Matt Rees's Blog, page 12

Special Promotion! 'Kissing the Dead' free 3 days ONLY

Kissing the Dead: The Revenge of a Betrayed Hamas Leader

As a special promotion I'm offering this long-form piece of journalism free until Saturday. Read about my other long-form journalism and short stories for download on amazon.

I spent months in Gaza tracking the story of Imad Akel, a Hamas military chief. Akel's brother was killed by Palestinian police. Imad's vengeance prefigured the civil war that later split his people and still divides them. This is his dramatic story. Download free to your Kindle from amazon.com in the US. Get the UK edition.

Poisonville: Song of the crooked hoboes

My Poisonville project produces music about crime fiction. Some of the songs are about my books, some about the work of greats like Chandler, and others are collaborations with contemporary writers. This is the title song of the project, the album, the band. It's based around Dashiell Hammett's first novel "Red Harvest." At the start of the book, Hammett's narrator, a detective called the Continental Op, says that he "first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey." Later, he says, he heard the name pronounced that way by people who didn't also called their shirt a "shoit." The novel shows us why Personville deserved the name. The song was co-written by The Talented David Brinn who plays the accordion. I do the rest. I aimed for a sound like a bunch of crooked hoboes playing in a Poisonville speakeasy.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/4069..." params="auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=ff7f00" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

My Caravaggio novel 'superb tale of intrigue and wrong doing'

My novel about the great Italian artist Caravaggio A Name in Blood won't be out in the UK until July 1. Still the review copies are out there and the It's a Crime blog gets in first with a very positive mention.

A Name in Blood is a superb tale of intrigue and wrong doing in Renaissance Italy from Matt Rees, author of the award winning Omar Yussef crime series.

There's also love and art in the novel. But I'm happy for a crime blog to pick up on the intrigue and wrong doing!

Poisonville: Crime Fiction Music Podcats

The only thing as evocative as a good noir crime novel is music. So, I thought, how about making an album of music about crime fiction? That’s what I’ve done and I unveil it here. The project’s called Poisonville, after the mispronounced location of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel “Red Harvest.” (The place was really called Personville, but Hammett’s Op learns that people call it Poisonville for a reason.) You can listen to the songs free on my website. Share them. I found it inspiring to work on these songs. You’ll see the styles vary from industrial to rock to funk to the sound of hoboes in a speakeasy, as well as my impersonations of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

Download the Podcast: (Download the MP3)
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Poisonville: the Music of Crime Fiction

The only thing as evocative as a good noir crime novel is music. So, I thought, how about making an album of music about crime fiction? That’s what I’ve done and I’m unveiling it here.

The project's called Poisonville, after the mispronounced location of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel “Red Harvest.” (The place was really called Personville, but Hammett’s Op learns that people call it Poisonville for a reason.)

You can listen to the songs free on my website. I hope you’ll share them. I’ve found it inspiring to work on these songs. You’ll see the styles vary from industrial to rock to funk to the sound of hoboes in a speakeasy, as well as my impersonations of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

Here’s the idea behind Poisonville: I’ve been in bands for many years, playing various instruments. But I have a newish baby and I don’t want to stay out late performing, because I need all the sleep I can get! So I created a studio – I call it Big Pink Oboe Studio. Not because I play the oboe. The pink oboe is an old Spike Milligan euphemism for an excitable part of the male anatomy. I also revived my old stage persona: when I was in an alternative band in New York in the 1990s, I was Napoleon Blownapart. (The band was Money Shot, which those of you with any knowledge of porno parlance will understand and also gives you and idea of the sort of gig we used to do.) The name gets me into the right head for music.

And so into the studio I went, writing songs about my own books and songs about books I love (by Hammett and Chandler). I perform most of the instruments, with a little help from The Talented David Brinn (which is the stage name of my pal David Brinn, in case you’re wondering) and The Lovely Jasmine Schwartz (which is the name in her passport, you should know.)

I’ve also written songs with a couple of crime authors: Jasmine Schwartz, whose fabulous Neurotic Detective series will be out in a few months, and Helen Fitzgerald, the Australian writer of the sexiest crime novels around. You can hear these writers reading a line or two from their books during the course of the songs.

Jasmine and Helen both wrote lyrics about their books, which I set to music. I’m intending to do the same thing with some other favorite writers of mine in the coming months. If you think there are crime writers I ought to get on board (because they’ve written books that’d work well in a musical setting), let me know.

You’ve probably stolen music on the web, even if the music wasn’t about crime. Poisonville’s crime fiction music is your chance to listen free – without being a criminal.

