David Grossman - Sleeping on a Wire - Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Six years passed. Shammas in the meantime published his Hebrew-language novel Arabesques . It is a sad and very beautiful work, “a novel disguised as an autobiography,” which begins in Shammas’s Galilean hometown, Fasuta. In recent years Shammas has lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, teaching at the University of Michigan. He has been preparing a collection of articles on the Middle East, written in English, for publication.

Yehoshua, nicknamed “Buli,” has in the interval published two novels, Five Seasons and Mr. Mani , and is now working on a new novel, a love story.

At the beginning of January 1992, Shammas came home for a short visit, and the three of us met at Yehoshua’s home on Mount Carmel. Shammas entered the house and Buli rushed to meet him. They embraced, looked each other over, embraced again — maybe to ground the electric charge of the meeting. Anton, balding, of delicate manners, wore a blue sweater, round glasses, and a kind of poet’s economy on his face; Buli, fifty-five years old, his mane of hair already gone silver, always tensed and stormy, warm and physical, wore a red flannel shirt with the simple, direct prosaism that is his.

You haven’t been here for four years, I said to Shammas, and he said, “Only four? You could say that for forty-one years, ever since I was born, I haven’t been here…What, have you two been here?” And Yehoshua: “I’ve always been here too much…I wish I hadn’t been here a little…”

Shammas: “A line from a poem by Nizar Kabani, the Syrian poet who served his country as a diplomat in Spain, just came to me: ‘In the narrow alleys of Cordoba I would extend my hand and look for the keys to our house in Damascus.’ I don’t feel that way anywhere. There is no real home. You ask if I was ‘here.’ I understand the word ‘here’ in its geographical-Hebrew sense. I was not here in the Arabic sense of ‘here,’ because they have taken the ground out from under me. When you say ‘Galilee,’ what is that word for me? The Galilee is yours; for me it is the Jalil ; the change in pronunciation makes all the difference; without it my entire semantic security in my sense of homeland is unsettled.”

Then he recalled an article he had written some years ago, in which he referred to the experience of being “a guest in the language”: “With what might have been destructive cynicism I compared myself to the Harold Pinter type of character who appears suddenly in one’s house, remains for dinner, washes the dishes, and stays the night, and the next morning he is already starting to take over. And I said, But I will try to be well-mannered. I arrive in the house of the Hebrew language under the banner of good manners.”

I asked him if there had been any moment in his life in which he had felt that he had the “key” to a home. He had sensed it, he said, when Arabesques appeared in Hebrew — the writer Amnon Shamush then published a review of the book, concluding with an allusion to Shammas’s ironical “declaration of good manners”: “One makes up a bed for the guest, Anton my friend, my brother, and one hosts him in the best tradition of good hospitality; but one never gives him the keys to the house, or the deed to it.” Shammas: “Then I understood that Arabesques is my key. But who knows if they won’t change the lock.”

We sat and spoke, and Yehoshua closed an old account with Shammas: Why had he chosen to call one of the characters in Arabesques , an unpleasant Israeli writer, Yehoshua Bar-On? Shammas laughed and denied any connection between A. B. Yehoshua and the character in question, except for the name, he said; and anyway, the book had been written before the debate. This brought us to the subject of that encounter, of who had supported Yehoshua and who had supported Shammas, and we inevitably changed tracks from literature to politics. Here is the conversation, with necessary condensation:

“The struggle for equality is certainly an important one,” A. B. Yehoshua said, “and we should have begun it immediately, without waiting for the conflict with the Palestinians in the territories to end. But my problem and debate with Anton are not about equality but about identity! Because as a national minority in an Israeli state—”

“What’s an ‘Israeli state’?” Shammas interrupted him, “there’s no such thing!”

“What do you mean there’s no such thing?” Yehoshua said, mystified. He smiled the slightest bit because here it was, beginning again. “For me, ‘Israeli’ is the authentic, complete, and consummate word for the concept ‘Jewish’! Israeliness is the total, perfect, and original Judaism, one that should provide answers in all areas of life. The term ‘Jewish,’ after all, came into being a thousand years after the concept ‘Israeli’ existed in practice, and it was created to describe a fraction, what remained after everything the Israeli lost in the Diaspora, until he turned into a ‘Jew.’ That whole mess has no connection to the Palestinian or Arab issue; even if there were no Arabs here there would still be the problem between the two concepts ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli.’

Anton Shammas shakes his head grimly, and from the twist of his lips it is clear that we have gone back six years. He corrects me: Not six, forty years back.

“You see Israeliness as total Jewishness,” Shammas says, “and I don’t see where you fit me, the Arab, into that Israeliness. Under the rug? In some corner of the kitchen? Maybe you won’t even give me a key to get into the house?”

“But, Anton, think of a Pakistani coming to England today, with a British passport, and telling the British, ‘Let’s create the British nationality together! I want Pakistani, Muslim symbols! Why should the Archbishop of Canterbury preside over the crowning of the Queen? I want there to be Muslim representation as well! Why should we speak English? There are a lot of languages here!’ Think of him coming and making demands! The English tell him, ‘No, my good man! We have no objection to your speaking Urdu, and you may receive — as a minority — schools and mosques, but the country’s identity is English, and you are a minority within that nation!’ ”

Shammas: “Buli, the minute a man like you does not understand the basic difference between the Pakistani who comes to England and the Galilean who has been in Fasuta for untold generations, then what do you want us to talk about?”

“I don’t understand you,” Yehoshua sighed. “If there hadn’t been anti-Semitism in Europe, you wouldn’t even know how to write the word ‘Israel’! Let’s suppose that there hadn’t been a Herzl and that Jews hadn’t come here. You would have had a few Jews in Safed and Hebron, and you would never have heard the word ‘Israel’! You speak of an ‘Israeli nationality’ as if, I don’t know [Yehoshua expands his chest], your life’s wish has arrived! This entire Israel fell out of the sky on you! Why this longing for an Israeli identity?”

“Because you conquered me!” Shammas thunders.

“Okay, so I conquered you, and I imposed Israeli citizenship on you—”

“So you’ve got the responsibility—”

Yehoshua: “My responsibility is that whoever is within the country’s borders must be a citizen, and all obligations and rights apply to him, that’s my responsibility to you.”

Shammas: “And have you lived up to that responsibility? Did anyone even intend to live up to that responsibility?”

“Look,” Yehoshua says, “this new country’s immediate grant of citizenship to its Arab citizens in 1948 was an act of courage and a certain liberality. Just think — the Arabs who remained here had been shooting at us the day before! Yesterday they fought and wanted to kill us, and a month later they’ve already received from us the right to vote for prime minister! Put your claims in proportion! Ask me, did they receive everything? Of course not! There was a military government, there was prejudice, but show me one other country that would give citizenship and social benefits and social security to its sworn enemy a month after a war.”