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

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Our teacher, ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti, took my earlobe between his fingers and pressed. It hurt a little. He pressed more and it hurt more. The children in the classroom laughed at what was happening to me so I cried. I cried because I was young (not yet six), because he was punishing me in front of the whole class, and because, like anyone subjected to punishment, I felt I’d done nothing to deserve it. It was all because my mother had decided one day to take me to ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti’s house, where I heard her telling him, “So you want to deprive him of schooling just because of three or four months, Abu Marwan? Shame on you! You did harm enough to me when you stopped me from finishing my own education.”

“Me, Umm Mounif? I took your side and your mother knows I did my best. God forgive them, they were stronger than all of us.”

“May God not forgive them, in this world or the next! Let’s stick to the boy.”

“Umm Mounif, your son isn’t of school age yet. The laws.… ”

She interrupts him in exasperation.

“What laws? And who made the laws?”

“He has to be fully six years old to be admitted to the school.”

“He’ll be six in two or three months.”

“It’s just not possible, and it’s in his interest, so he can take in the lessons and not fail the first year and get a complex.”

“The boy’s clever, Abu Marwan. Cleverer than all the boys from the village that you’ve accepted. I know every one of them. Mourid is the cleverest of them all, as you’ll find out. Also, he has his brother Mounif’s books and he’s always got a pen in his hand at home. He can write the alphabet now, his handwriting’s good, and he’s memorized lots of songs. If you gave him the exam today he might pass.”

“Umm Mounif, they check and send inspectors and it would be embarrassing for me. If one of the inspectors discovered that he was too young.… ”

“And why should the inspector find out he’s too young?”

“He’ll find out, and the school administration will be blamed because of me and.… ”

She interrupts him again.

“Accept him, Abu Marwan, and when the inspector comes, send him out of the classroom. He stays out for one period and no harm done. Or make him get under his desk and hide, he’s small enough anyway.… ”

“He wasn’t small a minute ago, Umm Mounif!”

He laughed and added, “All right, Umm Mounif. He’ll start school, for your sake, but when the inspector comes he has to hide or get out. I’ll persuade the headmaster.”

My mother thanked him and next morning told Mounif, “Take your brother with you today, dear, and leave him in Class One. I’ve spoken to Abu Marwan and he says yes.”

We went back to the house. We found that my father had got back from work and she told him she’d succeeded in getting me into school. My father was embarrassed and hated the idea of having asked his cousin Abu Marwan for a personal favor, but my mother wouldn’t be put off and refused to let me lose a whole year because of a law she thought was stupid.

That evening, she took the scissors and a piece of thick linen cloth, made me a bag, which she would always refer to as a ‘case,’ and put in it a pencil and a new exercise book on which she had handwritten ‘Mourid ‘Abd al-Razeq al-Barghouti, Class One, Deir Ghassanah Boys School.’

(A long parenthesis. Later, I will discover that my name in my birth certificate isn’t Mourid at all. How I found this out is a story that bided its time until I reached Third Year Preparatory, or Class Nine, at Ramallah Boys Secondary. The Ministry of Education had decided to introduce a Preparatory Certificate. The headmaster asked us to provide the entry requirements for the certificate exam, which were ten Jordanian dinars and an original birth certificate. I went home, asked my parents for my birth certificate, and was confronted with one in the name of Nawaf ‘Abd al-Razeq al-Barghouti. In amazement I yelled, “This isn’t my birth certificate!” Things became clear when they told me that when I was born, my parents had decided to call me Mourid. After two or three days, they sent the midwife to the headman of Deir Ghassanah to ask him to issue an official birth certificate. The midwife, Amna al-Warda, went in to see Abu Rasim the headman and told him that ‘Abd al-Razeq (otherwise known as Abu Mounif) had been blessed with a male child and she’d been sent to get a stamped birth certificate. He got his papers ready and asked her the child’s name. The midwife had forgotten the name, which wasn’t common in Deir Ghassanah, or anywhere in the country for that matter. She tried to remember but it was useless, and was the headman going to hold up his business because of the midwife’s stupidity? He told her, “You don’t have to remember the name. His brother’s Mounif, so he’ll be Nawaf”: at his own whim, the headman chose me a name close to my elder brother’s and entered it in my birth certificate. He made his thumb print and stamped it and it was done. When Amna al-Warda returned with the stamped certificate, they stuffed it in with the other papers without checking and no one asked for it until the headmaster, because of the newly introduced exam. All through the nine preceding years, I’d been registered as Mourid al-Barghouti. In any case, once I’d explained things to him the headmaster agreed to let me take the exam under my freshly discovered name of Nawaf, as in the original certificate, and that is what happened. From then on, all my official papers have been in the name of Nawaf and no one outside the family and a small number of close friends knows this name, none of whom ever calls me by it. I refused to acknowledge, as did my family, my made-up name. We behaved as though it didn’t exist. I went on being known everywhere as Mourid and I publish my books, articles, and poems under the name Mourid al-Barghouti, a name that I love as much as I hate my official name.)

