Ishmael's Oranges Read online

Salim sat with his mother and brothers in the kitchen listening to the radio. Michael Issa was talking; he said that the shelling had killed hundreds of Arabs near the town centre and port. The Jews were advancing from the north, spilling from Tel Aviv’s steel bowels. People were fleeing ahead of them. Northern Jaffa was almost empty. He begged people to stay calm and stay in their homes. He would defend Jaffa to his last drop of blood.

  The heat of the afternoon became too much for Salim, and he went to pace around the garden. A yellow haze filled the sky. It seemed to him that the trees themselves were trembling, their leaves shuddering in the still air. Did trees feel frightened? He rubbed his hand on the bark of his tree, feeling the notches marking his growth. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered into the wood. ‘It will be over soon. Just keep growing, until the next harvest.’ He stood there into the uncertain afternoon, saying it again and again under his breath. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

  After a restless night, his father put on his best suit of brown wool from Jerusalem to go to beg the British Police Commissioner for help. His stomach strained against the belt loops and sweat coloured his armpits dark. Salim stood by the door as he walked past, out of the kitchen and through the back gate. Outside, Abu Mazen’s new car was waiting, its engine whining gently like a dragonfly over a pond. Mazen was in the back, dressed in his boy scout uniform. His face was pale against the tight buttons, and when he turned Salim saw his eyes were red and swollen. But as soon as he saw Salim staring, he raised his hand into the shape of a gun, aiming at Salim through the window; Salim saw his hand jerk back as the car roared to life and made off through the silent streets.

  Abu Hassan returned that night with good news. ‘The British have given the Jews an ultimatum,’ he told them. ‘If they don’t pull back, the Angleezi will blow those rats out of their holes.’

  Salim took a deep breath and Hassan, beside him, clapped his hands and said, ‘Al-hamdullilah’ – thank God!

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ their mother replied darkly. ‘The British have made plenty of promises before. They leave in three weeks. Why would they want any more of their soldiers to die? Better to let us kill each other.’

  But this time, not even his mother’s words could quell Salim’s relief. They had been rescued from the brink. It was like when that little girl slipped into the sea from the pier last summer, while her mother screamed. Everyone had leapt to the dark water’s edge, but then a wave from nowhere had washed her right back onto solid ground.

  That night they all slept. But the next morning, fear crept back. It was nearly three days since the mortars started falling. Three days, with no water or power. The house reeked of sweat and fumes from the toilet, and the air was oily with smoke.

  Where were the British? The streets remained empty. Sporadic radio broadcasts said the fighting was still going on to the east and outside of Manshiyya. Villages close to Jaffa, and the outermost suburbs, had been taken. Where was the Arab Liberation Army? They felt utterly alone.

  In the afternoon, Salim’s mother asked Hassan to start bringing in their stocks of food from the garden shed. ‘We have to hide them,’ she said. ‘Who knows how long it will be like this?’

  He helped his brother heave the hessian sacks of flour inside. They looked like the bags the refugees carried, the ones the fellahin used to take fruit to the market; now they were all that stood between him and an aching belly. You’re just another stupid fellah now, you donkey.

  As evening fell, the hairs on the back of Salim’s neck rose. The sound of mortar fire returned to the north. In the gathering darkness he rushed into his parents’ room. His mother was there, filling a suitcase with trembling hands.

  ‘What are you doing, Mama?’ he said, dry fear swelling in his throat.

  ‘I won’t let them take our things, if they come here,’ she said, not looking up. ‘You need to get ready too. Put some clothes in a bag and bring it to me. Tell Hassan.’ Her voice was calm but her hands fluttered over her dresses and jewels.

  Salim ran from her, stumbling down the stairs in panic. His heart was pulling him like a desperate animal. Out, out, it urged. Run! Hide! He tried to calm himself. His mother needed him to be a man.

  He walked slowly over to the family mantelpiece. It was packed with carefully arranged pictures – grandparents he had never met, and one sad, yellowed image of a young girl at her wedding. His eyes searched desperately for the one he wanted.

  There it was: a small, rectangular photograph of a wide-eyed baby propped up against a tree. The baby was looking up in placid bewilderment at some distraction behind the camera. In the background, the white Al-Ishmaeli villa rose like a ghost, flowers curling around its façade.

