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

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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6. The Ambulance

So this is the Qalandya crossing.

It’s changed a lot. It now looks like a terrifying border post between two countries at war, though in fact it’s located between Ramallah and Jerusalem, that is, between two cities in Palestine connected by the natural urban growth that fills the sixteen kilometers separating them.

For three or four years after the Oslo Agreement, this Israeli checkpoint between the two cities was one of hundreds of routine checkpoints to be found at the entrances to cities and villages. Later, though, it gradually transformed itself into a permanent and closely guarded border post, intended to prevent any of us from reaching Jerusalem.

There’s no need to describe the exceptional tragedies that take place here. The mere likelihood of such things occurring is enough to make the scene appalling. It’s enough to picture in one’s mind the density and solidity of the fortifications, their iron-ness and cementness, and then to picture the fragility of the human body, any human body. It’s enough to imagine how a person feels when crammed here for hours waiting for soldiers behind fortified positions to shout through loudspeakers their instructions to stop or to move on through the revolving electronic gates with narrow bars that the Palestinians call ‘the milking stalls’—an apt name; in the Hungarian countryside I have seen better set-ups for managing herds of cows.

Here identity cards and permits are checked, at the slowest possible pace. Here bodies, clothes, shoes, bags, feelings, intentions, and expressions are inspected. Here police dogs grant permission to pass or bark in one’s face with the zeal on which promotions up the ladder of canine rank perhaps depend. Here are cement blocks, bars, soldiers of numerous facial types (Russians, Falasha from Ethiopia, Poles, Americans from Brooklyn, Arab and oriental Jews), tanks, armored cars, earth-movers, troop carriers, and, all day long, wary faces. A fortress has been improvised here. Hundreds of cars disgorge their passengers, who then stand in rows in the open in all weathers, after which they are permitted to pass, on foot and pulling their bags or carrying them on their heads or backs, among the tanks and machine guns, which are aimed and ready to fire if anything unexpected happens. That’s on normal days, so you can imagine how it is today. Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah has been three quarters destroyed and the tanks that surround it day and night are amusing themselves selecting angles at which to bombard the walls, windows, and entrances. They also prevent food and water from reaching the president and his companions and cadres who are trapped with him along with a large number of international supporters from almost all European countries and the U.S.; these include Jews who are critical of the savagery of the Israeli Occupation and who support Palestinian rights. The refugee camps are being invaded. The detainees are in the thousands. It isn’t just the Muqata‘a or just Arafat; the whole country is under siege. The roads between the cities and the villages are blocked.

The surprising suggestion came from my friend Faisal when he learned that I wanted to get into Ramallah.

“Will you make the journey with me in an ambulance?”

“How?”

“Leave the arrangements to me. I’ll phone you tonight to confirm.”

We travel together from Amman to the bridge. The travelers are few. We go through the Jordanian police post, then the Israeli police post, and continue to Jericho. There, instead of going to the bus park at the resthouse, we make our way to the hospital, where an ambulance is waiting to take us to Ramallah via the main highway and through the Qalandya checkpoint without our having to get out. It isn’t guaranteed since sometimes they search ambulances too but we’ve decided to risk it. We wait a while for the preparations for departure to be completed. Then it’s time. The first time I rode in an ambulance was when I accompanied my brother Mounif. The night rain was heavy over Amman Airport as we stood on the airport runway next to the baggage hold in the belly of the plane from Paris, waiting to receive the coffin. The workers brought it down in the rain, an ordinary wooden coffin bearing numerous seals. I was surprised that the coffin wasn’t wrapped in the Palestinian flag. I know that Mounif, though a good citizen, was without official status – neither a king nor a ruler nor a minister nor a top officer – but who ever said that the flag should be used only for those? Mounif had wronged no one in the country, had done no one any harm. He hadn’t arrested anyone. He hadn’t tortured anyone or been the cause of any of our continual defeats. He was good company, generous, and a man of honor, and flags were created for people like him: they are flown over palaces and in offices in his name, in the name of citizens like him, in the name of us all – ordinary people like you and me and him and her. Is the lot of the good citizen to be a naked wooden coffin such as this on a rainy night such as tonight? If I were ruler, I would give instructions that every citizen who departs this life be covered with the country’s flag; that’s the least his still living countrymen owe him. The flag is the flag of the people, of the citizens. The flag is the flag of the ruled, not the ruler.

