Bye-Bye, Palestine

I grew up in an old stone house on Al-Salt Street in the steep, narrow maze of the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood above Haifa’s port. Not long before my birth, Haifa was a sleepy city of limestone block houses and citrus orchards squeezed between the Mediterranean and Mount Carmel, but a flood of European Jews and the strategic needs of the British during the war broke Mothra Haifa out of her chrysalis, with a steampunk head at the docks and suburban wings extending up Mount Carmel. Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger.

I can smell the cool limestone and the herbs she’s drying. I’m seven, with a mop of black hair and otherworldly blue eyes. Rossetti would have loved Mama, with her lush features and cascades of raven curls, a troubled Persephone, her dark eyes gleaming with the last light of the living world upon the Styx.

Until she was thirteen, she lived in the village of Bayt Thul, where young men assessed the strength, grace, and beauty of the unmarried girls as they balanced heavy jarras of water on their heads: from the well to the wedding, as the old village saying went. And that village might have been her whole life, but her father married outside his clan, estranging both her parents from their families, and then a border dispute brought him to blows with a neighbor, whose heart gave out. Not only was her father jailed for murder, but the man’s family sued and won all his land and possessions.

Destitute, Mama’s mother became a live-in maid for a wealthy Catholic family in Al Quds. Madam was Swedish, Sir from one of the ruling Ayan. Their son, a couple of years older than Mama, decided to play Professor Higgins and Mama emerged from this household speaking Parisian French, BBC English, and Lebanese Arabic (the family summered in the Matn mountains), though he never managed to teach Mama to read or write.

Severe dyslexia, the words on the page like locusts swarming in a field. Mama, baking all morning, looks exhausted, ever trying to find ways to alleviate our financial straits. Taking the tray of sweets, I slalom down the winding streets, avoiding donkeys and hawker’s carts, threading through Jews and Arabs in traditional or European fashions, and beet red British soldiers in khaki shorts.

Our “restaurant” is a food booth near the docks where Baba fries falafel palatable as rocks and serves ice cream that tastes of garlic and stale oil, delights that can only be sampled if a customer can find him. Today, presiding at his shigg under the shade of a carob tree a hundred yards from the booth, Baba hasn’t got around to opening. This is where Baba holds court every day, sitting with his cronies on olive oil cans topped with cushions.