The Haj - Leon Uris [59]
He only stopped when Hagar ran out and threw herself over me and begged for mercy. For several days I could barely move. I crawled into the kitchen near the stove and cried all day. The sky had come down on me. My father had taken me out of school.
This went on for a fortnight. Although the color of my bruises began to fade, the pain in my heart would not. I finally heard my mother confide to one of her cousins that she would have to put a stop to it or I might starve myself to death.
For the first time since Ibrahim married Ramiza, my mother was very nice to him. She brushed against him, undulating slightly, touched his shoulder, and did the rest with her eyes. She made suggestive remarks like she used to before Ramiza came. She seduced my father with all the sensuality she could muster and he invited her to bed that night. The next morning Haj Ibrahim seemed a changed man. The anger against me was suddenly gone. My mother went to bed with him again that night. The next morning my father, with a magnanimous flick of the wrist, told me I could return to school.
Eventually I found out who had told my father about my going to Shemesh. It was my best friend, Izzat. He had always waited for me by the bus stop and became suspicious of the one day a week I told him not to come. Izzat saw me leaving the kibbutz. His family was like the village leper. No one had spoken to them for years. Izzat thought that he could win a reprieve for them and gain favor with my father.
It taught me a lesson: Never trust anyone, especially your best friend. I didn’t trust my brothers, particularly Kamal, who was my greatest rival. I didn’t even trust my mother even though I loved her very much. She was always scheming and using me against my father. I suppose I did trust Nada.
I only went back to Shemesh Kibbutz one more time ... but that is another story.
18
I DID NOT WANT TO be a goatherd, although there were some goats I liked. I was good friends with our yard goat, and when my father told me to help my brother Jamil slaughter her, I could not. Not only was being a goatherd the lowliest of all jobs, but I simply did not like to kill animals. Haj Ibrahim told me I must learn how to kill and he forced me on three occasions to slaughter goats. I did it because he was watching, but I ran off and vomited afterward and cried all night.
When I returned to school I was more determined than ever to become a great scholar. It was apparent that Mr. Salmi could not teach me much more. He was a poor man and had only a few books in his personal library. I devoured them quickly. I talked him into saving his newspaper for me to read after he had finished with it.
The Jews spoke their own language, called Hebrew. We spoke Arabic, of course, so when we had to deal with Jews we almost always did it in English. Neither we nor the Jews like speaking English because the British ruled the country. However, so many signs and so much business was done in English that all of us knew a little of it.
Mr. Salmi could read and write in English, but he had no books. There were a few Jews in Ramle who had businesses around the bazaar. One, Mr. Yehuda, owned a junkyard and collected and sold old newspapers and magazines. He was a friendly old man and quite unlike the Jews in the kibbutz. Mr. Yehuda spent most of the day sitting in his tiny office and reading prayer books. He would let me scour his newspapers for the Palestine Post, the English-language paper. I worked it out so I could spend a half hour after school reading in the junkyard before taking the bus back to Tabah. It was a wonderment, and my learning English eventually saved the life of my family. Reading the Palestine Post had to be kept secret from my father because it was published by the Jews.
By the third year in school I began to write quite well. Mr. Salmi encouraged me to write about my village and other things I knew of. Almost every night I wrote another new story. Some of them were in the form of poetry, like the Koran. We Arabs use poetry a great deal