by Elias Khoury
He never once called me “son” or addressed a word to me. He’d speak to my mother so that she could speak to me, since I was her son. I knew nothing about the man. I hated the smell of cognac mixed with garbage that wafted from his mouth and clothes. When I later learned his story, pity blended with my hatred of him and of myself. He hated me and hated my mother’s insistence on sending me to the school in Wadi al-Nisnas.
As far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter either way. Books were doors that I’d open onto the world, and the Hebrew teacher was pleased at how enthralled I was by “the language of paradise,” as he called the language of the Torah, which I alone in my class spoke well. It was my door onto the world. I never got into the worlds of children’s books, which didn’t attract me. In contrast, I entered a wide world fashioned by literature. I memorized the poetry of Bialik and read the novels of Yizhar, was bewitched by Agnon and amazed by Benjamin Tammuz, but my true love was for Russian literature in translation.
“Your son has to work,” the man told my mother, one wintry, rainy night.
When it rains in Haifa and the salty sea wind rages, you feel that you, in your house on the flank of Carmel, are in an ark tossed by the waves, and that the dove will drown in the sea.
I told the daughter of the owner of the garage where I’d ended up both working and living, whose name was Rivka, about the dove planted in the water. It was my point of entry into her heart. The girl understood what I meant by the simile only when we went far out to sea together on a fishing boat. There, Rivka discovered the dove and almost drowned in the sea…which is another story that deserves to be told.
“I can’t spend any more on him. He’s big as a donkey now, so he has to work and help me,” my stepfather said.
The donkey decided to leave. That night, he didn’t sleep a wink, and at two in the morning Manal came to him and he didn’t say anything because she already knew.
I was surprised the woman didn’t ask me where I was going.
She bent down and kissed me and said it was time, so I understood that she knew and that she wanted me to go.
She went to her room and returned, tiptoeing on her bare feet, then gave me a long letter written in ink that had faded almost to illegibility, along with a sheet of paper written in clear ink.
“These papers,” she said, “are your father’s will. I’m giving them to you even though he left them for me, because I have no right to them. They are the will your father left you.”
I took the papers in my hand and almost laughed. “You call these papers a will?” I asked.
“We own nothing,” she replied, “but words.”
Such was our farewell. She said she might have been wrong.
“Well, well, maybe it would have been better to bury the will with your father, but at the time, poor us, I had no idea what was going to happen and everything was topsy-turvy. I didn’t know what to do and now I’m handing over the sacred trust. You’re his son. Do with them as you like.”
I put the will in my bag and left, and when I read the pages in the cramped room where I stayed at Mr. Gabriel’s garage, I felt for the first time like a character in a novel, not a real person. When the feeling repeated itself forty years later in New York as I listened to my blind friend Ma’moun telling me my story as he had lived it in Lydda and in the midst of the Caravan of Death that had left the city, I felt as though a thunderbolt had split me in two, and no longer knew who I was. It is a story that “if inscribed with needles on men’s eyes would serve as a lesson for the wise,” as Scheherazade puts it in her book (inviting us to read the story with Ma’moun’s blind vision).
The Blind Man and the Goalkeeper
ALL THAT REMAINS with me of my childhood is a vague image of two friends with whom I lived through the days of the ghetto, to the rhythm of my mother’s stories.
Can I really describe Ma’moun and Ibrahim as friends?
Ibrahim was a friend of Ma’moun’s, which is why he became my friend. Ma’moun was the one who put together this trinity of friendship, which was like a ladder in terms of our ages, Ma’moun being eighteen years, Ibrahim five years older than me. Despite this, Ma’moun was able to build a pyramid of friendship. He brought us together in the midst of a melting pot that can be understood only through the sense of loss that had transformed the inhabitants of the city of Lydda into strangers.
Ma’moun was my first friend.
I called the man a friend because he insisted on being so called, though it would have been more appropriate for me to call him a father. I know nothing of his relationship with my mother, but I came to consciousness to find him already in our house. True, he called the room he lived in his house, but his room was in the courtyard of the house that had become ours after the fall of Lydda, so it was as though he was living with us. With him I learned to see through closed eyes and to read the letters of darkness.
The blind man was like my father. With him I discovered I was living in a world of the imagination, even though it was real and tangible. The things around us were substitutes for other things.
Our house wasn’t our house but a substitute for the one that had been occupied by people who’d come from Bulgaria. It was that house, which we were not allowed to enter, that my mother called “our house,” while she called the one that we lived in “the Kayyali house.” Likewise, my father, who had died before I was born, became a father in the story but my day-to-day father was the blind man who taught me and took care of me because my mother was kept busy all day long by her work in the neighboring citrus grove.
Following the removal of the barbed wire that had defined the borders of the ghetto that the people of the town lived in after the fall of their city and the Dahmash Mosque massacre – after which the vast majority of them were forced into displacement on the Caravan of Death – Ma’moun the Blind became the ghetto’s teacher. He was the only one among the young people to have graduated – in 1948, from the Amiriya College in Jaffa – and to have his matriculation certificate, so it was agreed that he should open a school to teach the fifteen or so boys and girls, ranging in age from five to fourteen, who were all that remained of Lydda’s younger generation. I went to this bizarre school for two years, until it was closed following the return of normality to the city and the opening of the first official Arab school, which was placed in the charge of a teacher from Nazareth called Mr. Awwad Ibrahim.
