Going Home

by Raja Shehadeh

  I remember walking in the crowded centre at that time and accidentally brushing against another pedestrian, a middle-aged man. The impact was so light that I did not think an apology was necessary. And yet I found the man turning round and apologising to me profusely, even though it was my fault. It was as though by touching him I had awakened him from some sort of deep reverie; as though he had been so taken up in his own world that the slightest collision had awakened him from a stupor. By apologising he was trying to avoid any sort of trouble and quickly return to his previous state. That was how the old behaved in the stifling confines of our ghetto during the tail end of the Intifada. In the absence of police to enforce law and order, behaving with excessive cordiality seemed to have become a common strategy for survival. Despite the pressures of life in a confined space without physical outlets, walking in the streets one did not encounter many scuffles.

  In those last confusing days of the first Intifada, Almaz, the widow of the owner of a haberdashery shop who at seventyfive still thought of herself as a young woman, wore pink dresses and full make-up as she tried to keep up her deceased husband’s Nouveautés, the name given to many stores. She lived next to my uncle’s house and would come to visit and boast, ‘Today I made two shekels.’ Once during a snowstorm I offered to drive her home. She got into the car and I asked her to give me directions, but she couldn’t. She became very confused. It was a long time before I managed to get her safely to her house. Labibeh, my uncle’s wife, visited Almaz just before she died; in fact she was the last person to see her alive. Almaz was in her shabby clothes and it made Labibeh feel sad, so she asked her to put on a fancy robe from when she was young, maybe from her Jaffa days. Almaz did and it was the same robe she was wearing when she was found dead after the balcony of her flat collapsed.

  Among the enduring mysteries was the death of the Es Saati Al Almani (the German watchmaker), whose shop was on Main Street next to Almaz’s. His was a small shop full of clocks everywhere one looked. As a child I had been there with my mother when she needed to repair her wristwatch. The shop was dark and quiet except for the ticking of the large number of different-sized clocks. Two grandfather clocks stood on either side of the counter behind which Es Saati Al Almani stood. No one called him by any other name; I doubt if anyone knew what his real name was. He spoke little and when he did it was in a heavily accented Arabic. He would grab the watch angrily, as though about to scold my mother for what she has done to his watch, for all of the watches anyone wore in Ramallah came from him. He then picked up his black monocle and pushed it into the socket of his left eye. He had no neck to speak of: his head seemed attached to his shoulders and he was slightly hunched. He wore his trousers high. They came to the middle of his chest, held up by blue braces, making him look like a large football wrapped with two bands. He would flip open the back of the watch and expose the insides. Craning my neck, I would see a whole world of wheels upon wheels, all circling round. What was this ordered world? What was the world of this strange man who came to our city from God knows where and settled here? Both were equally mysterious.

  While he was examining the watch and assessing the damage, we would stand very still, holding our breath, concentrating on the ticking of the numerous clocks. It was then that I got the best opportunity to examine the top of his head. He must have been completely bald except for a lining of hair on the lower borders of his scalp. From the back he had taken a very long strand of hair and rolled it again and again over the top of his head. The curling band of hair on his bald head was like the swirling circles in the inside of the exposed watch. The strand of hair was well oiled and pasted to his skull with a heavy dose of Brylcreem, for it never seemed to come unstuck. Sometimes in my more mischievous moods I would imagine pulling the tip of that cake of hair and get it to unfurl for miles and miles. The very thought would excite me, as though I would be undressing this hump of a man. But of course I never dared put my hand anywhere near the frightful head of Es Saati Al Almani.

  Eventually he would lift his head and murmur, ‘Hmm’, while looking at my mother with the black monocle still dangling from his left eye. He looked positively frightening. Then he would quote his price for the repair.

  Who was this man? Dr Shawki Harb, a cardiologist from Ramallah who studied medicine in Germany, once spoke to him in German and found that his German was weak. He later told me that this clockmaker could not be German. Where, then, did he come from? Was it Poland or Ukraine or some other East European country? And how did he end up in Ramallah? No one knew his name. His neighbours called him Abu Maurice, though he never had any children. He had no relatives here, only his Palestinian wife. Could he have been a Nazi or a Nazi sympathiser running away from prosecution? Or was he simply a Polish or Ukrainian Jew who ended up on the wrong side of the border? As far as I know, his wife faithfully kept his secret – if she was privy to it, that is – and no one ever knew anything more about this enigmatic man.

  He died near his shop. He was crossing the street to go home for lunch at the Salah building, carrying a small plate with a piece of pastry for desert, when a Vespa (motorcycles were a rarity in Ramallah then) hit him, causing him to fall and the plate with the pastry to fly into the air. He died instantly. Was it an accident or an assassination for crimes he had committed in his former life? The Israeli police, having investigated the incident, did not prosecute the driver. They claimed that the German clockmaker died from the impact caused by his head hitting the kerb. No relative came to his funeral or contacted his wife. His secret, whatever it was, was buried with him.

