On the top part of the garden he created a seating area with a table and benches, all made using the rocks he had excavated. He once took me on a tour of this strange garden and, after we had walked down pathways shaded by canopies of all sorts of trees and pushed against a mishmash of shrubs and herbs, I found myself entirely bewildered, unable to see beyond the garden or be seen by anyone on the street or in the building. I thought this must have been precisely the atmosphere he wanted to create, a world of his own design in which he could lose himself.
Now the building, along with the garden, has been sold by his heirs. The new owner transformed the garden into a restaurant café called Al Reef (the countryside), which has been highly successful.
Our decision to build our own house, where we would never have to worry about the antics of an obsessive landlord, turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever took. Land prices had not yet risen astronomically, as they have since. At first we planned to build on land we owned right across from the house where I was born and had lived until I was sixteen. But my brother, Samer, advised against it, and he was right. The area is now bustling and noisy, and the much-cherished view of the Ramallah hills, reaching all the way to the west, which had been the main attraction of the land, has been blocked by new buildings. Instead, we found a good-sized plot at the edge of town in the Tireh quarter (so called because it is one of the highest and windiest parts of town) on a quiet street north of the city and began planning. We decided that the house would be built around an inner courtyard, so the view wouldn’t be blocked by any future construction work near the house. As it was going up, we would walk to the site in the afternoon and enjoy seeing the house materialise stone by stone. It is traditional to place in the foundations some precious metal as an omen of future prosperity; instead we decided to write on a parchment how we wished our life in the house to be lived, rolled it up and inserted it into a pipe, which we buried. Will anyone read what we wrote at some future time? I very much doubt it. If this should happen, I wonder what they will think of us. But we didn’t mean it for posterity. The foundations of our house with the buried script of hopes must by now have become enmeshed within the roots of the lemon tree we planted in the middle of the courtyard. Or perhaps with those of the three olive trees in the backyard that are sure to outlive us. Everything else will die except those resilient trees. Most likely, the text of our aspirations has returned to nature, as our bodies will some day.
In the bedroom we had built a walk-in wardrobe. As I stood there trying to decide what to put on, I was aware of the significance of this day. Past anniversaries of the occupation used to arouse strong feelings in me and I would try to ward them off by taking a long walk in the hills. It used to be possible to leave the city behind me. This was preferable to staying at home and brooding. Today I will walk to the office, taking my time. My first meeting is not until one-thirty this afternoon. Perhaps more will be happening than I expect.
I stood in front of the shirts and coats from different periods of my life, among which is a charcoal-grey pullover knitted by my grandmother which I haven’t worn for years but cannot part with. My wardrobe is a museum spanning decades. Because I’ve remained the same size and haven’t gained weight for years, I can still wear many garments, yet I rarely do. I am tempted to believe that, like my city, my wardrobe – the various shirts, suits, hats or ties – is a repository of what I’ve tried to be. Some of my father’s clothes are still here. They are so much him that my mother could not throw them away. She gave them to me, hoping that I would wear them, though I could never bring myself to. I’m a hoarder and have a hard time throwing away any possession – especially clothes that remind me of other periods of my life.
When I walk in, I am bewildered by the choice I have, but I always end up going for my favourite clothes, which I keep even after they get holes in them. Clothes are like houses, objects we cover ourselves with and often dwell in so as to create an impression for others and not just for the comfort they provide. My different lives are represented by the different clothes I have worn, as by the homes located in different parts of the city where I have lived. To this day I have my writerly clothes and my lawyerly ones, some from when I started my career thirty-seven years ago – shirts, belts, trousers and jackets.
Like our bodies, our houses and our clothing are but sparks of our existence, our self, which we inhabit for a while and make our own. Then we leave them and the connection is severed. Clothes wear out and houses are sold to other owners or fall into ruin, and the city continues as if we were never there. Until the city itself ceases to exist, whether through war or natural disasters, and then it is as though it never ever was.
Barring some political or natural calamity, Penny and I hope to spend the rest of our days in this house. And yet, despite this long-standing attachment, I continue to be troubled by a recurring dream in which, for what feels to be an agonisingly long time, I search for but cannot find my home. For someone who has lived the majority of his life in the same small city, who owns a property in it, to feel in my subconscious that I’m bereft of a home is a strange affliction. This was what I was thinking that morning, a little after nine, when I prepared to leave my house, dressed in a clean, well-ironed, black-and-white-striped shirt and dark trousers (my lawyerly clothes today), to walk to my law office in the centre of town.
Two
The morning sun was shining through the eastern window, lighting up the sitting room. This is the best time of day. I could hear Penny settling down with a book on the sofa by the window, her mug of coffee next to her, listening to music while the sun streaked in, and I wondered, why am I leaving?