Mounif, who is three years older than I, was in Class Four, and he took me with him, the linen ‘case’—containing my exercise book and one pencil – in my hand. No sooner had we separated in the school corridor and I’d entered the classroom than silent tears flowed down my cheeks. I sat down in the last seat. I felt afraid of all the children. I felt as though I was in the village guesthouse in the middle of all the grown-ups, not in the Class One classroom. When the teacher came in for the first period, I went up to him, crying, and told him, “Take me to Class Four, Sir.”

“Where?”

“To my big brother.”

“To whom?”

“To my brother Mounif.”

“Go and sit down in your seat.”

I went, still crying. The teacher left and came back with Mounif. The moment I saw him I forgot my tears and felt happy. Mounif hugged me, wiped away the tears with his fingers, and sat down close by my side.

“I want to stay with you. I don’t like this school.”

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. We’ll go home together after the last bell.”

That is how I became a pupil in Class One at the Deir Ghassanah school.

The terrifying inspector came, of course. I ducked my head and disappeared beneath the desk, as agreed. Toward the end of the year, the inspector came again and again I dived straight under the desk and held my breath. The plan would have succeeded if the inspector hadn’t asked the children a question – I don’t remember exactly what now. Not one child raised his finger to answer and when he called on one of them to do so, he answered wrongly. I was almost dying of fury because I knew the answer but was forbidden to appear. Suddenly, I popped up from my hiding place, stretched myself to my full height, raised my hand as far as it would go, and cried out, “Me, sir! Me, sir!”

Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti was speechless.

The inspector heard my answer and said, “Bravo, my boy. Correct. But why were you underneath the desk?”

I looked at him and then at Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti standing next to him and said, “Because I’m too young.”

The children laughed and even the inspector laughed, but Mr. ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti didn’t laugh. I sat down. As soon as the inspector had gone, the teacher came back alone, called me out, and started rubbing my right ear between his finger and thumb and shaking my head from side to side.

“What have you gone and done?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Go back to your seat. I’ll handle it.”

He did handle it, though I don’t know how things were smoothed over. In any case, I continued, took the exam, and came top of the class. Abu Marwan went to my parents and congratulated my mother and father, saying, “Take good care of him. God protect him.”

“When the village stopped me from continuing my education, Abu Marwan, I couldn’t take them on. But now the education of my children has become my whole life.”

“May God punish those who were behind it. It wasn’t just you they wronged, Umm Mounif. They wronged all the girls of the village.”

