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

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

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.

I was a companion to his childhood, and he to my fatherhood, for only five months and five days. I was away from him for seventeen years, during which I saw him at widely separated intervals.

His first birthday came as I started my first year in exile around the world. I mailed him a birthday present in a small envelope. It was a poem entitled ‘Tamim’ and dated 13 June 1978.

He grew, sheltering in his beauty, and slowed my fear

But longing hastened my desire.

And I would speak truly if I said the windows

And the light and the grass resemble him

And that the poems cannot catch up with him

For he keeps running and rising

While poetry walks on two crutches.

We go through the Damascus Gate to the relatively shady Khan al-Zeit market. We make our way with difficulty through the market, which is crowded with passersby and buyers and sellers. We see few foreign tourists. Israel has succeeded in designing routes for tourists that stick to the Jewish bazaars that were erected after the occupation of the city in 1967. The result is that the tourist comes to Old Jerusalem and leaves again without discovering that there is an Arab quarter that is stuffed with bazaars and shops selling curios and necklaces and carved Christian and Islamic objects. This has destroyed the Arab Jerusalemites’ primary economic resource. We pass Zalatimo’s Sweets and Ja‘far’s Kanafeh but Tamim prefers to buy, rather than kanafeh, a piece of sweet semolina pastry.

We keep going in the direction of the Via Dolorosa.

It amazes me that I am now walking in the city as a father, when half a century before I walked in it as a son, and that now my son walks beside me.

I ask myself, is his Jerusalem my Jerusalem or something different? I saw it as a child and as an older man, and it was lost to me in between. Tamim is starting to get to know it now as a young man.

I come to it after absence and find myself comparing stone with stone and matching street with street and my school as it is now with my school as it was then and looking for my favorite shoe shop. I was very concerned to buy shoes that would please the teenage girls in Rukab’s Garden on Sundays, or a real wool jersey that would spare my mother long evenings with two exhausting knitting needles. In the here and now, Tamim rubs the stone of the road against the stone of imagination. He compares the reality of the mosque, the church, the crosses and the crescents with his images of them derived from the delight of narration, from colored books, statistics, and the magic of naming. He counts the ancient gates to confirm with his eyes the accuracy of what his ears had heard from the storyteller, who was me. Now he is inside the narrated scene – the narrated scene as it is in real life, needing no one to describe it. But, I tell myself, no reality cancels out imagination. Reality waylays us quickly but gives rise in the mind to further imagining. I come close to asking myself if there is a ‘truth’ outside the human ‘imagination,’ and am at loss for an answer.

I don’t know if I was right to be so surprised when Tamim asked me to take a photograph of him beneath the street sign on which Tariq al-Alam is written in Arabic and under that in Latin characters Via Dolorosa, with two words in Hebrew at the top. It would never have occurred to me that I would stop to take a photo here or anywhere else in Jerusalem. Everything was fixed in place and secure and natural, like my own presence there. The steps of Christ along the Via Dolorosa from the Lions Gate to the Church of the Resurrection were just one of the facts and features of the city, like the weather, the trees, and the ancient walls. The Via Dolorosa was just a street we used, a narrow street in which we took care of our affairs and did our shopping or which we went down on our way to the one next to it. All the sacred sites nearby with their names, and the minarets, mosques, churches, crosses, bells, columns, domes, and tombs of the sultans and saints to which these alluded, were the ordinary and familiar that was always where it always had been, to whose destiny and significance I gave no thought. ‘History’ was a street, a shop, sweets, shoes, schools, stubborn weeds on walls, teenagers’ quarrels, and lusts, attainable or unattainable – not a landmark where photos are taken. Taking pictures was the Japanese, European, and American tourists’ and pilgrims’ ‘thing,’ not our ‘thing.’

The narrow road takes us on a slight curve to the covered market. Then two Arab guards stop us at a small door. They’ve spotted the camera in Tamim’s hand.

“Tourists?”

“No, we’re from here.”

“Welcome. Go on in.”

We go through the door.

