq said, easing the tension.

  For these students, the prospect of marriage and children was not a distant one. A number of them were married. Marah took her honeymoon during the semester, while another student asked for extra time on an assignment because of the pressure her divorce was putting her under. She was 21 and had two children. Three of my students were pregnant. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the median age at which men were married in 2013 was 24.7, while women were on average 20.2 years old.

  Haytham’s views on marriage had been provoked by Thomas Hardy’s story ‘Interlopers at the Knap’, which opens with a wealthy farmer, Charles Darton, travelling to meet Sally Hall, who he is due to marry. But events intervene, and he marries someone else. Much later, after his wife has died, Darton tries to woo Sally again, but she chooses to stay single. I told the students that I would read aloud the opening few paragraphs and I asked them, as with earlier stories, to underline any words they did not know. As I read, I saw the students were underlining whole sections, or staring in bewilderment at Hardy’s idiosyncratic prose. ‘I really tried to read this!’ Inas said.

  We read the ending together:

  ‘Please do not put this question to me any more,’ [Sally said],

  ‘Friends as long as you like, but lovers and married never.’

  ‘I never will,’ said Darton. ‘Not if I live a hundred years.’

  And he never did. That he had worn out his welcome in her heart was only too plain.

  […] It was only by chance that, years after, he learnt that Sally, notwithstanding the solicitations her attractions drew down upon her, had refused several offers of marriage, and steadily adhered to her purpose of leading a single life.

  The students debated whether this was a happy or a sad ending, and most thought it was both, and that there is a sort of melancholy in the reference to Sally’s heart. A few students speculated that Sally was hiding a secret in her life, and Haytham said that he thought she might have a lover. ‘It’s a happy ending,’ he insisted, as everyone started to get up at the end of class, ‘because nobody got married.’

  I had been taking Arabic lessons twice a week in Ramallah. In one lesson, my teacher, Mohammed, taught me minutes, hours, and days; fruits and vegetables; the numbers above ten and a series of phrases. I had only just started to write in Arabic, so I wrote the phrases down as I heard them.

  ana quis chukran bas ana mish mutafa-el fi falestin elyom

  I am well but I am not hopeful about Palestine today

  fi mushkile

  There are problems

  aseer

  prisoner

  asra

  prisoners

  ed-rab an e-ta-am

  The hunger strike (or ‘the strike about food’)

  ehna kareena kesa Thomas Hardy an zawaj

  We read a Thomas Hardy story about marriage

  ez-zawaj mushkile

  Marriage is a problem

  Mohammad told me that a dowry in the West Bank was often as much as 20,000 shekels, the equivalent of about £3,000, and that it was ‘mushkile,’ because people could not afford it. He also said that most boys were adamant that they did not want to get married until they were 22 or 23, and then they did.

  The West Bank was tense for several weeks after Arafat Jaradat’s death, with visible protests and skirmishes. I had just started to settle into a routine, and now I felt again that each day threw up something unpredictable. I had breakfast with Ahmed and Fu’ad one morning, in Fu’ad’s office, and asked them how things might develop. Ahmed was adamant that the situation would not get worse; that people were too apathetic to start a third intifada, and that there would only be one if the PA collapsed. Fu’ad was more equivocal, telling me that if I died, it would be Allah’s will. He said he was a believer, but not a fanatic.

  I was teaching until late that day, so I ended up trying to get on a servees at the busiest time—about 4.30pm. One of the men who organised the rides latched on to me, and eventually he got me a seat.

  On the servees, I got chatting to Qais. He had suddenly appeared in my Shakespeare class about eight weeks in. He was a skinny boy and slightly pale-looking. He always wore a baseball cap, which he pulled down firmly so that it shielded his eyes. I had laughed when he told me he had just registered for the course, partly at the chaos of the system, but also at the cheerful way in which he announced his arrival. He had then made excuses about not handing in an assignment, and I assumed he would disappear just as suddenly.

  When we reached a roundabout ahead of Qalandia check-point, there were soldiers in riot gear marching across it. A lot of cars were avoiding Qalandia, taking a circuitous route through the nearby refugee camp. Qalandia is the main access point between the northern West Bank and Jerusalem. It was often busy with people going in and out of Israel to work, and it had also become a flashpoint for protests. Our vehicle ploughed on. There was smoke everywhere. There was a fire by the check-point, and dozens of young boys and teenagers were gathered there. As we got closer, I saw a group of adults—including two Westerners—run towards us, on my side of the servees, holding their mouths. The driver called something over his shoulder and everyone closed the windows.

  There were queues of traffic moving in the opposite direction at Qalandia, and Qais said that it amazed him that everyone carried on driving past. He said that our servees was relatively new, so it could keep the tear gas out. ‘Every time it’s like that, I just hope I won’t get shot,’ he said.

