Читать книгу On the Hills of God - Ibrahim Fawal - Страница 12

“Can you believe this!” Yousif’s mother exclaimed next morning on the balcony, as she watched two men unload a pickup truck packed with boxes of oranges.

Yousif shook his head. The truckload was a gift from the family friend who bought the orange grove his parents had visited a few days earlier. The stack of boxes was now getting taller than the men. Yousif was overcome with disbelief. He loved oranges, but what could one do with two thousand of them?

“That’s the Arabs for you,” his mother said, bemused. “No sense of moderation.”

“We’re generous people, that’s all,” Yousif said. Taking his knife, he made a precise incision around the top of one orange. He took pride in the art of peeling. Whereas most people peeled and ate a whole orange in a couple of minutes, he spent far longer. For him the trick was to strip the fruit naked without injuring the flesh. The pleasure was in the ritual as much as it was in the fruit itself.

“What are we going to do with all these oranges?” his mother now asked, wiping her hands with her apron.

“I’ll take a few with me to Salwa,” he said, offering her half of the orange he had just peeled. “I’m late already.”

“Don’t take a few, I’ll send a box with Fatima sometime today. We need to distribute all these before they rot. Let me see, a box to Basim’s house, a box to brother Boulus’s house, a box to Salman’s house, a box to . . .”

“Don’t forget Amin and Isaac,” Yousif reminded her.

“Of course not.”

“Do you think Father will take me and Isaac when he goes to visit Amin?”

“I don’t see why not. Poor Amin,” she said and resumed counting on her fingers the names of those to whom she would send a box of oranges.

On his way to see Salwa that morning, Yousif carried the compass in his pocket. Amin’s amputation broke his heart; Basim’s talk of war rang in his ears. The thought of war and the taste of oranges reminded him that the big, juicy, fragrant Jaffa orange was Winston Churchill’s favorite fruit. Yousif’s father once told him that during World War II Churchill always had special oranges shipped to him from Palestine. Yousif could picture Churchill pacing and plotting his strategy against Hitler while savoring the flavor and delicacy of a Jaffa orange.

Yousif admired the British for their role in defeating the Axis powers, but their continued presence in Palestine was an injustice he couldn’t accept. To his mind, the Arabs had not fought with the Allies during World War I in hopes of throwing out the Turks only to be saddled with the British in Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, and with the French in Syria and Lebanon. But that was exactly what had happened.

Yousif wished he knew more about how and why Britain ended up in Palestine for a thirty-year mandate. That was part of the peace agreement, he had been told, which had brought no peace to his people. It irked him not to know what part Churchill had played in the formulation of the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917. In one brief, ambiguous paragraph, Britain had ignored the Palestinians and promised the Zionists a national home in Palestine. What a dilemma, Yousif thought. First the Turks, then the British, now the Zionists. And that was only in recent history. In ancient times it was even worse. Were the Palestinians to be subjugated forever?

Now, in 1947, what mattered most to him was the fact that a foreigner—be it Balfour or Churchill or anyone else—could sit thousands of miles away from Palestine and dictate to the Palestinians what would or would not happen to them and their country. The arrogance!

Yousif walked up and down two hills on his way to Salwa’s house, paying no attention to those he was passing. He was preoccupied with Britain’s duplicity. First the Balfour declaration in 1917. Then the White Paper of 1939, with which Britain had tried to modify the Balfour Declaration. This, in turn, infuriated the Zionists. Yousif shook his head as he thought of Britain’s chicanery, and pitied Arabs and Jews who were her victims. Once Churchill had declared, “The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement and our promises and pledges to it.” Yet, his government, like all British governments before it, had either vacillated or been brutally supportive of everything Zionist. Still, that British Bear received special shipments of Jaffa oranges, even when the world was aflame, when the Mediterranean sea and sky were impassable. The nerve! Yousif wondered what Churchill was thinking now, and whether he had any remorse.

There was so much to tell Salwa. Yousif marveled at how lucky he was to have the opportunity to visit her house every Thursday. Ever since the beginning of summer vacation two weeks earlier, he and Salwa’s bothers, Akram and Zuhair, would hold their class in the family garden. They would carry their stubby chairs with the straw bottoms and walk around until they found a suitable spot. On both Thursdays Yousif chose a spot that afforded him a perfect view of Salwa’s room.

Today Akram and Zuhair were waiting for him on the balcony, but Salwa was not in sight. They had their books in their hands and behind them were the familiar stubby chairs.

