Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too.
He knew that he had no chance with the Jews, so he adopted another name for himself, Dudu. He didn't have curly hair, but he went by Dudu just the same. That's how everyone knew him. That's how you know a few other Arabs too: the car-wash guy you call Rafi, the stairwell cleaner who goes by Yossi, the supermarket deliveryman you know as Moshe.
What's wrong? Is it only fearsome Shin Bet interrogators like "Capt. George" and "Abu Faraj" who are allowed to adopt names from other peoples? Are only Israelis who emigrate allowed to invent new identities? Only the Yossi from Hadera who became Joe in Miami, the Avraham from Bat Yam who became Abe in Los Angeles? ...
One of these two quarter-deck lords went among the sailors by a name of their own devising—Selvagee. Of course, it was intended to be characteristic; and even so it was.
In frigates, and all large ships of war, when getting under weigh, a large rope, called a messenger used to carry the strain of the cable to the capstan; so that the anchor may be weighed, without the muddy, ponderous cable, itself going round the capstan. As the cable enters the hawse-hole, therefore, something must be constantly used, to keep this travelling chain attached to this travelling messenger; something that may be rapidly wound round both, so as to bind them together. The article used is called a selvagee. And what could be better adapted to the purpose? It is a slender, tapering, unstranded piece of rope prepared with much solicitude; peculiarly flexible; and wreathes and serpentines round the cable and messenger like an elegantly-modeled garter-snake round the twisted stalks of a vine. Indeed, Selvagee is the exact type and symbol of a tall, genteel, limber, spiralising exquisite. So much for the derivation of the name which the sailors applied to the Lieutenant.
In the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled 'A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;' in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild, dark–plumed name—a name which had, in her mind, the steel–blue gleam of rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake–like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be described presently.
"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he explained.
Like I've been telling you, I'm Leigh Botts. Leigh Marcus Botts. I don't like Leigh for a name because some people don't know how to say it or think it's a girl's name. Mom says with a last name like Botts I need something fancy but not too fancy. My Dad's name is Bill and my Mom's name is Bonnie. She says Bill and Bonnie Botts sounds like something out of a comic strip.
