Текст книги "I Was Born There, I Was Born Here"

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Then she came down the short flight of steps, took the hoe from me, and started whacking the vegetable bed while we watched. I don’t know how Majid felt but I was jealous and embarrassed. When I was a child I thought my muscles were weak because I was thin. I heard someone say that potatoes ‘build you up’ so I went overboard on potatoes in all forms in the hope that my muscles would harden. Whenever my mother asked the question she asked every morning as we made for the front door on our way to school—“What shall I cook for you today?”—I’d turn my head and beat my brothers to it by saying, “Potato casserole.”

She took me seriously once or twice. Then she started making fun of me and I became an easy target for my brothers’ jokes. When I published my first collection of poems, I was pleased with how thin I was. In moments of stupidity (which fortunately didn’t last very long), I’d wonder at the ‘blooming good health’ of Pablo Neruda, because he looked like a bank director – as though a poet had to look wasted, half dead, and pale, like someone who’s fallen into a chasm or just been pulled out of one!

Now we’re faced with a real chasm.

The driver stops the engine.

“Get out, everyone. We’ll have a look and see what we can do.”

We get out.

And we see.

We are on the edge of a cutting across the road that the rains have transformed into a huge, impromptu, mud-filled trench that the car will not be able to cross unless a Greek god from the heavens of myth, capable of changing fates, appears and gets us out of this earthly fix. Our driver has improvised our present route through this gray valley. He has remained in control, more or less, no matter how much it has twisted and turned and narrowed, so long as it has been uninterrupted, but now it’s cut; it isn’t a road any more. And this long, deep trench could swallow dozens of cars.

The man from al-Khalil says, “It must be my fault. I’m unlucky by nature. I’ve been that way all my life. If there are a thousand tins of milk at the supermarket, I’ll pick the one that’s gone bad.”

I tell him about Abu Wajih, who was a ploughman in our village. Once a friend of his found him exhausted from ploughing a huge olive field and told him, “Your work will soon be done, Abu Wajih, and then you can rest.”

Abu Wajih answered, “I swear to God, if the Resurrection comes and I go to paradise, I’ll find no rest. If there’s land to be ploughed in paradise, the Almighty will say, ‘Arise, Abu Wajih, and plough it.’ You think He’s going to ask Abdel Halim Hafez?”

Mahmoud doesn’t look worried. In fact, he looks as confident and calm as if the Greek gods were his first cousins.

In just a few minutes, a giant yellow crane appears from among the trees on the other side of the trench, glistening under the drizzle. In it are two thin, poorly dressed youths, one of whom gestures to Mahmoud to prepare for the rescue.

Later, years after this incident, I will cross a similar trench at the Surda checkpoint on foot in the company of a group of foreign writers who are our guests and whose program includes a visit to Birzeit University. Our cars leave Ramallah in convoy and halt at the Surda checkpoint, halfway to the university. The Israeli army has previously destroyed the mountain road by making a kind of trench in it about 500 meters long that can be crossed only on foot, and with difficulty at that. On a hilltop next to the road stands a large house belonging to a Palestinian family that the army has occupied after throwing out the residents and has converted into both a military post monitoring everything that moves and an operations room where the decision to close the road can be taken at any time. The entire front of the building is covered with green camouflage material pierced with holes and through these can be seen the barrels of machine guns pointed at the people going through the checkpoint. The cars that have brought us from Ramallah stop and we get out to cross the trench on foot. I keep up my conversation about theater with Wole Soyinka and we try to avoid stumbling. Around us the others are continuing their discussions on literature and politics, their bodies approaching and separating according to the unevenness of the dug-out area. Saramago, Goytisolo, Breytenbach, Consolo, Bei Dao, and Mahmoud Darwish move forward inside the trench with the caution of the elderly, returning the greetings of the students, teachers, and traveling salesmen who walk beside them, for this rough trench is the only road for those traveling between Ramallah and the villages of the north. It’s been this way for a whole year. Wole Soyinka pulls me to one side to make way for a young man carrying an aged peasant woman on his back. He proceeds with extreme caution while she keeps repeating, “God damn them in this world and the next!” and readjusting her headscarf, gripping its ends between her teeth so that it doesn’t slip off her white hair completely. Another old woman, a foreigner, is walking next to a donkey in whose panniers are two suitcases from each of which dangles a Delsey tag, specifying the luxury brand. The Delsey factory can never have imagined that donkeys would carry their suitcases here. A few meters further on we make way for another donkey, ridden by a pregnant woman and led by a boy of seven or a little more. Clearly, he makes his living hiring the donkey out at the checkpoint. He looks around, bemused at finding foreign faces in this corner of the world. Saramago, contemplating the scene and turning to the hills, the houses of the Palestinian villagers, and the guns of the Israeli army pointed at us from a distance, says to Leila Shahid, our ambassador to France, in his deep, extremely dignified, voice, “Leila, this reminds me of a concentration camp. The people here are living in a concentration camp. It’s a true concentration camp. That’s what I think.”

