floor to her neighbors’, where everyone was gathered around the radio. They hushed her, but she was agitated, fuming: about the Turks, about the distance between Elias and her, about the tension and the suspense.
“Don’t take it so much to heart,” her neighbor Albert said as he waved the slip of paper with the results, 33 to 13. “Who cares who voted what?”
Albert’s wife served tea and cookies, which no one sampled. Even the glasses of tea remained full and were taken that way, now cool, to the sink. Lila sat wondering with whom he was sitting at that moment, with whom he was sharing his anger. What would this decision mean for people like them, those hiding behind such uncertainty?
And what, she thought, would I say to him on a night like this, when my people’s joy is his people’s disaster, our victory their downfall? Jerusalem had been declared international territory, and to everyone it was clear there was no force in the world that would stop a war. She had no way of knowing what was happening with him: no telephone, no telegram, no messenger, no homing pigeon. They were so united in their souls but so divided at this moment. It took mere minutes to travel between them, but this evening the distance felt like that between two riverbanks that had been severed one from the other, the bridge between them having collapsed.
The people in the Rianis’ living room sat stupefied under a cloud of smoke from George’s pipe. “The cemetery is a happier place than this house,” Elias’s mother complained as she set down a tray with date cake she had baked. No one paid the slightest attention to the cake, and Nadira did not bother with slicing and serving it. She, too, fell into stunned silence along with the rest of them.
George looked at his watch and said, “It’s a matter of hours before the shooting starts.”
Nadira searched for something positive to hang on to; at least her daughters, Elias’s older sisters, were married and safe in their comfortable homes in faraway Riyadh. The war they were talking about would not catch them there. The heating stove was dying out, but no one rose to revive it.
Munir, normally incessantly busy and never one to let the flame extinguish, sat staring numbly into space, plucking wisps of wool from his vest.
Elias paced the room, his slippers clacking on the floor, his gaze on the darkness outside. His heart wandered to Lila, to the dim lights shining in the western part of the city. His longing turned painful, and he felt utterly helpless. He did not care who would do the shooting and who would be found shot, who would be first to fire and who would lock his weapon, so long as the bullets passed over her head. He wondered if she was alone, if she was as elated as he imagined; she surely had the need to share with others this world drama delivered over the radio. And what would it mean to them, that their country was changing?
He was not thinking about the business of tea or about the dastardly effect these events would have on finance and commerce, but about her, about them. Things would not be getting better, so it was necessary to prepare for worse.
In the time that passed after their return from Turkey, they had managed to meet quite often. It was a crazy, burning autumn that no power could cool, not the bomb that exploded on Jaffa Street a few minutes’ walk from her home, not the daily incidents, the dangers. Sometimes they would steal a morning together: he would arrive at six with fresh bread and cheese and butter and a bottle of milk and would prepare breakfast for her before climbing under the sheets with her for an hour of joy. Then they would go their separate ways for the long day ahead, he in his office across from the Damascus Gate, she at Salon Hubert.
Mornings like these, he told her, strengthened them against the trials of the day, sent them out in protective gear that warded off disaster. “I see the world through our eyes,” he said.
“Don’t take it so much to heart,” her neighbor Albert said as he waved the slip of paper with the results, 33 to 13. “Who cares who voted what?”
Albert’s wife served tea and cookies, which no one sampled. Even the glasses of tea remained full and were taken that way, now cool, to the sink. Lila sat wondering with whom he was sitting at that moment, with whom he was sharing his anger. What would this decision mean for people like them, those hiding behind such uncertainty?
And what, she thought, would I say to him on a night like this, when my people’s joy is his people’s disaster, our victory their downfall? Jerusalem had been declared international territory, and to everyone it was clear there was no force in the world that would stop a war. She had no way of knowing what was happening with him: no telephone, no telegram, no messenger, no homing pigeon. They were so united in their souls but so divided at this moment. It took mere minutes to travel between them, but this evening the distance felt like that between two riverbanks that had been severed one from the other, the bridge between them having collapsed.
The people in the Rianis’ living room sat stupefied under a cloud of smoke from George’s pipe. “The cemetery is a happier place than this house,” Elias’s mother complained as she set down a tray with date cake she had baked. No one paid the slightest attention to the cake, and Nadira did not bother with slicing and serving it. She, too, fell into stunned silence along with the rest of them.
George looked at his watch and said, “It’s a matter of hours before the shooting starts.”
Nadira searched for something positive to hang on to; at least her daughters, Elias’s older sisters, were married and safe in their comfortable homes in faraway Riyadh. The war they were talking about would not catch them there. The heating stove was dying out, but no one rose to revive it.
Munir, normally incessantly busy and never one to let the flame extinguish, sat staring numbly into space, plucking wisps of wool from his vest.
Elias paced the room, his slippers clacking on the floor, his gaze on the darkness outside. His heart wandered to Lila, to the dim lights shining in the western part of the city. His longing turned painful, and he felt utterly helpless. He did not care who would do the shooting and who would be found shot, who would be first to fire and who would lock his weapon, so long as the bullets passed over her head. He wondered if she was alone, if she was as elated as he imagined; she surely had the need to share with others this world drama delivered over the radio. And what would it mean to them, that their country was changing?
He was not thinking about the business of tea or about the dastardly effect these events would have on finance and commerce, but about her, about them. Things would not be getting better, so it was necessary to prepare for worse.
In the time that passed after their return from Turkey, they had managed to meet quite often. It was a crazy, burning autumn that no power could cool, not the bomb that exploded on Jaffa Street a few minutes’ walk from her home, not the daily incidents, the dangers. Sometimes they would steal a morning together: he would arrive at six with fresh bread and cheese and butter and a bottle of milk and would prepare breakfast for her before climbing under the sheets with her for an hour of joy. Then they would go their separate ways for the long day ahead, he in his office across from the Damascus Gate, she at Salon Hubert.
Mornings like these, he told her, strengthened them against the trials of the day, sent them out in protective gear that warded off disaster. “I see the world through our eyes,” he said.
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