The Heat of Ramadan, page 31
He lifted the long cloth package from the dank hole, and he jumped back as a huge spider ran between his legs. The package fell, clanging dully on the stone floor.
He lifted it again, unwrapping the dusty cloth.
Inside was a short, wide iron tube. One end was splayed, like the bell of his beloved oboe. The middle was encircled with polished wood, also like some alien musical instrument. However, the other end was threaded, two short turns, unlike any woodwind he had ever seen. He did not know what it was, and he did not care.
He replaced the stone and the closet, and he brushed up the chips and the dust. Then, from inside the French doors he removed his precious oboe case and laid it on the bed.
There were many times when he had wanted a new case, for his instrument lay too loosely inside the purple velvet trenches. But the case had been a gift, delivered anonymously long ago, with a note that said he should not divest himself of it. Now, as he extracted the bottom half of his oboe and replaced it with the strange tube, he knew why. The ugly iron pipe lay there as if returning to its womb.
He closed the case and locked it with a small key. Then he laid the homeless bottom half of his instrument on his pillow and draped it with his frayed coverlet.
He left the house quickly, hurrying to catch the bus to Bethlehem. He felt like he was carrying a cobra, and he wanted to be rid of it before it bit him.
* * *
Unlike Yussuf Hassan, Tawfik el-Aziz was not a stranger to iron hardware.
His tiny workshop on Wadi el Jadid Street in Hebron looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a toilet factory. Everywhere you looked there were piles of jagged copper tubing, ceramic sink parts, steel faucet handles, and broken bath tiles. The smoke-blackened stone walls were punctured by rows of square-sided cement nails, upon which hung scores of elastic pipe-joint tape, rubber drain stoppers, and greasy plastic washers from wedding-ring to horse-collar sizes.
The workshop had no real windows—just a trio of vent holes made high on the walls with a pickax. Above the steel workbench in the center of the single room, a pair of bare electric bulbs hung under aluminum reflectors, providing harsh yellow projections like the generator lights of a combat field surgery. The air stank of burned acetylene.
When you were inside Tawfik’s shop, you could hardly tell day from night, and that was just as well for Tawfik. Being a highly demanded plumber, he was always in his shop by 5:00 A.M., and after his daily house calls, he returned to prepare the next day’s replacement parts, often working until midnight. He did not keep a clock in the shop—he needed no reminder that he spent three-quarters of his life soldering, bending and shaping the venues that would carry someone else’s shit into the gutters of Hebron. His wife made certain to repeatedly apprise him of his absences. However, she never complained when he handed over his weekly pay.
Tawfik was a bear of a man, his gleaming muscles evidence of years of hammering and hauling. To his friends and neighbors, he could hardly have been regarded as a political animal. He wore heavy boots, work pants and flannel shirts, not even bothering to sport the checkered kaffiehs that were the minimal costume of Arab nationalists. In public, he never expressed his militant, anti-Zionist viewpoint. However, at home he made sure that his four young sons knew precisely where he stood as far as the Jews were concerned. The effort paid off, and he was supremely proud when they would come home battered and bruised from rioting against the occupation troops.
Tawfik el-Aziz was his own man, an independent owner of a thriving business, answering to no employer and bound by no schedule. The only constraint in his life, the single undefiable rule, was that he had to be in his shop, every morning, from 7:00 A.M. until 8:15. During that time he could listen to any radio program that pleased him. However, he had to keep the telephone line clear.
He happened to be standing next to it when it rang. Otherwise, he would have had to charge through a thicket of PVC pipes and plastic toilet seats to get to it. He expected the voice of Nabila Um-Khalef, for the old lady kept complaining about a drain that was perfectly functional, if she would just stop mixing mooz cakes in the sink.