After crossing the trench, we will climb up to the highway and get into different cars, sent by the Birzeit administration to wait for us on the other side so that we can finish our journey to the university.

This morning, however, things are quite different.

We are now in front of a trench similar to the one at Surda but we’re in a taxi carrying large, medium, and small suitcases on its roof and with seven passengers inside, and it is this car and no other that has to get us to the other side. It is this car and no other that has to take us to Jericho; there is no alternative in this remote stretch of country. There is no way back and there are no taxis waiting on the other side of this fissure in the earth.

It occurs to Mahmoud that he ought to secure the suitcases with rope to prevent all or some of them from falling off during the rescue operation. He fetches a long rope, ties one end to the luggage rack, throws it over to the other side, tugs on it, and then repeats the procedure, helped by the sad young man, who comes quickly to his assistance. He doesn’t stop tying till he’s completely satisfied. He orders us to return to our seats inside the car so that the two rescuers can start their work. We sit and wait.

Mahmoud issues his instructions: “Fasten your seat belts. Don’t panic. We’re going for a ride on the swings!”

He laughs, to encourage us and himself.

He takes his place behind the wheel, first making sure that the doors are properly closed.

A moment of total silence envelops us all. A moment as silent as a candle burning. A moment as silent as a letter being passed under a door.

Then the rumbling begins.

Dumbstruck, I watch what’s happening.

The huge long arm of the crane rises gradually into space until it reaches what its drivers judge to be the correct height. Its metal joints rub and chitter against one another and from time to time it groans as they lower the arm slowly toward us, tilting it a little to the left, then a little to the right, and finally, with extreme care, bringing it down till it is almost touching the car. Next, it takes the car in the grip of its terrible iron fingers, which wrap themselves around its body like the fingers of a hand around a pomegranate, and with careful slowness lifts it, and us, into the air. We are now between earth and sky.

The suspended bubble of air in which we seven are swinging is now our place of exile from this earth. It is our disabled will and our attempt, in a mixture of courage and fear, to impose our will through wit and cunning. This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself. It is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the air of others’ countries. In the world’s air we seek refuge from our earth. We sink into the upper spaces. We sink upward. God rest the soul of Salvador Dali, who (being dead) will never be able to picture this scene. This absurd bubble of air is Mahmoud’s way of letting no obstacle defeat him and force him to take us back in failure. Now the wish of those who, like us at this moment, have risen high, is to become low. I absolve my grandmother from any blame; she would call down blessings on me, boy and young man, and say, “Go, Mourid, son of Sakina my daughter, may God elevate your rank!” or “God raise high your standing among men!” The only high place I’ve achieved among men, Grandmother, and the only high rank I’ve risen to in my country is thanks to this deaf metal monster. Did you pray to the heavens so often for my ‘elevation’ that they decided to answer your prayers like this and mock us both? I want my high standing to be brought low, Grandmother. I want to descend from this regal elevation and touch the mud and dust once more so that I can be an ordinary traveler again. The Occupation is these moments of loneliness between man’s earth and the sky.

