Yasmine Read Online Free PDF

Sawt al-Arab radio from Cairo. I turned it on in the middle of a live interview with Ahmad Shukeiry, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
    “Isra’il,” he mocked, “your head is made of wax, so why are you walking in the sun?”
    “Throw them in the sea! Throw the Jews into the sea!” screamed the interviewer, Ahmad Said, Nasser’s loyal spokesman. But why is Egypt behaving like this? There’s a whole desert between us. “Go on, Jews, pack your belongings and leave!” Said commanded in a different tone, a thick, warm and actually quite pleasant voice. I didn’t know which was scarier, his screams or the quiet injunction.
    I turned off the radio and on my way back a nagging thought occurred to me, again: why weren’t we destined to live somewhere else, a safe, quiet place, far from this turbulent, crazy country? What did we need all this for?
    Once, when I was a child, I heard an old man talking about reincarnation. He said that when the soul leaves the dead person’s body it circulates around the family until it settles in a new baby. I was named after my uncle, my mother’s brother, Nuri Elias Nasekh, who died before he was thirty. Perhaps my time has come, and the soul that I inherited from him will soonleave me too. I’m not far from thirty. I said this to Trabulsi, only half in jest. He sensed the fear behind it and took me straight to
    Slutzky, our amateur palm reader, to read my fortune. Slutzky rattled on at length about my character, my career, the women in my life, a great love that will appear and end with heartbreak, but said nothing about death. When I steeled myself to ask about it, he pointed to my life-line – long and clearly delineated. Then Trabulsi and Aflalo asked about their life-lines, and he told them they had nice firm ones too. Time would show that he was both right and wrong, but I mustn’t anticipate.
     
    A bad headache drove me to look for a quiet corner and try to calm down, so I slipped away from the racket in the tent area and sat in the shade of an old eucalyptus tree beyond the rows of tanks. I listened to the wind riffling through the leaves as if they were pages in a book of poetry, now stopping for a quiet read, now skimming fast, glancing and flitting on. The breeze made me feel better, though the headache persisted. Apparently, I was smoking too much.
    I pulled off some leaves, crushed them in my hand and breathed their sharp, penetrating odour, the way Father used to. How was he feeling in the face of this imminent war, this innocent scholarly man who thought of Israel as a fragrant holy land, an earthly paradise? I remembered him sitting beside the radio, chain-smoking, listening to the BBC, to Israel Radio in Arabic and in Hebrew, to Sawt al-Arab radio stations from Baghdad, Damascus, Amman, Riyadh, reading all the newspapers and driving Mother crazy. “Why did we come here?” she would protest. “For war?”
    My parents argued – about justice and about the Muslims’Allah and the God of the Jews, about us and them and the lousy character of the Muslims, who don’t know how to compromise and always leave something unresolved, and Mother repeated for the thousandth time the story about that folklore character Juha who sold his mansion but asked to keep just one nail on the wall in his possession. The buyer agreed and thereafter Juha made his life miserable by coming to inspect his nail before dawn and in the middle of the night, on holidays and festivals, on Fridays and workdays, and the buyer never knew when Juha would show up and disrupt his life, until in the end he quit the mansion just to get some peace…“That’s the Arabs for you,” Mother would conclude. “They always leave a nail in the wall and get worked up and fight. There’s no ending with them!”
    Because of the emergency call-up I hadn’t gone to say goodbye to them and though I kept writing and sending postcards, I still had had no reply. Telephone? They’d been waiting