It was there that Jamil Abu Eisheh was born, in 1923, when the West Bank was known as Transjordan, and the whole of Palestine was part of the British Mandate. Jamil still has his British identity papers and his British driving license, which he had when he started working as a driver, like his father, who owned a bus that did the route from Hebron to Jerusalem. But those were other times. Today, sitting in his house on Ein Sara Street, Jamil has talked to me many times about his childhood. “Our neighbor in the old city of Hebron was a Jewish woman. When my mother had to go out, she would leave us in this woman’s house and if it was for a long time the neighbor would breastfeed her son and then my little brother.” That was what life was like between Jews and Arabs in those days. It was the British who created the problems, the old man says, when they gave the power and the government buildings to the Jews. They set the two sides against each other and then just left.
Jamil remembers his journeys by truck. He has thousands of stories. For example, when he traveled alone along the edge of the Red Sea to get to Jedda, in Saudi Arabia. Six hundred miles without roads through the desert, praying to Allah that the engine of his truck would hold out and he would not have to abandon it in some solitary place through which other truck drivers rarely passed. He finally reached Jedda, the city of the white towers, and then, after another forty-five miles, Mecca, the holy city of Islam, the pilgrimage to which he has done seven times, which gives him the title of “Hadji,” and that’s why, whenever he talks about Mecca and remembers his pilgrimage, the old man gets down on his knees and touches the floor with his forehead. What’s Mecca like? I asked him once, and he replied: there’s nothing like it in the world, it’s the holy city, it’s the center of the universe, it’s the first and last city, it’s a prayer made of tile, white walls, and towers. Jamil knows all the distances in the Middle East in miles, which is something that everyone has forgotten now, because of the borders and the barbed wire fences. Today most of the roads are either closed or can only be driven along if you have a safe conduct. “From Jerusalem to Amman is seventy miles,” he says. “From Amman to Daria, on the border with Syria, another seventy, and from Daria to Damascus, seventy.” At this point he opens his eyes wide and exclaims: “And from Damascus to Beirut, another seventy!” If the region were at peace a person could have breakfast in Jerusalem, lunch in Damascus, and dinner in Beirut.
Then I decided to ask him an uncomfortable question, which I hated asking him but if I hadn’t done so, I would never have been able to round out his portrait. I said to him: what do you think of life these days in Palestine? The old man shifted in his chair, frowned, and lifted one of his arms. “Let them go and make their Palestinian State in Gaza, they and the crazy fundamentalists, and leave us alone. The best thing that could happen to the West Bank would be to revert to Jordan, and be ruled from Amman.” There was not the shadow of a doubt in his words. “That would be my dream, because in the past, when we belonged to Jordan was the best time.” Between the wars of 1948 and 1967, the West Bank had been under Jordanian control, and Jamil had driven a bus that did the route from Hebron to Amman, there and back every day. “I know that road like the back of my hand,” he says, “and I would give my life to drive it again, freely.” Then he was silent for a moment before adding, slyly: “more than anything else I’d like to go back to Beirut, with its movie theaters and its nightclubs, its women with eyes as black as caves who take you back to the first day of the world, with its neon lights in the night that seem to say to the visitor: you’ve just gotten here after a long journey, now just enjoy yourself.”
Jamil still has his Jordanian documents, his passport and driving license. After the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, he had to change documents again. He was living in Israel now and couldn’t go back to Amman. The border on the river Jordan, which before had been only a small bridge, had now turned into an unbreachable wall. The region had become smaller and he had to limit his journeys: to Jerusalem, to Nablus, to Haifa. After a few years, with the Oslo Accords and the new maps, he had to change documents again for those of the Palestinian Authority and the territory became even smaller, so he decided to retire, sell his truck, and open a store selling cold drinks, ice cream, and candy.
The story of this old driver is the story of a whole region, with a past that is cruel, intense, and beautiful. A metaphor for life in the world: Jamil has lived in four different countries without ever moving house.
Rashid was applauded, and I looked again at the back of the room, where Jessica and Egiswanda were. They were still sitting side by side, without talking. I felt like getting up and going to them, and revealing to them something of what united them, but I could not leave the table. In this, I must confess, there was also a slight erotic charge: I wanted to know which of the two had been the voice I had heard in the darkness.
Suddenly I heard my name and, looking at the chairperson, saw that she was smiling at me. In my distraction, I had heard neither her introduction nor the question with which she had handed over to me, so I had to rule out the idea of improvising, especially because, as I now realized with horror, I had completely forgotten the theme of the round table.
I thanked the chairperson and the directors of the ICBM, apologized for having missed the first event at which my presence had been scheduled, and announced that, as a writer, the best thing I could do would be to read a story. And I immediately grabbed the first of my papers and started to read:
The story I am about to tell you is rather sad, and the truth is, I don’t know why I should tell it to you now and not, for example, in a month or a year, or never. I suppose I am doing it out of nostalgia for my friend the Portuguese poet Ivo Machado, who is one of the main characters, or perhaps because I recently bought a model plane made out of metal that I now have on my desk. Excuse the personal tone. This story will be extremely personal.
The protagonist of my story is, as I have already said, the poet Ivo Machado, who was born in the Azores, but what matters to us now is that his everyday job was air traffic controller, in other words, he was one of those people who sit in the control towers of airports and guide planes along the air routes.
The story is as follows: when Ivo was a young man of twenty-five (in the mid-Eighties) he controlled flights in the airport of the Azores, that Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic, an equal distance from Europe and North America. One night, when he came into work, the chief controller said: “Ivo, today you will direct a single plane.” He was surprised, because the normal thing was to guide the flights of a dozen aircraft. Then the chief explained: “It’s a special case. An English pilot taking a British World War II bomber to Florida, to hand it over to a collector of planes who has just bought it at an auction in London. He made a stop here in the Azores and continued toward Canada, because he has to follow a strictly laid down route, but he was caught in a storm, had to fly in a zigzag, and now doesn’t have much fuel left. He won’t reach Canada, and he doesn’t have enough fuel to turn back. He’s going to fall in the sea.”