We stare downward out of the windows of the car. Yes, downward! Our dream now, Grandmother, is at the level of our feet. We stare at the abyss and the abyss stares at us. The screeching of the crane and the groaning of its metal joints rise and fall as we move away from the edge behind us and closer to the hoped-for edge on the other side.

The crane backs up a little.

Its flying arm, carrying us through the fog of the valley, tries to transfer us, with care, from one edge to another. The crane backs up again and stops.

We arrive.

The metal fingers move away from the body of the car, leaving it to make gentle contact with the earth.

The mechanical swing puts us safely down.

We all get out and the two Greek gods join us.

Everyone hugs everyone else (except for the veiled lady, who stands to one side, away from our crowding emotions). We find ourselves clapping as we stand there, as though celebrating an historic victory.

“Thanks, everyone. Good work.”

Mahmoud passes out coffee cups. Coffee and its timing, again. It’s not quite as hot but it’s still good, having now acquired the taste of reward for a job well done. I savor two cigarettes, lighting the second from the first and sharing with Mahmoud, the man from al-Khalil, and our two rescuers the pleasure of sheltering our cigarettes from the rain.

The old man moves away from us without explanation, disappears behind a nearby tree for a few minutes, and then returns, fastening the buckle of his leather belt and apologizing with obvious embarrassment for holding us up.

“Goddamn diabetes. Sorry everyone, I’ve held you up.”

The two mysterious rescuers wish us a successful end to our journey. They drive the crane back to its hiding place behind the trees, perhaps to wait for another rescue mission or to get ready to make a speedy return to their village before the soldiers discover what they’re up to.

The engine is turned on again.

The car moves forward along the valley.

After a period of bucking and rocking, the silk of asphalt takes us by surprise. We look at one another in relief and joy, as though it were a dream fulfilled, as though we’d scored a victory over someone.

Peoples under occupation may be among those most given to festivity and most ready to celebrate. This, of course, is directly opposed to the picture of grossness and cruelty that the enemy and the stereotype-obsessed media draw of them. Under occupation, you experience true pleasure just because you’ve managed to get hold of a cylinder of butane gas, a pile of loaves of bread, a pass, or a seat on the bus. You feel joy at finding blood pressure pills at the chemist’s, at the arrival of the ambulance before some sick person close to you dies. You get pleasure from reaching home safely and finding that the electricity has been turned back on. You feel ecstasy at being able to walk on the beach. You dance for joy at the most trivial victory in anything, even a card game. In its most subtle form, this human fragility may take on legendary proportions, when your endless patience becomes in and of itself soft pillows protecting you from nightmares.

I look at the paved road surface and a verse leaps into my mind from a poem by Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, who lived through both dictatorship and occupation in his native Iraq:

Fortunate Tigris, how have our ambitions shrunk—

Yet even the least ambitious of our aspirations is in doubt.

Well said, poet!

Hasn’t our most exalted aspiration on this blessed morning been to reach the asphalt, to reach, what, in the end, is no more than tar?

Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Jawahiri, that tar could be an aspiration? Did it ever occur to you that a road paved with tar could become the dream of a nation?

You have to imagine it, Mr. Jawahiri!

You really ought to imagine it.

Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation?

We enjoy a few smooth kilometers on the road. We achieve our ambition and in the distance the outskirts of Jericho appear.

Later, friends and relations used to moving between Palestine and Jordan via the bridge will explain that what happened to me on my strange journey is an everyday experience, especially the business with the crane that moves stranded cars. The Israelis know that on days when there are closures we take side roads to avoid their checkpoints, so they’ve taken to cutting them using dynamite and bulldozers to create chasms, trenches, and dikes that cars can’t cross. And what has happened? The villagers and nearby shepherds have come up with this method of helping others and themselves too. They hire this giant winch with a grab from a builder’s yard and take a hundred shekels for each car they rescue. Why not? It’s their labor. What matters is that for every obstacle the Occupation sets, Palestinian desperation finds a solution.

