2009 - We Are All Made of Glue

by Marina Lewycka

  “Hm. Hm,” he said, writing it all down in a notebook. “All will be fixitup good, Mrs George.”

  He’d never seen inside the whole house before. As his bright hamster eyes explored the details of the rooms he made little murmurs of amazement. “Hm. Hm.” When we went up into the attic, he gasped. “In here we could make beautiful benthouse suite.”

  “Let’s just concentrate on the essentials to start with,” I said.

  Down in the hall, he stopped once more in front of the picture of the church at Lydda, his arms folded in front of him. I tried to read the emotion in his face, but he was turned in profile, so all I could see was the shadow of a furrow in his brow.

  “You know, exactly next door to this church was a mosque. Cross and crescent standing side by side in peace.”

  “Tell me about Lydda,” I said. “Is your family still there?”

  “Do you not know about Nakba?”

  “Nakba? What’s that?”

  “Hm. You are completely ignorant.” He said it with a sigh, in the same way that he’d introduced the Uselesses. “In my country we say that ignorance is the warm bath in which it is comfortable to sit but dangerous to lie down.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll make some tea if you tell me.”

  I put the kettle on, rinsed two of the less grotty cups as thoroughly as I could under the tap, and put a krautertee tea bag into each of them. We sat on the wooden chairs at the kitchen table. Fortunately I’d cleared away the remnants of Mrs Shapiro’s last unfinished meal. He drank his pond water with three heaped spoonfuls of sugar, so I put the same into mine—obviously this was the secret. We stirred and sipped.

  “So you were going to tell me about your family,” I prompted.

  “I will tell you how they left Lydda. But you know the history—about British Palestine Mandate?”

  “Well, just a bit. Actually, not a lot.”

  He sighed again.

  “But you know about Jewish Holocaust?”

  “Yes, I know about that.”

  “Of course, everybody knows about sufferings of the Jews.” He sniffed irritably. “Only suffering of Palestinian people nobody knows.”

  “But I want to know, Mr Ali. If you’ll tell me.”

  This story—I could see by now that it was going to be much more complicated than a Ms Firestorm-type romance. But it had somehow got under my skin.

  Mr Ali blew on his tea and took a sip, sucking the sweet liquid off the ends of his moustache.

  “You know in the end of the war, after what they have done to the Jews, the whole world was looking for a Jewish homeland? And the cunning British say—look, we will give them this land in Palestine. Land without people, people without land. Typical British, they give away something which does not belong to them.” He looked up to make sure I was still paying attention. I nodded encouragingly. “This land is not empty, Mrs George. Palestinian people have been living there, farming our land, for generations. Now they say we must give half of it up to the Jews. Did you not learn about it in school?”

  “No.” I was embarrassed by my ignorance. Geography, okay I had an excuse. But I’d done history at ‘O’ level. “In history lessons we learned about Kings and Queens of England. Henry the Eighth and his six wives.”

  “Six wives? All at one time?”

  “No. He killed two and he divorced two, and one died.”

  “Typical British behaviour. Same with us. Some killed. Some sent away into exile. Some died.” Mr Ali shook his head crossly and took a gulp of tea, scalding his mouth and sucking in air to cool himself down.

  “But that was a long time ago.”

  “No. Nineteen forty-eight. Same like the Romans did to Jews, Jews did to Palestinians. Chased them out. We call it Nakba. It means disaster in your language.”

  “No, I mean Henry the Eighth was a long time ago.”

  “Before Romans?”

  “No, after the Romans, but before…Never mind.” I saw the bemused look on his face.

  “It’s all just history, isn’t it?”

  This seemed to make him even more annoyed.

  “You have learned nothing in school. Apart from a man with six wives. History has no borders, Mrs George. Past rolls up into present rolls up into future.” He made agitated roly-poly movements with his hands. “Young Israelis also are ignorant. In school, their teachers tell them Jews came into an empty land, but not how this land was made empty.”

  I thought about the letter in the piano stool. Yes, that’s what she wrote—a barren and empty land.

