“You’re determined to visit the Holocaust Museum, then, like you told me?” he asked.
“I’ll try. I want to see Deir Yassin from there. I want to see how the victims see their victims.”
We fell silent.
The car passed through the outskirts of West Jerusalem. We spotted the top half of the Ramada Renaissance Hotel above its lower neighbors. Salman turned the car, only to be stopped by a red light. When it changed to green, it gave Salman two choices: either to turn right and swing around the hotel to look for the main entrance—or so I assumed—or else to go past the light and turn in at the next street along. He waited too long, and the light turned red again. As Salman wondered aloud about the best way to go when the signal changed, I suggested turning right toward the hotel.
The light changed. Salman took my advice—the advice of someone who had never visited Jerusalem before. He was relying on my basic Hebrew to read the traffic sign at the crossroads we had left and translate it for him so that he could keep his eyes on the road. He turned to the right. The road led under a bridge, and gradually opened up. If the car had continued onward, we would most likely have ended up outside Jerusalem completely.
“You’ve made me get lost with your rotten advice!” Salman exclaimed, slightly irritated. “Your guesswork has ruined us.”
He pulled over less than a hundred meters on to ask a man standing on the sidewalk for directions. The man started explaining. I couldn’t follow most of what he said, but one word he said in Hebrew with a distinctive rhythm made me hide a laugh with my hands: ‘istabakhta.’
As he pulled out into traffic again, Salman explained to Julie that ‘istabakhta’ meant ‘you’re in difficulties’ or ‘you’re stuck.’
We would use this word a lot throughout the ten days we would spend in the country. I would repeatedly say, “Istabakhta, and everyone knows it!” “Istabakhta, but what’s happened has happened!” or “Istabakhta, and you’d better remain nameless!”
When we finally got to the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in West Jerusalem, we were met by a girl in her twenties, with a smile like a balmy evening, enough to wipe out half the troubles of the journey. I stood there for some moments, then gave her my passport.
I was greatly relieved by the sight of this employee, who continued to smile as she started to record our personal details. She was the first Israeli I’d seen in Jerusalem who didn’t have the professional worried look of the Israeli women in the airport. Meanwhile, Julie stood at a distance from the reception desk, contemplating the décor.
Salman came up to the desk and proceeded to engage the receptionist in a jokey conversation in Hebrew. They chattered together and exchanged smiles that sometimes turned into laughter. Suddenly, Salman put a question to the girl: “So, how is Ahmad related to you?”
This question, in Arabic, changed the whole scenario, and I felt reassured about my first impression. Her name was Ni‘mat, and she was a Palestinian, like all the Ni‘mats of this country. I was greatly relieved. I felt like I was in a Palestinian hotel (despite the fact that it wasn’t Palestinian), and that this woman would smile at the next guest to the hotel as soon as he arrived. She’d ask him for his passport to record his details. She wouldn’t pause at his nationality or ask him for his religion. She wouldn’t change the shape of her smile according to the customer. This Ni‘mat made me feel relaxed, for she confirmed to me that we were still spread through the country.
I would feel even more relaxed the following morning, when we had breakfast with Salman and Aida. The staff in the restaurant would welcome us with an extra greeting: “A hundred welcomes! You have honored us!” And we would smile because we were being honored by them in turn. On the morning after that, we would be welcomed by the restaurant manager, who would chat with us warmly, while one of the waiters surprised us with an extra act of kindness, offering to bring us a selection of the tastiest available food himself rather than making us queue up at the buffet. I personally thought he must be the owner of the restaurant, though he was only a waiter. The same thing would happen at the breakfasts we would take in the Dan Carmel Hotel in Haifa, when we visited the city some days later and stayed in the same place where the former Egyptian President, Muhammad Anwar Sadat, had stayed during his trip to Haifa in 1978. Salman would tell me the story of how Sadat had made him the first holder of an Israeli passport to secure an Egyptian entry visa, and how Salman had later become the ‘King of the Arabic Book’ and their biggest distributor in Egypt. In Beersheba, where we would spend a single night in the Leonardo Hotel, we would be welcomed by a Bedouin employee, and served an excellent breakfast by another Bedouin who supervised the restaurant staff, most of whom belonged to the Arab tribes in the region.
But that was all still to come. For now, I signed the papers for the hotel and the three of us went up to the twelfth floor, where we had adjacent rooms, to begin our journey of discovery in the country.
2
Haifa
On the international road to ‘The Bride of Carmel,’ Jamil took me away from my contemplation of a place that no longer looked like it did, back to our friendship in Moscow in the middle of the 1970s. At that time, he, Ludmilla, and I had formed a troika, more important to us than the one that dominated the Kremlin in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat at the time of comrade Leonid Brezhnev.
Jamil
