The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  They sat on the balcony and ate scrambled eggs with pieces of onion, and vegetables the cook had picked from the garden, drizzled with olive oil. Laila filled her glass with more and more lemonade, and after every sip she chewed the sprigs of fresh mint to extract every drop of their essence. Adela concentrated on her eggs and dipped slices of fresh bread in the olive oil. Her forehead was wrinkled in concentration, and it seemed she had to make a great effort.

  Rafael perused the French newspaper under his coffee saucer, as was his habit, and tried to guess at the hidden fragments of headlines. After their meal, he sat in the big armchair and sipped yansoon while he wrote letters. The two women stayed on the balcony talking, and after a while they joined him. There was total silence outside, and they could hear the curtains rustling against the open windows. Adela thought of their imminent parting and wondered when they would meet again. As soon as the memory of separation rose in her consciousness, she was eager to reach the moment and cross it, as one traverses a difficult path.

  Rafael took a small box from his pocket and gave it to Laila, a gift from Adela and him. Laila opened the box and found an eighteen-karat gold chain with a pendant engraved with three delicate lines, curling and intertwining with each other.

  It was time to say goodbye.

  They kissed in the hallway, and Laila went into her mother’s room. Rafael and Adela turned back and disappeared into their own room, and the door shut behind them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FAREED

  1

  IT HAD BEEN FOUR DAYS since Fareed’s return. He’d visited Shami Bar twice, joined one mass protest in Tel Aviv, and snuck out to glimpse the sea of Yafa several times.

  When he stood looking at the sea, Fareed’s gaze skipped over from the pale rocks to the sand, from the sand to the shallow waters, and out to the spot where the earth drops away and subterranean currents color the sea in dark turquoise and black. He was never bold enough to wade into the water, and was surprised at the children splashing around in this sea that could wash over all of Yafa at any minute, and the young boys climbing on each other’s shoulders to make pyramids in the water.

  Rami worked every night to save money before the semester started. He kept warning Fareed never to tell anyone where he was from and was privately starting to wonder about the visitor’s intentions. When they had corresponded, Rami was able to discount the borders between them, and the whole land seemed to him one entity. But here in Yafa, he felt a certain foreignness between him and the young man from Damascus, and for the first time in his life he began to contemplate those distant days of early 1948. Had the Jews expelled Fareed’s family? Perhaps they left when conditions became intolerable? He knew they’d lost their home and much of their property in the war, but they had survived without any physical harm. Their ears had not been deafened by bombardments, their vehicles were not confiscated for the war effort, and they escaped the days of panic and fear.

  And what if Fareed were to ask Rami why his own family had stayed in Palestine all these years? But those who stay in their homeland — Rami would reason defensively — don’t owe anyone explanations or excuses. Those who left were victims of war, and they should not justify leaving by blaming the ones who stayed behind. No one in the whole Arab world wants to take us in, Rami would say. We’re viewed with contempt and hatred, we’re ugly.

  He looked at Fareed, who was a handsome man: purplish-red lips, long soft curls, large and smiling dark eyes. He was fairly short, his body solid and well proportioned, his skin smooth, fingernails nicely shaped. He disliked his stocky thighs and tended to wear pants that hid their shape. Rami, in contrast, was tall, thin, and dark skinned, with thick black stubble and tiny eyes. The gold chain he wore was visible on his smooth chest. They were incompatible, and not just physically. Their eyes did not gaze at the same places. Their thoughts did not coincide. They spoke at the same time, or else were given to long silences.

  After a few days, Fareed realized that Rami’s hospitality was standing in the way of fulfilling his mission. Rami, on his part, missed his privacy and also began fearing that Fareed’s secret would be discovered and get him mixed up in a world of trouble. If his parents knew he was sheltering an illegal alien, they would accuse him of endangering the entire family.

