I was saddened by the story, though I wasn’t too surprised by what had happened. By virtue of my work in the press and other media, I had seen a number of young men vanish from the family’s ranks one after the other as a result of Israeli raids that had taken place in recent months. They were relatives I had never known, for most of the victims had been born in the years of my exile after 1967. Some had died in the settling of internal political and party scores between Hamas and Fatah.
I decided that I would visit Zakariya and his family before I left the country, to present condolences that were several years overdue. I was sorry for that, and I knew that I would be bringing up a dark chapter during an otherwise happy time. But the meeting was necessary in any event, and I also wanted to get to know Abu Khalid, and the Canadian experience, better. Jinin indicated that she would like to accompany me, which I welcomed.
We left the Van Houtte Café at around 11 a.m. The streets passed by under our feet, as commercial establishments and restaurant signs flirted with our eyes. We were detained by the image of a charming bride in a shop selling wedding dresses. I turned toward Jinin, trying to extract her and myself from the shadow of the story of Khalid Dahman, and asked her what I should have asked her a long time ago:
“So, Jinin, why haven’t you gotten married yet?”
“You’ve caught me by surprise!” she replied. Then, after a calculated silence, she went on: “I’ve had five proposals, if you can believe that!”
“Now you’ve caught me by surprise!” I replied. “As if you were Marie Munib, melting all five of their hearts!” I joked.
She laughed. “Ha, why not? I could be proposed to twenty times. In our country, getting engaged is just marriage with a stay of execution!”
We mulled this over for a few moments until Jinin broke the silence, saying that the first man she’d gotten to know had asked for her hand very quickly. He was in such a hurry; he must have thought she would fly away. As the day of the Quran ceremony approached, he had proposed to her parents that they should live in Nablus after the wedding. Her father, Mahmoud Dahman, had refused, and she had added her own refusal to his. So that marriage had failed before it could even begin.
Her second fiancé was from the city of Umm al-Fahm, in the northern triangle of Palestine. “Everything about him took my breath away,” she said, but she added that immediately after the announcement of their engagement he had started to hum and buzz around her like a blue fly. He had piled it on and was far too demanding. “If you want to live with me in Umm al-Fahm,” he’d announced, “you’ll have to wear the hijab. The hijab is chastity, Jinin. The hijab is the crown on a woman’s head, preserving her honor!”
Jinin had continued to refuse, trying to convince her suitor to accept her as she was, but without success. In the end, she had taken advantage of a visit that he paid with his parents to her parents’ house, and shouted in his face: “What do you think I am, a street girl with no honor or dignity? ‘The hijab is chastity, the hijab is purity’! Leave me alone, you . . . .” She had pulled the engagement ring from her finger and had thrown it in his face, adding, “If you’re so in love with the hijab, marry someone who already wears the hijab!”
We laughed together at the story, before Jinin moved on to her third experience. Suitor number three was an American of Syrian origin, from Homs. He had asked her to renounce her Israeli nationality and to live with him in America. He’d told her in no uncertain terms: “Look, I don’t want anyone to say that I’ve married an Israeli girl and to accuse me of assimilating!”
She had cut him out of her life, but not before telling him, “I was born in Palestine and I shall die in Palestine. Israeli nationality, as far as I’m concerned, is a matter of citizenship and rights; it’s true that it’s incomplete, but it lets me stay in my country!” He just couldn’t understand her position, so that was that.
Jinin had loved the fourth one as a lover ought, despite the fact that they had known each other only a short time. Sami was a handsome young man, loving and warm. He was from Nazareth.
His father had moved there from al-Khiyam village in the south of Lebanon a few years before the nakba. He’d worked as a shoemaker in Nazareth Market (which would later become the Old Market) for many years before the city was invaded by the commercial cooperatives and people gravitated to them in the search for new, ready-made shoes. He had had three sons, who had grown up and worked in various occupations. One day, the father had decided to leave Nazareth and go back to al-Khiyam. He’d said that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in his birthplace. So he and his wife had returned to settle in al-Khiyam. Two of their sons lived and worked in Beirut, after renouncing their Israeli citizenship and reclaiming their Lebanese nationality. But Sami, the youngest son, refused to return to Lebanon and insisted on staying in Nazareth. After the family left, however, he didn’t stay in the city long, but moved to Jaffa to work
