Books : A Trumpet in the Wadi : Excerpts

Chapter Six

Mary probably exaggerated the power of the lymph that flows in the eyes. I don't believe Wahid is capable of rebelling. He's mature, staid and prudent. He was not likely to break off with his parents, certainly not with such a formidable mother. Mary obviously appealed to him, maybe more than appealed, but when a man like him thinks about marriage, he looks for a hard-working woman, neither too stupid nor unduly clever, healthy, fertile and above all docile. Such a woman would surely suit him better than a romantic girl. Mary had known other men. In her illusion of equality, which a noisy democracy fosters in many hearts, she imagined that life is a magic garden where people run around unfettered by tradition and status. Or maybe for some incomprehensible reason she sobered up and leaped to the other extreme, adopting the old established attitude separating marriage from love. Sometime later I realized that she genuinely wanted to marry Wahid. On that failed matchmaking visit she was doing her best to capture the mother's heart, but failed miserably.

Mother took the defeat harder. Nor was she willing to forget the past. A few days later I heard her saying to Grandpa, "That lot? When they came to visit our house they sat on the edge of the chairs and sweated in their shiny velvet dresses." She was referring to her father's house, which loomed like a mountain over the horizon of the past. Since 1948 she had made no attempt to find out what happened to it. It was registered in her brothers' names, and was confiscated when they were deported. In the course of the years it grew in her imagination and ours into a dream palace. But the family relations scattered in the villages of Israel preferred to forget that past. I suspect that it was not only to honor the dead that Mother took care, almost compulsively, to attend every funeral. Death is a defeat. The men and women who ill-treated her were being carried helplessly in hard wooden boxes into the soil, which swallows everyone indiscriminately and pitilessly. The visit of Wahid's family had kindled a new hope in her heart. She hoped through Mary to forge new links to the past.

Not so Grandpa. His laughter did not dim after that visit. He came from the banks of a vast river that flows through a mighty desert. He had very little faith in human will. To him, fate and God were one and the same thing. Confronted with them you could do one of two things -- grind your teeth and avail nothing, or smile and regard life's shifting fortunes as a great joke.

That evening he sat at the table and looked at the fine lines forming around Mother's eyes. "Isn't it a shame to waste the food?" he said gently. "Don't tell me that the bread and the cheese have also become enemies."

"I can't swallow anything. And why aren't you eating?"

Later that evening Abu-Nakhla came in. Unlike the previous time, he skipped the niceties and went straight to the point. He put his tarboosh on a nearby chair, a sign that he meant to remain seated until he concluded the business for which he'd come. "I've talked to Jamilla," he started. "I gather it didn't work out with the family and you failed to sell Mary."

"We didn't intend to sell her," said Grandpa.

"All right." He didn't care what they called it, so long as the deal went forward. "She's pretty, I admit, but Zuhair's overdoing it. A man shouldn't lose his head over a woman."

"He'll settle down," Grandpa said. "Young men are apt to forget themselves."

"Zuhair young?" Abu-Nakhla frowned. "He's forty."

"You have to believe," sermonized Grandpa, the hater of sermons. "God is great."

Abu-Nakhla laughed aloud. "Don't tell me you've begun to pray."

"I didn't say I was a priest," Grandpa replied patiently.

Abu-Nakhla is corrupt but not an atheist, nor a skeptic like Grandpa. He believes wholeheartedly in God, but regards him as a kind of income-tax inspector. So long as he isn't caught or punished, he is innocent in the eyes of heaven. Allah is great and mighty and eternal, but undoubtedly has no time to worry about such trivialities as Abu-Nakhla's doings. Nevertheless, it is advisable to be cautious, the ground is not always safe under one's feet -- needless talk about Allah might draw the tax inspector's attention. After a brief silence he returned to the subject at hand. "I've come about Zuhair and Mary."

