Originally published in Segue, Miami University in Ohio, Issue 8, Fall 2009
Haifa, 1948
Abu
Abdullah sat on his arm chair until his family told him it was time to
leave. The chair’s wooden back bore an
engraving of an emblazoned sun, its rays stretching forth in a multitude of
slender arms, either rising or setting, the old man could never decide. The chair was important only as one star in a
constellation of other furniture in the spacious rooms of the Abdullah town
house. An end table crafted in Damascus. A rug woven in Baghdad.
A bureau hewn from a solid slab of Cedar of Lebanon. In his youth Abu Abdullah had traveled abroad
on business: Tripoli,
Beirut, Istanbul, sometimes even
Paris, and he had a certain acquisitional fondness for well-made furniture, and
continued to ship such objects home until he retired. Now at ninety, he sat completely blind, nearly
deaf, his lawyer grandson yelling in his ear that it was time to go, the war
had come to Haifa, that there was no time to pack anything but clothes, that they
would come back when the shooting stopped, when the Arabs retook the city from
the Jews. And then for the first time in
a decade, the chair was empty.
Lieutenant
Gad Shapiro considered shooting over their heads. But his Captain, a man named Kleingrosser, who
had a mop of flaming red hair perched atop his head like a brilliant flare,
told him to put his pistol down.
“You fool, Shapiro, what goes up must come
down. You’ll kill some innocent Jew.”
“But
how do we stop the looting, Captain?”
“Looting?”
Captain Kleingrosser answered, squinting into the afternoon haze. Haifa
lay before them, unguarded, like a giant who had fallen to the ground and was
being eaten alive by a colony of ants.
“Where you see looting I see expropriation.”
“But
this order…” Lieutenant Gad Shapiro held out a regimental order typed on a
piece of faded paper. Captain
Kleingrosser waved it away like a gnat.
“HQ
can’t keep up, Gad. You know what the
established custom is, which they are now accepting? If you put a bed in a flat and spend the night,
the flat is yours…”
“And
what of the flat’s possessions?”
“We
are supposed to inventory them…” the Captain explained as he waved his finger
about the street, counting, “…one table, two chairs, a chest of drawers… as you
can see, we don’t have the manpower to do this.”
So
the Captain and his Lieutenant watched as the contents of Arab Haifa’s homes
and flats were removed. Right before
them floated a rug woven in Baghdad,
a bureau hewn from a Cedar of Lebanon.
It all evaporated into the haze floating in from Haifa harbor, was loaded
onto drays and trucks, carried on shoulders and carts, and was taken to other
parts of Haifa, to Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Rishon-le-Zion, perhaps as far as
Jerusalem. Only a chair remained on the
sidewalk where the Lieutenant and the Captain stood. The heat was remarkable. A piper cub flew low overhead, taking pictures
of enemy positions to the south.
Lieutenant Gad Shapiro began to sway unsteadily in the heat.
“Sit
down before you fall down, Shapiro,” the Captain said, as he gently pushed the
chair forward. Shapiro barely had time
to look at the sun on its back, either rising or setting he could not
tell. He sat for a moment and then fell
to the ground. A leg, no doubt wobbly to
begin with, had broken. The Captain
laughed as he offered Shapiro his hand.
“Well,
at least we have discriminating looters.”
Haifa, 1949
Meyer
Hoffmann cobbled together a living any way he could. Buying here, selling there, squeezing out a
meager profit from objects moving through his bony hands. He had arrived in Palestine in 1947 from a British internment
camp in Cyprus,
as thin as a reed from dysentery, and had been immediately sent up to the army.
He
knew Hebrew from a Zionist youth group, so he worked as a quartermaster’s
assistant for a brigade in the Negev, helping
to squeeze the Egyptian army into an ever narrowing pocket, like a hoard of
jackals killing its prey by slowly taking nips at its heels.
When
he was discharged after the war he was even sicker than he had been in Cyprus. The Government Custodian of Abandoned
Property in Haifa
assigned him a small flat with a storefront facing the street, since he repaired
furniture in Prague
before the war. But men came in twos and
threes and demanded to inspect the flat and the storefront, asking brusquely to
see the lease, claiming they were Jewish Agency officials. He quickly realized that these people were
imposters trying to bully him out of his legal property.
Hoffmann
went to the police, but they were too understaffed to investigate. One night a rock was thrown through Hoffman’s
store window. The next day he took a
board and sawed it in two pieces. With
one half he covered the broken window, and with the other he wrote in careful,
large Hebrew letters: MEYER HOFFMAN FURNITURE REPAIR, and then beneath it, in
smaller letters, he wrote the same in German, in deference to the many German
Jews in the neighborhood.
