Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim-Jewish Love Story. Robert A. Rosenstone
hardly wait. The masjid there is one of the wonders of our world. So’s the Alhambra, but we’re not showing in Granada. Another place I want to visit is Medina al Zahara. Have you ever been there?
My mind is a huge blank.
I’ve heard the name, I say, but . . . I don’t quite . . .
It’s an ancient city somewhere near Cordoba, full of palaces and gardens. Now it’s mostly ruins, an archeological site, but once it was full of gold and silver and precious jewels and wonderful gardens and fountains. It was built by a Khalifa and named for his favorite mistress. The one he loved until the day she died. Isn’t that romantic? Poets have written about Medina al Zahara for centuries.
We reach the Plaza Santa Ana and stop in front of the hotel. No longer willing to restrain myself, I say that there’s something strange and unusual about meeting you today. At the very least, it’s a wonderful coincidence. For I’m here with a film, too, a very different kind of film, one that’s not really mine but based on a book I wrote. It’s being directed by TJ, I say. His first. You know who TJ is, don’t you?
Her smile is full of mischief.
You must think we Afghans are a very primitive people. Is there anyone in the universe who doesn’t know TJ? Tribesmen living in the remote Hindu Kush think of him as The Most Beautiful Man in the World. That’s what all the magazines say, that’s what’s on TV. But you can tell me firsthand: is it true?
I’m not the right person to ask. These days he wants to be more than just a pretty face. That’s why he’s making the film. It’s about the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Guys who had a sense of duty, who thought the world was one. They wanted to stop Hitler in his tracks. People don’t remember it much these days, but it was a kind of dress rehearsal for World War Two. The left against the right, democrats and radicals against fascists. I was one of the screen writers.
I want her to ask me about the book. I want her to ask me about the war. I want her to ask me about the screenplay. I want her to ask about commitment, sacrifice, martyrdom. I want her to ask why I wrote about people who volunteer for a foreign war, what’s my interest in those who put their lives on the line for a cause.
Hollywood! says Aisha. All that glamour, excitement, money. It must be wonderful to work on a Hollywood film. What’s the name?
Red Star Over Madrid.
I don’t tell her that I can’t stand the title. A decade later I still can’t stand it even if the film did win me an Oscar. Early on in the endless years of preproduction I asked TJ: Why not use the same title as my book, Crusade in Spain. Don’t be ridiculous, he replied. We’d destroy what little revenue we get out of the Arab world.
The Red Star, asks Aisha. Is that a character? Is that TJ?
You got it. He’s always the star. The film’s about a bunch of Americans who fought for the Spanish Republic. Lots of them were Communists. TJ plays the commander.
We had Communists in Afghanistan. Too many of them. They ran the country for a while and pretty much destroyed it. That’s why we’re scattered all over Europe and the States. I’d love to hear more about your film but I don’t have time. The opening reception is in half an hour.
How about tomorrow? We could get together after your screening.
Let’s wait and see, she says. Who knows what will happen? Inshallah.
The lobby of the hotel is crowded with gilt edged furniture that would fit in a high class Victorian brothel. Photos of Manolete, Dominguin and other legendary toreros of the Thirties and Forties crowd one section of the wall, but don’t bother to go looking for them today. The Reina Victoria was renovated for the new century, and while its clock tower and Victorian facade remain, the lobby is now full of angular leather couches and chrome tables which exude all the warmth of a corporate headquarters, and the wall features photos of recent rock stars whose names I for one don’t know.
We shake hands. When Aisha repeats her invitation, I feel a need to reciprocate. Might she be interested, I wonder, in visiting our company on location? We’re just a forty-five minute ride from Madrid. What I hope is that she’ll answer No, not really. Commercial film doesn’t much interest her. Hollywood is too vulgar, too empty, too formulaic for her taste. She prefers independent films, works of cinematic art that stretch the eye and the mind. She likes writers who used to be historians.
Wonderful, she says. That would be such a treat. Thanks so much. I’ve been working with film for over a decade and have never seen a real feature in production. Would I get to meet TJ? It would be such a thrill for my Mom and my sisters and all my relatives and friends.
A twinge tugs my heart. TJ’s fame, as everyone in the world must know, stems less from any acting talent than from his remarkably good looks and much publicized ability to get women—young, old, famous, beautiful, infamous it doesn’t much matter—into his bed and onto the front page of the National Inquirer. In theory his mating habits should be of no concern to me. I have just finished going through a divorce prolonged for more than two years by a struggle over what little property we owned, and my attorney has warned me that when it comes to women I should keep a low profile. In California a property settlement is never really settled, he explained, and your ex seems so trigger happy she might well try to reopen things up if she learns you’re involved with someone. So keep your zipper closed until she’s hooked up with another guy.
Sage advice, I’m certain, and after two marriages wholly consonant with my current feeling about getting involved with women. That’s no doubt why it has been easy for me to swear off of them for the duration. Problem is, meeting Aisha makes it seem as if the duration is up.
2
Aisha
You can’t imagine what a pleasure it was to be in Spain, a country where I didn’t have to worry about my name, where I didn’t have to pretend and hide or get annoyed or angry at all the stupid questions Americans are always asking. Where are you from, with a big smile, as if it’s their business. People you meet on the street or in a supermarket or the new teller in the bank or hiking on a trail in the hills or even in an editing room or on location and even if you’re the one in charge, everyone has the right to ask just because they are a blonde: where are you from? And if you answer Los Angeles they laugh or look at you funny and shake their heads and say No where are you really from, where are you originally from, where were you born, where did you grow up, where did your grandparents live, and their grandparents, and all I am hearing is What are you a brown person doing here when you should be somewhere else maybe in a jungle or a desert or on a bare mountain top because this is a country where only blondes belong, even if they aren’t blonde, even if they are Chinese or Jewish and darker than me. It’s no better with Latinos. They come up thinking I am one of them and speaking to me as if I am a sister, asking questions or saying something habla this and habla that, and I answer in perfect English, well, almost perfect, I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish, and they look at me as if I am betraying our mutual heritage, pretending to be Anglo when I am really one of them, and it doesn’t help one bit if I answer in Dari or Arabic or Urdu, they just turn away babbling in Spanish. I am studying the language now and it’s a nice language that I like very much, it’s sweet and musical. But not in Madrid. Here the hotel clerks spit words at you as if they are firing machine guns. It makes you wonder about the reputation of Spanish lovers, Don Juans, but that’s probably another cliche in a world full of cliches. You certainly wouldn’t want someone to sound that way in bed, but that’s something I will never get to find out.
The afternoon I meet Benjamin in the Plaza Mayor is my first time alone since arriving in Madrid the day before and being given a kind of royal treatment that one does not expect as the director of a documentary, but I was far too jagged and lagged and sleepy from the flight to appreciate it. A middle-aged woman named Immaculada who speaks English and seems to be a sort of a hostess and chaperone combined meets me at the airport by holding up a sign, Aisha Sultani, and