The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  The activists walked through the gate into the courtyard and easily broke open the back door to the house. Inside, they were met by darkness and dust. They opened the windows and began scrubbing and cleaning. As dawn broke, they hung a banner from the second-story bedroom window: THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE. Photographers and journalists came to capture the moment, but the protesters paid little attention to them. A few had their pictures taken and gave interviews, but most darted around preparing the space for habitation. At around eight in the morning, the police banged on the door. Even though they knew there was a temporary stay of execution on the evacuation order, thanks to their pro bono lawyers, the activists did not open the door. They continued to move around the house making themselves at home.

  Fareed did the same.

  Indeed, he had returned. Without a key, through the back door, he had nevertheless returned. His act of return was neither a political statement nor a national movement. It was conducted, as was most everything he did, unobtrusively, unselfconsciously, with the same sense of mystery that seemed to characterize practically all his actions: He simply found his place between the walls of this house, which had once belonged to his grandfather Abed and grandmother Laila. And what if someone were to stop and ask: Whose idea was it to pick this particular house to squat in? Why this house on Sha’arei Nikanor Street, out of all the abandoned houses in Yafa? Well, then, someone else would soon ask a different, more burning question, and the issue would be dropped.

  This was the house they had chosen, rather than any other, and who was he to judge? Return occurs in mysterious ways. You think you’ve given up something and then it sneaks up on you through the back door. You comfort yourself over a life long gone, and a new life forms right in front of your nose.

  Fareed had spent many long months in his room in Damascus contemplating the notion of return. And he knew if he returned, it would not be to the same place, because that place had changed and become something else. He knew that people had lived and died here, and had been replaced by other people. And yet something remained. And now, against all odds, he had managed to find that something in Yafa. And for one elusive, rare moment, he was happy.

  All he had left to do now was to seal the fate of the blue diamond.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RAFAEL

  1

  IN MAY 1945, French military planes bombed Damascus. Some four hundred people were killed and thousands made homeless. The next day, Adela gave birth to her first son, Salim-Shlomo. The baby had trouble breathing and coughed all night. Adela, exhausted and depressed, begged Rafael to get the diamond out of the house.

  Rafael left home, and when he came back at daybreak he found the normally unflappable Adela sitting in bed, sobbing with despair.

  “The bombings are over,” he reassured her, but she was inconsolable. After a difficult pregnancy, she now found herself surrounded by relatives, with a tiny, ravenous baby constantly at her breast. The noise of the bombardments, the cries of her neighbors, the smoke coming in through the windows, the thought of the land to their south, of the closed border, of faraway Laila — all these horrified Adela and rattled her nerves. She looked at Rafael in utter exhaustion and did not say a word.

  Rafael sat down on the bed and kissed his wife’s forehead over and over again. He picked up the baby and looked at him: His little face was covered with red splotches and surrounded by a damp, warm head of hair. His little eyes were torn, black, glassy. His upper lip was swollen in the middle with a tiny blister. Rafael stood up and carried the baby to the window. He breathed in the infant’s smell and searched for his own reflection in his eyes. But the baby wrinkled his face, parted his tiny lips, and screamed. Terrified, Rafael immediately handed him to Adela. It took several minutes before they were able to calm him.

  In the silence that now engulfed the room, they were finally free to examine each other. Traces of anger and anxiety were still evident on Adela’s face, but a certain comfort now softened her. And perhaps there was something else there now, a new emotion in the way she looked at Rafael. He thought about what his father had always told him: Childbirth changes a woman — it turns her into a completely different person.

  Ten years later, when Rafael was living far away, surrounded by his children and his silence, he would remember that night and Adela’s changing face.

  The baby kicked his father’s elbow as hard as he could with his tiny feet, and Rafael looked at him fearlessly, but also without pride or satisfaction. This baby was evidence of his own existence, an assurance that something would remain in the world when he left it, and he was now responsible for quieting the creature’s hunger and satisfying all his needs. A faint stench came from between the baby’s legs, and Rafael recoiled and stood up. Adela called for her sister, who came to help. Rafael left the room without a word.

  There was no longer any point in denying it: Things had gone wrong, both inside the home and outside. They had planned to meet Laila that summer in Aley. Rafael gave the authorities six hundred Syrian pounds to be allowed to travel, and they set off with little Salim. When they finally met, Laila wore the gold chain they had given her. She stared at the baby for a long time. She was afraid to touch him, but Adela asked her to hold him while she went to rest. Laila sat on the sofa with the baby in her arms, unable to detect either Rafael or Adela in his features. Evening started to fall. When the baby fell asleep, she gently placed him in his crib. Then she shut her eyes and waited for morning.

  But when it arrived, it was a difficult, disquieting morning. It was hard for the three of them to bridge the time they had spent apart. Rafael told Laila what he had said to Adela the night before: If things continued to deteriorate in Yafa, Laila would have to leave.

  “But what about you?” Laila asked. “Doesn’t your family want to leave Damascus?”

  “My younger brother, Yosef, wants to go to Tel Aviv, and he’s trying to persuade us to go with him.”

