Israeli society, in spite of its colonisation of the West Bank, was deeply democratic. Everyone stood in line at lunch time for their food. Once, I jumped the queue at Hebrew University as I was late for class. They dragged me back to the end of the line! Israelis dance on the rim of a volcano. Their ‘colonies’ afford them cheap labour and ample profit. On the Netanya beachfront I saw middle-class, middle-aged women wave bravely to Israeli boys going off to bomb Beirut in 1982. At a chic sun-roof restaurant I was once served a huge strawberry and cream. ‘Last days of the Roman Empire!’ I exclaimed. ‘First days of the Jewish Empire!’ retorted the campy waiter. The great Israeli poet, Yehuda Amithai disappointed me when he spoke: ‘I reach for a gun before I answer my door!’ I had loved his love poems.
The poetry of the Holy Land: Nablus is the Biblical Sechem. On Mt Gerizim Moses stood and glimpsed the Holy Land but died before he could enter it. At Beit Lehem Jacob slept in the Potter’s Field, a stone for a pillow and dreamed of a ladder to Heaven. At the Holy Mount I saw the stone on which Abraham started to sacrifice his hapless son, Isaac; the wooden frieze donated by the Knights Templar; below is the Wailing Wall, the only remnant of King Solomon’s Second Temple. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I saw a small rocky mound, Golgotha. The Seven Stations of the Cross wend through the way donkeys wend through even today:
O fools! For once I too had my hour
One far, fierce hour and sweet
When there were shouts about my ears
And palms below my feet.
—G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Donkey’
The Gate through which Jesus entered in triumph; the window where Herod pronounced ‘Ecce Homo’; the Crusaders’ gate with Richard Lionheart’s emblem of the Three Flying Lions on a pennant … The Church of St Mary was actually a Venus Temple decorated with seashells; the Samaritans still practised blood sacrifices and magic and women drew water from the well where Jesus promised Eternal Waters.
Then there are the daily miracles: of the Lubban Valley on the way to Jerusalem from Nablus with almonds in flower, the fallen petals dyeing the grass beneath each almond tree a deep pink, almost purple. The Land of Milk and Honey. Thrown up from the bed of the prehistoric sea, Tethys.
I had to lie that I was Moslem to be able to enter the Dome of the Rock before Friday prayers. ‘Nablus’ was really ‘Neopolis’ of the Romans. It was a centre for the olive, almond, and fig trade. Decadent, no doubt. Up until the 40s it had an elite homosexual Arab culture flourishing with the likes of Ibrahim Touqan and his circle of intimates. But now the Revolution forbids intimacy.
I broke all taboos: I loved men and women. Mahar Khayyat, a student leader rusticated from Abu Dis, touched me deeply. His mother was disappointed in him: she had sold her ‘oud’ (lute) to send him to school. His twin sister ‘Mahera’ had been jailed for blowing up a bus on the road to Israel. She found freedom in a prisoner swap. She joined Laila Khaled in Paris. Maher dreamt of going to meet her but the Israeli authorities denied him the right of return; one of thousands of such cases. I would visit him each afternoon after school. I lent him dinars, to support his small hosiery shop, which he duly returned. His elder brother even bought a secondhand car with it. I can see Maher’s slim waist, long arms and legs, small toes, big hands, pear-shaped buttocks, long nose, blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, white skin, large ears, thin lips hiding an overbite, cleft chin, the seven-o-clock shadow on his fair cheek. So closely had I observed him hour upon hour; and he, me. Writing this description I feel like the humble Bengal potters who fashion a god out of mere clay and hence come to be on easy terms of familiarity with a godhead. Maher knew I loved him passionately. His compassion prompted him to stay in the shop overnight on my last night in Palestine. I felt shy and I broke the tryst. I did not want the only Platonic love of my life to kiss the dust.
