Marian couldn’t help smiling, and when she did she felt annoyed with herself. She wanted to maintain a professional distance from this man, without letting herself be affected by what he told her.
“We’ll carry on another time. I’ve got two interviews to do on the West Bank. I’m going to visit a couple of settlements, and maybe go to Ramallah as well.”
“So you’re giving me a day off tomorrow,” Ezekiel joked.
“The meetings were arranged in advance,” Marian said apologetically.
“Don’t worry, I’m not asking for explanations! I’m just an old man who is having fun reminiscing about things that you have no reason to be interested in, and that have no relevance to your work.”
She bit her lip before replying, to give herself time to find the right words.
“Everything you’re telling me is important, I couldn’t do my work any other way.”
“I suppose you’ve found another charlatan like me in the Ziad family.”
“Why do you say that?” Marian was disconcerted by what Ezekiel said.
“It’s obvious that what you’re telling me is more than just facts.”
“Well, it has helped me to understand what it means for the Palestinians to have lost their houses, their land, their future. And yes, I have been lucky enough to experience his generosity, and he has opened his heart to me to tell me how much he has suffered.”
They said goodbye. Marian said she would definitely call him in a day or so to arrange another meeting, “if your granddaughter will allow it.”
“Hanna feels responsible for me.”
“You are lucky to have grandchildren.”
“You are still young enough to have them, it’ll come.”
When she got back to the hotel, Marian fell down on her bed and closed her eyes. She felt exhausted by the endless train of emotions that her conversations with the old man inevitably provoked. She didn’t want to feel empathy toward him, but with every day that passed she felt it took a greater effort to maintain the emotional distance necessary to do what she had to do.
She was woken by the ringing of her cell phone. The voice of Michel, her boss at the NGO, brought her to her senses.
“I suppose you want me to fire you,” he said as a greeting.
“Michel, I haven’t finished the job.”
“Ah, no? You’re going to sort out the Middle East crisis yourself? Come on, Marian! What you need to do is write a report about the displaced people, speak to a few families, go to the ministry, and there you go, job done.”
“It’s not so easy.”
“No? You’ve done it before: Burma, Sri Lanka, the African Great Lakes . . .”
“This is different.”
“No, it’s not, and I think you’re getting personally involved, which is bad. They don’t pay us for that. That was the first thing I warned you about when you began writing for us, but you Americans are very sentimental. Well, enough talk, I want you here tomorrow; and if the material you have is not enough, then I’ll send someone else to finish the job.”
“What are you saying? I’ll finish it, I won’t let anyone get in my way.”
“I’m the boss, so I’m sorry but now I’m going to give you an order: I want you in Brussels tomorrow, and if you are not in my office by tomorrow afternoon then I will fire you, and we will send an e-mail to the Israeli authorities to say that you no longer represent us.”
Marian knew that the battle was lost and that she has no option other than to return to Brussels. She called the reception to ask them to reserve her a ticket on the next flight back to Belgium. She was in luck, there was one at seven in the morning and a couple of seats were still available.
Her boss was not pleasant when he saw her come into his office.
“You’re too old to play games,” he said, pointing to a seat.
“You know I like to do things properly, and Palestine is not easy.”
“Marian, I know you’re going through a bad moment personally, and I know you won’t tell me why, but we all see it here. The rumor going around is that you’re getting divorced and are using your work trips as a means of escape. Perhaps you should take a holiday or else just face up to your problems. Look, I’ve been divorced twice and I know it’s not easy. Don’t make me regret having sent you to Palestine; I think that the situation there has gotten to you. Maybe you should have taken a break after Burma. This is a job that needs you to be as coldblooded as a doctor, they face death every single day the same way we see tragedy, but they and we cannot get personally involved. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to do what we have to do.”
She listened to him like an obedient pupil. She didn’t want to give him any details about her private life, much less tell him that she had gotten divorced months ago. He had met Frank only a couple of times anyway. When she had been offered this job, thanks to Frank’s contacts, their marriage was already letting in water and it had seemed a good solution for them to separate temporarily. Frank remained in New York City, while she went to Brussels. They had divorced in the end, although they still had a good relationship. “I know that Frank will always be there,” she thought.
She gave Michel the box of dates she had bought at the airport and settled down to use her powers of persuasion to get him to let her go back. An hour later she was given permission, but on one condition—her boss asked her to leave him a rough copy of the report she was preparing. She had no option but to agree.
The days before her return to Palestine seemed to stretch into eternity. She had called Ezekiel to arrange the next meeting. He seemed tired and she was worried when she noticed over the phone that he seemed to have trouble breathing.
When she finally landed in Tel Aviv, she felt relieved. She was back. She hired a car to go to Jerusalem and went back to the American Colony. She felt at home in the hotel. She planned to resume her conversation with Ezekiel the next day. But she had not imagined that no one would open the door for her when she went back to the gold stone house. She was worried. Did he not want to see her anymore? A neighbor said that she shouldn’t keep knocking, that Ezekiel had suffered another heart attack last night, and they had taken him back to the hospital. No, she didn’t know what had happened.
