Going Home

by Raja Shehadeh

  Looking at him made me wonder what it takes to remain human in a place so buffeted by aggression, dominated by the struggle for survival. How is it possible to avoid resorting to anger and utter hatred, and at the same time guard against becoming insular and insensitive? There is no telling how much longer this occupation will last. Both of my parents’ lives ended before they saw a resolution of the struggle. And mine may as well. I’ve always had to conserve my energies and prepare for survival under these harsh and distressing conditions for an indeterminate length of time. But I know from my experience in the first Intifada that days lost cannot be compensated for. I am no longer young. I don’t feel I have limitless time during which I will remain physically well. I don’t want to end up feeling embittered, standing on a street corner like that old man, with a sense that my life has been lost, dissipated.

  But no! I will not turn into a withered old man like this mysterious person manning street corners, or like those other old men, so common here, who rant in broken voices about what they did in their youth for the cause and how unappreciated they were and how things would have turned out differently if only the politicians had listened to them. I will live a fulfilled life. Each year will be better than the one that preceded it. If the practice of law is no longer going to be rewarding, then I will move on to some other pursuit. This man is a warning of what I could become.

  My musings were interrupted by the sight of Abu Muhammad, who is probably in his fifties. He was on his way to our neighbourhood, where he often finds work cleaning the pavements. Close to his chest, like a handbag, he held a white bucket in which was a black plastic bag, and balanced on his shoulder was his long broom. A rake with the tines up was used as a cane that he made look like a sceptre. He walked unevenly between the cars, avoiding the pavement. For many years now he has been coming over to seek work. He would make his presence known from a distance by singing. Then he would ring the bell. ‘Do you need your pavement cleaned this morning?’ he would ask politely. And if I said, ‘Not today,’ he would thank me and leave.

  He takes the bus from one of the downtrodden, impoverished villages northwest of Ramallah which has no pavements, then he walks from the centre of the city heading north to Tireh, where the well-off families live. After leaving my door, he proceeds to one of the neighbours, announcing his presence by his singing. When the singing stops I realise he has secured a job for the day.

  I’m comforted to know that he has started covering his bald head with a cap to protect his scalp from the sun. I could see a worryingly large lump protruding from the back of his head and it had been increasing in size since he began coming over to look for work five years ago. Several times he’s asked me, ‘They say America is down there by the roundabout, down this hill. Is it true?’ He laughs and shakes his shoulders, as if he’s enjoying his own joke.

  One day when I was returning home for lunch he had almost finished sweeping the neighbours’ pavement, doing his usual meticulous job, filling his bucket with rubbish and plucking out the weeds growing between the kerb and the tarmac and dumping them all in the field over the road, only for the wind to eventually spread them back again on the pavement.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asks.

  ‘Out,’ I say.

  ‘In America?’

  ‘Yes, in America.’

  ‘I was once there, you know?’

  ‘Who took you there?’

  ‘Vera.’ (Vera Tamari is the artist who lives in a house next to ours.)

  ‘Why did she take you to America?’

  ‘Why? To show me. She took me in her car and we went to the hill over there and stopped the car and I looked down.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘All kinds of fantastic things. I saw big trees and big houses. Everything so big and the pavements so wide and clean. They don’t need me there. The walls were high, but I could see from where we stood up on the hill blue water. Yes, they say it’s the ocean. I saw the ocean. Vera showed it to me!’

  I remain silent, so he continues.

  ‘They say in America you find gold on the pavements. But I couldn’t get down because of the growling dogs. I don’t know if it was true about the gold, but I saw America.’

  ‘And how did you find it?’ I asked.

  ‘Amazing.’

  He chuckles. I cannot tell whether he is giggling in selfmockery or laughing at my incredulity, or at the absurdity of the inequity of our world.

  ‘Bring me a wife from America,’ he sings. ‘I want a blonde one. Yes, I want to marry her.’ Then, as he walks away, he asks, ‘They say in America they put the dollars in burlap bags. Is it true?’

