The Lady from Tel Aviv E-Book

Raba'i al-Madhoun

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 309

Beschreibung

In the economy class of a plane, the lives of two passengers intersect: Walid, a Palestinian writer, is returning to Gaza for the first time in thirty-eight years; Dana, an Israeli actress, is on her way back to Tel Aviv. As the night sky hurtles past, what each confides and conceals will expose the chasm between them in the land they both call home. Walid soon discovers that Gaza has changed beyond all recognition. Yet through the haze of checkpoints and lives lived across borders, he finds a message from Dana that will change the course of his life. The Lady from Tel Aviv is a powerful and poetic story of love, loss and the desire to belong. The Lady from Tel Aviv will take you to the height of reading pleasure' Elias Khoury Al-Madhoun brings Gaza to life vividly through his characters and his ability to acknowledge the absurd within the tragic.' Selma Dabbagh

Leseprobe

Born in al-Majdal, Asqalan, Palestine in 1945, Raba’i al-Madhoun is one of the Arab world’s rising literary stars. His other works include The Idiot of Khan Younis and The Taste of Separation. The Lady from Tel Aviv is a bestseller in the Arab world. He is an editor at the leading Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-awsat.

Elliott Colla is a prominent translator of modern Arabic fiction, including novels by Ibrahim al-Koni, Ibrahim Aslan and Idris Ali. He currently teaches Arabic literature at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

The Lady from Tel Aviv

Raba’i al-Madhoun

Translated from Arabic by Elliott Colla

This novel is dedicated to my wife Sana. And to its characters, Walid Dahman and his mother Amina, Adel El-Bashity and Nasreddine, who lived with us for a full three years.

Prologue

Tomorrow morning Walid Dahman arrives in Gaza. His mother cannot believe the news. She thinks it is just a rumour or legend. Or a fable, like the story of Palestinians returning to their homeland one day.

Each morning she asks herself, ‘Will my son come back home before I die? Will I have the chance to tell him all those things I was keeping from him? What will he tell me?’

She has asked herself those questions over and over for thirty-eight years. She listens as the wind whispers the words back to her. She murmurs her disappointments to herself while folding them in the wrinkles and creases of her bedclothes. These are the misgivings she goes to sleep with in the evening. These are the questions she wakes to in the morning. When Walid called from London, she could barely hear him say, ‘Mama, I’m coming to Khan Yunis. I’m coming home.’ She could not believe it. She did not believe it. Her words ramble on feverishly, and then suddenly, trembling, she blurts out, ‘Son—what in heaven’s name could be bringing you back here after all these years?’

Walid gets in about 9 am. His visit is no longer just an idea or possibility. No—he bought his ticket to Tel Aviv. He even chose a flight with an arrival time that would get him there in time to eat breakfast with his mother. For thirty-eight years she has been making breakfast and setting it out for me every morning. And now the time has finally come to eat it with her.

He lugs a large suitcase in his right hand, a bag hangs from his left shoulder. He puts his British passport in the shirt pocket right over his heart. He closes the door behind him and begins his journey.

Walid is meeting his mother in an apartment he has never set foot in before. They call it ‘the last bachelor pad’. It is a two-bedroom place on the fourth floor. They have made up the room on the street-side for his stay. They put a wooden bed and a wide couch in his room, along with a simple desk where Walid will sit for hours. In the morning, he will surf news sites, skim his email and reply to some of the messages in his inbox. He will also resume work on Homeland of Shadows. So many of the details of the book—his fourth novel—hang on how this trip goes.

Something that Walid does not know: in the morning he will rise to the light of a hand-me-down sun that has passed through the Jewish settlement of Nisanit. Gradually he will come to understand this strange phenomenon for what it is, and will do what everyone else does with it. In his dreams, he will wash out the sun. He will do his best to wash away all the shadows of possibility so that the sun stays clean all day long. Yes, as the sun begins to venture off once more into the night, the settlers from Dugit will steal it again. They will grab the sun just before it melts, out there, into the folds of the horizon. When that happens, Walid, like everyone else, will feel the light as it breaks out there, beyond the distant line of barbed wire, outposts and observation towers. When the sun returns again the next morning, it will be wearing clothes cast off by others.