I hear Mahmoud’s voice.

“From here to Jericho there’s no army, no checkpoints, no cranes, and no swings in the air. Praise God for a safe arrival, everyone!”

Laughing, the fat man says, “And you got me onto the swings at my age, boys! I’d never been on one before. I used to get dizzy just looking at the Ferris wheel and wonder how the little kids could ride it. We’ve become a spectacle, I swear. God bring it all down on their heads!”

I want to tell him the story of how once, in a violent storm, Tamim and his friend Zeid got stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel at the kids’ amusement park in Budapest and were rescued, but decide it wouldn’t be appropriate in our present situation. That was the second reason; the first was that I’ve got used to not talking if I’m with people I don’t know in a car or a bus or line. You never know which way a conversation with strange traveling companions may turn. A question you ask, or your answer to a question, may be embarrassing or dangerous or stir up a painful memory, or so I convinced myself some time ago. Also, under Occupation, you may find yourself learning things you’re not supposed to, and who knows what difficulties your tongue may get you into? You may indicate your admiration for the resistance fighters and fugitives in the mountains who are wanted by Israel and tell the story of one of them whom you know because he’s a relation, friend, or neighbor, and the person you’re talking to may be an Israeli agent, of whom there are thousands, unfortunately. Israel has made it a condition (accepted by our very clever negotiators) that the Palestinian leadership does not have the right to punish, pursue, or even try them. They move among us, some of them known to all. You may find yourself at a ceremony of mourning for a martyr while, because of rural family bonds, an agent – the martyr’s cousin, for example, or his in-law – receives condolences for his relative the ‘hero,’ and the agent’s mourning for the deceased may be genuine too. This has actually occurred in Deir Ghassanah, just as it has in other villages, and it will continue to. There are plenty of other risks also – such as spoiling the atmosphere with an unfunny joke, as the man from al-Khalil had done. Nevertheless, all these possibilities taken together neither explain nor justify my position, which in fact isn’t justifiable. What’s certain, though, is that my aversion to talking makes me seem aloof. Some may accuse me of being stuck-up – which is unbecoming for someone with a political cause – and I cannot defend this fault and I won’t justify it. Man’s biggest fault is to deny his faults and defend them to the death. It’s true too that my aloofness results in my losing the beautiful friendships that traveling with others might lead to under ordinary circumstances. The Occupation, however, permits no ordinary circumstances. The Occupation distorts the distances between humans as much as those between places. I wonder about this idea, which has just occurred to me and which I shall give more thought to soon.

When one is lifted off the ground, a certain loneliness and sense of isolation combine with the unexpected loftiness. This is true whatever the vehicle, be it a swing or an elevator or an airplane. This leads to me think about Mahmoud’s coming loneliness and my worries about him.

A question now comes into my head that will preoccupy me for many years: how will Mahmoud get back alone to Ramallah under these extraordinary circumstances?

Doesn’t he give any thought to the dangers of the ruined, muddy roads that await him as he returns to his family after a day’s work that was supposed to be routine but was anything but routine?

Will he go back today?

Will he spend the night in Jericho and wait till the morning?

And what if the closure lasts for days?

I admire his poise and ability. Indeed, his conduct, liveliness, youth, and confidence now seduce me into a burst of optimism that sees the Palestinians as the stronger side in this long conflict with the Occupation. All I need is an inspired idea on how to thank this boy without insulting what he did with empty, worn-out words.

The moment he hugs me I decide that the best I have to offer is silence.

I throw out the fleeting idea of offering the young man extra money in less than a second.

I consider a strange paradox. One may easily get into a quarrel with an opponent and slip without thinking into uttering the most vulgar words, which you will later regret – but find it difficult to choose a pleasant word with which to praise a friend. Some forms of gratitude demean the gift, sometimes, and that’s what I’m afraid of in this case.

