The Mulberry Affair

NOTE: To those who follow this blog, I admit to falling short of updating it regularly. In the coming few days I will post an article a day till I run out of new material.

March 5, 2018:

We are back in our home in Arrabeh enjoying the Galilee spring. It is as beautiful as we knew it would be. The rains this year have been adequate and well-spaced. Imad, our nephew who takes care of the garden and keeps an eye on the house while we are away, likes tending the chickens and we have seventeen healthy birds including four beautiful roosters and one sitting hen. They keep the grasses and pests down except for a couple of wild plant varieties that seem to have taken over the sunny spots between the various fruit trees. The Palestinian Arum with its dark green leaves, each the size of a giant’s palm, hasn’t started blooming yet. The bugle-shaped yellow-tinged flowers are no less striking in their white sheen than the pink corncob-like ears that follow in time to decorate the entire area. The promise of the variegated colors to come competes mentally with the bluish green current leafy expanse. The elevated rock garden in the front yard section of the near one acre of our space has been overtaken by wild cyclamens that we introduced decades ago and continue to pamper with selective weeding of all other native plants. The pleasure of ambulating between the exuberant blooms with their variegated shades of pink every morning is worth the years of consistent care. As I leaf through the dozen pages of the Ittihad, the only Arabic daily in Israel, I am reminded every morning of the fragility of my love affair with the land my father bequeathed me. Always, on the back cover of the communist daily, there is a scenic photo of the remains of one of the 531 Palestinian towns and villages that have been erased from existence as living communities, their sons and daughters made refugees elsewhere. A photograph of the remains or of the cleared site and a brief explanatory note document the location and size of the ghost town. A glance at the headlines inside always confirms Israel’s creeping ethnic cleansing of us, its Palestinian citizens, and continuing stealth of our land and culture.

Yesterday I transplanted a mulberry tree that I had tended for the past five years or so to a sunnier spot. My humongous carob tree next to it had overshadowed and stopped it from bearing fruit. It took me about an hour to dig the right hole to receive it where I hope it will flourish in the full sun. It took a little longer to dig it out and sever its healthy roots to the right size and shape. Last year, when I suspected that the tree was not going to bear fruit in its shaded location, I didn’t want to give up yet on the promise of the sweet mulberries from its special variety with the buttery white lusciousness. Besides, that very tree holds some special nostalgic memories. Way back when I was a child, every morning on my way to school, I would pass by a huge mulberry in the front yard of a family that didn’t mind schoolchildren reaching across the low fence and savoring some of the fruit. What added to the sweetness of the delicacy was that the family had three pretty girls of about my age. Lo and behold, one of those girls is now the wife of my good friend, a biochemist who eventually headed the laboratory of our regional hospital. The lab job was his formal source of livelihood. But he always supplemented that with farming his several inherited and acquired pieces of land in the Battouf Valley, the joy and pride of our village’s farming community. He even takes care of my single near-one-acre property there. So, some years back I asked my friend Abu-Ayman to please get me a cutting from his in-law’s mulberry tree. He did and I planted it in the wrong place where the aggressive carob overshadowed it. I still dream of savoring the fruit from that tree with all the attached childhood reminiscing and the nostalgic shades of flavoring.

Imagine, if you will, some bureaucrat sitting behind one of those three dozen windows at the immigration facility in New York deciding to stop me from coming back to tend my little orchard this time of the year, the only proper time for transplanting trees just ahead of their burst of leaves and flowers, their annual growth period. That exactly is what has happened and I am vain enough to want to record that experience for posterity: Thinking about the future of their parents, that’s to say Didi’s and my future, Rhoda and Ty, our children in the USA, decided to make sure that there would be no problems with our joining them if and when old age and infirmity made that necessary. Health-wise, both of us are in relatively good condition. But the children are correct in wanting to anticipate whatever unforeseen emergencies may develop. Since they both are unlikely to come back at the drop of a hat, they decided to petition for me to get a green card and eventually an American passport so that I can physically join them if and when needed. Three years ago, we started the process by submitting an application with the needed medical form and the biometric documentation of finger printing, current photos and digital images of my irises. All the paperwork had to be redone twice while some slowpoke official took their time checking my security background. Over a dozen years ago a border security official at the New York airport told me casually that my country, Israel, had put my name on a no-fly list. But Didi and I have since gone through the meticulous paperwork of proving that I am who I say I am and I have been flying with little delay since, except for the frequent ‘random’ check, the ‘random’ designation seeming to shine from my forehead at all times. A younger politically active Kanaaneh clan member who is a recognized Palestinian nationalist thinks he brought that curse over our collective head. Be that as it may, I had thought that this all was behind me.

