Ishmael's Oranges Read online

  ‘I won’t walk all the way. Maybe just a little bit. Is your mama okay?’

  ‘Yes, she’s okay. She’s afraid now. She and Papa fight a lot.’

  ‘Mine too.’ Salim kicked the ground in front of him. ‘Is she frightened that the Arab armies are coming to save us?’ These days, the radio and Friday sermons were full of nothing else.

  Elia didn’t reply, and they walked along in silence. Salim started to feel sorry for him. If he were Elia, wouldn’t he fear the great Arab armies? He imagined them, rows and rows of men with their flags streaming and guns waving, just like the bedouin from the old stories.

  ‘You can come to our house,’ he said in a rush of feeling. ‘Mama will hide you. We won’t tell anyone you’re Jewish. You’ll be safe with us.’

  Elia raised his head sharply and Salim was suddenly frightened by his expression. ‘Ya Salim, I don’t think we can live like we used to,’ he said, slowly. ‘Mama says your people hate the Jews and will never let there be peace. So we’ll fight each other, no matter what.’ He shrugged his shoulders again. ‘Only God knows who will win.’

  ‘The Arabs will win,’ said Salim firmly. He had little affection for his father, or Abu Mazen, or for any of the other heavy men who came and went from his house. But his world was built around the smell of their cigarettes and the low hum of their conversation. It was impossible to believe that their authority might ever cease to be there, quietly ordering the universe.

  ‘You’re just like Mazen, if you think that,’ said Elia, stopping dead beside him. ‘Why didn’t you go with him? He’ll teach you how to shoot at my family and trash our shop, like his terrorist friends.’

  Salim laughed before he could stop it; the thought of fat Mazen screaming with a pistol in his hand was too funny. But the sound seemed to hurt Elia somehow; his thin shoulders recoiled into his body like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring. Yelling, ‘Yallah, go on then! Go!’ his arm shot out in a half-punch, half-shove, hitting Salim in the chest and pushing him against the stone wall.

  It felt like the time he was stung by a bee – numbness, followed by a sharp, rising pain that made Salim want to howl. Hot tears sprang to his eyes.

  ‘You should go!’ he shouted back, bunching his hands into fists. ‘Go away. This is Palestine, where the Arabs live. Go back to your own place.’

  ‘Jaffa is my place!’ Elia sounded tearful. ‘But that bastard Mazen wants to throw a bomb through my window. What are we supposed to do?’

  Salim thought of the terror of Clock Tower Square, the bloody pile of broken stone and the raw screams filling the air like smoke. Mayor Heikal had spoken on the radio that night and called the Jews murderers of children, as savage as bears. Mazen and his gang had sworn revenge. On that day, across the whole of Jaffa, it was heresy to think that Jews were not devils.

  But despite this, Salim still believed the world of Jews must surely be divided into the bad and the good. The bad ones lived in Tel Aviv and those vast farmlands where Arabs did not go. People said they had driven families out of their homes, invaded Haifa, Jerusalem and other Arab villages and killed in their hundreds while the British just stood by. Salim had never seen one of these nightmare Jews. But at night, they stood dark and faceless on the borders of his sleep.

  But Elia’s family looked much the same as everyone else in Jaffa. They worked and lived just as his family did. So how could they be enemies?

  He wanted to explain some of this to Elia, but confusion tied his tongue. Instead he just stood there, eyes cast down, twisting his foot on the gravel. They were still some distance from the gates of El-Balasbeh, and it was already closing time. Elia sighed, a sound that seemed to say: Well? But if it was an invitation, Salim did not understand it.

  ‘I have to go home now,’ Salim said finally. Tomorrow, perhaps, they could put it all right. Elia nodded.

  ‘Okay, Salim,’ he said. ‘Ma salameh’ – go in peace.

  As Elia walked away, Salim’s stomach felt heavy – like small stones of worry knocking together. And then there was nothing left to do but run, past the ruin of the Square and through the shuttered streets, back towards the safety of home.

  The Al-Ishmaeli house was known as Beit Al-Shamouti, the Orange House. A thick wall of shamouti orange trees flickered darkly behind the bars of its iron gate, spring blossoms swelling on their boughs. Over summer, they would turn from small lemon buds into globes of Jaffa’s gold. Then the air would fill with a bruised sweetness as they were crushed into juices or sliced and sprinkled with sugar and rosewater. Across Jaffa, others would be wrapped in paper and packed into steamships, destined for lands Salim had only dreamed of.

