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Other People's Houses

Page 18

by Hilary McPhee


  Security measures the day I visited the mosque meant that I could enter through the small barred gate but men under fifty and women under forty-five could not. There were groups of armed police in the grounds. I stood inside the silver domed Al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest site in Islam after Mecca, where a Palestinian assassin gunned down Jordan’s King Abdullah I in 1951, and Prince Hussein was saved by a medal pinned to his chest. The King and his grandsons would sometimes ride on horseback the 75 kilometres from Amman, to attend Friday prayers at the mosque.

  Everything Sidi Hassan had told me about the deliberate erosion of Muslim faith in the course of the book was being played out here in the new buildings and legislation. The Arab quarter is very much smaller than it used to be, he said. ‘The Israelis simply took over Jerusalem and nobody stopped them.’ Rumours abounded that the Greek Orthodox Church was selling up its real estate.

  Why is God such a divisive force? Why is there no recognition of the shared history, the common roots, the human soul in torment reaching out as best it can? Why the need to win, exclude, lord it over, kill and maim and reduce to rubble? I was trying not to hate this place, which made me feel both privileged and bereft.

  Tensions were great in the Old City in May 2009, but perhaps they always are. Hatred was palpable. I wandered through the ancient quarters, astounded by the hoardings advertising holiday complexes being built for American Christian evangelicals. I joined the crowds visiting the Friends of Zion Museum proclaiming the continuous occupation of Palestinian lands since biblical times. My English guidebook spoke only of Greater Israel. I saw young boys throwing stones at an old couple, from the top of a wall in the Arab quarter. I saw conservatively dressed women from the settlements marshalling their large families through the fruit markets, and a woman stall holder spitting after them.

  Then the festival’s packed opening night at the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem was raided by heavily armed Israeli police and shut down. Already the moral weight of PalFest’s first visit the year before had made itself felt. Writers were not welcome here—seeing the West Bank for themselves, visiting the towns and universities, speaking to students, reading and performing at night, alongside Palestinian artists, reaffirming Edward Said’s the power of culture over the culture of power. The opening event had to be relocated to the nearby courtyard of the French consulate-general.

  Walking there, Carmen mentioned that she had been reprimanded for finagling my joining the group in Jerusalem. The young administrator who accepted my booking had also been reprimanded. All I could do was leave or keep going. I didn’t offer to go back to Amman. I offered to pay more and call it a donation.

  Hilarious and horrible, as we travelled through a divided landscape of checkpoints and watchtowers; of Banksy murals; and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, who had died the year before, graffitied on the Separation Wall near the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from Ramallah. Free Marwan Barghouti was everywhere. And When one lives with oppression to revolt is a duty. Nobody spoke to me on the bus, and Carmen and I soon started snapping at each other.

  After a day or two, there was a thaw. Suheir Hammad, Henning Mankell, Claire Messud and Khalid Abdullah, brilliant performers all, were friendly. Adhaf Soueif and Jeremy Harding were also. They quizzed me about Kevin Rudd’s government’s apology to the Stolen Generation in February the previous year, and whether Australian reparations to the Indigenous people would ever be made. I thought not, unless the High Court found a way to honour the Mabo and Wik decisions of the 1990s, or the British government joined with ours to confront its country’s role in the killings, its violent appropriation of the sovereignty of an ancient land. Here, in the West Bank, the argument was writ large.

  In Ramallah, the group visited the house of writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh. His Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, had just been published. Shehadeh described six walks taken during the past forty years, through the terraced hillsides and verdant valleys of Palestine, now dangerous and almost impassable because of roads and walls, the hilltop settlements severing the landscape as far as the eye could see. He led us through the fields to a beautiful small stone house opening onto terraced olive groves.