Now, the presumed standard immigration procedure has taken another kinky twist, likely complicated beyond normal by President Trump’s aversion to immigrants with my skin color or imagined particulars. This forced us to engage a specialized attorney with Obama’s looks and empathetic demeanor. He knew his way around the system and was accorded the proper cordiality and the occasional chatty smile his profession affords him. Still, we had to spend the better part of two separate days to be summoned half a dozen times to our assigned officer’s window for additional evidence of my actual existence and of the veracity of the emergency development that necessitated my trip away from my desired future home country, the USA. The lawyer repeatedly inquired from the officer if there were any other concerns that we should address and she kept coming up with additional demands: a more current photo, another medical certificate from my ill sister at home, a return ticket, etc. etc. She seemed to operate in the shadow of an oppressive superior who she expected to doubt everything I explained, thus needing to substantiate every word in her online file on me with new hard copy documents and new statements.

For two days, I fought the urge to pull out my mobile phone and show the woman a photo of my fruitless mulberry, or perhaps of my front yard in spring, overrun by the deluge of cyclamens in bloom. I expected her to understand. Like most of the officers manning those seeming guard posts at the immigration office to block the rush of immigrants into the USA, she looked and sounded clearly of foreign birth. Nostalgia alone should be a sufficient explanation for my need to return to my real home. Perhaps they all were chosen because of their foreign language facility. Or perhaps because of the system’s awareness of the greater fidelity of new converts. I didn’t gather the courage to face her with the yearning she is sure to have for her foreign land of birth. We had to wait for a week between two appointments and while awaiting the medical certificate from my sister’s family physician certifying her ‘touch-and-go’ medical status, Yusra obliged with an added emergency: Without falling, she managed to fracture a hip, her bones were so week. I called a colleague who visited her and sent me a duly-signed and stamped medical opinion. It was all real and convincing. The officer, about the most demanding I have ever dealt with, and I have dealt with hundreds if not thousands of them in my life, both as their client and as their boss, was finally convinced. She turned pleasant, almost chatty, and, apropos of my ignorance of my alien number, even made some wry remarks about my outer space origins.

Neither my mulberry transplanting, paying my respects to two families in the village recently bereaved of men my age, visiting my dentist, getting our two old cars in running order, nor the trimming of my overgrown figs and citrus trees has kept me from visiting Yusra daily. She seems to draw strength from my mere presence in her space. On my first visit, she gained enough strength and courage to stand up and take a couple of steps on her walker. Yesterday, her physiotherapist grandson sent me a selfie with her venturing outside her room to spend a little time in the sun. Immediately, I joined her and was rewarded with her reminiscing about the beautiful experience she had some twenty years ago when she was successfully resuscitated from a heart attack. The beautifully lit tunnel she was so drawn towards after hovering above the gathered doctors and nurses that scurried around her bed came back to her mind. Yusra doesn’t call it a near-death experience and I have refrained from using the term in conversing with her. But she compares her stepping out into the springtime sun to that lit tunnel in warmth and luminosity.

And there is my niece Samira. She is younger but even more frail, having survived Cervical Cancer and all the intensive radiation that cooked her viscera into the sick mess that required repeated surgeries. “That is why it is called ‘the nasty disease,’ the cure is nearly as bad as the ailment itself,” she says. Except that she is still with us, having outlived Asa’ad, her cousin husband, and his few years of that tongue-twister illness of the old. He had just departed and Samira misses him. “At least I would walk to his bed and tuck the sheets around him. Now I get up four or five times a night to the realization that he is not there. The breath of a man in a woman’s space is worth all the trouble.” In the last stages of his Alzheimer’s Disease, he was merely vegetating, tube fed, breathing and occasionally open-eyed but not giving any sign of awareness of what went on around him or of recognition of anyone there. His children were too proud to submit their father to the anonymity of life in a nursing home. They bore the financial burden of paying half the expenses of a fulltime caregiver, a Filipino male nurse named Jonathan. The Social Welfare Department bore the other half. She came to love the boy like her children, Samira says. He was such a great help, so dedicated to Asa’ad and to his own three little daughters back home with whom he spent all his free time talking and laughing on the phone. When he came back to pay his respects to Asa’ad before the burial, and to say his prayers in his special way “with his two palms held together in front of his face,” he promised to come back to visit ‘Mother Samira.’ And she promised to boil rice for his lunch as usual when he comes.

Before his memories lost their details and specificity and then went completely blank causing him to break out in fits of unexplained crying, Asa’ad would entertain me, and anyone with the patience to hear him out, with stories from his younger years as a professional plasterer and as a hobby folk dancer. He would tick off the names of so many Jewish friends in Tel Aviv’s suburbs, mainly women, and so many Druze families in Galilee villages whose new homes he had plastered with caring finishing touches. At this juncture, Asa’ad always lifted his right hand before his face and twirled it admiringly. In retrospect, it is striking how easily he flitted and slid between one location and the other and between his relevant activities in the two distinct social circles. What was common between the two sets of permanent social relations that developed inevitably was the element of welcome and trust shown by those hosts and of honorable conduct on the narrator’s part even when the underlying foundations of the narrative hinted otherwise. There was never any suggestion of dispute or bitterness in either of the two sets of his fond stories. Yet the two had distinctly different endings: The old memories of his Jewish friendships would be reawakened when he would incidentally meet a member of one of those families and they would invite him back to their homes for a visit with hugs and kisses and a meal. With the Druze it always ended with the happy occasion of a wedding in the family and with Asa’ad arriving with Samira and outdoing himself in leading the Dabki line dance and with his Druze sisters singing and ululating for him.