  “So was it like…the Nazis and the Jews?”

  “No, not like Nazis,” he tutted angrily. “You must not exaggerate. Israelis do not plan to exterminate all Arab people, only to drive them out of the land.”

  “But the Jewish people need a homeland, too. Don’t they?”

  He sighed. His mouth curled down.

  “But why in Palestine? Palestinian people never made any harm to Jews. Pogrom, ghetto, concentration camp—Europeans made all this. So why they make their revenge on us?”

  “It was their land, wasn’t it? Before the Romans sent them away?”

  “This land belongs to many peoples. All nomadic peoples wandering here and there, following their sheeps. Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia. Who knows where everybody was coming from?”

  My mind blanked out. All those places—how on earth did they fit together? I would have to look it up on the internet.

  “They will tell you Palestinians abandoned their farms and houses and ran away because their leaders told them. No, they ran away because of terror. Israeli state was made by terrorists. You think only crazy Arabs are terrorists?” Mr Ali was becoming intensely un-hamster-like.

  “I’m sorry to be so ignorant. At school we just learned British history.”

  “So you must know about Balfour declaration?”

  “A bit.” I couldn’t admit how little that bit was. “Wasn’t it about partitioning the Middle East at the end of the First World War?”

  I’d seen Lawrence of Arabia once, with Peter O’Toole. He was great. Those eyes. But I’d never understood who betrayed whom over what. I remembered the bit where he fell off the motorbike. That was sad.

  “Balfour said to meet Jewish aspirations without prejudicing rights of Palestinians.”

  There was something about those words that reminded me vaguely of the Progress Project. He took a gulp of pond water, and continued.

  “But Palestinian people still are sitting in refugee camps. They have lost their lands, fields, orchards. They have no work, no hope. So they sit in refugee camps and dream of revenge.” His eyes were glittering with unusual ferocity. “They have no weapons, so they make their children into weapons.”

  I put the kettle on again, wondering about Ben. How had he blundered into this thorny Biblical world?

  “Isn’t there a prophecy, Mr Ali? Don’t the Jews have to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, where the Messiah will come back? The third Temple?”

  “Their book says they must rebuild the Temple. But it is not possible at this time, because on this site now stands our mosque—Al-Aqsa Mosque. Next to the Dome of the Rock. One of our most holy places.”

  “But is it true that Muslims, too, are waiting for the Last Imam? The Imam Al-Mahdi. Do you believe that, Mr Ali?”

  He hadn’t struck me as a man of extreme beliefs—beyond an extreme misplaced belief in white UPVC.

  “I will answer your question. Mostly Shia believe in the return of Al-Mahdi. I am Sunni.” He gave me a curious look. “You learned about this in school?”

  “No. On the internet.”

  I saw now that the hard glitter in his eyes was a trick of the light, and when he turned towards me his face was gentle and sad. I took a deep breath.

  “Actually it was my son who told me. He found all this stuff on the internet. Weird sites about the end of time. Antichrist. Armageddon. Great armies and battles. The Abomination, whatever that is. H
e’s so preoccupied with it…I was worried, that’s all. I wanted to understand what it was about.”

  The kettle whistled, and I made us another round of krautertee. Mr Ali spooned three more sugars into his cup and stirred, looking at me gravely.

  “Mrs George, the young are ready to believe anything that will lead them into Heaven. Even to die for it. And there are always some whisperers who will say to them that death is the gateway to life.”

  “You mean…?”

  I shivered as though a cold draught had touched my neck. I had a sudden image of Ben—my lovely curly-haired Ben—his eyes radiant with conversion, his boyish body strapped up to that deadly payload, attempting a little smile or a joke as he said goodbye. The thought made me feel sick.

  Upstairs I could hear the young men—they’d managed to set up the CD player and bursts of wild jangling music were swirling downstairs. They were thudding about as though they were dancing, though probably they were just walking around. Ben, who’s quite slim, always thuds like an elephant when he walks.