  The kindly man who took every rejection of an offer to work so politely, with such tolerance and grace, was walking in his uncertain way down the street towards Tireh Road as I stood watching him from behind.

  Not far from where I was standing a young man of eighteen, Ayman Ratib Jabarin, was killed by Israeli soldiers on 22 June 2006, during the tail end of the second Intifada. There was a plaque commemorating the spot and a street named after him. I wondered whether he was a grandson of one of the families who came to Ramallah from Sair, near Hebron, the family who owned a bakery nearby. I crossed the street to check whether it was still there. I passed through the narrow one-way lane between the walls of the two buildings on either side, hardly metres apart, remnants of old Ramallah. The original city, said to have been established in the mid-1550s, consisted of eight clans, each living in its own hara (quarter). The one I was entering was where the Yousef hamoula (extended family or clan) lived. Just around the corner the bakery made its presence known by the strong comforting smell of freshly baked bread. I popped my head in. It was just as I remembered it, with cobwebs on the arched ceiling and wooden paddles to put the bread in the oven and take it out again. Only they no longer baked the flat bread for the women who brought dough they prepared at home. Now they made the round sesame cakes with the hollow centre that are very popular and sold uptown on the busy streets of Ramallah.

  Walking through the narrow lane, I recalled how, as I was growing up, we made our own dough and took it to this same bakery for baking. My mother’s helper, Adeeba, would have prepared the yeast days before, feeding it with water and flour until it became active, bubbly and billowy. She would use some of it to mix with the flour and water, keeping the rest for the next session. She would dig the knuckles of her long, strong hands in the dough and knead it. Then she would pat the pliable mass that felt almost alive, taming it into one big soft ball that she covered with a heavy cloth and slipped under the couch in the sitting room. Next morning she would remove the cover and check that the dough had risen. We called this sourdough bread samoune. She would roll up a white cotton sash into a circle which she placed on her head and gently lift the big dish containing the dough on to it, then walk in a slow, stately manner to the bakery at the corner, down from the house of the bad boys who often came out to play in the street without their underwear. I would walk down with her, holding her hand.

  Usually there were many other women already at the bakery, all with dough ready or, for the more energetic, the lunch dish of chicken or vegetables that they wanted to go in the oven. They would talk together as they busily separated the dough into small fist-sized balls, which they placed on the flat straw tray to be picked up by the baker. Meanwhile I examined the intricate spirals of cobwebs in the arched domes of this old bakery. The walls were blackened all the way up to the ceiling. Saah, the baker, wore short sleeves that showed his muscular arms. He was silent as he placed the round pieces of dough on his paddles. If the customer’s order was for samoune bread, he kept the dough as one lump; if they wanted wardi he flattened it, beat it lightly with his nimble fingers and then dug all ten fingers up and down to make holes in the dough, after which he quickly hurled it into the fire. As soon as this was done he pulled out the earlier load of bread, now steaming hot, from inside the oven. I watched with fascination, my face glowing in
the heat from the open hearth, wondering how it was that the wooden paddle that was shoved in and out of the oven did not catch fire. I had to back up as the hot bread was hurled on to Adeeba’s straw tray while she stood waiting. She would juggle it up and down to cool it, then arrange one piece next to another in tidy rows. After she’d received the lot, she would cover the hot bread with a cloth, mount it on her head, take my hand and set off again. And so we’d saunter back to the house: Adeeba, tall and straight as a rod, with her dignified pace, and me, short and with my head bent, surveying the ground, lost in my own private world as I munched on a crust of the hot bread, my favourite food.

  I could smell the freshly baked sesame cakes as I passed the old bakery. But I did not consider buying any. It has been almost two years now since I’ve eaten any wheat bread. Now I can only enjoy the smell.

