Meet Me in Gaza (21 page)

The manager of Mata’m Haifa is a grizzled fella with a face full of moles. Known for his rancorous moods. However, he is also a talented chef, especially when it comes to home-made pizza. Which makes his restaurant very popular.

A week before Ramadan, I’m back at Mata’m Haifa, this time with Niveen and the Smoothie. The restaurant is busy, but the beach below is deserted, and we ask the manager if we can have a table right down on the sand. It would be such a treat to sit there and watch the sunset while we eat. He seems to be in a good mood this evening and says that’s no problem at all. A waiter lays a table for us, takes our order and leaves us on the tranquil beach. As we sit, the Smoothie winks at me and I wink straight back at him. We are both in a good mood too.

Niveen is smiling, but she’s jittery this evening, lighting one cigarette after another. I haven’t seen her for quite a few weeks. She says she has a lot on her mind.

‘My daughter, Sarah – you know she’s studying in Cairo; but now she has applied to do her Masters in Canada,’ she says, ‘and if she goes there, then I will not see her for a very long time. And my son, he needs to see his sister.’

In the next week or so, Niveen has a telephone interview with a British educational trust that may agree to fund her to resume the PhD she had to abandon when her husband died five years ago. If they do, she will try to leave Gaza and take her children with her to the UK.

‘Imagine – I could be in London next year, finishing my PhD!’ she says, her voice quite breathless. ‘If my son and daughter could be there with me, I would be the luckiest mother in the world …’

‘How will you get out?’ I ask.

‘I have some professional contacts; I will try to leave by Erez. If not,
habibti
, then it will be the tunnels for me!’

The three of us chortle.

The Smoothie also intends to leave Gaza. He is being harassed by Hamas, who have summoned him to his local police station for regular interrogations about his work, his political views and who he mixes with. He is a youth worker, says he has nothing to hide and is contemptuous of their attempts to bully him.

‘I’m going back to Sweden,’ he says, ‘not staying here and putting up with this shit.’

The Smoothie used to live in Sweden. After his Swedish wife was killed in a car crash, he says he went half-mad and had to return home to Gaza for a while, to heal himself. But now he wants to go back to Sweden. Gaza is no place for a free-thinking poet like him, he says. He has several children here in Gaza now. But I’ve no doubt he
will
make it out and take his kids with him. Some people always manage their situations and the Smoothie has the sheer chutzpah to carry it off. It’s going to be much harder for Niveen, I think. She is independent and free-thinking too, but also really fearful of whatever lies ahead. She’s torn between loving Gaza and being quite desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of her life here.

Both of their situations depend a lot on whether this
tahdiya
lasts, and cracks are already appearing in the calm. Fighters have launched a few rockets and mortars towards Israel – rumours are circulating that businessmen who own tunnels down in Rafah are paying them to do so because they don’t want the border crossings opening and spoiling their monopoly on business. Hamas is arresting fighters from various militant groups, including the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which Hamas claims is violating the
tahdiya
in order to undermine its rule. It is an ugly scene: Gaza under Israeli siege, and now turning in on itself, politically self-destructing from pressures inside and out. No wonder so many people are talking of escape.

A few days ago, a foreign radio journalist called me. ‘I will see you in Gaza soon,’ he said, ‘when the
tahdiya
breaks down and things go back to normal down there.’

Our pizzas arrive, along with bowls of fresh Greek salad. The food is tasty, especially out here on the warm beach with its winsome evening breeze. We eat slowly, then linger for a long time afterwards, smoking as we watch the slow setting of the sun. Eventually, stiff from sitting so long, we decide to take a stroll across the beach, groaning as we get up because we’re all stuffed full of good pizza.