Many years before, I received a major shock in connection with the flag when the prominent Palestinian historian Emile Touma died before my eyes in the Communist Party Hospital in Budapest. He was suffering from the last stages of cancer and had gone from Nazareth to be treated in Moscow, and from there they sent him Budapest, where he died. Radwa and I visited him daily. George Toubi came from home to accompany the body to Nazareth. Radwa and I bought meters of red, black, green, and white cloth from the market and made a Palestinian flag. We covered the coffin with it and accompanied it to Budapest Airport. At the airport, George stammered a few times before informing us that it would be better to remove the flag from the coffin. Seeing our surprise, he reminded us of something we’d completely forgotten: “They will never let that flag into Ben Gurion Airport. Emile Touma was an Israeli citizen with Israeli nationality. Have you forgotten?”

We had indeed forgotten, Comrade George.

Palestine’s great historian and political writer, who, starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, had raised generations in the struggle, was now an Israeli!

We had indeed forgotten, Comrade George.

We removed the Palestinian flag from the historian’s coffin.

Mounif comes back from exile with no flag. Emile returns to his homeland with no flag. No flag for the exile, no flag for the resident. We put Mounif in the ambulance and climb in next to him, to accompany him to the Takhassusi Hospital, where he will spend the night alone in the hospital refrigerator, awaiting his final farewell following the next day’s noon prayer. I sat next to the coffin, which held within it the secret of his passing, whether natural or by assassination, at the Gare du Nord in the French capital. His mother wasn’t with us and couldn’t have been. She was waiting for us at the house in al-Shmaysani. Only when she saw us returning from the airport would she believe the fact of his death. She had believed but not believed, still unable to accept that God could do all this to her. Sulafa, Ghassan, Ghada, Ghadeer, Majid, ‘Alaa, Talal, and our friend ‘Abida had accompanied his body on the way over from Paris. They had had no choice but to believe. They’d believed so much they’d found it in themselves to joke about the ironies of fate.

At a height of thirty-seven thousand feet, my brother Majid asked playfully, “This is the first time we’ve all traveled together in one plane. Do you think it could go down with all of us on board – Mounif, Sulafa, Ghassan, Ghada, Ghadeer, and me and ‘Alaa and Talal and ‘Abda and Fathi and all the other passengers?”

Talal responded, “Of course it could. The Good Lord could do it. You don’t know Him!”

Next morning, my mother insisted on going with us to the Takhassusi Hospital to see Mounif.

“I want to see his face.”

She kept repeating her demand and we didn’t know if it would be a good or a bad thing. We went down to the basement where the hospital’s refrigerators were located and our friend Dr. Barakat lifted the covering from his face. A strange feeling of tranquility and comfort came over me on seeing him return from exile and in the days that followed I discovered that everyone had been touched by the same tranquility and comfort, which is something I can’t explain. It seems that news of the death in exile of someone living outside his homeland means basically that his family and those who love him will never see him again, as though he were just a news item, heard but not seen. As though, being no longer physically present anywhere, he was lost to them and they to him. As though he had been transformed from a body into an idea. When I saw his face, I felt I had discovered him over again and recovered him from the unknown. I went and touched him with my fingers, as my mother had done. This was his hair, this his brow, this his nose, and these his lips. This was Mounif with all his facial features, for real. We looked at him for the last time before pictures of him, hung on the walls, took his place in our house. My mother chose one picture and put it on the small table next to her bed and I’d often hear her talking to him in the early mornings—“Good morning, dear” in the mornings and “Happy feast day, dear” on the feasts – and she still talks to him from time to time; indeed, she consults him on decisions she intends to take, apparently genuinely waiting for answers. When I used to take her to her room at the end of the evening to sleep, I’d kiss her, cover her, put out the light, and say “Good night,” leaving the door ajar as she didn’t like it closed completely, and I’d hear her say, “Good night, dear.” At such moments, I wouldn’t know if she was talking to me or to the picture of Mounif.

At the hospital in Jericho, we say hello to the driver and get into the ambulance. Faisal and the doctor get in next to him and the nurse and I get in the back.

A sudden shudder runs through my body and I don’t know where to look to avoid seeing what I just have.