Abu Marwan was the first communist in Deir Ghassanah. He held what in those days were called ‘progressive’ ideas but was a lone voice crying out in a village of massive locks, confident in its darkness, which could defeat him but which he could not defeat. My mother wasn’t ready for marriage because she was still under fourteen. She didn’t know who my father was when they mentioned his name in front of her as a possible groom. In fact, her young heart had been bewitched since she was nine by a boy, a relative of hers, who was somewhat older than she. He used to bring her nice gifts of books with colored pictures and drawings and encouraged her to go to school and made her memorize lines from old poetry. She called her attachment to him true love and never forgot it or tired of recalling it, sometimes as a love story, sometimes as a childish crush, and sometimes as a matter of admiration and need; in her lively imagination he remained a beautiful dream that had been shattered. The boy disappeared from her life the moment they engaged her to my father. He left Palestine to continue his education and returned to marry another woman; he died decades ago at an early age. An entire life has passed since these events, and now, at almost ninety, she still remembers how happy he made her childhood, even though she was a poor orphan, and tells us, often with invisible tears in her eyes, her story, down to the most precise details, as though it were happening to her now; in fact, she demands that I write it down.

She says: “It wasn’t just me they wronged. They wronged your father too. He didn’t know me and had never seen me before in his life. They said, ‘So-and-so is for so-and-so’ and that was that. It wasn’t your father’s fault. They wronged us both. Take it as my testament to you all: ‘Treat your daughters fairly.’ Nobody should impose their will on anybody else when it comes to marriage.”

She no longer wants anything from the story but the story itself, especially now that, except for her, none of the actors is still living. I hear her calling down death on those who prevented her from going to school.

“They died long ago, Mother.”

To which she replies, “I wish they could die twenty times.”

We return from the school and when we reach the square again, someone comes and tells us that lunch is ready at Umm Talal’s. Marwan al-Barghouti phones and I tell him we’re at Deir Ghassanah.

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“You’ll find a splendid lunch waiting for you.”

Tamim, as it happens, has been dreaming of eating musakhan and his hopes are not disappointed. His grandmother introduced him to musakhan in Amman, though always with the reminder that “musakhan’s different in our village” and “real musakhan is the type made in the clay oven,” meaning the musakhan of Deir Ghassanah.

We take our seats around the lunch table in the garden. A whole chicken per person on a large loaf of bread coated with olive oil and then roasted, the chicken split open down the middle, basted in oil, roasted, and then covered in sumac, with lots of minced onions fried in olive oil piled on it and on the bread. The bread has been baked on the ruzuf (hot stones the size of large walnuts) of the clay oven, covered with large quantities of fried onions and sumac, placed particularly in the hollows made in the loaf by the stones. Next to this is a bowl of buttermilk and another of finely chopped green salad as well as tahini and chili peppers. A glass of hot tea with mint or sage comes as a necessary finishing touch to an amazing meal of this type.

Anis says to Tamim jokingly, noticing how much pleasure he is taking in the food, “Don’t eat too much! You’ve still got the poetry evening and I’m afraid you’ll fall asleep.”

We go to the square.

I don’t know where the villagers have found all the plastic chairs, which they have set out in rows. Together we climb the steps to the village guesthouse.

I remind the audience of my last encounter with them, two years before in this very square, and say that tonight I am back, bringing my son with me for an evening of two poets. I read them a number of my new poems and then ask their permission to introduce Tamim to them myself.

“This young man, born in Egypt of an Egyptian mother, who has spent all his life away from you and who saw Deir Ghassanah for the first time only three hours ago, will read poems about Palestine, some written in classical Arabic and some in the Palestinian dialect, and he’ll sing country songs – the ‘ataba, mijana, and dal‘ona. If you think it was his Palestinian father who put Palestine in his heart and mind, you should know that it was his Egyptian mother, Radwa Ashour, who made it her business to nurture his Palestinian identity out of her love for Palestine, so allow me to send her a greeting from here and tell her that Tamim is now reading his poetry in the square of Deir Ghassanah.”

I wanted to speak of Radwa in the square of Deir Ghassanah and to the people of Deir Ghassanah because it wouldn’t be natural if Radwa’s almost total knowledge of everything about the village and its people – their names and life stories, the funny things they’re known for and their sorrows – were to remain one-sided. I wanted them to know her too. I wanted her to enter their houses without a visa from the State of Israel. Radwa will probably never see Deir Ghassanah with her own eyes nor Deir Ghassanah her. Radwa will never consent to line up in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo to ask for a visa.

