My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  I have to admit that Manal liberated me from my father through her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashhal. After we moved to live in Haifa, I exited the man’s story, even though my mother, who didn’t dare hang my father’s photograph in the living room of the new house, put it in my room, and when she came to wake me in the morning would stand for ages in front of the photo and continue her muttered discussions with it in a low voice.

  I say I exited the man’s story, but that’s not accurate. I was liberated from the martyr’s photograph but never from his seemingly miraculous story that my mother ceaselessly recounted, even after her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashhal and the discovery of her inability to bear children.

  How is it that I never asked her, or myself, the most obvious question about that inability? That’s how most people are – blind, unable to see the things in their lives that are closest to them.

  “Damnation!” said Ma’moun. “So what, man? If she didn’t tell you, couldn’t you see?”

  I should have understood, but I didn’t – at least that night, when Manal asked Abdallah to take me to spend the night in the house of one of his relatives, because it was their wedding night, and the man refused because he had no relatives. “And what’s all the fuss about? Suddenly you’re a virgin? You’ve got a boy the size of a man!”

  I was eight. I went with my mother to Haifa, after she’d gathered a few belongings and clothes into a bundle, and the man was waiting for us in front of his house.

  He mocked her and her bundle. “Your trousseau is your son, who’s popped out at me from God knows where?!” The formalities of the marriage contract were completed without fuss. The sheikh came, bringing two witnesses, and when he’d finished his work, he turned to Manal and asked her to give a ululation of joy. A lifeless trilling, closer to a moan, emerged from her mouth. And then…I don’t want to remember! I heard the man shouting that he could feel blood, and cursing because he thought that Manal was having her period, and I heard her whispering to him and swearing that she hadn’t realized.

  After that, I don’t remember. Perhaps I dozed off, or fainted, or…I don’t know what happened.

  I should have known, as the blind man said, but I refused to, so here I am now, observing those moments, which well up from a place I didn’t know existed. I remember as though I were imagining, or as though the scene were taking place in front of me now.

  I’d better get back to my father and ask my memory to erase that scene and throw it onto the garbage dump of oblivion.

  The story says my father was wounded at the Battle of Latroun and spent ten days in the hospital at Lydda afterward.

  Manal never tired of telling the story of her dead husband’s heroism. She said my father was an aide to the martyr Hasan Salama, whom the Arab Higher Committee had appointed commander of the Central District, meaning the Jaffa-Lydda area, during the War of the Nakba. By a miracle, the two men survived the Haganah’s attempt to blow up the position Hasan Salama had taken as his command headquarters, an orphanage located west of Ramallah consisting of a large three-story building surrounded by an orange grove about two kilometers from the Jewish settlement of Be’er Ya’akov.

  Haganah forces succeeded in penetrating the building and blowing it up, and around thirty fighters fell, their remains visible on the walls and in the trees.

  My father and his commander survived the slaughter by chance. Manal never stopped thanking the Lord of All Worlds for putting it in the men’s heads not to spend the night there.

  Fate, however, had other plans, for the two men met their ends as martyrs in quick succession. My father died first, at the Battle of Latroun. Hasan Salama followed him ten days later at the Battle of Ras al-Ein.

  The two were alike in everything, and Manal’s account of their deaths made them seem like twins, because she mixed them up and they turned into one person with two names and two deaths.

  “Honestly, my dear, that’s how it happened, and that’s what I went through, and God is my witness, I never mourned for the man or for myself. Your father’s a martyr in the Gardens of Eternity and God left me behind for you, or why else am I still alive? I stayed so I could raise you and you could grow up and clear the path for me to join him.”

  As it happened, she cleared the path for me: she went and married that man. I couldn’t understand her or come up with any explanation for what she did. Two years later, she told me she didn’t love him and was sorry.

  “Okay, so why did you marry him?” I asked.

  She looked at me with dead eyes and answered dully, “It was fate.”

  “What do you mean, fate?”

  “I mean fate. Heavens above, you don’t know what that means? It was my fate and I accepted it because that’s the way it was. Honestly, I don’t understand why I did it, I just hope God forgives me.”

  What do she and I have to do with one another? Our present topic is my father. Her story is for later and is going to stay that way because I don’t understand it, just as I don’t understand why she withdrew from me and put a veil of silence between us, as though she wanted to force me out of her life so she could go to her death without having me on her conscience.

  The news of my mother’s death reached me when I was thirty-five years old – twenty years, in other words, after we parted. She died having divorced the man and gone back to her family in Eilaboun. I can imagine how she was looked down on in her village, how she became a servant in the family house, which her older brother had inherited, and how she went to her death because she stopped eating. That is what the man who brought me the news told me. He also told me that they wanted me there to receive condolences, but I didn’t go, which was one of my many mistakes. I should have gone so as to find out the woman’s story, but I was in a different mood then. I’d thrown the past, all of it, into oblivion and got on with my life, or what seemed to be my life, the way I wanted to. Now, though, I regret it. I shouldn’t have left my life full of these holes and gaps that have turned today into besieging ghosts.