That
afternoon a man came into the store and told Hoffmann that it was a disgrace to
have a sign with that language after
what that nation had down to our people. The man had no doubt that Hoffmann would
suffer grave consequences if he continued to so brazenly display that language, the tongue of murderers.
So
Meyer Hoffmann took down the sign made from the board which he had sawed in two,
and sawed off the German portion. He
took the long scrap of wood and broke it against his lean knee, then silently
propped it up against the stove in the corner for kindling.
Later
that day, his first customer entered. He
left four pieces of furniture: a small chest of drawers badly chipped on one
side and missing a board on the other, an ottoman with its upholstery ripped
and its stuffing hanging out, a desk with holes he imagined were from bullets, and
a chair standing on only three legs, with a sun, either rising or setting he
could not discern, emblazoned on its back, and the broken leg sitting on its
seat.
Hoffmann
supposed the furniture was looted from some Arab’s house. His suspicions were confirmed when he opened
a drawer of the desk and found a bundle of papers written in Arabic. A deed?
A lease? The stamp of the British
Mandate Government adorned each sheet of paper, and a page in English had been
attached to the back. Hoffman did not
know either language, so he put the papers near the German sign, thinking, now
I have paper to light my kindling when the cool breeze blows in from the harbor
at night.
The
chair was the simplest repair, so Meyer Hoffman picked it up in his thin
arms. He examined it through the veil of
cigarette smoke rising from his lips, then felt dizzy at the exertion of
holding the chair aloft, and had the terrible urge to retch. He was not a well man, but he had to make a
living.
Haifa, 1950
Ben-Eli,
Tzabar. Date of Immigration: born in
Jerusalem. Country of origin: Palestine. Number of Persons: Two. Squatted on 12-3-49 in Block # 140, Section # 304. Number of rooms, two. Date of recommendation: 1-25-50. Maghrebi, Yoni. Date of Immigration: 3-1-49. Country of Origin: Egypt. Numbers of persons: 8. Squatted on 23-7-49 in
Block # 162, Section #13. Numbers of
rooms: three. Date of recommendation: 2-10-50… Grunweil, Immanuel…
Tzabar
Ben-Eli, formerly surnamed Eliovich, carried everything he could to the flat,
spent the night on an army cot, and then told his wife to come in a week. Later that week, men from the Jewish Agency
came and asked for a lease. Ben-Eli
would not be fooled. He told them to go
away, that any jackass could say he was with the Jewish Agency, that he was a
veteran who would not suffer fools lightly.
The men showed Ben-Eli a lease on Jewish Agency letterhead. The flat was reserved for a couple from Poland.
Ben-Eli
waved his discharge papers at the men and showed them his field medals, non-stop
talking all the while. After much
wrangling, the men agreed to lease the apartment to him retroactively. His name was added to a long list of such after-the-fact
occupancies, and the men departed.
All
the furniture Ben-Eli had brought to the flat had been damaged. When he was stationed in Haifa, he had taken them
from empty Arab flats, one of them quite grand, and hid it out out in the
countryside.
He
could not bring his new wife to this flat, with its broken furniture and nauseating
smell of disinfectant. So he spent all
his discharge money on items for the apartment and the repair of the
furniture. He took the furniture to the
Hoffmann fellow down the street who only charged a pittance for his
services. Ben-Eli almost felt sorry for
him when he handed the man his meager payment.
But Hoffmann was a greenhorn, and they all had to learn about life in Israel the hard
way. The furniture gleamed. The sick man was truly a craftsman.
Ben-Eli
placed the chair with the sun, either rising or setting, he never had time to
really ponder it, by the only window with ventilation. After his wife had their daughter, she would
nurse the child on the chair. The infant
would feverishly suck and suck until she was forced to take a few breaths, and
then do it again, until she fell into black slumber.
Nazareth, 1952
Elias
Abdullah was a lawyer of excellent repute.
In the Mandate days he had represented British, Jewish, and Arab clients
in the courts. Now, from his cramped
office within the “Green Line,” or the area set as Israel’s border at the conclusion
of the 1948 war, he filed a flood of petitions with the Israeli courts to gain
possession of his family’s properties. These
included an orchard and vineyard on the north slope of Mount Carmel, a town house in Haifa where his grandfather
had lived until the city was emptied of Arabs, and even some plots of land in
west, and hence Jewish, Jerusalem.
Elias
Abdullah believed he had an excellent case for the return of most of his lands,
even though he knew they were already in use by the Jews. He was forbidden to enter Haifa, but he was informed from some former
Jewish colleagues that his grandfather’s house in Haifa had been looted -- every pin carried
away to the four winds -- and divided into flats. The agricultural land on Mount
Carmel had been annexed by an adjacent kibbutz. The plots in Jerusalem were close to the No-Man’s-Land
between Israel
and Jordan,
and therefore garrisoned by the Israeli army.