  Shehadeh’s book is a powerful meditation, melancholy and realistic, accepting some things as immutable—a perspective I badly needed, not only for the next few days, when we visited Bethlehem and the University of Hebron. Students quizzed us, eager to know where we’d come from, and what it looks like. Could we help them to study there? They told us how long it took them to get to class through the checkpoints, and how only a scholarship, a permit and a passport, almost unattainable, would allow them to leave Palestine to do further study. Our guide, Mohammed, who worked part time, studying English literature and semantics at Birzeit University, showed us his 360-page textbook, on his very small phone.

  ‘Israeli planners worked on strangling our inhabited areas and separating them from one another,’ Shehadeh said. Agricultural villages had had their fields expropriated, which had turned the men into construction workers building the concrete walls and settlements on land that once belonged to them. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s 2006 Convergence Plan to form Greater Israel reneged on the commitments made under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which meant the exercise of sovereignty over the borders was absolute. The settlements, now called ‘developments’, loomed on the hilltops, with all the confidence of permanent occupation.

  At the Khalil Sakakini Center in Jenin, Suheir Hammad performed her poetry and her five-part ‘The Gaza Suite’, to accompaniment by musicians from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. The oud, qanoun, percussion, flute and her voice soared and swelled as darkness fell and I, for one, was profoundly moved. The audience thronged the grounds, the very young sitting high on the walls of the Sakakini Center, everyone beating time to the music.

  The next day, we visited Bethlehem and the Aida Camp, with the Banksy murals of the small girl and the soldier, where there were workshops about making political points without polemics. There was a mime by five young girls about finding a backpack on the ground. They played with it, cuddled it, squashed it, wrote all over it; then it exploded and they all fell down.

  The rubbish piles, the signs of hopelessness, were everywhere. One of our guides told us firmly that: ‘Some of the Palestinians are complicit in building the wall, which is funded by the Palestinian Authority through Egypt which supplies the concrete. The Palestinians supply the labour.’ The self-righteous questioning from some of us was worse. ‘Why the rubbish piles?’ ‘Why don’t you all start little businesses?’ Why has no one blown up the wall in strategic places?’ ‘Why don’t thousands of you just gather, alert the international media and demand that it is pulled down?’ Answer: poverty, lack of services, cameras, guns, incarcerations. The Palestinians, like indigenous peoples everywhere, like the Jews in the ghettos, are accused of not getting off their butts and helping themselves. We came to gawp, and take photographs and notes, and tell them about our privileged worlds. At the Bethlehem checkpoint, we were allowed, as a concession, to leave our luggage on the bus once it had been inspected; then we had to trudge through long wire mesh tunnels to the other side, past walls graffitied with Jesus Wept for Jerusalem. I thought of mothers carrying small children, pregnant women dragging suitcases, old people on crutches.

  The last night of the festival couldn’t be held at the Palestinian National Theatre, as advertised, so the British Council stepped up, and the cultural officer of Fatah and the British consul welcomed us to their high-walled garden. The evening was one of celebration and speeches. I was tired and grumpy. The British speakers congratulated themselves on the power of English literature. That it can be bestowed and is held in high regard was true—students in the Middle East are taught to revere the classics of English literature. I remember my friend Khalid, the late-night baggage handler in Amman; and the hairdresser in one of the large hotels who opened a drawer to show me his c
opy of Jude the Obscure among the combs and brushes.

  But they need support to tell their own stories; to make their own films and have them translated for us to understand, not to create pale imitations. The Canadian M.G. Vassanji and the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah say much the same. I bought their books, Gurnah’s Desertion and Vassanji’s most recent novel, The Assassin’s Song, to read on the plane. On Sunday, I would be back in Melbourne. Home again.

  I returned to Jordan through the Allenby Crossing, where delays were arbitrary and merciless. Nobody was fast-tracked but taxi drivers knew who to bribe to get visitors like me through ahead of Palestinians, who were being interrogated, then kept waiting, then interrogated again. Many of the armed guards were blonde young women and there was no flag of Palestine to be seen.