  The neighbours whispered, too, that without his fifteen dunams of orange land south of the city the thick-lipped Saeed Al-Ishmaeli – Abu Hassan to his friends – would be lucky to afford a shed in his own back garden. That was the other reason for the house’s nickname.

  As he walked back home through the darkening streets, Salim brooded over Elia and Mazen. They’d all been friends once. But last year everything changed.

  Frère Philippe had tried to explain it at school. Palestine was to be divided up between the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews would get the northern coast, the Galilee and the southern desert. The Palestinians got the fertile west bank of the Jordan and the green hills before Lebanon, as well as the southern port of Gaza. Jerusalem was given to the whole world. Because Jaffa was in the Palestinian part, by law, the Jews could not take it. Salim had looked at his teacher in amazement. Who were the people doing all this giving and taking of homes?

  The thought of anyone taking his own trees made his skin prickle. Fellah! How dare Mazen call him a peasant? Peasants were dirty and poor, with rough hands and bad teeth. They worked the land, but never owned it. I am a landowner’s son. It’s my right to pick the harvest.

  When he visited the fields last week, he’d not been allowed to take any fruit. Salim was too young, Abu Hassan said – by which he meant too disobedient. Harvest is a job for a man, not a child, he’d proclaimed.

  Instead it was always Hassan who went. It suited Abu Hassan to parade his eldest boy up and down the lanes of trees like a real effendi – ‘As if he was heir to something important and not just a few acres of dirt,’ his mother had said. Salim was too complicated a case for a man who loved income, idleness and coffee in that order, who bought Jaffa’s newspaper Filastin just to keep folded by the living room table.

  This is why Mazen’s jibe hurt so. It was his way of saying ‘My father is a clever and important man who understands things. Your father may have a bit of money, but he has the brains of a fellah. So when the fighting comes your family will be out in the cold.’

  Turning the handle of the back gate, Salim slipped inside the garden. The trees looked sleepy in the dusk, the air between them still flushed with the sun’s warmth.

  He liked to count them as he walked the path towards the porch. Each had a story: this lopsided one lost its branches in a famous winter storm and now stood like a beggar at the gate, reaching out to guests with one plaintive arm. This one was a bully, pushing its branches into all the others while its roots bubbled up out of the earth like a sea monster.

  Then there were the three smallest trees planted for the three sons: Hassan’s first, then Salim’s and then Rafan’s just last year.

  Hassan’s tree was a good height for its age, tall enough to shelter under, with thick roots. It had matured early and Hassan was only five when he started taking its fruit. Salim could not recall a year without the ritual of holding his elder brother’s woven basket and breathing in the bitterness of freshly plucked oranges.

  Salim’s tree had been fruiting for a year now. But his father had not let him take the fruit during this harvest, to teach him a lesson in obedience. Orange farmers plant trees when their sons are born, the fellahin said. But they only grow sweet when the boys are ready to become men.

  Perhaps that was why you’re so little, he thought sadly, stroking its bark
. It was only three years younger than Hassan’s but less than half the height. The tree leaned westwards into the sunset, its branches like hands clambering up the wall to escape.

  The stunting of Salim’s tree was a kitchen joke in the Al-Ishmaeli household. Hassan found it particularly funny. ‘I hope your balls grow bigger than your oranges, Salim,’ he used to say. ‘Or you might turn into a woman after all.’ His mother blamed it on the wrong ground. It was stony by the gate and lacked the morning sunshine. But she never mocked him for loving it. He touched the fresh cut on the trunk made that week, the memory of tiptoeing into the garden by candlelight together, to mark his seventh-year height on the tree and eat sweets under the stars.

  She was sitting on the porch as he reached it, Rafan at her breast. Behind her the sky was emptying, and the blue shadows made her red hair look black. Her head was bent to the baby and the hushed sound of her song was swallowed by the sea breezes.

