Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  The Saudis had brought to an end almost one thousand years of Hashemite control over the holy city of Islam.

  “Now any chance that the Arabs will have a nation has truly gone for good,” Mohammed said sadly to Samuel and Louis.

  “Mohammed is right,” Louis said. “The British have allowed this to happen simply because we are pawns in a game that they are playing entirely for themselves.”

  He was right, or at least events proved him right. Samuel could not understand why the British had decided to raise to the highest rank the man who had initiated the Nabi Musa disturbances. Haj Amin al-Husseini had, thanks to the British, been made mufti of Jerusalem.

  Mohammed had said that Omar Salem and most of his friends preferred al-Husseini, although he himself inclined toward Raghib al-Nashashibi.

  “The Nashashibi are as patriotic as the Husseini, but they at least seem willing to talk to the British and to all the communities here,” Mohammed explained to his friends.

  In August 1929, Dalida was seven and Ezekiel was three. The same as every year, Jerusalem in August was hot, burning hot. Has anyone realized that the majority of wars and revolutions start in the summer? The tension between the communities had not dissipated; it was still there, sometimes more intense, sometimes less. Louis didn’t stop protesting against what he considered the cynical attitude of the British, and Samuel, too, albeit reluctantly, had accepted that the Jews could rely on no one but themselves, and could certainly not leave their fate in the hands of the British. But even accepting this did not lead him to become a member of the Haganah. He felt old, and did not think that he could be of any use if the time came to fight. Only once had he wanted to kill someone: Andrei, Dmitri Sokolov’s friend, whom he considered to be his father’s murderer. Andrei’s face came to him in nightmares. He hated him and no one else, he didn’t even hate the men who had beaten him on Nabi Musa. He was convinced that he did not have the strength to hurt any other human being. But he could not stop Louis from convincing Igor to join the Haganah, as did the three sons of Moshe and Eva. Samuel felt anxious for these young men, who had scarcely outgrown their adolescence and who worked the soil with the same enthusiasm as he had, years ago. But Moshe and Eva accepted that their sons should be part of this undercover group, which probably had the British worried.

  “Louis is right, we need to be prepared,” Moshe said with conviction.

  Samuel had not managed to become friends with Moshe or Eva. He had nothing to blame them for, they worked uncomplainingly, they were always ready to do more. They lived quietly, not imposing themselves on the on the inhabitants of Hope Orchard, although they were always invited by Ruth and Kassia to eat with them on the Sabbath. Samuel was bothered by their excessive nationalism, and got angry when Moshe told him that this was Jewish land, and they had a greater right to it than anyone else.

  “I have no more right to be here than Mohammed and his family,” Samuel replied angrily.

  “But they have no more right than we do,” Moshe replied.

  “They were born here, their ancestors were born here, they are Palestinians,” Samuel answered.

  “This is the land of Judah. Our right comes from history and from the Bible,” Eva asserted.

  Eva was as much a Zionist as her husband, if not more so, and was as equally clear-sighted about future clashes between Arabs and Jews.

  “You’re a romantic, Samuel. Whether you want it or not, one day we will have to fight to the death, it will be them or us,” Moshe warned him.

  “What kind of Bolshevik were you back in Russia?” Kassia said reproachfully. “Socialism means believing that all men are equal, without distinctions of race or religion. You have suffered for being Jewish, and now you think you are different from the rest of mankind . . . I don’t understand you.”

  “Yes, we are fighting for the most beautiful of all ideas . . . What idea could be better than socialism? All men equal, with the same rights, without anyone being any higher than anyone else, brothers in the sacred cause of equality . . . Do you know how long the dream lasted, Samuel? I’ll tell you—it vanished as soon as it became reality. Anyone who didn’t share the dream was a counterrevolutionary, an enemy of the people who had to be destroyed. The dream is made real only through bloodshed, Samuel, and the worst of it is that I agreed at the beginning, until they decided to throw me out of the dream and then I woke up and realized it had been a nightmare all along.” Moshe’s words were filled with bitterness.