  Soon after I got home, I went to a party where Diana Gribble was standing outside with the smokers, where the best conversations are still to be had. She suggested coffee at Marios the next day, and I assumed we’d do what we had done ever since McPhee Gribble was sold to Penguin—give each other a brisk hug, ask about the children and aged parents, and avoid any talk about what had happened with the company, when I found myself boxed in by the deal and Di could walk away. It was Diana, of course, who broke the taboo at Marios that morning, insisting we stop talking about the children and talk about the end of McPhee Gribble.

  At first, we met early in the morning, every Thursday, moving from café to café around Fitzroy, Lygon Street and North Carlton, conscious of the spectacle we were making of ourselves. Two women in their late sixties, weeping and raging and clutching each other’s hands before staggering out into the daylight, white-faced in dark glasses.

  Sometimes we’d text each other afterwards, about how we’d nearly thrown up or had to go back to bed, having managed to find the words for how betrayed we felt, how devalued, how utterly helpless once the deal was done. How we’d each blamed the other for not recognising how terrible was the timing of expanding in the teeth of a recession. How what had started with a partnership agreement between two young women who were honour bound to be honest with each other had ended with a corporate buy-out that wiped what we’d done off the map. I had written about it later with Di’s permission, but we had never ever talked about it. High-risk stuff—but splendid in its way. After several months of this, there was nothing more to be said and we settled back into gossip and regular coffees at Marios, just down the road from our last office—a seedy old building that was now a chess club covered in graffiti.

  My diary when I returned home was full of building maintenance and doctor’s appointments. The federal government’s Energy Efficient Homes Package had passed me by, but all the light bulbs needed replacing, and I changed power suppliers simply because I liked the smiling young Irishwoman who sold the idea to me. Not so much, an Irishman with the gift of the gab who knocked on my door to tell me the window frames were full of dry rot and urgently needed replacing, by him.

  The divorce spluttered on. My assets were disclosed and the myth that I earned vast amounts in Jordan was dispelled. The house by the sea was long gone, and I didn’t query the book advances or the part-owned race horses. The day our divorce was listed, I asked a friend to come with me to the Family Court, because I needed to see it through to the very end.

  That night, I had friends to dinner in the overgrown back garden, just to mark the day. Diana Gribble and Les Kossatz; Jan and Helen Senbergs; Katherine Hattam and Jim Morgan—these were couples I had spent much of my adult life with, and greatly missed while I was away. Kath’s artwork was fiercely feminist, supported always by Jim, who wrote books and was her great stalwart. Les and Jan were always artists in competition, but on this night, Jan failed to arrive because he had pranged his car. Helen managed Jan, though he’d dispute that. Jim and Helen often describe themselves as artists’ wives. His novels and her beautiful work with textiles did not get enough time or attention. Les and Di’s house at Narbethong had been wiped out in the bushfires, and he talked about the plaster casts he’d been making of the scorched ground there.

  Diana I had known the longest, through thick and thin. She came to see me the next day, and told me that Les was very ill with throat cancer, but they were at Narbethong as much as possible, rebuilding their house. We walked to Les’s studio in Kay Street which was full of his metal-filing-cabinet sculptures, now adorned with snakes and ladders. Diana was distraught. Her marriage to Les was the strongest kind—they had been there for each other at every turn.

  Then there was an invitation to a lunch party at the North Fitzroy Star hotel, to which I went reluctantly. Despite its much-praised ambience, this was a place that was full of brambles for me. The Star was where my, now former, husband had long ago persuaded me to marry him. And I did, exchanging marriage vows in front of our families and every friend we had—in order to make it last, we said. Ha.

  This day, I was seated next to the formidable Betty Burstall, who had started the renowned La Mama theatre in Carlton, and, slightly desperately, I started a conversation about the diaries of her ex-husband, filmmaker Tim Burstall, which he’d brought to McPhee Gribble’s office years before, for us to read. Tim needed money for his divorce settlement and was hoping we’d plunge in recklessly. Had anyone published them?