Among the other things that Walid does not know: the last bachelor pad on the fourth floor of the apartment building sits just below the roof, which houses a small poultry farm. His maternal cousin, Nasreddine Dahman, constructed the apartment building during the economic boom of the seventies. In those days, Israel purchased Gazan lives by the year and in bulk. It bought bronzed Gazan forearms licked by the noonday sun and stroked by the salty Mediterranean breeze. In this way, a river of pure Gazan sweat flowed into Israel, irrigating the agricultural sector, mixing into the cement of settlements, and washing the dirty streets clean. That river of sweat was even blended into exquisite cocktails and, some said, used to distil drinking water.

In his day Nasreddine was a hulk of a man. He was tall, with broad shoulders and arms that could lift anything. His hands were so rough he could rub the face off a coin with his bare fingers. When he smashed almond shells against the wall, the explosion could be heard by all eighty thousand inhabitants of the Beit Lahia and Jabalia camps.

Nasreddine used to carry his grandfather’s goat on his shoulders. Abbas, his grandfather, had bought the animal so he could rent him out during the mating season. Tan, with honey-brown eyes, that goat had a silky red beard very much like the old man’s. Across Nasreddine’s massive shoulders, it looked like a kitten.

Nasreddine had a handsome face and the kind of dark skin that women go crazy for. Not that Nasreddine appreciated what he had, or even realized its significance. He hated the colour of his skin and said that it was the dull hue of aubergines. Because of this, he could not stand dishes that contained that swarthy vegetable. And he despised pop songs about tawny beauties—in his mind, they were appalling jingles that only drew more attention to the bad luck of men and women born with brown skin. For roughly the same reason, he loathed Gregor Mendel. Every now and then he would rail at the geneticist, calling him an imbecile who lied and fabricated his evidence. One morning, back in high school, Nasreddine had told his biology teacher that if Mendel’s genetic theories were correct, he would have inherited his complexion from his mother and father in equal parts. If the famous Austrian’s theories were at all correct, he would have had at least something from his father—like eyes so blue the sea would envy him, or hair fairer than sandy beaches, or the coppery skin of a pomegranate. Nasreddine’s teacher laughed and his dark-skinned classmates applauded him.

Nasreddine found employment in many trades. When the walls of apartment buildings began to go up in the Jewish settlements, it was on his back and shoulders. When Sderot and Rehoboth and Ramat Gan and Ashkelon—not to mention many other Israeli settlements, towns and cities—threw out their rubbish, Nasreddine devoted himself to hauling the stuff away. His hands planted their apple orchards and vineyards, his back heaved crates of export citrus.

Nasreddine would disappear into Israel for a day or more—sometimes for an entire week—selling his day to Israeli taskmasters. When night descended, he would spread out his exhaustion like a mattress and pull the sheets of darkness over him as covers. Over ten years of work, he had managed to save up a few thousand dollars and this enabled him to build a single-storey house for his parents. Over the years, the sweat of his oldest sons raised that house even higher, floor by floor, to the sky. Like him, they had not been able to sell their labour on the local market, and so went elsewhere. In time, the house became a four-storey edifice that took its name from the man who had first built it. Eventually, the Nasrite Building became the envy of many others still standing and others that died, nameless, under the blades of occupation bulldozers.

Walid knows that Nasreddine has seven children. He remembers the names of the five sons, though their identities are scattered in faces he has only ever imagined. And there are two girls who are more like constellations of letters than actual people. This hazy familiarity was a blessing—it allowed him to imagine his cousin’s children however he liked, changing their faces and personalities at will. Sometimes he imagined them dark-skinned and sometimes fair, but most often as complete amalgamations. Featureless, they drifted in and out of his imagination. When he grew tired of imagining them this way, he made them out to be perfect replicas of the young Nasreddine and assigned them names at random.

But Walid does know some things for a fact. He knows that Abdelfettah is Nasreddine’s eldest—and it is on his account that people call his cousin Abul-Abd. He knows that since birth, Abdelfettah has maintained his position at the head of the siblings list. As the first-born son, he enjoys special status with his father and, with others, a certain respect. Walid also knows that Falah occupied the junior-most rank of Nasreddine’s children. They used to call him ‘the last grape in the bunch’ until he was killed during an incident with an Israeli infantry unit. That happened three years ago on the outskirts of Beit Lahia. When Falah fell off the list, the bunch lost its last. That day the list of Nasreddine’s children was revised and Shafiq was reassigned the position of the youngest.