My seat is on the oblong bench fixed to the right-hand wall of the vehicle, which is normally kept for nurses or those accompanying the patient, while the opposite wall is allocated to shelves for medicines and medical equipment. On the floor between the vehicle’s closely spaced walls lies an old woman, her eyes opened to their widest, looking at me, and seemingly staring right into my eyes – mine and no one else’s. Her skin is no more than a blackish coating, tightly stretched and clinging to the bones of the face. Her eyes maintain their stare; indeed, it seems to me that they follow me no matter where I move my head.

Minutes pass before I notice the medical tubes connected to this very thin, very long, body, which fills the entire length of the vehicle up to the back door.

The nurse sits down next to me, monitoring lines and numbers on the instruments fixed to the opposite wall. So she’s alive. Why doesn’t she lower her eyes? Why doesn’t she make some movement to show that she’s alive, and why won’t she change the direction of that gaze of hers that keeps following me?

This time I am to enter Ramallah in the company of death.

As if death, like a creature of legend, were both outside and inside, behind the windows and in front of them. It seems impossible to get him out of one’s mind. He’s been in the city throughout the years of the Occupation and he’s close at hand here in this ambulance. The nurse explains: “We have to run an MRI on her in Ramallah. She’s being treated and there’s a chance she’ll get better, God willing. The poor woman contracted the disease while we were under siege. I just hope we find a place for her at Ramallah Hospital. Even the corridors are bursting at the seams with the martyrs and the wounded from this intifada.”

Then he suddenly asks me a question that sends a chill through me: “Did you know Hussein al-Barghouti? He’s from Kobar, but the Barghoutis are all one family so I expect you know him.”

“Of course, God rest his soul.”

It seems he hasn’t heard my answer, because he proceeds to tell me about Hussein.

“God rest his soul – a poet, a university professor, a playwright, and a very nice-looking young man. I used to see him at Ramallah Hospital and took a liking to him. I was upset when he died.”

The face of Hussein, who is gone and not gone, forces itself upon me.

The nurse realizes that I am no longer in the ambulance or following what he’s saying.

Hussein al-Barghouti and I are sitting in the Ziryab Café, next to the elegant fireplace designed by our friend Taysir Barakat, the owner. There are a number of friends with us and Taysir has interrupted his fascinating discourse to welcome another guest or give instructions to his assistants. Others join us until our table looks like an open seminar next to the fireplace, where the wood crackles and the sparks dance as the Ramallah rains drench the city. Hussein smokes with relish as he discusses poetry, the novel, philosophy, and politics without a pause between sentences, as though afraid someone will interrupt him. He reminds me of the charming verse by Mayakovsky that goes,

The words exit my mouth

Like whores from a burning brothel.

That is how he usually was, but this time his manner seems strange – tense, and difficult to read. Taysir joins us and I tell him I like his new woodcarvings with which he’s covered the walls of the café and ask him to give me a tour so that I can look at them more closely. Tasysir draws on wood using colors, carving, and burning; his talent is recognized by specialists and critics and has taken him to arts exhibitions in a number of countries around the world, always with success. He approaches life as though it will last a quarter of an hour, not more, loves to tell jokes, and has a fund of amusing adventures. He hiked from his birthplace of Gaza to Ramallah on a tour aimed at introducing him to the cities and villages of Palestine. As soon as he saw the mountains, he fell in love with them and their colors and contours and decided never to return to Gaza, which is as flat and tightly stretched as an ironed sheet. He picked up his paints and brushes and went around the villages, staying in any house that would take him in or renting a room wherever possible, painting, carving, sculpting, designing, and coloring. He put his artwork in the Ziryab Café in the heart of Ramallah, elevating the idea of café and restaurant to the level of gallery and cultural forum, which also gave him an opportunity to provide jobs for a number of young people. In the evenings, his wife and children join him for their almost daily family get-together. After we have moved away from the table and are on our own, I tell him I’m worried about Hussein, saying he doesn’t seem normal that night and asking him if he knows anything I don’t. As he is about to answer, a waiter comes to him for help with a problem, so I leave him to take care of his business. He turns back, though, and tells me in a low voice, “I’ll explain later.”

