I was a student with Jamil in a school that graduated Communist Party cadres. We had come from different places to participate, with others, in trying to find a solution for our country, which we dreamed would one day reunite us. He had been born in Palestine, and had stayed there. He came to Moscow as part of a group attached to the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah), which included a number of Jews. I was born there, too, but I hadn’t stayed. I became a Gazan who didn’t even retain his Gazan identity, but fled in the course of the national struggle, dragged along by events wherever the men moved who carried guns and raised banners (sometimes light, sometimes heavy) to flutter in the breeze, settling down wherever they settled in the hopes of freedom and return—though I never returned and neither did they.
That is how I came to know Jamil, a Palestinian in Israel, a half-citizen in a democracy that had no relevance for him, and which didn’t pay him any attention except at election times. And he came to know me, a Palestinian exiled in God’s vast land. Some years later, I married Julie, a British citizen, half-English and half-Armenian, and Jamil married the Russian Luda, who left Moscow and moved with him to Haifa after he had completed his course at the Party school. After their marriage, she became an Israeli with full citizenship.
In the car, I turned to Jamil.
“Jamilov!”
He looked over. “Da, tovarishch, yes, comrade!”
“What did your family say when you returned to Haifa with Luda?”
The question didn’t surprise him. It surprised Luda, though, who leaned forward and started to play with his bald pate, wondering what he would say.
“You’ve reminded me of that day,” he replied, as he surrendered to the fingers sliding over his head. “My grandfather, God rest his soul, was still alive. When I told him about it, he looked at me, and teased me, his eyes worn out with suffering. He took the cigarette that was in his hand, stubbed it nervously in the ashtray, and said to me, “Look here, you should be ashamed of yourself. Does the country need Russians so much that you have to go and bring back a Russian girl, and a Jewish one at that?”
His grandfather’s stance made me laugh. I was surprised that Luda was Jewish. It had never occurred to me, though I wouldn’t really have attached any importance to it; in a secular society, officially at least, no one asks about anyone else’s religion or attaches any importance to it. The last vestiges of Russian believers generally buried their God in their hearts and kept him hidden, fearful of government militia men. All three of us belonged to a group that didn’t ask.
“I’ve never been a Jew in my life,” Luda protested. Julie laughed, then addressed Luda in a whisper loud enough for us all to hear:
“I like what you say, Luda, because we both speak Arabic like Egyptian koshari.”
We all chuckled, then Jamil proceeded to wind up his conversation with his grandfather.
“I said to my grandfather, ‘Sir, God prolong your life, Luda isn’t a Jew. Luda’s a Communist, just like me! And you know we—’ Then he interrupted me in a sarcastic, jokey way and said, ‘Shame on you both. You’re like the man who came to paint kohl on someone and blinded her. You needed an extra member for your Communist Party, so you went and added to the number of Jews in Haifa?!’”
Luda was the Party school librarian. Jamil and I used to call the library ‘Ludi Malenki Grad’—‘Luda’s Little City,’ that is. It was home to thousands of philosophical, historical, and economics books, and a lot of classical Russian novels, and other literary works. Luda spent some of her working hours wandering the streets of her ‘city,’ busily rearranging them after the school students had returned the books they had borrowed. Otherwise, she would be sitting at her desk. We both fell in love with Luda’s city of culture at the same time, and allocated pet names to the different sections of the library: this was Karl Marx quarter, where his books lived; and this was the suburb of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I would sometimes jokingly advise a comrade who was looking for a book called What is Political Economy?, “Go to Rosa Luxemburg Alley in the Political Economy quarter!” To someone else, who couldn’t find a book by Friedrich Engels, I might say, “Go to such-and-such a lane and you’ll find it, it’s not very far from Marx Street, just before Lenin Lane.” Jamil would argue with me and protest: “Don’t take advice from Walidov . . . he’ll get you lost, comrade, and you’ll end up in an ideological hell!”
We would laugh and make others laugh—a short-lived diversion from our normally dry diet of ideology.
Jamil and I would go to the library almost every day, to borrow the books needed for the academic and political papers we were required to write. We were nothing but a pair of lying hypocrites, both equally devoted to our lying, and loving it. Of all the comrades in our groups, we were the least concerned with expanding our knowledge of materialist and historical philosophies. We were each searching in Luda’s world for the woman of our dreams, despite the fact that women were scattered like flowers in the restaurant and cafeteria. Their beauty defeated the ideology that had done away with the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, in February 1917, and had removed the government of Alexander Kerensky in October of the same year. The doors of relations between the sexes were open to all desires, from a first look to sex in the food stores attached to the school restaurant, or anywhere where the secret could be kept,
