The Almond Tree

by Michelle Cohen Corasanti

  ‘Are you from Gaza?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Jaffa, but we fled here in 1948 before the war, when the Jews took our city.’

  ‘Not a lot of tourists here these days.’ I glanced around at the empty restaurant.

  ‘Just you,’ he said. ‘At least, before, journalists and aid workers were allowed in.’

  ‘Where do you get the fresh food and supplies?’ I asked.

  He gestured south. ‘The tunnels. You know, the black market.’

  ‘You have to get all your food from the tunnels?’

  ‘No, no. The Israelis allow some basic food items in. I’m talking about the supplies needed to put together a hotel menu.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Do you know anyone who’s interested in purchasing a five-star hotel in a prison?’

  CHAPTER 50

  I stared out of the taxi window.

  ‘Where’s the presidential building?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘It was there.’ He pointed to the pile of concrete rubble. ‘Now it’s next to it.’ He gestured to a partially destroyed building with plastic draped over the blown-out sections.

  ‘We’re looking for Abbas Hamid,’ I said to the receptionist.

  ‘Your name?’ She had a patch over one eye. Two fingers were missing from her right hand. She looked grim in her black head-covering and black robe.

  ‘Ichmad Hamid, his brother, and my wife, Yasmine Hamid.’ I showed her our American passports.

  She looked disdainfully at Yasmine in her bright yellow ruffle-collared raincoat that she had bought in Paris and her tight black trousers. Thanks to Pilates and power yoga, Yasmine remained fit. The woman flipped through her clipboard.

  She lifted the receiver and dialled a number.

  ‘Go outside,’ she instructed. ‘He’s not here yet.’

  Outside, it was damp, drizzly and cold. We didn’t have our umbrellas. Across the street was a destroyed mosque. A group of girls approached, some in uniforms, others in crumpled and shabby clothes. Some had backpacks, while others carried bin bags. They giggled and whispered to each other when they passed us.

  I spotted Abbas’ crippled gait as he slowly approached with the help of a boy.

  ‘Brother.’ I went to him. ‘Finally.’ I hugged him, but he didn’t hug me back.

  He looked like he wanted to tell me to leave, but he glanced at the boy at his side and held his tongue.

  ‘Is it safe for you to be out in the open?’ I asked. I had read that the fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades were all underground.

  ‘I’m an old, crippled man,’ he said. ‘I, like Nizar, would like to die fighting for my country. He wasn’t afraid to show his face. I refuse to hide any longer. Let the world watch the Israelis kill me.’

  ‘Please don’t put yourself in harm’s way,’ I said.

  ‘Too late for that,’ he said. ‘I have a meeting now.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  He pointed to the partially destroyed building.

  ‘Can you take some time off?’ I asked. ‘I’ve travelled all this way to see you.’

  ‘Excuse me if I don’t drop everything to have tea with you, but I have a meeting to attend.’ He looked at me with disgust. ‘It’s almost time for my grandson Majid’s school to begin. Why don’t you go with him? He can give you a tour on the way. When he’s done, then we’ll talk.’

  ‘All day?’ I asked.

  ‘In Gaza, school’s in shifts of four hours.’ Abbas turned to the boy he was with. ‘This is my brother, your Uncle Ichmad, from America.’

  ‘I’m Yasmine, Ichmad’s wife.’ Yasmine smiled as she introduced herself.

  Abbas acknowledged her with a nod and then turned to his grandson again. ‘Show them around, let them meet some of your friends, then take them to school with you.’ Before I could say anything else, Majid was helping Abbas up the stairs.

  Yasmine and I waited until Majid returned. At least Abbas had agreed to see me after school.

  ‘What grade are you in?’ Yasmine asked as we walked together.

  ‘Sixth.’ He looked me directly in the eye. ‘So you live in America?’

  ‘We do.’ I smiled.

  He stopped, opened his backpack, pulled out an empty tear gas grenade and handed it to me. ‘I believe it was a present from your country.’ Majid smiled.

  I took it from him. On the side of it was written Produced in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania.