“Good morning,” Yousif said, as he approached them.

“Good morning,” the two boys answered.

“Where would you like to sit today?” Yousif asked.

The two boys looked at each other. “I don’t care,” Akram said.

“Why not inside for a change?” Zuhair added.

Yousif frowned. “It’s too pretty to be inside. Come on, I’ll show you where.”

They went down two narrow fields and again sat under a huge fig tree. Yousif wanted to be away from the house for a measure of privacy, just in case he was able to talk to Salwa.

He reviewed the boys’ homework. “Did you help each other?” he asked, looking at the arithmetic problems.

“No,” they both said.

“It’s okay if you did. Both of you did well. I’m proud of you.”

“You’re a good teacher,” Akram said, smiling.

“That’s nice of you to say, Akram. Today we’re going to study Arabic. Do you have your books with you?”

“I do but I hate grammar,” Zuhair complained.

“But it’s very important,” Yousif emphasized. “You can’t speak or write well without it.”

“It’s hard and boring,” Zuhair insisted, his lips twisting.

“Look at it this way. When you play soccer, don’t you follow certain rules?”

“Yes,” Zuhair answered, uncertain.

“Without the rules the game would be a mess. We wouldn’t be able to tell the winner from the loser. Am I right? It’s the same thing in reading and writing. The fun is knowing your opportunities and your limitations.”

As Yousif explained the intricacies of Arabic grammar to his young pupils, his eyes constantly watched Salwa’s windows and balcony. He hoped she would come down to hang her mother’s washing on the backyard clothes line, or shake a rug over the balcony railing. Finally, he heard her footsteps and then was able to see her through a curtain of fig leaves. She was wearing a red skirt and a white blouse. In her right hand was a plate of white berries. Yousif decided it was an excuse for her to see him. He smiled with that knowledge.

He heard her murmur good morning.

“Good morning,” he replied. He was so happy he could only stare at her.

“I picked them this morning,” she said. “I thought you might like some.”

He nodded. “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said.

“Can’t stay long,” she demurred. “Mother is waiting.”

“Please,” he said, fixing her with a meaningful look.

He gave her brothers a long assignment and walked from under the leafy tree to where Salwa was standing.

“I’d rather help you pick them off the tree,” he told her, taking the plate of white berries from her hand.

“What would the neighbors say if they saw us together?” she laughed, her thin gold bracelets tinkling around her wrist.

“Can’t they see us now?” he asked, putting a couple of berries in his mouth.

She looked around, worried. “I am taking a chance. Maybe I should leave. The last thing I need is their gossip.”

She started to walk away, and he reached out to stop her. “Please don’t go. Sooner or later they’ll have to know.”

His confidence seemed to surprise her. “That day will never come,” she teased him and swung away, her round white earrings reflecting the morning sun.

“That day will come,” he insisted, taking and eating a few more berries.

For a moment both seemed to be held in suspension.

“You’ve heard about the amputation,” he said, leaning against the trunk of an apple tree.

“It’s terrible,” she said, nodding.

He pulled out the compass and showed it to her. “Here’s what I found that day,” he said, looking grim.

“What is it?”

“A compass. It must’ve fallen out of their pockets. I just knew they were spies. Basim agrees with me. He also thinks that for all practical purposes the war between us and the Jews has already started.”

She took the compass from him, pouting. “I wish I were a man.”

Yousif looked at her, surprised. “Why?”

“Then I’d be able to fight. Girls can’t do much except hope and pray. I wouldn’t like that.”

A plane swished over their heads. Apparently it had taken off from nearby Lydda airport only a few minutes earlier, for it was still ascending. He could read the airline markings on it. Yousif watched it streak against the blue sky; Salwa kept her eyes glued to the ground. The mood grew somber.

“I want to find a way to help,” Yousif told her.

“There’s only one way.”

He scrutinized her face. “Fighting?”

“What else?”

“It’s not that simple. Oh, Salwa, there’s so much we don’t know.”

When she did not respond, he looked at her. She seemed unmoved.

“Right now it’s like watching a film after the fifth reel,” he explained.

“It’s clear to me,” she said. “All I know is that I’m standing on land my father inherited from his father and he from his father. This berry tree is our berry tree. That house is our house. Everything we own we either inherited or bought and paid for. And if the Zionists want some strangers from Europe to settle here, they’ll have to fight us first.”

“And if they succeed? If they take it all away?”