Then I turn to Tamim and tell him, “If you want to be a poet, you have to begin here, among your own people and on this land.”

As he begins reading, astonishment shows on their faces at his village dialect that is no different from theirs. After reading them his poems, he sings them verses in the ‘ataba and mijana forms:

My country, forgive us if we’ve sinned.

We set off to come to you but to others inclined.

Stitch us in with the threads of your robe’s design.

Shame it were, that we be strangers in your land.

Anyone with a stick waved it in the air. Any woman good at trilling the ululations of celebration did so for this boy come from a country she didn’t know. The girls clapped for a long time and whispered among themselves. Handsome young ‘Abd al-Latif al-Barghouti climbed from the audience to Tamim’s side and started reciting more ‘ataba and mijana, in turn with him. At this (extremely rare) literary celebration of theirs, the people of the village almost forgot that basically they were weary, very weary, in a village sunk in weariness.

Later, nine whole years after we stood there, Tamim and his poetry will take on a different meaning for the people of Deir Ghassanah. They and the people of the surrounding villages will come to hear his verses. The people will fill the school playground. The child born in the Dr. Gohar Maternity Hospital on the banks of the Nile in Cairo will become the young poet of Palestine and its handsome son, with his long flowing verses, his smile, and the message of hope that these brought them, despite the long-lasting national dejection. This was a new son who was ‘theirs.’ This was a son they had discovered unexpectedly as they went about their normal daily acts of resistance and endurance. He had arrived ‘ready-made,’ as though he’d been born standing like that in some distant place and had come back to them.

Your Palestinian message, Radwa, had arrived.

5. The Identity Card

Each of our relatives and friends wants to invite us to lunch or dinner, or offers to go with us in the car to show us the village, or for a walk in the streets of Ramallah and al-Bireh. We prefer walks so that Tamim can see as much as possible of the houses, gardens, trees, and humans. On two separate occasions, I see the Namiq and avoid him, as usual.

By coincidence, when turning the key in the door of the apartment, I discover that a friend is living in the apartment next to ours in the Yasmin Building. He says his wife is working outside the country now and he’s living alone but will cook us an Italian dinner. He also surprises me by telling me that another friend of ours is living in the building. I go to see this other friend, leaving Tamim to rest a little.

We speak about many things. Then I say to him, “Lots of people have asked me why you accepted the position of minister, and I couldn’t defend your decision.”

“Of course. You never will be able to defend it. It was indefensible.”

“So why did you do it, when ministers used to tremble at the mere mention of your name in the days you were an MP investigating their corrupt practices?”

“No one really wants to uncover the corruption and I was getting nowhere. They offered me the job so I took it.”

“And where did all the effort you’d put in go?”

“Nowhere.”

“Do you know someone called Namiq?”

“Namiq al-Tijani?”

“Yes.”

“Did he cheat you?”

“He cheated all of you.”

“I know that.”

“No punishment?”

“From time to time they punish people like that by reducing their rewards. Then they give them many times more.”

“They’ve asked me to supervise a cultural project of which he’s one of the main employees. The project’s faltering and it seems they want to save what can be saved. They said they were looking for someone who could be trusted with the money, someone to curb the expenditures and speed up the work so as to finish the project.”

“Did you agree?”

“I asked for time to think.”

“When do they want you?”

“Next year, in March.”

“Did they offer you a guarantee that they wouldn’t interfere in your areas of responsibility?”

“We haven’t got into details yet.”

“They’ll give you the guarantee.”

“Good.”

“But at the first clash, they’ll abandon you, all of them.”

“So?”

“Accept.”

“Why should I accept?”

“To save what can be saved, my friend!”

I leave my friend and return to the apartment to go with Tamim to Ziryab’s café to show him Taysir’s drawings. I find him in the doorway on his way out. He opens his arms to hug me and yells, “Uncle Abu Saji called!”

I hug him and push him back into the apartment.