  1. My parents, Aziz and Wedad, with their first born, Siham, in Jaffa.

  2. Me, standing by the gate of our first house in Ramallah, with the empty hills in the background.

  3. With my sister Samar and our helper Adeeba in the saha (yard) of our first house.

  4. My father is holding my younger brother Samer during a Christmas party at our first house; to his left is my older sister Siham and next to her my mother. Leaning forward, next to Santa, is my sister Samar whose birthday is on 21 December, so she’s blowing out the candles of her birthday cake. I’m standing next to her, with her friends who are attending her birthday party.

  5. A New Year party, with dancing.

  6. A competition at the dancing rink of the Grand Hotel in which I participated.

  7. My grandmother Julia.

  8. The Shehadeh family preparing for an outing in the mid fifties, before my brother Samer was born.

  9. With my parents in their home, circa 1967.

  10. My parents at their sun balcony in the early eighties.

  Six

  From the bakery I walked up through the old city, looking at all the changes taking place. Unlike the area behind the massive Arab Bank building that I had passed earlier, this part has retained more of its old flavour, with narrow winding alleys and some of the traditional homes still standing. These were designed to have two floors, the lower one reserved for the animals while the family slept above. They had thick walls and solid wooden doors, now worn with age and imbued with recollections over many decades of the generations of families who lived there. The doors had huge wrought-iron keys that could not be copied and were much more effective than the Israeli-made multi-lock doors, so undifferentiated and characterless. But the keys were bulky and heavy, indicating that the owners of these homes rarely ever left them without someone staying behind.

  I was surprised there were no children playing in the streets. This was so unlike the way it used to be when I was growing up here. Abu Abid’s obdurate and often-abused mule that pulled the cart delivering kerosene for cooking and heating used to leave many blobs of dung on the street. The children didn’t have to worry much about passing cars then. One would pass every few hours and the local bus made the rounds twice a day, in the morning and the afternoon. Now the streets are full of speeding vehicles and children sit at their computers or with their smartphones, playing electronic games and growing obese. There are no mule-drawn carts left in Ramallah, so no dung either. But domestic dogs can be seen, being walked by proud owners showing them off. Pets have finally arrived in Ramallah.

  In the old city I knew as a child nothing was wasted. Families could not afford, nor would they ever consider wasting the money, to buy toys for their children. Children made their own toys from pieces of junk. Old wires from discarded electric cables were turned into small carts that could be driven and turned around with a handle, reminiscent of minimalist art objects. Balls were made from string. Girls made dolls from rags. Children used their imagination and skill to entertain themselves. A popular toy was made from rolled-up wire turned into a hoop and driven with a stick. As it gathered speed, the boys would run to keep up with it. The five-year-old son of a neighbour of ours ran into one of the occasional cars coming down the street and was killed.

  Most of the men and women passing through the streets of the old city wore traditional Palestinian village dress. For the women it was the colourful toub with hand-stitched patterns and colours peculiar to Ramallah, red and black, usually with a sash and a headdress festooned with old Ottoman coins. The men wore the serwal, a long grey garment resembling the shalwar kameez worn by Pakistani men, with faint black stripes and a thick colourful cloth belt. In winter they wrapped themselves with a loose overgarment we called abayah (cloak). This attire did not distinguish between people on religious grounds. Now those who still wear such clothes are a rare sight. When talk of immigration to the US was being discussed, one old relative of mine wearing a toub joked that if she ended up going to America she would have to wear a bra. She thought this was hilarious and with her gnarled old hands lifted her drooping breasts to indicate how it would be, laughing as she did so.

  It was then the custom, as it remains for some in Ramallah, to visit the eldest member of the extended family, who is considered its head, on feast days. My father was in that position, which meant that rather than go out and enjoy ourselves on such days, our house filled up with visitors, some of whom came only on these occasions, and my mother had to serve the traditional feast pastries and brew Turkish coffee for all of them. Every year she would complain to my father, who felt he had to tolerate the practice. Then one feast day she announced that it had to stop. She convinced my father to dissuade everyone from coming and they stopped showing up. My mother always managed to get her way. Though I thought, as I was growing up, that it was the other way round.

