A grave in Gaza

Chapter 9

Ataxi dropped Omar Yussef on Emile Zola Street at seven-thirty. He rested his hand against the smooth bark of a tall sycamore and coughed. Dirt gusted through the air. With the falling darkness, the thick dust storm turned Omar Yussef’s vision into a monochrome blur. The branches of the tree danced above him, jousting with the tricolor behind the wall of the French Cultural Center. The metal loopholes in the flag scratched rhythmically against its pole.

The wind came from behind him, caught his white hair and blew his little combover into his eyes. He moved carefully. Even here, in Gaza City’s most expensive district, the sidewalk was uneven. He caught his toe on a protruding brick, forced out of its place in the diamond pattern underfoot by the roots of another old sycamore, and stumbled. With relief, he came to a gate and found a buzzer. Next to it, scribbled on the whitewashed wall, was the name Maki.

Beyond the tall garden wall, the wind abated. Omar Yussef fixed his hair with a plastic comb from his shirt’s breast pocket. He rubbed his shoes on the back of his trousers to clean away the dirt. The garden was lush and tropical. Omar Yussef wondered if Maki might be to blame for Gaza’s water shortage, the grass was so thick and the spiky feet of the date palms were swamped by so many low fern bushes. The path to the house was short, but it wound around a fountain of molded concrete and turquoise tile. A large plastic doe peered from behind a bush next to the bubbling water. Omar Yussef pressed his palm to her snout and stroked her head as he passed.

The plain mahogany door opened as Omar Yussef came up the steps to the porch. A tiny maid in a brown nylon housecoat held it for him and greeted him in deferential, whispered English. She was narrow and straight and bony, almost like a little girl. Omar Yussef assumed from her look and accent that Maki had shipped her in from India or Sri Lanka. Omar Yussef thanked her and looked around. He had never seen such luxury in the home of a Palestinian. The floors were a milky brown marble polished to shine like the surface of a summer lake. At the center of the room, there was a brilliant chandelier so large that the last Shah might have thought it ostentatious, and a dining table and chairs not less sparkling than the floor. For a small girl, the maid put in a lot of elbow work.

“Professor Adnan will be with you soon, sir,” she said. “May I bring you a drink?”

“Thank you. Soda water, please.”

The table was laid with two dinner settings of shimmeringly expensive silverware and crystal. Mentally, Omar Yussef set a place at the table for Eyad Masharawi and reminded himself that he must think carefully over every stage of his conversation tonight. Masharawi’s freedom depended upon it.

The maid brought him his soda water and disappeared. The glass shook in his hand.

The low strains of a Fairuz love song drifted through the room. Amid such opulence, Omar Yussef half expected the Lebanese diva to step from behind a curtain with a string quartet.

Instead, Professor Adnan Maki made his appearance. He came from a corridor whose entrance was disguised by a black cloisonne Chinese screen decorated with blue and red birds. He wore a loose cobalt-blue silk shirt that made him look like a movie pirate and dark linen pants. He reached his arms wide. “My dear ustaz Abu Ramiz,” he said.

Omar Yussef advanced carefully across the marble, in case it was as slippery as it looked.

Maki gave him three kisses on his cheeks. The smell of cologne was once again powerful. “Consider this your family and your home,” he said.

“Your family is with you.”

“Welcome, welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. Merciful Allah bless you.”

“Allah bless you.”

Maki held onto Omar Yussef’s hand and led him to the table. He pulled out a chair for him and slid it in under his guest. He glanced at the soda water. “Abu Ramiz, you are not in Hamastan any longer. The interior of this home is not even in Gaza, as far as I am concerned. It’s wherever I want it to be, and it can be a place for any enjoyments I care to arrange.”

I’ll bet, Omar Yussef thought. Maki certainly was right that his salon didn’t look like it was in Gaza. “As I mentioned earlier, I don’t drink alcohol, Abu Nabil.”

“Surely just one glass,” Maki said. “Your namesake, the ancient Persian poet, rhymed divine and wine. Was he not correct? Let’s toast to him.”

“Much as I enjoy the poetry of Omar Khayyam, my health doesn’t allow me to join you in your toast, Abu Nabil,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the internal organs of his abdomen.

Maki raised a cautious eyebrow.

