My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  The committee held its first meeting then and there in the middle of the square and discussed the need for a plan to distribute the people among the empty houses, with the aim of diffusing the crowds from the hospital, the mosque, and the church. Iliyya Batshoun yelled at the people to wait for the committee’s decisions, but no one took any notice. The hunger, thirst, and sun that had worked their way into people’s bodies after that long day of waiting made them incapable of understanding what was going on, and all they wanted was to leave and search for a crust of bread and a drop of water.

  At that moment, the ghetto’s first tragedy occurred, and the shock of that seventeen-year-old boy would remain engraved on people’s sensibility. Ma’moun couldn’t keep himself from weeping as he told me, here in New York, his memories of his emotions and those of my mother, fifty years after the boy was killed in that pitiful way. His memory swept him back to that first day, when Mufid Shahada died, suspended from the barbed wire like a sparrow with a broken neck and scattered feathers, before falling, his arms outstretched.

  “The people called him the sparrow,” said Ma’moun, “and his death was the start of the relationship between the people of the ghetto and death.

  “The death couldn’t be calculated: wherever you looked, you saw nothing else. I’m not talking here about the bodies we had to pick up from the streets and the houses and then bury or, in the end, burn. No, I’m talking about the phantom of the fear of death and disease that haunted the ghetto and turned our lives into no more than a little comma in the registry of the dead. What can I tell you? The city had died. Has anyone ever seen the corpse of a city? I swear, the death of the people was nothing. The disintegrating bodies can’t be compared to the disintegration of the corpses of the houses and the crumbling of the streets and sidewalks. Do you remember Saladin Street? I saw how the street had died when they let us out of the ghetto in groups to gather up the bodies. I swear to God, none of us dared put his whole weight on his foot because he’d feel that the asphalt was giving way beneath him. The asphalt had become a corpse, and we had to walk over it slowly so as not to disturb it in its death while we looked for our own dead.”

  Ma’moun, recalling Mufid Shahada, said that when the memory of death seizes a person in its grip, it paralyzes all his faculties. “We had to learn, my son, to live at the mercy of memory, which, when it wakes, is like a raging wind that breaks our souls into little pieces and rips our bodies apart.

  “And how about you?” he asked me. “How’s your relationship with memory?”

  I told him, “I don’t like memories and I hate nostalgia for the past, because I have no past about which to feel nostalgic. Even the tatters of that past were shredded in front of me when you told me the story of how you picked up the child that was I from beneath the olive tree, so how can you expect me to remember? When you don’t remember whose son you are, memory becomes a trick. I don’t want to fall into the trap of memory! Leave me alone, my friend, to live my life. Why did you follow me all this way? What do you want from me?”

  Ma’moun didn’t answer. I saw the ghost of an embarrassed smile pass over his lips, and he said that our memories are a storm we have to weather or we will be turned into corpses. “Only death, my boy, has no memory.”

  I was not prepared to argue with the elderly blind man who sat before me in the lobby of the Washington Square Hotel, not out of pity for him, for my heart had been freed from all pity after he’d decreed that my memory should be null and void and confessed to conniving with Manal in fabricating me and turning me into a lie. It wasn’t out of pity, it was out of despair. Despair, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed the moment when our human nature reaches its highest point, approaching divinity. The gods must certainly experience despair, and they have nothing to face it with; even suicide is impossible for them, since he who never sleeps never dies and the gods neither sleep nor die and are denied the ability to kill themselves.

  To get back to the story. I don’t know what happens to me when I try to write. It’s as though I’m not the one doing the writing, or the words are just passing through me on their way to wherever they’re going. It’s what we call “musing,” which is another name for what Western critics call “stream of consciousness.” I am not, however, writing a stream of consciousness. The fact is, I don’t care for forms. I let the words run through my fingers and limn the darkness of their black letters on the white page, and I watch my soul as it breaks up under the raging of a memory that I had decided to abandon – and that now suddenly devours me, for no better reason than my decision to tell the truth in the face of those shared lies that took over the auditorium at Cinema Village when the Israeli director and the Lebanese writer colluded to disfigure the image of the woman who had become the victim of the movie she’d wanted to make.

