In Search of Fatima, page 13
And indeed, in a short while, the taxi appeared with him sitting in the front seat next to the driver. The latter was clearly nervous and told us to hurry. My mother had our case and the old blankets ready in the liwan, and Ziyad, who had been very quiet that morning, now said he wanted to take his bicycle along. “Don’t be silly,” snapped my mother. “But I want to take it,” he insisted. Everyone ignored him. Siham had a winter coat which our father had brought back for her from London. It had been too big for her when he bought it but now it fitted and she had scarcely ever worn it. She now tried to pack it with the rest of our clothes, but it was too bulky. “Never mind,” said our mother, “leave it for when we come back.”
Muhammad and Fatima took down our cases over the veranda steps towards the gate, leaving the front door of the house open. Through the door, Rex now ran in, undeterred by his usual fear of my mother and started to jump up all over us in great agitation. He made a high-pitched, keening sound I had never heard before.
“He knows we’re going,” Siham said. “I don’t know how, but he does.” Ziyad and I could not catch hold of him long enough to pat his head and calm him down. He kept rushing from one to the other so fast that his hind legs slipped on the floor. But I managed to grab him and hug him tightly to me. Fatima came back in and tried to say that the car was now ready, but she started to cry. My mother put a hand on her shoulder, “There, there, we’ll be back. It won’t be long.” But Fatima just went on crying. Then she said, “I’ve got to cry now because I’ll be too shy to cry when we say goodbye at the depot.” She meant the place in town where we would stop to change cars for Damascus.
There was a loud explosion outside. My father said we must now leave. He had a heavy brown overcoat on his arm which he now gave Fatima. He had bought it in England for himself and it had a label inside the collar which said Moss Bros.
“This is for you.” And as Fatima started to cry again, my father said hurriedly, “Here, take the key and keep it safe.” This was the key to our house where Fatima was going to stay until we all returned. She put it in the side pocket of her caftan and wiped her eyes. “I’ll look after everything, have no worry.”
We came out with Rex still running round and my father locked up. We put Rex into the garden and closed the gate on him in case he ran out into the road on his own. I lingered, looking back at the house. The shutters were all closed and silent and the garden seemed to hug the walls, as if to retain their secrets. Enclosed in that space was all the life that I had ever known and I thought what a dear, dear place it was.
A deafening burst of shooting. My mother ran forward and dragged me away. My father got in the front of the car with Muhammad and Ziyad and the rest of us squeezed into the back. I sat on Fatima’s lap and wondered whether I dared ask if I could go back for my teddy bear, Beta, which no one had thought to pack for me. I thought of him left all alone with Rex in that silent, shuttered house. Ziyad was quiet in the front seat. He too was thinking about Rex and whether he could have managed somehow to smuggle him into the boot of the car. But as we were about to move off, my father suddenly said to the driver, “Wait!” A soldier from the Arab defence unit which was encamped at the British zone checkpoint was striding purposefully towards us. He was armed with a rifle and had a gun at his side and there was no doubt that his business was with us.
My father got out of the car and greeted him politely. Rex started to bark and jump up against the gate. The soldier peered into the taxi and examined each of us in turn. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “Don’t you know it’s not allowed to leave. AHC orders.” “It’s all right, I understand,” said my father calmly “but this is my wife and these are my children. I’m simply taking them to my father-in-law’s house for safety. I will be coming back straightaway.” “All right,” replied the man, “make sure that you do.” He checked the suitcase and then, apparently satisfied that it contained nothing but our clothes, he nodded to my father. “God be with you.”
My father got back into the car and my mother said, “Why can’t they make up their minds? One minute they tell us all the women and children are to leave and now they’re saying we shouldn’t. And anyway, what’s the point now with everyone already gone?” My father told her to keep her voice down. As we started to move off, I twisted round on Fatima’s knee and looked out of the back window. And there to my horror was Rex standing in the middle of the road. We can’t have closed the gate properly and he must somehow have managed to get out. He stood still, his head up, his tail stiff, staring after our receding car.