Ma’moun succeeded in turning his school, which he named the Lydda Oasis, into the only place to preserve some vestiges of the city that had been destroyed.
How the blind youth managed to administer a school consisting of a single schoolroom holding a mixture of ages and levels is an amazing story that made of Ma’moun “the only person in the city who could see,” which is how Nurse Ghassan Batheish described him at the celebration held in the square in front of the mosque to bid farewell to Professor Ma’moun, who had decided to travel to Nablus and rejoin his family, and who was to set off from there for Cairo or Beirut to complete his studies.
In those days, no one opposed the idea of someone leaving Palestine, of which the name was now Israel. Once, with the opening of the official school, the blind professor lost his job because the city’s Education Office, citing his disability, refused his request to be appointed as an English-language teacher, he no longer had any reason to stay, far from his family, who had moved out two months before the fall of the city.
Ma’moun had refused to leave and he had lived alone through the siege of Lydda and the massacre. In the mass exodus known as the Caravan of Death, he had decided to go back, having discovered that the humiliation that faced him in exile would not be much different from that which faced him in the occupied city. Once he told the students of his school that he’d decided he would prefer to die from the bullets than of thirst in the desert. There, in the Sakna Quarter, which had become the city’s wire-fenced ghetto, he slept in the Great
Mosque for two days before finding for Manal the house in whose garden he would live, in a room built originally for storage.
Ma’moun invented a unique teaching method: he divided the students into three groups, a Big Class, a Middle Class, and a Little Class. He taught the big students Arabic, English, and math; the big students taught the middle class; and the middle students taught the little ones. The textbooks were brought to him by the big students from their raids on abandoned houses, from which he had asked them to bring him whatever textbooks, exercise books, and pencils they might come across.
By such means, work at the school was set on a sound footing, and our professor was possessed of an amazing memory, as though he’d learned every book by heart. When teaching us, he seemed to read through his eyelids, which he would move, allowing him to see everything. He corrected using his finger, with which he would draw the words in the air, and nothing escaped him, so much so that the students believed that this blind man wasn’t blind at all but sighted and that he placed thick black spectacles over his eyes so that he could read people’s secrets.
Ma’moun chose Ibrahim among all the students to be his friend. Ibrahim was a hardworking student, but failed to perform outstandingly in any subject. Despite this, Professor Ma’moun chose him as his friend because he saw in him the flower of Palestinian youth that would inevitably awaken once the terror of the days of the Nakba was over.
When he left us, to complete his studies, I felt I’d been left an orphan, that my world was coming apart, and that I could no longer see things. After his sudden departure, which I was unable to comprehend, everything lost its meaning, and two months later Ibrahim left us too, telling us, jumping up and down with joy, that his mother had decided to go back to live with her family in Nazareth. Nazareth, as Ibrahim told us, repeating his mother’s words, was still an Arab city: “There we can breathe and die, because we’ll be among our own people, and there I can realize my dream and become a goalkeeper on a football team.”
That day, on which I was seven years old, I felt I was suffocating and alone. I think Manal too must have felt homesick, because she wasn’t from there, and both her men had left her on her own, with a small child called Adam. In her marriage to the man who humiliated both her and me, she found herself a doorway that got her out of Lydda and took her to live in Haifa.
In Haifa, I learned how to read the pages of the sea and to become friends with the foam of the waves that beat on the endless shore. There, at the school at Wadi al-Nisnas, I found, in books, my refuge and my world. I was bewitched by the books of the Old Testament, especially the Lamentations of Jeremiah, in which I found an echo of the pain that for no clear reason had spread through the tops of my shoulders. My mother took me to the Arab doctor in Wadi al-Nisnas, whose name I no longer remember. He told her there was “nothing wrong with the boy – they’re psychological symptoms resulting from trauma.” He advised her to take care of me and said the best cure was sea air, and the sea’s iodine-rich waters.
I asked my mother what “trauma” meant and she didn’t know, but the word gave me a feeling of importance. I used to tell my schoolmates, when I pulled out of a game of leapfrog, that I had “a serious illness called trauma.” This led to “Trauma” becoming one of my names at school, and I only found out what it meant at the University of Haifa when I took a class on the Nazi Holocaust during which the professor described the trauma that afflicted Jews who had survived the disaster.
From time to time, the blind man would call me by the name Naji, meaning “Saved,” and when I got angry and rejected it because I already bore the name of Adam, the father of humankind, he would pat me on the shoulder and tell me, “Your name is also Naji, and time will teach you what it means to bear two names.”
When I complained once to my mother that he’d called me Naji at school, she smiled and said, “Let him say what he wants. He’s blind, and the blind see things we don’t.”
