The information she had requested arrived in instalments, much of it vague and in need of further detail. At first, she was irritated, then suspicious. But soon she was overtaken by a normal sort of curiosity, which led her to think that the person involved was someone who wanted to correspond with her rather than wanting her to design a website for him and his business (if indeed he had a business at all). She was aware that the elegance she observed in the wording of his messages could well disguise a personality with ill intentions. She found comfort in her suspicions, and enjoyed her curiosity. Both gave her a pleasurable feeling of suspense, together with a sense of expectation.
The exchange of emails between her and the unknown person, who used the name Basim, continued until they acquired a rhythm like a heartbeat, with set times that they awaited separately like lovers waiting at street corners, in cafés, clubs, gardens, and train stations. At the end of each virtual encounter, each of them would leave something of themselves for the other, which the other could call to mind between encounters.
Their relationship began to acquire an emotional flavor. They began to avoid the work for which her website had been designed, gradually exposing their inner feelings. Night after night, they would check their personal accounts, stripping off their inhibitions piece by piece, like clothes, and throwing them on the bed of their desires. One night, they shed their inhibitions completely and slept together on the Messenger ‘chatter’ page. They slept with a deep happiness on a bed of passion, covering themselves in words, and waking in the morning to a joy that blessed them as a ‘virtual couple.’
On the first morning of their virtual marriage, Jinin sent Basim an original present: the address of a website that she had set up, called Honeymoon Paradise. She gave it a slogan, ‘Love starts virtually,’ and wrote on it the details of their relationship. In one corner, she subtitled it ‘Tales of a virtual romance.’ And she laid down conditions for subscribing to, and participating in, the site.
Basim replied to Jinin by inviting her to an urgent meeting in Washington, which ended in an agreement to return to the country together, in the first instance for each of them to visit their own relatives—he to Bethlehem in the West Bank, and she to Ramla. Afterward, Basim went to Ramla and asked Jinin’s parents for her hand in marriage. The moment they signed their contract, in an emotional display of warmth, Jinin realized that Basim was a young man who had surpassed all the white knights that had passed through her dreams. She had spent months drawing pictures of him from her imagination, but the reality of him was more beautiful than all her imagined pictures combined.
In the end, Jinin never actually designed the website that Basim had asked for. He no longer reminded her about it, and perhaps he no longer even remembered it. But she designed for both of them a timeline for living in Jaffa, beginning with a marriage that experienced minor family problems, and ending with them in a small yacht anchored on the shore of the city, at the foot of the Citadel.
9
After some years of marriage, supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, and with his residency extended from time to time by Ayala, Basim changed. He was no longer the virtual man Jinin had gotten to know through the internet. And he was no longer the real man she had married.
He talked all the time about the impossibility of staying in the country. He started to recall and feel nostalgic for his places of exile—as if he had never tired of America, from which his romance with Jinin had freed him and brought him back home. Sometimes Jinin screamed within herself: God Almighty, what is this fate? My husband’s gone stubborn as a mule again! Don’t I have enough of it with the stubbornness of the hero of my novel and the rest of my family?
One evening, she teased him affectionately. They were sitting at the table for a supper of green salad with mint, and chicken breasts roasted in the oven with sliced potatoes and onions. They were eating by the window, looking out over a Jaffa evening that could not take sides with either of them.
“You seem stubborn, Bassuma, my darling. Isn’t the stubbornness and obstinacy of The Remainer enough for me?”
He stopped cutting his chicken breast, and rested his knife and fork on the sides of his plate. Then he spoke with feeling:
“It’s not a question of obstinacy, Jinin. Tomorrow you’ll finish your novel, and The Remainer will become just a character like any other in a novel. You’ll be free of his obstinacy and pigheadedness, while I’ll still be as I am, suspended between heaven and earth. I’m not stubborn or pigheaded. The position we’ve gotten into has left me without an ounce of sense. Tell me what I should do!”
He was silent for a moment. She made no comment, but waited for him to go on, which he soon did.
“Do you want me to sell hummus and falafel? Who’ll give me a permit? And if we got one, could I compete with Abu Shakir in Jerusalem, or Abu Hasan? Or Saeed al-Akkawi? Or even Abu Khalil in Lydda? Do you want me to sweep the streets of Jaffa so I can stay in the country? But even working as a sweeper is forbidden to me! Even if the whole of Jaffa was buried under a mountain of trash, and they couldn’t find anyone to clean it up, they’d never employ me. They employ Ethiopian and Eritrean women, and women from Darfur, to clean the streets. There’s
