The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  “I’ll tell them I decided to go visit my friends in New York. They’re used to me being impulsive. It won’t be a problem. I might ask Noor to reassure them first. I trust her.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you’re here,” Rami warned.

  “Obviously not. So what are you up to today?”

  “I’m working a shift this evening. Do you want to come with me?”

  “To Shami Bar? Of course!” Fareed said. “But I want to take a shower first.”

  “Sure. There’s time before we have to leave. The shower’s back there.”

  After Fareed had showered, he threw off his towel and lay down on the living room couch for a nap. Before he shut his eyes, he took Sabakh out of his pocket and placed it under the pillow.

  He woke up with a start, disoriented. It was dark outside. He went to the window and looked out. He could just about glimpse the sea in the distance, between two buildings. There was a full moon, and not a single star in the sky. Fareed assumed Rami was sleeping in the other room. He lay down again, pulled the box out from under the pillow, and took out Sabakh. The blue diamond’s color was dulled in the darkness, drawing him to delve into its deep, dark refractions. Something about Sabakh seemed different since their arrival in Yafa: Its silence was now secretive. Fareed stared curiously at the stone and thought of the lines: Hold fast thy secret and to none unfold, Lost is a secret when that secret’s told.

  In one of Scheherazade’s tales, which he’d read as a young boy, three sisters quoted those lines to a porter who came to their home. Then they gave him wine to drink, which addled his mind. The porter felt as if he were in a dream and started kissing the three ladies. The lady of the house undressed and bathed in the pool. When she stepped out, she sat naked in the porter’s lap, pointed to her privates, and asked, “My love, what is the name of this?” The porter tried to give this thing hidden between her legs a name: womb, vulva, pudenda, clitoris. Each time, she slapped him. Finally, she told him the name: “Basil of the bridges.” Then the second sister took off her clothes, bathed in the pool, threw herself at the porter, and asked him to name the thing between her legs. Again he tried in vain to say the right name. The woman slapped him and said it was called “the husked sesame.” And the third sister, after bathing nude in the pool and jumping into the porter’s lap, revealed to him the name of the thing between her legs: “the Inn of Abu Mansur.” Finally the porter stood up, took off his own clothes, and started swimming in the pool, naked. When he stepped out, he threw himself onto the ladies’ laps and asked them to name the part between his legs. The three laughed and said, “Your pecker!” The porter said no and took a kiss from each of them. They said, “member,” and he said no and took a hug from each.

  “But morning overtook Scheherazade, and she lapsed into silence,” said Rami. He was standing near Fareed; his hair was wet and he smelled of cologne.

  “Oh, you’re awake?” Fareed rubbed his eyes. For a minute he was worried about Sabakh, but when he reached under the pillow he found it there, safe and well.

  “Yes. And you were talking about Scheherazade in your sleep. Come on, we have to go.”

  * * *

  The street they took to the bar was narrow, and there were guys sitting on the curb on either side. Some of them smoked, some held bottles of beer. They greeted Rami, a few in Hebrew and others in Arabic, and curiously eyed the stranger. Rami introduced Fareed to two of his friends, Khaled and Faadi. They asked where he was from, and he said New York.

  “Welcome to Yafa,” said Faadi. “No trouble when you came in?”

  Fareed wondered if they’d been following him. “Why would there be trouble?”

  “You know, with airport security.”

  “Oh,” Fareed lied. “No, they were okay.”

  “It’s because of your face,” Khaled said. “You don’t look Arab. So, how long are you staying in Palestine?”

  “Two weeks,” Fareed answered. “Maybe more, I’m not sure yet.”

  “Are you planning to travel?” Faadi asked.

  “Like where?”

  “You know, tourist places — Jerusalem, Akko, Nazareth.”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “You might want to stay away from the problem areas up north,” Faadi cautioned. “Did you hear what happened at the Syrian border today? Riots again. They say a few guys managed to get into Israel.”

  “Cute guys?” Khaled quipped. “I hope they come to the bar!”

  Rami glanced at Fareed out of the corner of his eye. Fareed looked calm on the surface, but he bit his lip and looked down at the ground.