  “Do not worry about your son, Mrs George. He will grow up before too long. Ishmail and Nabeel used to talk also about these things when they lived under occupation. Now they talk about football.”

  The thudding upstairs turned into thundering on the stairs, and a few moments later the Uselesses appeared in the hall. They said something in Arabic to Mr Ali, and he translated for me.

  “They want to say thank you. This is a very good place.”

  His eyes were twinkling again.

  “There’s something else they have to do,” I said. “They must feed the cats.”

  I showed them the cupboard in the kitchen where the cat food was kept. They nodded enthusiastically.

  “And they have to clear up the mess.”

  I led them back into the hall and pointed out a small deposit the Phantom Pooer had left in the usual place. I’d spotted it earlier but not got around to cleaning it up. The taller one—1 think he was Mr Ali’s nephew, Ishmail—shuddered and put his hand over his nose and mouth. I shrugged and offered a sympathetic smile, but I was thinking, that’s nothing—you wait till you find one of the big fresh ones. The other one, Nabeel, said something loud and urgent in Arabic. Mr Ali said something loud and urgent back. They argued like that, back and forth, for a few minutes. Then Ishmail went and got a piece of kitchen roll and started to wipe it up, but somehow just managed to spread it around even more. Mr Ali shook his head.

  “Completely useless.”

  Anyway, in the end, the cat poo was wiped up, and it was time for me to go, and I took the keys I’d had cut out of my pocket.

  “If anyone comes to the house, anyone you don’t know, you mustn’t let them in.”

  Mr Ali translated it into Arabic, and they nodded emphatically.

  “No in. No in.”

  They made waving ‘keep out’ gestures with their hands. I gave them the keys. And I must admit I felt a pang of extreme apprehension. The least bad thing that could happen would be that the repairs would be done less or more uselessly, and the house would be bedecked with white PVC. The worst case didn’t bear thinking about. Who were these young men? I didn’t know anything about them. They could be illegal immigrants. They could be terrorists. Mr Ali could be the leader of a terrorist cell. A terrorist disguised as a hamster. He smiled.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs George. All will be fixitup good for you. I will subervise.”

  33

  Avocados and strawberries

  The following Saturday afternoon I made my way down to Sainsbury’s at Islington for my big weekly shop. Although there’s a closer Sainsbury’s at Dalston, this one is on a direct bus route. At the top of the end aisle, I spotted a crowd milling around—it was the sticker lady doing her reductions—and out of habit I made my way to join them. Without Mrs Shapiro there, it was all much more refined, just a bit of genteel basket-barging when something exciting turned up. One woman was helping the sticker lady by gathering up the past-sell-by-dates from the counters and passing them to her for re-stickering, standing over her to make sure she got first pick. What a cheek. Even Mum didn’t do that. Still, I managed to get some good bargains on cheeses, and a plastic box with three avocados reduced to 79p, perfect apart from a dent in the lid. I remembered the letter I’d found in the music stool at Canaan House—avo-kado she’d called them. They must have been newly discovered at the time. Mum called them advocados. Given her aversion to anything exotic, I’d been surprised to find she’d quite taken to them. She served them with defrosted shrimps doused in salad cream. Even Dad ate them.

  There were some bargains on the fresh produce aisles, too. Bananas, slightly spotted—tastier that way—reduced to 29p; nets of oranges on buy-one-get-one-free; plastic-box strawberries flown in from somewhere or other, pretty but flavourless. I remembered the strawberries Dad used to grow on the allotment at Kippax—the fresh, intense flavour, the kiss of summer on your tongue, the occasional slug to keep you on your toes. Keir and I would go down after school and fill a bowl up for tea, then fight over them all the way home.

  No, even at half price, these strawberries weren’t worth it. Where can you get strawberries so early in March, I was wondering, as I made my way out of the store. A young woman was handing out leaflets near the entrance—I must have missed her on the way in. I took one from her hand absent-mindedly and was about to stick it in with my shopping when the words jumped off the page at me: BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS.

