My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  I could hear her voice, choking and imploring, from behind the locked bedroom door, but I couldn’t hear his. It was as though she was talking to herself. I went closer and put my ear to the door and heard the beating. The slaps followed one another in succession and the woman was moaning. Now, as I recall the incident, I don’t know whether the man was saying nothing or whether I couldn’t hear him or whether I’ve erased his voice and his words from my memory. All the same, when my mother came out of the room and said that the trip to Lydda was off, I saw that her face was covered in bruises. I looked at her, and said in a low voice, “I’ll kill him.” Then, suddenly, I saw him in front of me with the pomegranate switch in his hand, and he rained blows on me, cursing me, and then started hitting us both, my mother weeping and hugging me to ward off the blows and me embarrassed, humiliated.

  That day, when I was nine years old, I discovered that I was capable of killing and that killing is a form of expression that may on occasion be necessary. The strange thing is that the first person I decided to kill wasn’t an Israeli but a Palestinian, and that the stories and the bitterness of the ghetto never drove me to think of murder, maybe because I was young then, or maybe because talk isn’t enough on its own: the decision to kill is made first by the eyes.

  This is what I tried to explain to Dalia when we were discussing suicide operations. I told her I could see the ghosts of the dead in the eyes of the young, would-be suicides, which are haunted with killing and its opposite. Killing is directed toward the Other: you kill the Other so as not to die yourself. A suicide operation, however, is a double death. This desire to kill isn’t the offspring of memories of the Nakba, as some think; it is the lived Nakba, for Israel has turned the lives of three generations of Palestinians into a never-ending catastrophe. The Israelis, who, with the stupidity of those with power, wagered on the Palestinians forgetting the stories of their Nakba, went and imposed on them a continuous Nakba. Every day, Israel continues to practice the subjection of the Palestinians to catastrophe, not just in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, but in Israel itself. As a result, the generation that was supposed to forget its fathers’ and grandfathers’ stories of their Nakba, today lives with both its own and theirs before its eyes.

  I won’t say that in my life killing was merely a passing urge that never repeated itself and that came about only because of Abdallah al-Ashhal’s savagery as he beat my mother and me on the eve of the Great Feast. Moments have come and gone when I have felt the need to take life. My words, stifled in my chest, and my identity that I hid, have made me experience states of anger that could be satisfied only by doing so. The second man I thought of killing was Rivka’s father, Gabriel. Thereafter, the impulse has come again and again – I can’t even count how often now – but I’ve never in fact killed anyone and can still say I’m innocent, even though I believe that symbolic killing, or the desire to do it, is no different from murder itself.

  All the same, I have never killed anyone, and it never occurred to me, as it did to so many of my contemporaries, to join the Palestinian armed struggle. I wanted to be a citizen of this state and forget. I invented a new memory for myself and rode it, sliding, to the end, to the point where I no longer knew who exactly I was. Am I the son of Manal and Hasan Dannoun, or the son of Yitzhak Danoun and his sick wife, or am I merely a story, fashioned out of words?

  Dalia was supposed to pluck me out of my story. I told her what she was doing wouldn’t do, because I’d chosen to be in order not to be, and she was destroying me and destroying our relationship. All the same, she insisted on knowing everything. She even took me to Lydda in the hope of stumbling across my story because she wanted our relationship to be built on the truth and not on stories. Eventually, we ended up as we did: Dalia disappeared when she stumbled over her own truth, my love for her dissipated in my heart, and she left me flailing in the torments of loss, which I am trying now to fill with words.

  I attempted to explain to Dalia that the truth means nothing. She accused me of sophistry because I was trying to find excuses for the Israelis, and my constant talk of the need for forgiveness concealed my inability to face up to the fact that the victim must seek revenge.

  Naturally, that wasn’t true. Indeed, it was part of the permanent misunderstanding that is a characteristic of love, but that isn’t my present topic. My present topic is that feeling of my ability to kill, which made my body tremble. I felt no hatred for Abdallah al-Ashhal, I was just aware of a sort of thirst. Killing isn’t necessarily an act that is accompanied by hatred. On the contrary, it comes from our depths, when they’re seized by a thirst for blood.

  What I’ve written above about killing is simply fortuitous: I had meant to talk about my forefather, or the person Manal claimed was my forefather, and his shrine, which stood on the outskirts of the city. There, before the yellow sandstone that gave off the smell of incense, dead plants, and voices raised in prayer, I realized that humans are spiritual beings and that their relationship with the dead is the one thing that gives people a feeling that life has meaning.

  To the shrine we would go – me, my mother, and Ma’moun. Manal would kneel, murmuring prayers; Ma’moun would stand, gazing into space; and I would feel a thrill running through my body.

  Manal would light three candles and place them in front of what is believed to be the saint’s tomb, then step aside reverently, bowing her head, which was covered in a white shawl, go down on her knees, open an exercise book in which she had written out the sayings of this righteous saint to whom the people had chosen to ascribe the status of prophet, and read in a barely audible whisper. Her reading began and ended with “patience”: “Patience is silence in the face of disaster, and making a show of wealth when poverty strikes.”

  Then followed excerpts from the man’s life and works:

  Those who worry most are the most immoral.

  Let him who would be modest direct his soul toward God’s majesty and it will melt and become limpid, and he who gazes on God’s might will find that the might of his soul has departed, for all souls are needy in His dread presence.

  Never have I beheld anything more likely to inspire a desire for sincere devotion than solitude, for when one secludes himself, he sees naught but God Almighty, and when he sees naught but that, he is activated by God’s wisdom alone. Whoever has come to love the rite of seclusion has attached himself to the pillar of sincere devotion and has taken firm hold of one of the main cornerstones of truthful speech.