“We’ll never rest until we get everything back. The thing to do is to make sure nothing falls into their hands. That’s what my father says. And I agree with him.”

They heard her mother calling her from inside the house.

Salwa handed him back the compass and started to leave. Then she turned around and took a good hard look at him. “Relax,” she said. “Our cause is as clear as this glaring sun.”

Yousif glanced at his two young pupils under the fig tree. Finding them busy with their work, he took several steps behind Salwa. “When will I see you again?” he asked, hating to see her go.

“Next Thursday.”

“Not before?”

She smiled and moved away from him. “We’ll see,” she answered, walking in earnest.

As she departed, his heart sank. He held her tall figure in his eyes until she stopped at the top of the stairs, waved her hand, and went inside. Momentarily he returned to the task at hand, finding pleasure in the presence of her two younger brothers.

“Will you bring me a bird next time?” twelve-year-old Akram asked at the end of the morning session. “I did well, didn’t I?”

Yousif smiled and made a mental note to stop at Salman’s shop and buy cannabis for his birds. Aside from going to the movies, his favorite hobby was buying, catching, and trading birds. But his collection of more than two hundred birds was costing him all his allowance. He really needed to sell some of them, but his heart would not let him. He loved them so much that he had a room in both houses designated just for them. Before the end of the summer he would probably catch more. How was he going to cope with that many?

“You deserve the best,” Yousif finally told Akram. “Next time I come I’ll bring you my red canary.”

“What about me?” said eleven-year-old Zuhair. “I did just as well.”

“You know I won’t forget you,” Yousif told him, rising and keeping his eyes on Salwa’s room. “How about a blue cage?”

“YEEEES,” Zuhair responded, shutting the book with a bang.

“That’s not fair,” Akram whimpered. “I’m older and I want the cage.”

Yousif laughed and ruffled their hair, wishing their sister would favor him with one more look.

By the middle of August, most of the vacationers were leaving Ardallah to prepare their children for school. Those from outside Palestine were returning home without a worry in their head. The Palestinians themselves were going away less certain about the future of their country. Even the people of Ardallah had been transformed during the summer months. The future looked worrisome.

Like many of his generation, Yousif was developing a new passion—politics. Day after day he would read newspapers, listen to the radio, and participate in discussions with his father and their night visitors.

One night they had many important guests, including the Appellate Court Judge Hamdi Azzam and his wife. Fouad Jubran and Fareed Afifi and their wives were frequent visitors, but the respectable judge came over only two or three times a year, and each occasion took on a special significance. Yousif’s parents became a bit more formal, and their hospitality a bit more lavish. Instead of sitting on the balcony, as they normally would on summer evenings, tonight they sat in the living room. Yasmin and Fatima were busy in the kitchen sending out dish after dish of maza. While serving the guests drinks and dishes of cheeses and pickles and hummus and, later on, coffee and sweets, Yousif listened to every word they said.

Of particular interest to the men and women that night was what Britain was going to do in Palestine. Her mandate was about to end. For a while, it was generally believed that Britain would choose to stay. Some Arabs were of two minds about that prospect. They wanted Britain to leave, but they did not want the Zionists to replace her.

“Frankly,” Dr. Afifi said, “I prefer Britain’s staying to an open war with the Zionists.”

“I agree,” Fouad Jubran said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s the lesser of two evils. What do you think, Judge?”

“Hard to tell,” the judge answered, resting on his left elbow, his legs crossed at the ankles. His right hand was toying with the ivory head of a cane that was his trademark. A smallish man, he wore glasses and cultivated a well-trimmed mustache. As many times as he had seen him, Yousif could put everything the judge had uttered on one page.

“Is there the slightest chance a war can be avoided?” Dr. Afifi pressed.

“No,” the judge answered, shaking his head. “But the British are determined to get out.”

“And leave us with the mess they created?” Yousif asked, emptying one ashtray into another.

“True, true,” the judge said, sipping on his Arabic coffee. “But now they want to dump the whole affair in the United Nations’ lap.”

Uncle Boulus’s worry beads ticked like a bomb.

“Imagine the vacationers who came to Ardallah a couple of months ago,” said Jihan Afifi, biting on a piece of baklava. “They came in one mood and left in another.”

The regional problem, they all feared, would be internationalized and the world powers would have a field-day playing football with tiny Palestine. Who could predict the outcome, especially when the Zionists start bringing up the Holocaust?

That night Yousif fell asleep knowing that Palestinians had every reason to be worried.