My Los Angeles

Eric, the scion of a soap fortune, pressed the "Wolf kills visitor" button inside the entrance of his Malibu beach-house. Outside his front door, I heard the approaching growls of an angry hound; a hatch opened and out sprang the three-foot neck of a blue-haired, red-eyed, mechanised wolf, drooling viciously over the welcome mat.
"That's cool," said Eric's friends. Eric smiled and led me inside to his pool, where, he said, there was a monster.
"It's down this end," he said. As I peered at the cartoon mermaids on the pool's floor, a Freddie Kruger model jumped up behind me and sprayed a jet of cold water down my back.
"I got you pretty good," Eric said, shaking my hand. A tanned girl in a bikini looked up from her deck chair and smiled, as if she'd seen this all before. I went out onto the veranda to watch Nicholas Cage playing in the sand with some children and a chubby blonde in shiny black-plastic trousers. The move star was without his toupee.
Los Angeles is full of the outrageously banal, the irresistibly empty, like Eric's $12 million home. Still, it's somehow one of America's most attractive cities, striving after substance in an instant kind of way, just as everyone here seems to feel they're only moments away from status and recognition in the entertainment business.
The city's most expensive shops, on Rodeo Drive and Via Rodeo, all decorate their windows with tastefully printed poetry by "y.o." -- none other than the artfully inane Yoko Ono. As Yoko orientalised about "following footprints in the sand / in the water," it seemed Los Angeles was the perfect place for her words. Only here could shopkeepers imagine a use for this most insubstantial of art, hyped and unread, as a way to make the act of consuming somehow more thoughtful, more deep. Just as most of Hollywood's movies are about dollar signs more than creativity. (At Universal Studios, tourists watch the less than terrifying spoutings of a mechanical shark and are told they've "survived Jaws, brought to you by Ocean Spray," a brand of cranberry juice.)
There's a conglomeration of ideologies in Los Angeles, as if it formulated its thoughts through the smog that hangs over the San Fernando valley, blurring the stripes of spinach-green foliage on the khaki hillsides. Like a radio that can switch bands instantly from AM talk shows to an FM rock station, Los Angeles is the ultimate American city, always seeking its next gig, hovering on the edge of the country. It threatens to break off in a techtonic cataclysm and fall into the Pacific, glimmering beneath the mountains along the coast road. The hip melange is there to greet you at LAX, the airport, where Hare Krishnas eschew their telltale robes and lure you into conversation with a high five from behind baseball caps and baggy homeboy jeans.
In a play I saw by one of Los Angeles' hottest new writers, Thomas M. Kostigen, a young man is described by his girlfriend: "He's thoughtful, but he's not thought-through." That's Los Angeles. And perhaps it took a Boston transplant like Kostigen to see it.
Los Angeles is no ardent, committed city of anger, like New York, with its downtown activists handing out needles to junkies, and arrogant Wall Streeters, crisp and one-dimensional in Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. It's no Frenchified town of think-tank pseudo-intellectuals like Washington D.C., and its snobbery can't compare to Boston's more desiccated variety.
In this city, they believe anything can be dressed up like a dream with a little cash, whether it's the backlot at Universal or a fat girl. An Argentinian who runs a West Hollywood salon selling extravagantly beaded wedding dresses for as much as $18,000 mimed the act of forcing fat into a
brace of petticoats and sneered at his customers. "They come in and think we can make them look like Cinderella. Well, for 90 percent of them, it just ain't gonna happen."
There's a danger in the dream, too, something of a nightmare quiet and smoothness, like riding in an air-conditioned Mercedes (leased not bought, of course, as most cars here are) through the shadows of the inner city. The riots of 1992 that wrecked South Central L.A. in the wake of the Rodney King trial showed how keyed the rest of America is to Los Angeles. The shock spread throughout the country. Even imperturbably ballsy New Yorkers called each other frantically with reports of shots fired at aeroplanes taking off from J.F.K. airport and massed blacks marching down from Harlem to pillage the Upper West Side.
That tension remains in Venice Beach, home to hippies and drug freaks, the place that spawned Jim Morrison. As tanned rollerbladers wind in their own Walkman-worlds down the path that twists along the beach, they're watched by crowds of blacks, milling about the cheap T-shirt stores and bargain shoe shops along the front.
A spray of cold water doused the back of my neck and I turned to see a seven-year-old black girl with a plastic cup in her hand run to her family, which giggled at her prank. I felt like a ringleted Jew strolling through the car-park outside a Nuremburg rally, waiting for the joking to turn harsher and, in the meanwhile, a game target.
A group of Black Hebrews stood in ranks between the rollerbladers and the crowded strip. A dozen black men in bright, satin turbans, they read from the Bible. One of them held a six-foot Star of David; another held a placard that listed the 12 tribes of Israel, redubbing them the 12 tribes of negroids. "Jesus was a black man," read one of their T-shirts.
Their leader, incongruously attired for the beach in the black, grey and white of arctic combat fatigues, held his microphone to the mouth of his acolyte reading a line from the Bible. Then he banged out his interpretation of the biblical verse with the venom of a rap song.
"That mean the white man and the white woman, the white race has done all that's evil; they are evil. He's oppressed and killed and raped and maimed. When the white man dropped the atomic bomb on the so-called Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they shall reap that destruction, that's what that says there. That means all this, this crap -- " he waved an arm along the beach, left and right, taking in all of Los Angeles "-- is going to get wiped out. Read!"
The reader stumbled over the words "perpetual destruction." "Say what?" the leader said into his microphone. Then he gave up and pulled in the man with the Star of David to read instead.
With his clothing and imagery, the Israelite could have been a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh, or a corporal in the U.S Army -- just about anything except a so-called Japanese, in fact. Thought-through? Whatever, it looked good to him. He had to live in L.A., after all, until the crap was destroyed.
Yet the ideological confusion is one of Los Angeles' most engaging qualities for any visitor, because it's the muddleheadedness of those who are at least striving to figure it all out, to understand what they want. Like the bearded Harley Davidson rider rolling along La Cienega Boulevard, long hair flying from under his helmet. His bike bore the traditional Harley motto: "Live to ride." Below was a second slogan, of high-speed recovery: "Ride to live sober." Kick some of your dangerous habits -- just some of them.
I heard that same tone, confidently doubtful of its own effectiveness, in the voice of a man in the pool at the Jewish Community Center in West Hollywood. He couldn't stop talking about the muscle-relaxants he was taking for a firmer erection and the stool-softeners he hoped would cure his constipation. There's a solution for everything, but, if it doesn't work out, find a new guru, or a new pharmacist. Or a new producer.
A casting agent who works at MCA talked about the city's Museum of Tolerance, where displays on the Holocaust stand beside exhibits on racism in America's old south. "It makes you think," she breezed. "But that doesn't last."
In fact, Los Angeles' apparent vapidity brings with it an inverted snobbery of superficiality. Every time I suggested to Angelenos that their city is a pleasant place to be and, maybe, to live, they pounced on the chance to show how they'd seen through it all. "Oh, but it's really superficial," they'd say. And you'd have to be deep to see just how superficial everyone else is, wouldn't you. See what I mean?
Perhaps you can't think too much, when that might mean facing up to the idea that success isn't just round the corner. At a party thrown in a gigantic Italian restaurant by one of the city's biggest acting agencies, the Dolce & Gabana suits spoke of wealth. But few of those at the party were agents; most were struggling actors, trying to persuade those agents to take them on as clients, or they were clients eager for the agents to send them to better auditions.
"They're not actors," said my friend Avital, a successful stage and film actress with an Israeli Oscar under her belt who's trying to get ahead in Hollywood. "But they have to face so much rejection, they've got to really love something about what they do."
When I left the party, a slicked-down 26-year-old was trying to persuade the man with the guest list that he was supposed to have been invited. He was the same hopeful who'd been badgering the host when I arrived two hours before.
And rejection can come quickly, just like success. Jeffrey, a transplanted New Yorker with a trim grey beard and a collarless Armani shirt, told me about his plans for the modelling agency he founded 10 years ago. "I want to take over a bunch of small, Mom'n'Pop agencies," he said. I couldn't imagine Mom and Pop mixing with Hollywood's top models, and perhaps the people who now ran Jeffrey's agency couldn't either: three days later Jeffrey handed in his notice. When a friend learned Jeffrey had resigned from the agency, she said: "Again?"
Back at Eric's Malibu beach-house, I walked out along the private road and passed a minor film star I vaguely remembered from a role in some kind of comic vampire film. "Isn't that...uh?" I asked my friend.
"In this town, you see a lot of people who are someone, but you don't remember their names," my friend said. "In a while, no one else will, either."

