“Get carried away?”
“Oh, I mean . . . listen, forget it. I’ll tell you later. Come on, cheers! Let’s enjoy ourselves!”
We clinked glasses. The mystery would have to wait.
Jinin leaned her head slightly toward me so that her hair touched my shoulders, and whispered, “I had an idea to invite you to breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ll take you to the Van Houtte Café, so you can eat the best bagels in town, and drink the best coffee, too. What do you think? Shall I come by tomorrow and pick you up from the hotel, so we can go together?”
I muttered my agreement, although it would mean I’d miss the delicious breakfast served by the hotel.
Jinin put her glass down on the table beside her. She ruffled her thick, flowing hair with all ten fingers. I watched her rearrange her hair over her shoulders and change the image she’d arrived with only a few minutes before.
“You’ll rival the bride tonight, Jinin!”
“Umm . . . should I be flirting with my cousin?” she mumbled, and moved away from me. She took all her youthfulness with her, and threw herself into a group of young people who were absorbed in dancing in the middle of the hall. I stood watching Jinin swinging her hips around with the lightness of an ear of wheat caught by a light breeze. I contented myself with a second glass of wine, as I watched the words of Stevie Wonder work on the bodies of the dancers: “I just called to say I love you . . . .”
In the Van Houtte Café, I sat with Jinin at a square cane table in the front left corner, flanked by a low wall of flowers that extended along the front of the café and enclosed three other similar tables, giving Van Houtte the feel of a high-class Parisian pavement café. The French hadn’t just brought the elegance of their buildings to the cities of this province, they had brought their cafés with them and deposited them on their sidewalks. I let my eyes wander along the street in front of us for a few moments, enjoying the morning. Passersby and their conversations were scattered around us like the masses of flowers that surrounded the place.
I ate the piece of cake I had ordered, with a pleasure that rivaled Jinin’s, who had started to umm and ahh as she ate her own. When she had finished, she wiped her hands and lips, and drank the rest of her cup of coffee. There were no grounds left at the bottom worth reading. Then she picked up the thread of what Zakariya had been saying when she’d interrupted him in a moment of caution made necessary by the situation the night before.
She explained that Khalid, the eldest son, had been born in Kuwait City, but since his childhood had dreamed of visiting Gaza and of getting to know the city and his family there. This was despite the fact that all he knew about Gaza came from the odd comment made by his father. Many years later, the opportunity came to him, when he received a letter from the Palestinian Khabar agency in Jerusalem, offering him a job as an English-language correspondent in Gaza. They stressed to him their need for someone who had lived in the West and had a foreign nationality that would help him travel anywhere freely.
Zakariya vigorously resisted the idea. Khalid was his eldest son, who had given him the name Abu Khalid, the name by which people usually called him. Zakariya was afraid of the tense situation in Gaza, which he described as confused. He never stopped saying that Gaza lived in the hand of a devil who was continually calling people out to fight. But the dispute ended in a compromise, namely that Khalid should work in the agency headquarters in Jerusalem and forget the subject of Gaza. Khalid accepted the compromise, which the agency also did not oppose, so he moved to Jerusalem, where he made the acquaintance of his colleagues in the Sheikh Jarrah office. They all welcomed him, and considered him an important key to cooperative relations with the Canadian media as well.
One day, three months after he had arrived in the country, the Khabar agency commissioned Khalid to cover a protest march against the racist Separation Wall, south of Bethlehem, in which a number of foreign activists were taking part. There was a clash between the protesters and the Occupation authorities, in which Khalid found himself caught up. He was arrested and jailed for two weeks, at the end of which he was released on condition that he left Jerusalem. Khalid’s old dream awoke again: he asked for a transfer to Gaza, to work as a reporter for the agency there, and his request was accepted.
In Gaza, Khalid rediscovered his Dahmani roots. He became the Canadian son of the family, which welcomed him with great joy. But the family’s happiness was short-lived. Khalid was killed in an Israeli air raid on the outskirts of Beit Hanun while he was doing his job, less than three months after his transfer to Gaza. Zakariya was grief-stricken, as was the rest of the family, which had lost nine martyrs in the Second Intifada. But Khalid’s death was the most painful for everyone. The others had had proper funeral processions, even when these took place during Israeli aerial bombing raids. But Khalid’s parents and siblings were not able to get to Gaza to oversee his funeral. The Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv intervened with the Israelis to protest the death of their citizen Khalid Zakariya Dahman, and informed his father that they were prepared to transport his son’s body to Montreal. When Zakariya received this communication from the authorities in Montreal, he wailed aloud, as