  My love for the woman was extinguished, why I don’t know or I’m afraid to acknowledge why, but my admiration for her has no bounds. Perhaps my love died because I was afraid of that admiration and of my discovery that the woman had become a victim of her own movie. Dalia was a true artist, and an artist doesn’t manufacture works or write texts. The artist is merely a powerless vector. This is why the writer ends up not writing but being written. Was that not Gogol’s fate? Didn’t Emile Habibi end up believing what he’d written more than his own life? Didn’t Ghassan Kanafani’s stories get mixed up with his mortal remains?

  Dalia was of that same stripe of humanity, which is why she was incapable of making me feel she was mine, even though I’m sure now that she loved me. But I was afraid, and fear paralyzes love, and when Dalia left me I was afraid of the ending of love, so I ran away. My heart ran away from me, a wall arose in my breast, and I felt in some obscure way that I had to flee before the death of her love for me could catch me unawares. It may have been this that extinguished the desire in my heart and made me discover that love had drained away and vanished under the cold water of the shower, driving me to flee from myself and my memory and recompose myself as a falafel seller trying to write a novel about a little-known poet who was enveloped by silence, in life as in death. And the writing led me where it wanted, and I found myself emerging from the coffer of Waddah al-Yaman to climb into the coffer of my own story, and was obliged to go back to the beginning.

  The beginning led me to recall everything I’d forgotten, and the beginning was the ghetto, where I was born, or so I had been told. And at the start of the ghetto, the boy died, hanging on the wire, where his body continued to tremble in the people’s memory.

  The story says that, while the members of the committee were busy organizing the allocation of the deserted houses, Mufid Shahada ran toward the wires waving a piece of paper with Hebrew written on it shouting, “Mister! Mister!”

  The boy ran up to the barbed wire and began trying to climb it.

  “Tahzor le-ahor! Asur!” yelled a soldier, proclaiming that it was forbidden to approach the fence.

  Climbing the wire was impossible. It had been laid down in a hurry to make a boundary around the area and was rebuilt and reinforced three days later, at which point the closed-off site would resemble nothing so much as a roofless cage, and Iliyya Batshoun would make his celebrated remark, “This isn’t a ghetto, it’s a cage, and we’re like chickens. They treat us like chickens in a cage but, damn them, what misers they are! People feed chickens, but they’ve left us with nothing.”

  Mufid Shahada ran, waving the paper in his hand.

  “Rotseeh ledber with Mr. Mula!” he shouted in Hebrew. “I want to speak to him!”

  A soldier came forward, brandishing his rifle. “Go away! Away!” he yelled.

  “Mr. Mula,” said Mufid. “Yesh li mikhtav for Mr. Mula.”

  The soldier hesitated a little when he heard the boy was holding a letter for Mr. Mula.

  “Ken, Mula’s my friend and I have a letter for him.”

  The sight of the boy was pitiful indeed. He stood alone, a
carefully folded piece of paper in his hand, which he waved at the soldiers, asking them to take the letter to his friend Mr. Mula.

  The soldier, who had come up to the fence, reached out to take it.

  “Lo, lo!” yelled Mufid. “Not for you. Rotseh ani Mula. Tell Mr. Mula that Mufid ha’ben shel Ghassan Shahada – Mufid, Ghassan Shahada’s boy, who used to bring the vegetables to Ben Shemen with his father – Mufid’s here and he asks you, please, Mr. Mula, I want to go to our house. I want my dad and mom and brothers and sisters. Send me back to them. Is this any way to behave, mister? My granddad told my dad, ‘Don’t believe the Jews, they have no honor,’ but my dad said, ‘No, Mr. Siegfried wouldn’t lie and he said, “You’re under our protection.”’ Siegfried Lehman was our friend and he asked my dad to put me in school with the Jewish children at Ben Shemen. Mr. Siegfried said Mula was his student and wouldn’t do anything against his teacher’s instructions. He gave my dad the letter and said, ‘Don’t show it to anyone except Mr. Mula!’ My dad gave it to the soldiers who came to us at home and then they threw us out. I want Mula.”

