My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  I read the paper and I saw before me Dr. Samara as depicted by my mother – a thirty-six-year-old who had graduated from the American University in Beirut and come back to Lydda to be deputy director of the city’s hospital. The tall, self-confident young man married Sawsan, the most beautiful girl in the city, at the Church of St. George, and the wedding was blessed by Theophilos, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, who came, resting his weight upon his eighty years, to repay the favor to the young doctor from Lydda who had cured him of a fit of hiccups that had almost carried him off to his grave.

  This man, who spoke to people through tilted nostrils and told everyone he’d made up his mind to go to America to complete his studies as a specialist in diseases of the respiratory system, bent down with dignity, picked up the bird, still flapping about in its death throes, so as to get it away from the crowds that had assembled at the southern corner of the mosque courtyard, squatted down on the ground and when the Israeli soldier fired bullets at his feet, wet himself.

  When the fall of the city to the Israeli forces had become a certainty, the doctor had ordered all the hospital employees to wear their white gowns and make sure to put the Red Cross emblem on them. He said the soldiers would never dare attack medical staff. In the event, the doctor was shocked by the indifference to such concerns shown by the members of the Israeli force, which belonged to the Palmach’s 8th Brigade, and felt ashamed of his cowardice, so he did not raise his head. After that long day of sun came to an end, and when the officer ordered the people to disperse, the doctor couldn’t find the strength to get up and he stayed where he was and departed, with his wife and daughter, only after everyone else had left the square.

  What brought Dr. Samara to Beirut during the Sabra and Shatila massacre?

  The paper published in the journal was in essence a lecture given at the annual conference of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, held in November 1982 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the introduction to his paper, the doctor mentions that he went to Beirut at the beginning of August as part of a delegation of Palestinian academics headed by Dr. Ibrahim Abu Lughod. He states that his participation in the delegation was at the request of Edward Said, whose requests no one could refuse given the author of Orientalism’s academic and moral stature. He writes that he had decided to stay on in Beirut following the departure of the Palestinian fighters in order to take part in the reorganization of Red Crescent work in the devastated city and had found himself stuck in his apartment in Ras Beirut while the Israelis took over the city. Then, when he heard news of the massacre, he’d rushed to the camp, only to find himself faced with death, odor, and flies.

  The doctor writes:

  Leila Shahid phoned me in the morning and started yelling into my ear, relating in agitated words how she had gone with French writer Jean Genet to Shatila Camp, where they had walked among the bloated bodies that filled its alleyways. “What are you doing at home, Doctor? Do something! They’re slaughtering them!” When I entered the camp, my first surprise was the smell. The Lydda smell had come back. The smell has no name and can only be recalled when you smell it again, because it wafts up out of the memory. I smelled death before I saw anything. I entered the camp, and the words I had heard from Leila Shahid became echoes reverberating in my brain. I did not know where the buzzing that I could hear was coming from. Then I noticed the swarms of flies, in uncountable numbers, and smelled the Lydda smell – the very same smell, the smell of burned spice, spreading out from amidst the blowflies, as though time had taken me back thirty-four years, to where I saw myself fall to the ground, nauseous from the smell and unable to get back up.

  He recounts the story of his tour through the alleyways in the company of a doctor who was working at the camp’s Galilee Hospital.

  I pulled back, feeling I was about to fall, supported myself against the wall of the hospital with its flaking paint, and closed my eyes. Then I felt a hand reach out and touch my shoulder. I jumped in terror and beheld before me a tall dark-complexioned young man wearing a doctor’s gown. He asked me who I was, and when I told him I was a Palestinian American doctor, he took me by the hand and led me to the first floor of the hospital, which smelled heavily of chloroform. He introduced himself, saying he was Dr. Khalil Ayoub, gave me a glass of water, took me with him on a tour of the camp, and told me the tale.