She drove without realizing that she was exceeding the speed limit. When she got to the hospital, a nurse told her the number of the room where Ezekiel was. She was impatient and didn’t wait for the elevator, but ran up the stairs two at a time until she got to the door of his room. She was going to run in, but Hanna’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
“Marian! What are you doing here?”
“I had arranged to speak to your grandfather today, but I got to the house and they told me he had had another heart attack and was in the hospital. Is it serious?”
“At his age everything is serious. He has high blood pressure and an allergic inflammatory bronchitis, I told you that his heart’s not good, he’s already survived two heart attacks. Go in, he’ll be happy to see you, I think he’s missed you.”
Marian and Ezekiel shook hands and she saw that he seemed weaker than before, but he was happy to see her.
“Now Hanna can go to work without worrying about me. But my grandson Jonah will be along to see me later.”
When they were alone, he asked her to pull the chair up to the bedside.
“I’ll hear you better this way, it’s your turn now.”
Dina was helping Aya to fold the sheets that she would later store in the enormous boxes strewn around the room, some of them already crammed with clothes and utensils.
“All my life is in these boxes,” Aya said, trying to hold back her tears.
“Don’t stop, there’s still a lot to pack,” her mother said, trying to stop herself from crying.
The separation was not easy for either of them, but they knew that it could no longer be de
layed. Yusuf had been a very obliging husband to Aya, but his days of battles and missions for Faisal had come to an end quite a while ago, and now it was time for him to set up his own house. He had agreed that the house should be in Jerusalem rather than across the Jordan River, where he would have found a more difficult future in the service of Abdullah. But Yusuf knew that his mother and Aya did not get along, and that his life would turn into an endless round of complaints and contretemps between the two women, so he had decided to accept the job that was offered to him by Omar, whose family was still one of the most notable in Jerusalem. Yusuf helped him in his commerce with Amman, where he had contacts with some former comrades-in-arms who were loyal to Emir Abdullah, and it was useful for Omar to have Yusuf in his service, a man with contacts who had met Sharif Husayn and who had even fought alongside his son Faisal, who so sadly was now dead.
Omar felt that he was in debt to him and to Aya’s family, and he did what he could for them. In the end it had been he who had convinced Ahmed Ziad to join the struggle against the Turks, and Ahmed had paid with his life; Mohammed had not wanted to work for him, he preferred to carry on at Jeremiah’s quarry.
Yusuf had bought a house and a goodly tract of land in Deir Yassin, a tranquil town five kilometers west of Jerusalem.
He had not given Aya a choice. He had simply taken her to see what would be her new house and told her to get ready to move as soon as possible.
“Your brother has been very generous to us, but the time has come for us to have our own house, you are not far from your mother,” he said to console her. And now Dina and Aya were boxing up everything that had made up Aya’s life.
“Where is Rami?” Dina asked after her grandson. “We need him to carry these boxes, we can’t manage on our own.”
“He’ll be around here, with Wädi and Ben. They got back from school some time ago.”
Aya was proud that her son went to St. George’s British School, in Sheikh Jarrah, where the children of all the important families in Jerusalem were educated. Omar had convinced them to send Rami to St. George’s, as two of his grandsons studied there as well; at first Yusuf had refused, but Aya had persuaded him that he should not lose the chance to give his children a good education.
“We are not as rich as Omar, we don’t live in one of the Sheikh Jarrah villas. I don’t want our son to be mistaken about that,” Yusuf, who mistrusted the Arabs who lived in the exclusive areas of the city, argued. But in the end he gave in; what father does not wish the best for his children?
“We’re done,” Dina said as she put the last sheet in a box.
Aya sighed and looked around the room.
“Rami, Wädi, and Ben are inseparable, they’re going to miss one another. Wädi is not so much a cousin as a brother to my children, and so is Ben. And of course, I love Marinna as if she were my own sister,” Aya said, unable to control her tears.
“Allah has been merciful and has granted me grandchildren, and your son Rami and your daughter Noor, no less than Mohammed’s children Wädi and Naima, have made me happy. You are right, they are like brothers and they all are good children. As for Ben, Marinna’s son, I think of him as if he were another grandson.”
It was 1935. Rami was sixteen and his sister Noor was eleven, and Wädi and Naima were fifteen and twelve. Ben had just turned fourteen, and Dalida, the daughter of Miriam and Samuel, was an adolescent of thirteen. Ezekiel, the youngest, would be ten at the end of the year. They were the children of Hope Orchard, they had grown up together, they shared their toys and they had committed their first small crimes together, and now, as they approached adolescence, or entered into it, they were still more than friends. In the past Marinna and Mohammed had fallen in love, and now Wädi, Mohammed’s son, could not stop looking at Dalida, Miriam and Samuel’s daughter. The grownups said nothing, but they were worried.
Dina thought it a real stroke of luck that the friendship between the families who lived at Hope Orchard had continued more or less unaltered in spite of ever more violent clashes between the Arabs and the Jews. At first she had not given any importance to the increasing number of Jews who arrived in Palestine, and had even scolded Mohammed for worrying, but now she could not deny that the place that they had long shared was beginning to seem more and more Jewish.
