Stars of Jericho

Excerpt from Chapter Six of the novel translated by Seema Atalla

Abu Samir and his wife became acquainted with my parents after the famous Shorts incident, in which several plots against the girls, school, headmistress, and my mother in particular, had been foiled. When certain political forces tried to use the incident to illustrate the Left’s immorality, Abu Samir the patriot took my mother’s side.

That was how our families got to know each other and I found paradise spread out before me: a vast garden bordering on the springs of Ain al-Sultan so that little streams and rivulets flowed into it. A vast green expanse busy with every fruit tree one could imagine. Grasses, bushes, and vegetables carpeted the ground under sycamore, mulberry, mimosa and sesban trees. An ocean of perfumes wafted through the air. Butterflies flitted about like tiny suns and giant weeping willows trailed their hair in the brooks. Most important, there were children, among whom was a girl my own age, Marmara. No one followed us to see what we would do, or how far we would go. No one cared if we spent the whole day barefoot in the murmuring silvery streams or stayed up in the trees for hours on end. “There’s nothing to worry about,” said Umm Samir to my mother, who was amazed at my delight. “The girl’s cooped up at your place. Let her run around here and have some fun.” Umm Samir was perpetually in a housecoat that buttoned up the front. She dressed up only on the rare instances when she left the house to attend a wedding or to pay condolences. Wherever she went, an aura of happiness as rounded and undefined as her body accompanied her. The magical dishes she prepared filled the atmosphere around her with tantalising aromas: fragrant gum Arabic in rice pudding, sweet golden puffs of zalabieh dough, the warm thirsty-making smell of roasted watermelon seeds, soft lupine seeds in brine, dripping pickles, custards scented with orange blossom water. So many delicious, nourishing treats were always available and we didn’t have to wait for mealtimes or sit down at the table with everyone else. We could have what we wanted whenever we wanted it without being scolded.

The one question that plagued the boys and their sister, and tormented me along with them, was the tiny room adjacent to the garden where Abu Samir would disappear for hours on end without saying a word to anyone. This was his workshop, where he crafted the plaques he later sold to shopowners – proverbs and verses that people hung in their shops for good luck – phrases urging patience, sincerity, fairness and so on. But something else went on in that room, something none of us had ever laid eyes on. There was a canvas propped on an easel and draped with muslin and the children, who were not allowed into the room alone, had never glimpsed it. Years passed, and the painting sat there in the same position and the family found out nothing about it although they knew Abu Samir worked on it when the door was firmly shut. With his round spectacles perched on his nose, his bushy moustache protruding over his upper lip and the dark vest he wore day in and day out, Abu Samir had all the forbidding aura of a traditional father figure. He was lenient within certain boundaries which his children could never exceed. They could demand their own rights, but they would never earn the right to interfere with their father’s affairs, and woe betide them if they dared cross that line. Thus it was necessary for us, from the eldest to the youngest, to join forces, stealing glances whenever the door was ajar. We had overcome greater obstacles in the past, broken rules that could have had us severely punished, as on the day Marmara and I watched through an open window while a neighbour gave birth. Despite the momentous nature of what we had seen, the fluids gushing from between her legs before the baby’s head appeared, we considered Abu Samir’s authority the Great Wall of China, which we would never be able to overcome. Who would dare sneak into that room in secret, lift the cloth and reveal what we were burning to see? We were well aware of the teacher’s cane he kept among his things, and knew he wouldn’t hesitate to use it on us in a moment of anger. We could roam the house at will at any time of the day or night, we could stay out in the garden till dawn and never hear a word of warning or reproach, but that room was another story. Umm Samir refused to intercede or to give ear to her children’s imploring that she join their ranks. They threw comments her way like a stray camel entering an enemy camp, but since Umm Samir, with her unruly mop of hair, was likely to tell her husband of the children’s curiosity, earning them instant punishment, they never dared ask her directly to help them open the door, or provide them with a copy of the key; instead they merely offered to help with the cleaning. This was something she would never accept, and besides, Abu Samir had never handed over the key to her in the first place, even to do the cleaning. When curiosity prompted them time after time to bring up the subject, she silenced them by straightening the two dark arches of her eyebrows, which usually looked more like question marks that had wandered onto her forehead by mistake and stayed there. In the evenings, under a canopy of blossoming lemon trees, conversation centred around the content of Abu Samir’s mysterious easel. Qur’anic verses he scripted as a type of devotion? He was a believer but not overly religious, content to follow the basic teachings of the Holy book. Besides, why would he preach to himself, when he believed the whole world was mistaken and he the only one who was right? Perhaps it was a portrait of a nude woman. No, that couldn’t be it when he was so concerned with traditional clothes and folkloric costumes. Why, he was always scolding Umm Samir for wearing housecoats instead of traditional embroidered dresses. Umm Samir would point to her plump middle and her varicose veins and say: “You want me to wear a long, tight dress? How am I supposed to do the cooking, and hop around the plants in the garden? I’d be tripping on the ends of it all the time. Do you want me to walk like this?” And here she launched into her comic ballerina imitation.