  Noor Al-Ishmaeli was a breathtaking woman. Even Salim knew it, from the whispers of the boys, and the deference of the Frères when she took him and Hassan to school. It was her remoteness – as still and melancholy as a sculpture, as scornful as Andromeda tied to her rock. Her white forehead and olive-green eyes were the legacy of a noble Lebanese family, fallen on hard times, who bargained away their fifteen-year-old daughter’s virginity to Saeed Al-Ishmaeli for the equivalent of two new cars and her father’s retirement fund.

  Now, despite fifteen years in Palestine, with three children born and raised there, she still lived like a stranger. But to Salim she was the source of all wonder and love. He had always been her favourite – until the new baby came.

  He put his chin over her shoulder, suddenly desperately tired. She tipped her head to rest her forehead on his, and he closed his eyes for a moment in peace.

  ‘Where have you been, ya’eini?’ she asked. Salim was the only child who ever won that endearment from her, the mother’s blessing that says ‘you are more precious to me than my eyes’. She chose to say it the old way, in the formal Arabic of imams and singers – words that distanced, that said foreigner. But to Salim it sounded noble; it stirred his daydreams of knights and queens.

  ‘Out with Mazen, Mama.’

  She laughed, as Rafan snorted on her lap. ‘I don’t know what you see in that son of a pig.’ Salim felt guilt itch up his back.

  ‘I don’t like him either, but there’s no one else still here,’ he said defensively. It was true – many people had left Jaffa, saying they would be back when the ‘troubles’ were over. Salim hesitated and then said, ‘He called Baba a peasant.’

  ‘Aya, maybe he’s cleverer than I thought.’ She lifted her head into the dying light and turned those vivid, searching eyes on him. ‘Did it bother you, habibi?’ Salim hung his head, afraid to answer.

  ‘My beautiful boy,’ she said, and he heard amusement in her voice. ‘So sad, a mosquito stung him. There are so many here, buzzing all over the place. But when morning comes, ya’eini, what happens to mosquitoes?’ She opened her empty hand, and Salim imagined tiny puffs of shadow disappearing into the air. ‘One day, all these Mazens will mean less to you than that. You’re going to be a bigger man than them.’

  Then, just as quickly, she dropped her hand and turned back towards the horizon, where the pale darkness had settled over the sea.

  ‘If you want to see what kind of big man Mazen is going to become, go inside,’ she said, carelessly. ‘Abu Mazen is there, talking shop with your father.’

  The kitchen was dark, with the evening meal prepared and covered on the table; warm smells of rice, lamb, hummus and little parcels of steamed cabbage leaves. The kitchen door opened directly into Abu Hassan’s domain with its plush leather seats surrounding a coffee table of tortoiseshell lacquer.

  From behind the door, Salim could hear his father’s low, complaining rumble and Abu Mazen’s smooth replies. Hearing the word Jews, he pushed the door open just enough to listen.

  ‘You can think what you like, my friend,’ Abu Mazen was saying, ‘but these guys leaving now have their heads screwed on. Look at Heikal and Al-Hawari! Heikal is Jaffa’s first politician and Al-Hawari is its first soldier. But are they here? No. They’re waiting it out in Beirut and Cairo. They know the British have already dropped us like a rag. The Jews took Haifa and Jerusalem without the Angleezi firing a single shot. They’re coming here next. And when they do, it will be like Deir Yassin all over again.’

  Deir Yassin. The words made Salim go cold. He’d seen the pictures of the bodies in that village, after the Irgun came. They said Jews had put whole families in front of the walls and filled them with bullets.

  ‘The Jews are cowards.’ Abu Hassan’s voice, a wheezy bass. ‘Haifa and Deir Yassin had no defences. We have the Arab Liberation Army here, more than two thousand men.’

  ‘They don’t care about that rabble. They have the Americani at their right hand, and the United Nations. They have guns and artillery coming from Europe. In three weeks Palestine is facing a death sentence. When the British leave, the Jews will raise their flag and defend it. You think Ben-Gurion is going to wait while we hit his convoys and kibbutzim? For the Egyptians and Jordanians to invade his new Israel, to bed down in our cities then cross to Jerusalem and destroy him? No, the Jews won’t risk it, I promise you. They’re attacking first, and they’ll take all they can get. Haifa’s gone. We’re next. Remember Clock Tower Square? They don’t care what they have to do to us. Maybe we should all clear out, until our friends come across the border to help us.’