As I was walking to the door, I glanced at the Byzantine jar that we bought from an antiques shop in Jerusalem as a present for our new house. It was next to the piano, resting in a black metal stand. For the first three years after we moved in, the jar stood on the floor. Then, nineteen years ago, when I was at home working one day, the doorbell rang and I found the principal of the Lutheran Vocational Training School in Jerusalem standing at the door. A young man with highly pronounced muscles, he was carrying a number of metal stands that I had ordered a month earlier for various flowerpots and one for the jar. He told me that he had decided to deliver them in person to make sure they were to my liking. I thanked him, paid and took them inside. Choosing one I thought would be the right size, I carefully lifted the ancient jar and gingerly placed it on the stand. It didn’t fit: the ring was too small; the jar needed a wider one. I chose another stand that I thought would be perfect and slowly slid the jar in. It seemed the right size, but once I let go the jar passed right through my fingers and broke into many pieces. Nineteen years later I can still feel that sinking feeling as this centuries-old prized possession slipped down and shattered. I looked mournfully at the pieces of the once-beautiful jar now scattered on the floor and immediately started blaming myself for not taking more care in handling this piece of pottery that had been in use for a long time before it came to be displayed in our house. What had I done? How could I not have known that I should have used more care? My mind turned to how to put it back together again. I ran to the kitchen to get a broom and swept every single shard into a plastic bag. The evidence was removed, yet the jar was gone. Unwilling to accept this, I decided I must reassemble it. As I stood back and looked at the empty metal holder that was supposed to enhance the appeal of the jar but had led only to its demise, I thought how like Palestine was this precious old jar, once whole and lovely, now reduced to shards.
When Penny got home I told her what had happened and assured her that I would put the jar back together. Kindly, she resisted expressing doubts, but she made it clear that she thought I had better accept the loss of that lovely historic jar.
A year passed. And another. Penny was getting tired of having a pottery-shard-filled plastic bag in our pantry and yet I insisted that some day I would reassemble the jar. Then, with the end of the century approaching, I thought it woul
d be a bad omen to start the new one with a broken jar on my conscience. I gave myself ample time and began on 1 December 1999. I spread the shards on my desk and got to work. The most difficult section was the base, but as soon as that was accomplished the sides proved easier to fit together. I kept at it and before the century ended I had glued the jar back together. There is a Japanese art of fixing broken pottery called kintsugi. I didn’t exactly follow that practice, where the shards are fixed with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold; instead I used ordinary slow-drying glue. In Japan these repaired ceramic pieces are believed to be more valuable than unbroken ones.
My jar is now whole again. You can see the individual pieces when light shines through the holes which I failed to fill, but you can appreciate the effort of rebuilding the whole after the disastrous breaking. Perhaps one day this will be the fate of Palestine too. It will become whole again, far more appreciated after going through wars and massacres before being reconstructed kintsugi-style.
It was not a bad start to the century. We celebrated New Year with a dancing party at our house. There were high hopes that Palestine would be making up for lost time and prospering. A most promising project then was the Bethlehem 2000 celebration, ably headed by a friend of mine, Nabeel Kassis, who had worked hard for two years to make this a success. Bethlehem 2000 aimed to launch Bethlehem and Palestine into the world through tourism promotion, capacity building and the preservation of cultural assets in the West Bank and Gaza. Nine months later our life irrevocably changed when, in September 2000, the Likud party leader, Ariel Sharon, marched up to the Haram al-Sharif, the site of the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest shrine in Islam, and sparked the second and more violent Intifada, shattering whatever peace we had managed to achieve. Since then we have not been able to reignite those hopes and everything seems to have gone inexorably downhill from there.
Leaving the house, I opened the outside gate, where a towering jacaranda hugged the wall, its feathery leaves studded with glorious bouquets of blue, bell-shaped flowers. I lingered to admire it before closing the gate, then descended the three steps from our house and started to walk to my office in the centre of town.
All the houses on our street, which is called Al Rabia (the hill), have low outside walls and gardens. Each is different. The house opposite is adorned with six Corinthian columns and has roses. The one right next door used to have a number of purple bougainvilleas falling over the wall, but since the death of the owner his widow has replaced them with a row of pencil cypresses that stand like sentinels, attempting to conceal the seating area at the front of the house but depriving the garden of that lush, expansive, exuberant look. Perhaps the widow decided bougainvillea was too messy; that garden is so neat and orderly, with umbrellas, garden tables and chairs. But the lawn has real grass, unlike most other gardens, which use an artificial grass-like covering imported from China. It’s very different from ours, which in comparison looks like a jungle. Gardening style is a social indicator, though I refuse to be judged by it. A house further down the street used to have a thriving buddleia, which for some reason the owners decided to cut down and replace with a pittosporum that blooms in April and fills the street with a pleasant fragrance. In the front of the house there is a small unfilled pond and at the back a trampoline which is rarely, if ever, used.
As is the norm in Ramallah, all the houses are built from limestone. Those more recently constructed on the hill north of here are monumental in size. Not only do people show off with their sumptuous houses, but their front gardens with expensive palm trees are designed for the same purpose. The dilemma for those anxious to surround their houses with a high protective wall for security while hating to block the view of their garden is resolved by installing CCTV cameras. Ostentation is not frowned upon here, despite the dire economic conditions that most people have to endure.