  After a long conversation with Rami, Fareed packed up his bag, stood on his tiptoes, and kissed Rami on the cheeks. Rami gave Fareed a bear hug and his scent flooded Fareed’s nostrils. Then he quickly pulled away, thanked his friend, turned, and left. Rami watched him walk down the steps and shut the door behind him after he’d disappeared.

  The streets were languid. Fareed’s shirt clung to his skin in the humid heat, and when he turned to look at the sea, he saw nothing but a blinding yellow spot. Voices swirled around in his mind, and for a moment he did not know if they were coming from the street or from inside him. Only now, without a focal point or center of gravity in Yafa, did he see the city through the eyes of a true illegal alien rather than a tourist. He felt nauseous. He stopped at a street corner, leaned on a utility pole, and spat onto the crumbling wall. A few cats circled around him in some sort of incomprehensible dance, their tails erect and their heads bobbing like snakes. He took a few sips from his water bottle, then walked on without knowing where he was headed. He walked down Yefet Street, the route he had taken when he first got here.

  Fareed did not know a single person, nor did anyone know him. A local said something to him in Hebrew, and he panicked. But when he spoke up in Arabic, he was answered in his language. He was afraid to talk to anyone, suddenly convinced he would be pegged as a foreigner by his features and expression. The blue diamond rattled in its box inside his pocket, and every step reminded him of its presence.

  He stopped to look at a little park among the houses. There was a hammock hung between two trees. Tents had been set up on the grass, children ran among them, and birds flitted under the branches. A few men sat on plastic chairs smoking a hookah, with a little hill of mineral water bottles piled up behind them. Fareed stood some distance from the tents, breathing in the air.

  “Khalas — it’s enough! People are exploding here,” he overheard one of the men say. He was smoking a hookah and speaking into a microphone that a soldier was holding. “How much longer can we keep quiet?” The man told the soldier he was twenty-eight years old, married, the father of a five-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. He worked as a painter, rented a small one-bedroom apartment on Yefet Street, and made 3,400 shekels a month. “My parents were born in Yafa, my whole family is from here. We didn’t run away in the war, we stayed despite everything. But today I can’t buy an apartment, I can barely make ends meet. I have nightmares every night, I only think of one thing: money. My wife is afraid I’ll start stealing or dealing drugs. We don’t want to leave Yafa, and anyway we can’t. Where would we go — Tel Aviv? Ramat Gan? Where will my kids go to school? The city said young couples will be able to buy an apartment in Yafa soon, but how many couples are they talking about? Thirty? Forty? That won’t help us.”

  An older man sitting next to him added, “This has nothing to do with Jews and Arabs, it’s about the rich against the poor.”

  Then someone spoke to Fareed, in Hebrew, “Do you live in Jaffa?” When he didn’t answer, she repeated the question in English, and he said he was from New York.

  “Tourist?”

  “Yes.”

  She asked how he was spending his time in Israel, whether he’d visited Jerusalem, the Negev Desert, the Carmel forests. Fareed said he’d only arrived the day before yesterday and didn’t know anything yet.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “In a hostel in Tel Aviv,” Fareed answered. “But I want to save money, so I thought I might couch surf.”

  “Why don’t you just sleep here with us?”

  “Where?”

  “In the tent camp. You’re welcome to.”

  “But I don’t have a tent.”

  “That’s ok
ay, we’ll figure something out.”

  And so Fareed settled in the tent camp in Yafa.

  They spoke in languages he understood and in some he did not. The new tent settlers sat around talking all day and all evening, in Arabic and Hebrew, and at night they kept sitting there because they knew the earth would not run away beneath their feet. Every morning they gathered in a circle on the lawn, conducted debates, and declared in two languages: “We are the new Israelis.”

  This was how Fareed became, for the first time in his life, a worker, and for the first time in his life he demanded social justice. He sat in the circles and took part in the debates and made odd gestures with his hands. Sometimes they let him talk. He discussed alienation in the capitalist society, the generation gap in contemporary culture, the Arab Spring, and other affairs that troubled the tent dwellers in Yafa and in Tel Aviv and in all of Palestine.

