Jerusalem Stands Alone Read online

  SELECT TITLES IN MIDDLE EAST LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

  All Faces but Mine: The Poetry of Samih Al-Qasim

  Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a, trans.

  Arabs and the Art of Storytelling: A Strange Familiarity

  Abdelfattah Kilito; Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, trans.

  The Candidate: A Novel

  Zareh Vorpouni; Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian, trans.

  The Elusive Fox

  Muhammad Zafzaf; Mbarek Sryfi and Roger Allen, trans.

  Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi: An Ottoman Novel

  Ahmet Midhat Efendi; Melih Levi and Monica Ringer, trans.

  Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems

  Ghareeb Iskander; John Glenday and Ghareeb Iskander, trans.

  The Perception of Meaning

  Hisham Bustani; Thoraya El-Rayyes, trans.

  32

  Sahar Mandour; Nicole Fares, trans.

  Copyright © 2018 by Nicole Fares

  Syracuse University Press

  Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition 2018

  181920212223654321

  Originally published in Arabic as Al-Quds waḥda-hâ hunâk

  (Beirut: Hachette Antoine, 2010).

  ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48—1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-1103-5 (paperback)

  978-0-8156-5446-9 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shuqayr, Maḥmūd author. | Fares, Nicole translator.

  Title: Jerusalem stands alone / Mahmoud Shukair ; translated from the Arabic by Nicole Fares.

  Other titles: Quds waḥdahā hunāk. English

  Description: First edition. | Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 2018. | Series: Middle East literature in translation

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018001310 (print) | LCCN 2018005385 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654469 (e-book) | ISBN 9780815611035 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PJ7862.H854 (ebook) | LCC PJ7862.H854 Q3713 2018 (print) | DDC 892.7/803—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001310

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  To Jerusalem, the city that taught me to love.

  FROM THE TRANSLATOR

  To my husband, William Quinto.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Jerusalem Stands Alone

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  A SPECIAL THANKS to my dear friend, Sara Ramey, whose advice and insight has been indispensable to this novel. Thank you for your time and honesty. And to my parents and brother, whose love and support sustained me throughout.

  Nicole Fares

  Jerusalem Stands Alone

  A City

  IN THE MORNING I walk to the markets surrounded by the city’s history, ghostly layers of people from past eras, men of different ages and women of different times. The living women are careful to avoid physical contact, which the overcrowding all but invites. In this city, soldiers are everywhere.

  I return from my usual walk to sit in the Damascus Gate Café on the terrace overlooking the market. The waiter is busy serving other customers. Is he the same waiter from before or someone who looks like him? (Stories of doppelgangers are spreading throughout the city.)

  I contemplate the yellowing rocks of the Walls of Jerusalem and the windows of the houses spread out before me. Some are closed, others open, and I imagine the stories and secrets hidden within. I drink tea and watch a thin blonde foreigner slowly sipping her coffee, attentively turning the pages of her book while I spread my papers out in front of me. The woman leaves. (Maybe she’s from a different time?)

  I remain at the café until evening but the windows of the houses refuse to speak.

  Another Evening

  AT THE LAST MINUTE, the city realizes it’s closing time. In his thick-doored fridge, the fishmonger stores what’s left of the fish his hands didn’t catch. (He buys fish netted in the Jaffa Sea.) He washes his tile floor with soapy water, and the runoff with its residues and odors escapes down the drain.

  The city empties. Its merchants close up their shops and rush home, eyes straight ahead, hoping not to see anything unexpected. And from the Damascus Gate to the Lions’ Gate, from Herod’s Gate to the New Gate, the city passes a sorrowful night. Through its outdoor and indoor markets, only the homeless wind and the echoes of the soldiers’ steps are heard.

  Neighbors

  HER NAME IS SUZANNE. She’s a thin blonde from Marseille who rented a room in the Old City, where she shares a bathroom with her neighbors, a bathroom she uses once in the morning and again around midnight.

  Her window overlooks a house occupied by five settlers who appear on the porch every morning. She can see the top of the pale yellow wall not far from the house. (Suzanne loved this city from the moment she arrived last year.)

  Suzanne bought a small armoire and set it against the wall that divides her room from her neighbors’. The thin wall was raised to create a surplus room and, despite the lack of space, Suzanne likes it here. She listens to the radio in the evening. (She doesn’t have a television set, doesn’t like television—she says it drains her soul.)

  She feels uncomfortable whenever the voices next door invade her room and bought the armoire, thinking it might block noise from coming through the wall, but it barely helps. Some nights, Suzanne hears her neighbor murmuring to her husband, loud one minute and faint the next. This morning, the neighbor uncharacteristically threw her teacup at the wall, unleashing a barrage of insults at her husband for not letting her travel with her neighbors to al-Aghwar and Jericho, to the Sea of Galilee and Bisan.