  “Do they think they’re going to import the Arab Spring over here?” Faadi wondered.

  Khaled laughed. “More like the Zionist Autumn…Remember what Barak said, back when he was prime minister? He said Israel was a villa in the jungle.”

  “Why are you making light of it?” Rami asked. “There are demonstrations in Tel Aviv now, too. Israelis want their jungle. Everyone’s talking about regime change — it’s no joke.” When he noticed Fareed’s puzzled look, he explained. “It all started with cottage cheese. A whole lot of people called for a boycott on cottage cheese because it was so expensive. Then this woman in her twenties couldn’t find an apartment to rent because everything was too expensive and there was so much demand, so she put up an event on Facebook and invited people to come live with her in a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, across from the national theater. That’s how it began, and now there are loads of tents up and down the boulevard, which is Tel Aviv’s most upmarket neighborhood.”

  “That Daphni woman with her blond hair, how come no one would rent her an apartment? It’s not like she’s an Arab!” Khaled commented bitterly.

  “Stop with that, we have a tourist here,” Rami reminded him.

  Fareed was still confused. “Wait, I don’t understand. Are there really people living in tents on the street?”

  “Oh yeah,” Rami replied. “Tons of them. Maybe a thousand. But people are already saying they’re just spoiled kids, that they’ll pack up and go back to sleep at Mommy and Daddy’s in a few days.”

  “Do you really believe anything can change here?” Faadi asked Rami. “I mean real, profound change?”

  “I’d like to think it can. Maybe for once, people here will learn something from the countries around them.”

  “Dream on,” Khaled retorted. “The day some gorgeous Syrians or Saudis come visit us in Yafa, we can talk about the influence of Arab states on this villa in the jungle. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.”

  “Oh, I thought you were into Jews,” Faadi teased, “and preferably blond ones.”

  “I’m not too picky when it comes to cute guys,” Khaled responded. “But my mother would like to see me with a nice Muslim boy. She’d compromise on a nice Arab Christian, but definitely not a Jew. My grandmother couldn’t care less what anyone’s religion is — she’s a Communist. But she has one condition: He can’t be from Yafa. She says men in Yafa are ugly and not nice. She’s a snob, she lives in Nazareth. Won’t set foot in Yafa, no matter what.”

  Fareed was astonished. “You mean your grandmother knows you’re…?”

  “Of course!” Khaled said. “You wouldn’t believe how she adored my first boyfriend. She cried more than I did when we broke up. We used to sleep at her place when our parents wouldn’t let us stay with them. After a while my parents calmed down and accepted him, but even then my boyfriend used to visit her for advice or to grumble about me.”

  “Don’t think everyone here is like that,” Faadi clarified. “Most gay Palestinians in Israel are closeted. It’s a very conservative society. Even our leaders, the ones in the Knesset, say things like, ‘Arab society is not yet mature enough to contend with this issue.’ What is it mature enough to deal with, then? Bunch of clowns, those guys. What’s for sure is that the Shami Bar, here in Yafa, is an oasis. It doesn’t represent anything going on in this country, certainly not the discri
mination and racism against Arabs. So don’t get the wrong idea…”

  “What Faadi is trying to say,” Khaled intervened, “is that you have to watch out for pinkwashing. Do you know what that is? He doesn’t want you to go back to New York and tell all your friends how peachy everything is in the only democracy in the Middle East. Bottom line is we’re second-class citizens here, and it doesn’t make any difference that we’re allowed to fall in love with men and that Israeli society accepts us, supposedly. That goes out the window the second we turn up at the airport and try to get on a flight — that’s when they forget that I have an Israeli passport just like any Jew who was born here, and they go through my luggage like I’m a terrorist or an illegal alien.”

  “Okay, come on, enough politics. We’re here for the cute guys,” said Faadi.

  “Yeah, and I have to start my shift,” Rami added. “I’m here to work, not to have a good time.”

