The Haj - Leon Uris [52]
The new husband, who had held nothing more delicate than a shovel or plough handle, could be rough and often leave infection. Or the daya, with her sharp, dirty fingernail, sometimes cut into the vaginal wall and caused hemorrhaging.
But this was not the fortune of Haj Ibrahim. In the morning he presented the bloody sheet to Sheik Walid Azziz, who held it up on the tip of his sword and galloped around their tents, waving it to the cheers of his people.
Haj Ibrahim accompanied Sheik Azziz and his bodyguards and slaves as they rode out ahead of the caravan as it left Tabah. The entourage stopped at a half day’s travel mark and waited for the main body to catch up. The two men found shade on the fringes of the Negev Desert, one of those incomprehensibly cruel parches of earth where only a handful of people of a distinctive breed could endure. The belt of Islam held some of the planet’s worst land, which ran from North Africa into the dismal places of the Pacific Ocean. It was that crushing part of the world where men could not beat the earth. Numbly they embraced Islam and its fatalistic outlook. Islam gave them something to grasp hold of in order to continue the struggle through life. This land bullied everyone who attempted to exist on it. So harsh, so brutalizing were the forces of nature that those people imprisoned upon it were convoluted into forming a society where cruelty was commonplace.
Brown spots and rising veins declared the age of Walid Azziz, an old desert chieftain whose hand had twisted more daggers into more bellies of enemies than the biblical Joab. Ibrahim and Azziz were men who had declared themselves leaders and proceeded to carve out mini-kingdoms. The tribe and its strongmen had always been the bulwark of Arab political structure.
Ibrahim needed information, perhaps guidance, but men even so close by blood relationship and position seldom spoke straight with one another.
‘It seems the war will soon be over,’ Ibrahim said.
Walid Azziz, who had seen it all come and go for almost ninety years, merely shrugged. They all came, they all went. Only the Bedouin was eternal.
‘Perhaps I am relieved. I’m not certain,’ Ibrahim continued. ‘I never did trust the Germans.’
Walid Azziz said nothing. Early in the war the Germans had slipped one of their agents into the Wahhabi tribe and made the Bedouin all kinds of promises if they would stage a rebellion to coordinate with the Afrika Korps when it advanced on the Canal. Walid Azziz made vague and noncommittal promises, just as he had made vague and noncommittal promises to the Turks and the Egyptians and the British, all of whom had claimed sovereignty over the brooding spaces roamed by the Bedouin.
‘I have been approached to help form a new All Palestinian Party,’ Ibrahim said, ‘and I have been asked if the Wahhabis will come in.’
‘You live like the center of a target. Villages are no good. I go to the desert. It makes no difference to me who tries to rule Palestine.’
‘But, Uncle, when the big war stops, a new one will begin here. The British will leave sooner or later. They have failed and they are very weary. We must be prepared to move in and take over Palestine.’
For a long time Walid Azziz was desert silent. ‘Donkey piss,’ he finally said. ‘You rule your village. I rule the Wahhabis. The rest is donkey piss. No two Arabs can agree on the distance from here to that tree over there. We have been on this land since the sun has been in the sky and no Arabs have ever ruled Palestine. Be careful about political alliances now.’
‘When the British leave, surely the Jews will not be able to take on the entire Arab world.’
‘Perhaps not. Of all the infidels who have come here, none is more loathsome to us than the Jew. This mission against the Jew is like the milk of life for us. And now, for the first time in hundreds of years, there may at last be someone we can beat in a war. But what then? Will the Arab nations hand over Palestine to your wonderful new political organization? Or will Syria grab the Galilee and Egypt the Negev? Will the Arab