We feigned amazement, but Abu-Nakhla wasn't taken in. "We Muslims," he went on, "are not like the Jews and the Christians. Our house is open to all and we don't force anyone to kiss the cross or the mezuzah. I don't know how Mary bewitched my son. He doesn't sleep and doesn't let others sleep. All right. I don't begrudge you. Maybe thanks to her he'll grow up and Allah will bless them. One more thing, we won't ask for money and a dowry. On the contrary, I'm not short of money and I won't be stingy with my son. They can have a villa anywhere they like, even the most expensive neighborhood of the Jews. Even on the Carmel." He took out his beads and clicked them as he observed our faces. "Umm-Huda, you will admit that I never wasted my money on foolishness. I've always lived modestly. Money was saved and kept piling up. Here's your chance to restore everything to your daughter and her children." He looked at Grandpa, who was gnawing his narghileh mouthpiece. "We're both old men, you and I, and know how to forgive and forget. What's a Muslim? What's a Christian? We're all human."

Grandpa regarded Abu-Nakhla primarily as a kind of representative of the authorities, and like all Orientals, viewed the authorities as a menacing force, like a flood or a fire. "What can I say?" he replied.

"Give thanks to God, bless the couple and wish them happiness." He leaned forward and looked at Grandpa in disbelief. "You hesitate? What is there to consider? You're paupers and I'm leaving everything to Zuhair and your daughter." He turned to Mary and graced her with his princely smile. "Now it's all up to you."

"I'll do what Grandpa and Mother say," she whispered.

I rebelled. She isn't a coward. It isn't fair to place the burden on other people's shoulders!

Abu-Nakhla gave me a pallid smile. "You hear? She'll do what Grandpa and Mother say! She didn't ask them when she ambushed my son in corners and addled his brain."

"Abu-Nakhla!" Grandpa shouted.

The guest silenced him. "Leave it. It's between me and your granddaughter. Mary, listen. I say it again, you're as beautiful as a spring morning. But we both know how short morning is. Look, just look at your sister. She also turned up her nose once. Now even a worm of a man wouldn't piss on her."

"Abu-Nakhla!" Grandpa shouted again.

Abu-Nakhla ignored him. "Mary, you and your family had better understand me. I'm no crazier than you are about this deal. But I said, if Zuhair wants you so much, maybe that's what fate ordained. You're not exactly the chaste virgin I dreamed of for my son. Maybe you people are right. Maybe you're only a craving of his, like a new car. He likes shiny toys."

Mary fled to our room. Grandpa writhed on his bench as though struggling with invisible chains. Abu-Nakhla looked at him and grinned. "Don't think I underestimate you," he said to placate him. "If I were lying I'd have bitten my tongue and swallowed it. Ever since I can remember death has appeared to me in many strange guises. I've never really feared him, but I've treated him with respect." He stood up. "Egyptian, that's the respect I have for you. I've always suspected that you're only another guise of death. I didn't mean to insult you, any more than I'd dare to insult death. But the children have grown up, and not the way we expected. It's like a cucumber growing from a seed that you thought would sprout a palm tree like yourself. Still, it's the new generation and we have to accept God's will. Don't get up, I haven't come here to wrestle with you." He went to the front door and turned the handle. "I'll let Zuhair sort out his own mess with your daughter. I won't meddle in this business any more."

Mother was alarmed. "He'll destroy us. You've got to restrain him."

"Me?" Abu-Nakhla asked, standing in the door, his tarboosh almost touching the lintel. "Maybe I was wrong, Umm-Huda. Maybe death is as miserable and as shitty as my son. Let your daughter restrain him. I've tried everything and failed. Good night."

That night silence came down on our house. Nobody dared to ask questions and no one would answer those that were left unasked. Even Alex crept upstairs on tiptoes at dawn. Jamilla didn't come and even her cat kept quiet. Mary thumped her pillow ferociously and kept turning from side to side. In the darkness her cigarette was a wandering firefly. Nevertheless, by morning she was sound asleep in her rumpled bed, her fine face as calm as the face of a shipwreck survivor who's found a firm plank to float on.

Four hours later she came into the travel agency, met Adina and Shirley and sat in an armchair, leafing through tourist brochures, fresh and dynamic and attractive in her tight trousers and floppy shirt. I envied her. She knows how to sleep and forget. While dealing with a customer I glanced over and saw her taking a cigarette from Adina's pack, chatting lightly with Shirley and shaking her loosened hair at Boaz, who came out of his office and took her for a customer. "I'm Mary, Huda's sister," she reminded him with a stunning smile.

