Shaul had coughed, ignoring the polite response, and had exclaimed, “Congratulations to us!”
So now he turned to his wife, and rebuked her with feeling. “Adon Dahman won’t hide us in his house!”
Aviva begged him. “Okay, Shaul, ask those four German soldiers to fire on you, my love. Try death for my sake, just once in your life. It’s really essential for a German to kill you for you to gain a share in the Holocaust like me.”
In his house, The Remainer heard Aviva’s ravings, which continued faintly on the other side of the wall: “I don’t want to die tonight. I don’t want to die again. One death is enough. I don’t want to . . . .”
Those members of our family who had not gone back to sleep heard the sound of a door being slammed just before dawn, and Shaul’s voice cursing Aviva and her life, repeating that he wouldn’t be coming back home again.
And indeed Shaul never returned to the house after that morning. Even when Aviva finally died for real several years later, and her death was reported to him by his sons, Ilan and Yuri, Shaul contented himself with simply asking for God’s mercy on her. He then asked them if the government would continue to pay compensation for their deceased mother as a survivor of the Holocaust or not.
“I am her true legal heir. I own her past and all that has followed from it, good and bad,” he said.
As for The Remainer, he sympathized with Aviva after Shaul left her and her two sons stopped visiting; after Ilan married and settled in Ramat Gan, he no longer came regularly to visit Aviva at home, while Yuri opened a lawyer’s office in Jerusalem and was busy with his clients’ cases.
The Remainer now went more often to Aviva’s house, and started spending more time with her than previously. That annoyed Husniya, who was not enthusiastic about establishing relations with the Jews who lived in their quarter.
She once said in front of him, “Can it be right that these houses, equipped with a stand for a poker on the top of the stove, should be taken by people who’ve come from overseas, while their owners lie in camps among sandstorms and live their whole lives as refugees? Who could put up with such injustice, oh Lord?”
Then she burst out laughing and said to him, “Do you know, Abu Filastin, I was the first one to get to know Afifa? She was complaining to me, slagging off the Absentees’ Property Administration, from whom she rented the house. She told me that when she’d first looked around the house, she hadn’t seen much furniture in it. I said that the furniture had been stolen. She told me, with no shame or embarrassment, that the kerosene stove that the owners of the house had left behind was all messed up. It reminded her of the eyes of her husband, Shaul, each one looking in a different direction, because the flames came out of the top in two different directions. What’s more, she hadn’t found a poker to clean it out. She was hysterical. She went and sat on the bed in the bedroom, and found that it had rusted and become loose. She went out of her mind, and cursed the owners of the house who had fled before they could repair the bed on which they slept. She couldn’t think how she and Shaul would be able to sleep on it. ‘Curse them! Shame on them!’ she shouted in Arabic—these two expressions being ones the old rascal had learned from me.”
“Rabia’s right, Umm Filastin,” commented the Remainer. “The Palestinians are tramps, gypsies—only a few are genuine, they’ve no breeding or shame. They fled the country and left behind them a jumble of furniture, cookers with no kerosene in them—and no pokers, either!”
Since moving to Lydda, The Remainer had never stopped encouraging Husniya to establish relationships with the Jewish neighbors in the quarter. Whenever Husniya showed some hesitation, content to have warm relations with our Christian neighbor, Umm Jurj, who lived two doors away, he told her, “We can’t live in a ghetto on our own, Husniya. In this country, we’ve always been open to the world, with hearts as wide as mankind. My dear, you don’t have to like them or treat them like relatives, just let your relationship with them be normal.”
And as the days and years passed, Husniya changed and began to make friends among her Jewish neighbors, the first of them being Afifa, as she called her.
3
Dahman in Gaza
Mahmoud Dahman usually went to the Israeli Radio building in Jerusalem once or twice a year. He recorded a message to be broadcast to his relatives in the camps in the Gaza Strip. Tall as a palm tree, and with the girth of a mature mountain olive, he would stand in the queue for the Peace and Greetings program, to talk to his family, who could not be more than fifty kilometers away from him, via a microphone that conveyed his message but returned no reply.
“I am Mahmoud Ibrahim Dahman, nicknamed The Remainer. My peace and greetings to . . . .”
In the airplane, I put the pages of Jinin’s novel into the pocket attached to the seat in front of me. I shut my eyes and thought.
The Remainer hadn’t imagined his message going around camps he had never visited before, searching for a family that had been swallowed up by the Khan Younis camp—searching for one of them to come to one of the radio post offices, known as Abu Lisan, which used broadcasts instead of postage stamps. The Remainer hadn’t expected that his message would be lost without arriving, even in a public road that opened
