ahmed was balding, with gray stubble on his chin, the inflatable grin of a birthday party clown, and a precarious walk: Despite his grandfatherly years, he waddled as a toddler might after pulling himself to stand and move upright for the first time ever on his own two feet. The baby image was reinforced by the oversized trousers he wore — diaperlike, dirty, and held in place by a thick length of rope that he tied around his belly.
He did not live in the house across the street, but seemed in his own way to belong to it. As far as we could gather, Ahmed had, long ago, before the Jews had settled this part of the neighborhood, laid claim to (owned? rented?) rooms in the large building. Maybe he still did. It was awkward to ask questions, and Ahmed’s Hebrew was far too thin for complex response — though even after Peter had begun to learn Arabic and could pour forth a stream of clear, straightforward talk in Ahmed’s own language, the old man confined his exchanges with us to his pidgin Hebrew singsong, a series of all-purpose idiomatic phrases he’d picked up, weary intonation included, from the kerchiefed Moroccan biddies for whom he swept and painted and chased away stray cats. He alternated these expressions freely, no matter what the conversational situation, and smiled with pride as he issued them up, no matter how cranky their flavor: Not good, not good … What can you do?… Everything will be all right … That’s the way it is … No problem! Legal ruminations and detailed family histories were not, evidently, poised on the verbal horizon.
If the official status of his connection to the place was hazy, his feelings seemed quite plain. He was attached to the shady courtyard, the rambling old house across the street, and indeed the whole pitched flagstone alleyway in the selfless, trusting manner of a dog that will walk miles just to be reunited with the lingering trace of a familiar scent. The canine comparison may sound heartless or condescending, but I mean it only in the most objective way and as a means of describing my occasional discomfort at Ahmed’s nuzzling determination to serve: When I emerged from our apartment to throw away the kitchen garbage, for instance, he would heave himself up from the stone wall where he was sitting, muttering to himself, seize the bags from my hands, and pad arthritically to the bin down the street. Let me, let me. Once when I opened the door to sweep the dust from our front hall, across the threshold, he insisted on taking the broom from me and finishing the job himself, an act I tried and failed to prevent by reaching to grab back the handle. But he was already intently scuttling cobwebs from their corner hideaways; to insist he stop seemed almost mean. He ended up sweeping the entire street.
I cannot know for sure, but I feel close to certain in my bones that Ahmed never had a conscious scheme to return to live in the big stone building across the street — a scheme, that is, which would be reasonable for an ejected tenant to have hatched. While there is always the faint possibility that Ahmed’s smooth brow was hiding vast stores of well-reasoned bitterness that his outward grumbling-but-contented bearing never let slip, his plotting seemed unlikely. He was one of the most practical people I have ever known — a simpleton, he might be called, though there is a nasty edge to this term that doesn’t do justice to Ahmed’s considerate bearing. He managed to be simple without being a fool. Far from it: He sometimes struck me as the wisest and most rational person on the whole hot-tempered block. That his head seemed almost entirely free of elaborate thoughts did not make him an idiot. If anything, it gave his movements a special, focused tangibility — every impulse was realized in actual terms. If he could not dwell in the house, he seemed to find it sufficient to spend his days in its company, puttering out front, sweeping the outdoor flight of stairs, and heaving groceries for the old women in exchange for a bit of spare change, the broken electronic devices they might be throwing away, a few scraps of stretched-out clothing. Ahmed’s interests were financial as much as sentimental, of course, and when he had nothing else to do he would rummage through the garbage bin in search of reusable stuff, fishing out anything glassy, wooden, or made of tin. Then he would add it to one of the growing piles of cryptic detritus he squirreled in the corner of the courtyard and in the basement of the house; these heaps were the only pieces of this property that remained, in actuality, his own. When the stash was large enough, he’d begin to sell off bits and parts to junk dealers around town, though I wondered what the profits could be from this bedraggled collection. The rusting door handles and busted radios, the peeling sides of window frame and halves of cabinet, old toilet bowls, lengths of plastic sheeting — how much could they really be worth? More than a few coins seemed doubtful.
At first I worried for Ahmed, who would not hesitate to plunge his hand into the neighbors’ trash, without shame, unknotting the bags to poke his calloused fingers through, then carefully tying them up again and placing them back in the bin. And I worried for us at the same time: Perhaps we were using him, taking advantage? The arrangement seemed crudely colonial. But he appeared so content with his status as caretaker, fix-it man, and honorary neighborhood pack rat that I learned, for his sake, to squelch my fidgety liberal unease. (Once I watched him through the window as he unearthed some slick American magazines I’d tossed out, and his face opened with awe as he flipped backward through that aggressive, corporate shine. For a brief instant, neither illiteracy nor high-gloss advertising seemed to me quite so deplorable.) Who was I to question how Ahmed spent his time? He had chosen to pass his days here and, as it dawned on me gradually, he also had another, more important role to play — as the garden’s guardian angel.