  The Handkerchief

  RABAB COMES OVER sometimes to spend half an hour in Suzanne’s room, explaining Arabic words Suzanne doesn’t understand, and then spend the rest of the time gossiping comfortably without a chaperone. They exchange heartfelt words—Rabab whispers with her eyes glued to the door while Suzanne, though she whispers, doesn’t think what she’s saying is secret at all.

  Rabab asks what she thinks of the city.

  “I like it,” Suzanne says. Rabab asks her about Marseille. “I like it, too, but I don’t like my mom’s boyfriend.” They laugh.

  Before Rabab returns to her room, she gives Suzanne a silk handkerchief with a map of the city embroidered in the center, which Suzanne hugs to her heart. Rabab smiles shyly as she slips out the door.

  The Girl

  ASMAHAN BECOMES FLUSTERED when she goes to the bathroom to wash up. When she takes off her dress, she sees blood on the fabric but calms down when she remembers her mother’s detailed explanation of what would happen. “You’re about to become an adult,” her mother said. This pleases Asmahan; she’s excited to experience womanhood.

  She opens the door and frantically calls her mother, who holds her daughter and kisses her tenderly, hiding her own fear of what the girl’s future might hold. That day, Asmahan becomes a woman (or so she thinks).

  Fear

  FEAR IS IN THE MARKETS AND STREETS, beneath the entryways and porches. The father fears for his house and shop, convinced of the treachery of the times. The son is scared of failing his exam and of girls rejecting him when it’s time to get married because of his slight limp from an old illness. The mother fears for her daughter, who has just developed breasts, and the daughter is scared of the nightmare
s stalking her sleep. Meanwhile, the grandmother is afraid because she doesn’t know how her granddaughter will behave now that she’s grown (the grandmother thinks) two demons on her chest.

  Doors

  I WALK HOME, passing through the Jaffa Gate. Soldiers stop me there, helmets on their heads and swords in their hands. They frisk me and ask, “Where are you going?” “Home,” I say. Their spectral commander speaks a Romance tongue, so I know they’re foreign. He tells me in broken Arabic, “Walk. Go!”

  I go, walking to the New Gate, near the park the Israelis built at the foot of the wall. One of the Israeli prostitutes grabs me. “See the green grass there? It’s better than any bed,” she says. I pull out of her grasp and keep moving toward the New Gate, where Israeli soldiers detain me. They wear bulletproof helmets and hold machine guns, and ask for my ID, reading it carefully. Their commander asks me, “Mi-eyfo ata?” (“Where are you from?”) I answer him, and he tells me in broken Arabic, “Walk!”

  At the Damascus Gate, I see on the road someone who looks like a beggar, hurrying toward West Jerusalem, occasionally glancing behind him in terror. I grow suspicious but maintain my pace. A group of knights on horseback follows him, wearing helmets from the Ayyubid period, and Yamani swords hang on their waists. They don’t stop me as I move past them.

  I walk down Nablus Road and unlock the door. Home. In the mirror, I see myself wearing a helmet. I stand there for half an hour.

  Affiliation

  WHEN I WAS BORN, the war was two years old. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been born in the time of Tankz al-Nasiri or Saladin the Victorious. I don’t recall the defeat of 1967, but I’m living it now, having been born in a neighborhood a few hundred meters away from the wall. A quiet, self-contained neighborhood, like a well-behaved child. My mother said that on my birthday tanks drove down the street and soldiers fired at houses. “All the west-facing glass shattered”—our house had arched rectangular windows—“and we took cover in a room with east-facing windows, that weren’t shot out.”

  I’ve been writing about this city for twenty years and I see its past mixing with its present. I’m forty and now, you see, the war is forty-two. The city is more ancient than either of us, too many years to count.

  Porches

  SET CLOSE TOGETHER, front porches in the old neighborhood exchange secrets. Every two or three days, the porches endure clothes hanging on the lines without complaining about the women who laugh spontaneously. They tolerate the women’s whispers, which sometimes last forever.

  Nor do the porches mind the men smoking hookah or killing time. The porches, weakened by savage riots, only fear they’ll collapse when children lean on their low walls.

  In careful silence, the porches mull over the appearance this morning of five settlers. They know that, after this, their existence will never be the same.

  Friday

  THE FISHMONGER goes to Friday prayer. He and his wife leave their house and walk, leaving behind their worldly desires. Asmahan, their thirteen-year-old daughter, stays at home with her grandmother and Rabab says she’s going to a friend’s house to study. Their eldest son left the country two years ago in pursuit of a woman he loved.

  They reach the al-Aqsa Mosque Square, remembering their other son, who was arrested here for throwing rocks at soldiers. They haven’t been allowed to visit him for two months, as he’s in solitary confinement for assaulting a guard.

  The fishmonger and his wife part ways. Khadija goes to the corner where women pray; Abd el-Razzaq to the corner where men pray.

  Rabab is on her phone all the way to her Tuesday night date with a boy from college.

  A Dress

  TUESDAY NIGHT to Friday afternoon is a long wait.