Unlike Yussuf Hassan—whose name he did not know and whose voice was not familiar—Tawfik was not alarmed by the signal which activated him. As a boy, he had been a brigade runner for the Jordanian Legion. Later, he had begun the initiation into a local cell of the PLO. Yet before he completed the rituals, a senior officer had approached him, suggesting that he could serve The Cause much better by withdrawing from the Resistance. Tawfik was a simple man, but he realized quickly that as a deep-cover “agent,” he could go about his business, bound to perform only one or two crucial, patriotic tasks.
The package had been delivered nearly ten years ago. Except for the annoying morning schedule that he was forced to maintain, he would have forgotten about it completely.
He looked at the receiver in his grease-stained hand, then he hung it back on the wall cradle. “Christmas.” The voice had said, “Christmas.” Well, that was it then. All he had to hear. He clapped his hands together. It was going to be a beautiful, exciting day.
There was a large metal bin at the back of the shop, something like a restaurant’s outdoor garbage trolley. It was full to the brim with copper and plastic tubing, which made Tawfik curse. Yet he moved quickly to his task.
It took him almost half an hour to empty the bin. Finally, he had to climb inside to get to the package. The heavy black plastic wrap was covered with drip stains and sour mold, but when he peeled it away the object inside was still sealed in a length of unscathed truck-tire tube. He pulled it off and examined the hidden treasure.
It was a length of black iron pipe, about forty millimeters at the mouth and just over half a meter long. Part of the back end was covered in polished wood. Below the tube, there were two handles, their grips of the same umber wood as the rear of the piece. One handle was smooth and without mechanical additions. The other grip was more like that of a pistol, complete with trigger, guard, and a thumb catch for cocking.
Tawfik was not afraid of the obviously lethal device. He would have been much more alarmed had he found the body of an oboe.
He rewrapped the device and climbed out of the bin, nearly falling on the precarious pile of tubing. He went over to his worktable and pulled his tool box from underneath. Then he lifted out the metal top tray, emptied the lower contents of the box into a burlap sack, and laid the tire-tube package into the bottom of the box. The tray went back in, and he locked the metal catches and left the shop.
Um-Khalef’s sink would have to wait.
He hopped into his battered blue VW van, putting the tool box on the passenger seat floor. As he began to drive north toward Bethlehem, he realized that he had forgotten to make the prescribed telephone call.
“Ya Ahabal,” he cursed himself. Well, it was all right. The number was as clear to him as his own birth date.
He began to look for a public telephone.
* * *
In Jericho, Mustaffa Zuabi lowered himself slowly to the ground. He was wearing a long, gray-and-black striped jallabieh, yet he did not lift it away from his knees, for the sharp stones of the Jordan valley had finally begun to discomfort his tired old flesh. With his sandaled feet beneath him, his aching coccyx settled over his heels, he lowered his white kaffieh-swathed head and stretched his arms out toward the east, the tip of his regal nose nearly touching the dry earth.
He was not praying. He had done that already. Mustaffa was checking the new seedlings in his watermelon patch.
He turned his face and peered along the arteries of fragile vines that wandered over the coarse earth. Water. More water. There was never enough of it.
Grunting, he placed a hand on one folded knee and levered his body upright. He turned slowly around to the west, and at last he managed a smile. On that side of his small property, the watermelons multiplied like African locusts, growing into long, fat, hard green balloons, which at this stage of his life he could barely lift.
The western grove flourished because the earth there was rich with the spillover from Wadi Kelt, a snaking ravine that cut down to Jericho from the Jerusalem hills and was always sputtering with chilled fresh water. On the other hand, the eastern grove might as well have been in Saudi Arabia. It had to be watered by hand. And it showed.
That was the difference between the Power of Allah and the pathetic tribulations of Man.
All right, so he would never be wealthy, the owner of a sprawling plantation, a muktar respected for his business acumen or ability to employ the town’s fellaheen. He was lucky to have been born in Jericho, an oasis that had flourished for eight thousand years, never subject to destructive droughts, always enviably green.
If they ever managed to be rid of the Jews, it would once again be Eden.
