My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Recounting the story of the caravan of death, Ma’moun said, “Thirst only reaches its peak when it strikes the eyes. The moment our tears dry up, we becomes fragile, like a dry stick.”

  How could he, a blind man, feel the thirst of the eyes? Do eyes that have been obliterated also feel thirst? Why did he tell me that thirsty eyes cease to be able to see, beholding things as though covered in a thick milky fog, and thus lose their ability to distinguish?

  Probably, the people of the ghetto, despite having been allowed to drink from the ablutions tank of the mosque, were afflicted with thirst of the eyes, from whose symptoms they would continue to suffer for a long time, facts becoming mixed up in their memory with optical illusions. This would explain why each of them retained his own version of Mufid’s death – so much so that when I visited Lydda at the age of thirty (because of the nurse Najwa Ibrahim who had asked me to help her sell her house there and whom I discovered later was the mother of Khalil Ayoub), I heard a different story. Mrs. Karima Salihi claimed that the boy had climbed up the barbed wire and that he died because the Israeli soldier had fired a single shot at his head: “He had his arms open and was speaking Hebrew. Then I saw him lying on the ground. Poor boy! I don’t know what he was thinking of, climbing up. All I know is that when I saw him he was like a little bird hanging from the wire. His body was shuddering as the soul left it, and he didn’t fall to the ground, he stayed hanging there. Hajj Iliyya went to the mosque and fetched a chair. A blind young man, whose name I don’t remember, stood on it, took the poor boy down, and laid him on the ground. Then they buried him.”

  I listened to her in disbelief, as no one who’d witnessed the incident had said they’d heard the sound of a shot. I was certain the story she was telling was a figment of her imagination, or of the alterations that affect orally transmitted stories. But I didn’t say a word. I concluded the deal for the sale of Umm Khalil’s house and left.

  These varying versions of the death of Mufid do not deny the truth that the boy died on the wire, and that the Israeli army, which had corralled the remaining inhabitants of Lydda into the ghetto, was as responsible for the killing of the sparrow-boy as it was for the massacre that killed hundreds of the city’s inhabitants.

  I don’t believe that the multiplicity of versions is attributable solely to the fact that they were never written down. Basically, it should be attributed instead to the victims’ attempts to adapt themselves to the new reality by viewing the succession of tragic events through the third eye, which sees only what a person can bear to see. This is the basic cause of the confusions in stories about the Nakba. The solution doesn’t lie in writing them down, because you can’t organize the stories of the past in writing and extract a harmonious narrative from them when the Nakba is an ongoing process that hasn’t ceased for the last fifty years and has yet to be transformed into a past that has truly passed.

  What story would my biological father, whom I don’t know, tell if we suppose that he was living in Jenin Camp and lost two sons when the Israeli army invaded the camp in 2002 during the Second Intifada? Would he tell the story of a child who was abandoned, discarded in the open country while still a baby? Or would he tell the story of two sons felled by Israeli bullets fifty years later? Would he say that he forgot me and my mother? Or that he tried to save himself and abandoned us both? Or that he’s still looking for me? Or never even mention my story, because it has become a source of shame to him when compared with the story of the two heroic sons martyred while fighting the army of occupation? My father might forget my story in order to justify his life, for nothing can justify abandoning little children and leaving them lying on the corpses of their mothers under the olive trees. And all I have to do, if I want to get on with my life, is forget.

  The boy from Lydda believed the Israeli pedagogue, thinking that the sharing of bread and salt was stronger than war and more important than a land said to be promised. He had, therefore, to die, and his death had to leave that wretched handful of the people of Lydda in fear, despair, and uncertainty.

  —4—

  NIGHT UPON NIGHT, darkness out of darkness. That is how I am obliged to describe the stifling night that enveloped the city in darkness. Though I don’t remember. No matter how hard I try to bore into its depths, my memory refuses ever to take me to the night of the baby I was in July 1948.

  My memory consists of a few words spoken by my mother. She never sat me down next to her to tell me the story all in one go. She told me fragments and little pieces, as though weaving the tale spontaneously. The words had no fixed occasions but erupted from the night of memory. She wasn’t telling the story to me – I was there because I was there. She didn’t think of me as a listener; probably, she thought I didn’t grasp what was being said. She’d give me paper and pencil to draw with and talk at length with Ma’moun. I see them absorbed in rehearsing the memory of death, “rehearsing” being the word that best describes this constant activity of theirs.

  After dinner, they’d sit in the shadow of a pale candle and weave memory. Their present was their memory, as though they weren’t actually living but were fashioning the remembrance of a life that had been denied to them. This is how I would define the Palestinian experience, or, let’s say, this is how I lived it. My life was a kind of present that I treated as memories, as though things only take on meaning in the context of that permanent feeling that the present is escaping and cannot be grasped, that it is made up of simple exercises that serve to take us down into memory’s depths.