Of Nasreddine’s sons, only Shafiq was still a bachelor—and it is in the salon of his apartment that Walid’s mother spends most of her time, wallowing in her dread and apprehension. Like a statue of Buddha, she sits cross-legged on a small cotton mattress spread out on a cane mat. Her chin rests directly on her fist. It does not matter whether it is her left fist or her right, since in any case she shifts back and forth from one to the other. Her small head rests right on top, like a small watermelon perched on a bony stick, her elbow buried deep in a thick thigh. She remains like this for a long time and then, when her arms get stiff and tired, she rests them in her lap again.

In this way, Umm Walid goes on hunching over herself. Her contorted poses confirm that certain details of her frame have vanished. Six years ago, when rheumatism began to occupy and settle across her lower limbs, her legs engaged in a unilateral withdrawal. Eventually, they became little more than a horizontal projection from her lower half. Her body began to shrink into itself, as the flesh and fat slowly melted into a shapeless mound around her shanks, until finally all traces of frame and figure had been erased.

Yet Umm Walid’s body maintained a chest as wide as a threshing floor and a memory that laughed at forgetfulness. She remembers what Walid told her on the phone that morning, ‘Mama, I’m coming to Gaza to visit you.’ The words turned her world upside down.

She remembers sharing her doubts with him, ‘Are you toying with me, Walid? My boy, are you really going to come back after all these years?’ She recalls what she remembers, and still cannot believe it. It is too astonishing to believe, so she tries to call up the scene again.

‘Mama, really! I’m coming to Gaza to see you.’

‘Anything’s possible, son,’ she says—and surrenders to the wait.

When her nephews brought Umm Walid to their building about four months ago, she spent the first night at their father’s house, as custom would dictate. Ever since, Nasreddine’s sons have vied with one another to play host to their father’s aunt. They love her dearly as an aunt inherited from their father and as an adopted grandmother for their young ones. The young children’s maternal grandmothers had all disappeared some time ago, swallowed up somewhere amidst the closures, curfews, checkpoints, aerial bombardments and recurrent ground offensives—not to mention the chaos of the Palestinian Authority and the militias.

Zuhdiyya, Nasreddine’s mother and their paternal grandmother, had a stroke that left her half paralysed the day her grandson Falah was killed. Now she spends what remains of her days in a bed in a corner of her son’s apartment. This woman, who used to do all the laundry for the nine people in the family by hand, now waits, with some shame and embarrassment, for the person who will someday come to wash and say prayers over her dead body. The young children only have one real grandmother now, Ruqiyya, Nasreddine’s wife. There are fourteen of them, girls and boys; the oldest is not even six, and the youngest has yet to let out his first real scream. Since there are so many of them, the kids have little chance of getting even a hug from her.

When Umm Walid arrived it was with a warm breast broad enough to hold them all in a single loving embrace. But she changed when her legs stopped working and has now become a kind of radio whose volume and frequency are difficult to modulate. Compensating in talk and chitchat for what she has lost in terms of bipedal ambulation, nowadays she gets around mainly by way of tongue and lips and words. One day, two months after she arrived at the Nasrite Building, deluging them with informative programmes, Emad, Nasreddine’s second son, put forward the following proposal to the younger Nasrites, their wives, sons and daughters: they would implant an electronic chip in a small incision just under her tongue. The chip would help them adjust the broadcast function by remote. They could thus control the volume on their aunt in a convenient, fully civilized manner, or even turn off the torrent of words if necessary. For instance, you might want to change the channel so as to listen to Israeli bullets, aimed precisely to hit any Gazan that had the misfortune of standing in their way. (Then again, perhaps those pedestrians are the lucky ones, since at least in death they might find mercy and rest?) Or you might instead prefer to listen to the ricochets of bullets fired by true patriotic Palestinian militias, competing against one another to provide security, peace and calm? Or maybe you want to listen to something else, like the ululations of women cheering newlyweds to victory and triumph on their wedding night, as in the great conquests of times past?

