“Did I understand from Salman that it’s a glass vessel?” asked Nada.
“No, it’s porcelain, in the shape of a woman’s body, with the figure of my mother in her youth,” replied Julie.
I cut in, to arouse Nada’s curiosity, “You’ll see tomorrow. Then you can choose whether to help us or not.”
There was a silence like the moments that precede a decision.
Finally, we thanked our hosts and said goodbye, in the hope of visiting them the following day in their house in the Sheikh Jarrah suburb of Jerusalem. Then we left, to search for other details of the city. The car took us to the top of the French Hill district in the northeast of the city, its houses scattered along the line of our silent glances. Since 1971, the hill had been given a new Israeli name: Giv’at Shapira.
“They can call it what they like,” said Salman, “we’ll go on calling it ‘French Hill.’” Meanwhile, all eyes were roving over the illuminated houses in the settlement amid the sleepy forest trees. Close to the settlement, lights were shining in the Hadassah Medical Center, and in the Hebrew University, some of whose students lived in the settlement, where they formed part of the total of seven thousand residents, in addition to a number of doctors and nurses of both sexes who worked in the hospital nearby.
“This is the highest point in Jerusalem,” said Salman. Without waiting for anyone to comment, he went on, “I did a Google search on it yesterday. I don’t know what brought it to mind. Someone—a female estate agent, I think—wrote about how she’d come with a client who wanted to buy an apartment on an upper floor in the settlement. The woman brought him here and took him to the building, showed him the apartment, then stood him on the balcony, and told him to look. The man turned to where she was pointing and saw a view to blow the mind. He couldn’t believe he’d found an apartment in Jerusalem on a hill eight hundred and thirty meters above sea level!
“‘Adoni,’ she said to him, ‘you see the road over there?’
“He turned to where she was pointing.
“‘That road goes from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.’
“‘Beseder, okay, I like the view a lot. But the price you’re asking is too much.’
“Laughing, she told him, ‘The 400,000 US dollars that you’ll pay is for the view in front of you. We’ll give you the apartment for nothing. What do you say?’”
Aida, who lisped a little, gave a start and said, “It’s not just the hill, Salman, my dear—the Jews have taken the whole of Jerusalem for free.”
I didn’t make any comment. Nor did Julie, who was concentrating hard on the discussion going on around her. But I whispered to her, “We’ve become like the rest of the Arabs, and like the prophets of the city: we just look at these places as they bury Jerusalem under them, settlement after settlement. We see new features piling up over the existing ones, and new names tramping on the old ones.”
The night went on, loitering with us in the streets. Most of the evening had passed, and darkness covered the greater part of the city. Jerusalem appeared decorated with necklaces of stars, as the earth turned into sky. Eventually, Salman stopped his car.
“This is the American Colony Hotel.”
We all turned toward the hotel. It was a beautiful building, constructed of the white limestone that is used a lot in the country. In front of it were six bougainvillea shrubs, whose flower-covered branches hung over the front wall. We used to call them the ‘madwoman.’ They reminded me of my mother Amina, who loved them a lot, and would wait for the summer to welcome them. As they crept up the wall of our house, she would watch them the whole time. She’d said that they were strong, and that it was their madness that pushed them toward the trellis on the walls and made them climb it. One summer, I’d asked her, “The madwoman that’s on our wall, Mother, is she mad or sane?”
She’d turned to me with tears in her eyes, and said, “After Sharon’s tanks destroyed our house, my dear, there were no more walls for the madwoman to climb up!”
I loved the madwoman as well. Like my mother, I loved her flowery madness. Sometimes, I would talk to the madwoman. I would tell her what my mother said about her: “There’s no tree stronger than this one. She climbs up the walls like a thief. She’s got a shameless eye, which makes amorous glances at anyone who’s coming or going in the street, and talks with them.” And I would laugh.
I started to laugh again now, as I looked at the flowers climbing up the entrance to the American Colony Hotel. I looked at them, silent on a silent evening, but I recalled that their flowers were the only ones in the whole of nature that smiled with three lips. I saw them smile at the very moment Salman snatched them from me.
“Hey, I’m going to surprise you. Look over to your right. What do you see? That’s Orient House at the end of the street.”
Without asking their permission, I put my mother and the madwoman out of my mind, and thought, Orient House, Orient House, Faisal Husseini. I remember the day he died in Kuwait. The last day of May 2001. He went to deliver a letter to the Kuwaitis from the PLO, after the rupture that developed between them following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and he died. It’s as if the rupture, which had eluded repair, brought about his end.
I contemplated the place from a distance of a few meters. I looked at the house, which had disturbed Israel for years. Israel only found peace and contentment in 1997 after it officially
