After everyone had finished shaking hands and exchanging kisses, the first thing I said was, “Where’s the house, doctor?”
He gave a deep laugh and replied, “Underneath us, man! Surely Salman must have told you . . . .” He gestured.
The house was perched on a slope at the bottom of the mountain. The garage was on top, and not at the bottom as usual. Residents went in through the terrace above the third floor, and then down into the body of the house.
Nada accepted the flowers with a smile as rosy as the flowers themselves. I put the statue to one side. As we were taking our places around the table, which had been laid with bottles of wine and light nibbles, I noticed that Nada had a look of satisfaction on her face, which made her look different from the woman we’d met at supper the previous day. I felt relieved, and put out of my mind the cross look I’d seen in her eyes when Salman had broached the subject of Ivana’s ashes. I turned to Julie and saw a look of relief on her face that mirrored the relief I felt inside me.
We made some general conversation. As we talked, we took some wine, and this and that from the nibbles. Then Julie got up from her chair and I realized that the moment was upon us, that what had been just preliminaries were now the real thing, and that Julie had decided to commence the third and final ritual for saying farewell to Ivana, following the cremating of her body and the scattering of half her ashes over the River Thames.
Julie took her glass and asked the others to raise theirs. I looked at her, and I saw my mother-in-law in front of me: the same confident stance; the humble pride of a resident of Acre; the gaze that took in the others. I heard words that fondly recalled the rhythm of her mother’s words: “Friends, let us drink to the health of a woman who wanted to return home—even if only half the ashes of her body, and half a sinful spirit. We say farewell to her, ask God’s mercy upon her, and beg forgiveness for her.”
As the expressions of mercy humbly made their way from her lips to the open air like a prayer, Julie took out a stick of incense and lit it with a match. I moved my glass and some of the plates from the table in front of me, and Nada hurried to help me. I took the statue and put it on the table. Then, like someone peeling a fruit, I slowly tore the paper in which it had been wrapped. As Ivana’s porcelain body started to emerge in front of us, Nada’s eyes grew larger, filled with a look of amazement.
“Incredible!” she exclaimed. “Amazing, a real gem!” Then she asked to hug the statue to her breast. When I had finished removing the paper and the whole statue could be seen, I passed it to our hostess, who stood up and took it, then hugged it, and kissed it with her lips and tear-filled eyes. Nada gestured to Julie to come over to her, which she did, and the two women stood together, Nada with the statue held up between her hands, and Julie holding the lighted incense stick, which had begun to send out clouds of holy smoke. As the smell of the incense filled our chests, I went up to Fahmy without thinking, and we took positions together behind the women, while Salman and Aida stood behind us.
Nada now addressed us all: “Come on, let’s go down one step at a time to the sitting room on the third floor. We can pray for her soul and put the statue in the middle of the room, so that everyone who visits us can see it and hear the story from me or Fahmy, or even from our children, to whom we’ll tell everything—they’ll come back home this evening . . . .” As the others listened, I was searching for the Fairuz song ‘Flower of Cities’ and loading it on my cellphone. As soon as Nada finished talking, she moved away, followed by everyone else, to the rhythm of Fairuz’s voice:
For you, City of Prayer, I pray,
For you, most splendid of dwellings, Flower of Cities . . .
Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, City of Prayer, I pray!
We left the terrace, and turned, still in the line we had spontaneously created, Nada and Julie at the front. As we descended the house’s outside marble staircase, a beautiful panorama appeared in front of us: three- and four-story buildings climbing a wide hill, and olive trees racing each other in pursuit of them. Below stretched a valley, an extension of the Wadi Joz, from which smoke from burning car tires was rising up somewhere in front of us. A few meters away, there was a small gathering of people (a little later, when we went down to the garden—which clung to the bottom of the mountain—Nada would tell us, “Those are groups of Palestinian and Jewish leftists, some of whom still gather here. They’re protesting against a government plan to annex a piece of land in the valley”).
We went down the stairs one after another, enveloped in small clouds of holy incense, to the accompaniment of Fairuz’s voice and the solemn rhythm of our feet. We reached the third floor, and our small funeral procession went in through the door of the guest room. Nada stopped, so we all stopped. She gave the statue to Julie and asked her to place it herself in a corner of the room. When she had done so, and without any prior arrangement, we paused for a moment of proper silence, after which Julie received final condolences for the soul of Ivana, which I felt—and no doubt, the others felt the same—must now be hovering over