  The ghost of my father comes to me, drawn by my mother’s words. I see her wearing a nurse’s gown and sitting next to him, rubbing his hands, which tremble with pain. I see her bow her head and bend over him, kissing his dry lips and then lying down on the bed beside him, closing her eyes but not sleeping. I hear her sighs and witness the moan of death blending into the moan of life.

  My mother said they brought him to the hospital with blood splattered all over his back. They laid him on his left side because his back was hurting and his chest had been hit, and in the midst of the pain the man asked to see his commander, Hasan Salama, so he could return the gun he’d been given.

  My mother said the meeting was quick and without emotion or tears, but enough to make a stone weep. Abu Ali Salama bent over and kissed his friend’s brow. My father closed his eyes, which were exhausted with pain, asked his wife to hand him his pistol, and gave it to his friend. The next day, Hasan Dannoun died.

  My mother said that the pistol had become a legend. Abu Ali Salama had presented it to Hasan Dannoun for his courage in battle, and when my father was wounded at the Battle of Latroun, he gave it, as he lay dying, back to its owner. Then, when Abu Ali Salama was dying in the hospital at Lydda after being wounded at the Battle of Ras al-Ein, he presented the pistol to Hamza Subh, who had led the battle to recover Ras al-Ein from the Jewish forces. My mother said she knew that Hamza Subh, as he lay wounded and dying after the Battle of al-Nabi Salih near Ramallah, had directed that the pistol be given to the son of Hasan Dannoun, who had not yet been born. When my mother told me this story I was nine and I asked her to give me the pistol. She looked into the distance and said, “You’re still too young.”

  Then, when she gave me the will, in my haste to get to wherever my feet were going to take me, I forgot to ask her for it.

  To get back to the subject of my father, I searched for his photograph in the folder. I
saw a slim man with hawk-like eyes gazing at the horizon, and I told him that both of us had been tricked. My father was thirty-four when he died, a very young man who could take the part of my son today, though in fact I’m alone and have no children. I asked him what he’d say to switching things around: I’d adopt him, fully aware of what I was doing, instead of him adopting me unaware of what he was doing. I heard his laugh exploding in my ears and he said something, in a voice not unlike mine, though I couldn’t understand what it was. His voice resembled the texts in my dreams: I dream I’ve written something, and when I try to read it, the letters follow one another in succession like little black grains, and I am unable to decipher them. It seems I’m not a real writer, since I believe that writers dream their texts and all they have to do is recall them and write them down when they wake.

  I heard him and I didn’t. I didn’t propose adopting him so that I could kill him, the way fathers do, applying the will and testament of God’s Friend, Our Master Abraham. I’m allowed to kill him in his capacity as my father: that’s expected and accepted because Freud has convinced us that the killing of fathers is not only possible but necessary. The killing of sons, though (which in my opinion is more integral to human nature), appears in our modern age as a barbaric act to which no one would agree.

  I don’t care whether the story of the pistol is true but I’ve decided to believe it, because it’s a beautiful story. Beauty, not reality, is the yardstick of literary veracity. The story of Manal getting pregnant with me, however, I am incapable either of believing or of placing in the context of the relationship between beauty and truth. My mother would have nothing to do with magic or stories about afreets, but the story, which she told more than once, of her getting pregnant would work as part of The Thousand and One Nights, though not as part of the story of my life.

  I’ve gone into the matter in detail, not for literary reasons but to make sure that the report that Blind Ma’moun stunned me with was true.

  I know I am the only son of Hasan Dannoun, and that my mother didn’t know my father until after he was wounded. (I use “know” here in the Biblical sense in the report of the Virgin Mary’s getting pregnant with Jesus, where it’s stressed that the Virgin hadn’t “known” her husband, Joseph, meaning hadn’t slept with him.) My mother said she was a bride without a groom and that after she jumped onto my father’s horse, went off with him, and was married to him by a sheikh in one of the caves in which the revolutionaries were holed up, a woman came and took her to Lydda. Her husband asked her to wait for him at his mother’s house and promised he’d be back soon to build her one of her own. The girl found herself waiting in an old house in an unfamiliar city, living with an elderly woman who never stopped praying.

  Manal said she’d only ever seen her husband and beloved drenched in blood. There was a noise outside and she overheard a man telling the old woman her son was at the hospital, wounded.

  My mother ran after the man and found herself entering a long corridor and stepping over a pool of her husband’s blood. From that moment on, she never left her beloved’s side.

  “I stayed with him. ‘What are you doing, woman?’ they asked me. I told them I was his wife. They said, ‘Go home. There’s nothing for you to do here.’ I told them I was a nurse, and then a doctor from the Habash family, God bless him, took pity on me. He was fair skinned and had a thick moustache like your poor father, and he said, ‘Come along, Sister.’ So I went with him and he gave me a white tunic and said, ‘Now you’re a nurse. Stay with the man and take care of him. He’s in bad shape.’ And that’s what happened. I stayed with him and saw his soul depart. God, what a beautiful soul! A martyr’s soul is like incense – light white smoke with a delicious smell. I saw Hasan’s soul and felt it hover over my head before disappearing. It was telling me to look after you, and till now whenever I long for him I smell that same smell.”

