On reaching our old house on Dar Yousef Street, I was pleased to see again the Syrian pines which my grandmother had planted when the house was built in the 1930s. They were as towering and straggly as they had always been, shading both the house and the garden. A small house intended for summer use, it was open to the northwest, from where the wind blew, making it difficult to heat in winter. After my family were forced out of Jaffa in April 1948 this became our permanent home. We lived downstairs and my grandmother lived upstairs alone. She would often spend the morning on the balcony with its three arches, seated in one of her green wicker chairs.
Our hara was very mixed. Nearby lived Nazli, the Armenian midwife, and next door there was a Circassian family. The father was a short, frail man with a long, thin nose and a small face dominated by large ears. He often played on his accordion lively music with a strong beat that to us sounded like Russian tunes. Originally from a region in the north Caucasus, his people had fled from persecution in the late nineteenth century and ended up in Syria and Jordan. They were Muslims who retained their own language and traditions. Many fought with the Jordanian army and were loyal to the regime. We hardly ever spoke to the man we referred to as the Sharkasi (Circassian), but he was always spying on us to find out who was visiting our house. When my father was arrested for sheltering his communist friend Ibrahim Bakr, an incorrigible political activist who was later deported by Israel after the beginning of the occupation and became a prominent lawyer in Amman, we found out that it was the Sharkasi who had informed on us to the Jordanian police. Years later, upon Bakr’s release, I remember this stout man with a deep voice, whom I admired for his fortitude and courage, seating me next to him and tenderly telling me of a distant freer world, asking whether I knew of the existence of the vast expanding universe populated by innumerable stars and unexplored horizons. With his words and the use of his long fingers, he helped me imagine the spacious firmament on high. I listened with fascination, totally mesmerised. It was the first time that I was taken away in my imagination beyond the small but enchanting world I inhabited.
The Circassian family had a young son, a loner who kept himself to himself and did not associate with the other children in our hara. When he was five, they had a celebration which they said was a circumcision. I did not go, but others did. For days before it was due to take place, everyone pointed at the boy and said he was going to be circumcised, which seemed to embarrass him. He also looked worried, and the snot that had run from his small nose and stopped at his upper lip looked like it was frozen there. He seemed too distracted to wipe it away. Then, after it was over, he came out on to the street wearing a white robe because, they said, his penis was tied up and he could not be in trousers. And then that family left. Next, Zaki Hussary, a refugee from Lydda (now called Lod, in Israel), and his wife, Eileen, who were forced out of their city at gunpoint in July 1948, leaving everything behind, moved in. This significantly increased the number of refugees living in Ramallah. According to the 1953 census, out of a population of 13,500 people in the city 8,500 were refugees.
Zaki and Eileen had no children. They adopted one of their nephews, who years later told me how envious he was of us at Christmas because we got so many presents. One time my sister Siham sent him a present and he has never forgotten her kind gesture, remaining eternally grateful. Zaki, who was a truck driver, insisted that Eileen bake fresh bread every day. He worked hard and lived in penury; eating fresh bread was one of the few luxuries he insisted on. There was another family, also refugees from Lydda, who lived in the stairwell in the house across the street from ours. Every one of their eight children slept on a different step. This family has now managed very well and their grandson drives a Mercedes.
Ramallah’s economy was weak and could not provide full employment for its inhabitants. By the late 1950s more and more people were emigrating. There was an obese woman called Najla whom, because of her size, we always called Najla Al Bansa (fat Najla). She sold sweets which she kept in glass jars. She had a well-marked small chin that was sweaty and I used to think it looked funny, situated as it was among the folds of fat on her large face. But above that chin she had a serious, lugubrious face that belied the cute chin. We would keenly knock on her metal door. The minute she opened it we would be confronted by the musty odour of her house. One day we went to buy sweets and banged on her door but no one answered. We banged harder and the wall began to collapse. We scrambled over into the downed metal walls and saw that there was nothing left, none of the jars, none of the furniture, just the metal sheets spread on the ground. Najla Al Bansa had joined the ranks of those who went in search of a new life in America.