  It had been taken at Rafan’s tree planting ceremony, one year ago in the garden. The baby, his tree and the little shovel pushed into the earth, to mark the start of two new lives. Only Rafan’s tree had been too small to lean against. So they’d propped him up against Salim’s.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Hassan had said, when Salim complained it wasn’t fair. ‘It’s just a picture. What does it matter to you?’ But he’d always pretended it really was him in the picture, there in his rightful place.

  He touched the trunk of his tree in the image, and courage came back to him. Pulling it down from the shelf he ran into his bedroom. He packed his schoolbag with his pyjamas, two pairs of underpants and a change of shirt, laying the picture in the middle. Then he went outside, to wait for what would come.

  On that final night, Salim kept vigil in the garden under his tree, a penknife in his pocket. His mother twice tried to bring him inside, but he refused. Finally she brought him a blanket.

  He lay huddled with his backpack against the bark. Jaffa’s lights were out, and it was the deepest night he’d ever seen. Through the dark, flickering leaves, the sky was seeded with fiery pricks of starlight. As he closed his eyes, they blurred into a brilliant river.

  In the milky air of dawn, he got to his feet. The world was wrapped in stillness, empty but for the birds and dogs. For a moment he wondered if he was still asleep – if he might yet wake up in his own bed, with the light streaming in through the window.

  Then he saw them – the dark clouds rising into the air over the port. A burning stench crept over the sleeping houses. Nearer than before he could hear gunshots and shouting – a wild mix of whoops and shrieks. His stomach clenched. The back gate clanged; he turned in a heartbeat and saw his father scurrying back into the house. A second later his mother rushed out, her face drawn and blank. She grabbed him by the arm and began pulling him inside.

  ‘The Jews are here,’ she said, her voice thick. ‘Manshiyya has gone and they’ve reached the sea; they’ll come here next. The British have failed us. Come now, it’s time. Your father says we must go.’

  Salim looked up to see his father hefting two large suitcases down the stairs. Hassan followed with a duffel bag from their bedroom. Tears were running down his brother’s cheeks, and the sight of them sent more surging into Salim’s eyes.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ he wept, feeling as helpless as a leaf in a storm. ‘We live here. I want to stay here.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said his father, his round face pocked with beads of sweat, his clothes stinking of terror. ‘Jaffa is gone, the Jews are coming. Don’t you remember Deir Yassin? We’ll all be dead if we stay.’ At that moment Salim did not care.

  ‘We’re going to your sister’s,’ Abu Hassan continued, as he lugged the heavy bags out to their car. Abu Hassan meant his grown-up daughter by his first, long-dead wife. They’d once visited Nadia and her husband, Tareq, sipping sweet tea and eating dates in the hill country of Nazareth.

  In the background, Salim could hear his mother’s gramophone – a woman, singing sadly about love. They can’t make me go. The words hammered in him, louder than the lament, louder than the boom boom boom coming from the port. He ran out to the patio, ignoring Hassan’s shout of ‘Hey, Salim!’ and Rafan’s wailing.
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br />   He couldn’t go. They didn’t understand. The air was thick, and the branches of the trees drooped wearily as he raced towards them.

  The penknife bumped heavy in his pocket, sneaked from Hassan’s wardrobe weeks ago. He pulled it out and dug it into the yielding bark, carving the word out one letter at a time. If anyone comes here, they’ll know you’re mine. His hand was shaking and the marks were weak, and before he could finish he felt his mother’s hand close on his arm.

  ‘Come on, Salim, don’t make it worse,’ she gasped, pulling him back inside. ‘Your father has made up his mind, and please God it won’t be for long.’

  Over the years to come, Salim would try to replay those last minutes in the Orange House, scraps of memory dancing away like embers from the flames. The fluttering of the yellow curtain in his bedroom as he pulled his socks on and the dim reflections of his mother’s mirror as she gathered the last of her jewellery. The sudden spring wind that set the orange trees whispering as they bundled him into the back seat. The squeal of the gate as the bolt slid shut. And the final slam of the car door. That last sound seemed to ricochet inside his heart, as they tore from the gates of the house, speeding him away.