“What are you waiting for? Call a taxi straightaway.”

We go to the office and Abu Saji stands, holding up Tamim’s identity card in his right hand.

He hugs him and gives him the card.

He calls a number on his cell phone and hands the phone to Tamim: “Speak to Dr. Ashour.”

My mind is wandering so much I don’t hear what Tamim says to Radwa. I see him hugging the violin, gazing at it and touching it gently, his face full of light and triumph. He was less than two years old and had left our table at the Restaurant Budapest, gone over on his own to the gypsy band, and stood in front of the wooden stage, watching the violins and the players with interest. They were playing the pisirta, their most famous and popular piece, which depicts a flock of birds circling in fluent coordination. At first, the violins seem more delicate than the smile of a sleeping baby; then the playing suddenly increases in tension: a wind has arisen, carrying one of the birds far from its companions. In a crescendo, the feverish music rages, depicting the flock searching for its missing member, or the bird searching for the flock. Then we hear the bird’s song, approaching gradually from the distance until it fills the foreground. All the players have stopped now except for the soloist, whose violin is transformed into a singing bird (this is considered a display of supreme mastery and skill). Finally, the violins return, playing their concluding tune, celebrating the return of the bird and the completion of the encounter with a joyous, festive melody to the enthusiastic applause of the revelers. Tamim kept clapping along with the rest and Radwa and I watched him without interfering, as he wasn’t annoying anyone. Suddenly, the principal player went forward to Tamim, smiling, held out his violin, and left it in his safekeeping. Tamim kept gazing at the violin, touching it and then gazing at it again until the next set began and the player took back his instrument with a kind smile. We got up and thanked him and Tamim came back with us to the table.

For a long while after that night, the Budapest was the only restaurant he would let us go to. Eventually, though, Tamim worked out for himself that most restaurants in the city, and the whole of Hungary, serve their dinners to the accompaniment of similar gypsy bands. The two weeks when he was with me during his half-term vacation and the three months of the summer holiday each year were festivals that he would dream about throughout the months he was at school in Cairo.

Later, after thirteen years of residence in Budapest and after my return to Cairo, I will come to realize, from Radwa and from Tamim, as well as from what I deduce without either saying anything, that Radwa has had to put up not only with my absence and the burdens of raising Tamim, as a baby, a child, and an only boy, and protecting him from harm, she has also had to put up with his insistence on going to Budapest. Budapest was associated in his mind with our being together as a family and with the holidays and fun and a sense of security and freedom. Cairo, on the other hand, was associated with homework and discipline and getting up early and exams. Not to mention that Cairo had expelled his father.

The worst moments for Tamim were when he boarded the Malev plane at Budapest Airport on his way back to Cairo. They were so bad that once he said to his mother and me as we were on our way there, “I hope the plane crashes.” The most beautiful moments in his life were when he boarded the Malev plane at Cairo Airport to go to Budapest. His school holidays began before those of the university where Radwa works and he refused to wait until they could travel together to Budapest. Instead he’d insist on going to me on his own, immediately, while Radwa had to wait for her holidays to begin and then catch up with him. He was less than five years old when he boarded the plane on his own for the first time. She had arranged for the airline to take care of him on the plane and to hand him over to me at Budapest Airport, and at the airport they allowed me to wait for him at the foot of the steps leading down from the plane. No sooner did the plane open its doors than I saw him, flanked by two flight attendants, one holding his right hand, the other his left, a red tape across the stairway in front of them. I went up the steps at a run. They removed the tape and the way he hugged me made it unnecessary for them to demand proof that he was mine. One of the flight attendants told me as I thanked them, “He’s a wonderful boy. He speaks Hungarian like a Hungarian. God protect him.”

The first thing he did was to take off an elegant necklace that hung down to his chest, carrying a card with his and my names on it, my address and my telephone numbers at home and at work.

I told him that I’d been on a plane for the first time when I went to university at the age of nineteen. Then I asked him, “Who hung this card on your chest?”