I’m jealous of his determination and his abilities and I admire him to the point of feeling proud of him, but I can’t tell him that because the very word has something of the patronizing or the paternalistic or the classist about it that cancels our equality as humans. How am I supposed to convey this ‘pride’ to him? With a tip?

I’m worried about him.

I think of telling him, “Take care of yourself,” but don’t.

That tender and loving phrase is the most beautiful thing one can hear from a person who’s important to you when you part. My mother used to say it every time I left the house, or traveled for a job or other purpose. “Take care of yourself.”

“How am I to take care of myself, Mother?”

If an Arab ruler wishes to arrest me, he will without doubt arrest me.

If a policeman wants to kick me in the stomach and liver, he will without doubt kick me.

If an esteemed ‘sovereign’ Arab sister-state wishes to exercise its ‘sovereignty’ against my thin body or my innocuous words in order to kick me out with its imported shoes, it will kick me out.

I want to tell him “God be with you” and immediately smile at an unforgettable anecdote about God’s lack of support for the Palestinians. This was explained on the one hand by the repeated assertion of Sheikh Qaysar, muezzin of the mosque of Deir Ghassanah, that God wasn’t standing by us because we’d “abandoned His religion.” On the other was the comment of Hajja Umm Nabil, nearly maddened by the Arab defeat of 1967 and Israel’s six-day (really six-hour) victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Hajja Umm Nabil raised her arms in the face of a reporter who didn’t know her language and yelled at the top of her voice, “Performing our prayers didn’t help us and keeping the fasts didn’t get us in with Him either, sonny. It turns out the Almighty wears a kipa and shorts. If He curled his side-locks, He’d be perfect.” Sensing that anger had drawn her into saying something rather odd that didn’t go with her instinctive piety, she then muttered to herself, “I seek God’s forgiveness! It’s enough to make heathens of us.”

I say nothing to Mahmoud. To myself I say, “I’ll write him. I’ll write the driver Mahmoud. And I’ll put down exactly what he did and how he did it. I’ll write him. It’s my duty. I’m a writer and that’s my job. He did his job and one day I’ll do mine too.” And here I am doing it.

We reach the Jericho resthouse.

We get our bags down and each of us pays Mahmoud the fare plus his share of the cost of hiring the divinely blessed crane.

The bus for the bridge is standing waiting for passengers. We put our bags into the compartments allocated for them under the bus.

We say goodbye to Mahmoud.

He shakes our hands and wishes us a good journey to Amman.

I stand in a disorganized line where everyone is pushing, waiting to get my papers stamped.

In the long line next to mine, I see the veiled lady raise her veil hesitantly from her face. The Israeli policewoman tells her to remove it completely, which she does. Clearly the policewoman wants the security cameras or the officer seated behind tinted glass in the raised booth to identify the traveler’s face properly.

The people in the line surge about trying to get ahead of each other, those at the front of the line protesting at the others who are bothering them. The voice of a short, bald man in the line is heard: “Keep to the line, please. Have some manners. Let’s get on our way.”

He might as well have been talking to the deaf.

The Israeli officer notices the disturbance. He stands up and yells at everyone to form a single line.

They do so immediately.

Between the Israeli police post on the bridge and the Jordanian police post, we have to change buses. The first bus delivers us to a dusty lot around which our suitcases are dropped in scattered piles so roughly that bits of them generally get damaged or their contents are strewn everywhere. In all cases, it ensures that they get dirty, especially on rainy days. Then we have to get out, pushing and shoving like a repulsive human herd whose individual members are so selfish that the elderly, the slow-moving, and the polite are ignored among the struggles of each passenger to find his bag in the middle of the chaotic pile into which it has been thrown and then put it with his own hands onto the new bus that will travel the short distance to the Jordanian police station.

Someone whom I take from his accent to be from Nablus shouts, “Have you made your ablutions, Muhammad?”

“Sure, Dad. I performed the ablutions, praise be to God.”

“Okay, let’s get the afternoon prayer in quickly then.”

“Did you hear the call to prayer, Dad?”

