A Map of Absence Read online

  I went into the first room. In the middle was a table with breadcrumbs and the remains of a meal on top. There was another room behind it. It had two black iron beds. I thought the one that was carefully made must have been the dead young man’s bed. I saw on the other bed blankets piled on top of something. I pulled myself together and tried to get close to it but my courage failed me when I saw an open mouth and two glassy eyes.

  The man was dead, like everything else in the room, the small dark chest, the desk beneath a striped tablecloth, and the mirror marked by yellow dots as if it were a reflection of an ugly face. Nothing was alive in the room except the clock mounted on the wall, its timepiece swaying in a dance, and singing a tick tock tune.

  Translated by Wen-Chin Ouyang, Michael Beard and Nora E. Parr

  JABRA IBRAHIM JABRA

  Hunters in a Narrow Street

  When you arrive in a big city you are so excited that you do not deliberate too long about what hotel to stay in, because the streets are crying out to have you walk in them, and you feel an air of expectation about the city as if all these years it had been decking itself out for your benefit. You want to rush out and see it all in an hour; and within that hour are compressed the adventures of your dreams. Nothing is so exhilarating as the sight of unknown buildings and unfamiliar faces, after the eagerness that has worked up in you during the long journey and the longer preparations before it. And was Baghdad a big city? I had asked someone in Damascus. ‘It certainly is,’ came the answer. ‘There are fourteen cabarets in it.’

  I, however, on the first day of October, 1948, felt little exhilaration and less excitement on my arrival. It was not because I had seen London and Paris and Cairo and Damascus. I had forgotten my travels and could not remember what any city in the world looked like – any city, except one. Only one city did I remember, and remember all the time. I had left a part of my life buried under its rubble, under its gutted trees and fallen roofs, and I came to Baghdad with my eyes still lingering on it – Jerusalem.

  Some eighteen months before, we had moved into our recently built house on the Katamon hill in New Jerusalem. The house was the fulfilment of my father’s dream, and the result of a lifetime of toil and saving. On my return from England after World War II, I had chosen the spot myself on an eminence which on one side bordered on the hills of the country, and on the other on the beautiful road that wound its way to the heart of the city. But it also overlooked the Jewish quarter of Rehavia, whence I often saw from the balcony odd couples coming up and ringing our bell. They were attracted by the arched entrance, they said; by the geraniums on the white-stone staircase; and by the three-pillared tall windows on the second floor which, catching the sun, rose like a flame over the valley. ‘Do you let rooms?’ they asked. Sometimes we offered them coffee and they commented on my furniture and books, and left effusive with admiration for the ‘Arab way of life’.

  Next door to us lived the Shahins in a house twice as big as ours. They were a patriarchal family: the grandparents, the parents and the children made the house noisy and suggestive of tribal happiness, on which my brother and I commented freely in our quiet rooms. But hardly had two months passed before Leila Shahin, the eldest of the children, and I took eager notice of each other. The first few times we met we were as secretive about it as we could be. We walked about the rocky unbuilt-up part of the hill in the dark, often defying the mad barking of stray dogs, until I said, ‘Look here, Leila, I love you, and I can’t keep it secret any longer.’

  She had long chestnut hair always rather untidy, brown eyes, a large mouth and fair skin. We went for long drives in my small Morris, and were careful not to be seen by too many people. Two or three times I took her to a Jewish café in Rehavia where we could dance. Much to my surprise one evening her mother called on us, introduced herself and had a long chat with my mother. I understood. When she left I told mother about Leila and she said, ‘Isn’t it shameful of you both to have an affair behind our backs? Is that what you learned at Cambridge?’

  ‘But I love her,’ I said.

  ‘I will not hear such shameful talk. If you love her, do something about it. But remember, having just built this expensive house we’ve got no money left for a wedding just now. Besides, your father has been only eight months dead.’

  After that Leila and I met openly and our families exchanged visits. More often however we met when they could not see us, until Leila once said, ‘Will you ever kiss me enough? It’s terrifying.’ And I said, ‘I want you like mad. We must get married soon. Will you come and live with us?’ ‘Yes, Yes, Yes,’ she said jubilantly. ‘It’s like going to the neighbours and not coming back ever after, isn’t it?’

  Some nights later we were woken up by a succession of violent explosions that rocked our house. Jewish terrorists had been killing the British for several years, blowing up government offices, army barracks, officers’ clubs. Now they had started on the Arabs. United Nations had recommended splitting Palestine in two, and the terrorists were determined to achieve the bloody dichotomy. Barrels of TNT were set off in market squares, killing about fifty people at a time, and now it was the beautiful white and rose stone houses of the Arabs they were after. When we went out, trembling with fear, to see what had happened, we saw three great heaps, about three hundred yards away, smoking into the cold air of early dawn. Some British soldiers were soon there to investigate the rubble.

  Our quarter, being on the fringe, was in the grip of terror. Three or four people produced revolvers with which they said they would defend their homes. A villager offered me a rifle, an old German Mauser, with exactly five rounds. My brother bought it on the spot, but neither he nor I had ever fired a shot in our lives. The villager showed us how to fire, but we could not spare a single bullet for a live try.

