The Pillars of Hercules

We kept going. Sunshine turned to twilight. Dusk gathered. The dust of Nazareth was reflected in car headlights and people and animals wandered in the road (“Arabs!”). The lights did not help; their glare made it harder for us to see, and finally in the interior of the upper town, instead of illuminating the road the lights blinded us.

“Haifa is not like this! Look at Arab streets!”

He was ranting and it seemed we were truly lost when he asked a man and woman where Habiby lived and they said in a Scottish accent that they had only been in Nazareth for two days and had no idea.

“Forget it. Let’s go back to Haifa. We’ll never find the house.”

“You must find your friend!” Yossi screamed, making a U-turn in the dark. “And I must smoke a cigarette!” He was very upset. He screamed again incoherently. He was saying, “Don’t worry!”

The only lighted doorway on this street was a bakery. A man in flour-dusted overalls stood holding a squeeze bag of frosting and was using its nozzle to decorate some jam tarts. He had not heard of Habiby, but he said in Arabic, “Why don’t we call him and ask him directions?” He did so. The street was not far, he explained. He sat down and smacked some flour out of a shallow cardboard box and turned it over. Very slowly, he sketched a map on the bottom of the box. Then he handed this box to Yossi, and off we went, higher, almost to the top of the hill of old Nazareth.

Emile Habiby’s house was large and rambling, set among others on a steep hillside, filled with people, mostly women and children, all of them Habiby. The author had three daughters and ten grandchildren; his first great-grandchild had just arrived.

He sat, the patriarch, surrounded by this energetic family. He was seventy-three, stocky, even bull-like, with a heavy sculptured head and a raspy voice and a booming laugh. He had the build of a Mediterranean fisherman—he had worked on a fishing boat out of Haifa for many years; but he was also one of Israel’s intellectuals. He had published a number of novels, among them The Secret Life of Saeed and Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter, and he had won several literary prizes, the Order of Palestine in 1991 and the year before that the Jerusalem Medal. Two previous recipients of the Jerusalem Medal were so outraged at the fact that the prize had been awarded to an Arab that these thinkers (who had been singled out for their contribution to humanity) returned their medals in disgust. The absurdity was much enjoyed by Habiby, whose novels are excursions into the fantastic.

I had encouraged Yossi to come in with me and, welcomed, given a cigarette, he sat calming himself in this Palestinian household, a great nest of Habibys. Cups of coffee appeared and pastries and small children. In the kitchen other children were being fed, and the Habiby women were talking and laughing. I was moved as much by the size and complexity of the family as by its harmony.

And at last Yossi was smiling a real smile. In spite of all of his abuse and his shrieking, we had arrived, and he was happily smoking and we were receiving the best welcome imaginable, with food and compliments and solicitous questions.

There were pictures of Jesus on the wall, and portraits of the Madonna and Child. It was a reminder that this was a Christian family, and such pictures could not have been more appropriate since Nazareth was the home of Mary and Joseph. The Basilica of the Annunciation had been built over the house of St. Anne, and even Joseph’s workshop had been discovered and excavated in Nazareth, and there it was for all the world to see, the workshop of the best-known carpenter in Christendom.

“It’s good of you to come all this way,” Habiby said. “Though you know I would have come to Haifa to see you.”

“Yes. But I found the trip out here interesting,” I said. Especially when Yossi had pointed to the Jewish settlement of Natseret Illit and howled, “Jews! Jews! Jews! Jews!”

We talked about the tension since the massacre in Hebron. Habiby had written an article in The New York Times about it in which he had said, “One cannot go on pretending that nothing has changed,” and that the error many Israeli leaders and politicians had made was in refusing “to tell their people that they must reach out to the Palestinians; they have nobody else to rely on in the long run.” He was encouraged by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s condemnation of the assassin Goldstein.

What had happened afterwards had been inevitable, since both sides vowed retribution. But his view was that both Palestinians and Israelis had a duty “to stand up to our own extremists.”

“There is an old Arab saying,” Habiby said, “that the Jews celebrate their feasts around gardens, the Christians around kitchens, and the Muslims around graveyards.”

A peace conference was going on at that moment in Casablanca, to which Yitzhak Rabin had been invited. I asked Habiby what he thought of the Israeli prime minister’s contribution.