Yet he was deadly serious when he explained to his many offspring the beauties of folkloric clothes. When people appeared in their “birthday suits,” he explained, their foolishness was exposed. Folkloric clothing concealed this foolishness. Here his eldest son would wink at us.

“Is everyone without clothes stupid, father?” he would ask with feigned innocence, “Men and women both?”

The unsuspecting Abu Samir would reaffirm his beliefs wholeheartedly. Were these the makings of a man who was painting a nude woman in secret? Impossible!

“My father dreams of the alphabet at night,” Samir would say. “He goes on and on about the letters of the alphabet as if they were famous people.”

It wasn’t hard for me to get in on some of the calligraphy lessons that Abu Samir ‘practised’ on his children, as Umm Samir used to say . . .

On one of our days off, Abu Samir took us all to the Palace of Hisham Bin Abd al-Malik at the border of Nuwayima. We crossed a dry wadi, which looked nothing like the one near our home, except for its round yellow boulders. We passed vast farms and orchards said to belong to a single family and finally arrived at the eight-point star of stone, raised on two pillars. What had it been? A gateway, or decoration on an interior wall? We listened and nodded, enraptured, as Abu Samir explained. After pointing out the Kufic script etched into the walls, he showed us the most beautiful mosaic in Islamic history. An orange tree laden with ripe fruit, flanked by a grazing gazelle on one side, on the other a second, hapless gazelle being attacked by a wild beast. We gasped in delight at this magical assemblage of tiny stones, so unlike the illustrations we were used to in books and magazines. Abu Samir watched us with a mixture of satisfaction and disapproval. He was about to discover the transforming effect of art on those he had considered stupid and apathetic: for an entire week following this splendid experience, we scrupulously followed every word of his instructions and advice.

“Look carefully at the expressions on the gazelles’ faces,” he said, pointing. “On this side, a gazelle grazes safely. On the other, a lion is devouring a frightened gazelle. The Caliph Hisham wanted to show the boundaries of danger and safety. He was supposed to be seated on a dais behind these mosaics, although in reality he never was. Maybe he wanted whoever crossed that mosaic to think carefully before approaching his throne. That was the way he planned things, but after four years of construction he never got to live in his palace. There was an earthquake; maybe it ruined part of the palace or maybe some learned man warned him. Do you know why the Golden Gate in Jerusalem was sealed shut? During the reign of Sultan Salim, a learned sheikh had a vision of a swarm of rats and mice trying to enter the Golden Gate. The people of the city interpreted this as foretelling another Crusade, and they had the door sealed off.

“No,” he added, coming back to the mosaic. “It’s not an orange tree. lt’s a type of citrus similar to a Seville orange. Looks like an orange, but it isn’t.”

He used to immerse us in lessons and lectures behind Umm Samir’s back, for when she was present she refused to let him clutter our minds and spoil our appetites with his “tragedies,” as she called them. He tried to convince her that they were no such thing and that knowledge was much more important than the fancy dishes she spent so much time on. Umm Samir didn’t care what he said and fought back determinedly. Thus it was better for us all to deal with these things out of her earshot. And so we covered the topic of script and calligraphy, and moved on through pottery – which Umm Samir despised and considered a step below glass – to Tel Ain Sultan and the history of Jericho. He told us it had originally been named after the goddess of the moon, and sketched with quick strokes, out of Umm Samir’s sight, the ancient urns that had been excavated. Nor did she hear him tell of Miss Kenyon, head of the Department of Antiquities and, I think, a pioneer in her field. She had proven that Jericho had no wall in the days of Joshua son of Nun. That was one historical figure whose name we learned quickly, because in Arabic Joshua was spelled like Jesus, with just three extra dots, and because the last name Nun reminded us of the letter nun in the Arabic alphabet. Years before his time, and thousands of years after him, there were walls and temples, which few cities in the area had. Why had they built the original wall – the only one of its era – and then changed their minds until thousands of years later? Maybe they had been under attack, like us, he commented sadly.