  ‘How do you like Ramallah?’ he asked me after we had got off the servees and were walking through town.

  I said that I liked it a lot.

  ‘I don’t understand. Some English people seem to prefer it to home.’

  Without knowing I would, I said that I liked the sense of community there was in Ramallah and talked about the gap between rich and poor in the UK. Qais asked me if this inequality dated back to Mrs. Thatcher. ‘I am a big fan of hers,’ he said. ‘Partly because everyone here—they are such leftists, into Communism or socialism.’ Qais told me that he thought being on the left meant never saying anything was your fault. He had become a fan of Thatcher after watching her speeches on YouTube.

  As we were talking, Qais asked if I would mind if he stopped in a shop to buy some cheese. He scouted the shelves carefully, and explained that there had been an effort in Ramallah to stock fewer Israeli goods. ‘But I don’t want to buy any by accident.’

  7

  Some boy

  Ruqaya opened her bag and showed Dunia something that looked like a pencil case. Her gesture said: ‘Do you think it’s OK?’ Dunia shrugged, as if to say ‘why not?’ and tilted he
r head towards me. We were sitting at the back of a servees to Ramallah. They exchanged some words in Arabic, and then Dunia turned to me: ‘We decided it’s OK. I said “it’s only Dr. Tom.”’ It transpired that the small case was a make-up bag. By the time we passed through the checkpoint near Al-Ram, the two women were balancing at unlikely angles, holding a small mirror between them and applying lipstick.

  Some of the students were putting on a production of Caryl Churchill’s short play ‘Seven Jewish Children’, and I had been asked to help out with pronunciation. After the rehearsal, when we got to the playground that was used as a servees stop, it was crowded. A group of young men was about to push ahead of us, but Dunia and Ruqaya stood in front of the door, with their shoulders almost touching, to reserve a place. They insisted that I join them. I caught, from their attitude and stray words of Arabic, that they said to the men something like: ‘He’s our doctor, and he’s with us.’

  The two women looked almost identical at first. They were dressed in a similar way, each wearing dark jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. Neither of them wore the hijab, and both had thin black hair. Dunia’s hair was slightly shorter and she spoke in a louder voice, and moved her whole body as she spoke with ease and confidence. Ruqaya spoke more softly and held more of herself in reserve. When I caught the servees with students I was teaching, they would usually talk directly to me. But Dunia and Ruqaya talked almost as if I wasn’t there. As the servees tilted down the hill into Abu Dis, they debated the merits of one of the other lecturers. Ruqaya liked him, but Dunia said she didn’t understand what was being taught and that he could not keep control of the class.

  After about ten minutes, we reached a roundabout near Ma’ale Adumim. It is one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, with a population of nearly 40,000. The word ‘settlement’ suggests a temporary site, which might be quickly uprooted. Yet most of the 350,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank live in large cities.

  There was a small line of men waiting for a servees home, each one standing apart from the others and drooping by the side of the road. One looked up hopefully as we passed and then went back to staring at the pavement. They were Palestinians who worked in Ma’ale Adumim. The servees picked up speed as it entered a motorway, but then we were sent shuddering forward in our seats as our driver braked. A car had pulled out in front of us and was hovering half in each lane, so we could not overtake it. When we finally passed it, I saw the driver hunched over the wheel. There were payot curling down his cheeks, the sidelocks that are worn by many in the Orthodox Jewish community. There were often mini-battles between Israeli and Palestinian drivers on the roads near the settlements.

  Dunia and Ruqaya started to talk about exchange trips they had been on. Dunia had been to England and Belgium, and Ruqaya had been to Greece. My students could be wry about the fact that they only got to leave the West Bank on schemes that were funded to make them talk to Israelis. They could not escape the occupation, even abroad. Ruqaya told me about her trip to Greece: ‘When we got into town on the last night, we had our photo taken with the waiter because we had not seen a boy all week.’ Dunia had recently visited London. ‘I couldn’t believe it. There was this street where everyone spoke Arabic! This boy passed me and said hillwe. He thought I was cute! Hillwe. I couldn’t believe it.’ I asked her what she thought of England. ‘I realised if you say “in a minute” in English—well, an English minute is about two hours in Palestine.’ Dunia had a Jordanian passport as well as a Jerusalem ID. She talked about making trips to Tel Aviv recently and said that she preferred the shops there to the ones in Ramallah.

  The servees reached a steep road by a quarry and joined a queue behind a lorry that was inching its way up the hill. There were half-a-dozen cars in front of us and, every now and then, one would poke its shoulder out into the left-hand lane, looking for an opening in the oncoming traffic. But there was a steady blur of cars passing us in the other direction. We trundled slowly past a clutch of Bedouin shacks with corrugated iron roofs. A woman was gathering together clothes that were hanging on a line. A small boy sat on a donkey on the hill behind her.