  The style of the paper struck me as being overly personal. In fact, what I read was not an article, it was a speech given by Dr. Samara in the States, and before a gathering of American professors of Arab origin. The text’s intimate tone disturbed me and I couldn’t account for its style till I came, years later, to New York and discovered that what had seemed odd to me was in fact a peculiarity of life in America, where speeches delivered on political occasions are given a personal twist to make them sound more credible. To be honest, I was amazed when I discovered that people here don’t lie about their personal lives and that truth is an absolute moral and social value. Naturally, this isn’t intended as praise or admiration, just a point that anyone who lives here is bound to ponder. For all that, this penchant for truth telling is in no way reflected in American political discourse. I also believe that an exaggerated concern for truth does away with one of language’s basic elements, since deception is an ingredient of language: words are symbols, they deceive and don’t simply express (if and when they do express) but set traps to hide the truth, even when they’re trying to make an honest declaration of it.

  The Palestinian doctor’s account of how he came to be seated on the ground throughout that July day puzzled me. Did he use the smell to avoid talking about his fear? Or did he remember the story and recompose it in his mind over the course of thirty-plus years in such a way that he could forget that he’d been made into a laughingstock? Or does the whole thing amount to nothing more than the man’s embarrassment at his having wet himself, leading him to refuse to acknowledge the truth? My mother told the story innumerable times and I believe her. All the stories about Lydda that I’ve heard and collected have one basic source, which is Manal, who, whenever she got to the end of a story from those days in the ghetto, would sigh and say, “We have to forget, but sorrow can’t be forgotten.”

  I believe my mother. I have no choice – the story would otherwise be lost. It’s true, Manal didn’t tell me the whole truth, perhaps because she pitied me. I’m not talking just about the olive tree beneath which I was found, but about many details of life in the ghetto, which I gathered from people here and there to complete the picture of my childhood. I won’t borrow here the French novelist Albert Camus’s ambiguous words about the Algerian War, when he said that he chose his mother so he could avoid the deeper question about the choice between the executioner and the victim: my mother is the victim, and I swear if I were forced to choose, I’d opt to be a victim too, which is why I believe her.

  (Once, Dalia asked me a perplexing question. She said, “If you could choose between being born a Palestinian or an Israeli Jew, which would you be?”

  I told her I would choose to be her.

  “Does that mean you’d choose to be an Israeli?”

  I told her, “I tried to be an Israeli but I couldn’t. A Palestinian can only choose to be what he is. But who knows?”

  She said that if I’d asked her, she would have replied without hesitation that she’d choose to be Palestinian, because she’d prefer to be the victim. I said she was saying that because the choice was not available, which allowed her to enjoy both the virtues of the victim and the privileges of the executioner.

  She said I wasn’t understanding her. “Time will teach you to understand me, and when you get to that moment, you’ll discover that every human is the child of a permanent exile. That, in my opinion, was the existential condition of the Jews before Israel did away with it in favor of an absurd existence devoid of meaning.”)

  The doctor recounted that Dr. Ayoub had led him through the alle
yways of the camp, which were cold and empty now that the Red Cross had collected the hundreds of corpses, sprinkled them with lime, and buried them in a mass grave dug on its outskirts.

  He would stop at every turning that led to an alleyway and enumerate the bodies of the dead and describe the strange positions in which he had found them. Once he had finished describing the bloated, piled corpses, he pointed to the swarms of flies everywhere above us, saying they were all that was left of the massacre. Then he led me to the entrance of one of the shacks in the camp and recounted how the armed men had slit the belly of a pregnant woman there.

  I do not want to recount at length the information given by Dr. Samara in his article. The details of the Sabra and Shatila massacre are well known to all now, especially after Bayan Nuweihid al-Hout’s publication of her fundamentally important book. The massacre bore witness not only to the savagery of the murderers and of the Israeli army, which permitted them to carry it out and was their partner in it, lighting the night of the camp with its flares, but also to the ability of humans to lose their souls and become intoxicated with blood.

