One morning, later than usual, The Remainer returned to the garden shed. He took two large photos from a side shelf, and placed them on a small table in front of him. He took two delicate square wooden frames from among several other things in the corner to the right and put them beside the photos. Then he took a small square cardboard box from a shelf opposite, opened it, and took out a few yellow metal pins with small round heads. He put the first photograph on the first wooden square and fastened it with four pins, then fastened the second photo on the second wooden square in exactly the same way. He nailed the two pictures to the ends of long thin pieces of wood.
He now had two placards, which he carried over his shoulder. He shut the door of the shed and went back inside the house. He leaned the two placards against the wall in front of his office door. He pretended not to notice the presence of Husniya, who was absorbed in picking green mulukhiyeh leaves. She was aware of him, though she did not show it. He went into the office, sat down at his desk, and took a small key from his pocket, with which he opened a drawer on his right. He took out a file stuffed full of papers. He smiled. He grimaced. He laughed. He sighed. He let out a short groan of regret. He muttered. He turned the stories over in his head.
Husniya continued stripping the mulukhiyeh leaves from their brightly colored stalks. She gathered them together in an old brown sieve to her right—she would later wash them and dry them in the sunshine. She threw the slender stalks onto a page from the al-Ittihad newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Israeli Communist party, Rakah. She peeled two onions, and threw the skins on it. She sliced the onions with a knife and chopped them finely. Then she peeled seven garlic cloves and threw the detritus on the paper as well. The newspaper articles, which brought together all of the Arabs and some of the Jews around her, acquired the smell of onions and garlic, to which was added the smell of green coriander, which Husniya chopped with the knife.
She realized that The Remainer had been gone for a long time. She felt his absence deeply in his silence. “Abu Filastin! Abu Filastin!” she called. “Can’t we hear your voice, man?”
The Remainer quickly shut the file and pushed it into the drawer. He shut the drawer and put his little key in his pocket. He was on the point of going out, but hesitated. He felt the key weighing down his pocket. He was afraid that he might one day take it with him to his grave. He thought for a moment, and changed his mind; he decided to leave the drawer open, to let its secrets breathe in the hearts of others. He returned the key to the drawer. His pocket now free of a heavy burden, he felt at peace. He got up from his seat and left the room, taking the two placards with him to the sitting room.
He walked past Husniya, who took in her husband’s frame from bottom to top with suspicious eyes. She bunched her lips in the left corner of her mouth. He felt a desire to leave, and to let her dwell over her suspicions for the whole day.
Then her lips straightened and let out these words: “As God is my witness, the thing that’s unhinged your mind, and will destroy us all with you, is that Jewish neighbor of ours that you’re so friendly with.”
Basim tossed and turned in bed, muttering words that made no sense at all. His prattling made Jinin sad. She left The Remainer there, getting ready to go out with the two placards in his hand, pursued by Husniya’s words cursing the Jewess who had unhinged his mind, and thought about Basim, pondering their relationship since they had returned to the country together from Washington.
4
I came back into the country as usual on my Israeli passport via Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda, while Basim arrived on his American passport via Amman Airport in Jordan. From there, he took a taxi to al-Malik Hussein Bridge. He spent three hours waiting there, after which he was allowed to enter the West Bank. He took a second taxi to Bethlehem, and spent two days in his parents’ house before going to my parents’ house in Ramla and asking for my hand. That return was the first real event in our troubled marriage, and would remain like a strange clause inserted into its text, since from that time on we’ve been required to travel separately every time we leave the country and to return separately, to be reunited as if we were a couple recovering back from a temporary divorce imposed on us.
A year after our marriage, Basim started to choke on the details of his daily life, which had turned into a programmed tedium. He had no right to work and no permission to do so, either. He enjoyed no form of health insurance or social security—in fact, he had none of the rights that other residents in the country enjoyed, including those immigrants who enlivened Tel Aviv and other big cities by night, while by day they invigorated the political life of the whole country. They injected into the state economy millions (some said billions) of dollars a year, all collected by the tax authorities.
But I didn’t just leave him to his troubled thoughts, or to be squeezed by the laws of the land, because he might have decided to just leave. I continued to help him at every step, and to assure him that together we’d be able to overcome the harsh circumstances that we were living through here. All we needed was some
