My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  “Are you deaf, you idiot?”

  “Ma’moun’s blind,” Manal yelled.

  “Blind, deaf, it doesn’t matter. Go with them.”

  Ma’moun stood in the middle of the road confused as to what he was supposed to do. Hajj Iliyya went forward, took Ma’moun by the arm, and led him to where the thirty men the Israeli captain had picked out were gathered.

  Manal ran and yelled in the officer’s face, “He’s blind!”

  “Blind?”

  One of the soldiers went over to the officer and spoke with him in a low voice. The officer ordered Ma’moun to take off his glasses. Ma’moun removed them and stood, his eyes open onto the whiteness, before the officer, who stepped back and told him to go back to where he’d come from.

  The column of thirty men left the enclosed area, and as the people heard the truck’s engine turn, a wail arose from the women. “They’re taking them to their death,” Fatima, the baker’s wife, screamed, waving to her son Ahmad with the white kerchief that she’d pulled off her head, then starting to beat her breast.

  When the women’s wailing started, so did that of the children, as though their chests too had exploded with tears. Even the men wept. “And if it hadn’t been for Hajj Iliyya being so clever, they would have shot us all,” Manal said.

  “Hold your tongues!” the officer yelled.

  At that moment, a woman wearing tattered clothing suddenly appeared, as though from the bowels of the earth, carrying a baby. She lifted the child up high and went toward the officer, crying, “Take her! Take the girl! Take her! I want to die. Take her!”

  The thin, pale little girl was almost naked.

  All that could be seen of her were two large eyes. The woman lifted her child up high, and the child’s tiny feet, which seemed to be smeared with something resembling mud, appeared. The woman was screaming and weeping and shit was spreading over her hand; it seemed the child had soiled itself. The mother had lost all control when she saw her only son, who was fourteen, among the young men who’d been led off to the army truck. Everyone in the crowd was convinced that the thirty young men were going to their execution. This was what the Haganah and Palmach forces did when they entered an Arab village: they chose a group of young men, took them aside and shot them, then fired rounds over the people’s heads to force them to leave.

  Khalid Hassouna went up to the woman (this Khalid was a dignitary of the town and what he said was listened to with respect). Everyone saw the seventy-year-old man, limping on his left foot, approach the woman to ask her to lower the child.

  “Give me the little girl, daughter, and put your trust in God.”

  Instead of giving him the girl, the woman ran toward the officer, drawing the child back as though making ready to throw her. Signs of disgust drew themselves on the Israeli captain’s face, and he yelled at his soldiers to keep the woman away from him.

  At this point, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know exactly what happened. Manal told me, but I couldn’t believe her, even though she swore by my father’s grave that what she said was true and called on Ma’moun to be her witness, and he repeated what she had said, though in a different kind of language and more concisely.

  Manal said that the woman was seized by a fit of madness. She lifted her child up high and started dancing. She danced as though listening to a drumbeat in her ears and started circling around the soldiers, who stood there, dumbfounded and immobilized.

  She danced with the tears running down her cheeks, screaming, “Take her! I want to die!” as the people watched. Even Khalid Hassouna stood there, not knowing what to do, then burst out weeping as he approached the woman, pulled the little girl from her hands, and sat down on the ground.

  People asked where the woman’s husband was, and she responded promptly, “My husband was killed at the door of the mosque and left me the boy and the little girl. They’ve taken the boy to kill him, so what am I supposed to do? They should kill me too and get it over with.”

  Manal didn’t know how Khalid Hassouna managed to calm the woman and stop her tears, because at that moment everyone was distracted by Hajj Iliyya yelling in the officer’s face.

