My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Let me begin with the fall of the city, because stories begin with falls – this is what the scriptures tell us. Does not the story of Adam, grandsire of mankind, begin with his fall from Paradise and the transformation of a demigod blessed with immortality into a mortal, obliged to live life awaiting death?

  Adam was an image God created from mud, and an image has no shadow. Adam lived in Paradise without shadows and neither knew nor awaited death. His fall transformed him into a mortal, which is to say, into a being who dies and knows that the secret of life is death.

  This is how the story of humankind, as the three Abrahamic religions tell it, began. The fall carries with it a morbid nostalgia for a past that will never return. The story of Adam bequeathed us this nostalgia, and when I begin with the fall, I am adopting, without realizing, the assumption that Palestine was a paradise before it fell into the hands of the Israeli invaders. But that is absolutely false. Lydda most certainly was not a paradise and Palestine wasn’t Heaven. And I hate nostalgia absolutely.

  All the same, beginnings have infinite possibilities, meaning that each beginning takes us to a new one.

  The crime followed the fall, and with the crime history began. Human history does not begin with Adam but with Cain, who killed his brother and so bequeathed mankind the blood curse, which had to be complemented by the Flood, which created mankind over again. However, the children of Noah inherited the memory of blood despite themselves, and thus it was that Abraham had made up his mind to kill his son as per divine command, and so on and so forth until things end up with the death of the Messiah-Son on the cross, which the gospels paint as the end of the bloodbath, though nothing in fact has ended.

  My story too began with a double crime – the crime of Mula and his soldiers that turned Lydda into a field of killing and corpses and forced the expulsion of its people and their dispatch to exile and death; and that of my father, who left me as an infant on the corpse of my mother, whose milk had dried in her breasts.

  I will not blame my father: he was merely a victim, deserving of pity; and it appears that I can’t blame Mula and his men as I have been told I must not blame the Jews because they too were victims. I am not the victim of just one victim, as Edward Said would have it: I’m the victim of two. This is my present condition, as I have just now discovered it to be, when it’s too late.

  All the same, what if I decide to blame my father and hold him responsible? It then follows that I have the right to blame the Jews, or else logic no longer means anything. Let me blame both victims, without falling into the trap of making them equal: there is a big difference between a father who loses his son on Lydda’s march of death and an organized and rational military operation that made the decision to terrorize people so that it could expel them from their land.

  But then again, what am I to do with my fictitious father, Yitzhak Danoun, whom I invented to find a lineage for myself in their country, in which I have become what in the Israeli lexicon is termed a “present absentee”?

  My fictitious father has nothing to do with the matter. His only sin was to be a Polish Jew who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which he was able to escape, making a difficult journey that took him in the end to Istanbul, where he had no choice but to board a ship that carried him to the Promised Land.

  I shall not speak of what happened to the man in the Warsaw Ghetto. I shall let that story reveal itself in the context of the love that brought me together with Dalia and made me develop a deep friendship with her grandfather, a Polish Jew who also bore the brand of the Warsaw Ghetto on his memory. This fictitious father of mine would find himself in Palestine, marry my mother, the Russian Jewess, and decide on the eve of the so-called War of Independence to emigrate to France to continue his engineering studies. On his way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he would discover that the world had been turned upside down, and when he reached West Jerusalem, a military police squad would take him off to join the Haganah, where he would be attached to a unit of the Alexandroni Brigade and meet his death in the operation to take Haifa.

  The labor of inventing myself exhausted me, even though, to be honest, it was a job I enjoyed. I read lots of books about the Warsaw Ghetto, went there with a group of students, received my baptism at Auschwitz, and lived the same terror lived by that third father of mine who never fathered me. I was compelled, likewise, to study the reasons leading to the fall of Haifa, reading a book on the history of the Haganah and tracing an image of that father as a hero of the liberation – though the image soon began to fall apart when I read the writings of the Israeli New Historians; and when I came across the article “The Fall of Haifa” by Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi in Middle East Forum, I suffered a disappointment deeper than the sorrow I’d felt when I read Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Return to Haifa.