  Laila thought about this. Living apart for so long meant that the chasm between them was growing deeper. Would they meet in Yafa? It was hard for her to imagine the three of them strolling the streets she had known so well in her childhood. Adela and Rafael belonged to a different part of her life, outside the familiar daily bustle. The idea of them moving to live so close to her was not appealing.

  “A few weeks ago, in Damascus,” Rafael told the women, “I met a young man named Rachmo, who was a school friend of my brother’s. Rachmo was fired from his job in the market, and since then he’s just been sitting around all day and wandering the streets. He has a sick father and three younger brothers at home. Anyway, he told me he was on his way to ‘gather children.’ I asked what he meant, and he explained: A Jewish Agency representative goes around town recruiting young unemployed Jews to visit Jewish families and convince them to send their children, or at least their oldest sons, to Palestine. They receive one lira for each child they bring to the agency representative.”

  Adela looked at Rafael uncomprehendingly. Rafael was not sure what was going through her mind when she heard this story, but her look expressed disbelief. Laila, on the other hand, had several questions: Did this young man manage to persuade any families? Where would the children live? How would they manage without their parents? And what did Rafael tell him?

  Rafael explained that when families were reluctant to part with their children, the recruiters had a winning argument: “Today your children are wallowing in the mire, but when they immigrate to Palestine they will be cheerful, healthy young Israeli men. They will live a life of freedom and labor in their homeland.”

  “What do they mean, their homeland?” Adela asked angrily. “Their homeland is Damascus, not Palestine. That’s where those children were born.”

  Leila smiled. She was thinking about a future in which the three of them would live in Yafa, her own homeland.

  Adela continued: “Besides, what is all this about children wallowing in the mire? Is that what the Jews in Palestine really think of
us? Do they know anything about our real lives in Damascus?” There were tears of anger in her eyes. But she was not only upset by what Raphael had said. She, too, was picturing their shared future in one space. And the idea made her extremely anxious, which in turn aroused a great deal of guilt.

  * * *

  They spent the next two days together. Everywhere they went, at least two of them were together, if not all three. Adela liked to gaze at the pendant on Laila’s neck, with its three delicate intertwined lines. The gold square had perfectly straight edges, and the shape left a damp square on Laila’s skin.

  Rafael thought about Laila’s eyes, one blue and one brown. He tore a page out of his notebook and started writing:

  It takes courage to fall in love — the courage to deliver your soul into the hands of a woman, the courage to be exposed to her with all your flaws, to reveal the traces of time engraved on your face, the inevitably deteriorating body, and above all, the cruel fact of your needing her presence and her love. It is a need that is comforting yet also somehow terrifying, for it is inextricably and eternally bound with one question: Can love exist even when all external circumstances stand in its way? Even when social norms and acceptable mores mean that it stands no chance?

  He gave the page to Laila.

  Later that evening, Adela and Laila sat on a couch facing the window. “Perhaps we can set a diamond in the pendant we gave you, Laila?” asked Adela. She stared at the young girl’s white, unreadable face. There was a pair of deceptive eyes in that face, and when her pursed lips parted and revealed her slightly prominent front teeth, it gave her a childish look. Her tongue would protrude every so often and prod her lower lip, and she would frown.

  “Why a diamond?” Laila spoke slowly and her thoughts were distracted.

  “It would look lovely.”

  “But I like the pendant just as it is.”

  “It would still be the same, but with a diamond,” Adela explained.

  “And what if I replaced this pendant with something else? Would you be angry at me?”

  “Try it and see.” Adela smiled with great effort.

  “How long will it be before we next meet?” Laila wondered out loud.

  “It might only be a few months from now, if everything turns out well.”

  “How could everything possibly turn out well?” Laila asked. But even the dim possibility that things might improve, that perhaps the devastation would not reach them in the end — even that was a comfort to her now.

  “I don’t know…” Adela bit her lip. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Damascus thinking about you these past few years. I didn’t even know if we’d ever see each other again. I looked at my body, at my face in the mirror, and I asked myself what would happen if I died. But it wasn’t death that troubled me. It was other things. For example, that we wouldn’t have enough food or water, or that there would be no roses for the rosewater. I know it’s ridiculous: Who needs rosewater when there’s nothing to eat? But that’s what I thought of. And mostly, I thought of you.”

  Laila sat quietly.

  Adela studied her for a moment and went on: “On Saturday mornings Rafael goes to synagogue, but I didn’t always go with him. It was early on in my pregnancy and I felt unwell, so they let me be. And in those moments I suddenly felt the distance that stood between me and you. Do you know how you can feel that distance, Laila? It does many things, distance. After all, if I can’t see you anyway, what difference does it make whether you’re all the way in Yafa or just in the next neighborhood? But that’s not how it is. Knowing you were far away from us, breathing in different air, meeting different people, and seeing different landscapes, knowing that your food was grown on different lands — knowing all that had the power to change me. You wouldn’t believe it, Laila! I’m capable of changing my skin and almost becoming a different person. And in my mind I can also turn you into someone completely different. All because of the distance.”

  Laila still said nothing. Her fingers caressed the sharp edge of the pendant.

  What was she thinking? Adela wrinkled her forehead. Perhaps she should not have spoken to Laila about the distance. Yet she could not hold back any longer.

  “One Saturday morning when the house was empty and I lay alone in bed, I heard someone call out through the silence, ‘Mash’al naar, mash’al naar!’ When I got up and went outside, I saw Taher, the young man who works in the market. He goes around the Jews’ houses on Saturdays to light their fires, and the Jews give him a silver coin. He stood outside the doorway looking at me, surprised to find I hadn’t gone to synagogue. He must have thought no one would be home at that time of day. I called him in to light the fire because I wanted to drink some tea. The next week I stayed home again, and again I heard him shout, ‘Mash’al naar, mash’al naar!’ and I let him in. The third time he came, we sat drinking tea together. It was just the two of us. And then…” Adela hesitated. “Then I showed him the diamond.”

  Laila looked up at her in surprise. “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Taher was stunned at first. He held it up close to his eyes, and then he did something strange: He stuck his tongue out, licked the diamond, and put it in his mouth.”

  “That’s what he did?”

  “Yes, and I was afraid he’d swallow it. But in the end he gave it back to me.”

  “You shouldn’t have shown him the diamond, Adela.”

  “It’s too late now. You have to understand, Laila, I was so lonely in those days. And scared. I’m scared now, too. I had to tell someone about it. Maybe it was a mistake…”

  “Where is the diamond now?”

  “I have it. But I must get rid of it. Perhaps I’ll give it to you…” she said, thinking out loud.

  “To me? Why would you do that?”

  “Yes.” Adela frowned at Laila. “After all, you’re not afraid of the diamond, are you? You’re not afraid of anything. And I can trust you to keep it for me.”

  “Adela, you’ve lost your mind. Where would I keep it in Yafa? Do you know what’s going on there?”

  “I know, but I trust you to find a safe place.”

  “Why don’t you just sell it?”

  “I don’t have the courage.”

  Laila thought about this. “But what will you tell Rafael?”

  “I’ll think of something. I won’t tell him I gave it to you.”

  Just then, Rafael came into the room. His eyes were red from sleep. The two women smoothed their fingers over the creases on his face. Laila’s hand ran against the direction of his stubble, and she said, “You have a beard already, Rafael. When you’re an old man, you’ll have to grow a long white beard. It’ll suit you.” She smiled at him and he frowned and tried to imagine that faraway day, when he was old.

  It was time to say goodbye again. They stood in the hallway with their luggage at their feet. This time Adela and Rafael had no gifts. But the polished pendant glimmered on Laila’s chest just as it had the day they’d given it to her. They hugged and kissed, then went their separate ways and traveled home.

  2

  They met one final time before the war. It was very difficult to get from Syria to Lebanon, and once again Rafael had to deposit a large sum of money to be allowed to leave the city and cross the border. Rafael fretted about Adela while they traveled. In recent weeks a certain distance seemed to obscure everything she did, and even the way she spoke was peculiar. When he tried to find out what was wrong, she gently pushed him away.

  Each evening at home, when Adela lay down, Rafael sat on the armchair cradling Salim. He kept searching for something in the baby’s face, something he could not put into words, and time after time he counted to himself the number of years between them and calculated how old the boy would be when he himself was an old man. On particularly gloomy evenings he also pondered the boy’s old age, when he, Rafael, would no longer be alive.

  Rafael knew many things would change soon, and that the birth of his son was only the first hint
: He knew with certainty that he could expect separation, departure, and many years of silence. He had trouble imagining how he would feel on the day he toppled his life with his own two hands, packed it up in bundles and crates, and relocated. But he no longer thought of the future with fury or astonishment. What must be done, would be done. Still, a sense of disquiet gnawed at him.

  In the late evenings, Adela would wake up and take the baby in her arms. She would shut herself up with him in the bathroom for a long time and allow no one to enter, not even her mother or sister. When she emerged, the baby was stunned by the water and soap, and lay waving his hands and feet on a sheet spread out for him on the rug. Sometimes he smiled and sometimes his lips curled and he cried an almost adult cry, an experienced cry, as though he were lamenting something. Adela looked at the baby and then at the window. She nursed him and fell asleep on the couch. At midnight, or later, Rafael woke up and came to look for her. He shook Adela gently and led her to bed, then put the baby in the cradle at his mother’s side.

  Adela fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow, but the minute the fragments of her first dream lit her eyes, she awoke in dread. She reached out for the baby, felt his face and checked his body temperature, held a finger to his lips to feel his breath, then got up quietly and went to the living room. There, in a box hidden behind a picture frame in an alcove in the wall, was Sabakh.

  Adela took the diamond out of the box, held it carefully, and sat down at the table. She turned on the lamp and closely studied the glowing stone. She tried to delve into the diamond’s dark depths, to follow its curves, to see its blue refractions. What would an identical diamond look like? She wondered if Sabakh’s deceptive refractions would be visible in a replica — a real diamond, just not this one, not the cursed Sabakh. And she counted the days until the twin she had commissioned was ready.