"Ah, yes, yes. Hullo. Welcome," he mumbled, laid some papers on Adina's desk and withdrew to his office. In Mary's presence the bashful grew more timid, and the bold bolder.

"I've come," Mary said to Shirley, "to buy Huda a swimsuit."

I'd forgotten the promise, and at that moment the idea struck me as pointless and absurd. Shirley was astonished. "Now? It's almost winter. But that's Huda. She always puts things off." When I finished with the customer I excused us by saying, "Things are always cheaper at the end of the season."

The three of us went shopping. There was a great selection, but everything seemed designed to emphasize precisely what I try to hide. In the years after Bahij I felt I was gradually withering. The shopkeeper stretched the swimsuit to demonstrate its elasticity and good quality, and I felt as if his fingers were touching my flesh and not the garment I had not yet bought. "Go on, take it," Shirley urged me. "It'll suit you. You've got a terrific figure."

There was no mockery in her tone and I was afraid to look into her eyes. The shopman grew enthusiastic. "You must try it on. Over there behind the curtain."

I didn't go. I put my hand on something green and said, "This one, please."

Outside Shirley complained to Mary, "Going shopping with your sister is like visiting the bereaved."

And when you cling like a branch to a post stuck in a stream, said I to myself, your very existence hinders the current of other people's lives.

Mary gave her a mischievous smile. "Now everything's going to change. Huda's fallen in love with the trumpeter."

I ought to have denied it and scolded her. I kept silent. I even enjoyed Shirley's prolonged stare.

In the evening Wahid showed up at our house. He looked like a man who's run as hard as he could and having reached his destination doesn't know what to do with himself. He sat and smoked in silence and sipped the coffee noisily and did not look at any of us. Mother's warm smiles did not help him break his silence. He'd come straight from work and smelled strongly of sweat. I saw that he had a gold tooth in his mouth. Suddenly he stood up, went to the window and came back, grumbling, "The police gave me a ticket."

Mother and Mary hastened to the window. "This is an awful place," Mother apologized, as though it was her fault.

Not to appear indifferent, I also went to the window. I saw Alex leaving the house. He stopped for a moment by the car and looked at the ticket. Then he glanced up and saw me, and his hand rose a little as if he meant to wave to me. I forgot the guest and looked after him till he turned the corner and disappeared. Something in my expression made Wahid think that I was doubting his word.

"It's a ticket, I tell you," he exclaimed.

"Never mind," Mother said to comfort him, and put roasted almonds and biscuits on the table. "Go and get dressed," she whispered to Mary.

Mary was still dressed in tight trousers and the loose shirt and her face was clean of makeup. She looked at Wahid with big eyes and asked, "I'm dressed all right, aren't I?"

Wahid blushed. Grandpa hurried to help him out and said, "I'm sorry the last visit ended as it did."

Wahid addressed Mother. "I haven't come to apologize." He fell silent again, as if the words were fluttering wildly inside him, unable to break out. Mary sat down facing him, radiant with the glow of a promised paradise.

Grandpa again tried to raise the guest's spirits with Oriental chitchat. "We thank you for coming. You're a welcome guest in our house."

"Umm-Huda," the guest struggled with the words, "Umm-Huda, I want to marry Mary."

Mother's face beamed. "We'd be delighted, truly delighted."

Grandpa stood up and they shook hands. After a moment's hesitation they embraced. While they were clasping each other Mary spoke up. "It's out of the question." There was no smile on her face.

"Why? Why?" Wahid cried out.

I almost burst out laughing. His hoarse voice sounded like a wailing child who has found himself under a dripping gutter and doesn't know how to escape it. He sank into the chair and stared at her. Mary passed her tongue over her lower lip, slowly, as if estimating the taste of her prey, and looked devastating. But her voice suggested closeness, as if she was tackling an intimate matter with a person of undoubted importance. "I respect your mother and father, and I don't want to enter your house as an enemy. I haven't the strength, I haven't the strength for that."

I need not have feared that she would overdo it and demonstrate how powerless she was. She knew the right measure.