  Rabab kills the time in several ways. She reads the Shakespeare assigned to her in college, and the Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot, too. She visits Suzanne in her room to hang out with her and watches TV (reruns, romance movies, recent music videos, some news channels). She writes down her thoughts and attempts a few poems in her notebook, then helps her mother sweep and prepare dinner, and stands in front of her bedroom window for half an hour meditating, looking out at the houses. (They are unusually close together and have windows of every size.) Before she goes to bed, she models each and every dress she owns. She can’t wait to wear her new red dress out.

  She dons it Friday afternoon on a trip to a distant grove, thrilled by his endless compliments, both of the dress and the person wearing it.

  The Doppelgänger

  THE STORY of the double reaches Khadija and she repeats it over and over and over to her neighbors.

  The neighbors quake in fear (inside each burns a secret desire, curiosity shrouded in expectation). They gather in a small, secluded area of the market by a metal door and whisper, sharing intimate words. Then they laugh. An hour later, they return to their homes amazed by the things that can happen in this city, so remarkably jumbled.

  Like her neighbors, Khadija is sometimes confused by this story (and sometimes, like her neighbors, flustered).

  Mirrors

  HIS NAME IS YORAM. He’s the police captain in charge of maintaining the city’s security.

  One afternoon, on the way back to his house to retrieve something, it’s as if the captain forgets how to walk. Frozen in his steps, he glances over at a commander who looks like him. Not just like him, though: an identical image. He goes into his garden and the double goes with him while there, on neighboring porches, stand three of his female neighbors. The captain opens his front door and his double does the same. He calls out to his wife but gets no response, and then he remembers that she’s still at work. (His double also call out, and receives no response.) The commander thinks he’s looking at himself in mirrors set up everywhere. There are no mirrors, though, and his shock pierces to the bone.

  When he goes into the living room, he finds no one else standing within the cluster of couches.

  A Promenade

  SHE OPENS HER CLOSET and sees her jilbāb but doesn’t think of wearing it. Instead, she wears her new burgundy dress out, down the wet alley toward the main street, to find him waiting for her in the car his father (a building contractor) bought him. She sits in the passenger seat and looks around to make sure no one saw her. Another couple sits in the backseat. The girl wears a loose dress and crosses her legs. It’s the seventh time these four have driven out to the distant grove to take a walk and have a good time. The boy admires her as a breeze flows through her hair. The car the boy’s father bought him accelerates without a care.

  Five minutes later, Rabab relaxes and starts to talk, and she hasn’t stopped talking since.

  Long Beards

  THEY APPEAR ON THE PORCH each morning: five of them with long beards. Sometimes, other men and women are with them. They stare ominously at the neighboring houses. When night comes, they get angrier and angrier and finally start firing off their guns at the sky. Around the house, they put up a metal fence and bright lights. The gunfire and noise and excitement that follows them frightens Suzanne. Khadija sticks her head out her bedroom window and yells at them, while her husband begs her to lower her voice. “Don’t embarrass us. Be a good girl, now. You know you weren’t brought up like that!”

  After midnight, the neighborhood grows quiet and everyone falls asleep except for one of the long beards. He’s uncomfortable sleeping with the blanket over his beard, and he’s uncomfortable with his beard over the blanket, so he just spends all night rearranging his beard.

  The Beard

  ABD EL-RAZZAQ SAYS, “If he spent his time worrying about his beard, we wouldn’t have a problem. If this were his only problem, we would’ve offered him some solutions. If he hadn’t killed one of the young men in the neighborhood because he thought he wanted to harm him, we would’ve said that his beard is his own business and he’s free to do with it what he wants.

  “See, the question is what really brought him to this neighborhood. Wouldn’t it be better for
them and us if he takes his beard back to wherever he came from? There he could wash it, clean it, dry it, perfume it, comb it, make sure it’s free of lice and bugs. He could take it with him to the temple and on a walk on the beach. He could talk to it, listen to it, ignore it, display it for ridicule, sell it for cheap. He could do whatever he wants with it, even set fire to it.”

  Waterdrop

  THE FAMILY IS SCATTERED. One son is lost, another in prison. One daughter is on a trip with her friends (her parents think she’s studying with a friend from college) and hasn’t returned home yet.

  Khadija reads the Qur’an after Friday prayer while her husband watches the news. Her husband’s worried: he calls his wife but she doesn’t answer. Asmahan plays on the computer, and in the kitchen there’s a leaky faucet. Every minute a waterdrop, too heavy to hold on, makes a faint, monotonous sound as it falls on the metal of the sink—maybe with purpose, maybe to remind the family of something they’ve forgotten.

  Fragility

  ASMAHAN GETS READY FOR SCHOOL in the morning. Wearing a blue apron and white socks, she puts on her backpack and is off, cheeks flushed and hair braided. She walks out the door and through the metal fence the settlers erected days ago, pressing against the wall of a house so she can pass through the alley. With some difficulty, she catches up to the girls waiting for her.