  It is a “memory for forgetfulness,” as Mahmoud Darwish wrote in his semifictional personal narrative of the siege of Beirut in 1982. What the poet who wrote Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? failed to note, however, was that his Beirut present was a possibility only because it was constructed within the framework of a political and social entity that was in the process of being founded and, as such, was eligible for transformation into memory. In those days of the ghetto, though, we lived in a maelstrom of present memory and a present that resembled memory, and through catastrophe after catastrophe. My story with this story that I’m trying to write is full of the ghosts of darkness, of speech exchanged between a man and a woman before a child whose presence they see as an absence. They wove the story without meaning to. They were rehearsing for living in a world that offered them nothing: lovers without love, companions with no road to walk; their relationship was just a past without a present, so they fashioned out of memory a bed for a love that never was.

  I gather together the threads of what they said and it feels as though I’m listening to rustles and whispers, and I discover that all stories are like this or, to put it more precisely, that this is how stories are born – in fits and starts, whispered, near silent – and that when the writer starts to mold them to fit a pattern, he kills their soul and turns them into a memory for forgetfulness.

  What was said on those dark nights, nights so dark that they can be compared only to themselves, as when the Arabs write of “the most nocturnal of nights”?

  The story says that the night the boy Mufid Shahada was killed was starless. When the people of the ghetto tell the story of those days, they speak of the stars disappearing in the month of July. They say, with their direct way of speaking, that “the stars fled the city’s skies because they couldn’t bear to witness the death that turned into shrouds borne by the youths of Lydda to the collective graves.”

  “Stars are the eyes of the sky,” said Khuloud as she recounted how her madness on the morning of the second day had been not madness but a fear of the intense darkness that enveloped the city’s sky. “When the stars disappear, the sky disappears. Are we to live in a land without a sky?” Well, no, Khuloud didn’t say those exact words, but she said something like them. “I went mad with fear and stood by the window and saw Mufid Shahada’s body lying there uncovered. I swear by God Almighty, they wouldn’t allow us to cover it. I thought, now they’ll come and t
ake it and bury it. Nobody came. I stood there as though nailed to the ground. I don’t know what came over me. And everything was dark. I looked at the stars. My grandfather, God rest his soul, used to say the stars are the eyes of the sky, and I saw that the sky had gone blind. A sky without eyes, and the young lad dead and lying on the ground, and nothing to cover him but the dark.”

  Manal related that what she’d seen couldn’t be believed, “like stories of jinn and afreets.” She said that at the instant the boy fell, the light withdrew and darkness descended on the place.

  “All of a sudden, when he fell, the sun went out.” She said darkness wasn’t supposed to fall like that: the dark should blend with the light before devouring it. The instant Mufid died, though, the light withdrew and the dark descended, as though the darkness was his shroud, instead of an actual shroud.

  Iliyya Batshoun, as head of the ghetto committee, went out into the square in front of the mosque and walked toward the wire, asking everyone to help him carry the body so that it could be buried. No one, though, dared to leave his shelter, as the people had heard the sound of the Israeli rifles being cocked and the voice of the soldier ordering Iliyya to leave the square and go back where he came from.

  “We have to bury him,” said Iliyya in a hoarse voice.

  “Tomorrow,” said the soldier.

  “That won’t do! Please, let me drag him to the house.”

  The only person to go up to Iliyya was Khuloud, who was carrying her little girl in her arms.

  “Go back to the house!” Iliyya yelled at her.

  But Khuloud refused to go back. She sat on the ground and began moaning, while Iliyya stood there not knowing what to do.

  “Both of you, go back to the house!” the soldier yelled.

  Khalid Hassouna approached. He took Khuloud by the hand and told her to stand up. She got up and walked ahead of two men, stumbling through the darkness, to spend the night sitting at the window, keeping watch over Mufid Shahada’s corpse.

  “Did it ever occur to you that one morning the sun might not rise?” Ma’moun asked me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He repeated the question as a reply, saying that that night was the first time he feared the dark. “Can you believe that a blind man would be afraid of a blackness whose meaning he didn’t know?”

  He said Manal had sown the fear in his heart when she informed him of the blind sky and said she was afraid the sun wouldn’t rise.

  I smiled when I heard Ma’moun’s figure of speech. I don’t know how he saw my smile, but he said he knew I was making fun of him and of the expression he’d used. “But Manal, my boy, was right. Till now the sun hasn’t risen. A whole people is still, to this day, living in darkness.”

  Manal spoke of the mournful funeral that took place the following morning, saying that she’d learned the meaning of sorrow when she saw the young men wrap Mufid’s body in a white blanket and carry him into the mosque.

  In the Great Mosque, the corpse was laid out on the ground and nobody knew what to do.

  “Where’s the sheikh?” Iliyya Batshoun yelled. “This won’t do!”

  “Where do you want me to find you a sheikh?” Khalid Hassouna said. “The sheikh ran away with all the rest.”

  Hatim al-Laqqis came forward holding a Koran and recited a passage from the chapter The Merciful.