My family considered emigrating only once, when the Jordanian authorities’ harassment of my father became intolerable. But then my parents decided against it. Prior to 1967 my mother glorified Jaffa and her father the judge, how he knew what was going to happen to their city and how once they left they would never see their house again. Then, after the ’67 war, my father fantasised about a new era of peace with Israel with a Palestinian state next to it, and cooperation between the two nations in which he would play a part. He strongly believed that it would happen if his advice was heeded. But it did not come to fruition. I, of course, being a dutiful son, continued to believe that it would.
As a child on summer mornings I would be passed like a parcel over the wire fence that separated our house from the neighbours’. ‘Giv’m to me, giv’m to me,’ my aunt and our neighbour Wadia would say, and I would be handed over. Wadia’s father was a brilliant doctor who had been employed as the private physician of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Her husband, Salem Ghannam, ate eggs with yoghurt, which everyone thought was odd. I later realised this was a Turkish recipe that he must have learned from his mother-in-law. Wadia would hug and kiss me with a sucking sound and give me biscuits dipped in coffee. I liked this very much. When Tata came to claim me back, Wadia would declare, ‘Hatha husti’ (he’s mine). Perhaps for her I temporarily replaced the son who had left and was never close.
Wadia had a substantial behind and was always burdened with problems. She wore her dressing gown all day. When she came to visit she would bring her kettle of coffee and her knitting. She knitted extraordinarily fast, faster than most other women. The more engrossed in her thoughts, the faster the needles worked their way through the wool. She did all her housework quickly, leaving time for her problems, which she sat and discussed with the ladies. She had a colourful way of speaking. Commenting on the neighbours whose husbands worked in Kuwait, she said, ‘They leave these poor women alone all year and come once a year to inflate them and leave again.’
I was a weak, frail child, too small for my age. When we sat to eat lunch around the dining table, my father at the head, my mother next to him, I would refuse to eat. I suffered from diarrhoea and a bloated stomach. The feeling of being hollow and weak, with a vulnerable physique, was constant throughout my childhood. I envied those boys in my class who had strong, dependable bodies that made them feel robust and energetic.
When I started going to the Ahlia School around the corner from our house, the big boys would follow me around, trying to open the clasp of my small box. My mother had given me a little wooden red box with a handle for my pencils, drawing book and sandwich. The boys kept coming and trying to open it and I would hold it away from them, but they were bigger and I could not stop them. Eventually one would succeed in opening it so that all the contents fell out. It embarrassed me to have things exhibited on the ground for all the other boys to see. One winter’s day I couldn’t wait to leave school and get home, so I set off without putting on my coat, even though it was raining. I dragged the wet garment behind me as I trudged back home. It was only a short distance to our house, so I didn’t think it was necessary to wear the coat. I will soon be home, I thought, trailing it as it became heavy with rain. The house was further than I had thought. So I dropped my coat and arrived home dripping wet. My mother was livid with the te
achers. How could they allow a four-year-old to leave without making sure that he had put on his coat? Next morning I was ill with pneumonia. My mother was so furious she never sent me back. A year later, when I was old enough, I was enrolled at the Friends School, a little further away.
After my bad experience at the Ahlia School I was given a leather bag to take with me. I was glad that the older boys had no curiosity about my bag, but I was still stuck with tiny feet that continued to be of interest to them. Boys would come over to check them out and measure them against their own. Yet none of this mattered, because I was more alive in my head than in the physical world around me.
During the summer holidays I stayed within the small world of our house and garden. I would look at the empty rolling hills to the front, which provided an unobstructed view to the horizon. I was fond of catching butterflies. As I ran after them I imagined myself running down the terraces all the way to Ayn Musbah, the spring at which women lined up every morning to fill their jerrycans with water. The first story I wrote was about the adventures of a boy running after a butterfly, escaping the walled garden and going through thistles and down terraces into the wadi, then getting lost.