“Look!” I cried out frantically, “Rex has got out. Stop, please, he’ll get killed.” “Shh”, said Fatima, pushing me down into her lap. “He’s a rascal. I’ll put him back when I return and he won’t come to any harm. Now stop worrying.”
But I stared and stared at him until we had rounded the corner of the road and he and the house disappeared from view. I turned and looked at the others. They sat silently, their eyes fixed on the road ahead. No one seemed aware of my terrible anguish or how in that moment I suddenly knew with overwhelming certainty that something had irrevocably ended for us there and, like Rex’s unfeigned, innocent affection, it would never return.
The short journey to the taxi depot in the Old City opposite the Damascus Gate passed without much incident. We were stopped again at the checkpoint outside the zone, and my father explained once more why we were leaving. When we reached the depot, we got out and transferred our luggage to a taxi which would take us to Damascus by way of Amman. To reach Damascus from Jerusalem, one would normally have taken the northern route through Ras al-Naqura. But all that part of Palestine was a raging battleground and no car could travel that way. Hence we had to take the longer and more roundabout route through Amman. The taxi depot was bustling with people leaving Palestine like us. There was a different atmosphere here to the one we had got used to in Qatamon. As it was a wholly Arab area, there was no sound of gunfire and, though it was full of crowds of people crying and saying goodbye, it felt safe and familiar.
Fatima stood by the car which would take us away. For all her efforts at self-control, tears were coursing down her cheeks. She embraced and kissed the three of us in turn. My father said, “Mind you look after the house until I come back,” and she nodded wordlessly. I clung desperately to the material of her caftan but she gently disengaged my fingers. As we got into the taxi and the doors were shut, she drew up close and pressed her sad face against the window. We drove off, leaving her and Muhammad looking after us until they were no more than specks on the horizon, indistinguishable from the other village men and women who were there that day.
No doubt my parents thought they were sparing us pain by keeping our departure secret from us until the very last moment. They also believed we would be away for a short while only and so making a fuss of leaving Jerusalem was unnecessary.
But in the event, they turned out to be woefully wrong. We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned, without coffin or ceremony, our hasty, untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
I did not know until much later that, although my parents had accepted for some time that we would have to leave Jerusalem, if only for a while, there were two major events which had finally persuaded them to go. The first was the death of Abdul-Qadir al-Husseini and the second, close on its heels, was the massacre at Deir Yassin. In the first week of April, the battle to control the road to Jerusalem had raged between Jewish and Arab forces. Fighting was particularly fierce at the strategically important village of al-Qastal, ten kilometres to the west of Jerusalem. This was built on top of a hill and derived its name (castle) from an ancient fortress whose remains still stood there. It was there, as the Arab side was winning the battle (in which Husseini was joined by our Qatamon commander Abu Dayyeh and his unit), that he was killed by a Jewish soldier from the Palmach. This was a special unit of the Haganah whose men were highly trained for difficult or dangerous assignments.
While Abdul-Qadir’s death meant little to the Jews it had a profound impact on the Arab side. Even my father, who was sceptical about the Arab forces’ chances of success, shared in the general hope embodied in Abdul-Qadir’s courage and commitment. His death was therefore seen as an omen of impending disaster. In the wake of his killing, it was said that the Arab fighters were so overwhelmed with grief that most of them escorted his body back to Jerusalem. This emotional send-off left al-Qastal unguarded and enabled the Jewish forces to regain it later that day. They were exultant and claimed that the Arab fighters were deserting in droves and returning to their villages. Traces of that triumphalism are still evident today. When I saw al-Qastal on a sad, windswept day in 1998, Israeli flags were fluttering from its old castle walls and placards declaring it to be the site of a major Israeli victory.