  Hatim faltered as he recited, so Ma’moun took over from him:

  The All-merciful has taught the Koran. He created man and He has taught him the Explanation. The sun and the moon are to a reckoning, and the stars and the trees bow themselves; and Heaven – He raised it up, and set the Balance. (Transgress not in the Balance, and weigh with justice, and skimp not in the Balance.) And earth – He set it down for all beings, therein fruits, and palm trees with sheaths, and grain in the blade, and fragrant herbs. O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny? He created man of a clay like the potter’s, and He created the jinn of a smokeless fire. O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny? Lord of the Two Easts, Lord of the Two Wests, O which of your Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?

  Suddenly, Iliyya Batshoun’s voice rose in prayer. The sixty-year-old stood behind the body, held his hands out, and began to recite his prayer in Greek, and before he reached the final amen, the people beheld a strange sight: Sheikh Usama al-Humsi appeared from no one knew where. He approached, pulled Ma’moun from his place, and asked if the body had been washed.

  “The martyr needs no washing other than that of his own blood,” Khalid Hassouna said. “So let God then accept him as a martyr.”

  The sheikh looked at Khalid Hassouna with disconcerted eyes and said nothing. The seventy-year-old sheikh of Lydda, who had disappeared and whom everyone thought must have been forced to join the caravan of death, looked different now that he had shaved off his long white beard, cast off his tarbush and turban, and stood there in front of the throng in blue trousers and a white shirt.

  “We are God’s and to Him we return,” he said, and the throng behind him repeated the words.

  Ma’moun cried out in a mighty voice, “Count not those who were slain in God’s way as dead, but rather living with their Lord, by Him provided!”

  The sheikh took a step back, looked at the crowd that had gathered in the mosque’s courtyard, and said, “Say after me, ‘God is great!’” After this had been done four times, he said, “Now we can bury him.”

  A group of the young men picked up the blanket that had become a shroud and walked with it around the square in front of the mosque. They saw Khuloud scatter rice over it and heard her let out a trill of celebration.

  “Where shall we bury him?” Ghassan Batheish asked. “In the Muslim cemetery,” Iliyya said. A small procession set itself in motion and approached the barbed wire. It is said that those carrying the body were forced to set it on the ground while long and complicated negotiations took place between the committee and the Israeli officer, who said he didn’t have the authority to give them permission to leave the ghetto. He proposed they dig a grave in the courtyard of the mosque, and said he was prepared to give them the necessary implements.

  “That won’t do!” Iliyya Batshoun yelled. “The young man must be buried in the cemetery!”

  The officer said he couldn’t go against military orders and the head of the committee said he couldn’t renounce the rights of the dead.

  He tried to explain to the officer that he was aware that he belonged to a defeated people and that “the price of defeat is the renunciation of all our rights – even our houses aren’t ours any longer – but we cannot renounce the right of the dead to be buried with dignity.”

  The officer responded, “You renounced nothing. We took everything with our own hands. Please, let’s not have any more of such talk. I carry out the orders that come to me from above and you have to obey my orders.”

  (This conversation took place in halting English, and Iliyya Batshoun translated it to everyone the next day, when he informed them of the gist of the Israeli decrees and organized the work teams demanded by Mula, the commander of the Israeli forces.)

  The people stood for a long time under the burning sun, and the waiting seemed endless, but Iliyya Batshoun had made up his mind that there was no room for retreat. “They’ll kill us all the way they killed Mufid, and if we can’t defend our lives, let’s at least defend our deaths.”

  The fact is that the Israeli officer was embarrassed and did not know what he was supposed to do, as a single bullet from his rifle would have persuaded the committee members to obey his orders – so said Mula, “the Liberator of Lod,” as they called him in Israel. After long hours spent waiting by the people guarding the body, during which it began to decompose, the commander appeared and summoned Iliyya Batshoun to his office, which he’d set up in the Dahmash family house, close to the ghetto square.

 
; “When I found out that it was Mula, the officer who’d had Mufid killed for wanting to give him the letter, I told him everything. I told him about the letter that one of the soldiers had torn up and trodden on, in which Dr. Lehman had asked for special treatment for the Shahada family and all the people of Lydda, and said that we were requesting him to let us give the victim a fitting burial.”

  Iliyya said that the officer was deeply affected when he learned that his soldiers had been the cause of Mufid’s death and said, “It’s war. You know we have no option but victory.”

  Iliyya begged him to allow them to bury the boy in the cemetery but the commander said it was a difficult matter because the roads of the city weren’t safe and were full of corpses!

  In the end, however, he agreed. He allowed five men to carry the body to the cemetery, where they would be accompanied by three soldiers, and they had to get it over with quickly. He said he agreed for humanitarian reasons and to honor the wishes of Dr. Lehman, who had raised him according to the highest moral values.

  And that is what happened.

  The funeral procession was led by Ghassan Batheish. They lifted the boy up, took him on a circuit of the square and then left, accompanied by the soldiers, in the midst of a silence broken only by Khuloud and her sobbing.

  I heard about what Khuloud did from a number of people, and all confirmed that she picked up her child and joined the procession dancing, and when the soldiers prevented her from crossing the wire with the small procession, she raised her daughter up high, wagged her to and fro to make her look as though she were dancing, and asked the soldiers to take her. This time too, Iliyya Batshoun rebuked her, and dragged her back to the house in which he’d decided to live.