FREE Arab Spring short story: The Sweetest Things

A year ago I wrote the first of a projected series of short stories set against the backdrop of the "Arab Spring." It got a terrific response -- and the version I posted as a Podcast had quite a few downloads in Syria. Here's the second of the stories. Like the other, I've also posted it for download to Amazon's Kindle. (You can see my other short fiction and long-form journalism for download here.)

The Sweetest Things

By Matt Rees

When I entered the shop, the storekeeper was smoking a cigarette in a ’Seventies chrome chair beside the baklava trays and watching the riots on a small television. He sprang to his feet with a smile as generous as his heavy belly.
“Said Ihab Said,” said Said. “That’s my name: Said I. Said. What do you say?”
“Tsharrafna. Pleased to meet you, Said.”
Delighted with himself, he persisted with his joke. “Say! And I’m pleased to make your acquaintance also. Mister…?”
“Swallow. Tom Swallow.”
Said bowed and gestured to the only table in the tiny store. He spoke in Arabic to the frail, old man with the white mustache who stood with his hand in the small of his back in the open shop-front. The old man filled a plate with pastries from the metal cases inside the store and from the wide platters that balanced on copper heating-barrels in the shop’s entrance on King Faisal Street.
“We shall show you the best of Amman’s sweets here.” Said poured a glass of water from a stainless steel jug. “You must drink to keep your mouth moist and enjoy the sweets. People always are stuffing their faces. They forget that the sweetest things are hard to swallow.”
I sipped the water, which was lukewarm. I tasted dust. The feet of the rioters had raised it from the street and it had settled on my lip. Now I swallowed it.
The old man set the plate down before me.
Said extended a stubby finger over the food. “Here we have qanafeh, which is made with sweet cheese and syrup. This pastry is called Syria’s dates. And here is kol woshkor, which means ‘Eat it and thank God.’”
“They look wonderful.”
Said flattened his hand and moved it toward my mouth as though it held one of the sweets and he would feed me with it. He beamed a smile as I ate. I told him the sweets were the best I had tasted. He pointed to the water glass. “Don’t forget,” he said.
“I’d like a coffee, if you have any,” I said, though I knew shops like this never sold coffee. The owners were always too hospitable to refuse me, as if I had been accepted into their home, rather than their place of business.
“Of course.” Said spoke quickly to the old man, who shuffled out of the shop. “This is your first time in Amman?”
“No. But I just came here to live. And to work.”
“Ahlan wa-sahlan. Welcome in Jordan.”
“Ahlan fik. Thank you.”
“Ahlan, ahlan. It is good that people should come from abroad to Amman. The people here are a good people, but people who come from abroad will keep them that way,” said Said. “I have a maid from the Philippines. If I had a maid from Amman, she would cheat me, but this maid from the Philippines is honest and respectful. And so I am honest and respectful to her. This is good for me. You’re here for work, you say. What is it you do?”
“I’m a reporter, a sahafi. For some newspapers in America and Britain.”