I go barefoot, trailing just behind Niveen and the Smoothie. I have spent a lot of time on the beach over the summer. The sea flows through so much of life here, freeing but also imprisoning Gaza, almost like another wall. Imagine, I think to myself, if this sea was open for fishermen and sailors, if there was political reconciliation and if the crossing down at Rafah was
really
open as an international border. Imagine what Gaza could be …

I press my feet into the still-warm sand. Suddenly the entire beach appears to be quivering as though it has just come alive. Niveen, the Smoothie and I all stop at the same moment, then crouch in the dusk, gazing at a carpet of tiny white crabs making their slow sideways dance towards the retreating waves.

The Islamic calendar is lunar, so every month begins in sequence with the new moon, and each Ramadan starts about eleven days earlier than the previous year.

On the first night of September, a silver sliver of new moon is cradled in the sky above Gaza. I go to sleep early and am startled awake by what sounds like a drum being beaten. I totter onto my bedroom balcony, which looks out over the street, to see who the culprits are. Two men are pushing a bicycle down the street, a large drum resting on the saddle, shouting and bashing the drum. Their job is to wake people in time for
Suhoor
, the meal just before dawn, when fasting begins.

Last year I spent Ramadan over in the West Bank. In Ramallah, restaurants heaved every evening with people breaking their fast; the city centre streets bulged with temporary street markets; even some of the bars were open at night, and serving beer. But in Gaza, Ramadan looks and feels like a threadbare affair. During the day, the streets are nearly deserted – the weather is still very hot and humid. People do come out at night, but the crowds seem subdued in the under-lit streets. The exception is the lamp-lit al-Deira Hotel, which at night sparkles like a jewel in the dust, as the waiters preside over the lavish daily
Iftar
evening break-fast buffet. But the vast majority of Gazans cannot afford to sample its decadent fare. Most break their fast at their own kitchen table.

At the beginning of Ramadan in Gaza, I briefly wonder whether to try fasting, just to join in with my colleagues. I ask
Ustaz
Mounir what he thinks. We’re still having our twice-weekly lessons, still fiercely debating but still listening to each other.

‘It would be interesting for you to try fasting,’ he says. ‘But you know, Louisa, many people in Gaza are fasting for the wrong reason – just so they can tell everyone they are fasting like good Muslims.
Khalas
! The question we have to ask each other is not whether we are fasting during Ramadan – but what will we do
after
Ramadan?’

And that puts me straight. Nobody at work expects me to fast anyway – just to be discreet and to keep my office door closed if I eat or drink anything during the day.

In Gaza almost everyone conforms to the thirty-day Ramadan fast … bar a handful of rebels. And the local Christians, of course.

I’m curious about the Christian community here in Gaza and how they are faring under Hamas. In September 2007, a few months before I first arrived here, a young Gazan Christian was abducted by unknown assailants and murdered. He was the owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookshop, and his death – his punctured corpse was dumped in a back street in the old quarter – ignited Christian fears that Hamas extremists were targeting their local community. The killer or killers were never found, but the murder seems to have been a horrific one-off.

The first Christian I met in Gaza was our receptionist at the Centre, Rawiya, a placid woman with a long uncovered mane of thick hair and deep-set brown eyes. We greeted each other every morning, sometimes chatted, and one morning she asked me if I was Christian. I gave her the simple answer – that I was brought up as a Christian – and we had a brief chat about the local Orthodox church of St Porphyry, which she sometimes attends.

One afternoon during the first week of Ramadan, Rawiya comes into my office and shuts the door behind her.

‘We are celebrating a Christian engagement tomorrow night, at one of the hotels,’ she says. ‘Do you want to come and join us?’

‘Yes I do!’

‘Welcome – it will be a good party,’ she says, with a wink.

Rawiya, her husband, Adil, and their two daughters pick me up at my place at seven in the evening. The engagement party is being held at the Commodore Hotel, on the same seafront street as the al-Deira. I know everyone will be all dolled up – Palestinian engagements and weddings are usually big, showy affairs – so I wear my smartest outfit and my only pair of decent shoes. Rawiya looks elegant in a sparkling dress and her husband has donned a sharp suit. Adil has a neat brown moustache and a merry glint in his eyes. He asks if I have brought anything to drink. When I tell him I have a bottle of red wine in my handbag, he rubs his hands with glee.