Although nearly all of his family had fled abroad to Cairo or Beirut, he had remained. They were officially ‘absentees’ under the
new laws, so their property was considered forfeited and state- controlled. But
Elias had never left and even had Israeli citizenship, so he had hope of
getting back at least some of his family property.
At
first, his case seemed to be moving at a brisk pace and he had no doubt he
would get a favorable conclusion by late 1952 or perhaps early 1953. Then he began to encounter roadblocks. His friends in various government agencies
began to loosen their associations with him in a direct proportion to how hard
he pushed to get the family land back.
Then some were juggled around in a shakeup of the various departments of
the Land and Property Bureau. His hold
on matters was slipping. Sometimes the
phone in his dingy office would ring and no one would immediately respond
despite his repeated hello, who is this,
in Arabic, English, and Hebrew.
After
three years of motions, Elias Abdullah was finally given an official
status. He was a ‘present
absentee.’ He had fled his home and
properties, even though he had remained in Israel. Despite the fact that he was an Israeli
citizen, he had no right to the family land.
He had become both ‘present’ and ‘absent’ -- a paradoxical, even
dangerous legal situation, that practically meant he could not redeem a single
olive from the family land.
All
along while struggling to get back his own land, he had taken on similar
cases. One particularly thorny issue was
the seizure of properties overseen by the Waqf, or the Muslim religious
authority which maintained religious sites, shrines and land. If Waqf lands had been abandoned during the
fighting, they became Israeli Government property. Under Islamic law, all Waqf land belongs to
God, so in open court Elias Abdullah asked “So has God now become a ‘present
absentee?’”
Tzabar
Ben-Eli was called up to active duty.
The duty officer who arrived said it would be a short assignment. He tied his boots on the chair with the
rising or setting sun, picked up his rifle where it leaned on the window sill,
and reported to the garrison. His squad
was met by an Army intelligence officer.
They woke up an Arab man in the middle of the night and allowed him to
pack a bag of clothes, but did not let him change out of his pajamas. The truck drove east until they reached a
bridge over the river. They watched the
man until he had crossed over into the Kingdom of Jordan. And in this way was Elias Abdullah deported
from the State of Israel.
Haifa, 1956
When
the period of mourning was over she removed the black cloth from the mirrors,
took a nice cold shower, packed some bags, and dressed her little girl. She would no longer live in this flat.
“But
what of the furniture? Your things?” her
mother pleaded.
“I’m
having them all sold. I don’t care. I’m sad Tzabar was killed, but you and I both
know this was not a happy marriage.”
“Shhh,”
the mother leaned forward. “The
child. Your husband’s blood is still
fresh in the sands of the Sinai, and you say such things. He is a hero of Israel.”
“He
was hit by a jeep, mother. An Israeli
jeep. Mother, you must close the
door. The agent will sell this shit.”
The
agent kept reminding the small crowd of buyers that the man who had lived in
the flat had died in the Sinai Campaign, that he was a hero, and that the widow
was so desperate she was selling her prized possessions to keep clothes on her
little girl and buy bread for her empty tummy.
But this did not help at all. The
agent walked away from the auction with money much below his expectations. The commission had hardly been worth his
time.
Ramallah,
1967
“Goddamn
it! Shit! Amit, get the hell in here!” The police chief howled, and a young man
poked his head in the door. His blue
police shirt was stained purple from sweat at the armpits.
“Yes,
chief?”
“This
is it, huh? The new chair?”
“Yes
sir,” Amit replied. “Better than the old
one, no?”
“Absolutely
not. What the fuck. A sitting room chair? I feel like I’m in an iron maiden -- or on a
bed of nails. And it stinks. The top smells like borsht and the bottom
like onions. Where did you get it?”
“It
was shipped from Haifa,
I think, along with some desks and tables,” Amit replied.
“I
want it out of here by days end. I want
an office chair. A proper office chair
that swivels, with wheels, so I don’t feel like a mummy in a tomb. Got it?”
“Yes,
sir.” Amit answered as the chief began
to squirm.
“Actually,
get this piece of shit out of here now.
I mean right now.”
“But
we don’t have any more chairs…”
“Amit,
you are a real basket case, you know that?
Do you understand Hebrew? We are an occupying force. This is the West Bank. Go to the mayor’s office and requisition one.”