  Samuel stood up from the table so as not to continue arguing. He was afraid that he would not be able to contain himself and that he would say aloud what he felt, that he now regretted inviting them to Hope Orchard. If he had ever felt any interest in socialism, it was because of its promise to create a world in which all men were equal, with no boundaries or religion separating them. He had not come to Palestine to fight with anyone, much less the Arabs. Why did they have to fight?

  “Because they think that we are foreigners, that we are taking their lands away,” Moshe insisted.

  “They’re worried that we’re buying land, that lots of the Arab peasants are now out of work, they are worried about their future; it is our responsibility to make them understand that we can’t take anything away from them, we can only share what there is and live together,” Samuel replied angrily.

  Miriam normally denied much importance to these discussions, for all that she, like Samuel, rejected the idea that conflict with the Arabs was inevitable. Her mother was from Hebron, where she still lived, and some of Miriam’s best friends were the Arab girls she had grown up among and had shared her first secrets with. Farmers like her, the daughters of farmers who loved the land as much as she did.

  “You shouldn’t pay them any attention, they don’t know Palestine. They’ll learn,” she said to Samuel one day.

  “No, I don’t think so, haven’t you ever noticed how cold Moshe is toward Mohammed, and how Eva seems to be uncomfortable that Dina and Aya and Salma come in and out of Hope Orchard without being invited? I have tried all my life not to pay any penalty for being a Jew, and now no one will convince me that we are better than the rest, that we have more rights because a book tells us so, even if that book is the Bible. I came to Palestine out of the love I bear my father, I owe it to him, but I did not come to build a fatherland or take one away from anyone.”

  “This is my fatherland, Samuel, I was born here and I don’t think that it’s mine more than anyone else’s. I am no more Palestinian than Mohammed is, but neither is he more than I am. We can live together,” Miriam said.

  Samuel couldn’t stop worrying about the sporadic clashes between Arabs and Jews, and the ever-widening gap between the two communities. They were only in agreement over one thing, their opposition to the British, whose decisions upset both communities equally, although there was a kind of truce for a few years when the Arab Commission invited a group of Palestinian delegates to join them.

  Meanwhile, Samuel’s children grew up alongside the rest of the children at Hope Orchard, and Miriam made the effort to speak to them in Ladino.

  “My grandmother and my father spoke to me in Spanish, I spoke Hebrew with my mother, and spoke to my friends in Arabic. Dalida and Ezekiel can speak three languages without problems.”

  “They should concentrate more on English, it will be useful to them in the future,” Samuel said.

  “The English should learn our languages,” Miriam replied.

  “They’ll never be bothered.”

  “That’s why they’ll never know the souls of the peoples they wish to dominate.”

  The first days of August 1929 were very hot. Kassia told the children not to make any noise while the adults rested before going back to work. Ben, Marinna’s son, was in Dina’s house playing with Rami and Wädi. Dalida was playing with Naima, and Miriam was teaching Ezekiel how to read, telling him to read quietly so as not to disturb the
adults, when suddenly the door burst open and Mikhail appeared, his face red from the heat and his gaze clouded with anguish.

  “Where is Samuel?” he asked Miriam abruptly, without even saying hello.

  “In the laboratory. We didn’t know you were in Jerusalem . . . What’s happened?”

  Mikhail said nothing and left the house without closing the door behind him. Miriam followed him worriedly. Samuel was shocked to see Mikhail’s face.

  The young man gave him no time to ask any questions, but simply held out a letter, which Samuel read eagerly.

  Dear friend,

  I write to tell you that today my dear wife Irina has passed away. Her demise was unexpected, as she seemed to be in good health. The doctors have informed us that the cause was a heart attack. I beg you to be so good as to inform Monsieur Samuel Zucker of this sad news and to ask him to travel to Paris as soon as possible in order to deal with matters related to my wife’s inheritance, as well as the shop she rented from Monsieur Zucker.