  There were a number of other mysterious people in Ramallah. One of these was the knife sharpener, who was always dressed in green and wore a green leather apron. He called himself Al Hamam Al Akhdar (the green dove). He would go around from house to house and people would bring out any knives that needed sharpening. After he finished he lingered to chat with them and hear their news. He was seen riding in an army jeep with the Israeli army when they entered Ramallah after the 1967 occupation.

  Had the Intifada brought us independence from Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state, as we had expected and struggled for, perhaps people would have remembered it differently. But it hadn’t, and that was why so many now dread the possibility of more Intifadas.

  I spoke to one such person after going, along with some friends, on a spring walk in the lush verdant plains outside Jenin. When it was over, Penny and I decided to pay a visit to the geography professor at Birzeit University, Kamal Abdulfattah, and have coffee with him. This was when I met his wife for the first time. We spoke of what happened in 1989, during the first Intifada, when Kamal was arrested by the Israeli army and prevented from continuing with the geography trip he was leading, which I happened to have joined. He never forgot how I helped defend him on that occasion. At the mention of the Intifada, his wife, who had been the headmistress of a school in Jenin at the time, said, ‘I don’t want more Intifadas. The two we have already had have brought us nothing. They caused two generations to lose their education and end up ignorant and unskilled. Our suffering was for nothing. My son was fourteen when the soldiers came to take him. He didn’t submit easily. He resisted. We were trying to help him when I saw a little box thrown right into our living room. I didn’t understand then what it was. But before long the whole place clouded up with smoke and we couldn’t breathe. Meanwhile they had managed to take my son away. Once in their jeep they struck his face with a gun. They split his cheek. But this was nothing. It healed. The more serious damage was to his jaw, which they broke. Now when he eats he makes a cracking noise. His children ask him why he makes such a terrible noise when he eats. He has tried to explain to them, make them understand that he can do nothing about it. But how can they? Crack, crack, crack with every bite he takes. This will be with him to the end of his life. That’s the legacy of that useless Intifada.’

  During the struggle a number of shops in the centre of town were sealed by the occupation soldi
ers to punish their owners. Cinema Dunia, close to my office on Main Street, was not one of them; instead, its managers decided to close. After years of being abandoned, its front and the display panel showing what films were showing were turned into space for pedlars of cheap merchandise. Plastic bags and paper flew around and collected on street corners. There was not a single clean wall or shopfront. Layer upon layer of graffiti was scrawled in red, green and black, so that it was often hard to make out what they said. One was a drawing of the former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir as a mouse. And numbers were scrawled there – that was how the army used to call the collaborators they had recruited. There were also plenty of salutes to various political factions and denunciations of collaborators.

  The first thing that the new governor of Ramallah, Mustafa Issa, did after the Palestinian Authority took control of the town was to sandblast all the walls and repaint shopfronts in the town centre, removing the graffiti and posters stuck there, an accumulation from the many years of struggle. Indeed, it was his way of asserting that now the PLO was home, the struggle had come to an end. He also proceeded to restore the Manara roundabout, installing four large lions, which was all he could fit there. One of these lions, imported from China, was wearing a watch. It is not clear why, perhaps a sign of the weird times we are living through. He also tried to impose uniform colours for all shopfronts and have barber shops close on Mondays, but this he could not enforce. The newly appointed Palestinian governor of Ramallah was an old-time resident of the city who had joined the resistance outside and returned with the PLO after the Oslo Accords. He was clearly nostalgic for the way things had been when he was growing up in the city and wanted everything to return to how he remembered it.

  Next the new Palestinian Authority made an effort to regulate traffic. During the period of Israeli control no traffic lights were allowed because of what the Israelis said were security reasons, and for the safety of their soldiers and settlers, who would not feel safe having to stop at traffic lights in the middle of the Palestinian city. I thought it was admirable how quickly the residents began to comply with the new traffic regulations and how order was returning to the civilian life of the city. Local policemen began to patrol the streets. Most famous was one well-trained wiry young man, impeccably groomed, who directed traffic with strict gestures. Most other policemen, with their ill-fitting uniforms and new unpractised roles, were as ungainly as he was balletic. He seemed like the harbinger of a new, more hopeful future. However, the police did not yet have enforcement powers because the courts were still in disarray and whether or not their orders were followed depended on the mood and social standing of the offender.

  Ramallah was transformed by the return of the PLO cadre from Tunis. With the absence of the Israeli army on the streets, nightlife returned. The presence of Israeli soldiers in our midst had meant that, with the first waning of the light, the streets emptied and no one ventured outside. At night the city became a ghost town, free for the Israeli soldiers to carry out their night raids and pull people from their homes to paint over graffiti scribbled on walls and remove stone barricades placed by the activists. I too was woken up at night and made to do this, after which I could not go to bed without wondering whether this was going to be another night when I would be woken up by a knock on the door. The departure of the Israeli army made it safer and less stressful to go out at night. We no longer had to brace ourselves for the prospect of being stopped by the young soldiers, who would amuse themselves at our expense.