“Ah, America,” said Said. “I lived for ten years in New York. I have an export business.”
“You sold the business to buy this shop?”
This was evidently a very funny question, because Said laughed and slapped his leg and patted my shoulder across the table. “You’re here because of all the trouble?”
“The Arab Spring.”
Said rolled his head side to side and gazed into the street with a wistful expression. “You still call it that?”
“I just now went to watch the riots.”
“There are many Syrians and Iraqis here these days. Refugees from the violence of their own countries. They are the ones who make the trouble here in Jordan.”
“I spoke to some Jordanians there.”
Said nodded and smiled as though I had agreed with him. The old man came back with a coffee pot and a tiny cup balanced on a copper tray. For his benefit, Said repeated my question about selling his business in America. The old man poured the qahweh from the battered, long-handled urn and said something to Said in a high voice that sounded as if it had been sandpapered.
“He says maybe we’ll sell you this shop for a million dinars. This is more than a million dollars, you understand.” Said laughed, and the old man rasped a laugh, too. “He is to joke.”
I smiled and took the small coffee cup. The coffee was thick and grainy and good.
“No, Mr. Swallow, he is to joke, because my father owned this shop until he died and it was only the start of my business interests. I keep it open now just to provide a job for Hamad, who is here since my father owned the place.” He said something in Arabic that was too fast for me to follow. He spoke in a harsh tone and the old man waved a hand in acknowledgement and limped back to stand in the sun at the doorway. He put his hands in the pockets of his grey flannels and rocked his hips back and forth.
“The money I make here is nothing.” Said hissed. His lips lifted his thick, grey mustache at both ends as though there were a truly bad smell in the shop. I smelled nothing but sugar, syrup, and the remains of Said’s Egyptian cigarette. “I started here and now have a big business to export sweets like these, but in mass-production form. I have a factory in the north, in Irbid, and also in Elizabeth, New Jersey. You know this place?”
“I’ve been through there on the train, I guess. But I was in Irbid last week. Riots there, too.”
“It’s better to call them protests, not riots, Tom.” Said looked about him for prying ears, as if the shop were not deserted. “Anyhow, do you think the owner of a shop like this would have a mansion in Abdoun? This I have. You know Abdoun?”
Certainly, I knew Abdoun. It was on a hill in the south of Amman. The villas were built in bleached, sandy bricks that were molded to look like unfinished stone. They had extravagant picture-windows and stood in the middle of small, lush gardens with high fences. The Western countries had their neat, modern embassy compounds there. I had been to a dinner in Abdoun a few days before at the home of a Palestinian executive in the Arab Bank. All the guests sat in upright chairs around the edge of the reception room, as if it were a Bedouin tent. Every newcomer had to walk the perimeter shaking hands with everyone else. It took a long time. I wanted to scream with boredom. The rest of the evening was still less entertaining. Panic made the rich Arabs preoccupied and duller than usual. They could think of nothing but the riots down near the ancient Roman amphitheater, but they refused to say anything of interest about it. I’d been in the Middle East long enough to recognize the censorship that grips the tongue of anyone with enough to lose. They weren’t stupid; they knew what was happening. But they feared more than just a change of government. If the chaos swelled out of the valley and up into their district, they could find themselves beaten and gutted on their marble doorsteps.
“Everybody in Jordan who is important lives in Abdoun, except the king,” said Said. “Your newspaper pays for a house in Abdoun?”
“I don’t have that kind of arrangement,” I said. “I’m freelance. My newspapers don’t have a lot of money these days. I live in Jabal Amman.”
“Come to my house. You will see Abdoun. My maid will give you a good time.”
I choked on a piece of shredded, sugared wheat bound in a tube around a pistachio paste. Said handed me the glass of water and laughed.