  Another soldier came up, reached his hand through the wire and snatched the piece of paper from Mufid Shahada. The soldier retreated and began reading the letter, while Mufid waited, his body against the wire, a slight smile on his face.

  “Jewish agent!” somebody shouted.

  “Agent and son of an agent! They’ve been collaborating with the Jews since forever. We should have shot his father,” said another.

  The boy, though, seemed not to hear the threatening language being used or the muttering that could be heard, and didn’t turn to look at the people standing there, unmoving, waiting.

  At that moment, Dr. Samara, who was still sitting where he had been, under the sun, spoke up. The doctor hadn’t moved from his place all day long. Even when the people were allowed to go to the ablutions tank to wet their parched tongues with water, the doctor stayed where he was and refused to respond to his wife’s plea to go with her and his daughter to drink.

  I don’t know how thirst came to be engraved in the man’s memory, because he doesn’t allude to the subject in his article.

  “Thirst breaks voices, and speech comes to resemble a death rattle.” That’s what Ma’moun said when he told me, fifty years later, the story of the caravan of death that set off into the wilderness that awaited it, taking with it most of the city’s inhabitants.

  “Calm down, everyone!” said the doctor in a hoarse voice almost no one had heard before. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe Mula will let us go.”

  But Mula didn’t come. Shmuel Cohen, known as Mula, was the commander of the Palmach’s 3rd Battalion, which had occupied the city. The man, who had studied at Ben Shemen, was known for his love of classical music and was familiar with every house in Lydda and its villages as a result of his visits with his humanitarian mentor, Siegfried Lehman, builder of a settlement to foster coexistence between Jews and Palestinians – this same Shmuel Cohen was the military commander who implemented the mass expulsion of the inhabitants of the city of al-Khudr and committed there the worst massacre of the 1948 War of the Nakba.

  Mula wasn’t there, or refused to go near the barbed wire, or who knows. What is certain is that he knew Mufid and his father Ghassan Shahada, the vegetable seller, who considered himself a friend of the founder of the settlement for the children of the survivors of the pogroms of Eastern Europe, who had always said, “There’s no need to be enemies.” The people of Ben Shemen were different. When the great earthquake struck on July 11, 1927, they rushed with their teacher to help the people of Lydda. “There’s no need to be enemies, everyone.”

  Mula never appeared, and Mufid Shahada remained, unmoving, at the barbed wire, waiting. Then the boy fell. It looked as though he’d fallen from above, his arms outstretched, as though attached to a nonexistent cross. His head hit the ground and he stopped moving.

  It is said that the Israeli soldier tore the letter up, ground it into the earth with his boot, and said something in Hebrew that Mufid didn’t understand. The boy’s knowledge of Hebrew didn’t go beyond a few words that he’d picked out of people’s mouths as he passed through the Ben Shemen colony with his father. When the soldier spoke, saying, “That time is past. Today between you and us there is only the sword!” the boy didn’t understand, though he did understand the language of the soldier’s boot when it trod on the torn scraps of the letter.

  It is said that when the boy heard the soldier’s words, he cried out in a mighty voice, “Where art thou, Khudr, our master? Come! Behold what has become of us!”

  It is said that when the soldier heard Mufid’s words, he rained blows on the boy’s head with the butt of his rifle, and the boy didn’t protect himself with his hands; on the contrary, his arms remained outstretched before the wire and the blood on his head took on the shape of a crown of thorns. Then, suddenly, he fell.

  It is said the soldier didn’t hit the boy with the butt of his rifle but pushed him away from the wire and that Mufid, instead of stepping back, lost his balance and fell.

