The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land Read online

  The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Omer Friedlander

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories were previously published in substantially different form: “Alte Sachen” in The Chicago Tribune; “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land” in Moment Magazine; “The Sand Collector” in Winning Writers; “Scheherazade and Radio Station 97.2 FM” in Sonora Review; “Jellyfish in Gaza” in The Baltimore Review; and “Walking Shiv’ah,” titled as “Aleph Friedman Killed,” in Lunch Ticket.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from “Eyes” from The Great Tranquility by Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1982 by Yehuda Amichai. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  University of California Press: Excerpt from “God Full of Mercy” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai edited and translated from the Hebrew by Chana Block and Stephen Mitchell, copyright © 1986, 1996, 2013 by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of University of California Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Friedlander, Omer, author.

  Title: The man who sold air in the holy land : stories / Omer Friedlander.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021033335 (print) | LCCN 2021033336 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593242971 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593242988 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.R55527 M36 2022 (print) | LCC PS3606.R55527 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021033335

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021033336

  Ebook ISBN 9780593242988

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover images: Getty Images (fruits and poppy), Shutterstock (wall)

  ep_prh_6.0_139713517_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Jaffa Oranges

  Alte Sachen

  The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

  Checkpoint

  The Sephardi Survivor

  The Sand Collector

  Scheherazade and Radio Station 97.2 Fm

  High Heels

  Jellyfish in Gaza

  Walking Shiv’ah

  The Miniaturist

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Jaffa Oranges

  We are a fruitful, many-branched, and sprawling family, ranging from Jaffa to Haifa, and our business is oranges. I will be eighty-seven at the turn of the new millennium, and I own one of the last true shamouti orange groves, where the fruit is sweet and the peel is thick. My four children—three sons and a daughter—work in finance and law, and my grandchildren—all nine of them—can’t tell the difference between a shamouti and a mandarin. From time to time, they come visit the grove in HaSharon, help pick the fruit, wrap it individually in waxed paper, and pack it in crates, which are later sold in the farmers market. I’m always reminded of a poem by Yehuda Amichai when I think of my children and my grandchildren. It’s called “Eyes,” and I know it by heart. My eldest son’s eyes are like black figs for he was born at the end of the summer. And my youngest son’s eyes are clear like orange slices, for he was born in their season. And the eyes of my little daughter are round like the first grapes. And all are sweet in my worry. And the eyes of the Lord roam the earth and my eyes are always looking round my house. God’s in the eye business and the fruit business. I’m in the worry business.

  When I stumble across the young woman wandering around the grove, I’m preparing for the spring. Since dawn, I’ve been clearing out the unripe fruit clogging the irrigation canals. I’m wearing my tembel hat, its brim hardly covering my large ears, which stick out. My movements are slower than they used to be, my bones ache. The woman, wearing a button-down blouse, billowing beige pants, and sandals, is accompanied by one of my workers, an Arab man who guards the grove, whose hands are always clean and spotless, fingernails clipped and neat. The woman does not seem surprised to see me. In fact, she’s been looking for me. She is starkly beautiful with radiant olive skin, dark, tumbling curls, and black eyes under unusually large lids. She tells me she is the granddaughter of my childhood friend Khalil Haddad, a Palestinian whose father owned one of the largest orange groves in Jaffa during the British Mandate.

  I can see the resemblance immediately in her eyes. He had the very same ones, dark as coal, heavy-lidded. I try to control my breathing, as we walk through the grove, the light golden on the plump fruit. Her hands cradle the oranges, she presses her ear to them, as if they might whisper a secret. What does she know? What has Khalil told her? My heartbeat is rapid, my hands shake. I have not spoken Khalil’s name aloud for years and years. None of my children or grandchildren know his name. The soft grass is spotted with fallen fruit, buzzing bees flit from purple lemon flowers to white lime flowers. Lilah explains that Khalil told her about me—his devoted childhood friend, his only Jewish friend—countless times. When her grandfather died several months before, she decided to come here to ask me about him. She loved him very much, but she feels like she doesn’t know much about his past in Palestine before he lived in London, before the war, before al-Nakba.

  “It wasn’t an easy trip for me,” Lilah says.

  Despite her British passport, she tells me that she was interrogated by the border control officers for hours at the airport.

  “And what did you tell them? That you were just going to talk to an old man about his oranges?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I told them. I am Palestinian, so they were suspicious.”

  I never saw Khalil after he departed with his family. So many Palestinians fled by sea and land, after the heavy bombardment of Jaffa. The port was overwhelmed with refugees crowding small boats. The Haddad family, like the other orange growers, dismantled their water pumps and deserted their grove, carrying with them only a small portion of their belongings in handcarts. Jaffa was burning, the trees in the orchard were burning, the oranges were burning, and the flames spiraled up into the sky, and for days, ash floated in the air, blanketing the abandoned city in a haze. I don’t like to think back to those moments.

  “Khalil and I packed the oranges together into crates in your great-grandfather’s orchard. We wrapped each orange individually in waxed paper.”