  A few young men and women, wearing short summer clothes, sat at the bar. A heart-shaped string of tiny light-bulbs twinkled on the wall. There were two DJs at the stand. One was short, thin, and muscular, with a pencil mustache, wearing starched shorts and an unbuttoned shirt. He was swaying his hips to the rhythm. The other DJ had a big head of hair and held a cigarette between his fingers. They played the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. A few people danced on the tiny square between the bar and the door.

  Rami went behind the bar and got to work. He changed a keg of Taybeh beer, then started pouring drinks. Fareed sat down and stared at the customers. Rami gave him a beer, and Fareed leaned his elbows on the bar with his body half turned toward the dance floor. A few minutes later they were joined by a young blond man, who sat down next to Khaled, hugged him, and kissed him on the neck.

  “This is Avi,” Rami said in English. “Avi — Fareed.”

  “Shalom,” Avi said and held out his hand. Fareed shook his hand and smiled, though he felt embarrassed. Rami started talking about the social justice protests, and everyone agreed to go to the demonstration planned for the following week. Only Maha — a pretty redhead who had joined them, wearing a black tank top and a necklace with a pendant in the colors of the Palestinian flag — objected. She thought they shouldn’t get involved with the protests because they weren’t advancing the Palestinian cause. But the others argued that if the protests led to real economic and social change, they would have a profound effect on the political situation in the long term. After a fervent debate, Maha pulled Avi to the dance floor. Rami went back to work, and Fareed sipped his beer and looked around awkwardly. This was not how he had imagined his time in Yafa. Eventually he was persuaded to dance, but a few minutes later he said goodbye to Rami and went outside.

  2

  Fareed was born in Damascus in 1991. When he was five, he moved to New York so that his father, Shaker, could attend medical school. After completing his studies and a residency in ophthalmology, Shaker was offered a job in the city, but the family returned to Damascus because Shaker’s father, Abed, was ailing. At fourteen, Fareed had to readjust to life in Damascus, where everything was so different. To ease the transition, Shaker enrolled his son in an American school.

  Fareed knew little about his family, and if truth be told, he didn’t ask much. He knew that his paternal grandparents had come from Palestine, which was a place not far from Damascus but unnamed on the map. He knew they’d left their homeland and relocated to Damascus, and that was all. After Abed died, there was only one person left from the old world whom Fareed felt close to: his grandmother Laila. But she rarely talked about her childhood. He remembered hearing about a tower with two clocks, about the sea, about summer trips to Lebanon, and fragmented stories about the necklace she always wore, a delicate gold chain with three intertwined lines.

  When Fareed turned seventeen, he decided he would go to college in the United States. But at eighteen he thought it was too soon to leave, and he deferred for one year. He sat at home and read books. He uploaded songs he liked to a website, and a year later he started a blog. On the “About Me” page he wrote:

  19 years old.

  Favorite music: Radiohead, Mashrou’ Leila

  Favorite authors: Albert Camus, Paul Auster

  Movies: Almódovar, Cinema Paradiso, anything by Adel Imam

  Favorite quote: “Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be / For the gentle wind does move / Silently invisibly” (William Blake)

  That evening in Yafa, Fareed stood in the middle of Rami’s apartment with his hands in his pockets. He had to get ready for the demonstration and still wasn’t sure what to wear. When Rami told him about the rally, which was being billed as the “March of the Million,” Fareed was apprehensive. It was bad enough that he had infiltrated Israel and reached Yafa by the skin of his teeth, but now he was supposed to risk taking part in a political event? And he hadn’t even done any of the things he’d planned yet. For two days he’d just walked from one end of Yafa to the other, stared at the sea, and read a book.

  Rami reassured him: It’s not a political demonstration. But how could such a thing exist, a nonpolitical demonstration? That’s what Fareed kept asking. Would there be signs? Yes. Police? Yes. A march? Yes. Slogans? Yes, lots of slogans. So how was that not political?

  Rami insisted the march was apolitical — it had nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and eventually Fareed believed him. He had to. In the past two days Rami had become his guide. Almost everything he said, even the most outlandish claim, turned out to be true. Right down to the smallest detail.

  But what if Fareed got stopped at the protest?