  ‘They are sitting by my bed and I still haven’t read them,’ said Betty. I don’t know that I believed her but I offered to have another look at them. With the help of modernist builder Alistair Knox, the Burstalls and their friends built mudbrick houses, small potteries and studios on the Eltham hillside above the creek. As a document of their era, the life and times of the ‘arties’ and ‘intellectuals’ of Eltham in the early 1950s, I felt the diaries should, at the very least, be deposited for safety in the State Library.

  I re-read them, all 924 pages of yellowing typescript, over the next week. Tim, then a young husband and member of the Communist Party, determined to become a writer, undertook to write 500 words a day, producing what he dubbed The Memoirs of a Young Bastard Who Sunbaked and Rooted and Went to Branch Meetings. The diaries were just as evocative and scurrilous as I remembered. I needed a project, and this one meant there would be mudbrick houses to visit, photos to find and friends of the Burstalls to interview. So, I offered to annotate the diaries and to find Betty a publisher.

  The project, and Betty herself, became a kind of lifeline for me; reorienting me by immersing me back in the place I knew best. Once or twice a week, I would arrive with my recorder at her Nicholson Street house in inner Melbourne, which she had shared with Tim in the last years of his life when his health was failing. Before that, they’d been apart for some time: Betty leaving in the 1970s to live with a lover in Greece for a few years, having secured the future of La Mama. I brought buns, and Betty made strong coffee, which we drank from Eltham mugs. Her paintings hung on the walls, and photos of Tim were there on the dresser, among her pottery bowls and plates.

  Betty didn’t read the diaries, even then. Instead she asked me to read her ‘the hard bits’—about Tim’s constant infidelities; his often harsh assessments of friends; and his long infatuation with a clever young student, Fay Rosefield, now the esteemed poet Fay Zwicky. His unerring ear for cant and pomposity, his ability to mock himself, his turn of phrase, Betty still laughed at, her face alight.

  We discussed his conventional English family, who had cut Tim off forever, and Betty’s more relaxed mother, who had taken them in. Tim and Betty had been promising first-year students at Melbourne University in 1944, when Betty became pregnant. She had to drop out, as women always did then. Tim’s parents took out a court order, preventing him from marrying until he was twenty-one. Betty’s mother let the young pair build a bungalow in her backyard. ‘Tim stuck by me and we were very happy,’ Betty said. Then their baby, named Peter, was born prematurely and died after a few days; an emotional catastrophe, she told me, which underpinned their marriage.

  My first marriage had started the same way, I told her. Partway thr
ough my honours year at university, besotted with the Anglo-Saxons and absorbed in Australian prehistory, I too dropped out because I was pregnant. My baby, christened Peter, after his father, lived for two days.

  I think that is why, I told Betty, I tumble into a bottomless black pit in late April every year. Even if I forget the date, I am stricken. You need a grave, she said brusquely. Tim and I had one—and a burial.

  I went home and rang the Melbourne Cemetery, which was just up the road, but the Public Burial Ground had not been there for a long time. The woman who answered the phone said, ‘Give Springvale a try.’

  Evidently, the hospitals dealt with the small bodies by sending them, in batches, to a general cemetery. There, they were buried, like the poor or those whose identities were unknown, in a public plot; the number, and the name, and that of the person signing the paper kept in a file somewhere.

  Women without husbands, young women like me, who left hospital with empty arms, were told nothing. I had left my shell-shocked family’s house and returned the next day to my student flat, looking out on to the kangaroo-like griffins. Peter and I had no words for what had happened, but we began to behave like a married couple. We entertained his brother and his wife, who came from Canberra, and smiling photos of us were taken to send to his parents in London. We went to parties together, and returned home to Peter’s loft. My parents, who also never spoke about what had happened, lent us the money for a bush block of tree ferns and blue hydrangeas in the Dandenongs.

 

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