  What amazed me in the doctor’s article, however, was his description of the victims’ last moments, when they were forced to dance and clap on their final march from the camp to the sports stadium, where some of them were killed.

  Dr. Samara writes:

  Dr. Ayoub saw how his words had etched themselves into my features. He took me by the arm and led me back into the Galilee Hospital, saying he wanted to consult with me on a medical matter, and he explained his speech therapy theory to me. He said he had discovered he could revive a patient who was in a coma by telling him stories.

  “What?” I asked him, and he repeated his idea, saying he had told the patient the story of his life, thus reviving his damaged memory and allowing his soul to awaken through tales of love. He said he had been led to that conclusion by his diagnosis of the patient’s condition.

  “That’s impossible,” I said, and explained to him that we had to diagnose the cause of the coma using a brain scan. Usually, a coma was the result of a burst vein, and we could measure how critical the condition was by measuring how far the blood had spread into the brain.

  I was amazed at the insistence of the man, who as far as I could tell was the only doctor to be found in that half-ruined place that resembled a hospital only in the smell of insecticides given off by its corridors. He went on with this sterile medical discussion and asked me to visit his patient, who was his father. He said his father had been lying there for seven days and had begun to display some progress as a result of this “speech therapy” that he had come up with all on his own. This was clearly absurd, as the elderly man was brain dead and there was no hope of his recovery. However, I did learn from this nurse (I found out later from Dr. Amjad, director of the Galilee Hospital, which is run by the Palestine Red Crescent in Beirut, that Khalil Ayoub was merely a nurse claiming to be a doctor) that this tableau of the doctor and his patient was no more insane than the death experience through which the people of Sabra and Shatila had passed. This doctor was proclaiming, in his own special way, his dogged devotion to life, making out of his memory and that of his father a passage to possible survival. The others, however, found themselves flailing around in their own blood, for they lived the experience of death while dancing to the orders of their executioners.

  Dr. Khalil told his story. His voice, interrupted by stretches of silence, shook as he said that the memory of pain was more terrible than pain itself.

  “The story doesn’t lie in the killing, or in the bodies of the victims, or in the savagery that etched itself on the faces of the killers, which shone under the flares fired by the Israeli army; the memory of pain, Doctor, is death by humiliation. Imagine us dancing – yes, dancing – while we were being killed, and that I danced and was killed but didn’t die. The bullet failed to kill me because ‘the General’ (the killers gave this name to one of their leaders, who habitually hid his eyes behind dark glasses) was busy issuing orders to the bulldozer that was working at digging a mass grave and didn’t notice that I’d only been wounded in the shoulder, and that my death was just a ruse. I lay down among the corpses, to conceal my life under the others’ deaths. I waited two hours, then got up and ran back to the hospital, where I treated myself.

  “That was at 7:30 AM on Saturday, September 17, 1982, which was the last day of the massacre. We heard loudspeakers calling on people to leave their houses and walk in the direction of Cité Sportif. I set out with the rest and we walked. Many gathered. The camp, which had been covered by the silence of death, suddenly split open to reveal huge numbers of people, walking like sheep. We were surrounded by armed men on both sides, and the man with the dark glasses had a loudspeaker in his hand and was issuing orders: ‘Clap!’ – we clap; ‘I can’t hear you properly! I want you to clap louder!’ – our clapping gets louder; ‘Say, “Long live Bashir Gemayel!’” – we say it; ‘Say, “God damn Abu Ammar!”’ – we say it; ‘I want to hear it louder!’ – we raise our voices. We walked and clapped and shouted slogans.