  ‘Tell your friends, thanks. We got their grenade.’ He put it back into his backpack and pulled out another fragment. ‘This came from a school. It’s a fragment from a white phosphorus artillery shell.’ Majid showed me the marking on his treasure. Pine Bluff Arsenal.

  ‘Don’t you have any books in there?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they got destroyed in the war,’ Majid said.

  I furrowed my brow. ‘Then why are you carrying around a backpack?’

  ‘We trade shells and fragments,’ he said. ‘My friend Bassam has this cool fragment from a 500 lb Mark 82 bomb I want.’

  I thought of my brothers outside the tent comparing ammunition shells, which they had traded with each other the way my sons traded baseball cards.

  Majid pointed to a group of tents next to the flattened school. ‘That was my school last year.’ A few grandparents or parents were talking to their children outside the tents, while others crawled in. ‘Yo Fadi,’ Majid called to a boy his size. The left sleeve of his worn blue sweatshirt hung empty. The boy came over and Majid put his arm around his shoulder. ‘This is my aunt and uncle from America.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ Yasmine’s voice was choked.

  ‘A missile from an F-16 fighter plane blew off his arm,’ Majid said matter-of-factly.

  ‘If you give me a shekel I’ll show you my stub,’ Fadi said.

  ‘No need.’ I handed him a shekel from my pocket.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your uncle was so easy?’ Fadi playfully cuffed Majid on the head with his good hand. ‘I would’ve asked for more!’ Majid and Fadi laughed, but then Majid coughed and tried to regain his serious demeanour. He glanced over at the tents, and spotted a little boy of six or seven.

  ‘Amir!’ Majid called. The boy came over. ‘This is my uncle,’ Majid said. ‘He’s from America.’

  His left eye scanned Yasmine and me. The right one didn’t move.

  ‘Show them your eye,’ Majid said.

  The boy popped out his right eye. Yasmine gasped and the kids laughed. The empty socket was pink and fleshy.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Fadi threw up his arm in the universal gesture of ‘what the heck?’ ‘Why didn’t you ask him for money first? You need to be a businessman like me.’ Fadi tried to cuff Majid on the head again, but Majid dodged.

  ***

  We arrived at a building that was badly damaged by shooting. Parts were burned out. Rain started to pound on its sheet-metal roof. This was the school.

  Majid’s classroom had no door or windows. Forty-six boys were packed into the room, sitting on the ground. It was dark and cold, but there were no light-bulbs in the sockets and there was no heat. A few of the boys had scars on their faces; most had dark circles under their eyes. On the cracked blackboard was a picture of a smiling young boy, who I realised must be a martyr. The boys chatted with each other.

  A man in a wheelchair entered the classroom and greeted us.

  Majid went to him. ‘This is my uncle and aunt. They want to join us today.’ Majid turned to us. ‘This is my teacher, Halim.’

  ‘Please excuse us,’ the teacher said. ‘I’d offer you a seat, but we had to burn them for heat.’

  ‘I’m a physics professor,’ I said, awkwardly.

  ‘We’ll begin with science then.’

  He handed me a sheet of paper dotted with jagged holes.

  ‘What happened here?’ I pointed to a hole.

  ‘The eraser. We have to smuggle paper in through the tunnels. The quality is awful.’

>   I read the handwritten sheet.

  Heat Movement

  solid liquid and gases space

  ↓ ↓ ↓

  conduction convection radiation

  ‘Isn’t this a bit easy for eleven-year-olds?’ I looked at the teacher.

  ‘The circumstances.’ He lowered his voice.

  How could that be? In Palestinian refugee communities, education was highly valued. Over the years, I’d encountered numerous Palestinian refugees doing their post-doctorates at top universities. ‘Do they each have copies of this?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘No. You know. The blockade.’

  ‘Of course.’ Yasmine and I stood next to him. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  ‘Today we have guests,’ the teacher said to the class. ‘Majid’s uncle and aunt. He’s a professor of physics.’

  The sound of jets flying over seemed to paralyse the class. One boy near us cringed visibly. When they were gone, the teacher asked, ‘Who knows anything about heat movement?’

