While Walid was trying to disentangle what he had just heard, hemming and hawing as he searched for words to match his wife’s happiness and eagerness to stay in the country, she hastened to refine some of what she had said, and this also surprised him: she said that she wouldn’t be opposed to buying a piece of land in al-Majdal Asqalan, Walid’s birthplace, where they could build a house if that was what he wanted. Her eyes searched his face as she spoke.
He asked her if her proposal and its subsequent correction were serious.
“Of course, darling, of course!” she replied confidently.
What was it that had made that ambition explode in Julie, a woman with an English father and Armenian mother, born in Palestine? What had made her suddenly think of returning to live in a country she didn’t know, and which it had never occurred to Walid himself to return to permanently—even now that going back and living there had become somewhat possible—after the exile, banishment, and refugee camps that had dented his Palestinian identity since childhood? Or was it Julie’s visit to her grandfather’s house, which her mother had run away from some seventy years before? Had Ivana’s will changed her daughter? Or perhaps Acre itself had affected Julie—Ivana’s Acre, which she had abandoned in a moment of emotional rashness. Acre, with its special magic and its history, which was written in the streets, and which walked in the neighborhood alleys of its quarters and its ancient squares—its history etched in stone, which the sea thundered against day and night. Acre, with its churches, its Franciscan monastery, its mosques, its harbor, its ancient market, with Zahir al-Omar, Jazzar Ahmad Pasha, and Napoleon scorned and humiliated under its walls, Sitt Maarif its popular guide, Hummus Saeed, and the Pasha’s baths . . . .
Thinking of the baths made him stop and sigh. Oh, the baths of the Pasha, what have they done to Julie?
Walid recalled that visit that had taken place on their first day in Acre. Julie had taken off her clothes in the ‘summer room,’ piling them up on the ground and looking at her body as she used to do when she was a teenager. Walid had watched her as she wrapped a cotton towel around her body under her armpits. She had put on wooden slippers, and walked pursued by their crunching, as if she was Ghawar al-Toshi, whom she’d never seen or gotten to know. Their echoing crunch had reverberated around the high-ceilinged room. Slipping them off, she had spread herself out face down on the wet tiles in the ‘hot room’ and had disappeared in the steam, murmuring, “Massage my whole body for me, Walid.” He hadn’t heard her because he was immersed in watching a video showing illustrated re-enacted scenes of what the baths and their rituals had been like until the nakba. It was accompanied by a commentary that talked about the periods before and after independence. In time, Julie had woken from her lovely, short-lived daydream and had started to look at the explanatory drawings that the authorities had put on light curtains to explain some facets of old-style life inside the baths. They were by the Israeli artist Tanya Slonsky.
This fact had made Walid recall Fatima al-Nasrawi’s words: “We give them accurate information free of charge, it’s better than them buying lies from the Jews for a price!”
Walid continued to turn ideas over in his head: Had Acre persuaded Julie to reclaim the half of her that had been lost as she grew up in exile? Had it convinced her to retrieve the Palestine she had inherited from her mother as pictures of a lost past? After all, they would soon be leaving the country as they had come to it, as British people who had completed a tour of Israel.
Julie hadn’t been satisfied with their visit, Walid realized. She hadn’t been satisfied with her return to the house of her grandfather. The handful of sand that Walid had scooped up with his hands on the shore two days before hadn’t been enough for her, either. He had put it in a little nylon bag and given it to her, whispering, “The smell of the country!” She had taken it with the same reverence with which she had carried half of Ivana’s ashes from London to their final resting place, but it hadn’t been enough. Presumably she also hadn’t been satisfied with the small piece of limestone she’d picked up from under a rock they’d sat on together near the Abu Christo restaurant after they’d eaten. Julie had been happy with the little piece of stone at the time; she had admired it and put it in her handbag, as the owners of several small boats moored in the harbor had watched the pair of them with typical local Israeli insouciance.
Julie had seemed sated by these little pieces of Acre, but now it appeared that she wanted more.
6
Walid was confused by Julie’s succession of emotions. He was several times brought to a standstill by the changes in his wife: a happiness that she had not displayed through the years of their long marriage; an increasing tendency to speak Arabic and use a varied vocabulary, having previously stuck to simple phrases; constantly touching the walls of houses, as well as those of public places and archaeological remains, which they visited like people visiting holy places. Julie was savoring the smells of anything in the country that was ancient, and filling her nostrils with it. Walid recalled how she had sniffed the walls of Acre the first morning they had gone from the Akkotel Hotel to the port via the eastern gate, and