  He wouldn’t, Rami promised. If he blended in with the crowd and didn’t stand out, nothing would happen. If he threw himself on the road afterward and yelled slogans against the police, they might arrest him. But there was nothing to worry about at the demonstration itself. On the contrary, Rami explained, the police were on their side, since the protesters were trying to improve the working class’s conditions, after all. They could hold up any signs they wanted, call out slogans until they were hoarse, even in Arabic.

  An hour later they left Yafa and started the walk to Tel Aviv. They were joined by Khaled, Avi, Maha (who had been talked into coming), Faadi, and some other people Fareed didn’t know. He told everyone he was from New York, that he’d been born in the U.S. but spoke Arabic because his parents were Syrian. They crossed Clock Tower Square and walked along the promenade.

  It was the first time Fareed had seen the Tel Aviv beach. There were breakwaters and restaurants along the beach with chairs spilling out all the way to the water. There were tall streetlamps, a broad strip of sidewalk with cyclists careening past, and shaded benches facing the water. On the other side, the street was lined with hotels, a cinema, and parking lots. And now there was also a huge mass of people making their way into the city center.

  They walked for about half an hour. The streets around the rally site were cordoned off. Police cars were everywhere, but unlike at other demonstrations Fareed had seen, the officers did not look tense. It was hard to tell if they were even armed. There was an air of indifference. Groups of kids in matching shirts identifying their youth movements poured in from every direction, alongside clusters of young men beating drums, couples walking hand in hand, and individuals carrying signs. They all had a determined look in their eyes.

  Rami was right. In fact, the event was so removed from the usual preoccupation with national and ethnic conflicts that no one paid any attention to a group of Arabs from Yafa calling out slogans. People barely glanced at their signs, and no one stopped to read the Arabic on their shirts.

  The police looked content. The protesters were not throwing eggs or flour or stink bombs at them. Instead, they showered them with love. When Fareed asked what the demonstrators were shouting, Rami said they were inviting the cops to join them, since they were being exploited, too. As the Yafa group neared the end of the street and crowded into Rabin Square, Fareed started wonder
ing what the objective of this love rally was, because if everyone loved everyone else, why go out demonstrating? Residents cheered from balconies all around and threw flowers onto the crowds. The noise surged into a deafening thunder, then ebbed, then rose again. People climbed up lampposts and sang songs in praise of the revolution. Hordes of protesters swarmed into the square from every direction. There were signs in English, Israeli flags, rainbow pride flags, and not a hint of violence.

  Fareed started to feel it — a love that depends on nothing, a love that does not seek fulfillment but simply exists, breezy and light. It erupted inside him and rattled his body. He was carried along on the waves of sound that thundered across the square, on the bodies of these people who trod so lightly, who were not really protesting or breaking anything, but simply pouring into this space, colossal and numerous, demanding to be acknowledged, to be recognized, noticed, to be allowed to move forward, demanding their right to convene in the square, to flow into this urban center in rivers and streams, to hug the police and to just be.

  And there, in the heart of this enormous, all-embracing love, amid the hundreds of thousands who had come to the square, borne by the masses, Fareed realized he had made a grave mistake crossing the border. It was in this apolitical demonstration, where no one was dispersed or shot and no one jailed, no one dragged by their arms and legs into a police van, that Fareed became acutely aware of his foreignness. And he sensed, even if he did not know exactly how it would happen, that he would meet a terrible fate in this country, the country his grandfather Abed and his grandmother Laila had longingly called “Palestine.”

  Later that night, he lay in the dark on Rami’s sofa bed and his fingers played with Sabakh, the blue diamond that worked in mysterious ways. From the moment a diamond surfaces, Laila used to tell him, nothing in the world can push it back underground. Fareed suddenly had the idea that he should just be done with the diamond once and for all, turn himself in to the Israeli police and ask them to send him back to Syria. But how would he get rid of Sabakh? He could go outside and bury it in the courtyard, he could walk to the beach and throw it in the water. He might just flush it down the toilet or poke it through the drain in the sink. If this diamond was so clever, if it had been through such incredible tribulations since the day it was mined in India, across France and England and Turkey and Damascus and now Yafa — then it would find its way back.