  Clear out? thought Salim, just as his father said, ‘Why should I leave my own house because of the Yehud? Let the Arab armies fight around me.’

  And then suddenly Salim yelled in shock; a hand had clapped over his eyes and another over his mouth.

  A giggle from behind him told him it was Hassan. He felt a hard pinch on his cheek as Hassan said, ‘What’s this, ya Salimo? Listening at the door again? Shall I tell Baba or can you pay me not to?’

  Salim wrenched himself around in panic, trying to break from Hassan’s grip. One flailing arm caught Hassan on the cheek. The older boy stopped laughing and started yelping ‘Baba, Baba!’

  The conversation halted; footsteps approached and then the kitchen door swung open. Stuck in Hassan’s furious arm-lock, Salim could just see his father’s round cheeks and sunken eyes glaring at him over his white shirt and neck-cloth.

  ‘He hit me, Baba,’ panted Hassan. ‘He was listening at the door and when I tried to stop him, he hit me.’

  The injustice made Salim choke; the words surged up before he could stop them. ‘You liar!’ he screamed. ‘You’re a lying son of a pig!’

  Hassan’s eyes widened in shock and Salim realized what he’d said. Then Abu Hassan’s ringed hand came sweeping out of the air, slapping him hard enough to drive his teeth into his lips. Saliva and the tang of blood mingled with tears running down his face.

  Looking up at his father’s face he saw the lip thrust out, the same immovable lip that last week said no to the harvest, no to his orange tree, no to his mother’s idea for a birthday party like the ones the British children had. He heard himself saying: ‘I hope the Jews do come to kick you out.’ Then he ran past them, sobbing as he hurtled up the stairs into his bedroom and slammed the door shut.

  Gradually his tears gave way to stillness. Sounds beyond the door became audible once again; the evening meal went ahead without him, his mother’s and father’s voices raised in their nightly argument. Today it was about the pearls Rafan had broken, that Baba said were too expensive to replace. ‘Do you think you married a rich man?’ he was yelling, in his fractured bass. ‘Wasn’t it enough those Lebanese thieves beggared me when I took you, now you want to finish the job?’ Then, ‘You want to dress like a Beiruti whore, go back there, I won’t stop you,’ before her cold reply, ‘In Beirut even the whores live better than I do.’ Salim pulled the pillow over his head.

  After dinner, the door creaked open and he heard soft
footsteps. A voice whispered, ‘Hey Salim, Baba said you were to stay here without any food – but I brought you a plate.’ It was Hassan, contrite. Salim turned on his side to look at him, but did not speak.

  ‘By God, it was just a joke, Salim. You take everything so seriously, you ninny. But why did you have to go and upset the old man? You know what he’s like.’ He reached out and ruffled Salim’s hair, a shamefaced touch.

  After Hassan left, Salim tried to ignore the food. But his tummy rumbled so badly that he ended up pulling it towards him and cramming it into his mouth, gulping each furious bite.

  Thoughts twisted through his mind like snakes. The burning unfairness of it, of Hassan’s proud day at the harvest, of Rafan arriving to occupy their mother’s arms and time. And him, Salim – not a man to be respected nor a baby to be loved. Then came Abu Mazen’s words, slipping down his hot throat with the taste of ice and fear. Why were the Jews coming here next? Why would they need to leave their home? It will be like Deir Yassin all over again. The story of that massacre had blown through Palestine like a red wind – fifty dead, one hundred, two hundred. The rice in his mouth was gritty as dust and he heard the woman screaming – Omar! Omar!

  He pushed the plate away and lay down again, pulling the blanket over his head. Another hour went by before he heard another click of the doorknob. This time, Salim felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead, and breathed in the reassuring smell of his mother’s perfume. He lay still as he could, afraid that if he spoke a word, he would make her want to leave again.

  A long silence passed. Finally he could hold back no longer. ‘It’s not my fault, Mama,’ he whispered. ‘Baba hates me.’

  ‘Hate?’ Her face was a white wall in the darkness. ‘You don’t know about hate yet, ya’eini.’

  ‘Why should Hassan go again to the fields and not me? It’s so unfair.’

  ‘What’s fair in this life?’ she said, her voice low. ‘Not even God is fair. Only fools say different – but you’ll learn, Salim. If a man wants something, he must find his own way.’