“But I don’t object to your partaking,” Omar Yussef obliged.

Maki snapped his fingers and the maid appeared, holding a silver tray with two fingers of whisky in a crystal tumbler. Maki took it without a glance and put it away. Even as he swallowed, he spun his finger to signal that he wanted another, and sat. He looked suddenly serious and leaned forward.

“Abu Ramiz, it’s such a pleasure to have cultured company.” He let out the groan of a man who has long suffered ignorant fools. “You can’t imagine how I’m stifled by Gaza and its provincialism. My wife can’t stand to be here longer than a few weeks. As you can see from the place settings, she’s not eating with us. No, she is eating in a far better establishment tonight. She’s in Paris.”

The maid poured another whisky and Maki dived into the glass as if he were coming down from the high board at the beach club in the dunes north of Gaza City. He came up, shivering as he swallowed, and peered across the table with the staring wide eyes of a man swimming underwater. “We have an apartment in Paris. A pied a terre, as they say. A little place built in the seventeenth century. It’s in the Marais. You know this part of Paris? It used to be the Jewish quarter, but now it’s rather exclusive.” Maki laughed. “I like that very much, to be an occupier of the Jewish quarter. Yes, this is my small revenge for the occupation of our land in Palestine.”

He emptied the second glass and, while his throat recovered, he wagged a finger to signal that he had a story to tell. “Some old Jews still live in our building in the Marais. I like to watch their little heart attacks when I tell them they share their staircase with a senior member of the PLO. They refuse to acknowledge me, so I just whisper Allahu akbar as I pass them on the stairs. My wife is there now, as a refugee from the dust and the heat of Gaza. The only negative thing about her absence, from her point of view, is that she will not meet you, dear brother Abu Ramiz.”

Omar Yussef felt he was supposed to smile. He twitched his cheeks and blinked. “Your children are in Paris, too?”

“Yes, a boy and a girl, may Allah be thanked. Both are doing graduate studies at the Sorbonne.”

“Did they do their undergraduate degrees here at al-Azhar?”

Maki laughed and reached forward to tap Omar Yussef’s hand, as though he were a delightfully naughty boy. “It’s a shame you don’t drink, Abu Ramiz. You’re so witty, even when you’re sober. You’d be hilarious if you would join me in a whisky. Of course they didn’t study here.”

The maid brought a bottle of red wine and poured for Maki. Omar Yussef covered the top of his wine glass with his palm, so that she wouldn’t give him any. The crystal sounded a light, full note as his hand brushed its rim.

“So you’re a schools inspector for the UN, Abu Ramiz?”

“I’m on a schools inspection at the moment. Usually I’m the principal of the UNRWA Girls’ School in Dehaisha camp.”

“Ah, the finest people are those of Dehaisha. Progressives, leftists. Not all Islamists, as they are in Gaza.”

“Although I’m the principal, my main activity is still teaching. For three decades I’ve been a history teacher.”

Maki threw his arms wide. “That’s my field also. Abu Ramiz, we are two historians. This is a wonderful night. Welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. We shall talk history all night and forget about the present troubles of Gaza.”

Omar Yussef smiled, politely. Moroccan soap operas or Egyptian soccer would have been more neutral distractions. But if Maki was relaxed, perhaps he would be more inclined to help Omar Yussef with the Masharawi case.

The maid brought a tray of mezzeh, distributing the small plates of salads and spreads in a spray across the table. Maki handed Omar Yussef a wide, flat bread with which to eat the salads and pushed each plate solicitously toward him. “Your health,” he said.

Omar Yussef scooped a deep red paste of ground nuts, cumin and chilis onto a corner of his bread and ate it. “This really is the best mouhammara I’ve tasted in a long time,” he said.

“These Sri Lankans know Arabic cooking better even than Arabs. However, I fear that your colleagues, the Swede and the Scot, don’t have the same feel for Arab culture. They can’t truly understand our situation here in Gaza,” Maki said. “And why not? Because they don’t understand the history. If one only knows recent politics, then everyone looks bad-the nationalists, the Islamists, the refugees, the resistance. One can’t see why Palestinians behave as they do unless first one traces the dim reaches of our history.”

“Do you think the men in the resistance know our history?”

