Читать книгу Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation - Colm Toibin, Ayelet Waldman - Страница 12

The next stop on Sam Bahour’s pocket tour of his cage, after the Palestinian identity card and the stamp in his US passport that had put an end to his entering and leaving the occupied territories as an American citizen, turned out to be a slip of printed paper, heavily watermarked and intricately Spirographed, somewhere between an employee ID badge and a modern banknote.

“I’m a business consultant, right?” he said, signaling to the young man working the counter at Rukab’s. We had finished our strangely malleable, taffy-like ice cream, all those colorful little scoops dyed in a mad Muppets palette. It was time for coffee. “I travel. For the work I do, I have a lot of business in Jerusalem. Obviously, I’m going to want to go to Jerusalem. But now I’m a full-scale Palestinian, right? I have to stay in my Ramallah cage, I’m not allowed to go into the Jerusalem cage. So what do I do?”

The counterman approached, a certain deference unmistakable in his manner toward Sam. He leaned in with a soft Arabic word of inquiry and Sam softly ordered coffee around the table. Speaking English to his visitors—most of us Americans like him—Sam seemed entirely a businessman from Youngstown, Ohio, a perfect Rotarian, genial, expansive, eloquent, an unexpected touch of the professor about him. But ordering coffee in his soft-spoken Arabic, or striding on his long stems through the center of Ramallah, at least a head taller than all the men around him, many of whom had seemed to show him the same gentle deference as the counterman at Rukab’s, there was something princely about Sam Bahour. A prince in exile, I thought, then, No, that’s wrong, of course; he’s home, he’s not in exile. Yet somehow the word seemed to accord with his demeanor. He had left Youngstown behind him—the city of his birth and education, where he had first met his wife, where his parents and his sister still lived—to come and live in the house of his forefathers, in the neighborhood that had been the home of his imagination as a child. But did he really feel that he belonged in al-Bireh? More important, did he feel—could any “full-scale Palestinian” feel—that al-Bireh, ringed by Israeli settlements and checkpoints, belonged to him?

“So I look around the Ramallah business community,” he told us, resuming the tour, “and look, I see people going to Jerusalem. I’m like, ‘How do you do that? I was told I could not go to Jerusalem.’ And they said, ‘No, Sam, there’s something called the permit system.’ What’s the permit system? You bring an invitation letter from someone in Jerusalem or Israel, fill out a stupid one-page application, go to the Israeli military, take your ID with you, and you apply, and either you get a permit, or you don’t.”

He reached into the billfold again and took out a second note of the strange tender of his captivity. He took out another, and then a third. He dug around with his fingers and came out with a whole little pile of them, a jackpot of winning tickets in a bitter lottery, all of them expired.

“These are all permits,” he said. “I have many more tens of them at home. I’ve promised my kids that I would wallpaper my office with permits.” It was a laugh line—probably an old one—but he didn’t sound like he really thought it was funny. We laughed at it nevertheless. “A permit is a single piece of paper issued by the same people that issued this.” He held up the green sleeve that held his identity card. “But a permit, usually, is only good for one day, from five o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night. I can use it to travel to Jerusalem, as long as I’m back by seven. If I don’t come back at seven p.m., they could arrest me. If I got caught coming in late, and the soldier who caught me wanted to arrest me, I would never get a permit again.”

The counterman returned with a tray crowded with coffee in tiny cups. Sam watched approvingly as the counterman distributed them to everyone who had wanted coffee.

“So I start getting permits. It’s a headache, and it takes a lot of time—the control of time is one of the biggest weapons of the occupation. It takes a day to apply, a day to get the answer. Imagine how hard it is to make an appointment for a business meeting when it takes two days to get the permit—and they might say no. And then a whole day for the trip to Jerusalem, because you have to go on foot. So I can never make an appointment for an exact time, I can’t make a two p.m. meeting. I have to say, ‘I’ll meet you between twelve and three.’

“But it’s not like I go to Jerusalem often. I have diabetes, you know what that means, right? It means, guaranteed, you have to use the restroom! If I get stuck at the checkpoint and there’s fifty people behind me, and fifty people in front of me, I get frustrated, because when I have to use the restroom, I can’t go back the way I came, and of course I can’t go forward. You’re in an area that is as wide as this.” He held up his hands separated by a gap the width of his shoulders. “There’s a gate in front of you, a gate behind you. A fence all around you. You don’t turn around when you have fifty people behind you, waiting, one by one, and start pushing, saying, ‘Please, back up, I need to use the restroom.’ It doesn’t work like that. These are people who have to cross every day. I think I’m frustrated? They are frustrated to the nth degree.

“So, I don’t go very often.” He slid the pile of expired permits back into the billfold. “I stay in my Ramallah cage, right? The way I’m supposed to.”

If Youngstown, Ohio, had not felt like home because it was not al-Bireh, Palestine, al-Bireh could never feel like home as long as it was under occupation. Sam Bahour was an imposing man with a quietly arresting presence who towered over the people around him, but he was not a prince in exile. He was a giant in a cage.