“This is for you,” said Peter.
The young man took hold of Julie’s right wrist and slipped the bracelet over it. Her hand trembled between his fingers, but she was calmed by a vague feeling that her mother would be there with her forever.
Julie went back home, conflicting emotions crowding her face. She put the statue on the make-up mirror stand in the bedroom. She opened the left-hand drawer of the dressing table, and took out a silver chain, hanging from which was a cross as small as her faith, which Ivana had given to her before she had died. She bent over the porcelain statue and twisted the chain several times around its neck, leaving the cross to hang over its breast. Around the statue’s hips she twisted a fine strip of one of Ivana’s colored silk scarves.
A week after Ivana’s death, Julie took the second porcelain container and went with Walid to Waterloo Bridge in the center of London. A few meters before the middle of the bridge, they stopped, near a spot looking over the Royal National Theatre building. The evening was turning into night, undisturbed by rain, unruffled by wind. The South Bank area below the bridge, and all along the river as far as Westminster Bridge behind them, jostled with comings and goings of every kind, with men and women of different ages and nationalities sharing their happinesses and their griefs on the river’s wide banks. Under the bridge, outside the theatre, a musical group played the Concierto de Aranjuez by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.
Julie leaned a little over the bridge’s black metal railing. She turned the container upside-down and shook it gently, and Ivana’s ashes scattered down to the water below, as was her wish. As the strains of Mon amour, the second movement of the concerto, rose into the air, Julie and Walid quietly repeated, “Goodbye, Ivana, goodbye.”
4
In Julie’s absence, Walid decided to stroll around the streets of Old Acre. He left the Akkotel Hotel and walked along Salah al-Din Street. After about forty meters, he was brought to a halt by a white cloth sign, which had been hung on the corner of the Nazareth Sweets shop on the left side of the street. On it, he read in Arabic, English, and Hebrew: “We will not move out.” He recalled what he had heard from the owner and manager of the hotel just a few minutes before:
“Now, sir, it’s the French Jews who are attacking us. One group’s coming after another, may God be your protector, and their pockets are stuffed with money. They go all around the houses outside the wall. They offer the owners high prices, far more than you can imagine. A house that’s about to fall down is worth more than one that’s standing. There are people, Mr. Walid, ground down by poverty, who have sold their houses. And there are others who’ve sold up because they’ve had so much trouble from the fundamentalist Jews who’ve occupied houses here and there. Then there are people who don’t want to sell up, and never will. These are the real people of Acre, the people who hold onto their land, and their homes, and their identity, who will cling onto Acre’s stones with their fingernails. These are the people who stood up to the French and the others, and threw them out. We can hear their shouting when we’re in the hotel, coming up to us from the street: ‘We don’t have houses for sale!’ But there are also people who dream of the homeland. What can we say? Okay, let the Arabs who are loaded with money buy them! No one will wake up and understand, Mr. Walid, that the Jews don’t just want our houses, they want to buy them and sell off our history for nothing!”
The sign reminded him of another, which the Shona district committee had prepared and hung up on a wall in the Old City, in Hebrew and Arabic: ‘My House Is Not For Sale.’ But it also recalled a third sign, which had been hung on the bars of a window he had passed earlier with Julie, on which had been written, again in two languages:—‘House For Sale.’
Walid continued on his way, his head full of signs challenging other signs, and slogans contradicting each other, while the houses of Old Acre, and the five and a half thousand residents who still occupied them, waited in a queue of victims of creeping Judaization—like the five buildings in the Maaliq quarter that had been restored for the Ayalim Society and had then been taken over by Orthodox Jewish university students.
The White Market, which no longer retained the color of its name, held little to detain him. There seemed to be nothing there except for an arched roof and the doors of shut-up stalls, so he walked past. He turned left, then branched to the right, and in less than four minutes was inside the Popular Market, standing in front of Hummus Saeed. There were some tourists gathered in front of the restaurant. They had taken over the four steps in front of the entrance, waiting their turn to get a table and blocking a third of the market path, while the boxes of vegetables and fruit belonging to the shop opposite had blocked another third, so that the shoppers and other tourists had only a slim central walkway to compete for.
He watched some of the waiting customers standing next to the closed blue door in the façade overlooking the market, gazing through the glass at the mouths lapping up their meals. He laughed, recalling that Julie had done just the same thing when they’d come to