When I reached my early teens my father would stand me against the wall to measure my height. Our neighbour Dr Ghannam, with his ginger hair and freckled skin, made a mark on the wall where the top of my head came. Every few months he would check again, but the mark stayed in the same place. I could tell that my parents were concerned.
The late 1950s were the years of coffee-cup readings, when the women sat for hours over morning coffee, gossiping and knitting. When they finished drinking their Turkish coffee they turned the small cups over, letting the grounds slide down the sides, leaving intricate patterns from which my mother would read their fortunes and, in her lovely melodious voice, announce what was in store for them. After morning coffee the women would each go their separate ways. Then Tata could be heard calling from her house, wanting to know if we had tomatoes: ‘I’ve run out of them. And could you also bring some mint leaves?’
When my father was banished from Jordan in 1955 because of his oppositional politics, we followed him to Beirut. There my weak health deteriorated further and it was thought best to send me back to Ramallah to live with Tata, while the rest of the family remained in Lebanon.
She cooked breakfast for me every day and made me eat it. ‘You should get fat,’ she would say in her imperious voice. She also brought in the nurse to give me a daily vitamin shot, so I called her Nadia Eiber (needle Nadia). I hated her and dreaded the injections. She swabbed my bottom with cotton wool and alcohol, stuck the needle in and kept it there. It hurt and so I cried. Then she pulled it out and said, ‘See, it is all over.’ And we would count how much longer before the next one and I would be comforted that there was still another day and night before the morning of the next day and the next shot. Nadia was rotund and spoke little. She left after she finished her task, taking with her the little bag with the dreaded needle and the medicine. She had a bad ending. When she retired, the doctor for whom she worked did not pay her the pension she was owed for her years of service. Impoverished, she died horribly after contracting gangrene and losing her leg.
With the family away, the house downstairs was quiet. I spent a lot of time alone with Tata, sleeping for long hours and taking naps after lunch. Now I lived upstairs, I was happy to be with my grandmother. She did not fuss over me but left me alone, except at mealtimes, when she made me eat. It was not possible to argue with her so I had no choice but to obey.
Whenever I hear the wind in the pines, I am reminded of the Grand Hotel. In the afternoons my grandmother and I would walk together to sit in the hotel’s garden at the top of the hill from our house. It had old elegant buildings with a large pine tree garden in the back and a colourful front garden closer to the main building. We sat on green wicker chairs and my grandmother had tea which she flavoured with lemon verbena leaves that she asked me to pick for her from the nearby shrub as she chatted with Um Yousef, the proprietress, who stood by reverently watering the dahlias with a long hose. After she finished she paused, before calling with a cracked voice to the handyman, ‘Rizq, Rizq, come turn off the water.’ Then she came over and sat with my grandmother.
Um Yousef spoke with a Lebanese accent and was often unable to hold back her tears, which flowed down her cheeks. Even when she didn’t cry her face remained sad. She couldn’t stop thinking of the son she had lost and the older daughter who had had to be confined to a mental asylum. She had good reasons to be unhappy, yet she also grumbled about everything. My grandmother never cried or grumbled. She was content to be sitting in her wicker chair drinking tea with her yellow angora shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I would go off to play alone under the pines, finding things to look at and examine. ‘He’s no trouble, none at all,’ my grandmother told Um Yousef. They spoke of Aida, her attractive younger daughter, with the glittering dark blue eyes, who was sprightly and always working, going from one part of the garden or the hotel to another in her colourful apron. Behind where they sat were the many hydrangea pots which were now concealed by curtains that the proprietress pulled back as soon as the afternoon sun began to wane.
