My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  “Why was it so?” I asked.

  “Why the Nakba?” he answered. “The only thing that could save a young woman from the death that had made a home for itself inside each of the inhabitants of the ghetto was a new life arriving like a miracle, and the miracle took place at my hands, without my meaning to do anything, like all miracles.”

  What kind of a bind was this? More than fifty years afterward, the man who claimed to have produced the miracle of my birth had killed off my second father – and that after I’d reached an age at which I’d forgiven that same father for abandoning me, killing my childhood, and handing me over to the heartless man who had become my mother’s husband.

  I’d hated my second father because he’d killed me, and now here I was watching him being killed, today, in front of my eyes, in the midst of Ma’moun’s white tears, while I sat there like an idiot, incapable of saving him.

  Ma’moun had come to me when it was all over to destroy the image I’d drawn of myself as the son whose father had killed him, and now here I was, faced with two impotent fathers – the first, who’d abandoned me when Lydda’s sky had fallen, and the second, who was just an image in which Manal, alone amidst the puddles of death and sorrow, had sought refuge so as to give a meaning to her life, which had lost all its meanings.

  You, though, Ma’moun, my third father, I will not allow to escape the punishment of the son whom you killed and abandoned, fleeing to Egypt to study, and building your life on the ruins of mine!

  What strange coincidence was it that led me to Ma’moun, or led Ma’moun to me in my journey from myself and my country to New York?

  After Ma’moun had told me what he did, I asked myself what was the meaning of it all. Ma’moun’s closed eyes, weeping tears that implanted themselves, white, in my memory, stirring panic within me. We were sitting. He was sipping a glass of scotch, I was drinking vodka, and his friend Naji was sitting in the corner, as though he didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. Suddenly, Ma’moun took off his dark glasses and wept. At first, I thought he’d uncovered his obliterated eyes so that he could wipe away his tears, so I held a paper napkin out to him but he didn’t notice it. I pressed the napkin into his hand, he took it and put it to his forehead but wiped neither his eyes nor his cheeks with it, as though he wanted his tears to remain graven on his face and to make me a witness to his baptism with them.

  They kill like fathers and weep like sons!

  It was as though Ma’moun wanted to take over my role, playing executioner and victim at one and the same time while I was merely a witness. He was the Abraham who placed his knife on his son’s neck and the Ismail who, abandoned to the thirst of the desert, took refuge in his tears and initiated the baptism that became a mark of being lost and a stranger.

  Now I understand why Arabic poetry began with Imru’ al-Qays. The wandering, exiled king of Kinda stood over the remains of the campfire and wept, and invited his friends to weep, but he was the opposite of everything the critics said he was. He wasn’t the first to open verses, and life, with tears. The first was the slaughtered son who gave the Arabs their particular baptism: the first was Ismail, whose tears were transformed into the water with which he quenched his thirst and that of his mother.

  Stop, and let us weep at the memory of a beloved and an abode!

  With these words, Arabic poetry began, in the desert that had given birth to the prophets, and I, the fugitive from those prophets’ shadows, hate myself for having been provoked by Ma’moun’s tears. I felt he was stealing my tears, borrowing my name and story so as to prove his innocence of his crime.

  He sits there and brings me his friend, or student, called Naji, to be a witness to my story. This Naji is not a real person. He’s a character in a book whom Ma’moun brought along to prove that reality is more fictitious than fiction.

  That had been the essence of Ma’moun’s lecture on Mahmoud Darwish at the university. He’d presented an astonishing lecture about the character of Rita in Darwish’s poems and then gone on to argue that the poet who had loved and married Rita was not Darwish but Rashid Hussein, and that the story of the death of that poet in New York was more tragic than any Palestinian poetry.

  But that was wrong.

  I kept my mouth shut during the discussion that followed the lecture, on whose exceptional importance all the speakers agreed. No one objected to the conclusions drawn, apart from Dr. Naji, who made a long intervention about the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish that boiled down to fiction being better able to reveal the multiple layers of reality than real events.