  Hajj Iliyya was known for his calmness and poise. During the siege, he’d been head of the rations committee that had succeeded in ensuring there was enough food for fifty thousand persons – inhabitants of Lydda and refugees from the neighboring villages – for six months. The sixty-year-old, who owned an orange grove and a field of olives, had been convinced that the siege would continue for a long while, but had also believed, like everyone else, that despite their overwhelming military superiority, the Jews would never be able to expel the Palestinians, who constituted the majority of the inhabitants of their country. Then, when the city fell, and he saw the blood flowing in the streets, he refused to join the throngs of humanity who were forced to leave. He told his wife, children, and grandchildren that he would never leave the city of St. George and would seek refuge in the hospital, pretend to be sick, and let matters take their course. He didn’t try to persuade them to stay with him as he knew that would be impossible in the midst of the vicious and deadly chaos that had taken over the city, but he decided that he would stay himself. He told his children he preferred to die there and wanted no more than that. “I have lived a long life and it’s enough. I want to die next to al-Khudr. Al-Khudr will never allow the dragon to devour the city.”

  His eldest son, Iskandar, said he’d gone mad and senile and tried to take him with them by force, but the man refused, yelling in their faces and cursing at them. Then he disappeared into the crowds – to reappear on that day, there, in the ghetto, shouting at the officer to restore Hamid to his mother.

  “He’s a child. What do you want with him? You killed his father, now leave him with his mother! Have you no shame?”

  Hajj Iliyya approached the woman, took the little girl, who hadn’t stopped crying, from Khalid Hassouna’s hands, took her to the ablutions tank, washed her and dried her off with his shirt, and hugged her to his chest. The child’s crying died down in the arms of the Hajj, who shouted to her mother, Khuloud, to come and take her daughter from him and stand quietly so he could solve the problem with the Israeli captain.

  Little did Hajj Iliyya Batshoun know that his tenderness toward the child would lead to a story he would never have thought possible, given that he’d passed sixty. The man was known for his piety and godliness and had raised a large family – five children and nine grandchildren. He was, likewise, so devoted to his wife, Madame Eveline, that his children believed it was she who decided everything, for them and for him. The woman from Jaffa who, at the age of seventeen, had married a man twenty years her senior, had been no innocent, as Iliyya had believed, while for him the marriage was a sign of his decision to mend his ways after a youth spent in the bars of Beirut: upon the death of his father, who had grown rich through his labors in the Lydda orange grove and in the orange business, Iliyya renounced his frivolous ways and decided to marry as part of his decision to change his way of life and to devote himself to work.

  It is said, though only God knows the truth of the matter, that he found his guidance at the hands of a Lebanese monk who had severed his relationship with the monastery of Deir Mar Saba, located east of Bethlehem overlooking Wadi al-Joz, and taken to wandering in the alleyways of Old Jerusalem, where he became known as Monk Jurji. Hajj Iliyya spoke of him to his wife Eveline only once, when the monk’s body was found lying close to Herod’s Gate, riddled with bullets. He told her he’d lost his spiritual guide and accused the Jews of killing him. The story of the monk’s killing is opaque: the only trace of it one is likely to find is in popular narratives, which have turned him into a hero and a saint. Probably, the clique of Greeks that runs the monastery of Deir Mar Saba and the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem considered the man a heretic and expunged him from their memory.

  Eveline attributed the Hajj’s
ties to the Holy Sepulchre’s Cave of Light to the amazing hold that the monk exercised over her husband – for the Hajj would leave his house in Lydda on Good Friday morning and go to Jerusalem, where he would remain, fasting, at the doorway of the cave till dawn on the Sunday, after which he would return home, shining, and celebrate the Great Feast with his wife and children.

  This man, who had surrendered himself to the God of his Lebanese monk and to his wife Eveline, making her the unchallenged authority in the house, and who was regarded as one of Lydda’s best minds and most notable men, played an essential role during the battles that raged around Lydda in 1948, and would go on to become head of the Popular Committee formed by the people of the ghetto, which directed its relations with the Israeli army of occupation and managed the difficult daily life inside the barbed wire.

  And this same elderly man would unexpectedly find love and drown in its tempestuous sea, and all of it in front of everyone, at the door of the Church of St. George, in the Lydda Ghetto.