  The story – not the one my mother tells but the one that most of the people of the ghetto firmly believed – says that the girl from Eilaboun spent ten days next to her dying bridegroom and that she’d steal into his bed at night and sleep next to him, and that she got pregnant by him before he died.

  I didn’t experience the ghetto. Or I did but I don’t remember it, because the wire was taken away – without our being allowed to leave – when I was about six months old, so how can I be expected to remember? (The truth is, we never left the ghetto. We stayed in it, but when the barbed wire was removed, they said, “The ghetto’s over,” though it wasn’t. The fact is it encircles us to this day, which is the whole thing in a nutshell.)

  Who says it’s memory that we remember? Memory is what we feel we’re remembering. In that sense, the memory of the ghetto lives on within me. When I used to tell my fellow students at the University of Haifa that I was from the ghetto, I wasn’t lying. I was giving them the truth’s first cousin, which is always truer than the truth.

  I never once wondered how the woman could have become pregnant from a man lying on his bed between life and death, his lungs damaged by bullets, moaning incessantly with pain. I believed her just as everyone else in the ghetto did! In those terrible days, when brother denied brother and son trod father underfoot as they sought to escape death, anything could have been true. Unbelievable things happened. An entire people was driven to its slaughter. More than fifty thousand people had found themselves driven along on the march of death that they’d been forced into by the Palmach forces that invaded the city. There were shredded bodies on the walls of the Dahmash Mosque, human remains on the roads, animals running loose, flies devouring the dead and the living.

  No one was interested in looking closely into the story of a woman who found herself alone with the body of her husband the martyr, so they believed her, turned her newborn child into the ghetto’s Adam, and celebrated him as the first son of their story, which was walled in by silence.

  If the truth be told, I was infatuated with the story of my birth as told by Manal. I believed it, considered it my destiny, and lived my childhood with the image of my father the martyr, who had produced the miracle of my birth from inside his death. All the same, the story long ago evaporated and broke up into little pieces in my heart. My father no longer means anything special to me. He’s just a story I had hidden away somewhere secret whose location I’ve now forgotten. And when, these days, it suddenly rose up again, it turned to dust.

  Curiosity and the death instinct drove me to research the dates of the battles that my mother had made the markers of my birth. I discovered that not only was the story a tissue of lies from beginning to end but that Manal’s naivety made it extremely easy to expose their fabrication. Here, I’m talking exclusively about my birth. The story of Manal’s relationship with Hasan Dannoun and how she was transformed into a nurse at the Lydda hospital and the business of her meeting with a doctor from the Habash family – probably Dr. George Habash, the Palestinian leader who was given, and with good reason, the title of Doctor to the Palestinian Revolution – is nothing to do with me, and I tend to believe it because it is beautiful and deserves to be true.

  My mother recounted that my father was wounded at the Battle of Latroun, that he died of his wounds ten days later, that the commander Hasan Salama was martyred as a result of being wounded at the Battle of Ras al-Ein, and finally that Hamza Subh, who decided to return the pistol to the son of the martyr Hasan Dannoun, meaning to me, died at the Battle of al-Nabi Salih in Ramallah.

  Even if I set aside the suspicious resemblance between my father’s injury and that of Abu Ali Salama, which I’d rather not examine too closely because it may either be true and/or the result of a mix-up in my mother’s confused memory (memory being always, as we know, confused!), an investigation of the dates of these battles leads to only one conclusion, namely, that the story of my mother’s becoming pregnant with me after my father was wounded cannot possibly be correct.

  I was born, according to my mother
and my ID card, on July 14, 1948, meaning that my mother had to have conceived me nine months before that date, which is to say at the end of November or the beginning of December 1947, while the Battle of Latroun took place on May 15, 1948. Thus, if I’m to believe my mother, the “miracle” of her becoming pregnant with me occurred in May, so I would have been born before completing two months in her belly, which is impossible.

  My mother wasn’t telling the truth. She pretended she’d given birth to me, and Ma’moun, for some reason I don’t know, colluded with her. Meanwhile, the people who remained in the city, inside the ghetto, in an atmosphere resembling that of the Day of Resurrection, were in no state to investigate the story of a woman who appeared to them wearing a white tunic, like an angel, carrying another, smaller, angel, and claiming that it was the first Palestinian child to be born in the Lydda Ghetto.

  The idea of one angel carrying another is not of my making, it’s Ma’moun’s. When he told me the story, he said the people had seen a white girl-child carrying a baby. “Your mother was a child,” he said, and stopped speaking, and I saw white tears running from his closed eyes and was seized by terror at the sight of dead eyes coursing with tears, as though they had welled up from nowhere. Then he said, “No, not a child. She was an angel carrying an angel.”

  “Why did she lie, and why did you join her in the lie?” I asked, after long minutes of silence.

  “No, your mother didn’t lie. She told half the truth.”

  “So what’s the other half?” I asked.

  “It’s what I’m telling you now,” he replied.