  Dr. Naji sits, hunched up, in his corner, observing me in my role as the hero of an unwritten story!

  What cruelty is this?

  After this encounter, it became possible for me to say what I’d always believed but never dared articulate, which is that writers are capable of being the cruelest of all creatures. In their claim to reveal the human condition and expose repression, torture, sadism, murder, and so on, they turn themselves into voyeurs who revel in what they imagine and describe!

  That’s why I shall never write a novel. This isn’t a novel, and Ma’moun, with help from my friend the Israeli movie director, opened the door out of this dilemma for me.

  Ma’moun was surrounded by darkness and silence, and I found myself drowning in his darkness along with him and could think of nothing to say.

  I stood, went up to Ma’moun to shake his hand, and stepped back. Then I turned around, mumbling words of thanks, and left.

  A Dream of Words

  WHAT DOES IT mean when a dream returns again and again? And what made Dr. Hanna Jiryis appear in my dreams?

  In Jaffa, I only met the guy once, when he brought me the story of God’s She-Camel. Then I met him several times here at the restaurant in New York; both of us, however, behaved as though our first meeting and our discussion about my grandfather who’d died in Manchuria had never taken place. Probably, the university professor no longer saw in the falafel seller I’d become an interlocutor worthy of him and his elevated academic standing. The man restricted himself to eating a plate of fava beans in my restaurant once a week and dropping in every now and then with his students to buy egg-plant-and-falafel sandwiches. For my part, I restricted myself to watching the various means he employed to seduce girls, using his cappuccino machine.

  When the man disappeared, having found a job in a university in America’s far west, I only realized after a while and by accident. The man and his God’s She-Camel researches meant nothing to me at the time.

  Suddenly, however, he turned up again and, without asking my permission, entered my dreams and became a witness to my crisis over reading and writing.

  The dream says I’m sitting in a public garden. It’s not clear where this garden is but it’s neither New York nor Haifa. It may be in Beirut. I divine that it’s Beirut, which I’ve never visited, from the noise. The garden is small and surrounded by barbed wire, and I am sitting alone and have my papers with me. The barbed wire might be a pointer to the garden’s being in the Lydda Ghetto, but, logically speaking, there couldn’t have been a public garden in the ghetto.

  What’s Haifa got to do with Beirut? It’s true that Haifa’s only about eighty miles from Beirut and that under the right weather conditions someone sitting on the beach at Tyre can see Haifa plunging into the sea with the naked eye, but the distance between the two cities cannot be measured in miles. Between them lie rivers of blood and other obstacles that make moving the garden’s location from here to there impossible.

  It is, on the other hand, a dream, and dreams don’t know borders or acknowledge distances. The important thing is that I’m sitting in a public garden surrounded by barbed wire similar to that of the Lydda Ghetto. In my hand, I’m holding pieces of paper like those on which I’m writing, or which I’m trying to read.

  Suddenly, I see Dr. Hanna. He is sitting next to me on the bench, puffi
ng on a Cuban cigar.

  I tell him I’ll read him the chapter I’ve written about him and my grandfather.

  “How come? You know how to write?” he asks, laughing.

  He says only those words, which repeat themselves like an echo, and when I start to read, the rain begins falling heavily – ropes of rain, blocking off the gray horizon and drenching the papers. I watch the ink running and the rain turning black, and I try to pick up the words that have run down onto the ground, and my face and hands become stained with ink.

  The dream ends there because I don’t remember what happens after that. Did the dream go on or stop? Strange is our relationship to dreams, because we remember only fragments of them, which is for the good: how could someone who remembers the totality of his dreams distinguish between waking and sleeping?

  On that occasion, I couldn’t read. Instead of the words being erased and turning into clumps of black ants, they dissolved in the water, to the sound of the historian’s raucous laughter, mocking me and my writings.