There hadn’t been a garden when we came to live on the street, just as at first Ahmed’s presence had not registered in any special way: He passed through once every couple of weeks, collected a few junky odds and ends in a wilted burlap sack, performed a small chore for one of the grandmothers, and moved on. His stronger link to the place only asserted itself later, in a slightly mysterious way, after Peter had won the approval of the wary neighbors and worked hard, to their bafflement but apparent satisfaction, to clear away the heaps of wooden planks and piles of pipe that had been gathering for years in the middle of the courtyard opposite us.
Obviously the space had once contained a fine Arab garden — it was designed for this purpose, with its wide-open central square plot, shoe-heel-smoothed flagstone path, stately stone wall, and the trees. Four tall, sparrow-filled cypresses, an unpruned pomegranate, and a rangy olive were all that remained of the pre-State bustan. But the garden itself was a ghost, and the other fruit trees and sweet-smelling climbers I imagined once flourishing there had long since withered and vanished, the rocky soil hardened and gone to hip-high weed. The place was far from quaint in its dilapidation, though. Amid the bursts of thistle, caper, dandelion, and scraggly grass there were broken bottles and piles of cat dung, bags of rotting trash: The place was a sort of permanent eyesore that the old-timers had stopped noticing, even after they had gone to great, costly lengths to overhaul their own homes, retiling floors and installing new kitchens, which they kept hysterically clean. Nothing would grow there, they warned us when we asked if we might plant a few saplings. “The soil is dead.” But our apartment looked right out onto this dump, and Peter had decided, even before we’d moved in, to restore the garden to its rightful place, and to fill our windows with color. A young couple, both musicians — Yona, French and softly owlish, and his wife, Vered, an Israeli with a thick, rich speaking voice and throaty laugh that had a faint but appealing foreign ring — lived with their new baby in one of the apartments on the top floor, and they had agreed to help, which was fortunate. The garden plot was not our property and the few days they spent, helping drag away rocks and splintery boards, made the project legitimate, and removed any stigma of Manifest Destiny on our part.
But Peter did the bulk of the work himself, while I shuttled trash bags and glasses of water and offered occasional advice. First he hauled garbage, then dug out and cleared the jagged chunks of chalky stone that were so abundant they seemed almost to breed there. Next he weeded, then began the slow process of turning the soil. It hadn’t been touched since 1948, as one of the old men who lived in the house announced with an odd sort of pride. A watery-eyed pensioner who wore a pancake beret pulled tight over his scalp and a wool scarf knotted at his throat no matter the weather, he was quietly thrilled that Peter had decided to plant a garden — this plan seemed to fulfill some long-held fantasy he’d harbored in secret but had been unable, for whatever reason, to realize himself — and each time he passed my husband at work, he would bless him a dozen times, once for every other step of his inching staircase ascent. The man’s grown son, meanwhile, a loudly dim-witted waiter at an overrated hummus joint downtown, and an infamous fan of the city’s favorite soccer team, also lived in the house and seemed a bit jealous of the attention and praise his father lavished on this green-thumbed, fair-haired American interloper, in direct contrast to the disgusted shouts the father reserved for his son, and vice versa. So the younger man eagerly approached Peter with his own plan to build a special tiled barbecue deck in the back corner of the garden. He would also be happy to pay “some Arab” to cut down the century-old cypress trees — which, he reminded the new-immigrant gardener in the confident tones of a seasoned veteran, only made dirt and drank up all the water in the ground. Peter managed to talk him gently out of both of these dreadful plans and made his peace with Shlomi’s stubborn determination to repeatedly chop down the hearty tree of heaven that had sprouted up without coaxing in the back corner of the garden. It was Keystone Kop–comical to watch this battle between the slow, stupid man and the quick, clever plant: Shlomi was no match for the determined weed-tree, which grew even faster and fuller after each of his klutzy assaults. He eventually gave up, and the tree grew to tower over the garden.