I never asked, during my childhood, why this man lived in our house. I came to consciousness in this world when he was already an inseparable part of it, so I never asked my mother, “Who is Ma’moun?” Just once, when Manal informed me that she’d decided to marry Abdallah al-Ashhal, I asked her why she hadn’t married Ma’moun. She didn’t reply, and the question remained unanswered. Why did they live together, and what was the nature of their relationship? Did Manal want Ma’moun to be like a father to me, after the death of my real father? And how could the people of the ghetto accept this business of a young man living with a young widow in the same house?
That’s the mystery of my mother.
All my life I felt that the woman was concealed behind a great mystery whose walls I was incapable of breaching or making a hole in to peep through. She hid her story in her dark brown eyes and never divulged it to me, and now I behold her walking like a phantom, her feet not touching the ground, roaming our little house on the flank of Mount Carmel and then stopping in front of the door that faced the sea of Haifa and taking the sea air into the depths of her lungs.
A woman of thirst, who filled all the vessels in the house with water because the experience of the ghetto had taught her to fear its absence. Her husband constantly expressed his disgust at her infatuation with water and cursed her for turning the house into a swamp.
Manal, my young mother, who drowned in her tears the day of Ma’moun’s departure, didn’t cry the night I told her I was leaving home. I couldn’t see the effect of my words on her features but I felt she had drowned in her eyes and gone far away. Her eyes were her weapons. She’d open them as wide as they would go, then narrow them as though she were squeezing the whole world inside them and turn away in silence.
Ma’moun, Ibrahim, and Manal – this was the trinity that surrounded my childhood and formed my memories of the ghetto. True, by the time I became conscious of the world, the wire had been removed and the people of the ghetto were no longer obliged to get permission from the Israeli officer to leave it, but the wires remained in their lives; indeed, their presence had become stronger.
When, so as to cross into the city, we passed the places where the fence had been, we would bend our backs a little as though passing beneath the barbed wire. Even Blind Ma’moun would bend, without anyone telling him that the fence had been there. We would duck and then continue on our way, as though slipping through from one place to another.
The people of the ghetto were one family, and I, Adam Dannoun, was the first child of the ghetto, so they adopted me, one and all. However, the man who became engraved on my memory as a father who didn’t beget me was Ma’moun, who surrounded me on every side, taught me to read the darkness, and then left me to my fate and departed.
The Will: Manal
MANAL SAID IT was his will and I had to take it with me wherever I might go. She didn’t ask me where I was going or how I’d survive on my own or what I planned to do in the future about my education. She just said she’d known the time would come and it seemed it had. We were like two strange ghosts swaying in the Haifa darkness. I stand facing the distant sea, inhale the dampness of the night, and watch my mother withdrawing.
I decided to leave because I couldn’t stand her husband any longer. At fifteen, I felt I’d become a man and that my stepfather, who reeked of garbage and cognac, hated me, and I had to make up my mind either to kill him or to go.
That is what I thought then. I was certain it was the right decision: I had to escape that atmosphere. Today, though, I discover, as I write down these stories, that it wasn’t my decision, and that I left because my mother had withdrawn.
I can imagine that the cause of her introversion and silence was her inability to have children. Her husband Abdallah never stopped cursing her because she couldn’t have children and he wanted a son to carry his name and didn’t want as his heir that orphan “whose name you didn’t know, so you called him Adam.”
He called me “the orphan,” and hated my n
ame because it wasn’t a name, and my going to school provoked him because it turned me into a burden on him and on society. His problem was not with me, though, but with Manal. He’d married her believing the house in which we lived in the Lydda Ghetto belonged to us and he could sell it whenever he wanted. When he found out that our own house was now listed as absentee property, that it belonged to the state and was no longer ours to dispose of, that the Israeli authorities had confiscated it and given it to a Bulgarian immigrant family, and that the house we were living in belonged to the Kayyali family, who had moved to the West Bank, he went crazy.
“The martyr left you nothing, and I hate martyrs,” he used to tell her when he was drunk, and I’d see her humiliation, and mine, and could do nothing.
Why didn’t I tell her to come with me?
Why didn’t she suggest she come with me? She made do with saying goodbye in silence. Then she went into the bedroom, returned with an envelope, gave it to me, saying, “This is your father’s will,” and left me alone in the dark.
I don’t know why I didn’t open the envelope that night. I put it among my clothes and carried it with me on all my moves, but I didn’t open it until the garage. At that point, I understood nothing, could find no mystery, and thought many times of tearing it up, but didn’t dare. Like all Palestinians, who lost everything when they lost their homeland, I throw away nothing connected to our fugitive memory, for we are slaves to that memory. It isn’t true what Jabra Ibrahim Jabra says in his novel The Ship to the effect that “memory is music.” No, memory is a wound in the soul that never closes. You have to learn to live with its pus, oozing from its open sores.
I went back to the will once more and discovered on reading it that it had nothing to do with me. It was a letter Ali Dannoun, my supposed grandfather, had written to his father from Manchuria just before he died. Probably Ali’s son, Hasan, my father, had inherited the letter from his grandfather, preserved it, and then given it to his wife as he lay dying in the hospital at Lydda, and it was never intended to be a will. I don’t know why Manal thought that the letter had to be in my possession and that I had to bear the burden of my martyred grandfather as well as that of my martyred father!
