I lean in closer, listening intently, but all she says is, ‘He lived in London. He was from Ukraine.’
‘What happened?’
‘It ended abruptly …’
‘You had a long-distance relationship?’
‘Not quite. In fact, I brought him to Tel Aviv.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Well,’ she replies. ‘He was Jewish, so …’ She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. As a Jewish person, he would have the ‘right of return’, the right all Palestinian refugees have been denied since the Nakba in 1948.
I remain quiet, and she continues:
‘I was in London on my way back to Tel Aviv after visiting my grandfather in New York. I was spending the night with Sarah, a close friend of mine. She threw a party for me and invited a bunch of her friends. She introduced me to this good-looking guy, who had just got here. For the rest of the night, we never left each other’s side. We kept drinking and drinking the marvellous wine that Sarah always serves. And we kept dancing and dancing until dawn, when he and I ended up at his flat in Hammersmith.
‘I fell in love with the guy, the moment I met him. After that, we emailed each other constantly. We built a bridge of letters and notes over which we sent all the important data about our lives. A few months later, I went to London to see him. We spent a lovely ten-day holiday there. Ten long summer days together. We went to the cinema a lot. We sat on every barstool, restaurant chair and park bench we could find. We fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and the ducks in Hyde Park. We smelled every rose there was to smell, and wandered from one museum and theatre to the next. We went to see Les Mis and loved it.
‘He took me out to dinner to his favourite restaurant, a Lebanese place on Edgware Road called Al-Dar. He had a close Arab friend from his English night school, who had taken him there once. The food was unbelievably good.’
‘I know this restaurant,’ I say. ‘I like it too.’
She smiles, and continues, ‘We were walking to the restaurant and he whispered in my ear: “You Israelis are just like the Arabs. You love your hummus and falafel.” I whispered back: “I can’t wait to get you to Tel Aviv so I can stuff you with chickpeas!” Then I said, in English and then in Hebrew: “I love you. Ani aheevat.” He replied in Russian: “Ya lyublyu tebya.” I asked him to say it again, and he went on until I memorized it. “Ya lyublyu tebya.” Now we were lovers in three languages. Shortly after that, he moved to Israel.’
A citizen in a land that never belonged to him or to his ancestors, I add silently; while I, who do belong to that land, have remained a refugee for decades.
‘But I utterly I failed in my attempt to get him to stay in Israel,’ she says. ‘I could not hold onto him, even though I personally brought him over from London. I stood by his side through thick and thin, throughout his time in Israel. I helped him escape the worst mess of all, when he found himself floundering about in the face of the Intifada that had begun to explode in the territories.’
I nod, thinking of the soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and call them by their name: ‘You know, I like this guy. He reminds me of the refuseniks …’
She looks at me and stops speaking, and then becomes lost in thought for a time without replying. Then, just like that, she throws herself into the world of cinema and acting, trying to change the whole subject as if seeking refuge there. She begins with an anecdote about being at the Eilat Film Festival with ‘other Israeli celebrities’ two years earlier: ‘It was risky for me even to participate, because it opened right as the war was starting against Saddam Hussein, and Iraq was all everyone wanted to talk about. The people in Eilat were surprised that we showed up at all, and then they made fun of us, saying that the only reason we came to Eilat was to escape from Tel Aviv before Saddam’s missiles came down!’
My seatmate goes on talking as if we come from the same country. As if we share the same fears, the same constellations of film stars. As she recounts stories about the festival, my mind recalls televised scenes of the war — the live coverage of American attacks that sowed democracy across Iraq. The tonnes of ordnance that went into ploughing deep furrows across the burning old fields of despotism.
I let her talk and wander off in my mind to Asqalan, where her boyfriend plays basketball. Majdal Asqalan is where the protagonist of my novel is from. His whole family is from there. If he, Adel El-Bashity could hear what she is saying, he would shout: ‘If only our conflict took place in stadiums! If only the shots fired were at goals, not on people, we would have already founded a Democratic State of Football that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and there would be enough room for all footballers to live there in peace and harmony!’ Sometimes Adel’s optimism seems ridiculous to me, and it makes me chuckle to imagine that even football could peacefully coexist between the two sides in the foreseeable future. It would be more like El Salvador and Honduras in the 1969 World Cup qualifiers — when football led to war.
She stops talking, and I don’t want to interrupt the silence. But she turns to me though realizing only now that she has gone on too long or shared too much. Coyly, she asks, ‘I’m sorry — where did you say you were from?’
3
The question surprises me. From the moment I sat down in my seat until the moment she asks the question, it has been bothering me. At first I am nervous, too unsettled to choose an answer. I could say, for instance, that I am Greek or Cypriot or Lebanese, or anything. I could pick any other nationality — anything but Palestinian. I am afraid someone might overhear and shout out: ‘Palestinian! This man’s a Palestinian!’ What if someone got up and made a public announcement, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: please be advised that there is a Palestinian on board!’
If this had been my seatmate’s first question, I might not have answered it. But now, after getting to know each other, I am not in a position to ignore her. Whatever apprehensions I may have, they belong to the past. Still, I decide to play dumb. ‘Where am I from? You never asked.’
‘No, I’ve asked you twice now.’ And then wryly, she repeats it again.
‘I’m Palestinian. I have British citizenship, but I am Palestinian.’
‘Aha. A Palestinian, huh?’ she says. It is as if I had tried to put one over on her, or my answer is not good enough. She plays with a strand of her hair. Under the faint overhead light, it has lost most of its golden sheen.
Flatly, even coldly now, she asks, ‘Are you taking a tour of Israel?’
‘No, I’m visiting family in Gaza.’
‘Gaza?’ She actually gasps as she says it.
‘Yes. Gaza.’
She stops playing with her hair and turns toward the window to hide her reaction. She rests her chin on her hand and stares out. The window has now turned into a small black mirror that casts shadows over things we may think but cannot see. All around us the jet engines hum in a din so constant it sounds like nothing.
My seatmate turns away from her mirror and asks in a trembling voice: ‘Do you often visit Gaza?’
‘Not at all. This will be my first trip in thirty-eight years. The truth is that I haven’t seen my mother in that long.’
She bolts upright in her seat. ‘My God! Thirty-eight years! How have you managed to stay away from your mother and family all these years? You’re not a negligent son, are you? You don’t look cruel, but … I’m sorry for your mother.’