But that would have to be left to the younger men. Mustaffa had fought in ’48, and again in ’67, yet he was too old for the battlefield now. However, he was not embittered by defeat, for he saw the Israeli presence as temporary, a flea on the massive oxen’s rump of Levantine history. The Arab nation possessed a secret weapon unfathomed by any of the Western cultures—patience.
All right, so his battles were over. Yet the war was still on, and Mustaffa still had one act to play out. He had waited for it for nearly ten years, and if he lived, he could wait another ten.
He lifted his face and squinted up at Qarantel, the arching monastery at the top of the jagged mountain just south of his home. When the sun was high enough in the east, the stone abutments above the monastery’s windows would begin to throw shadows on the metal window bars. As with every morning, when that happened Mustaffa could begin his daily watermelon sales.
“Father!” A voice called from behind, the direction of his house. Sandaled feet padded over the furrowed earth. “Father!”
“Dir b’alak. Watch the seedlings,” said Mustaffa without turning. Then he mentally shook his weary head.
It was one of his three sons—Jamil, by the sound of the voice. When he had chosen the name for the infant, almost eighteen years ago, he could not have imagined that beautiful would become the only positive adjective of which his youngest would be worthy. Jamil was handsome all right, striking as a Hashemite king. He was also quite stupid. As a matter of fact, all three of Mustaffa’s sons were stupid, a realization which pained the old man much more than his arthritic bones or his fusing spine.
His daughters, however, all six of them, were terribly bright. They all excelled in school, and three of them were well on their way to university degrees, a pursuit which Mustaffa would certainly have forbidden had his sons not been so pathetically hopeless. The boys could barely tell a watermelon from a pomegranate.
I did not pray enough, thought Mustaffa. I must have offended Allah.
“What is it?” He spun on Jamil. The boy’s beautiful eyes glowed with excitement, his perfect eyebrows arched together like a Druse moustache.
“The telephone rang!”
Mustaffa took a step back. This was truly an event, for none of the Zuabi’s friends or relatives had a telephone, and Mustaffa only kept the instrument because he had been told to do so. Except for the occasional wrong number, it almost never quivered in its cradle. Someone else paid the meager bills.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Father.”
Due to the range of Jamil’s IQ, which was somewhat below the level of the Dead Sea, Mustaffa was afraid to ask the next question. But he pressed on.
“Did you answer it, Jamil?”
“Yes, I did, Father!” The boy was now hopping from one foot to the other.
Mustaffa reached out his hands and gripped his son’s shoulders to steady him.
“And . . .?” Mustaffa encouraged the boy, afraid that he might soon forget what had been said.
“A man spoke to me, Father. A Palestinian, this time, I think.” The last telephone event had occurred almost a month before. It had been a Jew from the phone company checking the lines.
“What did he say, Jamil?”
“He said . . .” The boy knitted his brows, enjoying the rare paternal attention. “He said, ‘Tell the man of the house that I send him good wishes for an early Christmas.’”
Mustaffa stared at his son, not quite believing him.
“Christmas, Jamil? The man said Christmas?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No, Father.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Father.”
Then Mustaffa did something he had not done since Jamil was a toddler. He reached up and kissed him on the cheek. Then he patted the soft skin.
“You are a good boy, Jamil.”
His son was shocked. Tears came to his eyes, almost as if he’d been slapped. A blinding smile overcame his lips.
“Thank you, Father!”
“Yes, Jamil. Now, run and bring me my trowel.”
“Your trowel?”
“Quickly!”
Jamil turned and ran toward the house. In a moment he returned with the short tool in one upraised hand, his brothers Abed and Fuad following close behind.
Mustaffa took the tool. He looked at his three sons. Actually, they were all handsome. The combined intelligence of a loaf of pita.
“My sons,” Mustaffa said as kindly as he could manage. “There was no telephone call. Do you understand?”
The boys looked at him blankly. They slowly shook their heads, like the fools in an Egyptian comic film.