Our escapades were cut short the evening Munir was stung by a scorpion. Despite the gardener’s insistence that he had diligently uprooted weeds and burned thistles, somewhere under the poplar trees and among the willow roots by the big canal a scorpion had managed to hide, and Munir’s foot, clad in plastic flip-flops, found it. His skin turned blue, and the entire family rushed him to a nearby clinic. Marmara and I were left at home in case my parents should arrive and find the house empty. We waited, not knowing whether there was any hope of saving the boy in the prime of his youth while the rest of the family experienced the grey dread of waiting for the nurse to find the appropriate vaccines and the doctor to administer them. We weren’t there to hear the one phrase Munir kept repeating despite his illness and terror. “Yaba,” he said, his whole body shivering. “Father, you have to show us the painting. The one on the easel covered with the navy blue cloth.”

“Is that all!” cried Abu Samir, tears dropping from his thick glasses onto his bushy moustache. “Whatever you want! Just get better and I’ll give you the easel and everything on it.”

“My God!” the distraught Umm Samir wrung her hands. “All this is because of all the old wives’ tales and the superstitions you’ve filled their heads with. You just couldn’t leave them to their studies. The boy had a sound mind. Now look at him trembling, and us trembling over him, because of all the nonsense you’ve put into his brain. Come on, son, get up. God and his Prophet bless you. Your face looks much better and there’s nothing to worry about now that you’ve had the injection. We caught it early, thank God.”

And so Abu Samir ushered us all into his little room. “You know that my father was from Acre,” he said, “and we didn’t move to Jerusalem, my mother’s birthplace, until after the ’48 war.”

“Yes, yaba, yes,” replied a chorus of voices, broken by my dissonant “yes, ammu, yes.”

He glanced around at the tribe of children encircling him. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like to show anyone my painting because I consider myself a top-notch calligrapher and don’t want to be considered a painter of an inferior degree. But what can I do? That was Munir’s wish, and God brought him back to health, so for his sake you’re going to see the painting I’ve never shown anyone else.”

It was a seashore scene. Fishermen were casting their nets. He began to explain:

“This is the eastern gate of Acre. The fishermen are dragging out their nets and singing, as they do every morning at sunrise. See, here’s the wall overlooking the sea. Now, don’t think the sea looks the same wherever you go in Acre. No. Some places the sand’s red, other places it’s pure white, white as poplin. Some places the beach is sandy, other places it’s rocky. And of course there are different kinds of fish, depending on where you go. Every night before I go to sleep I imagine this scene. I wonder why Ahmad al-Jazzar built it. He was a man who had good points and bad points. Every day he had execution parties for the rebels and people he just didn’t like. Look, over here you can see the halva factory. We used to be able to smell it from miles away. East of the port is the nuns’ school for girls. We used to wait for them after school. Acre is a unique city. God never created anything like it.”

The older boys sighed in obvious disappointment. The secret had been revealed; there could be no more covert plots to lift the little cloth and find out what lay beneath.

“You asked to see it,” said Abu Samir. “Personally, I didn’t want to show it to anyone so that I could see it clearly and imagine it better and better. Ah, that halva factory. You could smell that warm, sweet smell from far, far away.”

None of us stopped to absorb what Abu Samir was feeling. We were too young to appreciate the places and people a paintbrush can render. Besides, Abu Samir had intentionally made us feel (or had he merely anticipated our reaction?) that the painting was a second-rate effort, not an example of the fine talent he bestowed on his calligraphy, and thus not worth looking at too long. It would take us years to realise that this painting was the most beautiful of all his works, telling as it did of what went on upon that shore. Little did we imagine that the fishermen still battled the waves every morning with rhythmic motions, a physical music Abu Samir had been deprived of since the occupation of Palestine. Had Abu Samir meant for us to be disappointed with the painting? Had he meant to convince us to go back to our games and leave his dreams alone? Every day he had to oversee dozens of little boys at school. Did he resent our intrusion into that calm, magical world where every evening he returned to Acre?

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Translated from Nujum Ariha [Stars of Jericho ], Dar al-Hilal, Cairo, 1993
Other works of Liyana Badr published in English are: A Compass for the Sunflower (Women’s Press, UK, 1989, trans. Catherine Cobham), Balcony Over the Fakihani (Interlink, US, 1993, trans. Peter Clark with Christopher Tingley), The Eye of the Mirror (Garnet, UK, 1996, trans. Samira Kawar)

Reprinted from Banipal magazine No 15/16, Autumn 2002/Spring 2003. www.banipal.co.uk

© Translation copyright Banipal and translator. All rights reserved.