  Yours faithfully,

  PIERRE BEAUVOIR

  Samuel and Mikhail looked at each other, then embraced and burst out crying. Miriam looked on in silence without daring to ask what had happened, although she guessed that the letter had to do with their past, and Irina was the key figure in that past, as she had found out when she had seen Samuel looking one day at an old photograph. It was a photograph of Irina. She decided to leave them alone. She knew that they did not need her and that her presence would only disturb them.

  When the two of them came into the house later, Samuel came over to her and said that he was going to Paris. He explained what had happened without hiding from her the pain he felt to have lost this woman who had never loved him.

  “I will go with you, we’ll all go with you,” she said without thinking.

  Samuel did not have the strength to argue with Miriam, nor any interest in doing so. She thought that she should be with him during this moment of pain. Although he did not need her and felt indifferent to her presence, he agreed.

  Miriam lost no time and started to prepare their luggage. They would travel with their children, as she would not feel happy leaving them behind in order to undertake such a long journey. Dalida was nearly eight, Ezekiel nearly four, so they could both deal with the journey even if it would be uncomfortable for them. Also, she thought, they would help take their father’s mind off everything.

  Preparations for leaving took a few days. While getting ready to depart they were all too aware that the difficult status quo maintained between the two communities was about to collapse once again. The year before, arguments about the Wailing Wall had broken out again in Jerusalem; it was the most sacred point of pilgrimage for the Jews, and since the times of al-Afdal, Saladin’s son, it had been in Arab hands. It was a place that Jews and Muslims both claimed, as for the Muslims it was where Mohammed had tied his winged horse, al-Burak, before ascending to heaven. It was also near the al-Aqsa Mosque.

  The British tried to limit Jewish access to the Wall, they even forbade the sounding of the shofar during the Days of Awe.

  That summer of 1929, the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, took one further step, attempting to forbid the Jews from praying at the Wailing Wall. On August 15 a group of Jews went to the Wall to assert their right to pray, and some witnesses claimed that they insulted the Muslims and even attacked the Prophet, which provoked a group of Arabs, after attending the al-Aqsa Mosque, to interrupt the Jews in the middle of their prayers.

  “I’m worried to be going at this time,” Samuel said to Mohammed.

  “What will happen is what has to happen,” Mohammed said, his heart divided.

  “I trust you more than I trust anyone else, I trust you as I trusted your father, my good friend Ahmed, so I beg you to look after all the members of Hope Orchard.”

  “I give you my word,” Mohammed said and shook his friend’s hand.

  On August 23, while Mikhail, Samuel, and Miriam were en route to Marseilles, violence broke out again in the streets of Jerusalem. Not until they reached France did they receive any reliable news about what had happened, thanks to newspapers and the reports that a friend in the Marseilles Jewish community gave them.

  “After a speech in which the mufti stirred up the faithful, the crowd went from the Dome of the Rock to the al-Aqsa Mosque and from there they went to the Jewish Quarter, fighting all the way. They went into Ramat Rachel, Beit HaKerem, Bayit VeGan, Sanhedria. The British didn’t intervene, and by the time they eventually did so the tragedy had already taken place. But the worst was yet to come. In the next few days violence broke out in other places, and nearly sixty people were killed in Hebron and Safed.”

  “But . . . but why?” Daniel asked with tears in his eyes.

  “You will know better than I do. It seems that the Arabs were upset that the Jews were praying at the Wall, apparently a group of Zionists even went recently to the Wall and raised a flag there. This inflamed the Muslims and, as you well know, the mufti is not exactly a man of peace,” the man explained.

  “But the Jews and the Arabs have always lived in peace in Hebron, we are good neighbors, we have common friends,” Miriam managed to say.

  Miriam’s upper lip began to tremble. She thought about her mother, her old mother, her uncles and aunts . . . Had they survived? It took everything she had to hold back her tears, but she could not stop herself from shaking.