Suddenly, a burst of light fills the horizon. We forget the narrow, dark streets. It’s as though we’ve been transported to a newly discovered planet.

The sky lies stretched out at full length, as though it had woken up full of energy to start its morning, leaving some of its white pillows lying around forgotten in the form of clouds scattered randomly over its celestial bed sheet.

This is the Dome of the Rock.

Stand, stranger, in its shadows.

Take it in with all your senses.

Think of the fact that today it is you who is the stranger.

You are a stranger to it – you, its son, its rightful owner; you who, by virtue of eye and of memory, of documents and of history, of inscriptions, colors, trees, Qur’anic verses, poems, and aged tombstones, are its possessor.

Stand, stranger, and look:

This is the Dome of the Rock.

The daylight spreads its gold over the golden dome, whose vast crescent and octagonal walls are inscribed with ancient blue, with the supplications of pilgrims and the exhalations of those who pray.

The al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand side by side. Around and between them are centuries-old cypresses, eucalyptuses, palms, and other trees whose names I don’t know. To our right we see worshipers entering and exiting the mosque as they have done for hundreds of years. Everything is as it always has been except for the Occupation, as a result of which the Palestinian’s ability to pray here has become a dream that goes beyond religious prescriptions to become a political ‘struggle’ too.

Today Tamim’s dream comes true. He performs a prayer of greeting to the two mosques. He wants his prayer to be recorded in his personal history here in this place whose habit it is to call out to the five senses of those who see it, “Don’t slacken here for an instant. Don’t slacken here, senses. Do your duty to the full now. Do your job as well as you possibly can. Go everywhere. Smell, see, touch, taste. Learn how history becomes stone and identity a building.”

Tamim doesn’t take photos or ask me to take his; without anyone saying anything, we seem to have decided that the camera would turn us into tourists forever. We have thrown it into the nearest waste basket. Yet, just like one-day tourists, we have hurried on to the Church of the Resurrection and the Mosque of ‘Omar that stands beside it, built at the spot where the Caliph ‘Omar ibn al-Khattab prayed on entering Jerusalem, refusing to pray in the Church of the Resurrection in case later on the Muslims made his having prayed there an excuse to turn it into a mosque. He wished to demonstrate his respect for the church and to make sure that the Muslims who came after him would respect it as such forever. He wanted it to remain a Christian church. As a result, its ‘old’ cross stands alongside the ‘new’ crescent to this day.

Jerusalem has tired us. By ‘us’ I mean all humanity. I can’t think of a city on the face of the planet that has tired the world’s people as has Jerusalem. A city that refuses to be a city, land that refuses to be land. How can this be when the sacred has piled up here, in it, on it, and around it, layer upon layer, throughout the ages? Perhaps it was land before people became fully aware of what their world looked like, before news of God had reached us, before it had been trodden by the leather-strapped sandals of the prophets, walking their steps of faith. Perhaps it was land once, but with all this sanctity it has become, unfortunately, a piece of the heavens. Here the sacred has acquired the fluidity of clouds, of meaning, of imagination, to the point that the stones have lost their stone-ness, the streets their street-ness. The roof-ness of the roofs and domes has taken wing and the buildings are now roofed with meanings. Interpretations pile high but no sooner are they seized by the mind, hoping for clarification, than they are pushed aside by the hand of obscurity. Jerusalem’s solidity has turned into the fluidity of supplications and prayers. Even this heavy, towering, dark wall that surrounds it seems to come from an ancient dream that repeats itself every time a believer passes through its arches and gates, a dream that the new arrival is destined to live and the departing traveler is urged never to forget. Horses have crawled to it on wounded knees squealing beneath the longings of riders prepared to die. Temple after temple has been built in it as an abode for the soul of man. And it has risen and risen, year after year, century after century, until it has become inseparable from the sky; and Jerusalem wants to remain sky, and as mysterious and ambiguous as the sky.

But Jerusalem is land.

And it is occupied land.

