“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 31 : Christmas with the Cablan
In our third year in Ramat Yishai, Arni was building for us a highly individualised, family house on columns of nearly two and a half meters. For one half of the building, facing south, a man-made heap of earth gently sloped up from the garden enveloping the columns to a wall dividing the front and back halves of the building. This earthy mound afforded entrance to the living area through a pair of large French doors and was known jokingly around the village as tel Goren, or Goren’s hill. From the north-facing rear of the structure you could see through the exposed pillars to the dividing wall and the steps to the main entrance door on the side at the back. The shaded half under the pillars at ground level would be used for hanging the washing and parking the car.
There were other features of our personally designed house, on a piece of land near the central crossroads, which made it stand out as being unlike any other building in the village. We had terra-cotta, Marseilles half-pipe tiles to a pitched roof with dormers in it above the staircase and bedrooms at the rear, most unusual then in Israel. The living area opposite was octagonal with a flat roof entered from a turning on the stairs and surrounded by a wrought-iron balustrade, which like the staircase had been designed by myself and executed by the village blacksmith. A few discreet lamps were to be installed at intervals around the balustrade, tilted from floor level to cast a soft light over the tiled area where we might sit in the evening to enjoy the long, lovely view down the Jezreel valley with its twinkling lights from the scattered settlements.
On the east side ‘But, soft! what light from yonder window breaks?’ we had a pretty, curved, wrought-iron Juliet balcony to the main bedroom and wooden shutters on the windows. Before it was finished and could be named it was already called bet anglit ‘the English house’. But to achieve our architectural wishes we were dependent upon our contractor, or cablan, who was a charming Christian Arab from Nazareth, Said Besharat.
Arni and Said became friends and fortunately Said proved extremely patient in dealing with all of our weird whims and wishes, even to the point of knocking out blocks to redesign a window already in place. I had wanted the high, arched window on the turn of the staircase to be tall enough to frame a wonderful, curvy cyprus tree in an adjacent garden.
Somehow the window had been built sixty centimeters short of the design height so that as you walked up the stairs the head of the tree at the half landing was missing from view. The fact that the tree might grow taller or that the neighbour might cut it down at some stage did not occur to me in my architectural enthusiasm. For the time being the window on the staircase framed a real life picture, a Van Gogh of a deep blue-green, wavy cupressus that could rock wildly in the wind, as his trees did, and change colour as the light changed, as his paintings would. The arch was the feature which took some time and cost to re-instate, to my husband’s annoyance but it was done to satisfy my mad whim.
By December of 1975 the new house was well on its way and my parents were coming to visit us for Christmas. Said, knowing that Arni’s wife and family were not Jewish, requested us all to join his family at his home in Nazareth to celebrate Christmas Eve. Midnight Mass would be relayed on TV from the Church of the Annunciation in the town centre, as well as TV film of scenes of the festivities from St. Peter’s Square in Rome. All this would be flashing quietly at us when we sat to eat at our host’s table alongside his extended family; his father, brothers and in-laws. The women, including Said’s wife, mother, daughters, sisters and brothers’ wives would remain discreetly in the background and serve at table. My mother and I were to be the only women sitting with the men.
We had been talking with our neighbour, Alexander Shoshani, of the intended visit and he asked to come along with us, which was perfectly in order and especially as we were very fond of him and knew that he enjoyed a party with the odd dram or two. We had arranged for the children to be looked after and the five of us piled into our small old Saab, with Arni driving and my father beside him. We climbed up towards Nazareth at dusk looking forward to a special occasion. Indeed we were made very welcome in Said’s large house, which they had gradually built over a number of years as funding became available.
The rooms were tall, the floors attractively tiled and there was colourful patterned tiling on the walls and many other decorative features. The spacious rooms were at least twice the size of any of ours and the house was built near the top of a steep maze of streets densely occupied on the very hilly, rocky ground of the old Arabic town. Said’s father, in the traditional Arabic tunic, was sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor with a
bubbling hookah and a pot of coffee on a little stove beside him. Alexander joined him and remained talking with him for the rest of the evening, downing the Scotch and sharing the hookah and coffee. They were soon deep in conversation, heads nodding, hands dramatically orchestrating emphasis to their words.
The table was laden with good things to eat; tasty meze, chicken, lamb, rice, wonderful dishes of spicy mixtures, followed by fruits, including succulent figs, and sweetmeats and finally the rich, dark and sweet Turkish coffee known as botz in Hebrew, or ‘mud’. Throughout the meal, bottles of every kind of alcohol were passed around, especially whisky which Said’s brother, next to me, drank liberally. Arni was sitting on his other side by my parents who needed some translations as English was not the predominant language. There was a good mixture of Arabic and Hebrew and I knew enough of the latter to manage quite well with Said’s brother. Being a woman, I was not offered the whisky but had a little wine and a lot of fruit juice. Arni was having difficulty saying ‘no’ to the spirits with his manly pride at stake so his glass was continually being filled, though he normally drank very little.
As midnight approached we were a very merry crowd indeed and the conversation veered towards the state of the world as we glanced at the screen of the large television beaming down on us from a bracketed perch high on the wall. We heard the Christian message of love and hope being loudly proclaimed to the crowds in both Rome and Nazareth. The clock struck midnight, glasses were raised and through genuine laughter and tears we unanimously agreed that Jew and Arab were brothers, we were all brothers and there was no reason on earth why we should not remain brothers for ever. All we had to do was to love one another. Love was our toast. We knew we had no personal reasons for discord and every reason to get along together and make a safer, better world for our children, as indeed we were all trying to do. To adopt negative and bitter attitudes in the face of current opportunity would be unreasonable and stupid. We hugged each other with, I believe, a real longing for the sort of world about which we shared a common dream, along with most other human beings.
