I asked a waiter in the restaurant to take a group photo on my cellphone of us all around Khaled Issa’s table, which he did. Then I quickly published it on my Facebook page, as we all returned to our table and finished our lunch. When we had finished eating, I cried in a voice that reached Khaled Issa in Sweden, but was heard by no one else.
I turned to Jinin, who was drinking her coffee, and asked her where she actually lived, having now discovered that the place in the old Jaffa Citadel was just a house for her in her novel, and that the real occupier was a foreigner called Mark Rosenblum. She said that she lived in a rented apartment in Jaffa Street, which she said was next to the sea. The apartment was a reasonable size, and got the sun most of the day, on its east side in the morning, and the west side in the evening. It had a balcony, which overlooked a back street, and was shaded by the leaves of an enormous tree. She said that because of this she had started to live in two streets and belong to two neighborhoods—she would watch the pedestrians in the morning from the window to the east, and spend happy evenings on the balcony overlooking the sea.
I had enough time left before our train back to Haifa for me to ask my postponed questions about Filastini Tays—especially the scene that left the reader in suspense, when The Remainer went out from his house carrying two signs on which he had stuck two pictures, one of the massacres at Deir Yassin, and the other of the massacres that the Jews had suffered in Kiev. At the time, he had told Husniya that he would be going to Rabin Square (formerly known as Kings of Israel Square, until the right-wing extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995), which made his wife’s heart quiver like the stalks of mulukhiyeh between her fingers, as Jinin had put it in her novel.
Jinin put her cup of coffee to one side, and began.
“I’ll tell you first,” she said, “about my father, Mahmoud Dahman, whose story has been with you since you were a small child, Walid, as you told me the first time we met in your house in London. Then we’ll talk about the scene you referred to in the novel.
“Just two days before his death, I traveled to Amman to attend the wedding of Asdud, the daughter of my sister Bisan, and I brought back with me a video of the wedding for him to watch. He hadn’t been able to travel to take part in it or celebrate the wedding of his granddaughter, because his illness had been getting worse. Despite being unable to sit on the sofa to watch the television for more than a quarter of an hour, he watched the whole video, which took a full hour to show. He smiled as he pointed at all the relatives who were at the wedding. Suddenly, he recalled Ghazza, and asked me, ‘Why didn’t Ghazza attend her niece’s wedding? She went to visit Gaza, so she could have traveled from Dammam to Amman to attend the wedding!’
“‘Ghazza didn’t know the date of the wedding, Father,’ I replied, ‘because your granddaughter’s fiancé postponed it twice. Then Ghazza went straight to Gaza, and she couldn’t get out, either via the Rafah crossing or by the Beit Hanun crossing. Ghazza was lost in Gaza, Father.’
“He shook his head and said, with a sorrow that was to be the last sorrow of his life, ‘I wish I hadn’t left Ghazza in Gaza the year of the nakba. I wish I’d brought her out with me, her and her mother.’ Then he asked me to take his hand and help him get up, then take him to his room so that he could lie down on his bed.
“His death was hard and painful for both him and me. All his children were scattered far away, inside and outside the country. Even Filastin, the eldest of us, missed the moment when our father passed from us. He’d been out since the morning, looking for work. Poor Filastin, he was in the same situation as my husband Basim, perhaps even more complicated. Whenever he found a job and submitted an application for it, he received a rejection because of his name. Once, the official told him quite openly and brazenly, ‘Come back when you’ve changed your name, my friend!’”
Jinin wiped away the tears that had crept into her eyes, as Julie and I wiped away a cloud of sadness that had swept over our faces. Then Jinin put her hand into her bag and took out some papers. She selected one of them and said, “This is the last scene I sketched for The Remainer.” But instead of reading from the page she’d taken out, she put it to one side and said, “Let me also wrap up part of another puzzle, Walid. It’s important for my readers, in fact.”
I listened to her without interrupting as she continued. “Do you recall when The Remainer took the two pictures, and was about to go out, but felt the heavy key in his pocket at the door, so he propped the two pictures up to one side, and went back into his room?”
When I assured her that I did remember, she