  Seeing my interest, she pushed a sheet of paper towards me on a clipboard.

  “Will you sign our petition?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “We want the government to make a commitment to stop serving Israeli-sourced products in the Houses of Parliament. Until Israel accepts UN Resolution 242.”

  “Isn’t that a bit…?” I stopped myself. The word that had come into my mind was ‘pointless’. She looked so solemn, her pale eyes fixed on me as she talked.

  “It’s all grown on stolen land. Watered with stolen water,” she said.

  “I know, but…” But what? But I didn’t want to think about it—I wanted to get home with my shopping. “But, I mean, it all happened so long ago. It was terrible, I know. The Nabka. (Or was it Nakba?) But isn’t it just—what they had to do?”

  “That’s crap!” Then she checked herself. “Sorry, I shouldn’t get so worked up.” I realised she was very young—hardly older than Ben. Her hair was cut short and teased up into little spikes on top of her head. “But it’s not just something that happened long ago. It’s still happening. Every day. They’re stealing Palestinian land. Bulldozing Palestinian houses. Bringing in Jewish settlers. From Moscow and New York and Manchester.” She spoke very fast, gabbling as though frightened of losing my attention.

  “That can’t be true.” Surely if it was true, I thought, somebody would put a stop to it.

  “It is true. The International Court of Justice says it’s illegal. But America supports them. And Britain.”

  “Why would anyone want to leave New York to go and live in the middle of a desert?”

  “They believe God gave them the land. To make an Israeli state. The people who were there before, the Palestinians, they’ve cleared them off. Those that are left, they’ve walled them in. Given them a few poxy reservations. Like the American Indians. The Australian aborigines. They think if they make life hard enough, they’ll just vanish away. Inconvenient people. Who just happen to be in the way. Of somebody else’s dream.”

  “But you can’t wind back the clock, can you?”

  “Why not? You’d only need to go back to 1967. Before the Six Day War. You know, the Green Line. Gaza and the West Bank.”

  This was all getting a bit too geographical for me. What Green Line? But there was something very disarming about her earnestness. I ran my eyes down the leaflet. On one side was a crude map, showing a thin straight line between Israel and Palestine, and another line, drawn in green, some way to the right, showing the Pa
lestinian land that had been occupied after the six-day war. There was a gap between the two lines. And there was a third line, hatched in grey, a contorted snaking line on the right-hand side of the green line. Right is east: left is west, I reminded myself. The key said:

  Line of separation wall. I forced myself to study it, remembering the map Mr Ali had drawn and wondering why maps had suddenly taken on such importance. The more I stared, the less sense it seemed to make.

  I turned the leaflet over. On the other side were pictures of Israeli produce. Avocados. Lemons. Oranges. Strawberries. Well, at least I hadn’t bought the strawberries.

  “But surely if they’re past the sell-by date? If they’re reduced…?”

  She fixed me with a solemn look. “Have you any idea how much water it takes to grow strawberries in the desert? Where do you think it all comes from?”

  Suddenly her head swivelled around, and following her gaze I saw a police car draw up and two officers get out—a man and a woman. They made their way towards us. They looked very young, too.

  “Would you mind moving on now?” said the man. “You’re causing an obstruction.”

  “No, we’re not,” I said, though I could see he was really addressing the girl. She was shuffling her leaflets and her clipboard into a bag.

  “We’ve had a complaint,” said the woman officer, almost apologetically.

  “We’re just chatting,” I said. “About avocados. Surely we’re allowed to stand on the pavement and chat?”

  The policewoman smiled and said nothing. I looked round to the girl, but she’d disappeared.

  §

  I was still wondering about the contents of my carrier bags as I made my way back towards the bus stop at Islington Green. After all, it was just the supermarket clearing excess stock. It would be wasteful to throw it all away. Wouldn’t it? What would Mum have done? I remembered an incident during the last strike. It was the winter of 1984, bitterly cold. Firewood was in short supply. I’d brought home a bag of coal that I’d bought at a petrol station. Dad had refused to have it in the house.