He fell silent, and I pointed out to him that he could learn the popular afternoon laziness prevalent in the country for free. He nodded, and then continued his enquiries: “Does your friend’s house look out over Mount Carmel or over the sea?”
This strange American will tag along with us when we walk off the plane after landing, I said to myself. Then we’ll be forced to introduce him to our host as soon as we walk through the exit door where he’s waiting for us in the airport.
I might well have replied rudely, “And what’s it got to do with you, man? Just leave me alone!” Instead, I said with a feigned English politeness, “I’m not sure, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I’ll walk around Haifa a bit, stroll on the shore for a little, visit the old Arab quarters, and climb Mount Carmel—Mount Carmel, in whose arms the city has slept since it first appeared, stretching its legs out to the sea and wetting its feet in the wa-a-ater!”
I yawned the last word with my eyes shut, before I closed my mouth over a curse that was trying to come out.
My neighbor made no comment and put no further questions to me after that, as if he had been struck by a sort of verbal paralysis. He didn’t even yawn, suspecting he might pay the price.
I woke up from my pretend sleep after a few minutes. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my neighbor looking at me, having now begun a pointless chat with a young Jew with two sidelocks dangling in front of his ears. From what I could hear of their conversation, I understood that the young man was a university student, American like him, and that he was visiting Jerusalem for purely religious reasons.
Julie was continuing to read Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun. She must by now be immersed in the details of Asya’s relationship with Saif. She had told me about it two days before: since her marriage to Saif three years before, Asya had had no sexual relations with him, but had been in love with Gerald, who compensated for Saif’s coldness in bed, leaving her with a thirsty spirit that she watered from time to time with what remained of her husband’s love.
I took the pages of Jinin’s novel from my small bag, wanting more than ever to get better acquainted with The Remainer. It would become clear to me that his wasn’t an inherited stubbornness, despite the view expressed by Jinin that it was a gene passed on through the Dahmans. Indeed, after he had left his first wife and daughter in Gaza, a second incident occurred in his life that confirmed this belief in everyone who knew him.
This is what Jinin had written:
One ordinary afternoon, their Jewish neighbor Aviva took advantage of his absence and that of his family from the house, sprayed a bottle of kerosene on their wall, and set light to it. She then started shouting, “Shoah! Shoah!” until the al-Jamal quarter in Lydda was filled with her screams. Other neighbors rushed to the fire, and one of them called the fire brigade, who came immediately and managed to put it out before it could spread. The police also came and opened an investigation, for which there was no need, since The Remainer—who, on hearing the news, had arrived from the Dahman Clothes Washing and Ironing store, which he owned—chose not to press charges. Instead, he forgave his neighbor entirely, and rejected the idea of taking her to court. “Let’s solve it the Arab way!” he said, despite the fact that the second party, the accused, was not an Arab. “Gveret Aviva is lonely and miserable,” he told the police officer in charge of investigating the incident. “No one can blame her. What she’s seen in her life, no human being should have seen, and it’s driven her mad and ruined her nerves. God help her!”
The officer was pleased by what The Remainer had said. He appreciated his forgiveness of his fellow citizen and his sympathy with her past. “If all Arabs were like this guy, we’d have burned all those Arab homes and they’d have been quite happy!” he said in Hebrew, and everyone understood.
The Remainer was a Communist, whose leadership was acknowledged by Lydda and Ramla, and accepted by the Arab residents as well as some of the Jews. He saw in Marxism a way for mankind to escape from the hateful evils and greed of capitalism, and for the peoples of the East to escape from Western colonialism and the social classes that depended on and cooperated with it. He believed that the philosophy of materialism was a powerful one, deserving of his admiration and acceptance. He also believed that it didn’t entail atheism, although its founders, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, had lost their way to God, introduced errors into their theory, and led their followers astray, bringing them close to the fires of hell. This was something that appealed to Husniya, The Remainer’s wife, and led her to adopt the same beliefs and philosophy as her husband.
The Remainer believed that the materialist philosophy was deficient, and needed a real Remainer like himself—or at least someone similar—to connect it to God, as well as to mankind. So