  I pick an orange and withdraw a pocketknife, flick the blade open. The blade glints in the sun, and I see my own face reflected in it, splotched with cancer spots and a sprinkling of veins like the rootstock of a tree. Without noticing, I’ve grown old. Rot sets quickly in an orange, infecting the entire fruit. The trick is to squeeze it firmly and listen to its sound. You can tell by the fermented smell that it’s spoiled. But the orange in the palm of my hand is young, unblemished. I dissect it, peeling the thick skin in one long curly slab, and offer her the naked fruit coated in porous, bitter white tissue.

  She eats a segment, juice spilling down her chin, and spits out a pip. “I thought Jaffa oranges were meant to be seedless,” she said.

  At the time, for a Jew like me to be friends with a Palestinian like Khalil wasn’t so strange. Under Ottoman rule, Jews and Palestinians carted sand together to make cement, toiled in orange groves and vineyards, tinkered in metalwork factories, ran seaside brothels, and oversaw the Bride of the Sea’s crown jewel, Jaffa harbor’s booming export business, fleets of cargo vessels sailing around the world, carrying citrus fruit. When Palestine changed hands, from the Ottomans to the British, my life remained mostly unchanged.

  As a child, I spent most of my time in the packinghouse with Khalil, wrapping oranges and packing them in crates. It was a good job, monotonous but not difficult. Every morning I walked with Khalil to the packinghouse, past the newspaper vendor selling copies of Falastin, and Abouelafia’s bakery, where filo pastries were baking in large stone ovens, stopping by Abu Ahmad’s, the tiny sweetshop, our favorite spot for halvah for many years before it burned down. Camels ambled lazily through Clock Square, their hooves clicking on the cobblestones. Khalil’s father and the other landowners sat under the shade of palm trees in elegant white suits, drinking coffee from small glasses.

  “Tell me about my grandfather,” Lilah says. Her voice is excited, like a little girl waiting to open a present. Her eyes—Khalil’s eyes—gleam.

  “Well, he was mischievous.”

  When we were nine, I tell her, Khalil decided to steal a camel, and he enlisted my help. The camel belonged to a rival landowner named
Nabil, a crook renowned for his temper, who humiliated his workers. Once Nabil struck a Bedouin girl who stumbled over the hem of her dress and dropped the fruit that she carried in a basket on her head. For this, Khalil wanted to punish him.

  That night, barefoot, we scaled the tall walls surrounding Nabil’s grove. The air smelled of salt and fish from the sea, citrus and orange blossoms from the land. I cut the soft flesh of my foot on a sharp brick edge, bleeding into the wall, and Khalil, already at the top, his legs swinging on either side, reached out his hand to hoist me up. The grove was pitch-black, grass long and thick, trees alive with chirping and rustling, startled birds taking flight.

  Most of Nabil’s camels were tied by the warehouse and packinghouse on the first floor. But there was one camel he prized above all, a dark-furred racing beast he kept separately. She was nicknamed Midnight, Muntasaf al-Layl. Her coat was pitch-black. We found her sitting elegantly on her own, tied to the well, aloof and mysterious. Untying her, we loosened the coarse rope around her neck, pulled and pulled, tugging with all our strength, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t make the proud beast follow our orders. She simply sat there, her long curved neck unmoving, blinking slowly at us. We yanked the rope, clucked and cursed her. Finally, Khalil stomped the ground in frustration, and she reared up, straightening her legs. She charged us, her fierce jaw snapping, drooling fat lips, crooked teeth snarling. We backed away, but she lunged at us, making a high-pitched bleating sound, then moaned loudly.

  Suddenly Nabil was beside us, dressed in his nightgown, a sheer silk robe spilling to the floor, dragging behind him on the grass. He wore nothing underneath his gown, and I could make out the shape of his body, the bulge of his belly, through the thin fabric. I thought Nabil, his face contorted in anger, would strangle us to death.

  “What stopped him from strangling you?” asked Lilah.

  “Khalil stopped him. Simply because of who he was, he could get away with a lot more than me. His father was an important man in Jaffa.”

  Despite Khalil’s family status, Nabil did take his revenge on us by dropping us into the bottom of the well. He seized our wrists, lowered us into the dark, and left us sitting in the well all night. The stone walls closed in around me, cold and wet. I couldn’t sleep, the ceaseless dripping made it impossible. I was terrified, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Khalil, who was braver than me. He kept inventing escape plans to pass the time, concocting scenarios to punish Nabil in different ways. Dangling him over a sea of carnivorous fish, feeding him to a giant squid, stuffing him inside an enormous glass bottle to float for eternity. We passed the time this way, imagining the worst possible outcomes for our captor, and eventually, in the early morning, one of the workers, a kindhearted fruit picker, who also worked on the Haddad orchard, rescued us. We promised never to tell anyone about the incident, and I have never spoken of it, not until today.