Across from where we live, the hills that remain visible between the houses reflect the sun in the late afternoon and glow pink. On humid mornings they fill up with mist.
As I make my way to the office I check the progress of the various gardens I pass. I feel weary. I was woken at three thirty by the Quranic readings, which were lengthy. They were followed by the call to prayer. And then, after I managed to return to sleep, another call to prayer. Everyone in the vicinity of the Al Taqwa (piety) mosque is in earshot of the speakers that boom out, yet no one is able to do anything about it. Frequently, when I’m writing, the azan (call to prayer) breaks my concentration. There is little doubt, to my mind, that the defeat of the nationalist project in Palestine by Israel that followed in the wake of the Oslo Accords encouraged the rise of political Islam, much like what happened elsewhere in the region. During the first Intifada in 1989, the UNRWA school not far from where we were living placed loudspeakers on its mosque. I called the principal, as did others, and objected to the noise. I said I expected a centre of learning to spread knowledge, not be a cause of annoyance to the neighbours. The principal eventually removed the loudspeakers.
Now we all – the entire neighbourhood – accept our fate in silence and are woken in the middle of the night by the zealous imam preceding the call to prayer with computer-recorded readings from the Quran. The two calls to prayer are made within a short interval, and the second ends with the statement that ‘prayer is preferable to sleep’. I find it especially annoying that I should be instructed not to sleep. But what’s the use: I’m already awake and must wait until the whole thing is over before I can try to get some more rest. When the tape finishes I hear the crackling static from the recording machine. All this is amplified with the help of ten loudspeakers decked around the exceptionally high minaret. And likewise the entire sermon and prayer from the mosque on Friday, when the sound is so loud I am unable to work. The sky is dominated by the prayer, as if we were living in some sort of seminary.
When I go shopping at the supermarket in the morning, rather than the lyrical voice of the much-loved Lebanese singer Fayrouz, I now hear Quranic readings. It took me a while to understand, but then I found that there is something hypnotic about these daytime readings. Hypnotic and relaxing. And so I’ve decided not to take this development as a personal defeat and have learned to live with it, adjusting my life accordingly and appreciating its meaning and effect on others as much as possible. Clearly religion has now become another weapon in the arsenal of struggle that is mobilised in the fight for selfassertion. The Palestinian villages next to Israeli settlements fill the air with the call to prayer to remind their unwanted neighbours that we’re here and this is Palestinian land. In response, the Israeli reaction has been to attempt to pass a law prohibiting amplification of the call to prayer.
I see the traffic speeding by on Tireh Road and feel fortunate to have the time to walk to the office rather than drive. When I first moved here this road was not so busy. There were few houses beyond the top of the hill, north of where St George’s School now sits. The pastoral has been turned into the urban and in the process the atmosphere of the place has been entirely transformed. Once a narrow, meandering road with many sharp turns, and fields of olive trees on both sides, led to the next tiny village of Ayn Qenia. The road used to be bordered by an ancient drystone wall that might have belonged to the nearby Byzantine khirbeh (ruins of an ancient settlement) called Khirbet Al Tireh, which is now being excavated by archaeology students from Al Quds University. It’s thought that the site is where St Stephen, venerated as the first Christian martyr, was once buried. You could walk along that narrow road and, just after the hill crested, Ramallah would come into view. It was a dramatic entrance to the sleepy city. One could linger to take in the scene without fear of being overrun by speeding cars, because there were fewer of them then. Now the wall has been demolished and the road widened from two to four lanes, so it is constantly busy with traffic leading to the numerous tall buildings that have arisen north of Ramallah, making the street ever busier with cars. In one such building, not far from here, the national poet Mahmou
d Darwish lived until his death in 2013. His doctor had prescribed that he take a daily walk and I often encountered him near his house. I can still hear his deep melodious voice greeting me as our paths crossed.
Near where he lived was a small plant nursery, one of several that now exist in Ramallah. Many of the houses in my area have gardens, but only a few are worked on by their owners. Usually the gardens belong to rich mansions whose owners are too busy or too lazy to do the work and can afford to employ a gardener. You can always tell when this is the case. Such gardens do not reflect individual taste but follow the usual plan intended to make it look as eye-catching as possible from the outside. They have few of the indigenous plants like snapdragons, zinnias and geraniums; instead they boast fancy kinds that demand much water and care. Gardeners are in high demand, but they are not celebrities as in the UK. Gardening is still considered a lowly job. The owners of the two largest garden centres in the city, Abu Arab and Abu Zaki, have different attitudes to their work. Though knowledgeable about plants, Abu Arab, came from Jenin and is more interested in the commercial aspects of the business than in the plants. Not so Abu Zaki, a refugee living in the Kalandia refugee camp. He worked for many years in Israel and knows only the Hebrew names for most of the plants he sells. Only in the last thirty years has Ramallah acquired garden centres. Before that, plants were shared and one got cuttings or planted from seed. Not so any more.
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