  Manal said it was the foolishness of a sixty-year-old. Ma’moun said it was love, and love is blind. Khalid Hassouna said it was a madness brought on by the madness of the Nakba. Whatever people said, what happened would become one of the great stories of the ghetto, because the man proclaimed himself a Muslim and married Khuloud “according to the custom of God and His Messenger,” and when the possibility of family reunion appeared on the horizon, his eldest son, who’d left along with the rest of the family to live in al-Birah in the West Bank, was astonished to find that his father ignored Madame Eveline’s letters, in which she demanded to be reunited with him and brought back to Lydda. What happened when his wife and children learned of his marriage? And what was the reaction of Hamid, Khuloud’s son and the brother of Huda, after he returned from captivity? Those are indeed stories that deserve to be told.

  Iliyya Batshoun became a Muslim without surrendering himself entirely to his new religion. He designed a new tradition to follow at Easter that was no different from what he’d learned to do from the Lebanese monk, beginning his fast after noon on Good Friday and ending it at dawn on Easter Sunday at the Church of St. George, which he now referred to as the Shrine of al-Khudr. His funeral, following his death in 1953, was unique and unlike any that Palestine had seen before.

  Iliyya Batshoun left the little girl in her mother’s arms and hurried over to the Israeli captain, begging and demanding that Hamid be let go. He said it was shameful, that the child was only fourteen, that it wasn’t allowed, but the captain’s features never changed; his face was as though carved in stone. Iliyya turned around and called on Khalid Hassouna to join him in negotiating with the Israeli captain.

  Manal said the negotiations were tough. “Of course, we couldn’t hear anything, but it was clear that the Hajj, who was the town’s model of dignity, was humiliated before the officer. His head was lowered and he raised both his hands as though imploring him. I don’t know what they said. We were on our feet, and the hunger was eating us alive. They went on for more than half an hour, and then the captain raised the loudspeaker and informed us of his decisions.”

  “Listen well!

  “First, we have asked Mr. Iliyya Batshoun and Mr. Khalid Hassouna to form a committee to represent the people of the city before the military governor.

  “Second, no one is allowed to go through the gate without the permission of the military governor.

  “Third, the inhabitants may use the houses located inside the wire, under the supervision of the local committee.

  “Fourth, the Israeli army is not responsible for providing the inhabitants with food and drink. This is the responsibility of the inhabitants, and we will accept no further discussion of the matter.

  “Fifth, the committee is required to take a census of the inhabitants, and present a complete list of their names, ages, and trades tomorrow at ten AM.

  “Sixth, everyone is required to assemble in this place at ten AM tomorrow and await further instructions.”

  Having delivered his speech, the officer withdrew with his men to beyond the wire, and the soldiers relaxed, shouldered their rifles, and sat on the ground, eating their food with the appetite of those who haven’t eaten for hours. The people, exhausted by hunger, slowly left.

  —3—

  “WHERE ARE WE to go?” asked Khuloud, who was carrying her daughter Huda in her arms.

  “Put your faith in God, sister,” Hajj Iliyya said. “Go back to where you slept last night, and then we’ll sort things out, God willing.”

  It was six in the evening. After a long and grueling day of waiting, the people started to leave the square in front of the Great Mosque. They looked more like shadows, enveloped in silence. “I swear, Naji,” Ma’moun told me, “that day, for the first time in my life, I heard the sound of silence.” Describing to me how the people had begun to set off for nowhere, Ma’moun said, “The Israeli captain was clear: ‘You can live in any house you want, so long as it’s inside the wire.’”

  “And what about us?” I asked him.

  Ma’moun said he was the one who’d found the house and told Manal, “You two live in the house, and I’ll stay in the room in the garden. That way, I’ll be with you.”

  (The blind man, who had discovered the sound of silence and its various rhythms, would transform the subject of this discovery into the basis for the lecture on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish that he gave here, at New York University, where he read the rhythms of meaning into the interstices of silence, announcing that the hallmark of the literature of the Palestinian Nakba was that it had “fashioned from the silence of the victim interstices that reconstructed the poetic image.” Even though, like most of the audience who listened to the lecture in the library of the Kevorkian Center, I couldn’t get my mind around what he meant, Ma’moun’s words had an impact on my heart, not simply because his analysis was astonishing, but because it took me back to the square in front of the mosque, where the silence of the victims rose up, drowning out the voices of the Israeli soldiers.

