22

The boy who hid behind the cupboard reminded me of Rabie. Was this boy like that boy? Is this generation like that generation? I asked Yasmine about this boy and the details of his life. She triggered my curiosity and awakened my emotions, causing me to dream during the night, and even during the day, about that boy, wondering what had happened to him and recalling that feeling. It is strange how we fritter away the time when we get old and age turns yellow. We lose our sense of tenderness, our sharpness, and the heart’s nostalgia. We become like chickens who shed their feathers after having been colored birds jumping in the sun and playing in the wind. I asked Yasmine how she felt. She told me, somewhat bashfully, that she felt like a fourteen-year-old. Really? Is that possible—a fifty-year-old woman who is able to recall the feelings of a fourteen-year-old girl? Why was I unable to feel that way? Was it because I was older and more cultured than Yasmine? Or was it because Yasmine’s life was empty? Or was it because I was disciplined, and lived under the pressure of time due to the amount of work awaiting me. I had interests, activities, my artistic projects, and my paintings. I was also taking care of projects in the house, the family home. I had been busy installing the pipes, repairing the cellar, getting rid of the old furniture and replacing it with new, modern furniture. I needed a washing machine, a refrigerator, a stove, and solar panels to provide me with hot water from the new barrels; the Jews had pierced them to prevent us from drinking and bathing.

I had a lot to do and I did not suffer from loneliness; on the contrary, I sought isolation in order to work, to produce and maintain my concentration, for fear of becoming a burden on myself, limited and naïve—like Yasmine. But Yasmine was funnier, she was sweeter and nicer, she had not become stiff or hard. That was why I liked to listen to her and pay attention to what she had to say and to her explanations.

She told me that she had met the boy’s mother at a wake. She said that the mother recognized her, sat beside her, and thanked her for hiding her son during the curfew. She told Yasmine about his father and his brothers and sisters, where he lived, and his grades at school. She said that his oldest brother worked in Dubai and the second one was incarcerated in Ramleh prison. His oldest sister was married and had children, while his youngest sister was engaged and about to get married. This meant that Saad was the youngest, the baby of the family. His father was a modest accountant, working at the municipality; he was in charge of accounting and collected the electricity and water vouchers, as well as the multitude of infraction fines. The mother believed that Saad had inherited his father’s gift for mathematics. He wanted to study engineering and work as an engineer at the municipality with his father. This was his ambition, and his father’s as well.

When she mentioned the municipality, I remembered that I needed to submit a request there for a stronger generator because I wanted to install a combined air conditioner−heater in every room, instead of the traditional units with all their wires. It was both cheaper and safer, considering the condition of the house’s walls, which were too old to survive drilling holes to attach radiators over the old whitewash that might crumble. The electric wires, also, would not support two radiators running at the same time. I asked the electrician for a solution and he recommended installing a much stronger line, but I would need a new permit from the municipality. When I was told about Abu Saad’s work at the municipality, I said to myself, let me kill two birds with one stone: submit a request for a stronger generator and get to know the father of the boy who stole Yasmine’s mind. I was curious, and Yasmine’s enthusiasm for the boy’s mother, his brothers and sisters, his grades at school, and his visits, ended up convincing me. She said that he was a decent boy and was grateful for what she had been able to do for him.

Ever since that day—in other words, from the day she hid him in her room, behind her cupboard where there was a depression in the wall—he had stopped by for visits, and he always brought something: a flower, tamriyeh, garlic, or a bunch of grapes from their vine. She could not stop talking about this boy, as if he were a member of her family or her own son. Sometimes I sensed an unusual tone in her voice, a desire for the boy, or possibly love, something that was not acceptable for a woman who was past fifty. If it were not for the hair dye and the creams, her hair would be all white like a loofah and her face would reveal more wrinkles than a loaf of taboun bread. But Yasmine’s face was very fresh, much fresher than the face of a woman in her forties. It was shiny, without wrinkles, and her hair was well colored and always curled, because she used rollers at night. She always smelled of jasmine. She picked the jasmine, made a necklace out of it, and wore it around her neck when she watched TV. She never went out wearing it because, as she explained, going out wearing a jasmine necklace was not suitable for a respectable woman. She wore it only when she watched TV and removed it before she went to bed and put it in her bra, then went to sleep. That was why Yasmine always smelled of jasmine.