The Commodore is busy. We join the throng clambering up the wide, carpeted stairs, past windows of delicately stained glass, from better days when tourists, including Israelis, stayed in these hotels. Tonight’s party is being held in the upstairs function hall. Muslim engagement parties are traditionally celebrated by women and men separately, with just the groom attending the women’s party. But as we enter the function hall, I’m confronted by the sight of at least 300 women and men sitting at long tables side by side, and not a
hijab
in sight. I cannot quite believe I’m still in Gaza.

I turn to Rawiya: ‘Wow! – This really is something else!’

‘Welcome to our world,
habibti
,’ she says.

There is also a dance floor, and a stage at the front, where two empty white thrones await the lucky couple.

We sit down, Rawiya on my right side. On my left is a middle aged man I’ve never met before. His name is Adham and he’s also amused at my amazement. I ask him what things are like for local Christians now, and he gives me the Gaza shrug.

‘Do we look scared?’ he twinkles.

‘No, you don’t, to be honest. Not at all.’

‘We have parties like this all year,’ he says. ‘Our community is very strong, we enjoy celebrating together. But you know, I only go to church for weddings, feasts and deaths!’

‘What are things like between your church and the local mosque?’

He chuckles and takes a sip of what looks like wine from his glass.

‘Our church, the Greek Orthodox Church, is the most conservative in the Middle East, you know, and we Gazans are the most conservative Christians in Palestine. We reflect our society, just like the local Muslims. I would say my views are pretty close to theirs.’

On the table in front of us, small plates of hummus and other dips are congealing in the heat beside baskets of bread. Adil, sitting across the table from me, quietly takes a bottle of whisky from inside his jacket and unscrews the cap. I pass him my bottle of wine. He pours three drinks, then tucks the bottles under his chair.

‘Usually we have the bottles on the table,’ says Rawiya quietly, ‘but we will keep them under the table this evening because it’s Ramadan and the waiters are Muslims.’

The hovering young waiters look bored, and oblivious, as we raise our glasses to toast the party. Our bottles, and a few others, are passed around, glasses are filled, other toasts raised. I offer Adham a top-up of wine.

‘I thought you would never ask!’ he chuckles again.

We clink glasses and drink to the engaged couple, who have yet to make an appearance.

When the bride- and groom-to-be finally make their entrance, the young woman – trussed into the traditional meringue of a dress and caked in white make-up – stares straight ahead, swallowing hard. Her fiancé is beaming like he cannot believe his luck. Schmaltzy romantic music fills the room as they move towards the dance floor for the obligatory slow twirl in front of hundreds of pairs of prying eyes. The bride-to-be looks mortified.

When the couple retreat to their white thrones on the stage, the guests take to the dance floor. At first the dancing is stilted, but as more people join in, the crowd starts to warm up. Rawiya wants to dance too. As she and I squeeze our way towards the floor, two older, immaculate women look me up, then down, curling their shiny lips as they sneer.

Ustaz
Mounir, and other friends from outside the city centre, often complain to me about the snobs in al-Rimal looking down on everyone else in Gaza, especially people from the camps, their sense of self-importance inflated by their sense of being from a better class. I follow Rawiya onto the dance floor, feeling a bit mocked and self-conscious.

As we dance, people smile and my confidence returns. Adil joins us, taking our hands in turn and spinning us around. The floor fills up with small, excited children, teenage girls in beaded, strapless ballgowns and portly older men whose faces become flushed and damp as the music gets louder and bolder. Rawiya and I dance for most of the evening, pausing only to drink water and a little more wine. A posse of long-limbed
shabab
, their eyes bright with testosterone, come over and I share a slow dance with one of them later; he is a tall teenage lad who holds me at arm’s length, giggling nervously, his breath smelling of coffee, cigarettes and cardamom. Women and men mingle, the atmosphere is relaxed and easy, and I do spy one or two
muhajabas
in the flowing crowd.