  The economy was revitalised, mainly by EU and US donors’ money and investments encouraged and often sponsored by the World Bank and other governments who were interested in making the Oslo deal work. But the benefit was restricted only to some. Ramallah became the centre of the Palestinian Authority and this attracted more internal migrants. My law office represented some of the new investors. This meant that I needed to return to dressing up in a suit and tie and going to meetings. I once hailed a taxi to take me to one such meeting. It was warm and I was wearing a new white shirt with a starched collar. Before getting into the taxi, I removed my jacket and put on the seat belt, as the new short-lived regulations required. Immediately after I did this I noticed that my white shirt was stained by a band of dirt across the front, like a sash. It was grime from the long years of the Intifada when seat belts were not in use and there was much soot in the air from the burning of tyres.

  The city and its inhabitants were trying to catch up with the world after years of dormancy and restrictions on development that the occupation had imposed. From a sleepy town, the place became vital and active again as we tried to lick our wounds and catch up with the progress we had missed. Ramallah’s residents were learning quickly to enjoy nightlife, going out on the streets at night and visiting the restaurants, cafés and theatres that were mushrooming everywhere. Many Palestinians returning with the PLO were now urbanised, having lived in Beirut and Tunis, and were used to such nightlife. Their presence in Ramallah made a difference. The new eateries and nightclubs encouraged young Israelis, curious about the Ramallah they had heard of from the news but had not seen, to come and spend evenings there. The local police, even though generally still lame, also gave a greater sense of security than had existed before. Drinking and dancing parties resumed.

  With the new mood and increase in consumerism the Christmas season, which had always been celebrated in Ramallah, now became a highly commercial extravaganza, with many shops employing young men to wear Santa outfits and roam the streets, shaking their little bells to encourage potential shoppers. One foreign woman got into the spirit of Christmas and, when approached by Papa Noël, greeted him with an enthusiastic, ‘Merry Christmas,’ to which his immediate response was, ‘Fuck you.’

  Such was the mixture of reactions to attempts at regulating the life of the city and moving it forward. The town was like an adolescent learning to flex his muscles, flailing his strong arms and causing random damage all around. Some welcomed these changes and began to make up for lost time and lost opportunities for making money and enjoying themselves, while others were disaffected and decided to emigrate. To them these changes were just a façade that amounted to a repackaging of the old oppression and occupation without ending it.

  In the wake of the accelerated development in my city, a number of historical buildings fell victim to the greed of developers. One of these was the attractive building of Cinema Dunia, which was demolished, only to be replaced by a bulky complex totally out of proportion with its surroundings, called Dunia Mall. The cinema was where the Jaffa refugees in Ramallah had met in the summer of 1948, when my father and others proposed that they return to Jaffa. ‘The road is open,’ they said. ‘Why should we not go back?’ It was resolved that they would all do so, en masse. The next day, before this could happen, he and the other leaders who took part in that meeting were taken prisoners by the Jordanian army under Glub Pasha. Now the building where that historic meeting took place has gone and no plaque commemorating the event has been placed there. The post-Nakba generations are not even aware that such an attempt at a return was ever planned, or that it was aborted by the Arab army.

  One of Faik’s sons, Ayman, works as a taxi driver. Not long ago, I hailed a taxi and he stopped for me. I asked about his father. He told me that Faik was now retired, after having had open-heart surgery.

  ‘My mother,’ Ayman said, ‘is in her sixties, but if you look at her she looks like a woman of eighty.’

  ‘And Amjad, how is he?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been imprisoned eighteen times. He’s an important leader in Fatah. Every time he left prison he resumed his activism in the struggle. The last time he was given a lengthy sentence which will end in four years. He’s now forty-seven. He’s the leader at Naf ha prison, where he is now.’

  Ayman told me that in 1989, when he was involved in the first Intifada, he was shot in the gut. I realise that not one of Faik’s sons has escaped being killed, injured or imprisoned. And h
e took them out of the camp in order to keep them away from politics.

  When I expressed sorrow at the death of his brother Muhamad, Ayman said, ‘It’s everyone’s wish to be martyred.’ Then he added, ‘This was his fate. He died fighting.’

  Neither Ayman nor his parents can visit Amjad in prison because the brothers have convictions and the parents are the parents of activists. For the hundreds of young men who have been in Israeli prisons, the prison becomes like a collective where men live together at close quarters, cook and eat together. Some, like Ayman, emulate this at their place of work. The taxi office where he works has a kitchen. The drivers take turns cooking and cleaning and every day they all eat lunch together, like one large family.