  Kanafani describes the tragic meeting between the Palestinian “Said S.” and his son, whom he’d left in Haifa as a baby, only to discover that the son had become an Israeli soldier and bore a new name. For a moment, I thought the Palestinian novelist was talking about me, though the idea quickly dissipated. Adam, meaning me, is more complex than Khaldoun/Dov: Adam became an Israeli by choice and made up his story as a life strategy, whereas Dov – “Khaldoun” before the fates imposed on him the role of victim/executioner – had no choice and became an Israeli soldier involuntarily. I am obliged to suppose that the person isn’t the issue. I may be closer to the character called Said in Emile Habibi’s masterpiece The Pessoptimist – though even that supposition isn’t true: Habibi based Said on the character of Candide in order to convey the experience of “resistance-through-collaboration” and “collaboration-through-resistance” and is a symbolic character embodying in abbreviated form the sufferings of the Palestinian in the State of Israel. Me, though, I neither collaborated nor resisted; I’m not based on any model, my story sums up nothing but itself, and I don’t want to be a symbol.

  My disappointment on reading Khalidi came from my feeling of how deceptive the heroism was. I’d wanted my Jewish father to be a real hero, fighting with a small band of soldiers against a mighty army and beating it, but discovered that my father wasn’t a soldier in the army of a David who killed the giant Goliath with a stone from his sling. My father was a soldier in the army of Goliath, which won because the Palestinians hadn’t found their David, and three hundred Palestinian fighters were defeated by more than two thousand five hundred Jewish soldiers, with General Stockwell, commander of the British garrison in Haifa, playing a clear role in their victory.

  My fictitious father Yitzhak Danoun was a victim, like my fallacious father Hasan Dannoun. They died as victims, leaving a fetus groping around in its mother’s belly, and they converge, albeit indirectly, with my biological father, who fled from Lydda and lost his wife and his young child. I will never forgive any of these three fathers of mine but I can’t prevent myself from feeling sympathy for them. Their common factor is that they were victims and that they died, or disappeared, as victims.

  Mula and Colonel Moshe Carmel (commander of the attack on Haifa), on the other hand, were not. The leader of the operation to occupy Haifa – the name of which was changed from Misparyim, meaning “scissors,” to Khametz, meaning “yeast,” on the eve of Passover, when the house has to be cleansed of yeast, so as to convert the Jewish religious symbol into one of the cleansing of the city of its Palestinian inhabitants – and the leader of Operation Dani for the cleansing of Lydda have in common that they were executioners, by which token my three fathers cannot be victims of the victims.

  I could make Hasan Dannoun meet Yitzhak Danoun and have them form a duo worthy of tears, but we are not – if my teacher Edward Said will excuse me – “victims of the victims.” We, and the poor Jews they brought from the Nazi concentration camps to the battleground in Palestine, are the victims of the killers who betrayed the language of the Jewish victim when they crushed the Palestinians without mercy.

 
Hold on, though! Perhaps what I’ve just said contains a degree of overstatement, due to my emotional reaction. If we were to suppose that my fictitious Jewish father perished in the battles to occupy Lydda after the death of my father Hasan Dannoun the Martyr, or during the operation to expel my biological father whose name I don’t know, my Palestinian parents would then be, somehow or other, the victims of my Jewish father who was himself a victim. By that token, Edward Said’s view would be right. In other words, the issue is susceptible to more than one interpretation, and God alone, as the Arabs say, knows the answer!

  In my story, I chose to have my father die in Haifa so that I could make Haifa my city. The idea came to me in the garage of Mr. Gabriel, who used to talk to me about his brother Shlomo, who was killed on Wednesday, April 21, 1948, during the attack launched by Haganah forces on Dar al-Najjada overlooking Wadi Rashmaya in Haifa. Mr. Gabriel said that I looked like Shlomo and that if I hadn’t been an Arab, he would have found in me his lost brother. I decided to be that lost brother but Mr. Gabriel didn’t believe me and fired me from the garage, which was because of the love story that Gabriel put an end to when he discovered I was having an affair with his only daughter, Rivka.

