Nabil,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the internal organs of his abdomen.
Maki raised a cautious eyebrow.
“But I don’t object to your partaking,” Omar Yussef obliged.
Maki snapped his fingers and the maid appeared, holding a silver tray with two fingers of whisky in a crystal tumbler. Maki took it without a glance and put it away. Even as he swallowed, he spun his finger to signal that he wanted another, and sat. He looked suddenly serious and leaned forward.
“Abu Ramiz, it’s such a pleasure to have cultured company.” He let out the groan of a man who has long suffered ignorant fools. “You can’t imagine how I’m stifled by Gaza and its provincialism. My wife can’t stand to be here longer than a few weeks. As you can see from the place settings, she’s not eating with us. No, she is eating in a far better establishment tonight. She’s in Paris.”
The maid poured another whisky and Maki dived into the glass as if he were coming down from the high board at the beach club in the dunes north of Gaza City. He came up, shivering as he swallowed, and peered across the table with the staring wide eyes of a man swimming underwater. “We have an apartment in Paris. A pied a terre, as they say. A little place built in the seventeenth century. It’s in the Marais. You know this part of Paris? It used to be the Jewish quarter, but now it’s rather exclusive.” Maki laughed. “I like that very much, to be an occupier of the Jewish quarter. Yes, this is my small revenge for the occupation of our land in Palestine.”
He emptied the second glass and, while his throat recovered, he wagged a finger to signal that he had a story to tell. “Some old Jews still live in our building in the Marais. I like to watch their little heart attacks when I tell them they share their staircase with a senior member of the PLO. They refuse to acknowledge me, so I just whisper Allahu akbar as I pass them on the stairs. My wife is there now, as a refugee from the dust and the heat of Gaza. The only negative thing about her absence, from her point of view, is that she will not meet you, dear brother Abu Ramiz.”
Omar Yussef felt he was supposed to smile. He twitched his cheeks and blinked. “Your children are in Paris, too?”
“Yes, a boy and a girl, may Allah be thanked. Both are doing graduate studies at the Sorbonne.”
“Did they do their undergraduate degrees here at al-Azhar?”
Maki laughed and reached forward to tap Omar Yussef’s hand, as though he were a delightfully naughty boy. “It’s a shame you don’t drink, Abu Ramiz. You’re so witty, even when you’re sober. You’d be hilarious if you would join me in a whisky. Of course they didn’t study here.”
The maid brought a bottle of red wine and poured for Maki. Omar Yussef covered the top of his wine glass with his palm, so that she wouldn’t give him any. The crystal sounded a light, full note as his hand brushed its rim.
“So you’re a schools inspector for the UN, Abu Ramiz?”
“I’m on a schools inspection at the moment. Usually I’m the principal of the UNRWA Girls’ School in Dehaisha camp.”
“Ah, the finest people are those of Dehaisha. Progressives, leftists. Not all Islamists, as they are in Gaza.”
“Although I’m the principal, my main activity is still teaching. For three decades I’ve been a history teacher.”
Maki threw his arms wide. “That’s my field also. Abu Ramiz, we are two historians. This is a wonderful night. Welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. We shall talk history all night and forget about the present troubles of Gaza.”
Omar Yussef smiled, politely. Moroccan soap operas or Egyptian soccer would have been more neutral distractions. But if Maki was relaxed, perhaps he would be more inclined to help Omar Yussef with the Masharawi case.
The maid brought a tray of mezzeh, distributing the small plates of salads and spreads in a spray across the table. Maki handed Omar Yussef a wide, flat bread with which to eat the salads and pushed each plate solicitously toward him. “Your health,” he said.
Omar Yussef scooped a deep red paste of ground nuts, cumin and chilis onto a corner of his bread and ate it. “This really is the best mouhammara I’ve tasted in a long time,” he said.
“These Sri Lankans know Arabic cooking better even than Arabs. However, I fear that your colleagues, the Swede and the Scot, don’t have the same feel for Arab culture. They can’t truly understand our situation here in Gaza,” Maki said. “And why not? Because they don’t understand the history. If one only knows recent politics, then everyone looks bad-the nationalists, the Islamists, the refugees, the resistance. One can’t see why Palestinians behave as they do unless first one traces the dim reaches of our history.”