“It’s our fault for selling our land,” Mohammed said. She thought he was right. If they did not sell any more land, then immigration to Palestine would come to an end.
When they finished closing the last boxes, the two women looked at each other apprehensively. Aya was a woman with two children, but for Dina she would always be her little girl.
They sat by the door, waiting for the men to come to pick up the boxes. The next day Aya and her children would move to Deir Yassin, and Kassia had prepared a grand farewell dinner for that evening. She and Ruth had spent the whole day cooking, and had invited Hassan and Layla, Jeremiah and Anastasia. Netanel would also be there—with the help of Daniel, Miriam’s son, he still worked in the improvised laboratory. Only Yossi would not be there. The doctor barely left his house nowadays, dedicated as he was to looking after the sick and after his wife, Judith. But his daughter Yasmin would come, along with Mikhail. Dina smiled to think how Yasmin had smoothed off Mikhail’s rough edges. The permanently angry young man would change his expression as soon as he saw his wife. She thought that they would enjoy the party, that they would eat and chat as they had done on so many other occasions. The only thing that Dina did not like was the presence of Moshe and Eva. She didn’t like these Jews, who were so different from her friends at Hope Orchard. She knew that Marinna didn’t like them either, she had said as much to Aya. But they were here, the two colonists who Samuel had insisted be allowed to join Hope Orchard. The antipathy was mutual, because Moshe and Eva did not hide their discomfort when they ran into Dina or Aya or Mohammed or Salma. Dina was annoyed at the superior way Moshe treated the Arabs, and on more than one occasion Kassia had asked him to shut up when he said that there was no room in Palestine for Arabs and Jews and that there would have to be a fight to the death between them.
Evening was coming on when Marinna came to Dina’s house.
“You’re late, my mother is impatient,” she said and took Aya by the hand.
“Yusuf and Mohammed have only just arrived, as soon as they are ready we’ll go. Is Rami with you?” Aya asked.
“They’ve been helping us for a while already. They’re just putting some streamers on the trees.”
Kassia and Ruth had cooked a great amount. Jewish dishes and Arab dishes were spread out all over the great table that Ariel and Jacob had made so many years ago with their own hands. Miriam had made a chocolate mousse, one of the dishes she had learned to make in Paris.
Mikhail kept a vigilant eye on the lamb that had been cooking for a while in the bread oven.
The women sat inside the house enjoying the spring breeze that came through the shutters; the men preferred to be in the garden, where they could smoke to their heart’s content without Kassia scolding them for it.
Jeremiah had brought cigars for all of them, long and aromatic cigars that he had bought from a Smyrna merchant.
“As soon as I am settled, I want you all to come see me,” Aya said to the women.
“I’ll come earlier to help you. You can’t sort out the house all by yourself,” Marinna said.
“We could all go,” Salma suggested.
“And who would look after your children?” Dina asked her daughter-in-law Salma.
“Wädi and Naima could come and eat with us,” Kassia offered. “They need only to walk from your house to ours.”
“I’m going to get a cigarette from Jeremiah,” Miriam said, getting up to go to the garden.
“You’ll get a cough!” Kassia said.
“I know, but I like smoking and I’m not going to stop.”
They stayed silent for a f
ew moments. They all liked Miriam and felt her suffering as if it were their own. In spite of the love that Dina bore for Samuel, she couldn’t help blaming him for separating from his wife and children.
When Miriam had come back from Paris, she had told them that Samuel had stayed behind in Paris for business, and this was the story she kept telling, even though it had now been two years and Samuel had not even come to see her or his children. Dina had no doubt that there must be another woman in Samuel’s life. One afternoon, as Miriam was showing her how to make the chocolate mousse that all the children of Hope Orchard liked so much, Dina dared ask her the truth. Miriam hesitated for a moment or two and then was sincere, she told her about the eruption of Katia into their lives and how Samuel’s past had stolen her present and her future. Then Miriam told Dina to be quiet. She did not want compassion, and neither did she want her children to grow up knowing that their father had abandoned them. She preferred the fiction that Samuel had important responsibilities to attend to in Paris, that the laboratory he had bought demanded all his attention. She tried to cheer up Dalida and Ezekiel by telling them that when they were older they would go to study in Paris and there they would be with their father, and this was what Dalida and Ezekiel told Wädi, Rami, Noor, and Naima . . . and they told their parents the same thing. Dina listened to what her grandchildren said without contradicting them, and asked herself if Samuel would ever realize what he was depriving his children of.
“I’ll ask Miriam for one of those cigarettes one day,” Aya said.
“What things you say! Your husband won’t let you, and neither will your brother,” Dina said.
“They’ve never criticized Miriam for smoking,” Aya said.
“Well, I smoke as well,” Anastasia reminded them, “but less than Miriam, and my husband doesn’t mind. Men have to realize that agreeable things are not just for them.”
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 50