  ‌

  ‌1956

  ‘Stretch, pet, stretch. Stretch those arms out! For God’s sake, Judith. Give it some heft, girl! How do you expect to get anywhere if you don’t bloody fight for it?’

  Every Thursday afternoon of her eighth year, Judith would put her head under the water at Wearside Swimming Club to escape preparations for the Tercentenary Celebration of Jews in Britain. Mr Hicks at the Wearside Pool didn’t care that the Prime Minister himself – and the Duke of Edinburgh too! – would attend a dinner with ‘every Jew that matters’. Dora’s temper was righteously inflamed: Alex Gold was one of the event’s organizers – and his family didn’t get an invitation!

  Judith knew that they were not rich, because Dora mentioned it at least once a day. She referred to Uncle Alex as ‘that rich pishaker in London’, and seemed determined to punish Jack and Judith for conning her out of her rightful place in society.

  Jack blamed the war. Gold’s Fashions had been a hit in the thirties. But when the bombs fell on Sunderland’s shipyards, blowing them to smithereens, half of its customers left. ‘Between your mother’s clothes and those bastards at the bank, even Moses couldn’t find a pot to piss in,’ Judith would hear him grumble as he went through the accounts.

  ‘He’s ashamed of you,’ Dora raged at Jack, the day before Judith’s eighth birthday. ‘We’re just the poor relations from the north while your brother’s machering around in Regent’s Park.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Jack said, edging towards the back door. ‘There are four hundred thousand Jews in Britain, we can’t all have dinner with the Prime Minister. Calm down and organize a dinner here with the Shul if you want to. Now I have to pop out to the shop, Gertie’s having some trouble with the books. Bye, pet.’ He kissed Judith on the top of her head, and slipped away.

  Dora swept past Judith into the kitchen in a blur of blue heels, and started setting the table with a furious clattering of china on wood. Judith tiptoed in.

  ‘See what your father’s family are like?’ Her mother’s chin gave a bitter jerk. ‘They don’t even know they’re Jewish. Gold by name but coal by nature, that’s all they’re bloody worth. After all we’ve been through, Jews should stick together. But not these fine fellows, oh no. It’s self self self all the time, and the rest of us can go shtup ourselves. Don’t you take after them, young lady.’ She shook a warning finger at Judith’s reflection in the kitchen tap. ‘It’s no naches to raise an ungrateful child, you know.’

  Judith nodded solemnly. It made her queasy, the idea of people sticking together – the Jewish people as a great stuck-together mass like so many pieces of the grey papier mâché they used at school.

  As she lay in bed that night she imagined that they were all standing outside Uncle Alex’s famous party in London in their finest clothes. But for some reason, as she slipped into sleep, it had become a wedding, and hundreds of feet were swirling round in the hora – a din so furious that Judith covered her ears. Then Dora snatched her hand yelling, ‘Come on, we’re all waiting for you, madam!’ But something was wrong – she couldn’t move, and when she looked down she saw her feet sinking into wet pieces of paper, clinging to her, gluing her to the spot.

  The Jewish girls at Hillview Junior School might not have minded being stuck together; neither Judith nor any of the others knew what it was to have a non-Jewish friend. But in their second year the girls found themselves arranged in the classroom not by tribe but by pure alphabetical populism. Judith was seated next to a new girl called Kathleen, a mass of black curls, gappy teeth and pink leggings under her school skirt.

  At break time, when the Shul club (as Tony called them) went into their usual corner, Kathleen asked blithely to see where the swings and the toilets were. As they walked around the playground in the cool morning sun, Judith felt Kathleen’s thin hand slip into hers, as she chatted away in a happy lisp.

  ‘You’re not like them at all,’ she said, kicking one of the boys off the swing and hitching her skirt up to sit on it. ‘They’re just like the ones at my old school – keeping themselves to themselves, you know. You’re nice, though.’

  Judith blushed and shrugged. ‘They’re not so bad,’ she said, uncertain. She looked nervously over her shoulder and saw the little group she knew so well – Minnie, Blanche, Ethel and Rachel – staring back in frank astonishment.

  Kathleen pushed herself off the ground and swung her legs to the marbled sky. Judith sat down next to her and did the same, a swooping feeling filling her stomach with the fall of the wind.

  ‘So why are you playing with me and not them?’ the stranger asked, as they flew past each other.

