by Moshe Sakal
The story of Jonah enchanted Sami. Over and over again he asked the monks to repeat it, over and over again he listened to the words Jonah shouted at the Lord from inside the belly of the fish: “For Thou didst cast me into the depth, in the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me; all Thy waves and Thy billows passed over me. And I said, ‘I am cast out from before Thine eyes; yet I will look again toward Thy holy temple.’ The waters compassed me about, even to the soul; the deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped about my head.”
When Sami emerged from the water, he would walk to the port and then on through the market that led to Saraya Square. The market was lined with fruit and vegetable stands, and a spice stall where the seller piled up colorful towers of powdered spices that tempted one to dip one’s fingers in and take them out bathed in red or yellow or green. People strolled about and prodded the vegetables. A man stopped at the spice towers and asked for a little sumac and some zaatar, haggled keenly with the seller, rummaged through a pocket sewn inside his trousers, pulled out a note, collected his spices in little paper bags, and went on his way.
Near the produce stands was a stall with swatches of fabric displaying gold-plated metal earrings made of several hoops, studded with yellow or orange or purple glass. Women leaned over to inspect the jewelry, tried on earrings, then picked up the copper-handled mirror and glared sternly at their reflections. Next to the earring stands were three scrawny donkeys with their eyes blindfolded and their tails twitching in the clammy air.
Among the shoppers, local residents, and travelers from nearby lands, Sami spotted four men walking tall, with their fingers touching the glistening swords and daggers that dangled from their waists. At that very moment his elbow was pinched by a woman whose face was covered by a black scarf, who tried to sell him pita and salted cheese. He shook her off and went to his favorite place in the market, where scribes sat writing letters of inquiry and complaints to the authorities on behalf of their clients.
One of the scribes sat on a stool in front of a woman in her fifties, who held a little boy by his hand. She had tears in her eyes. The scribe held his quill in one hand, licked the finger of the other to erase his mistakes, wrote something, and erased something again. He dipped the quill in a copper ink pot that was attached to his belt. The woman followed his every move. “Tell them I paid my taxes every year,” she said, “but this year I can’t pay, I have nothing. Write that they took my husband to the army last month. That very day, a man with a knife came into my shop and stole all the eggs! And tell them that after that, a Turkish soldier took my daughter to Syria and I haven’t seen her since then. I only got one short letter. She is the mother of this boy!” The woman rattled the boy, who tried to get out of her grip.
“Could you also write a letter to my daughter?”
The scribe nodded.
“Then write this: ‘Your son, thank God, is very well. But your father is gone and your mother doesn’t sleep at night and she has no money for her grandson. Come back quickly to your mother, and if you can’t come back then at least send money for the boy. Answer me quickly. Your mother.’”
The scribe licked his lips and wrote what she dictated, furrowing his brow in concentration. Then he read the letter aloud to the woman and held out both letters. Her eyes roamed from one to the other. She debated, but the young man standing behind her in line prodded her shoulder with his finger to hurry her up — he was eager to have his own letter written and mailed. The woman approved both letters. Sami watched as the scribe scattered fine powder on the ink to dry it, blew gently on the paper, then fold the letters into their respective envelopes and marked a small circle on one of them. “This is for your daughter,” he said, “and the other is for the city governor.” The woman paid and took her letters, and when Sami turned to leave, he heard the next person in line say, in an urgent, businesslike tone: “A letter to my parents in Cairo, 23 Suliman Pasha Street. ‘Dear parents, please inform my fiancée’s family that I have decided to stay in Yafa. Praise God, I have found work here in a soap factory, and I am engaged to my employer’s daughter. There is no need to send messengers after me; my decision is final. Yours, your loving son.’”