Um Yousef, whom we always called Madame Audeh, was a proud Lebanese. When the women of the town came to offer their condolences for her son’s death from cancer in the late 1950s, she threw them out. Yousef’s death had been sudden, he was in the prime of life, and she could not be consoled. Everyone thought that she had lost her mind, the way she screamed and refused to receive people. ‘Go back to where you came from,’ she would yell at the top of her shrill voice. ‘I don’t want to see any of you here.’ Madame Audeh never seemed to recover from the shock.
After the Israeli army withdrew from the hotel in 1968, a year after the beginning of the occupation, the hotel did not immediately reopen. Um Yousef would stand alone in the empty grounds as she tried to revive the garden and give way to her grief. She was thinking of her son and what he had planned for this place: a splendid hotel with a tennis court and nightclub. Even though a decade had passed since his death, she still couldn’t stop grieving. The air of melancholy dominated the attractive grounds where the rose bushes were beginning to bud. Um Yousef held the hose as tears streamed down her cheeks. It took several years before the hotel reopened, but it never returned to its former glory. It was as though that brief stay by the Israeli army had robbed the place of the special aura and glamour that the old Lebanese woman and her determined daughter had worked so hard to cultivate.
When twilight fell and the light began to fade, Madame Audeh could be heard calling to Rizq to turn on the lights. She said this in a broken, despairing voice, as though she was weary of having to keep saying it every evening. The lights came on, a row of bulbs slung from tree to tree. But there were few lights in the back garden where the trees were denser and the sky was turning dark and forbidding. I returned from the garden and sat next to my grandmother. ‘He is mine, mine,’ she would announce to Madame Audeh, as she held me next to her, and I would lean over and rest my head on her angora shawl. The birds were twittering in the trees, getting ready to go to sleep. I was glad to discover that birds twitter before going to sleep. The tea had got cold and it was almost time for dinner. My grandmother said she had to go.
‘No, Julia, stay a little longer.’
‘They keep breaking the light on my street, these terrible boys, and I am afraid to slip and fall in the dark. I keep getting the municipality to fix it, but they throw stones and break it as soon as it gets fixed. I don’t know what to do with these boys. So many bad boys in our street. They are not well brought up. Their mothers let them out in the street the whole day. I try to get my nap in the afternoon, but they scream at the tops of their voices. They allow me no rest. It is awful. I must leave now before it gets completely dark.’
And so we would walk home, down the street of Cinema Dunia to Main Street, past Ramallah’s only florist.
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On one occasion Tata noticed that Abu Iskandar was open and she walked towards him. ‘Do you want a shawarma? I will buy you a shawarma.’ What a treat, because I liked shawarma. Abu Iskandar always had a serious grin as he turned the skewer and examined the meat, then picked a good place and slid the sharpened knife down to slice the meat. ‘Don’t give him the fat, remove all the fat,’ Tata instructed. Abu Iskandar did not look pleased about this. He took the spatula and scraped away the pieces of fat, pushing them to the side. He opened the long hamam (pigeon) bread and scooped up the fat-free meat. He added sliced onions spiced with sumac, then poked the sandwich with a fork and placed it by the fire to warm up. Finally, he pulled it out and wrapped it in paper before, with a turn of the hand, stooping down to give it to me. He seemed proud of his sandwich and serious about his work. My grandmother took one with the extra fat for herself and we ate our sandwiches in the street as we walked home, her cane tapping against the paving stones.
But that shawarma did not agree with me and I awoke with diarrhoea. Again I got that familiar feeling of weakness and hollowness, and I suffered from stomach cramps the whole day. My grandmother put me on a diet of potatoes and bread, while she ate a steak.
Tata spoke with a full voice and had a gap between her two front teeth. She liked to eat and had a strong constitution. Her balcony with its open view was refreshing and inviting. Sitting in her green wicker chair, she monitored the street, calling down to women she knew who were passing by and inviting them up. Then she would rush inside to brew Turkish coffee and bring it out on a round brown tray with two small cups, and the women would sip coffee and exchange news about the neighbours. One day the news was shocking.
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