“They may not have studied for a doctorate, but I believe they fight in the name of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a real historical figure, or Saladin, who personally fought for Gaza against the Crusaders.”

“What lesson should my foreign friends draw from that?”

“That our people were fighting invaders long before the Jews came. It has been a constant battle throughout our history.” Maki picked up an oily vine leaf, bit through to the rice wrapped inside and chased it with a hearty swig of claret. “Two thousand years before we began to reckon time from the foundation of Islam, the Pharaoh Thutmose was our first invader. The Canaanites took Gaza from the Egyptians, only for the Philistines to capture it from them. In the oldest part of our city, you can still see a ruined stone building popularly known as the very temple which Samson pulled down on the heads of the Philistines. It’s nonsense, naturally-what’s left of the building is no more than five hundred years old, but it has a place in our historic memory.”

“The Jewish Bible says Gaza was allotted to the tribe of Judah,” Omar Yussef said.

“Of course, but don’t mention that-a thunderbolt may come down from the skies to strike us.” Maki looked up in mock terror. “Or one of the homemade Qassam rockets that our resistance fires into Israel.”

“You recounted these ancient invasions. But what importance do they have for the present conflict?”

“Great importance, indeed. They’re the roots of today’s conflict. Your foreign friends look at Gaza and see what? A shithole, of course. Who can blame them? The Scot is probably from Edinburgh, the Athens of the north, as they call it. Very cultural. Maybe the other one’s from the highly organized city of Stockholm, where no one crosses the road and farts at the same time. To them, Gaza is the epitome of absolute, worthless chaos. But Gaza was a crossroads of international trade when they were still painting themselves blue to raid the next village and steal its pigs.”

Maki took such a long drink of his claret that he was momentarily out of breath. “Look, if you read the surveys, you’d see that Swedish women have the smallest breasts, on average, in the whole world.” Maki rubbed his silk shirt in illustration. “Why? Because they don’t understand how to share life and its bounty. They’re individualists. Now Gazan women: under their robes they carry enormous breasts, big and heavy and full, like the hump of a camel.” He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes and held his palms upward as though they supported a great and sensuous weight. “This is because we’re surrounded by the desert, so we understand the value of life, of food and nourishment and community. Nature around us is harsh. We can’t look to it for easy sustenance, as they can in Sweden, with their lakes and forests. We must find nutrition in each other, in the fulsome bodies of our wives and in the feeling of belonging to a clan and in the shared struggle against the Jews. That’s the story of Gaza.”

Omar Yussef nodded and stretched his lips into some kind of a smile. He was glad Maki was enjoying his cultured evening discussion.

The Sri Lankan maid brought a platter of grilled, fatty lamb chops and kebab on metal skewers and charred chicken flecked with red grains of sumac. Maki slid the kebab from the skewers with a folded piece of bread and filled Omar Yussef’s plate. He picked up a roasted onion and pulled it apart with his fingers.

“The invaders continued to come. Saladin fought the Crusaders here, and then came the Turks.” Maki made circles in the air with the onion pieces, daintily, like a conductor with his baton. “The British fought three battles here before they took Gaza in 1917. Can you imagine? Do you suppose the British people know this, riding the London Underground and shaking their heads with a tut-tut as they read stories about Gaza’s violence in The Daily Telegraph?” Maki waved a segment of onion dismissively. “As they see it, the violence here is all about our immediate conflict with the Jews-we could have peace, if only we were reasonable, like the British. They don’t understand our three thousand years of oppression.”

“The problem isn’t that the Telegraph readers don’t know our history, Abu Nabil,” Omar Yussef said. “Our own people don’t know it, either. They learn history only in nasty cartoon form or from the mouths of politicians. How many people who claim to fight in the name of Saladin know anything about him, except that he was a hero who fought the Christians? They probably think he was a Palestinian, rather than a Kurd.”

Maki stared over the top of his wineglass. He made his voice serious and quiet. “As a historian, I should like to sit in on your classes, Abu Ramiz,” Maki said. “But I’m also a politician. I’d like to talk to you now about politics.”

“I welcome the opportunity to be your student.”

“The situation with Masharawi is very delicate,” Maki said. He rolled his wine around in his glass and watched the light of the chandelier filter through it. “I must appeal to you as a brother Palestinian that this case should go no further.”

