3

Alaa

I return to you, now, two weeks after first writing in this notebook. I don’t know why I begin by addressing you directly. As if you are still here, or you will actually read these words. I’m not even sure if there is life after death. Nor do I know where souls go after they depart our bodies. You might be angry with me for saying that! But I think you will laugh. Yes, that’s more like you. You would ask God to forgive me. But then you would laugh and say, “All will be well.” That expression used to anger me quite a bit, especially when you said it. How could someone who went through what you did, still say “All will be well.” “If all wasn’t well to start with, how would it be well afterward?” I used to ask you. But you would laugh and say, “Don’t give me a headache. Find something else to argue about. Is this what they teach you at university? Just finish already and find yourself a wife.”

I am sitting at Tsfoni Café. I always come back to this spot. Why do I like to come here? Maybe because it’s right on the beach. I take off my shoes and put my feet down in the sand. There is nothing but the sea. Here, Jaffa is on my left, and the sea is spread out before me. I leave Tel Aviv behind. I don’t see it, and it doesn’t see me. I leave its buildings and noise. The sound of the sea overpowers the sounds of the city. I know Tel Aviv is behind me, but I couldn’t care less about its existence.

We didn’t spend much time together, but I feel your presence everywhere in this country. What is “much” anyway? I had wanted to bring you here to this spot. Hoping you would try to remember if you, too, loved it in the past, before my grandfather left. Perhaps you two walked together here once? It’s not far from your house in al-Manshiyye.

I’m mad at you. Your memory, which is engraved in my mind, has all these holes in it. Am I not remembering all that you told me, or was it incomprehensible? I was very young when I started listening to your stories. Later, when I turned to them for help, I discovered these holes. I started to ask you about them. But the more I asked, the more you got mixed up, or maybe I did. How would things not get mixed up? I was certain there was another city on top of the one we live in, donning it. I was certain that your city, the one you kept talking about, which has the same name, has nothing to do with my city. It resembles it a great deal. The names, orange groves, scents, al-Hamra Cinema, Apollo, weddings, Prophet Rubin’s feast, Iskandar Awad Street, al-Nuzha Street, al-Sa‘a Square . . . etc. Where do all these names come from? We would be walking and you start mentioning other names too. Names not written on signs. I had to learn to see what you were seeing. Akh! And all those people. I got to know all their problems, and how they were forced to leave Jaffa. I knew all the boring (and at times interesting) details about their lives. I knew all the jokes they used to tell. All this without having even met a single one of them. And I probably never will.

Your Jaffa resembles mine. But it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each other. You carved your names in my city, so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. And we call both cities Jaffa.

You were the exact opposite of the others. They couldn’t talk about their catastrophes when they take place. Even if they dare open the gate of memory, they would do it just a bit, and years later. You were the opposite. The last time I asked you about how they kicked you out of al-Manshiyye, forced you to go to Ajami, and how you lived with the Hungarian family they brought to share your house with you, you said, “My tongue is worn away from words. Don’t ask me anymore! They didn’t stay long in the house we were forced to go to. We were lucky. That’s enough, grandson. What good will it do to talk about it? Even words are tired.”

You used to say that you would walk in the morning, but could not recognize the city, or the streets. As if they, too, were expelled along with those who were forced to leave. Back then, my child eyes tried to imagine the scene the way you described it. “As if the darkness had swallowed them, and the sea took them hostage.” That is how you described your days, and those people who were forced to leave and go beyond the sea. But you didn’t say that the population of the city went from 100,000 down to 4,000. No, you didn’t say that. You did say that you couldn’t recognize your city after they’d left. What bereavement! My mind cannot process these figures. Nor can I comprehend what it means for a city to lose most of its people. I, who was born and raised in Jaffa after Jaffa had left itself.

You used to eat oranges voraciously. I thought you loved them, so I was surprised when you said that you didn’t. You only started eating oranges after they forced you out of al-Manshiyye to Ajami. They fenced Ajami with barbed wire and declared it a closed military zone. Why, then, did you eat oranges if you didn’t like them? Were you exacting revenge against those who were on the other side of the sea, yearning for Jaffa’s oranges? You always complained that the cypresses on street sides lost their meaning after that year. They stood there doing nothing except dusting the sky. You used to say that and laugh. As if you knew it was meaningless. But you insisted that those trees were meaninglessly big. You didn’t like the taste of oranges when you were growing up, you said. You only loved their scent and blossoms. But “after they left, everything took on another meaning, or no meaning at all . . . I began to love seeing people eat oranges, but I, myself, never liked them . . . I ate them, but never liked them. Oh, enough already! I’m tired of blathering. Let’s talk about something else. You ask too many questions.”

