Umm Hassan said she wept over what had happened to her. “The Jewish woman bought my silence with the jug and her stories about her mute childhood, and I came back to the misery and poverty of the camp. She has the house and I’m here. What’s the point?”
So the story was turned into a videotape that’s now mine. Rami didn’t film the conversation between the two women. He made the camera roam over the house and around the land and the olive orchard. But it’s a beautiful tape, made up of lots of snapshots joined together. I’d have preferred a panorama, but never mind, we can imagine the scene as we watch. We’ve become a video nation. Should I be watching the tape every night, weeping and eventually dying from it? Or should I be filming you and turning you into a video that can make the rounds of the houses? What should I film though? Should I ask someone to play you as a young man? I might be able to play that role myself, what do you think? Mme. Claire already asked me if I were your son. I’d be able to say that I am and that I might play the role of you as a young man. But I’m not an actor, acting is a difficult profession! I wish I did know how to act, I’d have reenacted Shams’ crime, and the interrogators wouldn’t have laughed at me and humiliated me with their pity.
“Pity is the ugliest thing,” you used to say. “We must not pity ourselves. Once a man pities himself, he’s doomed.”
But I’m very sorry to have to tell you now that I pity you. I swear you stir more pity than Umm Hassan’s earthenware jug or that mute Jewish woman.
The Jewish woman told Umm Hassan she hadn’t forgotten her Arabic and said she’d been struck dumb when she came to Israel.
“I was on my own, the only child from Lebanon; they all spoke Hebrew. I went for five months without saying a word in class. I didn’t dare talk to anyone, I didn’t answer the teachers’ questions, and I refused to read out loud. Five months. Then I opened my mouth. It was as though I’d tried, in my silence, to become part of these people I didn’t know. French was my first language because at the Ecole Alliance in Beirut we were taught Arabic, like all other school children in Lebanon, but our language in school and at home was French. I knew a little Hebrew because we also studied it at school, though we never liked it. I also learned Hebrew at the Maabarot, but in the classroom, in the midst of all the children, I was struck dumb before I could speak like them.”
She told Umm Hassan how she’d lived in the Maabarot, where they’d sprayed the Sephardic Jews with insecticide, as though they were animals, before admitting them to the stone barracks. She cried when they’d forced her to take off her clothes; a blond woman approached her with the long, cylindrical sprayer and showered every part of her body mercilessly. Her father, a man in his fifties, began howling when they ordered him to remove his red fez and the men started kicking it around like a soccer ball. He chased after it while the soldiers horsed around and laughed. When he could see that his fez was destroyed, he started howling, repeating, “There is no god but God,” so they assumed he was a Muslim and subjected him to a prolonged interrogation before asking him to remove his clothes and spraying him — letting him get used to standing naked, without a fez, forever.
Ella Dweik told Umm Hassan al-Habit her story. And Umm Hassan told everyone that she’d wept.
“May the Lord punish me for how I cried. ‘Take this bleak, dreary land,’ she told me, ‘and send me back to Wadi Abu Jmil, send me back to the Elie Bron building!’”
“And what did you say, Umm Hassan?”
“What could I say? Nothing. I began to weep.”
Did you know, Father, that the medical profession is against pity? You can’t be a doctor and feel pity for your patients. That’s why I’m a failure as a doctor. In fact, I’m not a doctor. I came to the profession by accident. It never occurred to me to be a doctor until the Chinese doctor — a woman — decided for me. It was by her decree. She ordered my military training stopped and enrolled me in medical school. I don’t like medicine. I found myself in China and had to acquiesce. But the way people regarded my new profession won me over. They call you a hakim — a wise man — and think you’re a magician. I think that magic aura was what made Shams love me. Don’t say Shams didn’t love me — she loved me in her own fashion, but she loved me. I’m convinced her death contains a riddle that needs to be solved. The riddle will only be solved after the emotional shock has passed along with my self-imposed imprisonment in this accursed hospital. There’s dirt everywhere. The walls of the room are no longer white, the paint is peeling and yellowed, and something is smeared on them. I scrubbed them with soap, but it made no difference.
What do you say to Denmark?
You know Dr. No‘man al-Natour? I don’t know him, but he wrote an article that made me weep. I didn’t weep for old Acre, which has nearly collapsed, but I wept over the key.
Shall I tell you what happened to No‘man?
He went to Acre — he can visit Israel because he has a Danish passport. He boarded a plane at the Copenhagen airport and got off at Lod. He disembarked like any ordinary passenger, presented his passport to the security man and waited. The man took the passport, examined it closely and asked Dr. No‘man to wait. He waited for about a quarter of an hour, and then a young woman in military uniform arrived. She returned the passport to him and apologized, smiling. He took his passport and went out to the baggage claim, got his suitcase, which he later discovered had been opened and carefully searched, and left the airport.
These formalities had no impact on him because he was already in a dreadful state, everything shaking inside him. He thought he’d have a heart attack the moment he stepped off the airplane but was surprised to find himself behaving like an ordinary traveler, as though this weren’t his own country.
He left the airport and got a taxi, which took him to Jerusalem. He spent the night in a hotel in the Arab quarter and in the morning, instead of touring old Jerusalem as the tourists do, he took a taxi to Acre, where he alighted in the square close to the Jazzar mosque. He walked and walked and walked, lost and alone in his own city. He said he wanted to find his house without help. He was like me — born outside of Palestine with no memories of his country except what his mother had told him. No‘man walked, got lost in the alleys, stopped and scrutinized the houses, and walked some more. At last he found the house. He said he knew it as soon as he saw it. He knocked on the door and was greeted, as Umm Hassan had been, in Arabic, but they weren’t Jews, they were Palestinians.
He went into the house, greeted everyone and sat down.
The woman went to make coffee. He got up and started to look around, refusing the company of the man of the house. As he went through the rooms, No‘man recalled his mother’s words, and they became his guide. He came to the kitchen and there he saw his mother standing in front of the big saucepan of cracked wheat. No‘man said that in the Yarmouk camp near Damascus, where he’d been born, they ate nothing but cracked wheat. His mother would stand in their small kitchen in front of the saucepan, and No‘man would hold onto the hem of her dress and cry.
But in the spacious kitchen in Acre, it wasn’t his mother he saw, but a solitary child, standing in front of the Palestinian’s wife, who was making coffee. The woman tiptoed out when she saw No’man wiping away his tears.
They drank coffee, and the Palestinian explained to No‘man that he’d been waiting for him for a long time, that he’d rented the house from the official in charge of absentee property after they’d thrown him out of his own house, and that he was ready to leave whenever No‘man’s family wanted.