Sophie, who lived up the hill, had gone to buy coffee from Zaibak’s in the old city and found the shop closed. She asked his neighbour where he was and this neighbour jokingly answered, ‘Gone to heaven.’ So Sophie now had news to spread. She immediately went around telling everyone, ‘Have you heard? Have you heard? Zaibak is dead.’
I remember Zaibak very well, a frail unassuming man standing in his shop, which was crowded with sacks of rice and sugar and other foodstuffs. He was often helped by his sister.
‘Oh, really?’ said the first woman Sophie met on the way. ‘When did this happen?’
‘Just this morning,’ Sophie answered. ‘I went down to buy coffee and found his shop closed. The neighbour told me the news. He said, “Zaibak died.”’
‘Poor man,’ said the first woman, who began to walk more hurriedly so that she could get to the other women before Sophie and be the one to break the news.
My mother was the only one who was sceptical. ‘Zaibak dead? Impossible,’ she declared. ‘It’s not believable that a man like him would die so suddenly. He’s not that sort of man.’ And as confirmation of her position, she told the story of how one day she went to buy coffee from Zaibak and found another woman in his shop who wanted to buy rice. ‘And you know what,’ my mother said, ‘Zaibak wouldn’t sell her any.
‘“But why won’t you sell me rice?” the woman wanted to know.
‘“Not today,” Zaibak said in his off hand way. “Come back tomorrow.”
‘“But I need the rice this morning. I’ve run out of rice and I need it now.”
‘“I’m not selling you any rice this morning.”
‘“But why? Just tell me why?”
‘“All day I have to put rice in a bag and weigh it, and if it’s not rice then it’s sugar. I don’t feel like doing it now. Come back another time.”
‘“But I need some rice now,” she insisted.
‘“I don’t care. I’m too bored doing the same thing all day.”
‘She kept insisting, but he adamantly refused to sell her the rice. Can such a man die?’ my mother argued. ‘Imagine, he gets tired and bored of selling rice and decides to go on strike and nothing will change his mind. This is a man who knows how to live. He’s not the dying type.’
In the course of the morning Sophie had told so many people the ‘news’ that by the afternoon there was a large crowd at the Orthodox Church of Transfiguration, which had been built in 1850 in downtown Ramallah, close to Zaibak’s shop. They were all dressed in black and wearing sombre faces to attend the funeral, but they found Zaibak standing there as usual, stooped behind the counter in his shop, his sister with the crooked teeth standing next to him. That morning he had gone round the corner to his house to use the toilet and had closed the door of his shop when Sophie happened to arrive, and the neighbour jokingly told her that Zaibak had gone to heaven.
Whenever my mother later repeated this story, she concluded it by saying, ‘That day Zaibak died and rose from the dead just like Lazarus. And all because of Sophie’s big mouth.’
From the late 1950s until the 1967 war, an Italian pop group performed at the Grand (as we affectionately began referring to the Grand Hotel) every Saturday and Sunday afternoon in the summer. They would break for a few hours and then resume in the evening. Now the sound of Quranic readings between the calls to prayer dominates the air most of the day. We would relax in the garden of the Grand, listening to the rustle of the pine trees and the twittering of birds. We had no doubt and felt strongly that the city was ours. After we went home the band would strike up at the hotel’s open-air nightclub. I would fall asleep as they went on playing until late at night.
On weekdays in the Grand Hotel garden we could hear plenty of birds preparing to sleep high up in the pine trees as evening turned to night. Those were long, enchanted summer evenings when we lingered in the gorgeous surroundings. Sometimes father would decide to stay on for a glass of arak, which was served with a mezze of delicious small plates. Moving quietly between the tables at the Grand was a slight old man asking questions. For years the unassuming philanthropist Aziz Shaheen did research for his book of genealogies. He would shuffle from table to table, pen and paper in hand, asking for information from the expats who had returned to Ramallah for a summer visit, about the names of new spouses, and the names and number of their children. When he finished he left. He never stayed around to enjoy the evening as the rest of us were doing. While very few of Ramallah’s original people remain in the city, before Shaheen died he managed to complete and publish his book, which has preserved the names and lineages of the eight large families that established the city, most of whom are scattered in the diaspora. The town has developed into an anonymous city where a mix of residents and foreigners of different nationalities live. Shaheen died leaving an only son, Naseeb, who never married. He also died leaving no heirs. Aziz Shaheen will be remembered in Ramallah for his book, which has become the city’s bible and his most-lasting legacy.