We went to the municipality in the early morning. The sun was not yet hot, but it was shining and golden. In the merchants’ alley, the area of Habs al-Dam, the salesmen were still yawning, clearing their throats, and greeting each other with a “Good morning,” followed by the expression “There is no power and no strength save in God.” They reflected on their stagnant merchandise and the small number of buyers, due to the frequent closures in the city, and the barriers that made traveling an ordeal for the farmers. The closures were against the law, as was the closure of the alley for many days on the pretext of pursuing terrorists. During these closures, they undertook searches, got entangled in fights, threw sound bombs, light bombs, and tear gas canisters. There were also the bullets and the markaba. This uproar usually happened every two to three days, making the city look like the skeleton of a fish that had been eaten by a greedy cat, and leaving people dumbfounded.

Yasmine was wearing a tight knee-length black skirt and a red vest, and her curled hair fell over her shoulders. She was made up, but with only light pink blush on her cheeks, concerned that people might think she was an easy woman, or a divorced woman looking for a husband. Indeed, I believed that she was looking for a husband. I felt that she was beyond disregarding her worldly feelings and her femininity. Sometimes she used to tell me what she did when she was young and still married to the odious man who punished her because she could not conceive, though she managed to give him lots of pleasure. She would ask me, candidly, whether sex was different from women’s eggs. Surprised and astonished, I would ask her to explain what she meant by women’s eggs? She would go into detail, saying, “My period was very regular, and it still is, so why didn’t I become pregnant like my mother? My mother at least gave birth to me, but I did not give birth to either a boy or a girl. I have not celebrated the birth of a Fatmeh or a Muhammad.” I would smile kindly, but I would not comment because I also had not celebrated the birth of a Fatmeh or a Muhammad. But thanks to my exhibitions and my paintings, I had reached Paris and the UNESCO, and I refused to become pregnant and give birth like other women. I wanted to devote myself to an activity that would not make me say what my mother used to say: that children gave her a headache and broke her back. Despite my marriages and my relationships, I refused the breaking of the back, the headaches, the waste of gifts, and the self-denial. But I refused of my own accord, whereas Yasmine did not refuse. She wished and wondered, she rebuked God and wondered, she rebuked her condition and grumbled, and sometimes she would blame her mother, who had passed this infertility on to her. This explains why I believed that her attraction to this boy was twofold: on one hand, her denied motherhood, and on the other her infatuation and the appeal of sexuality. I, too, was mesmerized by her and kept watching her transformation, and whatever she unconsciously did in order to express her cravings and deprivations.

Yasmine was attractive and easily drew men’s attention. She walked with a calculated softness and dalliance. She moved her hips like the two sides of a scale. One side went up and the other went down, with an invisible beat, but one that was carefully studied. Her plump white legs appeared under a pair of revealing, light-colored nylon stockings that emphasized the whiteness of her skin, while the muscles remained strong. As for the red vest, the color of pomegranate, it attracted attention like a magnet—especially men’s attention. They cleared their throats as they looked. Then, defeated and angry, they pronounced the formula: “I seek God’s forgiveness!” But when their eyes met my eyes, I saw them look the other way, frowning, either because I had caught their look or because my appearance hurt their eyes. This made me reconsider my looks and examine myself in the mirror: my hair was like a boy’s hair and my face resembled that of a priest. My pants were a humble style and my leather sandals were like zannuba slippers. All this made me appear like a guard, walking by her side, but when I got farther away, I felt their gaze on her legs, on the back of her neck, on the red vest and the curls of her hair moving up and down as if they were springs. Someone would whisper in a hoarse voice, “God bless the Prophet! Have mercy on us, God.”

When we arrived at the municipality, the looks doubled because the employees, the visitors, and those with complaints and contraventions and vouchers were standing in rows and lines. We were forced to cram between the bodies. I would hear two or three men, breathing or sneezing or inhaling like drowning people, to catch the smell of jasmine and her femininity. They would look at me with subdued anger because my appearance was the opposite of Yasmine’s; to them, I was the guardian of her blessed femininity.

