When 15 May 1948 came, Britain finished winding up its camps, leaving Palestine to Jewish military groups, who declared the establishment of the state of Israel. John went back to Britain, along with the other soldiers of the Empire who were withdrawing from most of the country.
On 18 May 1948, Acre fell into the hands of Jewish forces. Antranik Ardakian, Manuel’s brother and Ivana’s paternal uncle, was killed in the last battle to defend Acre, along with a number of volunteers armed with old rifles, who gathered in the police station under the command of Ahmad Shukri Manna.
Manuel and Alice fled to Lebanon by the coast road two days before the city fell. They stayed in a forest near the district of Furn al-Shubbak. The forest was later sold, and in 1952 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Lebanese government leased a piece of land in the region of Jisr al-Basha, where they established a camp, which bore the name of the locality. Manuel and Alice moved to the camp with more than three thousand other Palestinians, a mixture of Orthodox and Catholic Christians who had been forced to flee from Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa.
Manuel lived a wretched life in the Jisr al-Basha camp—a life that ended with his death two months before the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1975. He died in a state of grief for himself, for his brother Antranik, and for his daughter, all of whose attempts at a reconciliation he had refused. He didn’t reply to her letters, which continued to reach him for the first five years after their elopement. Ivana implored him at least to accept and recognize his granddaughter, Julie, but she received no reply from him. On 29 June 1976, Alice was killed during a raid by the Lebanese Phalange on the Jisr al-Basha camp, the remaining inhabitants of which were forced to leave.
Ivana fell silent as she surrendered to an enormous wave of sadness that broke over her face. Her lips reacted with a tremor, and she clasped her hands tensely. Tears flowed from her eyes, as if stored up during the years of her loneliness since John had died. Everyone else—Byer and his wife, Leah and Kwaku, Walid and Julie—remained quiet as they contemplated her sadness, which had spilled over as her story had unfolded. She had never told it in such detail before, though it was still incomplete even now.
Eventually, Ivana dried her face with her hands, wiping from it the pain of her past, some of which she had recalled herself, and some of which had appeared despite herself. Then she spoke in a voice thick with suffering: “If I’d just said that my parents had died without my seeing them for more than fifty years, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“Oh, Mama!” Julie let out a wail of sympathy for her mother. She got up from her chair, and moved behind Ivana. She took her head between her hands, then bent over it tenderly and kissed it. As she returned to her place, she said, “It’s enough for me that my father and you were great lovers.”
Ivana’s lips parted in a smile that she hadn’t displayed for a long time.
“Forgive me, my friends,” she said. “I’ve upset us all. Perhaps my past has returned to bid me farewell.”
She sat up straight and went on: “My friends, I invited you here today to say something else, which has nothing to do with my past or with my inheritance.” Then she turned to Byer and addressed him in a business-like tone: “Mr. Byer, we will add some further details to my will together. I will come to your office for this purpose at a time that we will agree on later.”
Byer nodded, as Ivana calmly continued:
“I may not live much longer. I want my body to be cremated after my death, and my funeral eulogy to be delivered to the John Lennon song ‘Imagine.’ I would like this song, which does not die as mortals die, to be the last thing my ears hear before the fire consumes them and they are turned to ash. Anyone who wants to deliver a eulogy shouldn’t speak for too long, so as not to have to make up things that aren’t among my attributes. Funeral eulogies, my dears, are usually nothing more than a recalling of the deceased, through advertised and prearranged parties, which the speakers use to wipe out the wrongs they did to the dead person during his or her lifetime. If I knew the exact time of my death, I would ask everyone who was going to mourn me to write down for me on a piece of paper what they were going to say, so that I could revise it before I passed away forever, with no questions afterward and no possibility of introducing amendments. After the end of the cremation formalities, you will scatter a handful of ashes from my body over the River Thames, which will carry them throughout the waters of the ocean. You, my dear Julie, and you, Walid, will be responsible for that.”
Walid made no comment. Julie’s fingers did it for him. They stretched out to Ivana’s hand lying on the table and came to rest on top of it. Ivana put her other hand on top of Julie’s, and they contented themselves with exchanging glances.
Ivana continued speaking, giving instructions that another handful of her body’s ashes should be placed in a glass jar thirty centimeters high, the color of the sea in summer, and the shape of her own body in every season: a neck of haughtiness (she raised her head); a chest of pride (she pulled herself upright in her chair, revealing the elegance of her prominent, aristocratic nose); a waist encircled by a lover’s hands (she put her two thumbs