  That night we did not sleep. The terrorists did not come. Three nights later there was a mad howling storm. It thundered and rumbled and rain fell ferociously for hours. The power suddenly failed, and the whole quarter was in foul darkness. Every now and then the lightning gave us a glimpse of the hills through the uncurtained windows. The rifle stood on its butt in the corner.

  Nothing could be heard but storm and thunder. And we dozed off, dressed in our overcoats. It was December. Then there was a blinding flash, and the house shook as in an earthquake, and the glass was blown in, crashing on the floor. I was stunned. My mother screamed. Yacoub dashed to the rifle in the corner and through the now paneless window tried to fire – at nothing that he could see, but he thought he had heard a car shooting off at the same time as the explosion. But no fire came out and he pulled the trigger again. The rifle might have been a toy. It jammed.

  When I looked out, I cried in horror. The Shahins’ house was a great heap of masonry, faintly perceptible through the black night. We ran downstairs and out into the howling wind. What could we do? In a few minutes other people came. We started turning the stones over to see if there was any life trapped underneath. ‘God, keep Leila alive, keep Leila alive,’ I was saying to myself, and like a madman I skipped about the rubble and the great stones and the iron girders in vain hope. Then I felt something soft hit my hand. I dug it up. It was a hand torn off the wrist. It was Leila’s hand, with the engagement ring buckled round the third finger. I sat down and cried.

  During the next day the engineers of the British army unearthed eleven corpses piecemeal. Leila’s hand was returned to her battered body. One funeral was enough for the collective family burial. What was I to do to the faceless anonymous enemy? In our impotence, unarmed and defenceless, we vowed revenge. But the quarter on the hill was open and exposed to the nocturnal terror, like a helpless supine woman. In twenty-four hours it was evacuated. We found a two-room house in nearby Bethlehem. We had not spent three nights in our new refuge when our house, pillars and all, was turned into another large weird mass of ruins. Yacoub and I went to see the iron girders sticking out of the wreckage and pointing twisted fingers to a cold blue sky. The ruins of blown-up
houses stood in a row, as in a nightmare.

  Jerusalem was an embattled city. The most unorganised, the most unarmed collection of volunteers, trying to stop the fanning out of a highly organised, well-armed and ruthless force: a few erratic bullets against mines of gelignite. Soon the British army left the fighters to their fate, and hell set into the vacuum on its trail. We were cut off from Jerusalem and the Arabs of the city took shelter behind the great Ottoman walls, where their rifles could keep off the armoured cars of the Jewish Skull Squadrons. Night and day were filled with gun-fire.

  Arab villagers were massacred in the treacherous dark by men they had never seen, and nothing saved our town of Christ except the desperate volunteers who entrenched themselves in the hills and declivities around the town, and grimly waited and sniped and forayed and retired. We all bought our own rifles (I had to buy another one) despite the exorbitant prices (who knowns what group trafficked with those rusty outmoded weapons and came out with fearful profits?), and we would take our positions in what we considered strategic points, to keep the enemy off until the Arab Legion came to the rescue. On clear nights, we went down the terraces of the valley of Bethlehem; I could not help wondering what diabolical irony made of such a lovely place, thick with olive trees, the scene of our ill-equipped defiance of hate. Where the angels had appeared to the shepherds two thousand years ago to sing of joy and peace to men, we daily faced the ever-spluttering messengers of death.

  And time dragged and sorrow came upon sorrow without relief. Despite all our fears we had preserved a little hope, but each new day ate further into our hope. It was a war, we were told. It was the greatest practical joke in the world, and the most tragic one. There were armies; there were guns; there were generals; there were strategists; there were mediators. But the dislodged and the dispossessed multiplied. There was a truce, yet the refugees came in greater numbers. They carried their rags and their bundles, and buried their children unceremoniously under the olive trees. Amidst the wild flowers rest the torn pieces of flesh, human and animal inextricably twined. In the spacious courtyard of the Byzantine Church of Christ’s Nativity slept a tangled tattered mass of peasants and mules and camels, and only the braying of asses was louder than the hungry crying of children.

  In the town square an enterprising café proprietor had installed a battery of radio with a loudspeaker. Wireless sets were becoming cumbersome pieces of furniture since the cutting off of power in New Jerusalem. So the people would congregate in thousands in the town square to hear the news on the small café radio, three times a day, at eight, at two, at six, and when the hour was announced by the broadcasting station with its usual six pips, a hush would fall upon the listening crowd, all eager for one item of good news. Every day at the appointed hours the thousands gathered in hope and fifteen minutes later dispersed in agony. ‘When Jerusalem is open again …’ that was the phrase on every tongue. ‘When Jerusalem is open again …’ They would climb up the mountain of Beit Jala to have a look at the city they loved spreading the northern horizon in a haze of pale violet, no more than six miles away, but as good as a hundred thousand miles away, a city of dreams looming beyond a valley of death.