“I told you, Mister Swallow. The sweetest things are hard to swallow.”
Said refused to let me pay for the sweets or for the coffee. “Did I show you a good time?” he asked.
I agreed that he had. Then I left, promising to see him at his place in Abdoun.
Over the following month I spent many evenings at his home. His driver would pick me up at my apartment on Othman bin-Affan. The driver always looked at the house and then at me with incomprehension and suspicion, as though I must be living in such insalubrious quarters for some clandestine purpose. Foreigners were supposed to live in Abdoun. My street was narrow and its houses were slathered along the side of the hill like the other neighborhoods overlooking the mosques downtown. My neighbors were neither rich nor poor. The shopkeeper on the corner was always reluctant to change even a five dinar note that was worth about eight dollars.
Said’s driver had been born in Syria. He had a thin black beard and was about 24 years old. He kept his wife and children in two rooms on Jabal al-Alqalaa, the hill opposite where I lived, downslope from the ruined citadel of Marcus Aurelius. It was a rotten place, he said, but the air was good because it was high on the hill. He told me Abdoun was a rotten place, as he drove me there. It was corrupted by Westerners and their money.
“Look,” he said, as we crossed the strange modernist span of the Abdoun bridge. “Do you see the minaret of a single mosque?”
Outside the walls of the luxurious villas, Abdoun was barren. The empty roads were three times as wide as elsewhere in the city and the empty lots between the villas had been churned by construction into ragged stretches of dirt and stone. The place had a desolate quality, despite its luxury. The houses fought against some force more powerful than them, like air-conditioning in the desert valleys of Wadi Rum. It always seemed to be a burning noontime in Abdoun.
The driver was called Nidal and I soon saw that he provided sex for Said. Said was by inclination and training someone who liked to look after other people. Nidal knew it and he would sit languidly in a puffy, square armchair in Said’s big, glittering living room watching Western television channels, as Said fussed over him and giggled and told his maid, Teresa, to bring plates of sweets from the kitchen.
I did not like Nidal for the two-faced Islamic contempt he showed for Abdoun and the arrogant way in which he demanded things from Said and sometimes flirted with him, girlishly. I liked Teresa, but Nidal was never anything less than vicious to her.
One night, we were sitting in front of Said’s enormous television, watching reports of a new massacre in Syria. Nidal came from the bathroom, zipping up his pants. He clicked his tongue, picked up the remote from the glass coffee table, and switched to a game of soccer. The players of the Jordanian national team were being made to look foolish by the Chinese. Nidal read the scoreline, clicked his tongue again, and tossed down the remote. He wiggled his eyebrows at Said and slouched back to the bathroom. A few moments later, Said lit a cigarette and got up to follow him, pulling at the end of his mustache.
I flipped through the channels. When I got to the Jordanian government station, the soccer was over. Each night, the Jordanians ended their broadcasts by showing King Abdullah in some ceremony that had gone on that day. This time he was wearing combat fatigues and a black beret and reviewing his troops. The soldiers were thin and had narrow hips. Abdullah saluted them, his pursed lips moist and red in his scraggy beard. He looked cruel and sybaritic, not like a killer but like a bedroom sadist.
Someone turned on the shower in the bathroom. I turned up the volume on the television and watched a discordant marching band pass the king. Teresa came out of the kitchen to collect the empty coffee cups. I talked to her in Spanish for a while and she told me about her six-year-old daughter who lived with her sister in Manila. She went back to the kitchen and I walked out of the French doors onto Said’s terrace.
Amman was laid out below me along a dog-leg valley. The blue lights in the city’s windows ascended the steep hillsides. A single green band ringed the top of the minarets. There were mosques in the center of the valley and all along the ridges of the mountains. It was quieter here than in Cairo or Jerusalem, because the city had little claim on the hearts of anyone, except some of those who lived there. It didn’t call attention to itself, and that allowed you to see how beautiful it really was. I remembered it before the Iraq war filled it with refugees and Gulf money created a gaudy building boom. It hadn’t been an innocent place, because the proximity of thirst and death remained in the blood of its inhabitants, so recently come from the tenuous existence of the deserts. But it had possessed a simplicity that I had liked. I shook my head. I was nostalgic about this place where I was entirely an alien, but I remembered almost nothing of my own hometown.
Said bustled out onto the terrace, tucking his shirt into his pants. He was excited and spoke quickly. His face was bright and fresh, even under the heavy moustache and the bald head and fat jowls.
“Mister Tom, I am sorry to neglect you like this.” Said gestured toward Nidal and squeezed his fingertips together, as though he held the young man’s chin. “This is such a cheeky one.”
Nidal leaned against the door frame, smoking and looking smug. I didn’t like Nidal, but I was glad that Said showed his friendship by letting me in on the secret of their relationship.
“You must be hungry,” Said said. He clapped and told Teresa to bring some desserts.
She came out to the terrace with a tray of sweets and coffee. She wore a red and yellow sarong and a tight tee-shirt. Her skin was raddled on the cheeks. I thought about her daughter.
Nidal regarded the maid with disgust. He walked to the edge of the terrace and threw his cigarette into the empty lot below. He looked at Said with narrowed eyes and then gazed out toward the hill where his wife and children already would be asleep.
Said noticed Nidal’s sneer. He told Teresa to clean up the bathroom, where there was now a mess. Teresa withdrew with her head and her back bent. Said started to bother Nidal like a worried mother. Nidal, it seemed, did not like the way the maid was dressed and Said was defending it, because this was the way the maid had always dressed.