  Thinking about the still-empty plot where my father had planned to build a house, I remember that when I was a child, after the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), refugees from Lifta had taken possession of the empty house across the street from ours, which was owned by a woman who was in the US. They had brought cows from their village and put them on that empty plot. I wonder now how my mother must have felt about ending up living next to a cowshed after leaving her glamorous life in the affluent and cultured city of Jaffa, where her husband had a flourishing law practice. They had just moved into their exquisitely furnished new flat when they were forced out of the city, along with some three-quarters of a million Palestinians, in what came to be known as the Nakba. Surely it must have made her feel she had fallen from grace. Where once she had been the daughter of an affluent judge living in a cosmopolitan city, she was now across the street from the smelly cows of the Lafatawis (people of Lifta).

  The more sordid the surroundings, the more tenaciously my mother held on to her dreams and gave free rein to her imagination. This was especially strong during the Christmas season, when she managed to create an exciting holiday atmosphere, dressing up as Father Christmas and going round to all the terrified youngsters at the Christmas party she hosted in our house, changing her voice and taking our trembling hands in her red-gloved hand to hop around and sing together. Then, after removing her disguise, she would come back to the throng, expressing her sorrow that she had missed the fun, convincing us that it was not she who had been behind the mask.

  She would tell me bedtime stories about queens living in luxury and I imagined her to be one. Outside was the harsh material world and under the warm eiderdown into which I tucked myself next to her I heard magical tales of happy kings, queens and princes living in sumptuous palaces. How enraptured I was by that imaginary world. I promised my mother that when I grew older, wherever I happened to be at Christmas, I would always travel home to be with her.

  Working my way through the narrow lanes of the old city, I discover that a number of the old houses I had known have been demolished and replaced by modern buildings. I continue on towards the old house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, stopping to check the garden of Nahida Jaber, now an octogenarian, on the way. Unlike her late husband, Nahida has always
been resourceful and had a well-ordered spirit, allowing her to feel perfectly satisfied with her own company and able to retire into her own being. She rarely leaves the house. She gardens, reads and enjoys her extended family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their spouses, for whom she often cooks. Her garden is her world and is by far the best in the city.

  As I looked over the wall, I thought the garden looked glorious. No ostentation here and none of the unsightly palm trees that now seem to be a must in all new gardens. The front garden was awash with colour, annuals of different sorts competing with each other to dazzle. On every step of the stairway leading up to the front door was a plant pot full of flowering geraniums. On the side in a shady alcove there were pots brimming with fuchsias, which I’ve always found difficult to cultivate in Ramallah because of the dry heat. Nahida’s success was astounding. So many passers-by stop to photograph the garden that the family had placed a ‘No Photography’ sign by the gate.

  In 1989 the Israeli military had ordered that the house, which was originally built in 1941, be demolished. Nader, one of Nahida’s sons, had been involved in an armed operation against Israel, an act punishable by the demolition of the house of the perpetrator’s family. Nader had managed to narrowly avoid capture by leaving the country and so his family’s home was threatened instead. Al Haq, the human rights organisation affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists which I had helped establish and was directing then, waged a massive campaign to halt this disproportionate response and succeeded in getting the military to amend the order and demolish only the studio flat on the third floor of the three-storey building where Nader was living. I remember how anxious this made Ramzi, Nader’s father, who feared that the explosion would render the whole house uninhabitable. But it didn’t. Severe as the Israeli military are, they make precise calculations. The rest of the house survived and, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Nader’s brothers rebuilt the demolished floor. Nonetheless, more than a quarter of a century has passed since this happened and Nader now lives abroad. He is still not allowed to return home; even when his father died, he could not attend the funeral.