  It is said the soldier neither pushed the boy nor hit him but that he collapsed from sunstroke after standing for ten uninterrupted hours under the blazing July sun. That is what Shmarya Guttman, the city’s military governor, said during a meeting with the members of the committee. Hajj Iliyya Batshoun had requested the meeting to present an official protest in the name of the people of Lydda demanding that the Israeli soldier who’d beaten the boy with his rifle butt be held to account.

  Guttman said, “Listen, Hajj. I want to cooperate with you and fulfill all requests that I find justified, but we can’t start like this. Forget putting the soldier on trial. He’s a hero of the Palmach.

  “The soldier didn’t kill Mufid – Mufid fell and died. Plus, there are hundreds of dead bodies strewn around the streets of Lydda. I don’t want to hear any more demands of this kind. And tomorrow I’ll inform you how the work will begin.”

  Wherein lies the truth of the death of Mufid, who would remain in the ghetto’s memory as its first martyr?

  Things are said and people say things.

  Nothing is sure except that Mufid Shahada died with open hands and closed eyes beneath the setting sun, his head in a pool of blood.

  I lay all the possible causes of the boy’s death out in front of me, and I wonder about the truth, only to discover that my wondering has no meaning.

  Ma’moun was right, and Manal too was right.

  Ma’moun said the matter was of no importance. He said he’d seen the boy fall down and die but couldn’t remember the cause of that death. “Death is more important than what causes it,” the blind man said.

  Manal said, “Don’t waste your time! It’s all death. Death’s like death. What difference does it make if the soldier hit him or kicked him or he fell and the sun killed him? It’s all death.”

  Ma’moun said, “You’re right: the causes multiply but death is one.”

  Manal said, “What a waste! He died because he believed the letter. Good God, he’d seen what happened to his father! The man gave him Lehman’s letter and they jeered at him and forced him to get out, along with everyone else. Why Mufid was so stupid, I swear I don’t know.”

  Ma’moun said the boy must have known some secret. Maybe they killed him to kill the secret along with him.

  Things are said and people say things.

  I’m sitting in my little home in New York. From my window I watch the silence of the snow covering the sounds of the city and wonder what it is I’m doing now. Am I looking for the truth, or filling the emptiness of my life with questions to which I have no answers?

  (If I were to tell Dr. Hanna Jiryis this story, he’d forbid me to write it. I imagine him standing with his stooped shoulders, smiling that smile of his that combines mockery and pity and saying I can’t refer to a letter supposedly written by Dr. Lehman
if I don’t have a copy of it.

  And when I tell him that everyone who stayed in Lydda knows the story, he’ll respond that it doesn’t matter; what matters is that if we are to write history, we need written documents.

  “But I’m not writing history!” I answer him.

  “What are you writing then?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Something like literature.”

  “Nonsense!” he says. “Give up all this nonsense, so that the weeping can stop for a little and we can see what happened and why!”

  Thank God, Dr. Hanna isn’t here and I can go on with the story as it is, and not bother with a document that exists only in the memory!)

  The people of the ghetto made up their minds that all three versions were correct, that the differences among them were merely an optical illusion, and that the optical illusion had nothing to do with eyes and their malfunctions: people have a third eye, the eye of memory, which is invisible and defines what we see, after which we organize its elements, deleting and restoring so as to make a succession of tableaux.

  In the case of Lydda, the tableau of the boy’s death, as preserved by the eye of memory, is, of necessity, silent. In all likelihood, no one heard a word of the conversation that took place between Mufid Shahada and the Israeli soldier at the wire. People saw a scene dappled by shadows, a silent scene transformed by the rays of the retreating sun into something opaque and drained of color. The background to the scene is formed of the people’s mutterings, which rise and fall like a musical accompaniment to the sun, whose shadows are withdrawing from the square and departing. People’s eyes saw shapes and couldn’t distinguish individual objects, for the eyes of the people of the ghetto were thirsty and thirsty eyes don’t see clearly.