  “We’ll try to get in touch with your brother-in-law Yossi and with Louis, and you’ll see, your family will be fine,” Samuel tried to console her, but his words lacked conviction.

  “That man deserves to die,” Mikhail said angrily.

  “Who?” Samuel asked, alarmed at Mikhail’s hatred.

  “The mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. It wasn’t enough for him, the Nabi Musa massacre, he had to provoke another, and now he will continue until someone manages to deal with him.”

  “What are you saying? Yes, he’s a damn fanatic, but do you want to end up like him?”

  “I’m not a child, Samuel, you missed your chance to teach me what was right and what was wrong a long time ago, and much less do you have the right to tell me how I’m supposed to feel. This man has done us a lot of damage.”

  When they reached Paris, Miriam’s fears were confirmed. Her mother and her uncles and aunts had all been killed. Also, her sister Judith had sunk into a silence from which there was no way to rescue her. She had lost her sight on Nabi Musa, and now her family had been killed without their neighbors, whom they had trusted and thought of as good friends, doing anything to stop it. Yossi did not know how to deal with this collapse; even Yasmin, her daughter, could not make her mother respond, however much she begged.

  Miriam blamed herself for not being in Palestine to bury her mother or to share her sister Judith’s grief. She asked Samuel to let her go home with the children, but he insisted that she stay.

  “You cannot do anything. We will go back when we resolve the business that has brought us to Paris; I promise that we won’t be here for more than a week.”

  But he did not keep his word. The family was there for four years.

  Monsieur Beauvoir received them circumspectly. He seemed to be affected by Irina’s death.

  “She died of a heart attack. I was not with her at the time. Irina liked to stay late at the florist’s. When she closed up she would stay for a while organizing everything and preparing the bouquets that had to be delivered first thing in the morning. She liked her work so much that the time passed without her being aware of it. That day, when I woke up, the maid told me that the mistress had not slept in her bed all night. I was worried and went down at once to the florist’s. I found her on the floor with a bunch of roses in her hand. The doctor told me that it had been a sudden attack and that she had scarcely suffered at all.”

  Mikhail tried hard to hide the distaste he felt for Monsieur B
eauvoir.

  “But there must have been some symptom, something that showed she was not well,” he insisted.

  “She worked a lot, but she never complained or felt any pain. I don’t have to justify myself, but I will say that I was always concerned for my wife.”

  A fight was brewing between Mikhail and Monsieur Beauvoir, and Samuel interrupted to avert it from breaking out. He didn’t much like this man either, but he was the one Irina had chosen and he had to respect her will. They agreed to meet two days later at the notary’s house. Monsieur Beauvoir said that Irina had left a will, but that he didn’t know what it stipulated.

  The house, his house, was as he remembered it. Irina had taken care of it in case one day he or Mikhail should want to return.

  “I never would have imagined you to have such a luxurious house,” Miriam said to Samuel.

  “Luxurious? No, this house isn’t in the least luxurious, it is a petty-bourgeois home,” Samuel said, surprised at his wife’s comment.

  “You don’t think these velvet-upholstered chairs are luxurious? And what about the mahogany tables . . . and these paintings . . . and the mirrors? These curtains are real lace, and these ones are velvet brocade . . . I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Daniel was equally surprised.

  “I didn’t know you were rich,” he said bluntly.

  “Don’t fool yourselves, this is not a rich person’s house. We may visit some friends, then you’ll see what it means to be rich.”

  On the agreed-upon day, Mikhail and Samuel went to the notary’s office. Miriam said that she should not come and that she would stay in the house with her three children. It was hot, and the only thing she wanted to do was to go back to Palestine and mourn her mother’s death alongside her sister Judith. She blamed herself for being in Paris, a city where everything seemed strange to her.

  Irina had left all she had to Mikhail. She had left nothing to Monsieur Beauvoir. The notary also gave a letter to Mikhail and another to Samuel: Irina had included them with her will.