You said you used to walk down the streets laughing out loud with your father. Barbed wire surrounded you for more than ten years. No one could leave Ajami except with an official permit. They even stole Jaffa’s name when they placed it under Tel Aviv’s administrative jurisdiction. Is this why I dislike Tel Aviv? Did I inherit this lump in my throat from you? Why do I still live in it then? “Why shouldn’t you? This is Palestine. These are Jaffa’s villages and it’ll always be ours,” you said to me. But then you fell silent, as if talking was a painful act.

You said you went out with your father in what can only be described as a fit of madness. You walked with him and greeted strangers to fool him into believing that what he himself had said was true—that everyone had returned to Jaffa. You said he was demented and saw everyone there. Ten years had passed and he couldn’t get used to his new Jaffa. Can one get used to his nakba? They changed street names into numbers to remind you that you were in a prison called Jaffa. As if you needed anyone to remind you of that. You said that your father saw bus no. 6 coming on time and saw his partner, Zico, giving him back the keys to the mobilia warehouse they co-owned. You always said “mobilia” instead of “furniture,” because you loved the sound of that word. Had I not seen this Zico in a photograph with my grandfather, I would’ve thought he was a figment of your imagination. Zico. What kind of name is that anyway? Was it his nickname? I asked you. You didn’t know. He was your father’s partner and they owned furniture stores in Jaffa. “They looted the country and the people, so you think they wouldn’t loot furniture? Of course! And how many times have I said I don’t want to talk about this. My father became demented and died of his heartache after that year. Why do you keep asking? How many times do I have to give the same answers? Please, sweetheart, for God’s sake.”

Then you went back to your silence.

You realized that your father was demented when he knocked on your door one cold morning. He told you that Zico had visited him during the night, and said they could go back to bring the furniture from the warehouse and reopen their stores. You didn’t say anything when you heard him say that. You stopped arguing with him when he yelled and said that he wanted to go back to his home. When you told him he was at home, he accused you of lying. You didn’t understand at first, but then you realized that he was demented, all at once. And you realized that he was going to die, all at once as well. You took him by the hand and walked with him in his last morning. “I walked and felt I was going to the gallows. The Israelis could have killed us. We weren’t allowed to just go out whenever we pleased. There was barbed wire everywhere. We were in prison and he was determined to leave Ajami. God saved us. I don’t know how. I was reciting the Kursi chapter from the Qur’an all the way. I was terrified.” You took a deep breath after that last sentence. As if all the air in the world wasn’t enough to fill your lungs. Sixty years later and you would still feel a tightness of breath when you talked about the nakba, your nakba and Jaffa’s. Your Palestine. You took him by the hand and greeted the strangers as if they were the city’s people. You said that God must’ve heard your prayers because no one stopped you to ask for permits. Passersby nodded as they responded to your greetings in a language they didn’t know. As if everyone had agreed to let him bid his hometown farewell. When you returned home, he said he was going to take a bath and sleep a little. But you knew that that was it. Did he take a bath because he knew he was about to die? Did you do the same? Is that why you took a bath before leaving, and refused to let anyone come with you? You hadn’t left the house for six months. Did you want to die alone, by the sea?

Survivors are lonely.

Today I put on that white shirt with silver buttons you used to like. When I put gel on my spiky hair, I noticed some white hairs. I remembered how you used to sit near the flowerbeds in the small garden with our neighbor Um Yasmeen. You used to dye your hair and tell my mother she should do the same. You chastised her for neglecting her looks. She would smile and tell you that you are puerile. Then you and Um Yasmeen would both laugh. Why didn’t you teach mother to love life the way you did?

My mother cried her heart out when I called to tell her that I found you, and was in the ambulance, on my way to the hospital. When she entered the hospital, people looked at her mismatched shoes and hair. Her black scarf had fallen. She was crying silently. Gasping and crying in silence. Her eyes were so red, the white had almost disappeared. I took her in my arms. Her eyes were just like her father’s—blue and vast like the sea, as you used to say. My father just stood by and wept out loud, as if weeping for the first and last time in his life. I had never seen him weep before. He said he was orphaned. You were more than just a mother-in-law to him. You were the mother and father he never knew. He only remembered their phantoms and flickers of memory.

Mother saw the smile on your face. “Oh God, she’s laughing. She’s dead, but still laughing.” You were lying down as if you were about to get up, as you did so often, to complain of a headache, and ask someone to get you a cup of coffee. You know my mother gave away your clothes and furniture after you died. Was she taking revenge against you for leaving her? Maybe she never forgave you because she lived like an orphan, even though her father was alive. But it wasn’t your fault. I told her many times, “Tata is the one who should be angry with sidu. How can someone leave his wife and go to Beirut?” I could never finish a conversation with her about this subject. Maybe she loved him so much, because she never knew him.

“As if the sea took them hostage.”

This sentence swirled in my thoughts whenever I looked at the sea at Jaffa and remembered “that year.”

Longing for you is like holding a rose of thorns!