On my way back to Hussein’s table, I notice Namiq al-Tijani sitting at a distance and feel an urge to vomit. I leave the place immediately and explain to Hussein from my cell phone that I saw the Namiq, felt disgusted, and left. He laughs and says to me, “That Namiq is going to haunt you. He’ll never leave you alone if you don’t take the decision to expel him from your head.”

I do indeed run into Namiq al-Tijani everywhere and he does spoil everywhere for me. He seems to be more than just himself, more than just one person.

I become busy, don’t return to the Ziryab Café for three or four days, and don’t see Hussein. One day, I go out to look for a gift or a bunch of flowers to give to a lady who has invited me to eat fish for lunch having heard me singing the praises of fish on some occasion. At the crossroads in front of Rukab’s shop I find myself face to face with Hussein, who is carrying his only child Athar in his arms and holding his wife Petra’s hand. We greet one another and I ask him how he is. I don’t tell him that I had been worried about him that evening at the Ziryab. I say only, “Put my mind at rest. Are you okay?”

“I wish I could say that.”

I turn quickly to look at Petra’s face in the hope of finding something in it that would show that perhaps he’s joking but find her stony-faced and unaware that I’m looking at her.

“What do you mean?”

“You won’t be reassured, my friend.”

“You have bad news?”

“I have one of two possible things – AIDS or cancer.”

…

“No, I swear it’s the truth. Just as I told you.”

“Come and let’s sit down somewhere.”

“No. The doctor told me that the symptoms that I was complaining of are.… ”

Interrupting him, I say, “When did you go to the doctor?”

“A while ago. He said, ‘We’ll run some test for AIDS first and if they’re negative, you have cancer.’”

…

…

“Are they running the tests?”

“Of course. What else could I do?”

“When are the results due?”

“In a week.”

I look at Petra and Athar, and once more at Hussein. I say goodbye to them, do not continue on my way to lunch, and make my excuses to the lady.

The mountains of Kobar, its valleys and almond groves, as well as the streets of Ramallah and the corridors of universities, knew Hussein al-Barghouti by his long hair in falling curls around his exceptionally beautiful face, as also by his smile, his simple sandals, and his unkempt clothes, consisting usually of t-shirt and shorts. The cafes knew him from the gatherings at which he sat surrounded by students of his who loved literature and poetry and admired his writings and personality. No one knew him at Ramallah Hospital. He had to wait and receive the terrifying results from the hands of a female nurse with an expression bound to discourage optimism in anything that might originate from her.

Having found out that he’d been cleared of AIDS, he danced with joy … at having cancer.

Cancer was his own battle. It would never include his son Athar or his wife Petra.

When Athar was happy, he would ‘tweedle’—“o-oh, o-oh, o-oh”—so Hussein took to jumping around the streets of Ramallah repeating “o-oh, o-oh, o-oh” and postponing that point in time – a point he had no desire to either name or fix – when he would take in properly the meaning of a confirmed diagnosis of cancer and at which he would begin his mythic preparation for death. We followed him as he “walked to his destiny alone,” as he would write later in the book that reached me after his death and to which he gave the significant title I Shall Be among the Almonds:

I no longer have a place in this intifada beyond the boring routine of visits to the hospital, now my Kaaba or final Wailing Wall. The only space that can be made for me there is among the newborns on the top floor or in the refrigerator for the dead in the basement.… The wounded and the dead are everywhere, and I’m lost, asking for the hematologist. A harried nurse responds to my question with “Can’t you see we’re dealing with an emergency?” and I realize that I’m surplus to requirement, a parasitic patient walking to his destiny alone.

As I rewrote his death in my introduction to an Egyptian edition of his book, I did not mention the painful part of Hussein al-Barghouti’s story, which is that some members of the family didn’t recognize his value when alive. Some of them made fun of his ‘womanish’ hair, of his khaki Bermuda shorts, and of his habit of giving lectures in bare feet, and the poet was able to claim his place of honor among his family only through death. Even those writers who were consumed by jealousy at his skill competed over who loved him most in death.

The nurse is resting his head against the side of the ambulance, his eyes open, having graciously left me to my moment of withdrawal. The ambulance is taking the usual route from Jericho to Ramallah. There are no checkpoints on the road and everything appears to be going fine.