Suha was the sister of Maher’s friend. She was also at Abu Dis. Once I chanced upon her and we chatted about Anais Nin. Later I gifted her Under A Glass Bell, which I bought on Jaffa street. She fell in love with me. She was small, dark, and compassionate but also committed politically, something I hadn’t guessed. Her brother asked Maher what I wanted from her. Maher being shy couldn’t say, ‘they’re romantically involved,’ so he said, ‘Hoshang wishes to marry Suha.’ The brother would’ve harboured his sister’s secret. But I made a tactical mistake. I visited her house one afternoon and proposed marriage. Her father came home from office and practically drove me out of the house. But Suha and I remained friends. Her objection wasn’t that I wasn’t Moslem nor Arab but that I hadn’t joined the PLO! It is a life-anddeath situation that every man, woman and child faces in Palestine and there’s no time for frivolity. ‘Friendship is the only sweetness in our lives,’ Suha would say. She was angry when her brother brought home a second wife over the first wife’s head. But she was amused when the often women became friends and made common cause against their husband’s chauvinism. Survival strategies!
BURAK
We went under the arches
He and I
We bowed our heads
He and I
under a great moon
glowing over the old city
He took my hand
His in mine
We bent our heads
He and I
The dome glowed silver
all for us
The dome glowed gold
all for us
The city slept
Unlike us
We roamed and roamed
He and I
Our fate was doomed
His and mine
We exchanged breaths
He and I
We exhaled words
He and I
Our beings took flight
His and mine
On a steed
Neither male nor female
To a place
Neither earth nor paradise
We bowed our heads
Under the arches
because our fate was doomed
His and mine
Actually I was romantically involved then with Fayez, a student of mine. He was older than his class and sexually experienced. He slept with me out of friendship. I helped him pay his fees. The PLO had sent him to Athens but they demanded he eventually join their politics which he wouldn’t do. So he was left helpless. He loved a rich heiress at school. He naively hoped to marry her. The desire of the moth for the star. She was the modern Arab girl: Fashionable, virginal and politically active. As I had predicted she married someone else. Fayez was heartbroken. But I could only laugh out loud in his face. When they knew about my involvement with Fayez at school from their spies, they kicked both of us out. With my bonus salary I sent Fayez to Hebrew University. There he slept with all his young Jewish female teachers and got cent per cent marks in all subjects. (He knew Hebrew, having lived in Jerusalem among Jews.) He’d probably worked in Athens as a male prostitute to make ends meet. ‘You know,’ he told me, ‘When we were young we could do anything just for a pack of Marlboros!’ He would come to me smelling of woman, covered with a woman’s nail-marks and bites. He’d apologise. Then make love to me. I worked as a toilet cleaner and garbage picker at a Jewish Youth Hostel. But Fayez was good in bed, I loved him, and that made everything seem just fine for a while. At least I wasn’t whoring at the baths or at the gay park.
I would earn a dollar a day. I’d beg meals from guests (mostly women) and repay them with a poem. At week’s end I’d buy a book for $3.50 and see a movie for $3.50 at the Edison Cinema next door. I saw Carmen thrice in three weeks. I loved opera and wept each time at the flower-song, remembering Fayez’s infidelity.
Once I became deathly ill for a day after cleaning up the vomit of a tourist who’d visited an Egyptian pyramid sealed for a thousand years. I was fine after the bug left my body in a day. The neighbour was a professor’s widow; her son too taught at Hebrew University. She rightly hated all the commotion the young made at the hostel and directed her hostilit
y at me: ‘A professor who picks garbage!’ She’d snort in my face and slam her door on me. I’d recite ‘Lucy Grey’ as I took the stinking garbage to the municipal trash bin telling myself unsuccessfully about mind over matter! Once a duo of young Jewish musicians played a violin and viola sonata (perhaps by Brahms) for me in the stairwell at midnight. I sat atop the winding stairs where the crescendo rose. So, too, did neighbour. End of concert.
Gloria, a divorcee from Panama, travelled the world on $700 a month her American ex-husband gave her. She was pushing forty but was petite with lithe figure, firm breasts, and a peroxide blonde Afro hairstyle. Bus drivers solicited her routinely. Once we shared LSD and a shower together. Gloria had Hispanic morals. She’d go with you but she wouldn’t go all the way. She pitied me. I’d remove her toenail polish with acetone. I too was devoted to her. She was wild. She’d thrown a carving knife at her husband when she’d discovered him with another woman. Fayez wanted to sleep with her. ‘But he’s bald!’ she protested. Fayez’s vanity was hurt.