  Hands shot into the air. He pointed to the small boy in front of me. ‘Ahmad.’

  ‘I-I-I do-o-n’t kn-kn-kn-o-o-o-w,’ he said.

  When the science lesson was over, the teacher switched to maths. The children were still stuck on their two and three multiplication tables.

  ‘Where’s the restroom?’ I asked. I had had too much strawberry juice at breakfast.

  ‘The bucket’s outside behind the sheet.’ The teacher pointed.

  Outside, I picked through the rubble and filled my trouser pockets with stones.

  When I returned, the teacher was still trying to explain the maths lesson to blank faces.

  ‘Do you mind if I try?’ I asked.

  Yasmine and I sat on the floor, surrounded by the kids. I laid two stones on the ground.

  ‘One group of two is two.’ I used a stone to write on the dirt floor 1×2=2. Next I laid two groups of two stones on the floor. ‘Two groups of two are one, two, three, four.’ I wrote 2×2=4 in the dirt. Next to them I placed three groups of two stones and continued through ten. Their eyes lit up. ‘When you go home, I want you to use stones and the ground as paper and practise these tables.’

  Yasmine taught them a couple of phrases in English, the way she had learned them, and had the children use them to make conversations. When our children were young, Yasmine had started taking courses at the university and hadn’t stopped until she had her master’s degree in elementary education. Although she chose to go into business with Justice, had I known how talented she was with a class, I might have encouraged her to become a teacher instead.

  ***

  Majid left Yasmine and me outside Abbas’ makeshift office. Abbas invited us to his house.

  ‘Where are you parked?’ I asked. It couldn’t be too close because I’d seen him walk up.

  ‘I live nearby.’ His tone was cold. ‘The doctor says I must walk or I’ll be in a wheelchair.’

  We walked slowly, Abbas’ face contorted from the pain. He had borne the same expression fifty years ago whenever he walked. In silence we passed the crumbled charred remains of buildings. It began to pour cold rain. Children made their way through it to their four-hour shift at school. No one seemed to have proper coats or umbrellas, and no one seemed to mind.

  My brother opened the tin door to his mud-brick house. ‘I built it the way we did in the village,’ he said. ‘I’ve been teaching the families in tents how to do it.’

  Two women sat on the floor holding crying babies, while three toddlers dressed in rags played catch with someone who looked from behind to be an older boy. He turned around and my breath caught. He wasn’t a boy, he was a young man, and he looked exactly like me when I was his age. He even had my bushy hair, light beard and overall scruffy appearance. He kissed Abbas’ hand.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’m a teenager again.’

  ‘Yes,’ Abbas said. ‘This is my youngest son, Khaled. He not only resembles you in appearance, he also has your gifts in maths and science. But he has different principles from you.’

  ‘Are you my Uncle Ichmad?’ Khaled asked. He seemed shocked.

  Had Abbas spoken to him of me? I looked at Abbas, but his facial muscles were tight.

  Abbas shook his head. ‘How would you know who he is?’

  Khaled swallowed. ‘I read all his articles I could get my hands on. You know, he figured out how to compute the magnetic anisotropy of an atom.’

  ‘Is that the work you did with the Israeli?’ Abbas glared at me. He turned to Khaled. ‘Did you know, your uncle spent the last forty years collaborating with an Israeli to achieve those results?’

  Khaled lowered his head.

  ‘What university do you attend?’ I asked.

  ‘I used to study physics at the Islamic University …’

  Abbas interrupted. ‘The Israelis blew up the science labs during their offensive, as well as the records department.’

  ‘I read something about Hamas storing weapons there,’ I said.

  ‘You read Israeli propaganda. Did your colleague give you the article?’

  ‘No, I read it in the newspaper,’ I said.

  ‘You should have read the United Nations fact-finding report,’ Abbas said. ‘These were civilian educational buildings and they didn’t find any evidence of their use as a military facility that might have made it a legitimate target in the eyes of the Israelis.’

  ‘Were you studying nanotechnology at the university?’ I asked Khaled.

  ‘I wish.’ Khaled shook his head. ‘They don’t teach nanotechnology in Gaza.’