To Sami’s right were shops selling perfumes and medicines in little bags, and in the entrance to one such shop, behind an invisible cloud of scent, the elderly shopkeeper sat on a chair with a rope dangling above his head. Whenever someone came in, the old man would take hold of the rope and hoist himself up to welcome the customer. On the left was the Bulgarian’s shop. The shopkeeper stood there all day with a sunburned face, handling his merchandise, which was known all over the market: briny lakerda fish, smoked hard cheeses, dried sausages hanging from the ceiling, and jars of soft round olives. Near the Bulgarian was a stall displaying bowls of pickles, behind which stood a short, stolid man who never talked, and no one knew whether he was voluntarily mute or if his vocal cords had failed him. All day he picked up pieces of red meat and sliced them into thin strips, which he seared on skewers over hot coals. Customers stood in a long line for pitas filled with the meat, drizzled with a pale yellow condiment he stored in a glass bottle. Around the bend in the road, Sami experienced curiosity tinged with nausea when he eyed the skinned sheep hanging from sharp hooks, surrounded by clouds of flies. Not far away, a man wearing a robe crouched down and urinated, and farther on Sami could see the cafés with their tables spilling out onto the street, where men sat sucking on bubbling hookahs. He was almost at his parents’ café. He had only to pass by the money changers who perched on chests covered with glass panes, beneath which lay bills and coins from foreign countries, loudly announcing their wares. People came here to exchange local Turkish currency for foreign bills. The air was rife with smells from the nearby fish market, and for many years Sami always imagined a sharp fishy odor on foreign coins.
When he finally reached his parents’ café on Najib Bustrus Street, his mother waved at him from the kitchen to come in. He received a kiss and drank a whole glass of lemonade with fresh mint leaves, then went to his father, who was darting among the patrons, both Yafa residents and travelers from Beirut, Cairo, or Baghdad. In the corner of the room sat Sami’s grandfather. This grand old man, whose birth date no one knew, spent days on end huddled in a thick wool cape, sucking the hookah mouthpiece and drinking yansoon. When the last of the patrons had left, Sami helped his father stack chairs in the corner, then swept the floor and took the big garbage cans out to the street.
2
When the First World War broke out, Sami was fourteen. He had to leave his studies at Saint Joseph and help his parents at the café. The city was bombed and shelled. In between bombings, the men would gather in the café, whose location made it relatively safe. There they listened to the news, told of what had been bombed and who had been injured and whether any property had been damaged, exchanged money and sold various belongings, some of which were pawned until things quieted down. The women gathered in the homes, drank juice made of almond and pomegranate, nibbled on sweets, and with infinite patience wove a tapestry of matchmaking.
When Sami was sixteen, Hassan Bey, the commandant of Yafa, decided to destroy the shops housed in alcoves on either side of the market. He wanted to build a street leading from the Saraya House to the Customs House. He captured army deserters to serve as his labor force, and at night they followed his orders to destroy the shops and throw the bricks into the sea. By morning, there was a street there. Not long afterward, Sami decided to leave the family café. For a few weeks he worked in date and apricot orchards, vineyards, sugarcane fields, and tobacco fields, then he started working for one of Yafa’s major citrus growers. He got up early every day, washed his face, drank a cup of tea, packed a pita and a cucumber, and hurried to the orchard on the east of the city, which the Arabs called a biara — a well. Nearby stood the well house, which was also known as the biara. This grand structure was the home of the orchard owner, an imposing man who looked much older than he was, bald and
full-bodied, with one eye covered with a patch tied around his head.
Sami picked fruit all day, and in the evenings he stopped at the café, where his mother served him dinner. After he ate, he went home and dozed until nighttime, then went out to walk along the beach. His ears were attuned to the whispering waves as he watched the fishermen cast their rods: The line cut through the black air and pierced the water with a hook wrapped in bait. The fishermen pulled out their rods and threw them back in, and the little fish — known as “communists,” perhaps because they had invaded the Mediterranean from the Suez Canal after the Russian Revolution — flopped about on the sand. Sami looked north and thought of the day when he would have enough money to stop working and travel to Beirut and Damascus.