When the soil was ready, we began to make afternoon taxi runs to the local nurseries where the tanned workers — who all seemed temperamentally quite similar, easygoing and unruffled as bass guitar players in their flappy flannel shirts — soon knew us by name and would leave us alone to wander and choose what we wanted from the blooming rows. In stages throughout that first growing year, we planted a ring of fruit trees (loquat, apricot, and lemon) as well as yellow and white jasmine, a dainty white starburst climber called a solanum, or potato vine, magenta bougainvillea, oleander in three different shades, geranium, and a cestrum bush — a spurting, purple-flowered effusion of green that we’d never noticed before but recognized immediately when we saw it later at the Alhambra. There it grew dense and high as a great waterfall, flowing backward and up.
Ahmed’s presence started to sink in sometime during the garden’s second season, when the plants had begun to take root but hadn’t yet really flourished, and at first his being there didn’t seem to make a great difference. He would putter around the edge of the trees (to which, by then, we’d added two graceful young olives and another pomegranate), sweeping the walkway, stooping to scoop up trash, pulling grass from between the stones of the streetside wall, where it grew like bushy mortar. Then he quietly eased himself into closer involvement with the daily business of maintaining the garden, rigging a crude but effective stake of iron pipe for one of the oleanders that leaned too far to the left, arranging a border of spare stones around the nearly dead rosebush he’d rescued from someone’s trash bin and miraculously nursed back to life. He had a special sense for finding the handiness inherent in all materials, no matter how artificial, and would anchor a tilting bush to a tin curtain rod with a large plastic bag, or use a length of withered polyester yarn to guide a climbing plant over the wall. Twisted bits of electrical wire turned up along the stair’s banister, where they held the jasmine in place. Without saying a word, then, he began to weed — no small job, since the soil had responded immediately to being turned and watered, and an entire lawn of stubbly new nettles, clover, and rough grass had sprung up already, replacing the taller growth that Peter had cleared. When Ahmed was through removing all this unwanted green, he would rake in orderly lines, leaving the place looking elegant and cooler in its own spreading shade.
The plants began to respond to his touch, and though some of this was fussing that Peter himself could have done (and some of it he did; twice a week in summertime I would heave the hose over our porch wall and across the street, where he was waiting to douse the garden with its only source of dry-season water) and other progress was due to the passing of time and the gradual unfurling of stronger roots and branches — Ahmed brought something else to the garden, with his constant clearing, attending, adjusting, minding. I hesitate to name this thing, for I know that in its essence it has no satisfactory title, and that one walks a dangerous minefield of cliché when one mentions the simple happy native at work in the simple happy garden. But there is no getting around the fact that Ahmed, in his execution of these thousand tiny, spontaneous chores, had a weird, almost magical influence on the growth of the trees and flowers. Without coaxing, for instance, a bright pink hollyhock popped from the “dead” earth sometime just after Ahmed appeared, and it grew within weeks to his own height (small for a man, huge for a flower): the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk scale of the plant and its sudden appearance suggested enchantment, its seed blown in on a strange, knowing wind. And soon other shoots burst into fairy-tale bloom.…
There was, in fact, nothing self-conscious or even intentional about his relationship to the garden. If anything, he was unaware of his special connection and simply went about his business, performing the necessary tasks with the same lack of pretense that most of us use to breathe or walk. He seemed, too, impervious to insult. After he’d labored for hours and hours yanking out weeds, and spent several lengthy days erecting a lopsided green chicken-wire fence on one side, to keep the puppy of the downstairs tenant from escaping, he began to fill a plastic pail with olives from the gnarly adult tree. His picking also seemed an almost-necessary reaction to harvest-time, a kind of innate awareness on his part of the shape of the seasons: When the olives were ripe, one must gather them, of course, to cure and eat over the next year or to sell raw on the street for a few more coins. But another neighbor, Hannah, recently widowed and by nature a mild crank, yelled at him and ordered him to stop. The olives belonged to the whole neighborhood, she insisted, on principle — though, as became plain, she had no intention of gathering the olives herself. (No one did, in fact, and to my somewhat lazy dismay the lot of them dropped to the ground or wrinkled bitterly right on the tree.) So Ahmed shook his head and muttered faint curses under his breath, then shrugged and returned to the fence, which needed straightening.
Later, when the garden was already established as a living, thriving fact, Ahmed disappeared. For several months running, there was no sign of him. The weeds grew thick without him, and we began to worry, not for the plants, but for Ahmed: Taking off wasn’t like him. He’d seemed to need to putter in the garden several times a week, for his peace of mind, if not for the measly hand-out he got for his various labors. He wouldn’t just abandon his work (not to mention his carefully stacked junk heaps) like that, without warning. Something must be wrong. Peter asked Shlomi, did he know what had happened? And Shlomi answered with a terrible, indifferent shrug, “To the Arab? Who knows? Maybe he died.”
