A Christmas Tale
As for Raymonda, she says she was born under an evil omen. The problem began when Habib insisted on naming her after the heroine of Alexander Glazunov’s ballet with its hints of Moorish Spain, noble Crusaders, and villainous Saracen knights. He wanted his only daughter to be another Anna Pavlova, his favorite ballerina.
Like many people among his elevated social class, Habib liked to consult the famous Polish-Jewish clairvoyant Wolf Messing: back in Europe both Einstein and Freud tested his powers. The war had just broken out in Europe, and Habib needed advice on investments. In passing, he mentioned to the soothsayer that his wife had just given birth to a girl, and her name was going to be Raymonda.
“Oh, you mustn’t use that name!”
“Why not! It has a delightful ring to it.” He was tapping his tasseled Italian shoes, and his hands, with diamond rings on his fingers, made a dismissive gesture. He was incredulous that the psychic should so respond to a tale that ends with a feast and dancing at a castle to celebrate the marriage of two lovers. Habib was entranced by ballet and the glittering, sumptuous life of a vanquished era of nobility.
Wolf Messing saw something else. “If you name your daughter Raymonda, catastrophe after catastrophe will befall on you. Blood and killing, divorce, and hatred will never end.”
“Nonsense!” said Habib.
Raymonda was too young to have much more than dim memories of the war years or the Allied victory celebration in 1945. She naturally knew nothing about the way news of Nazi extermination camps and the world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the genocide generated a rage and frustration among Jews that would burn, and keep burning, all the way into Raymonda’s clammy cell in the Moskobiya Prison many decades later. Zionist groups ran clandestine factories churning out bombs and bullets in anticipation for the armed struggle for a Jewish state. An international arms operation, with donations to the Blue Boxes spread throughout the Jewish diaspora, smuggled in Lancaster submachine guns and bazookas.
Her first recollections are of the family villa in Acre, where as a five-year-old she loved listening to the waves just below her window beating rhythmically against the walls of the twenty-room mansion. In the garden grew a gigantic cedar whose shadows created dappled, dancing patterns on her clothes and across her face. She wandered from room to room and stared with enchantment at the painted ceiling, the grand piano from Leipzig, the volumes of books bound in satiny Morocco leather lining shelves in her father’s library, the oil paintings, Habib’s chestnut brown box of cigars.
Across the bay in Haifa, Raymonda could see the warships of the British Royal Navy sending up tall plumes of curling smoke. In the narrow alleys of Acre were solemn religious men with robes and beards and funny-shaped hats—Sheiks, Roman and Greek Orthodox priests, Baha’i, and rabbis. She can still describe with minute detail the iron gate to the church that was sea-blue, chipped and rusting, and decorated with two peacocks, one painted black and the other white; above the gate were interlocking iron-wrought hearts welded together to form a triangle topped with a cross. She remembers the minarets’ pencil-shaped tops, too; and the carved, latticed mashrabiya balconies jutting out from the stone walls—because of their tight-fitting wooden slats, pious women could peer out into the street but no one on the street below could catch a peek of them within.
It was a city with the twisting, narrow, crowded aesthetic of the Levant with tall, swaying palms in gardens and church bells ringing out the Angelus.
Her fairy-tale world was about to end.
During the first postwar years Habib continued to travel overseas on business, to Marseille and Cairo. Closer to home he took his motorcar to Haifa and its salons and saloons, leaving Christmas to raise Raymonda and, on trips back to the castle, manage the army of servants and the farmers tending the tobacco fields and pig farm.
Christmas with her bobbed hair gained fame throughout the Galilee for her liberated ways. She loved taking off her Coco Chanel dress, putting on riding britches, slipping a silver sword into a smooth hide sheath and, accompanied by Nubians, riding her stallion through the countryside. That said, as a liberated American woman, Christmas saw Habib’s aristocratic world as silly vestiges from the long vanquished world of knights and dueling pistols and the inherited system of privileges, titles, rank, and family name.
The feudal pretensions became even more evident after Habib, drinking heavily at the parties in the salons of Haifa, began sinking into debt. As if the boozing, womanizing, and financial bungling were not enough, his patriarchal need to control, and his unwillingness to stomach his wife’s independence, worked like a torpedo that blasted a hole in their marriage.
To shield her from the quarrels, Habib drove Raymonda in his shiny Oldsmobile to his sister Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street in Haifa, facing the sea near the port. Sylvie, married to one of the wealthiest tycoons in the city and a woman who considered speaking any languages other than French considerably beneath her dignity, employed two cooks, a valet, and a chauffeur for her silver-gray Daimler. On the baby grand piano in her living room, made of polished mahogany, she played the Chopin she learned at the prestigious girls school Notre Dame de Nazareth on Mount Carmel.
Habib and Christmas divorced in 1947, just as the country plunged back into internecine conflict. It was too much for Christmas: she had come to Palestine from America, a country with civil rights and a degree of equality for women, and here she was a feminist caught in the mentality of the harem. She rebelled by packing her bags and leaving him. She got a job and rented a small apartment in Haifa.
It was considered so scandalous that Habib ripped Raymonda from his estranged wife’s arms—she was kicking and screaming and flung her favorite doll to the floor—and whisked her off to a Nazareth convent run by French-speaking sisters from Lebanon and Malta. He instructed the nuns not to permit the mother to visit. Raymonda’s two brothers George and Yussuf were sent to a boarding school in Jerusalem. It was only on weekends that Raymonda could return to Haifa to see her divorced parents.
Sylvie felt vindicated by her brother’s marriage with a “villager,” the half-wild American feminist. In collusion, the two siblings cooked up a story, telling Raymonda that her mother was dead but she shouldn’t mourn because Christmas died a martyr’s death: the dastardly Zionists blew her up in a terror attack. Raymonda cried and screamed and shook her little child’s fist at God for snatching away her mother. Then one day, while standing on her aunt’s terrace, she saw Christmas walking up the street from the railway station where she worked as a clerk. At that moment Raymonda believed God had heard her recriminations and, showing mercy, had raised her mother from the dead.
Christmas saw her daughter, opened the gate and ran up the stairs to the terrace. Raymonda leapt into her arms, and through eyes filled with tears of joy she saw Aunt Sylvie scowling down at them from the upstairs balcony.