But everyone began to worry about what might happen to their aunt if she were to undergo this risky surgical operation. Emad reassured them, in the smooth confident voice of a doctor in a white lab coat, ‘Medicine has come a very long way, everyone. God willing, we can also have it inserted, free of charge, in Shafa Hospital here in Gaza. For your information, I will be there personally to supervise the procedure.’

The proposal was received with a roar of laughter, and they applauded their aunt, who would become the first woman in the Gaza Strip to be operated by remote control.

Despite the relief Umm Walid felt at their welcome, she was still prisoner to feelings of exile and uprootedness. The further from home you go, the smaller you appear, she murmured to herself. When she whispered to herself, she did so in instalments because if you speak to yourself continuously and without interruption, you cannot take real pleasure in the words themselves. She knew her homelessness was of an honourable kind. For one thing, her exile was not extreme—it was like that of the people of Acre who were expelled not out of the city entirely, but only to its outskirts. In any case, age-old protocols stipulated that when marrying, a bride must move from her family’s home to the groom’s. Despite all this, she could be counted on to bring up ‘the story of her house’ at any point, as if it might dispel these awful feelings.

Umm Walid’s house was, and still is, the last thing she possesses in a world whose time is about to fold up on her. She has no husband around, nor children. The only thing that has stood by her has been this home of hers. She loves it dearly and is quite possessive about it. Whenever she is alone with her home, she talks to it, reaching her fingers to the nearest wall as if to caress the features of a beloved friend. Sometimes she stretches and leans back in the tiny sitting room. That is the only position that allows her body to stretch out fully and her eyes to wander far and wide like two skiffs lost at sea. She stares up at the slanted, rickety ceiling made of thick sheets of asbestos, and she whispers a little prayer for her house. ‘May God protect you and make you strong, just as you have protected me.’ She rolls onto her side—either side, it does not matter which—and puts her ear to the ground. She listens carefully to how the house breathes. Its breath comes and goes like the soft whisper of a breeze carrying stories from beyond the hills—or is that sound the pulsing of her heart?

She used to speak to her house all the time, complaining to it, listening to its complaints. Each night, she would dream of laying tiles across its old floor. She dreamed of painting its doors sea-blue, and its walls such a bright chalky white that on moonless nights the house would light up the entire alley. One day, she watched as her dream awoke and came true. The Nasrite boys made their aunt’s vision a reality—tiling the floor, painting the walls and its little wooden door exactly as it had been in her dream. Her house became a wedding gown. That is, until an Israeli missile threw a mourning shawl over it. The roof was thrown to the wind. Parts of the walls collapsed. Most of the sparse possessions inside went up in flames.

Umm Walid abandoned her house for internal migration—it was the fourth such time she had done so in her life. During this time she went back to collecting all the old stories, making them into a single master narrative: ‘Our first house, where Walid was brought up, was razed by Sharon’s tanks in 1970. The Jews did that to widen the streets. They did that so they could use jeeps and armoured cars to hunt down the resistance. An Israeli shell fell on our second house during the Sharon era. I cleaned up all the rubble, shrapnel and splinters—then I rebuilt the place and plastered it. Not six months went by when an Apache helicopter fired a rocket into it. It landed right in my flour sacks. Every piece of furniture was destroyed, and a white cloud of flour filled the sky. As God is my witness, the place stood there empty, without a roof or furniture, until my brother’s sons rebuilt it for me. Abdelfettah, Emad and Shafiq put in the floor, they painted it and fixed it up. I went back to live in the house. Four months later I was sitting on the front doorstep when all of a sudden that Apache comes back. It’s hovering over us and making a racket. I say, “Lord, protect us!” Where do you think he’s going to shoot this time? No one’s around, except for a couple of Hamas twerps. One of them’s got a rifle, the other’s carrying something like a water pipe. They’re trying to hide themselves right in front of me in the alley—so I start yelling at them, “What do you think you’re doing, boys? Don’t you have any better place to go? People live here, you know—and now they’re going to shoot at us!” As soon as I say this, the missile hits. I watched myself do two somersaults through the air and land far from the house. It was God’s mercy that the missile landed inside the house, or I would have died along with those two boys. This was the fourth time that my house was destroyed by Sharon. God damn Sharon and everything to do with him—does he think my house is a military post, a training camp? Every time I build a new house, he blows it up—does he think that Hamas leaders follow me around each time I move?’