“That’s not up to me.”

“I think it is.”

“Did I arrest him? I didn’t report him to Colonel al-Fara. Oh, and I forgot to bring the keys of his jail cell with me tonight.”

Maki stared at his wine.

Omar Yussef reminded himself to stay calm. He needed Maki on his side if he was to secure Masharawi’s release. He made his voice sweet. “Forgive me. Do you have any new information about the investigation into Masharawi, Abu Nabil?”

“It’s a very serious case, Abu Ramiz. There’s evidence of his involvement in espionage.”

“How could a teacher possibly help a spy agency?”

“By disrupting the work of our university and poisoning the minds of our best students against the government and the security forces.”

“What evidence is there of this?”

“He has signed a confession.”

“He signed?”

Maki lifted his chin and held his palms forward in a gesture of finality. “Confessing everything.”

“Under torture.”

“We don’t torture prisoners.”

“We? I’m not referring to the university, Abu Nabil.”

“Neither am I. I mean that we Palestinians do not torture prisoners.”

Omar Yussef waited as the Sri Lankan slid a platter of fruit onto the table. The professor took a paring knife to an orange and cut it into sections.

“Then he will be put on trial?” Omar Yussef said.

“If the security forces brought him to trial, it would only allow him to spread his false propaganda once more.”

“Then what do you intend to do with him?”

“That depends on whether the UN makes a big deal out of it. If the UN remains quiet, then it’s possible that we might be able to allow Masharawi to go free.”

“Release a spy?”

“After a suitable period in jail undergoing some punishment for his crimes.”

“More torture.”

“Punishment.” Maki raised his eyebrows and waved a segment of orange at Omar Yussef. “But it would be necessary to persuade the UN to remain quiet. If it becomes a diplomatic issue, it will be difficult for Colonel al-Fara to back down. Masharawi might have to be executed, as a traitor.”

“Wallender already has been told that Masharawi was tortured. He won’t just let that go.”

“The Swede is at your mercy, Abu Ramiz. He doesn’t speak Arabic, right? He doesn’t understand the culture or the players. He knows only what you let him know.” Maki smiled like a contented man sinking into a hot bath. “I don’t expect your cooperation just because of my beautiful eyes, Abu Ramiz. I can offer you incentives.”

Omar Yussef glanced around the room. He thought of the furnishings in his own home. He and Maryam were comfortable, but there was something seductive about a room of such lavish excess. The Sri Lankan brought a coffee and put it before him. She smelled of spices and kitchen sweat.

Maki grinned and nodded toward the Sri Lankan as she left. “Incentives of whatever taste you may have.”

“She’s too skinny for me,” Omar Yussef said. Keep a grip, he thought. Don’t let him know that you won’t help him. “I shall do what I can, Abu Nabil. But you have to give me something I can offer the Swede. Some way for him to feel he saved Masharawi. Perhaps if Masharawi were simply suspended from teaching for a semester.”

“He would have to be suspended from opening his mouth. The fool can’t help but broadcast ugly accusations every time he talks.”

“If Colonel al-Fara allowed me and Wallender to visit Masharawi, we might be able to persuade him to reach a deal. To keep his mouth shut.”

“I would prefer to make you happy in some way.”

“We shall discuss that, of course, but you must give me a little help, so that I can persuade Wallender.”

“We understand each other?”

Omar Yussef nodded. He looked at his watch and rose to say goodbye.

“Shall I call a car for you?” Maki asked.

“No, thanks. I must walk off some of this excellent food you’ve presented to me tonight. It’s not far to my hotel.”

When Maki saw Omar Yussef to the door, he held his hand and kissed him. The dust blew in and Omar Yussef stifled a cough. Maki looked at him closely and all the softness of the evening was gone from his face. His eyes were hard in the half-light. He doesn’t believe me, Omar Yussef thought.

He went down the steps. At the fountain, the plastic doe nuzzled his hand again. He came to the gate. Maki was in the doorway, silhouetted against the gleam of the big chandelier. The professor buzzed the gate and it swung open in the wind, faster than Omar Yussef expected. It caught him painfully on the wrist as he reached for it. Out on the street, the dust storm had picked up.