Walid asked Fatima who was living in the house now. She gave a laugh to hide her slight embarrassment, and replied, “I know that the house has been lived in for about a year, but to tell the truth no one I know has any information on who’s living there.” She said nothing more. Walid, too, was silent, in the hope that she might add something useful to what she had already said. Fatima took advantage of their conspiracy of silence to change the subject.
“By the way, Mr. Walid, I’d like to apologize to you, and I ask you to apologize for me to your wife as well about tomorrow—I shall have to take Julie to the Ardakians’ house and then come back. I have a Swedish tourist group that I want to take around the town before they fall into the hands of Jewish guides.”
Walid made no comment. But when she noticed the sudden look of surprise on his face, she quickly suggested to him that he postpone the visit for three hours, after which she would have finished her tour with the Swedish delegation. Walid told her that time might not allow it. Fatima expressed her regrets and renewed her apologies. Walid thanked her.
“The Swedes, and Scandinavians more generally, like the Palestinians a lot,” he said. He asked her not to worry about Julie and to take good care of the Swedish group. Then he said goodbye to her with a few light-hearted expressions, asking her to bring her information on Old Acre up to date “so that they don’t strip you of your title ‘Sitt Maarif.’”
He watched as she went back inside.
Julie took a single step forward. The house door, garbed in heavy mystery, stared at her. She raised her gaze up to the sky, and took in a bright blue expanse full of quiet summer clouds, and a sun that had been enjoying the sea breezes since the morning. She considered what ‘Sitt Maarif’ had said to her as they had made their way toward the house, and recalled her own comment in response: “You love Acre a lot, Sitt Maarif!”
And she remembered Fatima’s reply: “Who doesn’t love Acre? God willing, anyone who hates it will go blind in both eyes! Acre is this world and the next, my dear! An Acre man who goes outside the wall becomes a stranger, darling (“stranger, darling, stranger,” she repeated in English), and an exile as well, I swear.”
Julie was touched by Fatima’s words. And although she hadn’t understood the expression ‘go blind in both eyes,’ she had felt the exile of the people of Acre. Then in a whisper she had sighed for her mother: “Poor Mama Ivana, she was another resident of Acre who died a stranger.”
Later, she recalled how Fatima had picked up what she had whispered between her lips and found it strange, “What, my dear? Your mother died in London a stranger from Acre? Well, just look at us here, strangers and refugees in our own country. So there’s no difference between the dead and the living where we’re concerned, praise God and thank Him.”
2
One late, lazy morning, inching its way toward noon, Ivana called her daughter Julie, and asked her to come with Walid to her home in the Earls Court area of London that evening to have a home-cooked supper, for an occasion that she said would be extremely private. She would be saying something that neither of them should hear without the other being there.
The couple reached Ivana’s house just before seven. Walid parked his Peugeot behind Ivana’s old black Mercedes, and they both got out. As they turned toward the entrance to the house, Julie noticed a silver Jaguar beside Ivana’s car.
“It seems Mr. Byer has beaten us here, Walid!” she said.
“I suppose he must have been invited like us,” he replied.
“I thought this was supposed to be a private affair.”
“I guess we’ll know what it’s all about soon,” replied Walid, as he pressed the bell by the front door.
“I’ve a feeling that Mama has decided to sell her house and move to a smaller apartment. It can’t be a coincidence, Byer being here. Perhaps Ivana has really started to feel lonely. Her housekeeper is really important to her. She emailed me last week to say, as a joke, that the house—which is so warm that it doesn’t need central heating—had started to shiver with cold. I told her off for letting Amanda take a holiday without telling me. If she’d done that, I could have arranged a stand-in for her, or at least visited her myself.”
“Don’t forget that we . . . ”
Ivana opened the door before he could finish the sentence. She spread her arms, embraced her daughter, and kissed her with an intensity that exceeded her usual compassion. Then she embraced Walid, kissing him in a way that confirmed that her pleasure in him was a little more than he would have liked. She invited them both to come in and meet the others.
First, Mr. Byer, whose car had shown he was there, and his wife Lynn. Walid recalled Julie’s wondering why they had been invited to a meeting that Ivana herself had said was private and confidential.
William Byer was renowned as a lawyer representing a large number of well-known middle-class people who perched at the top of their class and breathed its exclusive air. He had been a close friend of Julie’s father, the