  Even though we had already been punished, we were terrified Nabil might strike the Haddad orchard. He never did, and soon enough we all had bigger things to worry about. The Jewish Communist Party printed flyers in Yiddish and Arabic calling on Zionist workers to topple the British occupiers, and organized a May Day parade through Manshiyya, a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood, waving red flags with pictures of Karl Marx. Soon they clashed with a rival Jewish Labor Party protest, and fighting erupted between the protesters and the British police. Believing that they were under attack, the Arabs began chasing Jews with wooden clubs, breaking into homes, stabbing pillowcases, scattering the feathery down across the alleyways. And the Jews took revenge, rampaging the Arab-owned businesses, smashing glass windows, ripping lace curtains, beating store owners with iron rods, and leaving trails of blood along the cold stone floors.

  “The May Day riots were the beginning of the end of the cooperation between Jews and Arabs,” I said. “Khalil and I were too young to understand the tensions that were developing, but they were very real.”

  “So, besides packing oranges, what did you do all day?”

  We liked to trick arrogant men. Khalil went to a British school in Jaffa and knew the name of every street in London before he ever set foot in it. “He had an extraordinary memory, your grandfather.” He made a bet with a local tradesman, Abdullah, for a bag of British caramels. Abdullah was convinced he knew London better than anyone in Palestine. He even affected a British accent, sometimes, when he spoke English. We heard rumors that he ate sandwiches made with buttered bread and thinly sliced cucumber. He was always sucking up to the British soldiers, getting cozy with the colonizers. We wanted those sweets more than anything in the world at the time. We were maybe thirteen years old. The bet was each time Khalil guessed a street correctly in London, we got a candy. The tradesman, having come from London, had a city map with him. One by one, Khalil named the streets correctly, mentioning their intersections and crossroads, even adding their proximity to important monuments. By the end of it, Abdullah was furious, and we had a burlap sack full of sweets.

  Lilah laughs, and I find myself smiling at the memory. I miss my friend Khalil. We loved those sweets. We ate so many of them, we were sick the next day. If I think only of those early times, I can still convince myself I deserve his friendship.

  “He did have a phenomenal memory,” Lilah says. “He never forgot a single birthday. He remembered all my friends’ names when I was growing up, and their parents’ names, too.”

  “He was also quite the ladies’ man.”

  Usually girls approached him. I remember countless times they gravitated toward him, as if by magic. All he had to do was breathe next to them, and they would start talking to him. He had an aristocratic, aquiline nose and those remarkable eyes, dark as coal, heavy-lidded. When he was twenty, he started dressing like his father in elegant suits. He also took to smoking a pipe. On anyone else, this affectation might have looked ridiculous, but Khalil had the confidence to do whatever he liked. He became the accountant for his father’s business. His incredible memory and knack for numbers gave him an advantage over most of the older men. He impressed girls with his knowledge. Give me a math equation to solve, he told them. They would tell him to multiply ten thousand three hundred and fifty-four by five thousand six hundred and thirty-one, and he would whip out the answer almost immediately, performing all the calculations in his head. I was never good with numbers, they got all jumbled in my mind. For Khalil, it was effortless.

  “No one else in my family inherited that particular skill,” Lilah says.

  “He was very inventive with his talent.”

  He caught a man stealing once. It was one of the export men, I forget his name now, who worked at the docks and was in charge of shipping the crates of oranges to their destination, in Europe or America. At the time, hundreds of thousands of orange crates were shipped from Palestine, of which tens of thousands belonged to the Haddad family. Khalil knew the number of crates his family shipped down to the last orange. The export man swindled them out of a few crates, each weighing sixty kilos and containing about five hundred oranges. It wasn’t out of the ordinary. Out of thousands and thousands of orange crates, who would notice a few missing? Khalil did. Instead of making the man pay the family back for every single orange, he cut a deal. The export man would give him an item from each shipment he sent. His ships transported cases of corks, barrels of olive oil, bottles of wine, soap, and jewels. Khalil gave away most of these items he received, either to the poor or to the girl he was seeing at the time. I remember he gave me an oval cake of lavender soap and made some dirty joke about it. The soap wasn’t particularly expensive, but I kept it as if it were made of solid gold. A gift from Khalil meant something to me. I treasured that soap, although I would never have admitted it to him at the time, but with everything going on around us, our friendship couldn’t last.

  “Did you grow apart?”

  “We did, slowly.”

  Our friendship began to unravel, I tell her, when the Arab National Committee called a general strike and an anti-Jewish boycott in Jaffa, and I lost my job. Khalil’s father fired me from the orange grove, along with the rest of the Jews. “The Arab landowners, including your great-grandfather, possessed most of the orange groves around Jaffa at the time, and they were worried about losing the citrus business. They were afraid it would all go to the Jews, who used to be their partners.” After the strike was called, there was rioting throughout the country. The Arab rioters evaded the British by barricading roads with shards of glass and nails, hiding in the maze of Old City alleyways. The rioters knew Jaffa better than anyone, and the British understood they didn’t stand a chance, so they demolished hundreds of homes. Thousands of Arab residents were given a day’s notice to evacuate, and soon all that was left was ruins.