We entered the office. It was small and old, and files, dossiers, and haphazard stacks of loose papers were piled on three worn-out desks. Almost hidden behind the papers were three bald, fat men approaching the end of their lives. They raised their eyes, and I immediately noticed a pair of blue eyes in a washed-out face with scant hair that used to be blond but had now turned white. He was wearing a whitewashed navy blue vest that reminded me of European clothes, and had a hoarse voice that welcomed us profusely.

One of the men stood up with a bundle of files under his arm. The other one pulled out his chair for me to sit because it was obvious I was older. Yasmine remained standing behind me and the other man was stealing looks at her. As for the man I recognized to be Saad’s father, he looked once or twice, then smiled at Yasmine with a feeling of gratitude when she mentioned her name and her home address. He certainly knew that she was the one who had hidden his son behind her closet on the day of the curfew.

When the third man grew tired of ogling Yasmine, he got up from behind his desk and signaled to her to sit in his place. He then said, with great generosity and ease, that he would order two cups of tea for us. He asked, gracefully, “Tea with za’atar or sage?” While I asked for za’atar, Yasmine inquired coquettishly, “Do you have anise?”

The man lowered his head until he was nearly bent in two and said enthusiastically, “At your service, my lady. Anise it will be! We will get it even if it is at the end of the earth.”

We talked about the procedures and the permissions, but Abu Saad said that installing a stronger generator was not possible; the time when this could happen was further away than the distance between the earth and the sky. He explained that power was scarce because of the barricades and the closures. He proceeded to list the other items affected by the situation: solar, gas, water, electricity, wires, pipes, as well as sugar, rice, meat, vegetables, and fruits. We were in a state of blockade and people, may God help them, could not find bread. Where did I think I was—in Amman or Paris? Didn’t I live here? Hadn’t I experienced the closures like everybody else? Was I not also living in an occupied country?

I remembered the times of the British mandate and I reminded him of it, because he looked older than me, though I later discovered that he was younger and just seemed much older due to a life of oppression. He said that he did not remember the years of the British mandate, but he recalled certain dates and events that had occurred, how those days were hard, but how the most difficult thing was the occupation. He then asked me, “Were you here during the first days of the occupation, when they invaded in 1967?” I shook my head because I had been far away at that time, too far to feel what they had gone through, though I had been a member of the Intifada Committee in Paris. Then I got busy, and then I grew bored, and then I withdrew because things usually begin with a thundering storm, and with time they wither and subside. All my life, however, I felt the anger and the sadness. I would take a breather and return to my previous activities: painting, organizing exhibits. Finally, I retired, and here I was back at my base, with the family inheritance, in the house of affluence.

Abu Saad went on, “May God help us all. Everyone has enough to worry about. My middle son broke my back—one day he is in Ramleh prison, another day in Askalan, then in Naqab. The bastard was the best in his class, always first. All my sons were at the top of their class, but this one has always been on fire. Some people influenced him, and he decided to liberate Palestine. The first time he was imprisoned for two months, and the second time for two years. The third time he got fifty years because of a belt of explosives he was wearing. It is as if we lost him, as if we never gave birth to him. We see him once every five or six months. His mother travels by bus, then by taxi, then rides in another bus and a taxi to reach the Ramleh or the Naqab prison. There you see people waiting in front of the prison as if they are vagabonds, some sitting under a tree scorched by the sun and some standing near the prison fence, the burning sun above their heads, hot like an iron. The old women sit on the ground and pour water over their heads, and steam rises from their scalps. You see crowds of people like herds of sheep, excuse the expression, without a shepherd, beseeching a soldier from Yemen, two inches tall and carrying a two-meter-long rifle, who reclines in a chair as if he were the Prophet Moses. They smile, cajole him, beg him to let them enter, while he sits with his eyes wide open, seeing no one and listening to no one, as if he were the guardian of Paradise, or the glorious Radwan. Every now and then he shouts in a voice as loud as a cannon, “Go back, go back, go back!” He hits people with his rifle, but they do not feel it because they are used to humiliation and to rifles. I visited him once, then a second time, and then I let go. But his mother, the poor woman, does not forget him. She is miserable. We remembered him the first year, the second, and the third, but then we got used to his absence and forgot him. But his mother never forgets; this is the heart of a mother. Do you have children?”