  He knew what he was talking about. He knew about the Arab Spring, and about social justice. He had not experienced any of it firsthand, but in recent months he’d read the newspapers a lot, chatted online with acquaintances in Egypt and Tunisia, and above all spent a lot of time in contemplation. When he lay in his room in Damascus, he would sink into thought for many hours, and from the day he arrived in Yafa and was master of his own time, he spent whole days ruminating and making plans.

  Soon after he settled in the tent camp, Fareed walked over to a nearby convenience store. He bought a SIM card and put it in his iPhone. He snapped a photo of himself and uploaded it to Grindr, where he appeared first in the series of pictures on the screen. And he chose a username: “diamond20.”

  Sometimes Fareed disappeared from the camp for an hour or two. When he came back, he quickly reintegrated in the discussion circle, reinforced tents, shook out blankets, dusted off armchairs, stared at his camp mates, rekindled the hookah flame, and whispered advice to his new friends. Fareed gave good advice, and they liked to listen to him. When comrades from the Tel Aviv encampment came to visit, usually in the afternoon, Fareed would step aside and disappear into his tent until the coast was clear, or engage one of his Arab friends in conversation. Sabakh was always in his pocket, reminding him that, after all, he had not come to Palestine to deliver news of the Arab Spring to the region. He had a less ambitious task, and although he could have left the diamond in the tent and blindly trusted his friends not to take Sabakh, since after all they were there to support one another, he still walked around with the box in his pocket, as if to constantly remind himself of the very existence of the diamond and the fate it had dealt him.

  One day, while he was flipping through the app, Fareed became curious about another user: “hameagel21.” He sent a short message and got a quick response. The conversation was conducted in English. After a while, Fareed apologized and said he had to log off. He went back to the encampment and welcomed a delegation of Arab activists from southern Israel. That afternoon he was tired and lay down to sleep in one of the small tents at the edge of the park. He opened the app and saw that hameagel21 was online. They picked up their conversation where they’d left off. They exchanged a few more blurry pictures, and after chatting for about half an hour they arranged to meet at the falafel stand on Haj Kahil Square.

  When Fareed got to the meeting point, he couldn’t see anyone except a soldier with blue ribbons on his shoulders. The soldier held a small microphone and looked around awkwardly. Fareed recognized him: It was the soldier who had been interviewing people at the tent camp. What was he doing here? Fareed ordered a falafel, in Arabic, and stood eating at the counter, looking around for his date. The soldier glanced at him, but he didn’t look dangerous and Fareed wasn’t alarmed. Still, the looks bothered him, so he walked a few feet away and leaned on a car. In the middle of the small square was a traffic island, with vehicles all around it, honking, driving onto the sidewalks, stopping in the middle of the lane to pick up passengers. Arabic music blared from a car double-parked nearby. The driver got out and asked for five orders of falafel. The vendor sliced open pitas, spread them with humus, stuffed in falafel straight out of the hot oil, added fries and salad, and finished off with a generous squirt of tahini in each pita. The driver paid for his food, thanked him, and disappeared into his car. The music faded down the street like a curl of smoke.

  It was hot. Fareed bought a bottle of water, then leaned on the car again. He was wearing a white undershirt. The soldier, oddly, did not seem to be suffering from the heat, despite his uniform. But he finally went over and bought his own falafel, then leaned on the next car over. Now they were close, and conversation seemed inevitable. Still, another minute or two passed. And although they had chatted at length on the app, it took a while for the conversation to gain momentum.

  They finished eating and tossed their paper napkins into the trash. They crossed the square and walked up Yefet Street, where they turned right onto one of the side streets that lead to the sea. Honi asked Fareed why he had picked him, and Fareed said he was curious about his username. Honi asked if he knew what me’agel meant, and Fareed said no, but he knew what 21 meant. So Honi told him the legend of Honi the Circle Maker.

