The Haj - Leon Uris [227]
Hagar now took pride in being called Umm Jamil, the mother of Jamil. Strangest of all was the behavior of my father. Guilt, an emotion Ibrahim had never been burdened with, had slipped into his soul. He had beaten Jamil. He had contributed to Jamil’s murder. Now he grieved. I got an inkling that he wanted to make himself believe it was really the Jews who had killed his son.
Suddenly I was Jamil’s younger brother. My head was patted by everyone. Wasn’t I proud?
You are saying that Ishmael was cruel. Had he no compassion for his slain brother? Don’t fool yourself about me any longer. I might have been a boy in everyone’s eyes, but I was very smart and very strong and you would not want to play around with me. I had come to learn that life is not as important as martyrdom.
I had to regain my position.
If truth be known, it was Nada whom I missed and longed for the most when I was with the al Sirhan Bedouin. We are obsessed with defending the woman’s virtue. We do not do it for the woman but for the man’s pride and honor. I loved Nada differently. I loved her for herself. It was not a sexual love. It was because she was good and she always delighted me.
I loved Nada’s eyes, filled with curiosity. When we were alone together I loved to see those eyes turn to mischief. I loved to watch her wash by the springs and braid her long thick brown hair. I loved the sway of her hips when she walked. I loved her white teeth when she threw her head back and laughed.
I wanted to marry a girl like Nada someday. Until I did, the protection of her virtue was my most important mission in life. So I loved my sister and I did not grieve for my brother. At least I am not a hypocrite like my parents. Hagar I could understand. I could not understand Haj Ibrahim and prayed for his guilt to go away.
Because of my overpowering concern for Nada I was very quick to detect that something had surely been going on between her and Sabri in my absence. Usually Ibrahim would have smelled out something like this, but he had not been the same since he returned from Zurich. A fire inside him had dimmed. Something terrible must have happened to him over there. There was also this thing with Jamil that added to his misery.
Hagar, Ramiza, and Fatima possibly knew about Nada and Sabri. The women keep many secrets among themselves. In Aqbat Jabar, as in Tabah, the women of the clans fought among themselves constantly, and their mouths could be as foul as garbage. Yet there was a line that women did not cross when dealing with one another. Because their own fidelity meant their lives, they rarely gossiped to the men about women’s business.
Sabri Salama’s coming into our life had been a mixed blessing. We might well all have been dead if it hadn’t been for Sabri’s skill and ingenuity.
Father had spent all our money from the sale of the antiquities by going to Europe. True, we still had our cache of guns to fall back on, but we really depended on Sabri’s salary and his side deals for our existence. He never complained about turning everything over to Father.
At first I felt threatened. Sabri would win too much favor with Ibrahim. But that passed. Sabri had his own family in Gaza and spoke constantly of his desire to join them. Fortunately, Ibrahim’s early suspicions always kept him out of our intimate circle.
There had been this business about his sleeping with the Iraqi officer and perhaps other men. At times he had made me physically uneasy. Yet there was really nothing in his behavior that gave us cause to worry.
Nevertheless, I was concerned about him and Nada. Because Ibrahim seemed oblivious of the situation, I decided to look into matters more closely.
Sabri worked in a large garage in Jericho. The building had once been a warehouse from which West Bank crops were shipped into Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The place was abandoned during the war, then taken over as a garage for the steady stream of vehicles crossing the Allenby Bridge to and from Amman.
Wherever there