So great was people’s shock and grief that Abdul-Qadir’s funeral at the Dome of the Rock in the Old City on April 7 drew a crowd of 30,000 mourners. Two days later, on April 9, Irgun and Stern Gang gunmen perpetrated a massacre at Deir Yassin, a small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. This was the unmentionable thing which Ziyad and I were not allowed to know. The people of Deir Yassin were mainly engaged in stone quarrying and had been peaceable throughout the troubles besetting other parts of Palestine. They had even concluded a non-aggression pact with the nearby Jewish settlement of Givat Sha‘ul, approved by the Haganah, at the beginning of April 1948.
The accounts of what the Jewish attackers had done to the villagers were truly shocking. The survivors who fled came with stories of mutilation, the rape of young girls and the murder of pregnant women and their babies. Some 250 people were massacred in cold blood (though recent estimates have put the number at between 100 and 200). Twenty of the men were driven in a lorry by the Irgun fighters and paraded in triumph around the streets of the Jewish areas of Jerusalem. They were then brought back and shot directly over the quarries in which they had been working and into which their bodies were thrown. The surviving villagers fled in terror, and the empty village was then occupied by Jewish forces. The worst of it was that the gangs who had carried out the killings boasted about what they had done and threatened publicly to do so again. They said it had been a major success in clearing the Arabs out of their towns and villages.
In this they were right, for news of the atrocity, disseminated by both the Jewish and the Arab media in Palestine and the surrounding Arab states, spread terror throughout the country. But because of Deir Yassin’s proximity to Jerusalem, the news reached us first and led to an accelerated exodus from our city. The rest of the country was powerfully affected too. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, said with satisfaction that the massacre had helped in the conquest of places as far away as Tiberias and Haifa. He said it was worth half a dozen army battalions in the war against the Palestinian Arabs.
On April 30, the Palmach unit of the Haganah launched a huge attack on the St Simon monastery. They overcame the contingent of Arab fighters inside and within twenty-four hours had taken control of the monastery. Fierce fighting ensued between them and the Arab battalions defending Qatamon for a full two days before it was brought to an end by the British army. Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh fought and was wounded in this final battle. A twenty-four-hour truce was agreed between the two sides, but before it ended the Jews had occupied the whole of Qatamon up to the boundary of the British zone. The Sakakini family had been the last to stay on, but on April 30 they too left their home.
Throughout April, the Arab League was deliberating over plans of invasion to defend Palestine. These involved various combinations of Arab forces which would cross into Palestine from the neighbouring states and rescue the Palestinians. But none of them came to anything, while the Jews continued to consolidate their hold on the parts of the country they had conquered. In Jerusalem, they had control of most of the new city, which included our neighbourhood, while the Arabs retained the Old City.
We heard that Fatima kept going back to check on our house for as long as she could brave the journey. But in the end, it was too dangerous and she could go no longer. Her own village, al-Maliha, was conquered by the Jews (Israelis by then) in August 1948 and its people were made refugees. She escaped to the village of al-Bireh, east of Jerusalem and still in Arab hands, where we presume she stayed. After that news of her died out. In the chaos that attended the fall of Palestine and the mass exodus of its people, lives were wrenched apart, families brutally sundered, life-long friendships abruptly severed. No organisation existed to help people trace those they had lost. And so it was that we too lost Fatima, not knowing how to pluck her from the human whirlpool that had swallowed her after our departure.
As for Rex, whom we last saw that April morning in 1948, no news of him reached us ever again.
Five
My father escorted us as far as Damascus, a journey of which I have no memory. Siham says that when we reached Amman, we went to the house of my mother’s old friend Um Samir who had left Jerusalem long before we did. She tried to give us lunch but no one had any appetite and my father was in a hurry to reach Damascus. So we got back into the car and drove on into Syria crossing the border at Der‘a. And as we drove towards Damascus, Siham marvelled at the sight of people here looking normal, strolling about, sitting in the sun, even picnicking on the banks of the river. “Why don’t they look sad?” she asked. “Don’t they know what’s happened to us?” We looked with wonderment at the signposts, which were all in Arabic. We were used to seeing them in English and Hebrew as well in Palestine. We reached my grandparents’ house in the evening. They were warm and welcoming, my grandmother hugging and kissing us repeatedly. Ziyad, who had been excited by the journey to Damascus and agog to see new places, looked pleased with our new surroundings. Our grandparents had only known us by our photographs before and they made much fuss of meeting us in the flesh. They gave us supper, bread and a sort of hard ball-shaped cheese immersed in olive oil.