In the last bachelor pad, Umm Walid spends the night with no one to keep her company. She tosses and turns in bed for hours, and the hours toss and turn with her. Just before midnight, Emad, the last of them to go to sleep, hears her voice as he walks by the apartment door—and it makes him freeze where he is standing. ‘Abu Nasreen, may God keep you safe tomorrow morning when you go to pick up Walid at the Erez crossing. Please let them leave us in peace. Just for a little bit. My heart’s been full of worry ever since he went away. I want my heart to be as clean and bright tomorrow as the laundry I washed for him the day he left.’

Emad closes the apartment door behind him. In silent obedience to Umm Walid’s wishes, he takes his leave.

She shuts eyes heavy with images of the past. Shadows from that last day come rushing back to the surface.

Departure

His mother had finished washing the clothes he would take with him back to Cairo. She was getting ready to hang them on the clothesline when her question halted him in his tracks: ‘Walid, where you going this morning?’

His whole body tensed and a sudden sense of dread made him stop at the front door. God—what does she want from me this morning? The subtext of her question would always come out, eventually.

‘If you’re going out, boy, why don’t you take a couple of rabbits with you to sell at the market?’

He hated rabbits. He hated buying rabbits and he hated selling them. He hated slaughtering them and he hated eating their meat, even when it was served, Egyptian-style, in mulukhiyya soup. Most of all, he hated this question: ‘Walid, where you going this morning?’ He thought of that day, not so long ago, when his mother had sprung that same question, only it was a different time of day. ‘Walid, where you going this evening?’ He stood there then, as he stood there now, waiting. That night she had not hesitated for a moment to ask him to come with her to visit the family of another relative, Amin Dahman, who had just passed away. She wanted them to offer their condolences to his many children and grandchildren, even though they needed no consoling. That night, Walid listened to what was said—what had already been said hundreds of times at other services. ‘He was—may God have mercy on him—a such and such kind of man. He did all this, and he did all that …’ However, Amin Dahman was not a person about whom anything good could be said. The man was a total cheapskate—stingy and spiteful until his dying breath. He was a pathological liar. He lied more often than the average Arab leader, especially the kind who claimed he would stop at nothing to liberate Palestine. He was the kind of man to whom no one should show mercy when he died. The kind of man about whom you might say, ‘God, please send the old fart straight to hell!’

Despite all this, men thronged to offer their condolences when Amin Dahman died. On the way to the service, they began revising the scripts they were reading from and whispering among themselves that the dearly departed deserved the compassionate thoughts of one and all. They prayed that he would be granted forgiveness and mercy in the hereafter.

Umm Walid offered her condolences to the departed’s womenfolk: a handful of sobs pouring into a lake of tears shed by other women. These were women who wept in genuine grief when others suffered loss.

That day, Walid vowed to himself never to attend the funeral of his own father when he died. It would be enough for him to offer and receive his own private condolences. He did not want to have to hear hollow platitudes about his father. When his father did die, he remembered none of these promises. For three straight days, Walid sat submissively listening to every nice word that was said about his father.

Walid turned to face his mother. ‘Mama—I’m not going anywhere.’

A smile appeared on Umm Walid’s face. She knew that he would not leave the house before listening to what she had to say.

She bent over the laundry tub, taking a big cotton towel in her hands and wringing it out. A scented cloud of lye detergent wafted up through the house. From a cotton bag, she took out two wooden clothes pegs, putting one in her mouth while throwing the towel onto the clothesline. She put the other peg on one edge of the towel. With her tongue stuck behind her teeth, she said, ‘Yefteyay, uh fawhhh youyy faffer imm a drumm.’

He laughed at the sound of her tongue tripping over the clothes peg. She snatched it out of her mouth and clipped it onto the other edge of the towel. ‘Yesterday, I saw your father in a dream. God bless the man. You know, he was asking about you.’

Thank God my father hasn’t forgotten me, Walid whispered to himself.

‘He asked about you three times.’

Walid tried to shift the subject away from the dream. ‘Did you tell him it’s my last year in college and that I’m going to graduate?’

But she would not be diverted. ‘You should go tell him that yourself. Go visit him and recite the Fatiha over his grave—he’ll help you find your reward.’