  My Grandfather the Prophet

  “IN THIS CITY, the world will witness the return of Jesus son of Mary, peace be upon him, which is why God has written that our torments shall be the beginning of the road.”

  I remember hearing these words, or something like them, at the start of my relationship with the city, when I was six. They put us into a bus, loaded us with Israeli flags, and took us to al-Ramla to attend the military parade on the occasion of Israel’s “Independence Day.”

  I remember we cried, and the teacher who accompanied us to the festivities, Mrs. Olga Naddaf, had a cane in her hand and tried hysterically to make us behave. By the time we reached al-Ramla, our faces were covered in tears and fear was coursing through our bodies. That was in 1954, if my memory serves me right. A yellow bus, into which were squashed the pupils of the Lydda Arabic School, which had been established in the Ghetto District, close to the Great Mosque, after Professor Ma’moun’s school had been split up when the head of the municipality issued a decree for its closure.

  I don’t know what had got into the teacher and why she never stopped beating and threatening us. I remember her saying we had to stand quietly, wave the little flags, and not talk or be naughty, and explaining to us that it was a holiday for our new state and that we had to respect the white-and-blue flag with a six-pointed star in the middle. I remember that when we got onto the bus we were happy to be going on a trip because it was the first time we’d been outside the city. I don’t remember, though, exactly what happened on the bus to make the woman rain blows on us.

  The important thing is that our behavior made “Independence Day” synonymous with the cane, and that we arrived at the ceremony in tears.

  That is all I remember. Now that I’ve read about the impressive ceremony, which was attended by Ben Gurion, flanked by the great men of the state, and learned that the aim of putting on an Israeli military parade in an Arab city was to make the Palestinians realize that things had changed, that there was no going back, and that the country was now the property of the victors, I understand the hysteria of the woman, who was forty and had found herself alone in the ghetto.

  The ceremony was awe inspiring. How can I describe the feelings of the child I was carrying the flag and with his eyes glued on the columns of military vehicles rolling down the city’s main street, followed by columns of infantry; and when the balloons with Hebrew writing on them flew into the air, the children’s eyes flew after them. The balloons filled the city’s sky with wonder, and when a boy asked the teacher to translate the writing on them for us, Miss Olga Naddaf hesitated for a moment and then, in correct Hebrew, spoke the words “Tsahal Magen,” meaning “The Israeli Army Protects.” The teacher spoke the words in the two languages and tears fell on her cheeks. Then she looked at the dilapidated houses and asked, “Where are the people?”

  The city’s sky was filled with the words “Tsahal Magen,” and we felt obscurely that the teacher’s tears were translating them into another, unspoken, language; we fell into a silence that stayed with us throughout the return journey on the bus from al-Ramla to the ghetto.

  That other language, fashioned by the tears of the hard-hearted teacher, wasn’t a translation from the Hebrew into Arabic, it was a translation into the language of silence, whose letters only the inhabitants of the ghetto knew how to decipher – a language fashioned from the rubble of words that form themselves only as whispers and mumbles, whose words contained broken bits of letters, and which was expressed using signs sketched by hands, or by eyes that had lost their brilliance. That day, I began to understand my mother’s whispers and unfinished stories. To tell the truth, though, my life’s journey, which I have fashioned from forgetfulness, rendered me unable to make sense of the symbols of that language, and I had to wait fifty years to recover my language, here in the silence that fences me in, in New York.

  That year, a week after “Independence Day,” Ma’moun took me to attend the Friday prayer at the Great Mosque, the first time I went there. Ma’moun said I was a man now and had to learn how to pray. At the mosque, the words of Sheikh Abd al-Hayy Maqsoud seemed to me like a continuation of the al-Ramla trip. The man’s sermon concentrated on “Independence Day” and on the splendid scene of the Defense Force marching through al-Ramla. Then he uttered his celebrated sentence about the return of Jesus, son of Mary, and followed it with words taken from Islamic historians that I spent years looking for before finally stumbling upon them.