I can’t take my eyes off the woman. I want her to come to, to utter a word, to complain how bad she feels, so that I can reassure her; to ask about her children, so I can tell her their news. Imagination takes me to one in the Gulf, another in prison, a third held up at the bridge. Impossible: it’s clear she has no children and no husband. If my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, God rest her soul, had found herself in this situation while I was in Budapest, her daughter was in Amman, and her son was in Kuwait, would she be stretched out here like this woman? Is this woman, a stranger, lying here unconscious, aware that I now travel under her protection, that she is keeping me safe, colluding in my plans and collaborating with me, a child of her country whom she has never seen before and certainly will never see again from now till the end of time?

The ambulance stops suddenly and two Israeli soldiers approach.

To start with, one of them asks for the driver’s papers. The two of them talk in Hebrew for a few minutes. Then the driver comes back and takes other papers from the ambulance and hands them over to the soldier, who examines them thoroughly. The soldier asks for the rear door of the vehicle to be opened. The two soldiers stand side by side but, before the driver can open the door all the way, they look, first into my face, and then into that of the sick woman. One of them, turning away, shouts, “Close door. Finish. Go from here.”

The soldier hasn’t been able to look at the face of the woman lying stretched out in the ambulance. We leave them and pass through. The nurse tells me, “You have the right glasses. They thought you were her doctor.”

I think to myself, did this woman take part in the smuggling of two Palestinian writers without even knowing? When Faisal turns round to talk to me after we resume our journey, he sees her face and looks upset. I hear the doctor telling him what’s wrong with her but can’t make out his exact words. Faisal suffers from a slipped disc and I have chronic neck pain.

“To be honest, an ambulance is the right place for us. We’re not infiltrators. You have an identity card and I have an identity card. We’re citizens. But we’re too old to put up with ‘Qalandahar.’”

I laugh at the term, thinking it must be something Faisal has made up, but he explains that it’s the people who have given the Qalandya checkpoint this name, derived from Qandahar in Afghanistan.

On our left, the settlement of Maale Adomim sprawls and spills over till it almost reaches the road. We’re close to the Qalandya checkpoint now, though it hasn’t appeared yet.

Suddenly I feel a dryness in my throat.

As though I’d swallowed dust.

No hand has throttled me but I feel as though a hand had throttled me.

It’s the Wall.

The Wall, which separates Jerusalem from Ramallah and from all the lands of the Bank.