  However, the dream came back twice, in different forms, and neither time was there water; instead, the words disappeared into one another, as though they’d swallowed their letters, and the lines began to dance before my eyes so I could no longer pick out a single letter and read it. I averted my eyes from the piece of paper and tried to read using my memory, but my memory couldn’t remember.

  Did this mean I had to stop writing? Despite my insistence in principle that what I write is unfit for publication and will indeed never be published, at moments of weakness I’m afflicted by a desire to see my name among those of the writers I love, and I dream, during moments that I dare not prolong, that I shall publish this thing that I’m writing.

  This dream that came three times served to return me to the path I’d set myself. I don’t write to be read by Dr. Hanna and his like or to be recognized by Arab and Israeli historians. My tragedy isn’t in need of their recognition, and whether they acknowledge it or not, it is engraved on souls and places. The rocks, the trees, the birds, the rivers, and the seas speak it – and phooey to the scholarship of scholars, if it is going to remain captive to a mendacious story based on deficient documents!

  Sarang Lee drew my attention to another aspect of the matter. When I told her one of my dreams (not, of course, the one with Dr. Hanna), I said I was reading from a book whose title I didn’t remember, but I couldn’t read, like an illiterate who sees in front of him shapes whose significations he is unable to fathom. She said no one can read when dreaming, and when I doubted her words, she said that she too had once dreamed that she couldn’t read some text and that my dream was common and nothing to worry about, and so on and so forth.

  I told her I didn’t believe her, and she turned to me and asked me why I didn’t consult a psychiatrist.

  “Why a psychiatrist?” I asked her.

  She laughed shyly, the way she did, covering her mouth with her hand, and said she had noticed that I’d become a little odd since that accursed movie evening, and that I was drinking a lot and smoking nonstop. “Perhaps you need to see a therapist to help you get through the crisis.”

  I told her I didn’t believe in psychoanalysis and didn’t care for that kind of nonsense.

  We were in the small living room of my apartment. I was sitting in the cane rocking chair that I had come across in a place where they sold used furniture on East Hudson, and Sarang Lee was standing, pouring us coffee. She put it on the table and stretched out on the gray couch. Her skirt rose to above her knees, and I heard her say, “Stretch out like me, close your eyes, and say whatever you like.” I closed my eyes and silence reigned. “Why don’t you say something?” she said, her eyes still closed. At that instant, I felt a desire for her knees, but instead of leaping up and throwing myself down beside her, I closed my eyes and imagined myself drawing the girl to me and I did not wake from my naughty dream till I felt her hand stroking my cheek as she asked me where my imagination had taken me off to!

  Sometimes when she was beside me I’d be silent, when I felt the words were about to turn into thorns in my throat, and she’d respect my silence and not ask me why, waiting till I came back from the place or time I’d traveled to. Then we’d resume our conversation as though nothing had happened.

  This time, though, I’d broken with that tradition, which was linked to our friendship, which began three years ago. I suppose I was afraid she’d guessed my feelings, and I felt embarrassed and blushed.

  She told me not to be afraid. There was nothing to be embarrassed about in going to a therapist. “The doctor will forget everything you’ve said the moment you leave the clinic, plus there are strict rules to protect patients.”

  I told her I didn’t believe in psychoanalysis and thought that what they call “psychological” or “spiritual” malaise were just chemical reactions.

  “The chemistry of the soul!” she said. “A person is spiritual chemistry; otherwise they wouldn’t be a person.”