Their argument became heated. I pretended to be preoccupied by the desserts and the coffee on the table. From where I sat, I could look all the way through the living room to the kitchen. Teresa was not cleaning the bathroom. She sat on a stool in the kitchen with her hands in her lap, looking at the floor.
Said laid his hand on Nidal’s chest, stroking and murmuring soothing words. Nidal pushed him away, looking in my direction. I raised my hands in a gesture of relinquishment. Did he think I hadn’t noticed what went on between him and Said? I wanted him to know it didn’t matter to me. Then Nidal pushed Said’s shoulders and rushed past him. He turned in the doors and shouted. “You can have your little whore and live with her, not me. It will be two women together.”
“Habibi, please stay. I will make you happy.” Said called over the balcony as Nidal went to his car. “Haven’t I always promised you, I will make you happy?”
The maid sat just where she had been. Nidal’s car pulled away fast on the road outside. Said smiled at me with wide, wet eyes, wiping his nose and his mustache with his hand.
“I am sorry, Mister Tom,” he said. “I am a foolish old man. Please, eat some qanafeh.”
“I’ve just had some.” I didn’t feel too sympathetic toward Said then, and I was sorry for that later. “What’s his problem? Is he jealous?”
Said pushed out his lips. “I think, a little, but not in the way you think. He says I should not be alone in the house with a woman when we are both not married. This is ridiculous of course, because I...well, I am not of her persuasion, as you say. She is here for entirely different reasons.”
Though it wasn’t new to me, it seemed strange then that Nidal, who chauffeured Western diplomats of both sexes and who was the catamite of a wealthy merchant, would have such strong religious views. Perhaps his opinions and the exigencies of his situation conflicted and his guilt at this compromise made him angry.
“You should hear him, Mister Tom,” said Said. “He blames everybody. He blames the Jews and the American president, he blames the king and Bashar al-Asad, he blames his wife and his sons and his mother and father. He blames the weather.”
“Does he blame you?”
“No, no, no. I know that he loves me.”
The next day I was listless and bored. I had stopped bothering to attend the demonstrations down by the Husseini Mosque, just as I had recently stopped referring to the events of the last year as “the Arab Spring.” But the afternoon stretched before me, as empty as the long, flat road out toward Baghdad, and so I took a taxi downtown. There were a few hundred demonstrators at the main crossroads under the rough Ottoman walls of the mosque. They wore mustaches and loud shirts and polyester trousers. At the rear of the crowd, where I stood, they loitered, joking and smoking cheap cigarettes, while they waited for things to get going. Up at the front, there was chanting and a few rows of riot police in white helmets and thickly padded bodysuits.