Yasmin was a ‘pocket Venus’. Men followed her in the streets. ‘It’s your eyes,’ her grandma from Sidon would say. She and a friend would sit in the class and cruise the young male teachers’ boxes, she told me. She had an Arab photographer who’d put her on a table in his studio and give her oral sex. Her nose was crooked, to one side; her brother had broken it with a hockey stick. ‘You have Madhubala’s body and Nadira’s face,’ I’d mock her. She had told her grandma about me so grandma dreamed of us at a picnic beside a fountain; happy together!
This was not the first time Fayez had tried to nick in on my women. I was so devoted to him I’d let him do anything to me. But the women knew him better. My student Yasmin pursued me and finally succeeded in getting me in bed with her. Suha hated her. We dated for six months. We’d end up at my Naomi street bedsit (where Fayez visited also) after class and make love every single afternoon. My Jewish neighbour, a concert pianist, would practise modern music like Ravel’s or Faure’s on the piano. The wild music would be carried on the afternoon land breezes and would be a fitting background to our wild lovemaking. Yasmin was a clitoral woman and demanded full attention. Our neighbour’s balcony abutted my window. So busy would I be in bed I wouldn’t notice my curtain billowing on the breeze affording my young neighbour a full ringside view. He’d be grateful for our performance, too, and wouldn’t shy away even when we caught him at his voyeuristic pleasures. He was a Sabra probably and his free morality belonged to the Kibbutz and the Israeli Army which recruits women, hippies, gays.
I would marry Yasmin. I became a Moslem.
The young Ramallah mullah would exchange English lessons for lessons on Islam.
‘To marry woman is not reason to be Moslem!’
‘Do you believe in God?’
—‘I’ve heard he exists.’
‘In Mohammed?
—‘He was a historical reality.’
Say after me:
La Ilahi: Illallah
Mohammed al Rasool-ullah
I repeated the ‘kalima’. I was Moslem.
‘You can’t believe Buddha now.’
—‘OK!’
‘Also your Zoroastrian gods of your fathers’.
I said ‘yes’ with a pang for lost gods.
Two witnesses fed me kunafeh in the marketplace. Ramadan: fasting and praying. I could never fast and pray. Though I still pay ‘zakat’ to the mosques and I never take interest on my money.
How do I un-become a Moslem?
—‘You don’t, said Maher.
—‘A Parsi, Buddhist, Christian gay Moslem!’ sister mocked me.
My sister had prepared a basement room for us in her Chicago home. I had an American visa but our honeymoonmoney went for Fayez’s Israeli degree and Yasmin and I parted bitterly when Fayez tried to ingratiate himself to her by telling her I was gay and that she should prefer him to me. She retorted, ‘I love Hoshang for what he is’. Fayez came back, rather stunned, to tell me, ‘She really loves you!’ Her family was no help. Her mother hated me. ‘He looks like a postman with his bag!’ Her father thought she’d be forced back into the kitchen if she married me and went with me to what he thought was ‘a backward country’ like India. Her sister was then studying medicine in Russia and had a Russian boyfriend unknown to the parents. She’d try to fob off her Arab suitor on Yasmin. ‘An Arab doctor comes every evening in his Mercedes Benz to take me out. He wants to marry me. What shall I do?’ Yasmin wrote in a letter to me.
—‘Marry the doctor. I’ll never own a Benz’, I wrote back.
I broke Yasmin’s heart. She probably married and broke all contact with me.
That was my last chance to marry at thirty-six.
—‘It was not fated to be’, said an Indian astrologer to me.
The hostel owner also owned a bar on Jaffa street (Yaffo in Hebrew). English girls who doubled as waitresses lived free at the hostel. A barman, an Israeli with a British passport routinely stole money from the bar safe, money kept for safekeeping by unsuspecting lodgers, and from the luggage left at the hostel when the visitors went sightseeing by day. He was probably gay. We discovered a noose in the loft where he slept. He ‘dated’ the English waitresses to ward off any suspicion he was otherwise. I lost two passports and $500 at the hostel. When sister sent $500 and I kept it in the bar safe, that too went missing. So I doubled as glass washer in the bar by night. I lasted a day. I was to stay strictly in the kitchen. But by midnight my curiosity piqued me so I came out into the bar. I saw two burly men wrestling each other to the ground. ‘Make love not war!’ I said, much to the hilarity of the other drinkers.