“You must pretend that there was no telephone call. Do you understand me now?”
There was a bit more light in their eyes. They nodded.
“Now, go back in the house, and don’t come out until I call for you.”
The boys just stood there.
“Go!”
They spun around and ran.
Mustaffa turned back toward the western grove. There were only three trees on his property, gnarled ancient olives. He walked to the first, stepped past it, and then backed up until his painful spine touched the coarse bark.
The other two trees stood about fifty meters away, ten meters apart on a perpendicular line to the first. Mustaffa stretched out his left arm and splayed the fingers of his hand until the tip of his thumb met one tree, and the long nail of his little finger met the other. Then he lowered his middle finger until it pointed to one of his shiny melons. He fixed his eyes on that green orb and began to walk toward it, taking strides as long as his body would allow.
Conquerors could come and go, children were born and soldiers died, but a man’s hands and legs remained the same, Allah Issalmak.
He counted thirty paces and quickly knelt to the earth, this time ignoring his knees and feeling no pain in his spine.
He dug furiously for a long time, perhaps an hour, and when he was done the top of a long metal crate lay exposed at the bottom of a hole half a meter deep. The surface of the green strongbox had long been encrusted with mineral deposits and rust from years of exposure to the grove’s watery roots, but the integrity of the steel appeared intact.
Mustaffa did not expect to be able to lift it from the hole. Instead, he stretched himself out prone at the lip of the fresh crater and scraped with the trowel until the entire lid was unobstructed. Then he used the blade of the tool and pried it open.
There were three long packages in the box. Each one was a many-layered wrapping of the kind of thick clear plastic that the Jews used in their tomato farms. Inside each wrapping there were two olive-green tubes. Of each pair, one of the tubes was simple, like a policeman’s truncheon half an arm in length. The other tube was more meaningful, as at one end was an ugly steel head the size of a brass finjon. Each head looked like two green cones joined at the mouths, with one point melding with the tube, while the other exposed tip was covered with a flattened protective cap.
Mustaffa rose painfully from the hole. He began to tramp through his grove, selecting three of his largest melons. With his curved shabriyeh he freed them from their vines and rolled them over to the open crater.
He hauled the melons into a row, side by side. Then he sheathed the shabriyeh, reached inside his robes to the pocket of his pantaloons and came up with a Swiss army knife. He needed a scalpel now, rather than a machete.
He cut the ends off the watermelons, making careful zigzag incisions so that he could later replace the rinds. Then, like a maniacal abortionist, he sliced into the fruits, scooping out long holes with his hands until the ground was littered with pulpy red entrails and his arms were covered in wet black seeds.
A few more slices, some more scooping, some careful pushing and maneuvering, and all three plastic cocoons were hidden inside the melons. Finally, Mustaffa pushed the leftover red meats into the metal box, closed it, and refilled the hole with the fresh piles of earth. He stamped it all down and pulled on some vines until the scar was covered with leafy sinews.
He sat down. His thirst was raging, his kaffieh soaked through, and he took some time to catch his breath. At last, he managed to cry out.
“Jamil.”
The boy must have been watching from a window, for he came sprinting from the house. When he reached his father the old man looked up and whispered.
“Mayy baarida.”
Jamil sprung back to the house for a jug of cold water. When the old man had finished it, he said, “Bring your brothers.”
Jamil sprinted again, this time reappearing with Abed and Fuad.
“Help me up,” Mustaffa said to his waiting sons.
They pulled him to his feet, and like an emperor’s tailors, they brushed him off and smoothed his robes, cleaned his soiled arms, and brought him a fresh kaffieh.
“Today, we will begin to sell in Bethlehem,” Mustaffa announced as he straightened his Jallabieh and lifted his head high.
“But, Father,” said Jamil, “we always start in Beit Sachur.”
“Bethlehem,” said Mustaffa, and as he began to stride toward their Ford pickup, he turned and pointed at the trio of nestled fruits.