  The first historian was al-Muqaddisi, who writes in The Best of Dispositions Concerning the Provinces and Their Positions as follows: “Lydda, which is a mile from al-Ramla, has a mosque in which many of the people of al-Qasaba and the surrounding villages congregate, and a magnificent church, at whose door the Antichrist will be slain.”

  The second historian was Ibn Asakir, in The Great History, which reports of the Prophet that he spoke of the Antichrist and said that those Jews who are of his people will be his helpers, and that he then said, “Jesus – the son of Mary – and the other Muslims who are with him, will kill him at the gate of Lydda.”

  The sheikh said, “We must pay allegiance to this new state because it will not be worse than the invaders who have preceded it; indeed, God, Mighty and Sublime, has established it here so that the killing of Jesus the Antichrist at the hands of the followers of the Arab prophet should be a resounding event, by which peace will spread throughout the world.”

  The sheikh took my childhood deep into the history of the blood with which the city has been dyed since its foundation – a city that bore four names before settling on its present one, having been in pharaonic days Ratan; in Roman, Deuspolis; in Arab, al-Lidd; and in those of the Franks, the City of St. George; then it was al-Lidd again, before the Israelis gave it the name of Lod.

  It is the city of the miraculous church, site of the tomb of St. George, whom the Arabs call al-Khudr, whose tales have filled our imaginations – the brave knight who died under torture when he refused to abandon his faith and the man of legend who killed the dragon and saved the girls of the city from certain death.

  In the Palestinian popular memory, the prophet al-Khudr, or al-Khudr the Green, is a combination of two men – St. George, who was a Roman officer who embraced Christianity, and the prophet Elijah, who killed four hundred and fifty of the prophets of Baal with the jawbone of an ass in defense of his faith in the One, the Only. The slayer of the dragon that was devouring the city’s virgin girls and the slayer of the false prophets are two mythical heroes who have become mixed up in our memory and thus make of Lydda a city protected by storytelling. It was in honor of this combined prophet-cum-holy man that the Church of St. George, demolished after al-Zahir Baybars reconquered the city in 1267 and rebuilt in 1870 on a
portion of the demolished building, next door to the Great Mosque, was erected.

  The Great Mosque itself was built by Baybars, the Mamluk sultan, who ordered the following words to be inscribed on the marble plaque above the mosque’s main door:

  In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: this blessed mosque was built at the command of Our Lord the Sultan, Resplendent King, Foundation Stone of This World and the Next, Abu al-Fath Baybars the Righteous, Friend of the Believers, may God make great his victories and forgive him his sins. The work of construction and its supervision were undertaken by the slave in want of God’s mercy Alaa al-Din Ali al-Sawwaq, may God forgive him his sins, in the month of Ramadan 666 [1268].

  Every Friday morning, Manal would take me to the shrine of the prophet Dannoun, light three candles, and sit, weeping silently, instructing me to sit beside her. “This is the shrine of the pure saint your grandsire,” she would say. “When things go badly, come here and talk to the prophet Dannoun. Ask him whatever you want and he will grant your requests.”

  Manal stopped visiting the shrine after her marriage and move to Haifa, and when she tried, on the first Feast of the Sacrifice that we spent in Haifa, to take me to visit it, she met with a beating from her husband Abdallah.

  Manal woke me at four in the morning and told me to get dressed because we were going to Lydda to visit the tomb of my father, then make a stop at the shrine. I listened, in the dawn’s darkness, to her pleadings and then witnessed the beating to which she was subjected.

  She said she was going to visit the holy man’s shrine for my sake, because the prophet Dannoun was my great-grandsire; her voice was low and full of gaps. She said she wouldn’t go to Hasan’s tomb, “only the saint’s, I swear, only the saint’s.” She was weeping and clenching her teeth so that she wouldn’t make a sound. Then her moaning became audible and I began to hear the slaps and her weeping grew louder. She said she’d forgotten Hasan and didn’t think about him but was just going for me.