All religions say, ‘Thou shalt not steal’, including Buddhism. All religions are money based, for the moneyed bourgeois. Since I was stolen from, I stole petty cash from the hostel till for my boyfriend. ‘If you’re stolen from, you will steal.’ I had broken the last bourgeois taboo; against theft. I could also now say I had done everything for love including stealing money. The management sent Gloria to quiz me but I did not confess. She gave up on me and packed me a picnic basket for my sea journey to India via Greece. I was down to my last shekels.
I had to go overland to Jaffa instead of taking the ferry to Athens across the Mediterranean where my Air India Jet to Bombay awaited me. Jaffa had banyan and plumeria brought from India and transplanted in Mandate Palestine by the British. The heat and crow shit. I could have been walking in Bombay already. White plumeria was mother’s favourite flower. I also chanced upon Queen’s Lace which the Arabs call ‘Al-Quodsi’ after Jerusalem. Its pungent smell was the pervading smell in our childhood playground in Bombay at the mill-workers’ tenement where father lived with mother. Now he lived with his new wife on an upmarket Bombay beach in a posh apartment. I really had no home to go to. I wept and wept on the boat all the way to Athens.
When the boat pulled out of Haifa harbour at sunset we saw the Dome and cypresses of Bahaullah’s Mausoleum on the receding shoreline. Baha’is were a creation of the British, to break the Shiite mullahs’ might in Iran in the early twentieth century. So it was fitting the British found him a grave in British Mandate Palestine. A traitor and an exile.
The light at Patmos next evening was ethereal. It broke from the clouds. St John wrote the Gospel here. The very air was holy. I cheered up. All was not lost. Not yet.
The Adonises at the Athens Museum reminded me of Fayez’s lithe, sculpted body. I sent him an Adonis postcard telling him that. ‘Thank you,’ he wrote back. That was the last I heard from him. I learnt from friends he was in America. So was Ran Shinar, who had predicted nothing but doom for me and had broken friendship with me in my hour of need lest I mooch off him.
Some British tourists invited me to Olympus. I had to pass up the chance as my last $200 I had to keep as fees for a Bombay lawyer to claim my inheritance from mother who had been dead twenty years already.
‘Do not bring any of your prostitutes here,’ stepmother told me when I asked her if I could marr
y Yasmin and bring her home. I changed the subject and never broached the topic again.
What I remember of Palestine I press into these pages. The Fat Poet wanted to take me back to Nabil; to go with me to teach in Brunei now that I had publicly refused loyalty to the PLO by putting my name on an Israeli loyalty oath. Of course, I refused. The Jerusalem office of Al-Fajr (the Dawn), the only English language Arab paper in the West Bank where I first read a translation of Genet’s ‘A Visit to Sabra and Shatila’, still welcomed me. But the new-generation politician, Barghouti (now in an Israeli jail) refused to shake hands with me. The generation of Zohair and Rashda was kinder. Zohair died recently. After my letters to Rashda went unanswered for years I finally got a letter from her personal assistant
‘Rashda Masri died in 1990.’
With her died Mandate Palestine and the generation of accommodators, finally. She suffered from cancer and had had a mastectomy. Among my sister’s papers I found a request for a prosthetic bra from Rashda. ‘I want it for a cousin,’ she’d characteristically written. When she invited me home one last time Rashda fed me stuffed kusa (marrow) and pilaf under a portrait of her dad emblazoned: ‘Our Father who Art in Heaven!’ We had never come out of the playpen and now I was returning to mine …
I would like to end my Palestine Diary with a memory of my first day in Palestine. The children on my street ‘adopted’ me readily. They asked me to join their picnic to the Sea of Galilee for which they had hired a taxi. I was to be their guest. I, of course, spoke no Arabic and we communicated in pidgin. I sat on the beach all day in my street clothes as I had forgotten to pack my swimming trunks. The boys swam, played and fished. Their fishing was indeed cunning. They drugged the fish with opium (mukkhaddar) which they sprinkled on the waters; then simply picked up the dead fish with their bare hands. Among all the chaos I felt inexplicably lonely, lacking not only language but any connection to a new place. In my silence I heard the waves lapping on the shore; I heard my own heartbeats and the gasps of the fish flapping their fins on the sand. I felt oneness with the universe. As we left at night a full moon rose over the lake, illuminating the water, and a gentle breeze set up spumes of watery spray. On the breeze I thought I saw Jesus walking upon the waves.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 10