There was nothing we could do, no way to trace Ahmed — whose comings and goings had always seemed such a given that I’d never really thought to question irrelevant details like his last name or precise address. Peter set to work weeding the garden himself, and while the plants continued to grow and to bloom, it seemed to me (or was I imagining?) that the trees and climbing flowers had noticed Ahmed’s absence, and were somehow sadder for it, a little droopy, their colors a shade less intense.
But eventually Ahmed did return, with a hacking cough and a newly crooked gait. He was wearing a knitted winter hat in summertime; he limped. Hearing his noisy, phlegmy approach, we went outside to say hello and he greeted us right off with a typically blustery-but-resigned, monosyllabic account of where he’d been. A few months ago, two blocks away, he was hit by a car and left there, in the road. No one helped him. The invisible man. “Teeth —” he indicated with a sweep of the hand, “all on the ground.” He’d been in the hospital for weeks and, as if his hit-and-run-inflicted wounds weren’t enough, he had come down with pneumonia. “What can you do?” he sighed loudly, already turning to rifle through one of his piles.
Remarkably enough, given the injuries he’d suffered, of both a physical and emotional sort (he had, he said, been forced to lie in the road in a pool of his own blood and incisors for “a long time” before someone came to his rescue: minutes? hours? I wondered with a flinch), Ahmed didn’t seem especially distressed. He continued to mutter to himself and to sort through the trash and tie up the red roses with spare bits of wire. We gave him some money, and he put it in his pocket with a satisfied grin and one of his pet formulas, “Thank you very very much. Everything will be all right,” he would say when we slipped him a bill, though he made it clear that what he’d really like was clothing — any old pants, sweaters, or, best of all, shoes, we could spare. “Thank you very very much. Everything will be all right.”
This was not, though, the last of his disappearances. A while after his accident and recovery, he vanished yet again. And again we asked ourselves, What happened? Was he ill once more or had something inside of him snapped as a result of his wounds and the way he’d been ignored by those cars speeding by? Or was there some other reason for his absence? He never returned to explain. The last time I saw Ahmed was the first time I ever saw him truly upset: He was sitting on a stoop at the bottom of our street, and he seemed to me to be sobbing. I approached him and asked what was wrong. “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” he kept saying. He was clutching his burlap sack and his eyes were wet, though I do not know if he was crying or sick. He kept coughing. “Son of a bitch. All day, I work all day. They pay five shekel, chamsa shekel, ya ben zona.” He slipped into Arabic numbers but stuck to Hebrew curses. He did not appear to be angry at me, but hurt by the way he’d been used by our neighbors. And while it is tempting to assign his tears to a sudden awareness of the larger, longer, deeper injustice of his situation — here he was, an impoverished Palestinian, swabbing for pennies the once-Arab-owned steps of the Jews’ house — that does not seem right: Ahmed was, again, very practical in his complaints. Something particular had happened that day and it had upset him profoundly. What? “Chamsa shekel, son of a bitch …” When I tried to offer help and clarify what exactly had gone on (five shekels, about $1.25 at the time, was indeed an offensively minuscule sum to pay for a full day’s work, which should have brought him one hundred shekels at the very least), he looked up but right through me, without answering, then finally propped himself to standing and walked away, shaking his head, wiping his eyes, coughing, cursing.
Chronologically at least, that was my final glimpse of Ahmed, though another image lingered on, long after he departed and Shlomi hauled away his precious trash collection with much angry fanfare at seven o’clock one morning, cursing to their baffled faces the Ethiopian neighbors for not lending a hand: “They’re worse than the Arabs.” That other picture of Ahmed hovered in my field of vision, as a sort of holographic flicker, whenever I looked out across the street, through the window, and this shadowy sight almost convinced me that he was — or his spirit was — still somehow protecting the plants he had once tended in person with such unstinting love.…
At the end of the day, an average day, after he’d made sure that every bush and vine was solidly propped, the undergrowth cleared, and the lot’s bare sandy patches neatly smoothed across, Ahmed would finally allow himself to slow down. With a heavy sigh he would lower his tired frame onto an upholstered footrest that he’d salvaged, tattered and wobbly, from yet another garbage bin and placed like a low throne at the center of the plot. One hand slung across his knee, the other holding his small wooden pipe, he would sit, taking silent puffs, leaning forward, at last at peace in his garden.