His quiet, serious nature soon inspired the confidence of his employer, who put Sami in charge of a team of pickers. Then he supervised the workmen who built wooden crates and packed the oranges, and after a few months he was appointed liaison to the administrators in charge of land betterment tax, as well as the property’s groundwater and well water. For many hours Sami oversaw the workers, who crouched on the packinghouse floor, in a room neck-high in oranges. Each orange was carefully wrapped in tissue paper and placed in a crate. The finest were sent overseas, to England and France. The rest were sold locally and in neighboring countries.
One day at the café, Sami’s mother pulled him into a corner and began singing the praises of Nafisa Said, whose father owned a fabric shop in Souk el-Balabseh. Sami knew Nafisa, and had honestly never given her much thought. But he was interested in her older sister, Suad. When he tried to find out about Suad from his mother, it turned out she was engaged to a man who had gone to study medicine in Cairo two years earlier. Except that further investigation found that all contact with the young man had been lost for the past two months, and his brother had been sent to look for him. Sami did not say anything explicit, but his mother put two and two together and inferred her son’s interest. A week later she gave him information about Suad. It turned out her betrothed had fallen in love with an Egyptian woman, a distant cousin by marriage, and had decided to stay in Cairo.
The matchmaking needle abruptly changed direction, and now the women who sipped almond and pomegranate juice put their efforts into marrying off the older sister. The tapestry unraveled and was quickly rewoven. In their first face-to-face meeting, Suad looked even more beautiful than Sami had thought her from afar. She hardly spoke, but something in her silence, which hinted at unfathomable depths, echoed in his soul and enchanted him.
When they left the Hassan Bey Mosque after the marriage ceremony, they were accompanied along the streets by musicians, all the way to Clock Tower Square and on to Ajami. The next day, the orchard owner summoned Sami to his home. “That mosque, where you got married,” he said, and Sami imagined he could see his employer’s blind eye piercing him through the eye patch, “you should know that we shunned it at first. Who do you think built it for Hassan Bey? Deserters from the Turkish army! They suffered injuries and even death because of him. And he confiscated stones from private houses to build it. But even so, from that mosque, God willing, there will come great prosperity for your family.” He smiled, baring his teeth, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the sweat off his brow. Then he reached into the waistline of his trousers, dug around an inner pocket, and fished out three gold pound coins, which he gave to the new groom.
After the weeklong wedding celebrations, Suad and Sami moved into Sami’s late grandparents’ home near the sea.
3
Years later, Sami asked himself when things had started to go wrong. There were undoubtedly bad omens. Suad appeared to be peaceful at first, but over time Sami began to worry about the black circles under her eyes, her lips that trembled for no reason, and her distant gaze. Again and again he asked if she felt well, if something was troubling her, but the more he probed, the more entrenched she became in her silence. When he finally consulted Suad’s mother, he was astonished to learn that as a young girl, Suad had spent a long time lying in bed, refusing to go out, hardly eating or speaking to anyone. When he asked why no one had told him about the episode, Suad’s mother replied that it was a long time ago, and that the doctor had said there was no reason to expect it to happen again.
Sami’s mother was furious about this secret that was kept from her during the matchmaking process, but her son felt it would not affect his love for his wife, perhaps even the opposite. He was filled with compassion for Suad and did everything he could to appease her. Occasionally, he succeeded.
But one day Suad confessed a desire to end her life, and Sami removed all the knives and sharp objects from the kitchen. When he went to work in the orchard, he was distracted, and he comforted himself by leaving Suad’s mother in charge. There was unrest between Jews and Arabs in Yafa at the time, with dozens of people murdered and shops looted. Sami’s family was frightened, and he helped his parents break a hole in one of the walls at home and hide their meager savings, as well as a few pieces of gold his mother had inherited from her mother. When the unrest died down and there were a few weeks of calm, Sami thought Suad was recovering from her dark episode. He was twenty-one, and she was two years younger.