  “While this was going on, the armed men were pulling groups of young men to the side of the road, ordering them to lie on the ground facedown, and shooting them. It was, Doctor, a march of applause, slogans, and slaughter. But that wasn’t enough for them. When the procession reached the statue of Abu Hasan Salama, they made us stop, and we heard the loudspeaker ordering us to dance. ‘Dance, you sons of whores! I want you to shake it!’ A rigid astonishment seized us. No one moved or made a sound. Total silence, broken by the sound of bullets fired into the air from the barrel of an M16 rifle held by the General. And at the sound of the bullets, we saw Umm Hasan. The seventy-year-old woman, who’d bound her head in a white kerchief, emerged from among the ranks of the people, and her full body, which was covered by a long black dress, began to dance, timidly at first, then gathering speed until she seemed like a circle turning upon itself. How can I describe the scene to you, Doctor? The image of that woman, whose body twisted to the rhythm of the bullets, comes to me covered in tears, and the relative sizes of things become confused. I see her body become thin as a thread, then widen and stretch, the white of her headscarf spreading over the black of her dress, and everything turning. And I see her face, upon which the years had etched their stories, reveal a mysterious smile. You don’t know Umm Hasan. If you like, I can introduce you to her, she’s always coming here to visit Yunis. She’s like a mother to me. She’s the only certified midwife here, and all the children of the camp have fallen from their mothers’ wombs into her hands.

  “When we saw Umm Hasan dancing, dancing fever seized us, and everybody danced. To be honest, I danced without deciding to do so. I found myself dancing, and don’t ask me how long we danced because I don’t know. Time disappears at two moments only – of dancing and of death – so what’s one to do when they coincide? We were dancing and dying, Doctor, and only became aware of the scars on the soul after everything was over and we discovered that we’d all died. You’re right – no one has the right to convert death into numbers. Fifteen hundred people died here, or so they say, but the number says nothing, because everybody died here. The entirety of mankind died in that moment of dance, when some were driven to the execution wall still dancing. At that moment, they took me. They pulled me from my dance to my death, but I didn’t die. Umm Hasan danced until she fell to the ground. Then people heard shots and said that the woman had been killed, but like me and like most of the others, she died and stayed alive.”

  Dr. Samara ended his article with an analysis of the image of the sheep in terms of what Khalil Ayoub had said, opining that the man’s feelings of humiliation resulted from the people’s surrender to their fate, since they knew they were going to their deaths but had lost the will to resist and the instinct to live had deserted them. He then set up a parallel between the way the Nazis treated the Jews during the Nazi Holocaust and the methods used
at the massacre of Sabra and Shatila.

  I don’t like that kind of comparison. It deprives things of their meanings and turns mankind’s relationship to history into boring repetition by seeming to equivocate and declare the criminal innocent by making him just a copy of some other criminal and by treating war crimes as though they were inevitable. It turns the victims into numbers by ignoring their singularity and the singularity of the tragedy of each.

  Not to mention that the article angered me from two other perspectives. The first was its coincidental publication side by side, in the same issue, with S. Yizhar’s novel Khirbet Khizeh, which describes the fall of a village in southern Palestine (in all probability Khirbet al-Khisas), its destruction, and the expulsion of its inhabitants. One of the scenes of the novel intersects to an almost incredible degree with one of the scenes from the first day of the Lydda Ghetto and with that of Umm Hasan during the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. Any observer, on reading or hearing of the events of that day, will notice this.

  The second is the way it is written, which mixes identification with the victim with sympathy for him. The style really embarrassed me, for the text ends on a preachy note like that of a Protestant minister bringing the Good News to the believers.

  Dr. Samara’s text stirred many painful thoughts in me, especially the scene in which Umm Hasan dances at Shatila’s wedding of death. This woman, of whose tenderness and love for people Khalil Ayoub told endless stories, and who became the only character whose presence in the Lebanese writer’s novel about the village Bab el-Shams, or “Gate of the Sun,” caught my imagination – this woman, whose soul, which radiated a beauty that illuminated her wrinkled face, was a treasure house of wisdom, led the dance of death herself. Umm Hasan, the character most filled with humanity, had appeared to me, from the time I first became acquainted with her through words, as though she were written in water, not ink, because of her translucence, through which the soul shone; and here I find her dancing to the rhythm of the killers’ bullets!