The Wall wasn’t here last time. No news bulletin, statement of condemnation, official data as to its length, breadth, and height, or even photograph or television image, can convey its ugliness when seen by the eye. It’s enough to see a person, any person, of flesh and blood walking next to the Wall to feel upset. That person doesn’t have to be Palestinian, tired, wounded, an old man, a child, or in any way distressed to feel upset. Just seeing a person and this wall in the same frame is enough to send a shudder down one’s spine. It’s enough to see a cat prancing in its shadow or a nearby tree moved by the breeze or an empty can discarded at its foot to feel that nature – the air, winds, plants, weather – has been subjected to a cruel and disfiguring intervention. A thing of cement that winds its way among the houses, topped by army towers at irregular intervals. Reports, articles, speeches by politicians and campaigners for solidarity with the Palestinian people all speak of its disfigurement of the land. What I see, over and above that, is its disfigurement of the sky. Yes! This wall disfigures the sky itself. It disfigures the clouds that pass above it. It disfigures the rain that falls upon it. It disfigures the moonlight that touches it and the rays of the sun that fall next to it. The issue, however, certainly isn’t only one of aesthetics. The Wall is surrounded by lies, some of which have been passed off on our worthless media, which repeats them idiotically. Lies such as that the Wall is a ‘security’ wall. The Wall has nothing to do with security. On the contrary, it is the wall of the great historic theft, the theft of more land and trees and water, the wall of the displacement of Palestinians following the exhaustion of their resources through their separation from their lands, crops, and water basins. It is built on land belonging to the Bank and if it were for security, as Israel claims, it would have been built along the 1967 borders. It is the wall for the emptying of the Bank of the greater part of its inhabitants through its inhibition of industry, agriculture, education, and geographical and social contact among people. It is the wall of the Silent Transfer. This wall puts houses in prison. Prisons the world over are designed for individual criminals who, justly or unjustly, have been found guilty. This wall has been designed to imprison an entire human community. To imprison a morning greeting between neighbors. To imprison a grandfather’s dancing at his grandson’s wedding. To imprison the handshakes exchanged at a ceremony of mourning for the death of a relative. To imprison the hand of a mother and prevent it from holding her daughter’s when she gives birth. To separate the olive tree from the one who planted it, the student from his school, the patient from his doctor, the believer from his prayers at the mosque. It imprisons dates between teenagers. The Wall makes you long for colors. It makes you feel that you are living in a stage set, not in real life. It imprisons time inside place. The Wall is a word that has no definition except in the dictionary of death. It is the fear felt by our children and the fear felt by the others’ state, for the Wall is the fear of both its sides. This is what makes it so satanic. International resolutions, court cases, the voices of Israeli peace advocates and of Israelis who believe in the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and self-determination will never bring this wall down, I tell myself. At the same time, I am confident that it will disappear one day by some other means. This wall will be demolished by our refusal to become used to it. It will be demolished by our astonishment at its existence. This wall will fall one day but now, in this moment of sorrow of mine, I see it as strong and immortal. The only things stronger than this wall are the birds, the flies, and the dust of the road. Then I tell myself, this is the Lesser Wall. The Greater Wall is the Occupation. Isn’t the Occupation a wall too? I tell myself that I have lost all feeling. I tell myself, if nothing makes me cry any more, perhaps I would do better to laugh. And laughter would be easy: the victims of the ghettoes of the West reintroducing them in the East! In the third millennium, the Jews putting themselves in a ghetto again! And of their own free will, this time. Some of Israel’s more intelligent politicians have said the same but no one has paid any attention. In the internal struggle over Israeli decision-making, the less intelligent side always wins – the side that sees the solution to all problems in ‘absolute force.’ And in the debate between the civilian and the military minds of the Jewish State, the military always wins. This is the khaki state that throughout history has disliked colors. It is not enough that the Wall has no color; it also spoils all the colors around it. It spoils the embroidered dress of a peasant woman who waits four hours in front of one of its gates or beneath one of its towers. It spoils the school uniform of a small girl waiting impatiently for permission to get to her first class.

The Wall tempts its victims to jump it, if only in their dreams.

It tempts the strong and sturdy to wish that God had made them flying birds or climbing creepers.

It tempts one to infiltrate and penetrate it, as in a cartoon fantasy.

It tempts one to think of rock crushers, drills, and explosives.

It tempts one to make an unparalleled victory of the simple ability to move.

Israel has decided to put us in cans. Every crossroads is a cement can that we are stuffed into. Our movements, on the spot or in any direction, are hostage to a signal from their hand. Yes! A signal from their hand and no other. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation? The Occupation is stagnation and the inhibition of movement to the point of paralysis. It is the inhibition of great ambitions and a decline into small dreams. It is the rejoicing of the oppressed over victories that dissipate as fast as hurrying clouds.

Yes! One of the things for which the Occupation will not be forgiven is its narrowing of its victims’ ambitions. It hurls them, or most of them, into an abyss of small wishes and simple dreams. As a Palestinian whose will, like his land, is occupied – his history subjected to erasure and denial, the map of his country spread out on the table of the mighty masters, who have thrown on top of it a pair of super-charged metal scissors, ever ready to set to work – I fully realize that the repressed and oppressed of this world do not float high among the clouds of the sublime or of absolute beauty. They dig deep in the earth, looking for a living root, a viable shoot, a tree that may one day grow. Yes! The existential crises so long that they turn to boredom, the daily aggressions that expand to fill decades, imprison their victims in simple dreams, such as the dream of crossing a street safely, of a child’s reaching his primary school and returning from it on the school bus and not on the shoulders of his stunned schoolmates, of a safe stroll on the beach. The dream of there being anesthetic at the hospital, a glass of water when one is thirsty, a permit to visit the son in detention, idle chatter in the café, success in renewing one’s passport, the ability to bury one’s grandfather in his place of birth, to stay five minutes longer with the beloved, or to get the nod from a gum-chewing teenager in uniform to allow a lady to reach the maternity hospital before she’s forced to deliver her baby at his feet. And just as a reminder, I say to those who are willing to listen, dreams become more dangerous when they are simple dreams.