  Judith had no idea how to answer. She didn’t dislike her other friends. But she didn’t like them much either. ‘Just because,’ she said at last, feeling a perverse rush of courage as she imagined what Dora would say. ‘I like you. Why shouldn’t I like you?’

  Kathleen giggled and jumped off the swing onto the ground. ‘You’re a rebel,’ she hooted. ‘Mamma says rebels are the best kind of people.’ She started skipping around Judith, waving her arms in the air. ‘I LOVE it!’ she said. ‘It’s so romantic, like a song.’ And then she started singing ‘Tutti frutti, oh Judy’ again and again, until both girls leaned on the school wall and laughed until they cried. From that day, Judith became Judy and she and Kathleen were inseparable.

  Kathleen was a swimmer. ‘Mam says it’s all I’m good for.’ Wearside was on their way home, and Judith stood rapt as she watched the girls flying through the pool, their white caps cresting against the clean blue like the sea from Uncle Max’s postcards. There were no Jews under the water. That’s what Mr Hicks said in so many words when Kath nudged Judith to ask what it took to join the swim team. ‘Just strong legs and a bit of old-fashioned brass, pet,’ he answered.

  Life was different from that moment on. It was a rush of bubbles of water and air, the bursting exhilaration of the first breath at the surface, the cooling pressure in her ears that blocked out Dora’s irritation, and the feeling of weakness in her arms turning slowly to strength. After Wearside every Thursday, she’d walk with Kathleen to her house and listen to Pat Boone and Little Richard on her mother’s record player.

  Kathleen’s home smelt of fried sausages and chips. Her mother wore bright, tight trousers that showed her ankles and stripy tops that made her look like a doll. She had Kathleen’s black curly hair, she smoked and laughed like a teenage girl and told Judith to call her Molly. Judith once asked where Kathleen’s father was and got nothing more than a shrug from Kath and a ‘gone and good riddance’ from Molly. But she loved the fun they had together; the endless hints from Molly around making your own rules and living your own life. Judith was too young to see that Kathleen had trouble reading, that Molly sometimes cried and drank and Kath’s c
lothes were dirty behind their splashes of colour.

  On the last Friday afternoon of the summer holiday, Kath knocked on Judith’s door. From her bedroom she heard Gertie’s voice and Kath’s pipe, and tumbled downstairs. Mind yourself, Judit,’ Gertie grumbled, her lingering German accent soft against the northern vowels. Judith wriggled past her sister, rolling her eyes. Kath giggled, her shoulders squeezing up into her black curls.

  ‘Guess what, mon?’ she said, when Gertie had vanished. ‘I’m off to Wearside for a splash. Mam went out with some fella. She won’t mind. You coming?’

  Judith looked instinctively back over her shoulder. Gertie and Rebecca were in the kitchen, and the sour smell of gefilte fish was filtering through the hall. ‘I can’t,’ she said, frustration filling her. ‘It’s Sabbath.’

  Kath shrugged. ‘Judy-Rudy, you’re no rebel.’ But she smiled, a wicked freckled grin. ‘We’re doing Roker this Sunday. Last one of the summer! Mam says come too, why not?’

  The Shabbas prayers that night made Judith itch. Over Dora’s song, all she could hear was Kath yelling ‘Don’t get wet, pet’ as she skipped down the street.

  At the table she stirred her spoon morosely round the bowl, watching uneven balls of dumplings float to the surface. Earlier she’d watched Rebecca roll them up out of matzo-meal and egg, and drop them so tenderly into the pot, the sour wheat smell of them filling the kitchen. But now they floated heavily around her spoon, dreary and lumpen. Her stomach turned at the very thought of putting one into her mouth.

  Stealth in her fingers, she lifted one out and rolled it under the soup bowl. Gertie was concentrating hard on her own bowl, and Dora was telling Jack about a woman at Shul who was shtupping some goy from London.

  Judith lifted another one out and hid it. She was just trying for a third, when Rebecca suddenly said, ‘Mommellah, what on earth are you doing with those knedlach?’

  Dora’s head snapped up and her beady eyes saw the treacherous dumplings peeking out from under the plate rim. ‘What’s this, young lady?’ she said. ‘Hiding your food again?’