“Damn it, you’re a fool. Who’s going to give the call to prayer here? You’re wearing a watch the size of a wall clock and it’s prayer time.”

Amid the scattered suitcases, the man from Nablus and his son stand up to perform the prayer and a number of male passengers join them, so the rest of us have to wait until they’re done. It’s a new phenomenon in society, this public display of Islam.

We sit in the new bus waiting for them and then leave for the Jordanian police post. We arrive. A Jordanian policeman gets in, collects the IDs and passports from all the passengers, and leaves, after ordering the driver to keep the doors closed until he is given permission to open them by the officials on the other side.

In this spot in summer, temperature and humidity reach their highest levels in the world, sometimes rising to 50 degrees Celsius, even though the meteorological authorities, for reasons I don’t understand, record them as being only in the upper forties. It’s winter now and waiting does no harm, but having to wait again each time is annoying. During this wait too I retreat into my shell.

I’m alone with sounds and sights, with my private question marks and exclamation marks.

It’s as though a huge deserted warehouse had opened its doors to me or I’d become my own museum and its only visitor after the guards have gone home to sleep and locked me in.

I find fault with my acts, or the fewness of them, or the total lack of them, or their total ineffectiveness. I confront my faults like a courageous hero of the stage or make up hypocritical excuses for myself like any coward.

I become a severe judge who refuses to accept the arguments of the self, lovers, or relatives, and, in the same instant, I become the conniving, bribable judge who flees difficulties in favor of peace of mind.

I open my small eyes to the ‘intellectual’s diseases’ that have taken root in my body.

I say to myself, I’m just a poet. Why should I have to wait at all the different types of border?

Why can’t I put up with what the fat grandmothers, the young ploughmen with their handsome bronze faces, and the children, who have got used to the Occupation, put up with – so much so that they have, to everyone’s surprise, forced it into a tight spot?

I hear a voice inside me proclaiming its revulsion at the lack of backbone of some poets and writers and their constant whining. I feel that in the end I’m a bad person when compared to these people who make so many sacrifices without complaining.

I tell myself no writer deserves glory so long as his people are in torment, even if he’s the person best able to give expression to that suffering. People may honor him because they value his talent or his role but he will be mistaken if he thinks that’s the end of the matter.

I think, I wish I were a train. A train doesn’t wait. Nor does a farmer. All a farmer waits for is the rainy season, which is easier than waiting for this bus to move before I go out of my mind.

I want to get to the house.

I want to sleep.

The Jordanian policeman allows us to get off the bus. We proceed to the passport barrier, then to our bags, and then to the street.

In a little while the sun will start to set. I’ll be in our house in al-Shmaysani before my mother goes to sleep.

Once I’ve crossed the bridge and entered Jordanian territory, peace enters my soul. I start to feel that things are at least normal again. I become a tranquil traveler. I can enjoy the sight of the trees running alongside the car and contemplate the banana plantations, the oleander flowers, and the roads that have no checkpoints, barriers, or watchtowers. To one leaving Occupied Palestine, Jordan seems like a truly blessed place. No being stopped, no settlements, and no tanks. Here distances always measure the same. You know how many minutes you need to get from one place to another. I take a car to Amman because I want to be on my own. I want to go over this whole journey in my mind from the beginning. I have half an hour to go before I arrive. I put my Jordanian SIM card in my cell phone and call Radwa in Cairo.

“I’m finally on my way to al-Shmaysani.”

Then I call my mother in Amman.

“What’s for dinner, Mother?”

Next morning, the dead and wounded lie scattered in their hundreds.

Television screens are colored red, almost shattered by the shells from the tanks, which hammer at life without let-up. The long embroidered dresses of the mothers bend over the faces of the dead and their arms shake the bodies in their shrouds in the hope of reviving life, if only to bid it farewell. Their hands call before their lips can to those who will never hear a mother’s or a sister’s or a grandmother’s voice again until the end of time.

All news bulletins start with the news of the Israeli army’s invasion of Ramallah.