The Dream. Mohammad Malas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the sounds of kerosene stoves and the murmurs that could be heard coming from low windows along the Burj’s alleys. We were walking around. There was a group of men sitting at a corner right behind the alley discussing something with a woman who seemed to have been walking and then stopped. She was carrying things on her head—maybe she had stopped to take part in their conversation. We noticed them as we passed by and stepped back to listen. When we stopped they quit talking, and the woman looked at us then walked away. The men resumed talking—I don’t think they returned to their previous conversation, but they pretended to do so. Now they were discussing Islam, which we’d noticed was a common activity in the camp. One of the men was saying that we have deviated from the path and the law that the Prophet Muhammad provided for us and this was the cause of all that had happened; this is what had brought us rulers such as these: “Is there anything more humiliating than this? And we still don’t know what happened to us.”

      Two of the men were sitting on the same box, an empty wooden tea crate. One was tilted forward a bit, leaning on his knees. He held prayer beads in his hand while the other man leaned on the alley wall. Each was speaking without facing the other. A woman on the other side of the alley had come out of her store to find out why we’d stopped. She was looking toward us anxiously; perhaps one of the seated men was her husband. We squatted and started listening without interrupting the conversation. Then an older man addressed a younger one sitting among them, “I want to ask you something. Nowadays, do you still lay a meter of tile as scrupulously as you used to?” The young man swore he did, but the old man didn’t believe him and swore to the contrary. Then the old man turned to everyone and said, “There are no principles any more.”

      The camp is overflowing with life. The proximity of the houses and the way they embrace each other creates the impression that each ends and begins with the other. How can I reflect this feeling in the film? When we passed the bakery, a young girl was rolling out rounds of bread dough. The fire’s red glow flickered across the dough and her face, radiating warmth to each passerby.

      When we passed in front of an open door, a girl had just finished washing the small courtyard inside. She stood in front of a mirror with the bottoms of her jeans rolled up and began combing her hair. The radio played Umm Kulthum’s song, “I Swear to You.” We sat on the roof of one of the Resistance centers waiting, but it was unclear for what. Maybe to rest a while and drink tea. I think these visits are important. Although the Resistance itself is not part of the survey, the visits help create familiarity and put them at ease with us. I wonder, though, if our work can be limited only to store owners. Most of the people we’ve seen so far are store owners. During the day, the young men leave the camp, and going to people’s houses when no men are home is not easy. That is why we must regroup and change the times of our visits. A beautiful young woman went into a room and then left. She was on the lower level. I looked into the room and discovered that it was once a bathroom or kitchen that had become this woman’s house. Her small children were fidgeting, following her, going in and out, lifting the curtain that separates the room from the rest of the house. Whenever the woman went out to do something, she got into a fight with one of the neighbors. Fighting, shouting, screaming, cursing, spilt water, conversations behind the walls. The fighting ended just as we finished drinking our tea, then started up again. When we visited her, we found her narrow vault clean and tidied with extraordinary care. The air was fresh. Her three small children were lined up perfectly next to each other. Her beautiful young face exuded innocence and tranquility.

      Umm Hatem

      “I have a lot of dreams. Sometimes I see myself playing by the fig trees, other times I see my aunt feeding me butter.

      “Once I saw her making bread by the oven. I told this dream to Fathi to get his interpretation.”

      Umm Hatem was talking to us while washing her husband’s clothes in a laundry tub. Her husband was sitting in front of us, ridiculing his wife’s story with a sly grin. A slim young man, Umm Hatem’s husband is a soldier in the Liberation Army living here for his job. His wife had come to visit him from a suburb of Damascus, and although I don’t know why, she didn’t remember anything from Palestine except the tomato seeds.

      “I stole one of the loaves my aunt was baking and dipped it in a tub of olive oil—it was amazing.” Olive oil comes up in all of the stories we hear. “Once when I was asleep I saw a plane coming. It was just like the day our house there was hit. In the dream the plane crashed into the window, hitting the wardrobe and breaking all the glass. I started screaming, ‘Auntie! Auntie! The house collapsed on us.’ She said to me, ‘What can I do about that? God will recompense.’ And that day in Damascus, I dreamed that a plane came and shelled us, and the bombing threw me from the bed. I really was thrown from the bed that day, along with the radio that was next to me. Boom! I fell off the bed, and the radio broke. The radio broke for real, not in the dream. God, I’m really afraid of planes. I always dream about them. We were attacked once, in Palestine. I was carrying a plate of food that I was about to serve.”

      She overflows with vitality, narrating without us asking questions. Fathi, however, was waiting impatiently for her to stop. “Once in a dream my mother came and brought me a handkerchief. ‘Why, mother, did you bring me a handkerchief? I haven’t seen you in twenty years.’ She said to me, ‘I don’t know. I wanted to give you this handkerchief.’ I took it from her. In the morning, I asked my aunt about it. She said, ‘You’ll have a boy because a gift from the dead is a blessing.’ Sure enough I later became pregnant with a boy, but then he died.

      “My father is kind. Sometimes I dream about him. Once, he came and said to me, ‘Go apply for a passport for me. I don’t like living with your aunt.’” He lives in Iraq. “I said to him, ‘Come live with me.’ He said, ‘I’d like to, but your siblings won’t let me.’ He is suffering with my aunt in Baghdad. I said to him, ‘Baba, I can’t apply for a passport for you. You have to do that at the embassy there and then come.’

      “Once in a dream I saw a bulldozer creeping up to me, one of the big ones, a scary thing. The street was narrow. If I tried to go here, it would crush me. If I tried to go there, it would crush me. The street was high and narrow, like the streets of Nabatiyeh and so on. I was clinging to the edge of the street, hanging there. I said to myself, ‘If my hand slips I’ll fall, and it’s a long way down. If I climb up, the bulldozer will crush me.’ I awoke from this dream, shaking for almost an hour, and I was very thirsty.”

      Umm Yousef

      “I stay home all day—cooking, washing clothes, feeding the kids.”

      She is a thin woman who seems to be all skin and bones. She was moving around animatedly while she spoke, putting out food for her young son who had just arrived. When a bell sound rang, she’d said, “Ahmad will come now. That’s the sound signaling the lunch break at SAMED.” She was breastfeeding a child in front of us and calming another against her chest. She’d say something to us, then ask if we wanted ashtrays for our cigarettes, coffee too. She said, “Have lunch with us. Please. We haven’t been hospitable enough to you,” then, “eat, please, or time will run out. Don’t be shy. There are no strangers here.

      “I’ve been here since my daughter was born. Where is Suad?” She looked around searchingly. “Suad, dear, come over here a while. God, I haven’t seen a movie in a very long time!” She broke into a smile that took her back to a hidden youth, and a strange beauty emerged from the corners of her eyes. “But I saw Palestine. Praise be to God! I saw it twice. How beautiful it is—like a dream, a movie! I went first to the West Bank, then to the lands seized in 1948. I went to Nahariya, Tiberias, Ramla, Acre, and Haifa.¹⁰ But the Jews, those bastards, didn’t allow me to enjoy myself. Some people spoilt it. They sent for me and started interrogating me about my husband. He’s not involved in anything. He works at the syndicate.”¹¹ I don’t know why she told us this about her husband; it was as if she were talking to an interrogator. Something СКАЧАТЬ