I turned excitedly toward Jinin and looked hard at her. I was by now convinced that there had been a deception on her part, which she had covered up. “Jinin, I’ve seen this house before!” I said confidently, straight out.
“Isn’t it a surprise?” she replied. “This really is Mark’s house, Walid. I live in a different city, which we’ll visit if we still have time. Honestly, I borrowed the house to let Jinin and Basim live in it.”
I followed where she was looking, and recalled Basim throwing his clothes onto the bed. I could see her enjoying his legs, hoping for a ‘take away,’ a light love feast, and not getting it. I smiled to myself, as she continued, “And this is my desk. How many times my head’s fallen on it from tiredness when I’ve been up late writing the novel!”
“I got to know Jinin about two years ago,” Mark explained. “I met her by chance as she was wandering around the Citadel, and invited her to my house. She liked it a lot. She visited it three times after that, and remembered all its details.”
“It helped me to find a suitable place to locate my characters,” Jinin added. “It suits everything I imagined about Basim and Jinin’s life together.”
I felt at that moment that I was in the novel, and I liked what I felt. I walked toward the little window, sat on the chair next to it, and started looking at the little boats bobbing in the port, the gentle Jaffa waves behind them. I heard Mark say, “Would you like to move here? If you want to, I’ll help you with that.”
Is this an actual offer or a provocation? I asked myself.
He repeated the question. “Would you like to livehere?”
“Mark, first and foremost, the matter depends on the Israeli authorities. My being of Palestinian origin makes my getting the right to residence complicated. And my having British citizenship doesn’t make things much easier.”
“I’m not going to solve the Israel–Palestine problem; I’m Mark and I’m asking you: do you want to move here to live in Jaffa? To sit here, watch the sea, and write—to do in reality what Jinin did in her novel?”
When I didn’t give him an answer, he continued, “You won’t buy or own the house, but you’ll be able to secure the right to live there as long as you’re an artist. The house belongs to the church, and the church can’t expel you from it, either. You can buy the right to live in it for ninety-nine years. In fact, none of us owns any of these houses.”
I thanked Mark for hosting us, and for his offer, and then we left.
On the way to the famous fish restaurant The Old Man and the Sea, I asked Jinin for news of the two Basims: the Basim of the novel, and the real Basim. She told me that the Basim of the novel would leave Jinin, and return to the USA. His wife would accompany him to the airport to spend his last moments in the country with him. They would embrace for a long time, and would part slowly, allowing time for Basim’s last words to her before he disappeared from her life forever: “Listen, my Junayna, I’ll tell you, this society isn’t ready for coexistence. It doesn’t want us to go to it, and it certainly doesn’t want to come to us. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Then he would turn and walk off, to be swallowed up by the airport.
As for her real husband Basim, she said—with some reluctant satisfaction—that he had been working for some time as a teacher in Birzeit University, and that he was in good shape. But he had refused to settle in Jaffa. Before moving to live in Ramallah, he told her that his love was in Jaffa, but his dreams were in Birzeit. And she told him that her love was in Birzeit, but her dreams were the dreams of a Jaffan.
She said nothing for a moment, but seemed unhappy with her silence, and quickly broke it to say, “Ever since Basim left here, our marriage has become a sort of ‘transit’: sometimes he comes to me, and sometimes I go to him. Our whole life has become a ‘take away.’”
During lunch, I was busy removing a small, slender fishbone from my fish when the restaurant manager, Abu Zaki, came up to me, and whispered that he had left a table reserved in a nice corner of the restaurant, which he would not allow anyone to sit at. He said it was for an exiled Palestinian writer, a mutual friend on Facebook, and that it would stay waiting for him until he was able to come to the country and visit the restaurant. Abu Zaki had given instructions to all the restaurant staff to change the tablecloth every day, and to put a new bunch of roses on the table. I stopped what I was doing, and listened, astonished, to what the man was saying. He confirmed that the table would continue to wait for its rightful occupant until he and his staff saw him in the restaurant, sitting there and looking at the sea. Abu Zaki would then send a group of fishermen into the open sea, and prepare appetizers for him until the fishermen brought back fish worthy of his return.
Amid Julie and Jinin’s astonished gasps, which could be heard through the whole restaurant, I showered him with sarcastic looks, and accused him jokingly of acting the fool. Abu Zaki grabbed me by the right arm and pulled me up. I left the