Recklessly—in a mere two words—he took up the challenge, muttering, ‘Won’t/Dontwanna.’ He turned to go, then paused when he thought of the dusty old dictionary where she kept her curses. He could already imagine her saying, ‘He won’t/dontwanna? I’ll dontwanna, boy!’ He does not know which won’t/dontwanna she would use on him—but he knows that when she starts to won’t/dontwanna him, he is going to lose all feeling in his body.

The fear he felt toward his mother’s won’t/dontwanna made him revise his words. ‘Mama, the morning’s still young. I’ll make sure to go to his grave later.’

‘Does the memory of your father mean so little to you?’

‘Mama, Father’s dead, God have mercy on him. I have to go right now. I have to go to the market to buy some things for my trip.’

‘If you don’t go visit your father’s grave now, the whole day will come and go—and you’ll have lost your chance.’

She bent over the laundry tub again. She took out a dress shirt and, in her agitation, threw it roughly on the line. ‘Go see him right now. Go.’

‘OK. I’m going.’ He muttered to himself, As long as my father’s asking after me, I will go and ask after him.

Walid closed the door behind him. He walked along, intending to go just about anywhere or do just about anything other than start his day with a morning visit to the city’s dead. He had only taken a few steps when his mother’s voice caught up with him: ‘Listen to your mother, Walid.’

*

Walid thought about going to the market. But his thoughts were sidetracked by the familiar spectre of the barber Said Dahman, with his skinny lamppost frame and unruly curls flying in the wind. Using water infused with lime leaves, Said was washing down the cement bench in front of his barbershop. By the time the barber had finished carefully arranging the cushions on the bench, the air was saturated with the fragrance of spring and the place had taken on the appearance of a tourist spa. Said sat down and lit himself a cigarette, and let the resort appeal of the place do the work of pulling in customers from the main street.

The scene pulled Walid in. He drifted toward the shop where he knew his friend—and cousin—would welcome him warmly. ‘May your day be nothing but jasmine! All blessings on you, my magnificent friend!’ He would then start to tell Walid a great new story that would, like the fingers of dawn touching a flower, gently pry open his heart. And Said would assure him, as he always did, that he has never told this story to anyone else before. Then he would make Walid promise not to repeat it, since he might need to tell it again sometime, in the event he ran out of stories.

Walid referred to him as ‘Bard of the Camp’, and Said responded enthusiastically to the grandiose title. He gathered the stories of the camp from the lips of his customers and from others. He washed some of the sentimentality out of them to distil the essence of the words. Then he would add his secret blend of salacious innuendo. When it finally came out as a story told to his customers, it was always presented as brand new. Said would swear a thousand times over that it had never been told before.

Walid remembered that he’d already promised to meet Said in the evening. Their mutual friend Fawzi Ashour would be joining them too, and that was a sure sign they’d hear a newly minted fable. Or, if not exactly new, it would be one that had at least been cleaned and pressed in Said’s inimitable fashion. When Walid remembered all this, he changed his mind about going over to see him now. It’s not possible, he thought to himself, it’s not possible to listen to Said’s banter twice in one day, not even if it’s juiced up with irony and outrageous exaggerations. The thought gave him comfort and he turned away.

Suddenly, there was his mother’s voice again: ‘Listen to your mother, Walid.’ It occurred to him that he might try tricking his way out of the visit to his father’s grave with some brazen lying: ‘Oh yeah, Mama. I went to visit Dad today, and recited the Fatiha over his grave … He seems to be in excellent shape, by the way. He was wearing his old navy blue suit—the one with the grey pinstripes. Oh, and another thing: he gave me my allowance, right from his own pocket. He told me to say a big hello.’

What if she believed it and asked him to tell her more? ‘Don’t hide anything from your mother, Walid! What advice did your father give you?’

He would tell her, ‘Sparks were shooting out of his eyes and he asked me: “Has your mother remarried since my death, Walid?”’ The woman would lose the last bits of sanity she still had.

Yet, in that moment, his mother would not miss a beat. No, she’d reach into a store of curses so rare she only pulled them out on special occasions like this. ‘Want your mother wed? You’ll soon be good and dead. You’ll be buried before I’m married, boy. Go bury yourself next to your father and give me a break.’