If, as they say, in vino veritas, then each man was speaking a deeper truth than he dared to acknowledge or express when completely sober and beset by the politics of distrust, greed, chicanery or even measured goodwill aimed at ensuring that the rich keep their wealth and the poor do not become a nuisance in attempting to share those riches.
We all politely ignored the problem of ‘whose land is it anyway?’. That special night we were common folk sharing a very good standard of living in global terms, with a belief in higher education for our children, girls and boys, and a knowledge that despite differences in culture, background and religion, life would be easier to navigate for everyone in this ‘land of milk and honey’ in teaching and disseminating mutual respect and tolerance and forgiveness for the sins of the forbears. What we needed was a clean sheet, and wise governance. Glasses were raised again to that.
Arni, who by this time was looking decidedly tired and hazy, embraced everyone around him as my father and mother, who had been sincerely moved by the goodwill and hospitality of our hosts and the whole occasion, suggested we take our leave. Alexander was still sitting on the floor near his friend and looking mellow, if not rather sad. I was not sure why that should be and put it down to the highly emotional nature he had no doubt inherited from his Russian ancestry, but that, we later learned, was only part of the story.
My husband handed me the keys and asked me to drive us home. After falling into the back of the car with my mother and Alexander squeezed in beside him, he promptly fell asleep. Having no precise idea of how we had arrived at the house through the maze of alleys, I looked up the street and noticed that a road was running along the boundary of the town with open ground on one side and a bright moon in a clear sky alive with stars above it. I headed up the alley to the perimeter road, turned left, which I hoped was the right direction, and started a rough descent on the outskirts of the town until I met a main road with which I was familiar and made for home. The two Israelis in the car who knew the landscape inside out, were beyond giving me any help and indeed the one was snoring loudly next to my mother, who nevertheless remained buoyant and very cheerful.
Turning into the land in front of our house in the early hours of the morning, we woke the sleeping man. A body can react badly from being suddenly shaken from deep slumber and my husband promptly dashed off into the dark area of tall pine trees and was sick. Alexander, who hoped his wife Yudit would be in bed and asleep next door and not wake up upon his entry, sneaked quietly off. I had gathered on the way home between snatches of softly sung, lyrical Russian love songs, that Said’s father was known to Alexander but in concentrating on my driving, only half hearing what he was saying, it was a day or so later before Arni filled in the details. These he had learned as the two men conversed after rising in the early morning, as was their habit, to moisten the land at the bottom of our gardens before continuing their toiletries indoors.
Before and after Independence in 1948, Alexander had belonged, as was previously mentioned, to a group of ‘guardians’ who, like lawmen of the Wild West, had policed the areas around the Jewish farming communities in the Galilee and our district on horseback. The men were not uniformed but suitably dressed to saddle up, carried rifles and were employed to maintain order and prevent theft, guerilla activities and so on. One story we heard was that Alexander had a beautiful white horse at the time he married Yudit in the 1930’s and that following the marriage ceremony he had carried her off on this white stallion into the night. Well…he was romantic enough to do that, and in any case he had no other form of transport, so why not make a get-away from the guests in the quickest and most familiar manner. Yudit was a real woman by any man’s standard and I’m sure she was quite up to leaping into the saddle behind him and spending a fearless, first night of marriage under the stars, had that been the plan.
As a member of Hashomer sometime before or during the Independence war, Alexander had received orders to go to an Arab village close to Moshav Nahalal nearby and clear it and raze it to the ground. It was suspected of being a centre of dissidence and terrorist activities. Alexander knew the village well and was extremely unhappy with these orders but had to assume that others had intelligence that he could neither know nor verify. He put off the job for as long as he dared but finally went in with his guards and quietly but firmly ordered the inhabitants to leave before destroying their homes. The only shots fired were in the air. This had remained on his conscience and in his memory until this Christmas
Eve when he had unexpectedly asked to join us for the celebrations in Said’s home. He was unaware at that point that the old man sitting on the floor with his hookah would turn out to be the headsman he knew from the village he had destroyed so many years ago.
Strangely, the two men had never encountered one another in the intervening years. A circle was about to be completed. Alexander and the older man talked all evening of the events of that day and the way of the world. What had happened to the other villagers, where had they gone, where were they now? It was true that Alexander had looked sad and I do remember seeing him weep a little. These two men were now in their late sixties. The elder Besharat had survived and his sons had done well and the past was the past. Explanations were given, some truths were exchanged. With the old Christian Nazarene sharing his hookah with Alexander, who in turn confessed his deep feelings and regrets, our friend felt that something of the sin visited upon him by orders from above had been cleansed at the heart of its guilt, drifting gently away with the sadness of their shared past in the cooled blue smoke enveloping them both before dissolving on the air.
There was a strange irony in the fact that none of the rest of us, who were talking so enthusiastically about the desirability of brotherhood, were aware that a genuine act of forgiving and forgetting was taking place at that very moment in the same room. It had not been a light crime, people’s lives had been altered for ever, other people had needed protection and the full truth would never be known but it had happened a long time ago and time had finally provided a merciful moment for healing, perhaps for both men.
To carry around an unforgiving spirit is as heavy a burden as to carry an unforgiven sin. The opportunity to throw off both burdens leaves a lightness in their place which can only be described as real joy, tinged though it may be with the sadness that gives it birth. That night we were indeed celebrating a birth intended to bring joy to the world and in one tiny corner of the globe called Nazareth, it did just that.