“Do you think the men in the resistance know our history?”
“They may not have studied for a doctorate, but I believe they fight in the name of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a real historical figure, or Saladin, who personally fought for Gaza against the Crusaders.”
“What lesson should my foreign friends draw from that?”
“That our people were fighting invaders long before the Jews came. It has been a constant battle throughout our history.” Maki picked up an oily vine leaf, bit through to the rice wrapped inside and chased it with a hearty swig of claret. “Two thousand years before we began to reckon time from the foundation of Islam, the Pharaoh Thutmose was our first invader. The Canaanites took Gaza from the Egyptians, only for the Philistines to capture it from them. In the oldest part of our city, you can still see a ruined stone building popularly known as the very temple which Samson pulled down on the heads of the Philistines. It’s nonsense, naturally-what’s left of the building is no more than five hundred years old, but it has a place in our historic memory.”
“The Jewish Bible says Gaza was allotted to the tribe of Judah,” Omar Yussef said.
“Of course, but don’t mention that-a thunderbolt may come down from the skies to strike us.” Maki looked up in mock terror. “Or one of the homemade Qassam rockets that our resistance fires into Israel.”
“You recounted these ancient invasions. But what importance do they have for the present conflict?”
“Great importance, indeed. They’re the roots of today’s conflict. Your foreign friends look at Gaza and see what? A shithole, of course. Who can blame them? The Scot is probably from Edinburgh, the Athens of the north, as they call it. Very cultural. Maybe the other one’s from the highly organized city of Stockholm, where no one crosses the road and farts at the same time. To them, Gaza is the epitome of absolute, worthless chaos. But Gaza was a crossroads of international trade when they were still painting themselves blue to raid the next village and steal its pigs.”
Maki took such a long drink of his claret that he was momentarily out of breath. “Look, if you read the surveys, you’d see that Swedish women have the smallest breasts, on average, in the whole world.” Maki rubbed his silk shirt in illustration. “Why? Because they don’t understand how to share life and its bounty. They’re individualists. Now Gazan women: under their robes they carry enormous breasts, big and heavy and full, like the hump of a camel.” He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes and held his palms upward as though they supported a great and sensuous weight. “This is because we’re surrounded by the desert, so we understand the value of life, of food and nourishment and community. Nature around us is harsh. We can’t look to it for easy sustenance, as they can in Sweden, with their lakes and forests. We must find nutrition in each other, in the fulsome bodies of our wives and in the feeling of belonging to a clan and in the shared struggle against the Jews. That’s the story of Gaza.”
Omar Yussef nodded and stretched his lips into some kind of a smile. He was glad Maki was enjoying his cultured evening discussion.
The Sri Lankan maid brought a platter of grilled, fatty lamb chops and kebab on metal skewers and charred chicken flecked with red grains of sumac. Maki slid the kebab from the skewers with a folded piece of bread and filled Omar Yussef’s plate. He picked up a roasted onion and pulled it apart with his fingers.
“The invaders continued to come. Saladin fought the Crusaders here, and then came the Turks.” Maki made circles in the air with the onion pieces, daintily, like a conductor with his baton. “The British fought three battles here before they took Gaza in 1917. Can you imagine? Do you suppose the British people know this, riding the London Underground and shaking their heads with a tut-tut as they read stories about Gaza’s violence in The Daily Telegraph?” Maki waved a segment of onion dismissively. “As they see it, the violence here is all about our immediate conflict with the Jews-we could have peace, if only we were reasonable, like the British. They don’t understand our three thousand years of oppression.”
“The problem isn’t that the Telegraph readers don’t know our history, Abu Nabil,” Omar Yussef said. “Our own people don’t know it, either. They learn history only in nasty cartoon form or from the mouths of politicians. How many people who claim to fight in the name of Saladin know anything about him, except that he was a hero