  Fareed thought about it. “So when you log on to Grindr, you’re kind of like him, aren’t you?

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s like you’re drawing a circle around yourself. And not just that — your circle can go beyond walls, beyond borders, even.”

  “It’s a virtual circle, remember.”

  “I know, but it’s a concrete one, too. And here’s the proof.” Fareed pointed at himself.

  Honi blushed. Staring at this charismatic, confident young man, he felt something he could not explain in words. For reasons he didn’t fully understand, he was reminded of his conversation with Adela. He quickly explained that he was already spoken for, and Fareed smiled and said he was only here for a short time, and anyway he wasn’t planning anything serious with a soldier.

  By the time they got to the beach, they were each lost in thought. Fareed stared at the waves and thought about his grandmother, Laila. What would she say if she knew he was standing in Yafa now, looking at the sea, the same sea she had told him so much about?

  Honi turned on his iPhone and sent a message.

  “Stay with him,” I texted back.

  “But why?”

  “You’ll understand everything later,” I typed. “For now, keep talking to him and don’t leave him, no matter what. Trust me.”

  When evening fell they made their way back to the Garden of the Two. But when they got there, they saw a police car near the park and kept to the other side of the street. They walked farther down and stood at a safe distance away. A few policemen were walking around the park, shining flashlights into the tents. “Come with me,” Honi said.

  They walked down Yefet Street. There were police vehicles everywhere, and police officers walked around the side streets with walkie-talkies, looking for something. They stopped passersby to ask questions and occasionally huddled together to consult. Honi and Fareed managed to slip away, but they kept encountering more police. When they turned onto Yehuda Ha’Yamit and kept walking toward the radio station, the tense atmosphere dissipated slightly. Except that a police car was parked right outside the station, and two officers stood in their way. One of them was about to question Honi, but he quickly stepped aside and rang the buzzer to get into the station. Fareed hesitated, and Honi pulled him into the building. Fareed’s heart pounded as they walked in, but something about Honi seemed trustworthy. And he reasoned that if this was how his visit to this country had to end, then so be it.

  “What’s up, Honi?” said the female soldier at the front desk.

  “It’s all good, Stav,” Honi answered. “They’re working you like dogs, eh? When are you going to have time to do the news flash?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve already said it twenty times today: ‘The social protest began on the Internet…’ Who’s that?” She jerked her head at Fareed. “Let me guess, h
e’s working on the show with you.”

  “You’re the queen!” Honi exclaimed.

  “Look who’s talking.”

  A second later, the two men were inside the station, climbing up to the second-to-last floor. Honi looked into an office to make sure it was empty, and led Fareed through to the next room, which was under construction — the same room where I had first kissed Honi. He brought a chair in, sat Fareed down, left, and came back a minute later with two Styrofoam cups of tea.

  “Sugar?”

  “Why not?” Fareed answered. “Tell me, who do you keep texting?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Did you tell him about me?”

  “He knows you’re here. But don’t worry, he’s cool.”

  They sat next to each other drinking tea and calming their breath. Police cars honked out on the street, and their horns blended with the sounds of the muezzin. After about half an hour, Honi’s phone beeped, and he told Fareed, “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later he came back to the room, out of breath, with me close behind.

  Honi introduced us and I shook Fareed’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “You look exactly like I pictured you.”

  2

  The police came back to the Garden of the Two a week later. They dismantled the tents, loaded their contents on a truck, and threw the whole lot in the trash. The activists, who had been expecting this for a while, took over an old Yafa house that same night, not far from the Scottish Church. It was one of the houses that had been abandoned in early 1948, a few months before the war. A small, pretty stone house surrounded by a low wall, with a fountain in the courtyard. In the 1960s, the house was rented to Arab tenants from Yafa, who paid rent to the State of Israel through the Custodian of Absentee Property. But for the past two decades, after the patriarch of the family died and his children couldn’t pay rent, it had stood vacant.