The discovery of the body and its pleasures opened the door to infatuation with life and its small sins and our ambitions for it, both fanciful and realistic.
Mousa ‘Abd al-Salam dreamed of buying an oud so that he could play the tunes of our common idol, Farid al-Atrash.
‘Omar Dhib dreamed of having of a proper camera to hang over his shoulder so that he could stroll through the streets looking like a foreign tourist.
‘Adel al-Najjar and Fuad Tannous collected Beatles records so that they could hold parties with them.
Rami al-Nashashibi and Basim Khouri never stopped playing practical jokes.
We were good students and would join the demonstrations in support of Algeria and express our love for Nasser, Lumumba, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. We followed with boundless enthusiasm the news of the unification of Egypt and Syria and the birth of the United Arab Republic, the first in our modern history, and we mourned its subsequent breakup. Later, we were overjoyed by the socialist transformation taking place in Nasser’s Egypt and took part in demonstrations demanding total Arab unity. We dreamt of traveling to universities, completing our education, and returning to work, help our families, and become, one day, good boys.
This Ramallah that I recall in my imagination is just a mirage now. It isn’t the Ramallah that I’m showing Tamim today. It’s as if it, along with Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and all the other Arab cities, had been a creation of our imaginations, not a reality. Satellite-channel sheikhs and Islamic fundamentalists say that lands were lost and defeats suffered one after the other because of our generation’s dissoluteness and distance from religion. The same people hated Nasser, hated Arab unity, hated socialism, and hated our whole generation. I can’t understand these charges at all. Here, simply, was a city that decorated its streets for holidays, girls and boys who walked through its spaces, and records whose music we listened to obsessively, our hearts pounding with what we thought was love. We, in their view, are the cause of the defeat.
Tamim’s world is not like mine when I was his age. I walk with him along Lovers’ Lane and realize that nothing is as it was. The street, politics, political parties, religion, love, money, visits, school, left and right, women’s clothes, people’s thoughts, party politics — they’ve all changed so much that we seem to be living in a different era. Only someone unconscious of the world around him could claim now to experience that delicious daze in which the world has the feel of velvet and the taste of peaches.
I’m not saying that the city’s past was brilliant. There was poverty. There was the pervasive presence of the Jordanian secret police and the persecution of the nationalist parties and figures. The Nakba was ever-present in people’s eyes, even if they turned aside to their small pleasures. Since the loss of Palestine, we no longer have a garden of only roses. Pain is in every pleasure, a snake in every crack.
I do not weep for any past. I do not weep for this present. I do not weep for the future. I live through my five senses, trying to understand our story, trying to see. I try to hear a lifetime of voices. I try sometimes to tell the story and I don’t know why; perhaps because the history books will never write what I write.
I start the morning by phoning Abu Saji. I wake Tamim. We get to the office on time.
I show him Tamim’s papers and his pictures of the required size and leave him to fill in a form for a Palestinian identity card.
Husam joins us to take us in his car to Jerusalem in an adventure that may or may not succeed. When he notices my anxiety, he says, “We’ll see what it’s like at the checkpoint. If there are a lot of people waiting, it means they’re checking permits carefully. If so, we turn around and go back the way we came before we get to the soldiers.”
“There’s no other way?”
“There’s no other way.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to go in a car with yellow Israeli number plates?”
“Let’s try today and if we fail, I’ll arrange things with ‘Sam.’ He has yellow plates.”
We go. It’s the first scenario. The jam of cars at the Qalandya barrier is a bad sign. Husam takes us back to Ramallah. We have lunch with Marwan al-Barghouti and dinner at Za‘rour’s restaurant.
Next day we go to see Sam, setting off with greater optimism this time, though the anxiety hasn’t entirely dispersed. I enjoy Sam’s company and I like his personality, which combines intelligence with kindness and a careful choice of words whatever the subject. We join the long line of those waiting and move forward meter by meter toward the ultimate moment of tension.
We reach the barrier.
The Israeli soldier looks casually at our faces and gestures for us to pass without asking for anyone’s ID. Tamim jumps off his seat with joy, kisses Sam’s head, and thanks him.
In Arabic but with the accent of people from al-Bireh born in America, Sam answers, “Tamim, you are now at the gates of Jerusalem.”
Before entering the city, we stop to buy any camera that will do the job (just like any tourists). We arrive at the Damascus Gate.
How small that Israeli soldier seems, standing with his machine gun inside an aperture at the top of the ancient, lofty wall. I think he’s on his own here, but now he’s turned into many soldiers. In each of the wall’s openings is a soldier and at the side of the steps leading to the gate are more soldiers, their fingers stuck to their triggers as though the guns had come straight from the factory like that. Their eyes are fixed on us, even though their forefathers gave them to understand that they’d set up their state on a land without a people, a land in which there were no Arabs and which had no owner. In the street itself are police cars, their teams, also armed, sitting in them or standing beside them.
Tamim dashes into a telephone kiosk in the street and calls Radwa in Cairo.
“Mama, I’m in Jerusalem. I’m at the Damascus Gate. Baba and I are in Jerusalem.”
I watch Tamim in the telephone kiosk. I see him in Radwa’s arms, right after she left the Dr. Gohar Maternity Hospital. She is standing on the bank of the Nile directly in front of the hospital gate in a light summer dress with a pattern of small roses, holding Tamim in her arms and looking at him. He is only two days old and his eyes are closed against the mid-June sun but he isn’t asleep. Our car is waiting to take us home after becoming mother, father, and son. The son has a name that has been entered in the records, ledgers, and statistics of the government. The name is his and denotes him but the son doesn’t know it. He hasn’t joined society or a sect or a creed yet. At the moment, he is a life in process of formation, a life that seeks air and milk and warmth and sleep so that it can wake from its slumber and seek again what it has obtained day after day, and so on until new demands grow within it. He is as yet unaware of the borders between countries whose crossing causes us such misery. He doesn’t know the meaning of the watches we wear on our wrists. He is life in a small body and a soul that is slowly building itself. But wherever this small body goes, and wherever we go, its name is now “son of Mourid and Radwa,” and our names are now “Umm Tamim” and “Abu Tamim.”
“Photograph us here, Mourid, and get the Nile in the picture.”
At our home in Mohandiseen, I’d started training myself in how to carry Tamim properly in my arms. I was just getting the hang of it and was learning some of the sounds and movements that would make him notice me or produce a smile or a laugh, when the Egyptian government expelled me. It expelled our family relationship, it expelled our way of living, it expelled our marriage, and it expelled the possibility of us, Radwa and me, raising the new child together.