  ‘Did you ever think of going abroad?’ I said.

  ‘MIT offered me a full scholarship, but the Israelis won’t let me out,’ Khaled said. ‘I’ve applied for a visa many times.’

  ‘How can they keep you from accepting your scholarship? You’d think they’d want an educated population; it is ignorance and superstition that promotes violence.’

  Khaled opened his mouth to respond, but his father answered instead. ‘No, it’s poverty, tyranny and desperation – and denying children an education and a future promotes all of these things.’

  ‘Maybe I could help,’ I said. ‘I have connections.’ I would make it happen.

  Khaled smiled, but his father stepped between us. ‘Khaled doesn’t want to stain his hands by collaborating with the enemy.’ Abbas patted Khaled’s shoulder.

  I looked at Khaled. ‘Let me at least look into your options.’

  ‘There are over 800 students with scholarships abroad who can’t get out,’ Abbas said. ‘Even your connections couldn’t get Khaled out. The Israelis don’t want educated Palestinians. It’s part of their scholasticide policy. They want to make us desperate so that we have nothing to live for. They want to turn us into terrorists so that they don’t have to make peace with us and return our land.’

  I couldn’t believe how paranoid Abbas was. I’d show him. I’d move heaven and earth to get Khaled a visa. I’d get all of them visas. After all, I had got into Gaza, hadn’t I?

  In searching for a way to change the subject, I noticed four framed pictures: a lovely kohl-eyed young woman, two young boys and a girl. I knew from the way the frames were decorated with plastic flowers that they were martyrs.

  Abbas saw me looking at them. ‘Those were my boys, Riyad and Zakariyah.’

  They reminded me of Abbas and my brothers at that age.

  ‘Riyad was seven. Zakariyah was only six.’ Abbas pointed to the woman next to them. ‘That was their mother, my wife, Malaikah. They were still living in Shatilla. Did you hear about the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon?’

  ‘Yes, Abbas,’ I said. ‘When I first heard about it, I had a sick feeling that you were killed.’

  ‘No, unfortunately I didn’t die. My poor sons and wife did instead. May Allah have mercy on them.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I was forced to evacuate earlier that month.’

  On the day my brother los
t his wife, I had agreed to marry Yasmine. ‘May their spirits remain in your life,’ I said. ‘May Allah shower blessings on their graves.’

  ‘That was my granddaughter, Amal. She was hit by an Israeli missile walking home from school a few months after Israel told the world it had left Gaza. Khaled found what was left of her.’

  Khaled turned his head and wiped his eyes, obviously embarrassed for us to see such a show of emotion.

  A haggard-looking woman in a veil and tattered robe appeared with a tray and three glasses of tea. She squeezed Khaled’s neck as she passed him and said, ‘They were very close, Khaled and Amal; it has been very hard for him.’

  ‘This is my wife, Mayada.’ Abbas took a glass and thanked her. Yasmine and I followed suit.

  Abbas introduced us to his daughters-in-law and grandchildren. His other two sons were out trying to find work. Mayada, his second wife, their three sons and eight grandchildren all lived together in his two-room house.

  I’d bring them all back to America with me and transform their lives.

  CHAPTER 51

  Abbas, Yasmine, Khaled and I got into Abbas’ dilapidated little blue car with a yellow door. Yasmine and Khaled sat in the back seat. I didn’t think it would run, but Abbas made it start.

  ‘How have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m busy now.’ Abbas’ voice was cold. ‘I have important work to do for my people.’

  Two toddlers were playing in mud and rubble. A woman emerged from a makeshift tent next to a collapsed house and waved for them to come inside.

  ‘Are they paying you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ He took his eyes off the road and looked over at me.

  I brushed the dust off my trousers. ‘You’re living in squalor.’

  ‘I donate my money to the really needy.’ Abbas shook his head. ‘I couldn’t enjoy it knowing others were suffering.’

  Every building we drove past was either damaged or destroyed. I had seen areas of Gaza that were still intact – was Abbas deliberately trying to give me a false sense of reality?

  ‘What have you been doing all these years?’