The next morning, our parents returned to Amman (our mother had decided to go as well), intending to continue at once to Jerusalem. But they were advised to go no further, for all of West Jerusalem, especially Qatamon, were virtually impassable. Taxis were unwilling even to go to the Old City. Government offices, including my father’s employer, the education department, were being closed down one by one, it was said. They stayed for four days in Amman, hoping to find a way back and unwilling to believe that they could not return. It was at that moment that my father first started to feel a sense of finality, that somehow and with what seemed like incredible speed, it was all over, not just for Jerusalem but for all of Palestine. While in Amman, they met by strange chance the Karmis, the couple who had bought the house next to ours in Qatamon. They had a sad story to tell. Soon after we left, the attacks on the district, especially on our road, had escalated. One night, a bomb landed just behind their house and they fled in terror, still in their night clothes. “If only we’d gone when you did,” they said, “at least we would have left with dignity.”
Our grandparents’ house was very different from the one we had left in Jerusalem. It was situated in Harat al-Akrad, an old run-down suburb of Damascus with rubbish tips and a maze of narrow, unpaved alleyways, a world away from the prosperous roads and spacious villas of our part of Jerusalem. Some alleys were so impenetrable that cars could not pass through and people were dropped off at the open space outside and had to go the rest of the way on foot. The house was old-fashioned and had a central open courtyard with rooms around three sides of it; “inverted”, Ziyad called it, because the windows looked in instead of out. To get from one room to the other, one had to cross the courtyard, which could be unpleasant if it was raining or very cold. There were flower-beds against the whole length of one wall and potted plants against the other walls.
The kitchen was built of rough stone and it was dark and gloomy. Opening directly into it was a small toilet, a common arrangement in old houses of that type. This was a traditional toilet, a pear-shaped cavity in the ground with two ridged tiles on either side to prevent slipping. One placed one’s feet over the tiles and squatted over the cavity. In the corner was a water jug and a cloth for washing and drying oneself afterwards. I dreaded using this toilet because it was so dark and the hole in the ground so black that I always imagined something unspeakable would arise from it and grab hold of me. It symbolised for me all that was hateful and different about Damascus. We had had two toilets in our house in Jerusalem, white-tiled and fresh and clean, and both had seats. We used one and Fatima used the second one, but she always squatted over the seat as if it had been a toilet in the ground to which she was more accustomed.
The only other relatives we had in Damascus were my uncle Abu Salma and his family. They had preceded us into Syria by a month or so, driven out of Palestine like us by the increasing danger. The fighting in Haifa had forced them to move at the beginning of March to nearby Acre, to take refuge with my aunt’s family. They waited to return, but things in Haifa got worse and more and more people kept flooding out of the city. Seeing how rapidly the situation was deteriorating, my uncle decided after a week to withdraw his family “temporarily” to safety in Damascus.
Soon after we arrived in Damascus, my aunt Khadija’s family joined us, having reluctantly accepted that they had to leave Jerusalem as well. Abu Isam’s business had declined to the point of extinction. In the end, they were forced to leave their house and their shop with all its furniture and fittings behind. They had four children, three boys and a girl, and from the moment they arrived they seemed to be all over the place. I hated them because they crowded us out and the youngest two cried a lot. This did not worry Ziyad who had played with Isam, the eldest boy, when we were in Jerusalem. They now resumed their friendship. But I had no special playmate and felt differently. Before we came, my grandparents slept in the room opposite the entrance lobby and my uncle slept in one of the two rooms at the back of the courtyard. The other back room was used as a sitting room in winter when people could not sit outside. The house was not large, but adequate for the three of them. And at the time when we came my uncle Taleb was away in Belgium, training as a telephone engineer, and my grandparents had the whole house to themselves.