Land, and occupied by a powerful army whose only purpose is to keep my body, voice, steps, and memory far from it and stop me forever from reaching it. The world isn’t souls and clouds. The world is states, soldiers, borders and passports, visas and electronic searches, building laws and taxes, residence permits and cars that run on petrol, not prayers. Only the policeman now has the power to let us pray or stop us doing so. The Israeli policeman is now the master of the city, or desires to be. It is the armed policeman who organizes and decides, not the heavens or amulets, not the grief of those who have lost it or the prayers of those who love it.

Jerusalem is a city like any other city.

“Since when has Jerusalem been a city like any other city?” you ask me and I answer, “Since the soldiers in it came to outnumber its holy sites a thousand times over.”

From that ancient day on which it chose to be celestial, the soldiers have decided to love it by brandishing their weapons in the face of history.

Jerusalem has been a city like any other city from the day walls and checkpoints were built around it, from the day it became filled with government centers, police goons, surveillance cameras on electricity poles, nationality laws, police stations, army camps, torture sessions, and conquerors who dance to celebrate the day they conquered it instead of their own anniversaries.

Jerusalem has been a city since it was forbidden to us.

I told Tamim, “I’ll take you to Orient House.”

A beautiful, haughty villa. A very earthly mansion, built by builders using their worldly muscles who drank a lot of tea and complained of the cold, the heat, and the poor wages, as they would with any other block of apartments, house, and shop on man’s earth.

In Orient House, the late Faisal al-Husseini carried on his functions as manager of the city and representative of the PLO. Here Jerusalem’s guests – tsars, kings, ambassadors – were once received and moved through its elegant foyers. Here are offices for maps and statistics overseen by Khalil al-Tafakji, the most prominent Palestinian expert on settlement policies and the attempts to Judaize the city through the expulsion of its Arab inhabitants. (Israel had yet to issue its decree closing Orient House and all other PLO offices in Jerusalem.)

We went and talked to Khalil al-Tafakji, who appears to know the history of almost every building and house in Jerusalem by heart. Tamim asked him if he could look over some maps for academic research and al-Tafakji had what he wanted copied. Tamim started to explain what else he needed for the research.

Al-Tafakji, with the scholarly decisiveness that I admire in him, told him, “Ask me short, specific questions, to save time.”

Later, the Israeli army will raid Orient House and the government of Israel will decide to close it and all other buildings from which any Palestinian activity is managed, arguing that Jerusalem doesn’t belong to the Palestinians. Protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations demanding its reopening erupt but achieve nothing and it remains closed until further notice.

From Orient House, we go to an exhibition of hand-painted porcelain and ceramics run by a family that came originally from Turkey to restore the decorative work on the Haram al-Sharif and stayed on in Jerusalem. We buy beautiful dishes, an electric lamp with an oval base of porcelain hand-painted in shades of blue with designs of foliage and green roots, and a similarly painted flower vase as gifts for Radwa in Cairo. And yes, in Jerusalem, the people of God’s city buy and sell dinner plates, shirts, fruit, shoes, socks, flowers, pickles, new cars, kitchen appliances, bank shares, tins of sardines, lottery tickets, and sandawitshat (I don’t want to call them shata’ir; I don’t like the word, or most of the new words proposed by the Arabic Language Academy).

At the end of our stolen ‘tourist’ visit to Jerusalem, and again like one-day tourists, we have dinner in the garden of an old Palestinian restaurant and from there set off to return to Ramallah.

The Israeli army doesn’t stop us at the checkpoint.

Leaving Jerusalem is permitted – very permitted, in fact, and at any hour. If it weren’t, how could its Judaization and the cleansing of its Arab inhabitants take place?

Leave the road of departure forever open. Keep the road of return forever closed. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation?

Before, Tamim had seen Jerusalem through my eyes and through stories. Today, for the first time, he has seen it with his own eyes.

Now it belongs to him.

I don’t know what of Jerusalem settled in his eyes forever and have no way to write of that. A few years later though, he will let all of Palestine know, when he writes his poem ‘In Jerusalem,’ which will become the most famous poem about the city in Arabic that I know of.