Among the many garden cafés in today’s Ramallah, one of the most charming is owned by Amin Marouf, the son of the owner of the first flower shop, whose mother had lived in a most attractive tent on Friends Street. It is situated in a pine garden on the outskirts of the city. Appropriately, it is called Snowbar, which in Arabic means pine. Yet despite the charm of sitting under a canopy of pines both here and in the Grand Hotel’s garden, the newer place has less atmosphere than the Grand used to have. Perhaps that magic cannot be replicated, at least not with the wide projection screens showing bands playing incessant loud pop and rap music in Arabic and English. Frequently there are birthday celebrations accompanied by ‘Happy Birthday’ sung first in English and then in Arabic. Birthday celebrations used to be private affairs, mainly celebrated by the Christians in the privacy of their own home. Now they have become a public spectacle, adding to the noise and chaos in restaurants and cafés. Perhaps the noise is necessary to drown the fear and guilt at the neglect of public causes, like a drunk man wanting to forget all the surrounding misery. The stakes were never so high. Earlier, life was simpler. Perhaps, after fifty years of occupation, we now get drunk on loud noise.
The other night I was leaving another of Ramallah’s famous restaurants, Darna, after a pleasant meal. There was a cool breeze and white cottony clouds in the sky. I started thinking that this has the makings of a very good city to live in, but there is no joy; pleasure is blunted by the sad events and incessant bad news that envelop us.
When one of my mother’s favourite second-floor flats equipped with central heating in the centre of town became available we decided to rent it. After the occupation my mother felt safer living off the ground, because she still remembered the Jordanian police who came to arrest my father banging on the windows and insisting to be allowed in. She felt able to move away from the old house, leaving her mother alone in the upstairs flat, because she trusted that Sophie and her brother Harbi, who lived nearby, would keep an eye on her.
Sophie’s family were three siblings who lived together, Sophie, Harbi and the eldest, Hanna. Their second-floor flat had a spacious terrace with three arches just up the hill from our old house. The elder brother had worked as a civil servant with the Mandate government. He was retired and was a recovering alcoholic. He observed a strict routine, was autocratic and demanded that his sister prepare three meals as well as afternoon tea, following which he would take a small stroll. So wherever Sophie happened to be visiting she had to rush back to feed him. He altered his routine only during the Israeli occupation, when he vowed that he would not leave his house until the Israelis withdrew.
For years he would sit on the balcony with the arches overlooking a garden planted with pine trees and a floor of white-and-black-chequered tiles. Several years into the 1967 occupation, my mother happened to meet him on the street.
‘How come you’re out of the house?’ she asked. ‘Have the Israeli soldiers left?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I h
ave a dental appointment.’ Then he proudly boasted to my mother, ‘Do you see this suit?’
My mother said yes.
‘Well, would you believe I’ve had it for twenty years? And yet see how it still looks like new.’
‘But of course it would,’ said my mother. ‘It’s been hanging in the wardrobe unused for the past ten years.’
Hanna did not care for the Arabic soap operas on television and would not allow his siblings to watch them. That was why they escaped to Tata’s house every night to watch whichever ones they were following. Harbi, the younger brother, had also worked with the Mandate civil service. He was at the headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when it was blown up by Jewish terrorists. With his soft humming voice and unassuming manner, he described his experience as he sat in the green wicker chair with his sister and my grandmother:
‘I heard the huge explosion. The room I was working in filled with dust and when I could see I realised the floor had broken in half. The half where my desk was remained in place. Beyond it everything had collapsed. I stood there on the edge in shock, breathing dust.’
