When she spoke, Ivana surprised everyone. She summoned up her distant past, relating her stories with her eyes fastened on her dead John’s seat. She made them listen to a lot that they knew already, as well as some things that they had no knowledge of. She spoke about her early youth: she had been a teenager when she had fallen in love with the young medical officer John Littlehouse, who had given his daughter Julie his surname, together with the green color of her eyes and other details that anyone who had known him while he was alive could recognize in her features, even after she had turned sixty. She turned to Julie, as if to reassure herself that John’s features were still there on her daughter’s face. As if looking at the dead man in his seat opposite her, she said that he had been a handsome man, whom it was difficult for a girl of her age to resist at that time. Then she sighed, so deeply did she miss him, and started talking about her happy memories in detail. She said that a look from John’s eyes was worth the whole blue sky of Acre, and that she had never for a moment thought about the madness of her relationship with him, in case her reason might make her lose the best love story she had ever lived. She said that from the moment she had fallen in love with John, he had no longer been for her a hated British colonizer or a medical officer, but rather the only young man who had knocked her down with his first smile. The young men of Abbud Square and the Sheikh Abdallah and Fakhura quarters, as well as her colleagues in the Terra Sancta School, would scatter their morning smiles at her feet as she walked along with the coquettishness of a teenager, showing off the power of her beauty over others, never turning to pick any of them up. She was ready to do anything to bind herself to John forever, even if a great war should break out between Great Britain and Abbud Square, engulfing all the Armenians of Acre.
She said all this and more, but was silent about the details of the real war that had flared up at the time in St. George’s Church between the members of the Ardakian family and the residents of the quarter, which had inflamed their feelings and darkened their spirits. She didn’t tell them about her last moments in Acre, the details of which some local residents still remembered and gossiped about decades later.
One calm July morning, the officer John Littlehouse arrived in Acre in a military jeep, which took him and a companion to Old Acre, where the driver stopped in Fakhura Street near al-Hadid Tower. John got out and walked toward the Fakhura quarter. He passed quickly through several narrow, winding lanes to the Maaliq quarter, and from there to Abbud Square. He walked to within a very short distance of the fountain in the middle of the square, and put his foot on the marble base.
Ivana was ready to leave the house of her parents, who had gone out to church in the morning. At that moment, she heard the sound of a heavy shop door being closed. She opened the front door of the house and heard Mitri, the shoe shop owner, shout: “I’d like to know who brought this Englishman here to us! What’s he doing in our quarter?”
Ivana realized that John was early and had already arrived in the square, and that his arrival must have upset Mitri and the owners of the other shops that were open. She closed the front door and ran down the twenty steps of the staircase. She peeped around the corner of the house and surveyed the neighborhood. She saw Mitri standing in front of his shop with his face in turmoil, like someone emerging from a fight that was still unfinished. But she didn’t see John in the square as she had expected. Instead, she saw little Ata, the son of Widad Asfur, kicking a small stone and chasing it. John had left the square quickly after hearing Mitri’s shouts, sensing the man’s anger. He was hiding in the alley that led to the Sheikh Abdallah quarter. Ivana left the house and walked past Mitri, who quickly displayed his emotions in front of her, and warned her: “Tell the man who brought you up at home, the residents of the Abbud quarter will not marry off their daughters to the British—they’ve been riding the country for thirty years, holding on to our shoulders and kicking their feet. And now they have to ride our women as well?”
Ivana hurried off without a word and soon spotted John, calling to him in English, “Hurry up, John! Let’s go, darling!”
The young man grabbed Ivana’s hand, and they left the quarter, hurrying through the quarters of Maaliq and Fakhura to the jeep that was waiting for them, leaving Abbud Square to continue its clash of tongues on its own.
John and Ivana were married a long way from Acre and its people. They had a small, untraditional party at a British base near Haifa, where the couple spent their wedding night amid the officers and men of the base.
Then Ivana became pregnant, and in due course was delivered of a beautiful girl who looked like her father and whom they named Julie. In March 1948, Ivana left the country with her two-month-old daughter in her arms. She disappeared from her parents’ lives and from Abbud Square, where she had grown up. She became a mirage that visited the square on occasions to remind them of the scandal, a wind that blew somewhere else whose sound no one heard. People said, “Ivana’s in the custody of the English!” People also asked, “Wasn’t Palestine enough for them? Did they have to take its daughters as well?”