  The eloquence of the silence of the victims in the square in front of the Great Mosque made me think of the eloquence of the dance in the village square at Fasouta, in Galilee. I saw the dust of silence spreading, covering everyone – dust like that which rose from beneath the feet of the people of Fasouta as they surrendered to the Israeli army with their northern dabke, the dust hiding both them and the soldiers, veiling them so that conqueror and conquered were equally absent and concealed – a terrifying moment, described by Anton Shammas in his wonderful novel Arabesques.)

  The silence was broken suddenly when Iliyya Batshoun was heard asking the people to wait, so that the committee that was to take charge of the quarter’s affairs could be formed and distribute the people among the houses located within the ghetto’s ring of fencing. No one paid him any attention, however. The people wanted to get into the houses, not to take up residence in them but to look for food.

  Khalid Hassouna went over to Hajj Iliyya and they spoke in low voices. Then Khalid’s voice was heard again, announcing the names of the committee members.

  “Listen, everyone! The committee is composed of Iliyya Batshoun, chairman; Khalid Hassouna, deputy chairman; Ibrahim Hamza, Mustafa al-Kayyali, and Ghassan Batheish.”

  “Any objections?” asked Hajj Iliyya.

  Mufid Shahada raised his hand. “I object,” the young man said. “There has to be someone on the committee who knows Hebrew so we can communicate with them.”

  “You know Hebrew?” asked Hajj Iliyya.

  “Ken,” answered Mufid. “I used to go up to deliver the vegetables to the Jewish kubbaniyya at Ben Shemen and I got to know a few words there. I mean, I can communicate with them, and there’s Dr. Lehman too. He’s my friend and my dad’s, and he gave my dad a letter saying so.”

  “Where’s your dad, boy?”

  “My dad went off with the rest. First of all, he ref
used to leave the house. The soldiers came and said, ‘Get out and go to Abdallah!’ There were two of them and they were wearing keffiyehs. My dad gave them the letter. The first soldier took it and read it, but instead of coming to an understanding with us, he scowled and said, ‘Go on, get out of here!’ and spat and cursed at Dr. Lehman. The second soldier took the letter and was about to tear it up, but I said, ‘Please give it to me, God preserve you!’ and took it and started running, and I heard them laughing. I didn’t look back. I ran and found I’d ended up here, at the church, and got separated from my family, but I still have the letter.”

  “So where are your dad and your family now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s the letter?”

  “I have the letter with me. I took it from the soldier and ran.” Mufid pulled the letter carefully from his pocket and flourished it.

  “This letter’s no use to us!” said Iliyya Batshoun, but Khalid Hassouna had a different view. He said it might reassure the Israelis. “The important thing, my boy, is that you take care of the letter. It might come in handy.”

  “Give me the letter, my boy,” said Iliyya Batshoun.

  “I’m not giving it to anybody. Dr. Lehman said to give it to Mula and he’d take care of us.”

  “Who’s Mula?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Despite all his efforts, Mufid Shahada wasn’t included in the committee. Ma’moun said the committee ought to include a woman and proposed Manal, as the widow of the martyr Hasan Dannoun, but Hajj Iliyya refused, saying a woman’s place was at home. “You want us to behave like the Jews? No, my boy. Women are our honor, and honor must be guarded.”

  “The important thing is, the committee has been formed, and we’ve got people who can represent us and defend our interests before the Jews,” said Ghassan Batheish, who worked as a nurse at the hospital and whose membership on the committee had been accepted at the suggestion of Dr. Mustafa Zahlan. Dr. Zahlan had rejected the participation of any of the doctors in the committee because its work might take a political turn, which would compromise the sanctity of the medical profession and of the Hippocratic oath – which made it a sacred profession, above politics; as a result, roles were reversed in the little quarter, with decision-making power in the hands of a nurse, Ghassan Batheish, who would become a legend in the ghetto because he took Ibrahim al-Nimr with him to the committee’s meeting with Moshe and thus turned Hatim al-Laqqis’s idea into reality when al-Nimr was able to persuade the Israeli officer in charge to allow a group of the young men to fetch water in barrels from a nearby citrus grove.