He was a lucky man. In that bombing ninety-one people were killed, of whom twenty-one were senior government officials, thirteen were soldiers, three policemen and fifty-four members of the public: typists, clerks, messengers, employees of the hotel and canteen workers. Of the total killed, forty-one were Palestinian. Harbi was spared.
My grandmother had strong opinions about everything. She never grumbled, ate well, took a nap after lunch and went out visiting every afternoon. If she had no one to visit she went to the Grand Hotel, where she had tea for five piastres, with another piastre for a tip. She always had flowers in her crimson-coloured glass vase at home. She loved flowers and was a good gardener.
Unlike my mother, she was confident and not at all anxious. She often reprimanded others but she didn’t complain. My mother was different, unhappy about many things, but primarily my father. We would be waiting for lunch and my mother would be tired and bored. ‘He doesn’t like to come home,’ she would say. ‘He delays on purpose to annoy me. I have everything ready for him and he doesn’t come. He says he’s coming but doesn’t. I have to keep reheating the food again and again. I am so tired of him and his ways. You should not grow up to be like your father,’ she would tell me. ‘Why does he not like coming home? He hates coming home, hates his home. I do everything to make it pleasant for him but he runs away. He likes the office. He wants to be in the office the whole time. He makes me so tired.’ I would listen and sympathise with my mother and promise to grow up to be a better man.
One day we heard my grandmother screaming, ‘Go away, you dirty old man.’ We went up to check. It was Abu Nabil, the guard at the bus park on the hill. ‘He came into my house and touched himself. What does he take me for? Dirty old man. I threw him out and told him never to set foot in this house. He hurtled down the stairs limping, the dirty old man. Look at me,’ she said, ‘I am shaking, shaking with rage.’
He was not the only visitor she scolded. There was another episode with the newspaper man, Abu Al Habayeb, with his serwal and his dirty old grey-green jacket, who always carried the newspapers under his arm. He climbed Tata Julia’s stairs and saw that she was in the kitchen. He told her to open the window so he could lean over and hand her the newspaper. When he stretched his body to reach out, his garment split at the seams and my grandmother could see that he did not have any underwear on. ‘What is this, you dirty old man?’ she called out. ‘You must never come back here. You hear me, never come back. You have no shame. No shame.’ Reading the daily paper had to be sacrificed. No! My grandmother was not a mere villager from Ramallah. Heaven forbid. She was from the city of Haifa, the daughter of a hotelier. Heaven help whoever dared say she was from Ramallah.
Living next to the Harbs’ house was a man from Jaffa who owned a Buick. There were so few cars in our city then that it was possible to count all of them and know who a car belonged to when it passed. Car owners were a class unto themselves, known to everyone. People were identified by their cars: ‘He’s the one who owns the Ford’ or ‘He drives the VW sarsour’ (cockroach). There was only one Buick, a sky-blue 1948 model, and its owner was our neighbour. He bought the car just before the Nakba, when he could afford it. After the disaster and his impoverishment, he could not find a buyer and so for a short time, when the road to Jaffa was still open, he used it as a taxi to ferry people and make some money. When the road to Jaffa closed he decided that he would not use it again until the roads reopened. That car remained parked, never to be used. It was kept in a garage he rented from my grandmother.
One morning this neighbour with the revered old blue Buick climbed up the stairs to my grandmother’s house. From her kitchen window, Julia saw that his cheeks were smudged with tears. He looked terribly distraught, panting as he climbed the stairs and calling, ‘Um Emile, Um Emile.’
‘What is it?’ Julia asked, rushing to open the door, concerned that some great calamity had befallen her neighbour.
‘Ya, Um Emile,’ he started in a plaintive tone.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? Tell me, has anything happened to your wife?’
‘Ya, Um Emile,’ he began again, ‘you are well aware of the economic situation. I am suffering like everyone else. I implore you, can you reduce the rent?’
‘What rent?’ asked my grandmother.
‘The garage rent,’ he answered.