At some signal that was not apparent to me, the men outside the mosque crowded in around a couple of men whose faces were covered by checkered keffiyehs. The show was starting. They burned the Stars and Stripes, then they burned an Israeli flag. They burned a Syrian flag. Someone had a Jordanian flag and they might have thought of setting it on fire, too, but on this particular day they were dissuaded by the presence of the riot police. They waved it, instead.
The anger at the front of the demonstration dissipated as it rippled with diminishing force to the back of the crowd. If this had been Syria, they’d have been dead or running by now, and the knowledge that they were getting off easily seemed to drain the crowd of its energy. They looked and dressed like Nidal. Perhaps he, too, was angry because he had no one at whom he could throw stones who wouldn’t also be able to destroy him if they wished. A man came by me yelling about the killing in Syria. He beat his palms against his forehead and his voice was hoarse. His eyes were dry, but he wailed like a man racked by grief. He was calling out for aid from the world, to the UN and the US and the European Union and the Arab states. The first time I had seen such a scene it made a big impression. Then I had understood that he was operating from a script of victimhood in which all responsibility for his failings and the failings of his people was shifted to the inaction of big, faceless international bodies.
I went home. The phone was ringing when I opened the door. Teresa told me that Said was dead. She sounded scared, so I took a cab over to Abdoun.
The mahogany front door of Said’s house was open and the sound of oud music came out into the stillness and heat of the late afternoon. Inside, Nidal lay on the sofa, smoking and eating a deep-fried roll called Palace Bread. He smiled and waved.
“Come in, Tom. Sit. Welcome.”
Nidal lowered the volume of the oud music by remote control. I asked him what had happened to Said and his expression grew grave. He sat upright and looked at his hands as he told me about Said’s death. “It is very, very sad. He chokes to death eating a bowl of Umm Ali. A pudding with milk and fruit. It was from his factory.”
“Where did he die?”
“Here in this room. I was here, but I was in the bathroom and the maid is in the kitchen. And I hear him coughing but I think it is him laughing at the television, because this is how he laughs.” He hacked out a noise half way between a giggle and a choke. “Like this. And when I come, he is purple in his face and his head is back and he is dead with his mouth wide open.”
Nidal held his head. I heard him squeeze out a sob and then he was hammering his hands into his brow. It was the fakery of the demonstrator outside the mosque and I understood that he had put paid to Said. I wondered if he had learned to lie from the transparent fabrications of Arab politics, or if the demonstrators merely employed the melodramatic manipulations of hagglers in the souk. I was sorry for my friend, but I did not want to seem moved in the presence of Nidal, so I spoke to hide the fact that I was upset.
“What will you do now?”
Nidal looked horrified, as though I were offering to take the place of Said as his lover and benefactor. “There is no need for your help, Tom. Said says to me many, many times that he leaves in his will everything for me. It is very sad that he dies, but in his memory I will make this house a place of God and cleanness.”
I knew what that meant for Teresa. The serene expression on Nidal’s face made me sick. I went out to the kitchen. Teresa had a big bruise on her cheek. I told her to pack a bag. Nidal lifted his nose as she sloped past him.
I took Teresa back to my apartment. That night, I heard her crying in the other bedroom, quiet sobs like the intake of breath made by someone who has food in their mouth that is too hot.
In the morning, Teresa got up when the muezzins made their dawn chorus. I slept on another three hours, as usual. The terrible thing was that I always came half awake when the call to prayer sounded from all the minaret loudspeakers and echoed around the valley in its lingering baritones and whining tenors. I would go back to sleep, but inevitably I dreamed about the muezzins and their disturbing, nightmarish sound. It made me wake up nervous and less rested than I should have been. That day, I came awake suddenly in a sweat. I heard Teresa singing softly in the kitchen and that made me feel calmer.
I showered and went to the kitchen. Teresa was wearing her sarong and a tight T-shirt. She looked small and pretty and her wide face was smiling, even though she had been crying all night. She gave me coffee and sweets, but I told her in Spanish that I only ate toast and marmalade at breakfast. I told her that if she stayed with me she might send for her daughter to come and live with her.
I was reading the newspaper and Teresa was by the sink washing plates, when she froze. I went to the window and saw Nidal leaping up the steps to my gate. His eyes were very wide and white in his dark face. He was steaming. Had I not known him better, I’d have thought that the grief of Said’s death had somehow hit him with a delay.
I went out to meet him as he came through the gate. I was casually eating a piece of toast. I wished him good morning. This made him apoplectic. He looked beyond me and demanded to know where Teresa was.
“She’s inside,” I said.
“I must talk to her.”
“I warn you, she’s wearing her sarong. You don’t want you to pollute yourself, Sheikh.”
“What?” He realized I was making fun of him. “No, I must talk to her. There has been a terrible injustice. This is not right.”
He tried to go past me, but I stopped him with a hand on his chest. He hit me, but he was off balance, so he only caught my shoulder. I stepped back and pushed him against the bars of the gate. He slipped down onto his haunches.
“What’s gotten into you?” I said.
“That whore.” He repeated the words until I moved toward him as if to throw him out. Then he told me what had happened.
Nidal had gone early to Said’s lawyer on First Circle near the British Council. The lawyer showed him Said’s will. Said had left his house and all his businesses here and in America to Teresa. Nidal was bequeathed the tiny sweet shop downtown by the Husseini Mosque where I had first met Said. The will obliged him to employ old Hamad.

I laughed with an unaccustomed freedom. Nidal yelled for me to shut up. I told him not to be so angry. “Your life’ll still be better than it would if you’d gone on driving a taxi and sleeping with an overweight sweet-manufacturer. One day, perhaps your son will have a business like Said and a big house in Abdoun.”

“This is mine, this house in Abdoun, Said’s house and all his other wealth.” Nidal shouted toward my apartment, cursing Teresa. “Fuck your mother’s cunt, you whore.”
I advanced a step and he ran down the stairs with a very sour look on his face. I watched his taxi pull away from the bottom of the steps and I went inside. I remembered that Said had told me how hard it was to swallow the sweetest things. I thought that the taste of too much sweetness is really the same as the taste of sickness, but that just a little sweetness would linger in your mouth a long time and give you a chance to savor how sweet it was. Then I thought of the life Teresa had led until now.
I went into the kitchen. Teresa was sitting on a stool again with her small feet together. Her hands were linked on her lap and her head was lowered. I walked over to her. Smiling, I put my finger under her chin and lifted it.

(c) Matt Rees, 2012

Untold Mideast: Get the real story

I'm unveiling the first five in a new series of long-form journalistic pieces called "Untold Mideast." They're available for download to amazon.com's Kindle and will soon be part of the Kindle Singles program. If you have a Kindle, you can also borrow them from the Amazon Select library program. Untold Mideast presents long-form nonfiction that reveals Israelis and Palestinians as you don't see them in regular news reports or conventional nonfiction. These initial pieces tell stories about mentally ill Holocaust survivors, a betrayed Hamas leader, Israeli musicians, disgruntled PLO military chiefs and a very different take on the story of settlers and Israel's leftists. See all five pieces here, as well as my Omar Yussef short story "Damascus Trance," already available on Kindle. There'll be more "Untold Mideast" pieces coming as the year progresses, but these five are to get things going. Don't forget to write a review on amazon.