  In the Deserts of Exile

  Spring after spring,

  In the deserts of exile,

  What are we doing with our love,

  When our eyes are full of frost and dust?

  Our Palestine, green land of ours;

  Its flowers as if embroidered of women’s gowns;

  March adorns its hills

  With the jewel-like peony and narcissus;

  April bursts open in its plains

  With flowers and bride-like blossoms;

  May is our rustic song

  Which we sing at noon,

  In the blue shadows,

  Among the olive trees of our valley

  And in the ripeness of the fields

  We wait for the promise of July

  And the joyous dance amidst the harvest.

  O land of ours where our childhood passed

  Like dreams in the shade of the orange-grove,

  Among the almond-trees in the valleys –

  Remember us now wandering

  Among the thorns of the desert,

  Wandering in rocky mountains;

  Remember us now

  In the tumult of cities beyond deserts and seas;

  Remember us

  With our eyes full of dust

  That never clears in our ceaseless wandering.

  They crushed the flowers on the hills around us,

  Destroyed the houses over our heads,

  Scattered our torn remains,

  Then unfolded the desert before us,

  With valleys writhing in hunger

  And blue shadows shattered into red thorns

  Bent over corpses left as prey for falcon and crow.

  Is it from your hills that the angels sang to the shepherds

  Of peace on earth and goodwill among men?

  Only death laughed when it saw

  Among the entrails of beasts

  The ribs of men,

  And through the guffaw of bullets

  It went dancing a joyous dance

  On the heads of weeping women.

  Our land is an emerald,

  But in the deserts of exile,

  Spring after spring,

  Only the dust hisses in our face.

  What then, what are we doing with our love?

  When our eyes and our mouth are full of frost and dust?

  Translated by Mounah Khouri and Hamid Algar

  EMILE HABIBI

  Excerpt from The Secret Life of Saeed, The Pessoptimist

  I found that we were then at a crossroad between Nazareth and Nahlal, passing the plain of Ibn Amir. The big man signalled to the policemen through the glass window separating him from ‘the dogs’. They led me out and stuffed me in between the big man and the driver. I made myself comfortable and sighed, breathed the fresh air deep, and remarked, ‘Oh, I see we’re in the plain of Ibn Amir.’ Obviously annoyed, he corrected me: ‘No, it’s the Yizrael plain.’

  ‘What’s in a name?’, as Shakespeare put it, I soothed him. I spoke the line in English, causing him to murmur, ‘Oh, so you quote Shakespeare, do you?’

  ***

  As we descended further down into the plain toward its city of Affulah, with the hills of Nazareth to our left, the big man began reciting to me the principles governing my new life in prison, the etiquette of behaviour toward the jailers who were my superiors and the other inmates who were my inferiors. He promised, moreover, to get me promoted to a liaison position. While he was going through these lessons, I became ever more certain that what is required of us inside prison is no different from what is required from us on the outside. My delight at this discovery was so great that I exclaimed joyfully, ‘Why, God bless you, sir!’

  He went on: ‘If a jailer should call you, your first response must be: Yes, sir! And if he should tell you off, you must reply: At your command, sir! And if you should hear from your fellow inmates engaging in any conversation that threatens the security of the prison, even by implication, you must inform the warden. Now, if he should give you a beating, then say—’ I interrupted him with a proper response, ‘That’s your right, sir!’

  ‘How did you know that? Were you ever imprisoned before?’

  ‘Oh, no. God forbid, sir, that anyone should have beaten you to this favour! I have merely noticed according to your account of prison rules of etiquette and behaviour that your prison treats inmates with great humanitarianism and compassion – just as you treat us on the outside. And we behave the same, too. But how do you punish Arabs who are criminals, sir?’

  ‘This bothers us considerably. That’s why our minister general has said that our occupation has been the most compassionate on Earth ever since Paradise was liberated from its Occupation of Adam and Eve. Among our leadership there are some who believe that we treat Arabs inside prisons
even better than we treat them outside, though this latter treatment is, as you know, excellent. These same leaders are convinced that we thus encourage them to continue to resist our civilisational mission in the new territories, just like those ungrateful African cannibals who eat their benefactors.’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Well, take for example our policy of punishing people with exile. This we award them without their going to jail. If they once entered jail, they would become as firmly established there as British occupation once was. ‘

  ‘Yes, God bless you indeed, sir!’

  ‘And we demolish their homes when they’re outside, but when they’re inside prison we let them occupy themselves building.’

  ‘That’s really great! God bless you! But what do they build?’

  ‘New prisons and new cells in old jails: and they plant shade trees around them too.’

  ‘God bless you again! But why do you demolish their homes outside the prison?’

  ‘To exterminate the rats that build their nests in them. This way we save them from the plague.’

  * * *

  By now the police car was leaving the city of Affulah on the Bisan road, which led to my new residence. On both sides refreshing water was being sprayed on the green vegetation, fresh in the very heat of summer. Suddenly the big man, cramped there with me and the driver in the front seat of that dogcart, was transformed into a poet.