By the summer, Sami had saved up enough money for a trip to the north. He told Suad about his idea, and to his surprise she agreed. In fact she seemed happy to leave Yafa for a few days. A week later, they boarded a train that had come from Cairo, and traveled via Haifa to Lebanon. They disembarked in Beirut, and the train continued to its final destination in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.
Sami and Suad stayed in a hotel by the sea, and for a while it seemed to Sami that the distance from Yafa was easing Suad’s mind. Still, he feared for her and constantly scrutinized her expression. When they went to a restaurant and she left her plate full of food, he was worried. They strolled along the streets of Beirut, sat down to rest under the palm trees, licked ice cream, wandered arm in arm along the beach, and in the evening watched shows. After ten days they returned to Yafa.
Sami often traveled from Yafa to Tel Aviv, and he liked living in both towns, which shared the same sea. In Yafa, bare-chested young boys charged around on horseback, and expert oarsmen dressed in billowing black trousers and white shirts maneuvered small boats all the way out to the huge steamships that could not squeeze into the port. On land, camels arrived at the crowded port, loaded with wooden crates full of citrus fruit draped down on either side of their bodies. The crates were unloaded and dragged over wooden boards onto the boats, where they were lined up, row upon row. With great effort, the oarsmen navigated their cargo out to the ships, across the stormy waters of what was known as “the most terrible of the seven seas.”
One day Sami stopped to read a notice posted by the “Young Worker” Zionist organization, and stood deciphering the Hebrew letters. It said that the Jewish immigrants who had recently arrived in Yafa by ship included the following: saddle maker, leatherworker, wood-carver, water-pipe layer, dental technician, draftsman, butcher, two carpenters, stonecutter, electrical engineer, baker, wooden-crate maker, two welders, two pharmacists, teacher, secretary, architect, watchmaker, four gardeners, two typesetters, miller, stocking maker, shoe-polish maker, barber, coppersmith. “Anyone requiring a practitioner of these vocations will kindly contact the Young Worker’s office of labor in Jaffa.”
When he walked along the beaches of Tel Aviv, Sami saw deck chairs neatly arranged in rows, sheltered from the sun by a swathe of fabric stretched between two wooden posts. Women in bathing suits walked hand in hand on the sand, and every so often the bathers disappeared into huts erected between the beach and the road leading east, to town, perched on little pillars to protect them when the tide came in. At low tide, children crawled under the wooden floors to find a penny or two dropped by the bathers when they took off their clothes.
In between the two cities, not far from the notorious “pickpocket school,” where both Jews and Arabs trained,
stood the brothel. Its clients included Arabs and Jews, as well as British policemen. The British — who had by now replaced the Turks as Palestine’s custodians — lusted after young girls, and sometimes boys. All of Sami’s friends had lost their virginity at this institution and were full of stories about the prostitutes, and the rooms decorated with lace, and the strong perfume. Sami alone, of all his friends, had insisted on remaining a virgin until his wedding night.
Indeed, he was tied with every fiber of his being to Yafa. He loved Najib Bustrus Street and his parents’ café, which always seemed to be in a state of languor that soaked up the aroma of coffee, with his grandfather huddled in the corner sipping yansoon. He loved the clock tower with its two different times, and King George Boulevard bustling with thousands of guests from neighboring countries, the grand houses looking out to sea, with floor tiles in warm colors, the large balconies facing the waves, the little fountain in his courtyard, the fragrance of grilled meat and tomatoes, and the cubes of lamb dipped in flavorful tahini. Yet his feet still led him to Tel Aviv. He heard stories of how crowded the young Hebrew city was, with entire families living in one room, beds rented out for a few hours a day, in cramped and unsanitary conditions. He was increasingly able to appreciate the spacious homes of Yafa, the sea breeze on the balconies, the expansive courtyards where one could sit and rest. Yet despite all this, for most of his twenties — which were also the century’s twenties — Sami frequently left Yafa to stroll along Allenby Street and Rothschild Boulevard.