“Just
like that? OK, boss. It’s not my city, not my people…”
“Damn
it, man,” the chief got up and roughly dragged the chair across the floor. The legs screeched against the pine boards of
the Quonset hut. He cursed a myriad of
curses and hauled the chair, puffing and sweating, out to the road which led to
Nablus. He threw the chair, and somehow it landed on
its legs. In the bright sunshine, the
chief noticed a crack in one of the legs: an old repair which was beginning to
fall apart. He lit a cigarette and
picked the chair up. His father had been
a carpenter in Fez,
and the chief had spent much of his youth surrounded by wood, covered in
sawdust. Now that he did not have to sit
on the blasted thing he noticed that the workmanship was fine. Under the patina of age and misuse, the bones
were strong. Even the repair was old but
sound. All that was required were five
minutes with the correct tools and glue.
The
chief placed the chair carefully on the ground.
He wouldn’t sit on it in the office.
Sending the thing here was an affront.
Police work required proper equipment, including chairs. He pushed the chair out at arms length,
careful not to put pressure on the cracked leg, and squinted at the carved sun
through a veil of cigarette smoke. Amit
walked by, limping slightly, as if he had a pebble in his boot.
“Amit,
get the hell over here,” the chief called without looking at the boy. “What do you think, is that a rising or a
setting sun?”
On
hearing this, the boy grew nervous, fearing that in the flip of the coin that
was his answer, he would call the wrong side and bring down the chief’s wrath.
“Setting?”
“Jackass! It is rising!” the chief spat. “You are a ‘half-empty glass’ man, Amit, and
you’d better cut that shit out now. If
you have a glass that is only half-filled with lemonade, you still get to enjoy
it, even on a foul, hot day, in a place like this, the armpit of hell. So it is half-full, you dimwit. You don’t even drink the empty part, it
doesn’t exist. Therefore if you have a
chair like this, a fine piece of craftsmanship, and this beautiful carving of a
sun upon it, which must have taken someone weeks of patient labor with a
skilled hand, why would it be setting? A
sun as beautiful as this has just risen, and it has a full day of beauty before
it…”
“So
you want to keep the chair, chief?”
“Damn
your bones, Amit! No! Stop dawdling and get me another chair.”
As
Amit limped away, the chief sat heavily on the chair. In front of him the road was clogged with
civilian traffic, in cars, trucks, drays, on foot, streaming back to Nablus after the
fighting. The hot sun broiled the
chief’s bald head, so he returned to his office. He worked for five minutes standing up,
shifting from foot to foot, until he bellowed for Amit.
“Did
you stow that chair away, under lock and key?” the chief asked.
“What
chair, chief?” the boy asked.
“BY
THE ROAD. Damn you!”
Amit
stiffly stood aside while the chief stepped around him and outside. The chair was gone. The chain of Arabs continued to spool up the
road to Nablus,
with no end or beginning in sight.
“Amit,
you imbecile. I told you. If you don’t nail it down, these Arabs will
steal it. Even if you nail it down they
will try to steal it. I lived with them
in Fez for most
of my life, so I know. Even if it’s
nailed down, they’ll try to pry it off.
A beautiful piece of work, and some peasant will use it to roost his
chickens. A pitiful waste. Now get me another chair!” and the chief
pushed Amit toward a row of parked jeeps.
The
chief worked standing up for ten minutes until his legs cramped. Then threw down his pen and marched away. Standing there wasn’t worth the effort at all.
Notes that followed the story in the original publication:
“Not My City, Not
My People” began as a problem: how can the complex political and religious dimensions
of the Arab-Israeli dispute be represented in a work of very short fiction?
My solution was to make the main character an
inanimate object: a chair. By discarding
a person as the main character I gave myself a certain freedom to focus on the
chair as a small, mobile current that could witness many sides of the
Arab-Israeli dispute. The chair would
act as the hinge around which the action develops, and would be placed in areas
where ethnic conflict plays out. The
chair, as a prized antique, exists well before the story begins, and continues
to exist long after the story ends. So
the story was able to develop as a series snapshots of a dispute which is
ongoing, not solved, open-ended, and uncertain in its outcome. I shaped the chair as the repository of all
of this, and used it as an accessible and conventional device that gives access
to an unconventional time, place, and series of events.
After I decided on
the chair as the main character, the rest of the elements more or less fell into
place. All that was left was to bring the nuts and bolts of fiction writing
into practice. For me, fiction has a simple
mandate: the writer takes the reader on a journey. If the journey is good, the reader continues
along, word by word, from the beginning to the end. The job of the fiction writer is to keep
things moving forward to get to the finish.
But along the way, the writer must suggest other directions, detours,
and passages to the reader. Even in a
very short story like this one, the intimation of more routes than the one
presented is crucial to the success of a story.
There must be the sense that more is happening than we can ever know,
and that the world is bigger than us or our fiction.
All these elements
came together in the writing of Not My
City, Not My People. A profound
human problem was distilled into a specific instance, the formal elements were
created to put this problem into a place, and hints were here and there
suggested that there is more in this story than explicitly stated. If any of these elements were missing or
undeveloped the story would have failed.