The image in his mind made him laugh out loud. My mother is unbelievable—and so is that big bag of words she carries around. If you say, ‘Wedlock,’ she might reply, ‘Gets you in a headlock.’ Say, ‘I’m going …’ and she might reply, ‘To hell in a handbasket?’ Say, ‘We’re off …’ and she might answer, ‘To choke on your own drool?’ Say, ‘I’m falling asleep, I’m going to bed,’ and she might declare, ‘Hope the wall falls asleep on top of you!’ And do not say, ‘Mama, I’m on my way …’ because she will definitely quip: ‘To your funeral? Let’s go together!’

But when your mother is happy with you, her words turn from lead to gold. Say, ‘I’m going …’ and she’ll reply, ‘To be happy and secure in life!’ Say, ‘I’m going to go …’ and she will say, ‘To Heaven, my dear?’ ‘I’m on my way …’ becomes ‘To your wedding? We’ll go together—and I’ll sing for you, the happy groom!’

Fine. And when your mother asks you about the others you saw paying their respects at the graveyard? You are going to have to lie once or twice at the very least. And if you don’t get the story straight, you’ll get whacked by your mother’s bag of words!

Walid thought it over gloomily before he finally decided, Forget it, Walid. A visit to your father will spare you a visit from your mother’s tongue.

He continued walking until he reached the main street. When he got to the seed market, he leaned up against a wall and lit a Rothmans’ cigarette. He began to watch the scene in front of him through clouds of smoke.

He was about to leave. But when Mona suddenly appeared, he froze. Mona’s real name was Abdelhamid Awed. The city and its camps refused to recognize him as a gay man. Instead, they talked about him as a her. Mona was carrying one of the old black radio batteries on his left shoulder while walking, as people did, to the gas station at the roundabout. That was the only place where you could get batteries recharged.

Walid trembled. A deluge of old shame washed over his body. Why is Mona here, now? Why is that faggot so determined to damage my reputation? It only happened once, and that was a mistake. What does he want from me now?

He took a deep drag from the cigarette trembling in his fingers, and then exhaled it like a heavy load of remorse. Why did you have to mess with him, Walid? You used to hate the boys who talked dirt, and you used to keep your distance from the kids in the alley. Your father used to call out to you from his room while you were playing in the street. He would yell: ‘Don’t play with those dirty kids, Walid!’ Your father’s words were sacred. He did not have to yell more than once for you to listen. What would you say to your father if he came back from the grave and heard what was going around? Do you want to kill your father all over again, Walid?

It had happened one stormy autumn evening. Gusts of wind blew the pedestrians and loiterers off the streets and alleys. They swept off all the chickens, cats and dogs too. As soon as Walid was sure that no one would see him, he had hurried along, his hands gripping the edges of his open wool jacket while the wind grabbed and played with it. He’d set off behind Mona at a short distance without ever taking his eyes off him. Walid had watched the man walking with the coquettish saunter of a peasant girl carrying a clay water jar on her head. His hips swayed back and forth as he walked. Meanwhile, Walid trembled, unsure of himself. More than once he thought about going back. In the end, it was not Walid, but desire that finally made the decision, and dragged him beyond risk. When, at last, they got to the culvert down by the fields, Walid could not restrain himself any longer. He gave in, and let himself be drawn to Mona’s neck. There, where the empty water pipe was nearly one metre deep beneath the train tracks, four hundred metres down from the Khan Yunis train station, the sound of Walid’s heaving breath was lost in the whistling of the winds. The trembling of his body melted in the shadows of the pipes.

Walid’s eyes filled with tears as he trembled again, apologizing to his father.

*

Walid threw his cigarette butt down on the ground and continued on his way to the graveyard. Within minutes, he was standing in front of his father’s grave, silently declaring his submission to the sovereignty of death. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful…

This mound of cement is the resting place of Ahmad Nimr Dahman.

This is my father. An exact replica of myself, only older. His medium height, his slight build, his complexion, his piercing eyes (which people say that I also have, though I do not believe it). His temper, a tension in the body that you could almost smell. The way he walked, like he was marching in a military parade. I inherited all this from him. Anyone who knew my father would look at me twice and say, ‘This must be Ahmad Dahman’s son.’