Jinin had reminded Basim that her mother had had her in Jaffa, although he already knew it (he always laughed whenever she recalled her father’s comments on her mother: “Your mother used to pop girls and boys out one after the other, you all came out from between her legs like rabbits!” “Is it true,” Basim would ask her, “that when God gave your parents a new child, your father would exclaim, ‘One in the eye of the Jews,’ and carry on shouting until the neighbors looked out from their doors and windows and threatened him with the police?” And Jinin would laugh and reply, “True!” And her father would reply to anyone who asked him, “We produced a Palestinian in exchange for every one who emigrated and didn’t return!”).
“Bethlehem is a paradise,” he had told her.
“I’m not budging from here,” she had told him. “Jaffa belongs to me. It’s my Jaffa, just as Bethlehem is your Bethlehem. Just as you can’t bear Jaffa, I can’t stand it there, either. It’s like you came back here in a different way from me. I came back committed. Stay beside me and forget any idea of leaving. If you stay with me, nothing will drive us apart, not Ayala and not the government that’s employed her and others to make life hard for us and the other Palestinians who’ve stayed in the country!”
She’d said all that to him in a state of shock.
When they’d returned from the US, she’d been certain that Basim really wanted to come back home. Where had this certainty come from? She didn’t know, but she’d been sure that he wanted to live by her side. She’d been ready to support him, to dig together with their nails to bring Palestine out to the surface of their lives. They would seek shade in the shadow of a Palestinian city. They would give it an injection of new life so that it wouldn’t be infected by the Jewish immigrants, old and new, who were changing its appearance before their eyes. Jinin had wanted them to be two palm trees on the shores of Jaffa, dropping fresh dates; two stones in its ancient Citadel, to compensate for what had been destroyed; two waves that would never tire of racing toward its shores. Fish would dance for them, and the fishermen would trill for them.
Basim was never really a refugee, Jinin thought. The idea shook her certainties. Basim was from over there, from Bethlehem, which was content to look at Jaffa from a distance. It said quite openly that it was content for them to be neighbors. Two neighbors living side by side, divided only by a nine-meter wall that fed on their land here and their land there. Sucking their waters dry and giving the settlers perfect security. Dividing what was left of the land. Bethlehem, like Ramallah, was not ashamed to repeat, “What’s past is dead and gone; we are the children of today!”
Basim wasn’t a refugee, and Jinin hadn’t reckoned on his returning there. She didn’t understand things the same way that he did. She didn’t feel as he did—returning to the country that seven million Palestinians dreamed of going back to didn’t concern him as it concerned others.
“We’ll go back to Jaffa, to live and die there,” she had decided for herself and for him. “Come with me to Bethlehem, for God’s sake, come!” he had implored her, and had used every means at his disposal to persuade her.
Now she cried for him and for herself. For their love, which had opened a path to return to the homeland, only to separate them when they’d arrived. My God, it’s ridiculous that exile should bring us together and the homeland should drive us apart! She cried alone, her tears wetting the sheets. She cried because Basim was no longer hers. Because she soon wouldn’t need a bed big enough for two. Basim was no longer on Jaffa’s side—Jaffa, which they had loved together, intertwining their lives with its features for years. She realized that this had been a dry run for Basim, a rehearsal of his return to Bethlehem, the capital of his dreams! “Come with me to Bethlehem, our house is there, and my family, and our land. . . .”
He had evidently forgotten his last visit to his birthplace, when he’d come back to her angry, cursing at his parents and all his family, telling her that they’d argued among themselves even about distributing shares in their disagreements. He’d forgotten what his brother Mahmoud had said—Mahmoud, who hadn’t called him even once since he’d returned to the country; Mahmoud, who considered his marriage to Jinin to be the mistake of a lifetime.
As for his youngest sister, Nawal, she’d never stopped being angry with her brothers, who had insisted on grabbing her share of the family’s land and house. Whenever she chided one of them, he would quote the popular song: “Nawal, my sister, my darling, today or tomorrow you’ll be married, and everything you own will go to a stranger!” As if the person she married would remain a stranger—this person, who would be their brother-in-law, and to whose children they would be uncles, would remain a stranger?
Basim, like the rest of his brothers, had forgotten the family disputes, and had remembered only that he would get an apartment in the building his father had finished putting up at the start of this year, and his share of the land that his father had decided to distribute while still alive, so that his sons would not solve