I remained silent, and so did Yasmine. He thought that we were upset by his sad conversation and apologized: “Forgive me, but this helplessness affects our judgment. I forget myself; I complain, I annoy people and depress them. Please, sister, I beg you, I did not mean to break your heart.”

I looked at Yasmine and saw that she was crying. Her face was red; the kohl around her eyes was running, mixing with her tears. She was holding a tissue smeared with kohl. She replaced it with a clean one, and another and another. The man rushed to the old telephone and shouted, as if talking to someone in London and calling for help, “Where are you, Radi, for God’s sake? We asked for tea an hour and a half ago! How can it take so long? Abu Shukri made the order an hour and a half ago: one tea with za’atar and one anise.”

He then turned to me and said, “Excuse us. Our worries and our suffering make us lose our minds. Abu Shukri is also in a mess.”

I said, in an effort to console him, “We have all gotten old and lost our minds.”

“I have not lost my mind!” Yasmine objected.

I turned and saw a confrontational smile on her face, as she was trying to remove the traces of the tears. Her face returned to its normal look, even better than normal—thanks to the emotion, it looked fresher and brighter. She saw me staring at her. Placing the tissue in her purse, she returned my stare and said stubbornly, “I have not lost my mind. Let everyone speak for themselves.”

Abu Saad smiled, happy and surprised. He seemed to like the situation, and said, teasing, “I was talking about ourselves—us, the men. As for the women, God help us, a woman would be using a cane to walk, but would look young like a rose.”

She objected, in a flirtatious way, “Holding a cane! Do you see us holding canes?”

He smiled wider and his eyes twinkled. It looked like he too was intelligent like his children, and knew how to crack a joke. He might have been the best student in his class, but life had made him wither away, burdened him, and made him look older than his age. He said amiably, “May my tongue be cut if I alluded to or hinted at anything.”

She did not let this go by. “What do you mean by alluded to or hinted? God be praised, now we know who Saad takes after. Your son Saad, even while standing behind the cupboard and with the Jews at the door of the house, was joking and making fun of me, saying I talked nonstop, it was like having the radio on!”

The man gave a suppressed chuckle and covered his mouth with his hand, to avoid bursting into laughter. However, I could not control myself, because I remembered the situation and because I saw the other side of Yasmine, the one that shook forcefully through the tears and defied despair and grief and aging, and continued to defend itself, its life and the love of life. The side that forgot reality, the reality of humiliation and degradation, the reality of the blockade, the occupation, and the closures. The reality of men humiliated as they faced life’s real problems, worrying about their children. The reality of the young men behind bars, with sentences that could reach fifty, sixty, one hundred, and even two hundred years. It was an occupation and a blockade, and this was a man whose son had been sentenced to fifty years in prison. His financial situation was hard, and this was obvious from his appearance. He said frankly that he was losing his mind, but she confronted him, and reminded him of her femininity that did not age or retire.

What a strange mixture of disdain for reality and of harsh reality itself. Abu Saad might have been thinking the same thoughts as me. I saw him shake his head, take his hand from his mouth, and mumble while still trying to suppress the laughter in his chest, “The worst part of an affliction is laughing at it.”

Yasmine declared, “Let’s go. There will be no generators and no permits. All we need is a man to tell us about canes and going senile. Let’s go, let’s go!”

I got up slowly, still laughing inwardly. The man was laughing as well, and saying, “Tea with za’atar and anise.”

She rushed in front of me and said, “We do not want za’atar or anise. Let’s go before we start walking with canes.”

And so we left without canes and without drinking tea with za’atar or anise. We did, however, drink lemonade when we arrived at my courtyard and laughed under the poppy tree. We agreed on the fact that when men grow old, they become senile. As for us women, and specifically Yasmine, we never grow old, and we do not become senile. She would never use a cane to walk. The proof is that she will hold a magnificent dinner of kullaj, vine leaves, and stuffed zucchini, and she will invite Saad, his mother, and his father in order to prove to them that she is at the peak of her youth and is capable of making a feast.