‘What!’ screamed Julia in his face. ‘You come all this way, climb all these stairs, to ask for a reduction in a rent of one dinar? All you’re paying is one dinar and you want me to reduce this? Are you out of your mind? You should be ashamed of yourself, an old man like you, coming all this way to plead for a reduction in a rent of one dinar.’ And she sent him scurrying off down the stairs, showering him with words intended to shame him into never repeating his request.
I will always remember fondly these episodes that were repeated so often in the intimate friendly neighbourhood where I grew up. For many years I persisted in idealising life there, where everyone knew everyone else and took great pleasure in the bickering, the long morning-coffee visits and the gossip, believing that it was the sort of life I had envisaged living in my city. But it wasn’t. It was not at all what I wanted.
I was never someone who fulfilled his social duties towards the community, who went to funerals and weddings, or who knew how to make small talk. I stayed away from social gatherings. I did not open my house to many visitors, a practice expected and appreciated by my society. Penny and I have lived a largely private life, which we both absolutely needed in order to carry on with our writing.
Standing outside our old house, where I spent the crucial years of my life, more memories came flooding back. The old metal garden gate was unchanged after all these years. The houses up the hill where the Harbs and the owner of the Buick had lived were still standing. But the sky-blue car was not there. I stood beneath the pines, enjoying the all too familiar sound of the soft breeze blowing through their branches, and I thought I could hear opera coming out of the closed windows and my mother’s voice asking my father to lower the volume. How strange this music must have sounded to the other people around us. And I remembered my sisters with their red velvet dresses and white collars, and my parents, both well dressed, going to their black Mercedes for an evening out.
I was glad to have come to this breezy part of town and lingered, absorbing the atmosphere. What a romantic I had been, incomplete in myself and captured by that enchanted world to which for many years I remained hostage. Among other things, that world had appeared to offer sociability that served as a shield against being alone. For as long as possible I tried to delay getting out of it. When I finally did leave I thought that I had lost and became unfeeling. It has taken me a long time to accept my solitude. Yeats described poetry as a social act of the solitary man. In time I came to realise that my writing served that same purpose.
This neighbourh
ood is one of the few in Ramallah that has remained more or less as I remembered it. I could imagine myself as a little boy, feeling the refreshing wind, breathing the clean Ramallah air and thinking that all this would last forever. Time went by so much more slowly then. Is this why one yearns, as one gets older, to return to old haunts, to re-experience that sense of slow time?
The present inhabitants of our old house have the most messy garden. It is cluttered with all sorts of abandoned objects without a single plant in sight. Behind the old stone wall there are broken tables, chairs, pipes, plastic containers full of holes, rusty wire, cardboard, pieces of wood, trunks and branches of trees, bicycle wheels and an old stained toilet seat.
In my mind’s eye I clear out the rubbish and see a happy sight: my father wearing dark brown trousers and a white shirt and my mother wearing a red-and-white striped jumper, standing apart in the garden beneath the Syrian pines. Between them is my fourteen-month-old brother, with his curls and red cheeks bursting with health. He is taking his first steps between them. Their arms are wide open, ready to receive him, and their faces glow with pride. They show more happiness than I can ever remember them exhibiting and all thanks to my brother, for it was he, not I, who was the more gratifying son, the one closer to my father, the apple of his eye. Nearby is the patch of cress that I had planted from seed in my enduring attempts to win favour with my father, because he had said he enjoyed eating it.
Then another memory follows from the early 1980s, when I was in my thirties – long after I had left the magical world of my childhood, but before I had succeeded in finding my authentic self. It is of my grandmother, who had shown such kindness to me when I was young, being carried away on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. The orderlies who were bringing her down the stairs were being rough. Every movement hurt. My strong grandmother, who never cried, shouted to them to be more careful. The orderlies were indifferent. She moaned from the excruciating pain she was suffering. My sister Samar, who was standing next to me, said mournfully, with a lot of pain in her voice, ‘Tata will never be returning to her house.’ And I, the disappointed romantic, stood there stiff and numb, unable to grieve. How could I have been so insensitive and callous towards the woman I loved?
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