My Second Wife Predicts a Third

I write crime fiction. So here’s a mystery for you: Does anyone know an attractive young woman whose name is Wigoda? She might be my future third wife. That’s my second wife’s prediction, after all.

Like many good mysteries, this one is historical. It’s also linked to the Holocaust.

Perhaps my mind turned to this subject because today is Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, from whence I’m writing. This morning a siren will sound. Everyone will stop what they’re doing and stand in silence, whether driving or working (or, as once happened to me, weeping in a therapy session, when the therapist suddenly ignored my grief and got to her feet). When the siren sounds, I usually think: how the hell did a fellow from South Wales get here?

Of course, it was for love – of my first wife – that I came to Jerusalem. But how do I know my future wife’s name? And why do I wonder about that on such a nominally sad occasion?

The Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, constructed a new building a few years ago. The very first display is about a group of Lithuanian Jews who were killed by local Nazis early in the war. Murdered on the street. The display case includes some of their personal effects. The contents of each man’s wallet.

The first man’s identity card shows that his name was Shabtai Pruszan. Pruszan was the name of my first wife’s family before they got to Ellis Island. Not a common name. When I visited the museum the first time, I wondered at this coincidence.

My eyes drifted on to the next victim. His identity card listed him as Shabtai Blachor. More than a coincidence, I thought. That’s the family name of my second wife. Certainly not a common name, nor a common spelling. In fact there are less than a dozen of them in the whole U.S.

I told my wife about this when I got home from the museum. With a note of humor and a hint of suspicion, she asked: “What was the next victim’s name?”

Perhaps unconsciously I had noted that victim number three was named Wigoda. I mentioned this to my wife.

On the ground floor of our building, there’s a family named Wigoda. They have a married daughter. But you never know… She’s quite cute. My wife refers to her as my next wife.

“Wow,” said the present Mrs Rees. “For a guy from Wales, you’ve really entered the Jewish vortex when you’ve been married to the first two names to hit you in the face in Yad Vashem.”

So, gentle readers, I turn to you for a resolution to this mystery. My wife expects me to head down to the ground floor for my third wife. Or perhaps I’ll meet her when the Holocaust Memorial siren brings everyone to their feet today? Surely there’s some attractive Wigoda woman out there who’s prepared to wait it out until somehow I become available?

Suggestions please.

Staying Home

I haven’t been to the airport at Tel Aviv for precisely a year. I’ve gone down from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv perhaps four times in that year. I’ve tooled around the West Bank a little. And that’s it.

I’ve spent almost the entire last year in one city. Quite a place, of course: Jerusalem. But not a place with great opera or art galleries or even particularly fine dining. No marijuana cafes or idyllic vineyards or tapas bars. No beach, no girls in string bikinis. No Tuscany. None of the things that attract me when I do travel. I’ve seen all the sights and, well, let’s forget about the politics….

I’ll get to what prompted my stay-at-home year later. First let me tell you it’s great for one’s writing to be in one place.

Some writers would disagree. I suppose I used to be one. I was taken with Paul Bowles’ idea of traveling as he wrote and incorporating into his writing on Tuesday something that happened on the road on Monday. It’s a method I think works well for a while.

But travel isn’t always conducive to concentration. When I used to zip around Europe for book tours and festivals, I found it was almost entirely a creative blank. It was relaxing – because I didn’t take my kids with me – and that’s not to be sniffed at, as anybody relishing a lie-in at the Leipzig Penta Hotel after a few years of waking to the sound of little feet by the bed would tell you. Still it’s when I was at home and could have an undisturbed, routine day that I found my ideas came.

Ideas, and the undistracted hours in front of the computer putting digital pen to paper.

So a year ago, when my wife was five months pregnant with our daughter Mari, I decided to quit the road. With the arrival of the baby, it became evident that it wasn’t only book tours that had bitten the dust but recreational travel too. I didn’t mind a bit — and we used to go every three months to Italy, as well as visits elsewhere and back to the US and UK to see family.

I was happy to be in the house. Every night. I only go out to my yoga classes (admittedly that’s five times a week), to walk my son to and from school, to roll my daughter around the park, and to attend a bimonthly confab at a Jerusalem café with a pal of mine who edits The Jerusalem Report and gathers interesting types to celebrate the printing of each issue.

I think this has changed my writing somewhat, too. I’m more contented with the result of the writing, but in particular I enjoy the doing of it very much more, as well.

It could be that this contentment is less to do with the writing process and more the fact that my four year old son doesn’t feel insecure about Daddy’s forthcoming trip (because there isn’t one) and therefore doesn’t act up…much. A happy little boy makes for a happy household, that’s been my observation of late. (And when he’s not happy, oh my God…)

This weekend we’re off to Greece to escape the Passover holiday in Jerusalem. It’s a lot of money to pay just so we can be in a place where it’s possible to buy bread. But it’ll be worth it. I’m excited about travel for a change.

I almost forgot what the airport looks like.