"I've thought about it," Wahid growled. "What do you take me for. I wouldn't let them insult you."

"You yourself are perfectly all right," she enfolded him in her low voice.

"I make a good living, thank God. You won't have to dirty your hands working. We'll live anywhere you like. Doesn't have to be the village."

That's how Bahij too talked in the beginning. He was ready to promise a trip to outer space. He was completely unaware of the falsehood of his promises. All the same, his promises sounded different. Wahid sees himself as inferior to Mary, for all his mother's prosperous manner.

"It's not a question of house and property," Mary said to him. "A wife can always be discarded, replaced..."

Wahid's mouth fell open. "Me, discard or replace you?"

She ignored his astonishment. "But a child or a mother can't be replaced. I am very flattered that you came, but I don't want to start life like a thief."

"And if Father himself came and said what I'm saying?"

Mary gave him a sad smile. "You know that a mother-in-law is a second mother."

At that moment Wahid was ready to strangle his mother with his bare hands. He looked to Grandpa to rescue him. Grandpa was cautious and played Mary's game. "She's right, son. A bride must respect her mother-in-law's will."

"Then she will have to come herself," he announced and got up to leave.

Mother tried to detain him. "Stay a little longer. Have supper with us."

He declined politely. His throat was so tight he would have been unable to swallow a grain of rice.

In my bed that night I hugged my knees in distress. We girls were raised and trained to get married. They didn't bring us up as people who live in a community, but rather as soldiers trained to carry out a mission. Plotting, cunning, booty, triumphs, defeats and false morale -- all were legitimate in the struggle for the coveted goal, a husband to support us. That was the essential happiness, as our forebears saw it. But we live in a different age, one in which love has become a kind of new religion. The trouble is that in this religion there are no priests or prophets, no divine revelation or scriptures. Individuals must find their own gods, interpret the omens and make their way through life without any clear guidelines. We all go out into the desert in search of this love, and most of us get lost in the wilderness. I felt so tired. The empty roof weighed on my chest. If Wahid had enfolded me with the same fervor with which he enfolded Mary...I shudder to think how I'd have reacted. I, who rejected Bahij...

I fantasize and live in dreams. What have I to do with a roof and a trumpet I have never even seen, and the sturdy figure which had stopped and glanced in passing at my face in the window? Why do my fantasies cling to him, of all people? Even the blindest love has an element of choice in it. And here there is no real love, no blindness, nothing but choice, and it has no foundation at all. Since Bahij I've deliberately clung to nothing but fantasies. Once I convinced myself that I was in love with a pimp who came into the travel agency to buy flight tickets to Germany for himself and two of his prostitutes. Business is great over there, he told me jovially, it's work like any other, and certainly more interesting than selling airline tickets. He had knife scars, hard eyes, and a display of rings on his fingers. He must have noticed the darkness behind my forehead, or he wouldn't have dared to speak to me as he did. I was drawn to him because I knew that if I'd run into him alone in an alley I'd have passed out in terror. Another time my heart went out to a slightly retarded street cleaner in the wadi. He came every day from the Bedouin tin shacks near Jalama, dressed in a torn robe and nothing but plastic slippers on his cracked black feet, even in winter. He swept and raked the street diligently and sensibly, and would suddenly drop everything and run after a piece of paper tossed by the breeze, like a dog chasing a startled bird.

I didn't know what was preferable, the life without illusions that Mary opted for, or the fantasies which were driving me out of my mind.

In the meantime, half asleep, I listened for the sounds of Alex returning from the port. First I heard the heavy footsteps. Then the sound of other feet overtaking Alex on the stairs. Then our front door was shaken by powerful banging.

"Open up, I tell you!" Zuhair was yelling drunkenly. "Mary, I'm not leaving this place."

Mother leapt from her room and shackled Grandpa with both her arms. She rose on her toes and spoke into his blazing green eyes.

"You're not going near the door," she begged. "He must be armed. He'll get tired. The police will come, the neighbors will drive him away."

"I'll break his arms," Grandpa groaned, almost in tears at the sound of Zuhair's blows and curses.

Mary trembled. "He'll kill me, he'll kill me," she mumbled. "You don't know him..."