  When we passed the small checkpoint, the two women put the make-up away. We could see black smoke billowing in the near-distance. ‘Qalandia exploded,’ Dunia said. When we reached it, there were dense queues of traffic. In the distance, by the Wall, I could see three or four boys moving stealthily along, hiding behind what seemed like the broken top of a table or part of a door. As we slowed on the road, boys—pre- and early-teens—were moving in and out of the traffic jam, with rocks in their hands. One was showing a small length of wood to a friend. They had scarves around the bottom of their faces, with only their eyes showing and these were lit with an expression I recognised in boys that age, mischievous and excited.

  Tear gas exploded to our left. I couldn’t see soldiers, but we heard a gunshot as we passed. ‘They’re hiding,’ Ruqaya said. Dunia said she did not understand why the boys went to the Wall to throw stones.

  As we picked up speed, on the way into Ramallah, Ruqaya said she wanted there to be another uprising. Dunia recalled that during the second intifada, the uprising in the early 2000s, school had been disrupted. ‘My mother is a teacher, so we had school at home.’ She said that everyone’s grades had dropped that year, and that her sister’s husband had lost two brothers. The women asked for my opinion, and I said that I thought they shouldn’t have to choose between two bad options, a violent response or accepting the situation. But Ruqaya was insistent: ‘It’s better to do something than nothing,’ she said, ‘At least then the men can be martyrs and go to heaven. We have to defend our land.’ Dunia’s face tightened with emotion. ‘Getting the servees across the West Bank is defending it,’ she said.

  Noor told me that they had a phrase in Arabic that applied to Mercutio. ‘It’s pronounced mota rakhesa,’ she explained, as she wrote it out for me. ‘It means that he had a cheap death.’ I had set an oral exam for the Shakespeare class, in which they had to memorise one speech from Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to make use of the students’ ability to memorise texts and for them to get to know one of the characters a little better. Noor had chosen Mercutio’s speech about Queen Mab’s effect on lovers: ‘she gallops night by night / Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.’ Others opted for the Prince interrupting a street fight in the first scene or the Nurse’s speech about weaning Juliet as a baby.

  I put a sign-up sheet for the oral exam on the door to the office, and I discovered that forty students were registered for the Shakespeare course. There were several names that were new to me. On average, there had only been about thirty students at the seminars. Not all of the students appeared for the exam, and a small number turned up and asked for extra time, one of whom elaborately described a sore tooth that was troubling him.

  It was the first time that I interacted with all the students one to one. Tamam told me that, as he was the Prince, I had to imagine him arriving on a horse. One of the women, Ameera, was so nervous that she breathed heavily and kept up a dialogue with herself in Arabic. She told me she had chosen the Prince’s speech because her name meant ‘princess.’ Adel explained that he thought Mercutio was a ‘real man’ who is against love, whereas Romeo follows his emotions. Two of the women, Inas and Anan, had stayed up all night practicing the Nurse’s speech together. They had brought props: an apron which each of them tied around their waist and a towel, which they folded and re-folded as they spoke. They were mimicking a version they had seen online, and each of them stared past me at a memory of the baby Juliet, conjured in the mid-distance. ‘I don’t think I will ever forget this speech,’ Inas said.

  In the afternoon, a woman called Zahrah came in, dressed in tight jeans and a small t-shirt. She made a reasonable job of the speech, but most of her preparation seemed to be in urging me to give her a good mark, through solicitous smiles and gestures. After her, a man called Abd came in. He had a shaved head and was well-built. Abd stumbled t
hrough his speech and seemed close to tears. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked, finally realising the tears were not just a sign of nerves. He said that he had been engaged to Zahrah but that she had recently broken it off. ‘How did she do in her exam?’ he asked.

  ‘So who read the story?’ I asked. The students were starting to be more open with me, even when they had not done the reading. A few of them said they had been too busy, because they’d had exams; one man said he had been ill. A couple of others volunteered that they had read the story, Kipling’s ‘Lispeth’, but found the language difficult.

  ‘I read the title,’ Haytham said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t like it.’

  Marah said she’d read the story on the servees, to distract herself because the driver was going too quickly.

  Kipling’s story is set in India during British rule. Lispeth, who is Indian, lives with an English chaplain after her parents die. One day she returns home carrying an Englishman, whom she has found unconscious and who she plans to marry. The man is persuaded by the chaplain’s wife to play along, on the grounds that Lispeth will forget him when he leaves. However, when the man fails to return and Lispeth finds out about the lie, she is appalled and ‘reverts to her own people.’

  Lispeth walks for twenty or thirty miles every day, while the English ladies walk for a mile or so. I told the students about Fadi’s phrase that English people ‘don’t know how to walk.’ I gave the students an extract from a letter that Kipling wrote in 1895, in response to a request for a reference from the Board of Foreign Missionaries: