The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  “I don’t understand. Are you working for the Mossad or something? What’s this all about?”

  “No Mossad, no nothing. But it’s a long story, don’t worry about it now.”

  “Damascus…I don’t believe it. My father always told me about Damascus. He loved it so much. And it was his dream for us to go there together, me and him. But he died long ago. Wait, I don’t understand. How did you get here from Damascus?”

  “By bus.”

  “Bus?” Menashe started doubting the man’s sanity.

  “Open the box, Menashe.”

  “What if it’s dangerous?”

  “Do you think I put a bomb for you in that little box?” Fareed laughed. “Okay, if you’re not going to open it, I will.” He picked up the box, but at the last minute Menashe grabbed it and opened it himself.

  And there he saw a diamond. A blue diamond.

  The jeweler turned to look at the young man. Fareed’s eyes glimmered. A satisfied, almost triumphant expression took over his face. And then he told Menashe everything he knew. The jeweler sat there, stunned, and listened to the man with a mixture of disbelief and extraordinary fascination.

  “Here our tale ends. Praise be to Allah, Creator of the World,” Fareed said finally.

  Menashe remembered hearing that line as a child, from his father. And indeed, something in the face of this young stranger reminded Menashe of Rafael Salomon as a young man, in the old photographs he remembered from his parents’ picture albums.

  Fareed stood up. “Okay, I have to get going. Tell Tom the eagle has landed.”

  7

  That evening, Fareed slipped into one of the rooms in the house on Sha’arei Nikanor Street. The big house was full of activists and journalists, both Israeli and foreign, speaking in a cocktail of languages. Doors opened and shut. Cooking smells came from the kitchen. Young men and women sat on colorful rugs in the courtyard with big pots between their legs, peeling potatoes. The activists sat talking late into the night. The generator rattled, bulbs hung from the branches, the air smelled of the hookah and of Turkish coffee cooking on the gas ring. A packet of wafer cookies was passed around, growing emptier by the minute. At midnight they turned off the lights, leaving only a small lamp lit in the hallway. Sounds of sleep came from the rooms, with doors either shut or wide open: fragments of dreams, tossing and turning, teeth grinding. Fareed rummaged through his bag and took out a notebook. He sat down and composed a letter in English, then typed it on his cell phone.

  Darlings,

  This evening I began to suspect I was being followed in the house. I looked around a bit and realized I’m not paranoid: someone is really on to me. I locked myself in a room. I had a lot of time to kill. I lay in bed with my eyes closed and thought a lot about my life in this place, which I only came to a few weeks ago, without being invited by anyone. In fact, when you think of it, it’s amazing no one has followed me until now. And they say your intelligence service is the best in the region…

  I thought about you all evening. It hasn’t been long since we met, but I feel like I’ve known you for years, and I’m connected to you as if we’d been living together forever. I already miss you. Actually, I don’t miss you: I already feel your absence.

  All sorts of questions troubled me tonight: Will you stay here, in this strange country? Do you feel part of it? Of its people? And if not — where will you go? Where will you live? What language will you speak? Will you always stay together? Will you remember me?

  As for me, I want to go home, to Damascus. Not that I’m happy there, not at all. But that’s where I was born and where my family is. And afterward? I have no idea. Maybe I’ll go back to the U.S., maybe to another country. Maybe I’ll stay in Syria. Everything’s open. What’s clear is that my life after meeting you will not be the same.

  Since coming here, I’ve often felt rattled by an enormous wave of contempt. Not so much for this place, although I did feel that quite a bit, too, but in a broader sense. Contempt for what?

  Perhaps for all of human existence, if I can put it that way. At first I was alarmed by my thoughts, but then I realized perhaps there is nothing bad or wrong about them. Perhaps it’s even appropriate to feel contempt for yourself, for your life. Because life itself — its futility, its monotonous simplicity — deserves a certain amount of contempt. There are moments in life, after all, moments of mental and physical elevation, which we live for, aren’t there? And if that is the case, then contempt is an important motivation for those moments. But there must be courage, too.

  I’m really not worried about you, because you don’t lack courage. Perhaps what you need is a little more grace. You must nobly bear the heavy burden of life, constantly aspiring to certain moments, which may come when you are alone or with company, but they are always lonely and also slightly painful. And on the way to these moments you feel both pleasure and displeasure.

  These are just some of the things I thought about. I’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks. The things I saw and heard here are completely different from what I imagined before I crossed the border. Different for the better? For the worse?

  That’s not the issue. What’s certain is that I don’t know if there’s enough room for the three of us in this space. I look at this house I’m in now, my grandparents’ house, and I really don’t feel that I belong in it. I don’t miss it and I don’t belong. Still, this is my city, this is my family’s house, this is the sea my grandmother looked at for many days.

  The room I’m sitting in now might already be surrounded by armed soldiers, just waiting for me to open the door so they can rush at me and kill me. Before I came here, Ramadan told me there’s nothing Israelis fear more than an unarmed Arab. But here I am: an Arab armed only with pen and paper. And that really is a dangerous thing. Far more dangerous than a gun.

  The only thing I have left to do now, really, is to decide how this story will end: Do I have no choice but to turn myself in? Perhaps I must find a way to slip away and leave this place. Leave, but who knows where to…Maybe I should just surrender. There is a certain pleasure in defeat, in knowing that you’re delivering yourself into its safe arms, that you’ve lost the battle. I don’t mean defeat in the sense of the opposite of victory, but the more common kind of defeat, the kind that gives rise to insight: There was something here that got the better of me, that was more pleasurable than me, more attainable. Sometimes it just happens incidentally, on a particular day of the week: Sunday, Thursday, Saturday.

  I look at you, Tom, and I think about how writing dictates your life and not the opposite, as people usually imagine. But when you suffer defeat in life itself, writing will be your consolation, because you will write about the defeat and you will immortalize it on a particular day at a particular time — Thursday, Sunday, or Saturday. That is your bordered domain. No one has access to it. That, in fact, is the only thing you have. The only thing left. All the rest — passions, jealousy, success, release, life itself — all that is out of your hands. There is not a single thing, apart from your defeat.

  I love you both,

  Fareed

  At five thirty a.m., the city trash removers arrived. The garbage truck stopped noisily outside the house, but the inhabitants kept sleeping. The house was still dark. Two workers in green uniforms hopped off the truck. They entered the courtyard, dragged out bags of garbage, and tossed them into the truck’s belly. Then they went back into the house. The front door was open, and one went into the kitchen for a drink of water. The other followed him. It wasn’t easy to see them in the dark, although the first light was emerging and beginning to touch the rooftops, the solar water tanks, the top-floor windows, the curtains. But the sun’s rays did not yet hit the ground. The earth was dark and slightly damp from dew.

  The two workers stood in the kitchen, drinking tea and nibbling leftover wafer cookies from a packet on the table. One of them walked down the hallway, into a room, and soon returned to his friend in the kitchen. A moment later they l
eft the house with a third worker, also dressed in the green uniform. They all hopped on the back of the truck and held on as the truck drove away.

  As the garbage truck barreled down the streets of Jaffa, one of them shouted to the others, “I feel like we’re liberating the Sabena plane in Beirut!” They all laughed. The truck drove on through the silent streets. Lights were appearing in a few of the houses. On the left they could glimpse the sea dancing in the first sunlight. The smell of the sea mingled with the stench of trash that came from the back of the truck, and the three temporary workers, unaccustomed to this job, turned their faces away in disgust.

  * * *

  When the garbage truck crossed Jaffa–Tel Aviv Road and carried us toward Clock Tower Square, I looked at Fareed. He was saying goodbye to Yafa with his eyes. Honi watched Fareed, then they both looked at my own flushed, impervious face. I thought about how we would get to Honi’s apartment soon, where we would shower off the stench of garbage and lie down together to sleep.

  AFTERWORD TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

  I BEGAN WRITING THE DIAMOND SETTER IN 2008, shortly after starting work as an apprentice in my father’s jewelry shop, not far from Plonit Alley in Tel Aviv. For three years I sat every day at a small workbench and learned the art of jewelry making. One day the shopkeepers in the building learned that it was to be converted into a boutique hotel. My father refused to get upset. He’d spent more than four decades in the shop that had been opened by his father, Moshe Sakal, who came to Tel Aviv from Damascus, and he firmly believed that no financial calculations or real estate deals could uproot his little business. But sometimes the winds of change are stronger than willpower, and as fate would have it, on the day I wrote the very last line of the novel — in January 2014 — my father relocated the family business to a new, more spacious spot in a nearby street.

  During my days as a jeweler’s apprentice, I immersed myself in books about diamonds and precious stones. Their tales seemed like human adventures, and I followed my curiosity to track down the histories of these treasures, which had surfaced in India or South Africa and made their way through a succession of owners — both royalty and commoners — whose fates they either blessed or cursed. I also researched the intertwined histories of Tel Aviv and Jaffa throughout the twentieth century, and the stories of immigrants from Syria and Egypt, in which I often found a fascinating blend of East and West. In the summer of 2011, while I studied places that no longer exist and contemplated people long gone, the social protest movement began simmering in Israel. Ironically, the movement was inspired by the popular uprisings in neighboring countries that Israelis had turned their backs on for generations.

  While on hiatus from The Diamond Setter, I wrote another novel, Yolanda, which is largely based on the life of my grandmother, a native of Cairo. The book depicts a group of Egyptian-born Levantines who have lived in Israel for six decades or more and yet still feel exiled there. They exist in a sort of double diaspora, having lived as Francophones in Cairo and been overcome with nostalgia for Cairo once they came to Israel.

  In The Diamond Setter, unlike in Yolanda, there is no ignoring the characters’ immediate geographic sphere. My Syrian grandparents’ family had always talked about the days of open borders, when the people who dwelled in this region — at least those who belonged to a certain class — could move freely from one country to another, traveling from Jaffa to Cairo, from Beirut to Haifa, from Hebron to Damascus. Anyone who lived in Palestine before the State of Israel was established in 1948 had tales of brave relationships that survived even the bloodiest of times, love affairs and friendships between Jews and Arabs, and cooperation — economic and otherwise — even as the two nationalist movements hardened their stances and stepped up their acts of hostility.

  One day when I was about ten, I walked past a house on Sha’arei Nikanor Street, in Jaffa, with my father. I remember him pointing and saying, “This is where Grandfather’s best friend lived.” That memory, as well as the story of Hassan Hijazi, a young Syrian teacher who managed to get into Israel in 2011 and make his way to Jaffa, where he explored his family’s roots, were both inspirations for my writing. I was fascinated not only by Hijazi’s courage but also by the symbolism of his act, and his story sparked my imagination, leading the way to a plot that integrates multiple facets of this country and its surroundings. Syria has changed course since then and is now mired in a bloody civil war whose end, as I write these words, is nowhere in sight. I often think about Damascus, my grandfather’s beloved city, and about his dream of traveling there with me — a dream that will never come true.

  While writing The Diamond Setter I also finally learned Arabic, from a Jaffoite named Ali al-Azhari. I was amazed by all the raised eyebrows when people heard how I was spending my summer (“Arabic? What for?”), even when I explained that it was my father’s native tongue, the language of our neighbors, a rich and beautiful language.

  Another source of inspiration was Yehuda Burla’s book Meranenet, a historical novel about the young female singers and musicians who performed in Damascus during the latter days of the Ottoman Empire. These performers, whose stories Burla recounts without any reproof or moralizing, were Jewish-Arab geishas of a sort, conducting relationships with eminent Arab men. The Jewish community disparaged and condemned them, yet there was also a measure of esteem and gratitude, since these young women were able to give their community significant aid in times of economic hardship and political challenges.

  My grandfather, Moshe Sakal, was born in Damascus near the end of the First World War, and as a young man he taught French at the Alliance Française and worked at the stock exchange. He also wrote fiction, in Arabic, some of which was published in the Syrian press. The word “coexistence” does not begin to describe the way my family lived in Damascus. They were, quite simply, locals. When they came to Israel, they were fortunate enough not to be sent to one of the ma’abarot (Israel’s notoriously harsh “transition camps” for new immigrants in the 1950s), as they had the means to purchase a small apartment in Tel Aviv. Were they subjected to socioeconomic discrimination? No. Did my father, who grew up in the heart of urban Tel Aviv, suffer from racism? Not at all. And yet something was missing. And that thing, which in recent years I have begun to acknowledge as having left a void in my family, was the bond with Arabic culture and language, the affinity between the old and new homes. Some might view this loss as the inevitable collateral damage of immigration. Be that as it may, my writing is informed by my awareness of the hollowed roots in my family, and by memories of my grandfather, who stopped writing on the day he came to Israel.

  * * *

  The Diamond Setter is not a historical novel, nor does it purport to be one, although it is based on extensive research. The plot is an amalgamation of historical facts, family stories, and the fruits of my imagination. I learned a lot about Syrian Jewry from issues of the journal Peamim and from the book Syria, edited by Yaron Harel. Jaffa: A Historical-Literary Reader, edited by Yosef Aricha, and Around the Clock Square by Yaakov Yinon taught me a lot about life in Jaffa from the Jewish perspective. I made extensive use of descriptions of the market that was destroyed in the First World War, as documented by Haim Hissin and Benjamin Brenner, from the latter book, which allowed me to see the period in living color.

  I wove together some of the details of Fareed’s arrival in Jaffa and his residency in the “People’s House” — though perhaps in a reversal of sorts — inspired by the protagonist’s stay in Jaffa in S. Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday, and certain lines in the book allude to that novel. I also made use of City of Oranges by Adam LeBor, Jaffa by Yadin Roman, Jaffa, Bride of the Sea by Dan Yahav, and essays by Tzur Shezaf on his blog. All these tell a story that interweaves the histories of various residents of this complicated, fascinating city. I was further enlightened by Dionysus at the Center by Tamar Berger; The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by Benny Morris; Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Khanfani; The Pessoptimist by Emile Habib
i, in Anton Shammas’s Hebrew translation; and issues of Sedek, a journal published by the NGO Zochrot (Remembering). I learned about the life of the Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II and his palace from his daughter’s memoirs, in a French book kindly given to me by Benny Ziffer. I learned the stories of Palestine during the British Mandate, interwoven with the history of mysterious diamonds, from The Adventures of a Blue Donkey by Nachum Gutman, and also made use of Intrigue and Revolution: Chief Rabbis in Aleppo, Baghdad, and Damascus, 1774–1914 by Yaron Harel.

  A grant from the Fulbright Foundation (America-Israel Education Fund) enabled my participation in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and allowed me to conduct research on Palestinian refugees throughout the Arab world, from 1948 to the present. I was greatly assisted in this research by Dr. Edward Miner at the University of Iowa. During my time at the IWP, alongside writers from thirty different countries, I had long talks with the poet and filmmaker Hind Shoufani, daughter of the historian and former PLO member Professor Elias Shoufani, who later died in Damascus.

  The excerpts quoted from The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night are from Richard Burton’s translation. The quotes about housing in Tel Aviv from Haaretz are taken from the book Tel Aviv — Half Jubilee, edited by Maoz Azaryahu, Arnon Golan, and Aminadav Dykman (published by Carmel). The Baudelaire excerpt is from Intimate Journals, translated by Christopher Isherwood. The quote from the newspaper Falastin appears in “Jaffa and Tel Aviv Through the Double Prism of the Arab Press” by Rachel Hart in the magazine Kesher (Bronfman Institute for the Study of Jewish Press and Communications, Tel Aviv University, vol. 39, 2009). The poem by Israel Najara was quoted in an article by Professor Haviva Pedaya on the website Piyut. The story about the slave suspected of grave robbery is based on a text in the book Not a Thousand and Not a Night by Joseph Sadan. Furthermore, in one of the conversations between Ramadan and Fareed, I rely on answers Emile Habibi gave in an interview with Yaakov Agmon on the radio program Personal Questions, on Galei Zahal.