“The flight attendant told me, ‘This is your identity. It has to stay hung on your chest till you meet up with your father.’”

In Abu Saji’s office in the Muqata‘a, I take the identity card from him, look at it, and hand it back to him.

We thank Abu Saji for getting it done in time to prevent Tamim from being late for university.

We go to a special office where we obtain a permit for departure via the bridge. This departure permit, required for travel to any place outside Palestine, complements the identity card, and has to be shown to the Israeli officer at the bridge.

Tamim’s papers are complete. We can leave any time we want. He won’t be away from his university for long.

Now that he has his identity card in his hand, I ask him, “When do you want to go back to Cairo?”

“Can we stay here a few days?”

“What about university?”

…

“I propose that we go back to Amman tomorrow morning, spend two days with your grandmother Umm Mounif, and then go back to Cairo.”

“Okay. But not tomorrow. The day after.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Anything.”

“Uncle Hikmat wants us to go with him to his house in Jenin.”

“Great. I’ll see a new city.”

“Then we’re agreed.”

Next day we go to Jenin. We spend a whole day there. It’s my first visit too. The conversation revolves around the building of the American University in Jenin and the replanning of the city, and everyone is reassured by the return of normal life to the city. It astonishes me that Jenin is able to offer medical services to our people who remained in their country in 1948 and became Israeli citizens and that Jews also come from there in search of cheaper treatment, especially in dentistry. As a result, Jenin has brought together a large concentration of Palestinian dentists and with each new closure that prevents people from crossing the Green Line they lose money. This was in the years of the high hopes that followed immediately on the Oslo Agreement. The checkpoints, closures, invasions, hunger, detentions, and massacres will come later. The hopes, dreams, relief, convenience of life, education, commerce, and promise of independence will all be destroyed, at first by degrees and then at one go.

Years later, in 2002, the Israeli army will storm the city of Jenin, impose a siege on its refugee camp, and prevent any type of media and any ambulances from getting close. The people of the camp will show great courage in defending it with the few resources they have and the army will manage to enter only after pulling it down over the heads of its inhabitants, house by house, using tanks and bulldozers and withdrawing only after the massacre is over.

We have been subjected to massacres at intervals throughout our lives. Thus we find ourselves competing in a race between quickly realized mass death and the ordinary life that we dream of every day. One day, I will write a poem called “It’s Also Fine”:

It’s also fine to die in our beds

on a clean pillow

and among our friends.

It’s fine to die, once,

our hands crossed on our chests

empty and pale

with no scratches, no chains, no banners,

and no petitions.

It’s fine to have an undusty death,

no holes in our shirts,

and no evidence in our ribs.

It’s fine to die

with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheeks,

our hands resting in those of our loved ones,

surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,

with nothing left but a graceful farewell,

paying no attention to history,

leaving this world as it is,

hoping that, someday, someone else

will change it.

We return from Jenin before dinner to meet with Marwan al-Barghouti, who tells us he wants to register for a PhD at the College of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University and asks Tamim about the requirements for admission and the faculty from whom he might choose a supervisor. We agree that he’ll visit us in Cairo and that Tamim will follow up on it once Marwan has decided on the timing.

Marwan does indeed visit us in Cairo, where Radwa and Tamim receive him, and we do in fact begin the admission process for the doctoral program.

When Marwan returns, Ariel Sharon will be preparing to throw out Ehud Barak and quietly taking the first steps to that end.

One year later, Sharon will take one thousand Israeli soldiers with him on a visit that both he and Barak know is a provocation but on which he insists. The general, set on making the leap to leader of the government, will stroll conceitedly, protected by all those soldiers, through the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque as a way of asserting that it is part of the ‘Land of Israel.’ He knows very well what he’s doing. The general wants a collision; when the collision leads to bloodshed, Sharon will be the solution for the Israelis. They will call on him to lead them.

Sharon got exactly what he wanted. The Palestinians’ response would escalate until it culminated in what would later be called ‘the Second Intifada.’

The Israeli bull had been let loose in the china shop.