At that moment I was more afraid for Grandpa than for Mary. I knew he'd bar the bully's way with his body.

Zuhair kicked the door.

Mother pleaded tearfully, "Zuhair, my son, I beg of you, leave us alone and Allah will reward you."

"I'll break down the door if you don't open it."

"What do you want from them?" said Alex's voice in Hebrew.

How did I forget him? I froze. His voice sounded to us like a fanfare of deliverance. Then a different fear gripped me. They were both standing in the dark, one violent and armed and the other tired, weak-sighted and probably unaware that his rival was a dangerous man.

"None of your business," Zuhair said to Alex.

"Go away, go," Alex ordered him.

I could see him plainly -- short, his thick spectacles peering at Zuhair's face in the dark. I wanted to call out to him to be careful, that he was facing a murderous man, but as in a dream my shouts emerged as stifled moans.

"Piss off, punk," Zuhair said.

"What's that in your hand?"

"A knife. You want me to fuck your mother? I told you to piss off."

Alex's voice was heard no more. There was a short struggle and some dull groans.

"He murdered our poor neighbor," Mother said in terror.

The silence outside the door gripped my throat like a fist. We stood in the living room and listened to one pair of feet going down the stairs. My facial muscles seemed to have gone to sleep. I approached the door as if impelled. Mother let go of Grandpa and spread out her arms. "No, daughter, no. There's a corpse outside."

"But maybe he's only wounded and needs help," said Grandpa.

I opened the door and saw nothing. The light from the living room showed drops of blood on the landing and the stairs. I fled inside. "He's carrying him down," I said and ran to the window. On the pavement outside the entrance stood three of Zuhair's men, smoking and looking up. Lights were on in some windows and heads were peering out. "He's taking the neighbor down to his gangsters," Mother sobbed.

But it was not Zuhair who came out into the light of the street lamp. Alex was holding a bloody knife in his right hand while his own blood dripped down to his fingers. Zuhair was thrown over his left shoulder like a rolled-up rug. Alex didn't have his glasses on. He gazed at the thugs surrounding him without seeing them clearly. "Where's the police?" he asked, like a man who'd lost his way. One of the thugs laughed aloud. His friend silenced him with a slap and said to Alex, "You killed him?"

He was shorter than the three of them. His eyes searched for a breach in their wall. The street lamp must have looked to him like a dazzling puddle. Up the street a police siren pierced the silence, probably summoned by a neighbor on the phone. The thugs fled and Alex turned like a blind man to the approaching siren. The police car stopped with screeching brakes and two policemen spilled out as if popped out by springs. At the sight of the knife and the blood they drew their guns and again a silent scream froze in my throat. But Alex didn't see the small details. He noticed the open door of the vehicle and flung his burden inside, saying, "Take him." The heavy silence warned him that something was wrong, and he stepped back like a blind man sensing danger. The two policemen advanced toward him with their guns aimed at his chest. Drop the knife, Alex, drop it, the shout came out of my mouth as a low mumble.

"It isn't him!" Mother yelled from the window.

I grabbed her shoulder and trembled all over. Alex and the policemen looked up at us. I wanted him to hear my voice too but couldn't utter a sound. The other windows remained silent. The Arab street kept silent in defiance and with gritted teeth. Another Jew beating up an Arab. And although I was wholeheartedly on Alex's side, and would have stood between him and the cocked guns, I felt the Arab street's pain.

"What's going on here?" one of the policemen asked Mother.

"He came to smash up our house. He threatened to kill."

"This one?" he asked, pointing at Alex.

"No, the other one."

Only then did Alex understand what was going on. He dropped the knife and approached the policemen, pointed at the vehicle and said, "I didn't kill anybody. It is only stinking drunk."

The policemen pounced on him. A gun was pressed to his temple and another to his back. "And the blood on your hand?"

"What blood?" Alex wondered. He raised his fingers to his eyes, spread them and closed them, surprised by their stickiness. He hadn't noticed that he was wounded. "It is my blood," he said.

He was pushed into the vehicle. It roared away and then silence returned to the street. Jamilla's cat jumped out of the window and licked the drops of blood.