A third narrative on which Asa’ad, in his recollecting days, always touched was that of his children’s nationalist activism. Especially Mohammad, his firstborn and hence the one who incorporates the father’s first name in his own nom-de-guerre of Abu-As’aad, and who has risen to the post of general secretary of “The Village Sons,” has been pursued and imprisoned innumerable times. Abu-As’aad, the political activist son, boycotts Israeli elections and maintains close contacts with other Palestinian revolutionaries. Abu-Mohammad, all through his life, has managed to successfully compartmentalize his pride in his children’s nationalism separate from his close friendship with so many Israeli Jewish and, especially, Druze contacts, many actively serving in the security forces. Also, none of his four boys has taken plastering as a source of livelihood, even if, like most of our village boys, all of them had dabbled in it at one time or the other. However, his only daughter did literally follow in his footsteps as a fancy Dabki lead dancer, even if for the most part her magic footwork is confined to our village weddings.

Where did I start and how did I get here? Could it possibly be an early sign of the ‘tongue-twister disease?’ I am still trying to tell that foreign-looking immigration officer at 26 Federal Plaza in New York that there were other extenuating circumstances for my return to Galilee this Spring. Samira now brags to me about how fast she walked after her recent hip fracture and hip joint replacement. Physiotherapists and nurses held her as an example to others. Sima, her Iraqi Jewish roommate in the Rehab Department of the hospital, though younger, hadn’t started ambulating when Samira could climb the stairs. First, she blamed it on experience; it was her first and Samira’s second hip replacement. Then she admitted the real cause, an obvious one for a lone elder: “Your kids visit you more! And there are more of them,” Sima told Samira.

We, in traditional Palestinian society, still value family connections and respect for our elders. Additionally, we excel in two types of mass socializing, with progressively more of both occasions with time: weddings and funerals. Toufik, my closest childhood friend and fellow gardener, lost his brother, the last of his six siblings, two days after we arrived back and I joined him for a couple of hours at the traditional family function. He is struck by the extensive social network of his next of kin: three generations of descendants of the deceased and his siblings, each member with their circle of relatives through marriage, their friends and their fellow workers and casual contacts. Upon arrival, each visitor proceeds to shake the hands of the line of first-degree relatives of the deceased seated at one side of the shady space minimally furnished with rows of rented plastic chairs under a wide stretch of tarpaulin cover. The standard accommodations are provided automatically by the Islamic Movement’s social arm that arrives with its ware uninvited and accepts whatever donation the family offers. The only concession the movement’s lead religious activists are sure to exact is their occasional sermon to the gathered crowd. I tried to listen seriously to such a sermon and found it fairly reasonable in terms of the advice it offered regarding social behavior and the like. All guests are promptly received with offers of back coffee, dried dates and a cup of cold water. The reception space is surrounded by half a dozen multi-story stone houses, homes of the sons of the departed man, all self-made and successful: one agriculture labor contractor with the highest and most ostentatious castle-like home, then the homes of the two smiths and of the professional plasterer. Less grandiose are the homes of the lawyer, the civil engineer and the physician sons. The three sisters had married and spread out. The absence of home gardens and playgrounds add to the funerary ambiance of the yard. “The young women have hit on an even narrower sphere of showing off,” Toufik tells me. “They do funny things to their faces. Arrabeh’s two plastic surgeons do a thriving business.”

A group of female nurses shows up and huddle conspicuously in one corner with their colleague, the anesthesiologist-physician son of the departed. Later he comes to dutifully shake my hand as does his second cousin, an ophthalmologist at Hadassah Hospital who has just returned from two years of super-specialty training in Paris. A third medical scion as well as the lawyer in the family afford me special recognition as well, themselves gaining social recognition through the gesture as well. After all, I am the first physician in Arrabeh, now the record-holder community in Israel in the production of medical doctors. That demanding immigration officer should take notice.

Arrabeh had just delivered another knockout punch to its academic Israeli competitors: Naftali Bennett, Israel’s current Minister of Education, who thinks Palestine and the Palestinians are all fake, is on record appealing to worthy Israeli youth, to him Jewish youth by definition, to prepare for the future by focusing on science. He urged high-schoolers to go for the highest math preparation by choosing the challenging five-unit track. The principal of one of our three high schools in Arrabeh, a local boy, took that as a personal dare. His twelve graders this year scored the highest five-unit math average in the land. Toufik asked me to join a group of town elders who plan to visit the principal at his school as a meritorious show of support.

Eat your heart out, lady!