“There’s a blue sign over there!” Luda shouted in broken Arabic. “Come on, poshli, let’s go and see what’s written on it.”
Luda’s call brought us all together in front of a house, the front of which resembled a tatty shoe. Luda stood looking at the sign as if she were looking at herself in an old dull mirror whose mercury had peeled off. She tried to translate for us the Hebrew written on it, but her Arabic deserted her. When she tried in English, Jamil wouldn’t let her continue. He teasingly asked her to keep her tongue for some other speech. She did, apologizing in Arabic, English, and Russian.
Then Jamil went up to the sign, and we listened as he conveyed its meaning to us in his fluent Arabic:
Arusi’s House
This house is the last major private house to be found in the Dahman quarter, which was named after a family that lived there. The house is an example of distinctive Arab houses. It was constructed with a square called a hawsh in the middle of it, which is a basic feature of Arab houses. It is usually surrounded by bedrooms, and most of the daily household chores are conducted there. The distinctive feature of this house is that it still preserves the simple, traditional methods that the Arab residents relied on in their lives.
At the beginning of the 1950s, the house was occupied by new immigrants from the Yemeni community. They included the Arusi family, who still live in the house, and use the equipment to be found there—such as the olive press, the grain and wheat mill, the bread oven, and the grain and wheat store situated on the ground floor—in their daily lives.
A whisper crept from the inside of the house, and I peered through a large crack in the door. I was embarrassed about looking into the house of a stranger and spying on the people who lived there. But it might be my parents’ house, or the house of one of my relatives. I knocked on the door.
From the inside, I heard a voice saying, “Beseder, ima, ani bo . . . ,” “Okay, mum, I’m coming.”
“The house has got people in it, everyone!” I said. “There are Jews in our house!”
“Mi? Who’s there?” a woman’s voice asked apprehensively in Hebrew.
“Ani rotsah le-dabber im mi she-babayit,” Luda replied, saying that we wanted to talk to whoever was in the house.
A woman opened the door with a smile, having lost her former hesitation. “Welcome, please come in,” she said in Arabic with a slight accent. We didn’t yet know her name, nor the reason for her smile, which to me felt like guilt hanging on the conscience of its owner. We accepted the invitation with pleasure and went into the house that had been my family’s before al-Majdal Asqalan fell into the hands of the Israeli forces on 4 November 1948.
“My name is Roma,” she said.
In the right-hand corner there were two rusty old gas canisters and a bright plastic water bucket. There was an old wooden door with several holes for locks and bolts that suggested it had been borrowed from the front of an old shop in the nearby market after the owners had been driven out, perhaps looted by the Jewish Agency, which had distributed our possessions to immigrant Jewish families after the city had been occupied. About two meters away from the door, there was a small window with a pale-green wooden frame. About half a meter from that was another wooden door beside a rectangular window, which was also painted green.
I stared at what I thought had been our bedroom. Had it really been our bedroom? I walked on a couple of steps. My small feet stumbled on the threshold, two low, narrow steps. My mother picked me up and exclaimed, “God’s name be upon you, may God protect you!” I hid my tears, tears I was shedding secretly in my parents’ house. Was this really my parents’ house? Or was it a trick of memory weighed down by nostalgia, constructed out of stories piled up over the course of the years?
The woman excused herself for a few moments and disappeared into another room.
At the end of a yard, the floor of which was covered with small square tiles that had seen better days, there was a pair of black tattered men’s shoes and a wheelchair.
Roma returned and invited us into a second room. In the room was an ancient woman, a heap of bones piled up by time in the middle of a bed. She must have been over ninety. She didn’t register our presence, and she didn’t understand anything of what we said. She muttered the whole time, but none of us could understand what she was saying.
Roma took us around the house. To the left was a kitchen with no door. “This is the oven,” she said. “My mother used to use it.” And she pointed to an old photo of herself and her mother in a wooden frame, propped up against an oven. She said that they used to bake their bread together in it. I wanted to tell her that it was my mother who used to use it, but I couldn’t. “And this is the grain mill,” she said, pointing to a round stone mill with damaged edges. She took a handful of oats from a bag nearby and threw them into the soft flour channel to show us how grain was milled. I almost laughed at Roma’s ignorance, but I didn’t want to embarrass her—the grain should have been put in the small circular opening in the middle of the upper part of the millstone. There was a piece of marble beside the millstone, part of an old olive press. That press had belonged to the house of my aunt Ruqaya, the wife of Abd al-Fattah Dahman. Abd al-Fattah had had a mule with a wooden yoke to drive the press. The
