The Peace and Greetings program had disappeared before any of The Remainer’s messages arrived. No one enquired after him, or informed him of how the family had eventually fared. His father, Sheikh Ibrahim, died without fulfilling his wish to return to al-Majdal Asqalan, and without ever again sounding the call to prayer from the minaret of its mosque, as he used to do before the nakba. His brother Salih went mad and never recovered. He was sent by the Egyptian military governor in the Gaza Strip to al-Khankah in Qalyubiya. His sister Fathiya grew up and married Muhammad Sheikh. He was like the moon; the camp stayed awake by the light of his glances. But he died. He was one of two hundred and fifty young men killed by the Israeli forces after they occupied Khan Younis in the Suez War of 1956, when the Israelis reconnected the geography that they had cut in two and for the first time united the Palestinians in the Strip with those who had fled. But the reunion only lasted four months, ending with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Still, it came back with the third occupation in 1967, and endured. It became stronger than Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi’s unification of the Arab world, and far longer lasting than the Egyptian-Syrian union. Israel swallowed new Palestinian land and was unified, with the result that the Palestinians were able to wander the length and breadth of their land, which was no longer theirs, and enjoy themselves from Rafah to Ras Naqura, and from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—or, as it used to be said, from land to land and from water to water—a unity that allowed The Remainer to finally visit his relatives in Khan Younis. He was the first Israeli to be carried into the Gaza Strip, to the joy of his relations and the amazement of the neighbors.
The Remainer arrived at the Khan Younis camp in the summer of 1967, the year in which Israel unified the land again. One person he never found there was his divorced wife, Nadia, the young woman who had filled al-Majdal Asqalan with her shouting as she had tried to persuade him to board the refugees’ truck. Mahmoud Dahman had refused to budge, stubborn as a donkey fixing his legs to the ground, while the planes in the sky had screamed, the bombs had screamed, his daughter Ghazza had screamed in her mother’s arms, the people in the truck had screamed, the engine of the truck—which was getting ready to leave—had screamed, and his father, Sheikh Ibrahim, had screamed, “Mahmoud, my son, get up here with us, otherwise everyone will end up in a different place. If we leave one another, we’ll never meet again, my son. Tomorrow the Jews will beat you up if they find you. Listen to me, put the devil to shame and get up here with us!”
In the end, which marked the beginning of a collective regret that would last a lifetime, The Remainer had screamed himself, before they could leave: “Father, if you leave, you’ll never come back!” Al-Majdal had reverberated with the sound of the echo, “Father, if you leave, you’ll never . . . , Father, if you leave . . . , Father, if you l . . . ,” until his voice was lost in the hubbub of voices that the truck had carried far away, taking with it the thousands who had left on that ill-omened day.
After her divorce from The Remainer, Nadia had married Ismail Muqbil Dahman. Ismail worked as a teacher in the city of Dammam, in Saudi Arabia. His first wife had died of a swift, incurable illness, leaving him with five children, the oldest of them being Munir, who had been ten years old, and the youngest Suad, who had taken her first steps—wobbling on her little legs, laughing, falling, trying again—on the day her mother had died. “She’d have loved to have seen this,” Ismail said, making the mourners around him weep all the harder.
“Trust in the one God, man! He has fated it, and there is no escape from it,” they consoled him; and praised Him, who alone may be praised for a disaster.
Nadia couldn’t stay a divorced woman, gossiped about by the camp in Khan Younis and the popular news agencies. Nor could Ismail manage his own life with five children. The Dahman family brought together the widower and the divorcee. Nadia moved to Dammam with her daughter Ghazza, and took charge of bringing up Ismail’s children, who acquired another sister. Nadia and Ghazza became distant from their original family branch in Ramla, and had disappeared from The Remainer’s life forever.
More than sixteen years before going back to visit his family, The Remainer had recorded his voice message: “I am Mahmoud Ibrahim Dahman, nicknamed The Remainer. My peace and greetings to my dear father, Sheikh Ibrahim, my beloved mother, Imm Salih, my two brothers, Salih and Faruq, to my little sister, Fathiya, and to all the members of the Dahman family in the Gaza Strip and abroad. If you wonder about us, we are well. Be reassured!”
I opened my eyes. I collected the pages of Jinin’s novel from the pocket in front of me, put them back in the little bag, then dozed off, and only woke when I felt Julie’s hand shaking mine just before landing.
4
My wife and I were led into a wide hallway in Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda by a female security official, whose heavy backside slowed our carefully measured steps behind her and doubled the time it took to get to where she asked us to wait.
We sat together on a wide wooden bench, near a side room. The door of the room was half open, allowing us to overhear a conversation in English and Hebrew from inside, though it was difficult to make much sense of it.
“Will we have to wait here long, darling?”