  Sarang Lee may have been right. I’m writing now, without realizing it, as though I were lying on an analyst’s couch and talking spontaneously, though that is not the case. The goal of lying down is to sink deep into the self, so as to reach, by indirect means, the cause of the psychological disturbances one is experiencing. This doesn’t apply in my case as I’m not talking, because I’m looking for something and not closing my eyes so as to sink into the self. My eyes are open as wide as they can be so that I can see the entire world in the mirrors of words. These words that I write have become my mirrors. I look into them to discover the world and recompose it. Our lives, my mother used to say, pass quickly and lightly, like a dream, and she was right. Life is just like a dream, and the only way to see it is in the mirror of words. Herein, in my view, lies the importance of literature, for literature is the shading in of a world without shadows, in order to reveal its secrets. Such revelation has no object other than to create pleasure, a pure pleasure that looks no further than its own horizon. Do not believe writers with messages! They’re just false prophets and failed soothsayers. People with religious messages, on the other hand, are in essence writers who dream of filling in the distance between fiction and reality and who therefore build a world of delusions that quickly transform themselves into an authority practicing repression, terror, and control. This is why I have taken literature as my religion and the shadows of the world as my literature; why I have lived my whole life as though leaving one novel or poem simply to enter into a new novel or poem, my eyes becoming repositories for grief, my tragedy transformed into fiction…all of it thanks to al-Sitt Umm Kulsoum, though that’s another story!

  The only person I told of my dream about the words that refused to be read was Sarang Lee, who suggested I consult a therapist, failing to understand that my disease isn’t psychological and that the battle I entered into with Dr. Hanna in my dream costs me so much sleep because it seems to me a compressed version of my stories with my mother, and with Ma’moun, and with Dalia.

  Dr. Hanna Jiryis is a man of sound judgment, capable of deploying an irrefutable logic. One really shouldn’t write a work of history to suit his own tastes or as summary of his own personal experience; on the contrary, the writing of history should be documented and based on facts. My suggestion of adding a paragraph to my grandfather’s letter wasn’t serious, I just said it as a joke. Today, though, it’s become a real issue, because I’ve decided to write the story of the place where I was born, and herein lies the dilemma – for the story that I shall tell is one hundred percent true and is based on things my mother told me so often that I came to feel I wasn’t listening to the stories with my ears but had lived and witnessed them; it’s as though it’s my memory that’s remembering, not my mother’s. At the same time, I’ve made use of a number of books and testimonies, including Isbir Munayyir’s writings on Lydda, Raja-e Busaila’s memoirs, Michael Palumbo’s study of the expulsion of the Palestinians
, Ethel Mannin’s novel The Road to Beersheba, and innumerable studies and books on Palestine that I found in the New York University library, up to and including Aref al-Aref’s writings on the Nakba and the studies of Walid Khalidi. I even went specially to see Emmanuel Saba, whom I’d met at the seminar on bringing American war crimes in Iraq to trial that was organized by a group of leftist students and professors at the Cooper Union. I visited him at his home in Brooklyn and invited him to dinner at the Tanoreen restaurant, where he told me what I’d already heard from my mother. I remember the voice of his wife, Ahlam, trembling as we started in on the deluxe Nablus-style knafeh and her saying she could taste Palestine on her tongue. I also contacted many people still living in Lydda to collect testimonies from those days, facing in the process many difficulties, as though I were returning to a place I didn’t want to go back to – despite which I knew that going back was a condition of my final emergence from the cocoon of that place and its gappy memory.

  I won’t go on at length about my attempts to document the days of the ghetto. It was a cruel and bitter experience. All the same, I must confess that there are many gaps in the story of those days as I pieced it together, and I can only write a well-ordered account by filling in the blanks in the way I proposed to Dr. Hanna, namely, by simultaneously adding and subtracting.

  I had to leave out a lot of what I heard because it was full of passionate emotions and constructed out of an unabashed romanticism. Can one reasonably say that a seventy-year-old living in Brooklyn, who spends most of his time organizing religious activities among the congregation of St. Julian’s Greek Orthodox Church, “longs” for the days of the ghetto because they were filled with emotion, affection, and solidarity?!

  “You ‘long’?” I asked him. “Are you serious when you say that, man? Who could long for flies, thirst, and all the other crap?” He replied that I hadn’t understood him: when he used the word, he didn’t mean it in the ordinary sense. He meant “feel nostalgia.”