  I would listen to my mother’s murmurs and see how Ma’moun’s eyes moved as though he were reading her half-closed lips – words sanctified by a mystical attachment to the divine, by abstention from the pleasures of this world, and by desire for a solitude in which to seek an encounter with God.

  I didn’t understand what was being said, but would feel a coolness invade my spine. Ma’moun had taken upon himself the task of making me learn these excerpts by heart, as a complement to my memorization of the Koran. I don’t know what happened to the exercise book after I left. Did Manal take it with her to her village, and did she continue to read excerpts from it when she prayed in Eilaboun’s Church of the Virgin? Or did she throw away the words of our family prophet when she returned to the bosom of the Virgin Mary, whom she used to refer to as the Mother of Light, saying of the belly that had borne Jesus of Nazareth that it was the Cave of Light?

  These stories float on the seas of my memory. I’m trying to draw a map of pain before going into the memory of that pain that made its home in that city of mine that I left while still young, only to discover, when I visited it with Dalia, that Lydda too had left itself and was living in a state of permanent mourning of which it would never be cured.

  My relationship with my forefather the prophet was severed forever after the frenzy of beating to which Manal and I were subjected. When I looked for him in books, I found out that he was Egyptian and had died in AH 245, His name was Thawban ibn
Ibrahim and his sobriquet was Abu al-Fayd, or Father of Abundance. Some, though, say his name was al-Fayd ibn Ibrahim, that he was a Nubian widely known as Dhu al-Nun, and was a guard at an Egyptian temple at Akhmim. It is said that Dhu al-Nun knew the language of the Ancient Egyptians, which he had learned from the writing on the walls of the temple. It is a fact that this Egyptian Sufi and man of letters visited a number of countries, including Palestine, but it is equally certain that the shrine of the prophet Dannoun (whom some call Our Master Dannoun the Egyptian or Dhu al-Nun), located in Lydda south of the Great Mosque, has nothing to do with the Egyptian Sufi.

  A shrine fabricated from A to Z out of untruths to hold a family story that has no basis in reality – this Dannoun wasn’t the forefather of my father Hasan Dannoun as my mother used to say, and quite possibly never even visited Lydda, and no one knows why a shrine was built for him in our city. Very likely, in fact, he was just part of that downpour of prophets that rained on our land after the end of the Frankish Wars, which they call the Crusades, filling Palestine with shrines and tombs.

  This obsession with shrines – from those of the prophet Rubin and of the prophets Salih and Musa to that of my supposed forefather – is part of our country’s infatuation with holiness and holy things. Since the story of Moses’s flight from the pharaoh of Egypt, the Land of Palestine has never ceased making up stories of prophets, to the point that the people have become no more than the stories’ chroniclers.

  The shrine of the prophet Dannoun is one of sixteen shrines to be found in Lydda – of the prophet Miqdad, of Salman al-Farisi, of the prophet Kardousha, of Abu al-Huda, of Uweidat, of the prophet Simeon, of Muhammad the Peasant, of Ahmad al-Salihi, of Husein al-Alami, of Sheikh Salih the Syndic, of Yaaqoub the Persian, etc., etc. – not to mention the Church of al-Khudr, or St. George, and the shrine of my grandsire.

  Holy men and prophets, known and unknown, took up residence in Lydda to receive the tears of its inhabitants and help them to face their disasters, from the locusts that invaded the city in 1916 to the earthquake that struck on July 11, 1927.

  All these prophets, however, were unable to prevent the disaster of 1948. They stayed in their graves awaiting divine succor and left the tears of the women of Lydda to fossilize on the lintels of their shrines, most of which have now disappeared.

  In Lydda, there were two main streets – King Feisal Street, which runs from the municipal building south to the Ramallah Road, and Saladin Street, which crosses King Feisal Street and starts from Zahir Jandas Bridge. Two streets – the first for defeat, being named after the King of Syria whose state was torn to shreds following the Battle of Meisaloun, the second for victory, bearing the name of Saladin, the liberator of Jerusalem from the Franks. Even though Saladin the Ayoubid was unable to liberate Lydda, our city, like many others in Palestine, made a shrine for this military commander who almost achieved the status of a holy man – in the form of a principal street, to remind people that Palestine had known in the past an invasion similar to that of the Zionists and that the fate of the new invaders would be no different from that of their predecessors.

  I don’t like this return to the past, as it seems to me a way of escaping from the present. That doesn’t mean I’m not an admirer of Saladin and his victories. I just think that going back to the past and insisting on the idea of its rebirth has prevented the Arabs from fashioning their present, starting with a critical reading of it. The idea of rebirth scares me in and of itself. Who says the living can withstand the resurrection of the dead? Rebirth is a myth fit for literature and religion but not for a historical project. Who says the golden past of the Arabs was golden? Who says the Baghdad of the Abbasids was a city of justice? The founder of the Abbasid dynasty was known as Abu al-Abbas the Spiller of Blood. Haroun al-Rashid, who seems so kindly in The Thousand and One Nights, was the architect of the catastrophe that overtook the Barmacides. Who says our model should be a tyrannical state against which the Zanj rebelled because of the extreme oppression to which it subjected them? Even Saladin? No! No, I don’t believe I dare recount to you the massacres that Saladin carried out against other Muslims: it might cost me my self-confidence. As you can see, I too, despite my harsh words, have fallen into the trap of consecrating the past, albeit in an indirect and unconscious way, which is the problem. Dalia told me that what I call “the Arab problem” is also the Jewish problem, because the latter succeeded in resurrecting their state from the ruins of their myths.

  And Dalia, as usual, was right. But who says that the Israeli model, which carries the seeds of its own destruction within it, has to be repeated? And why do the Arabs, and especially the Palestinians, have to cling to the ropes of a past that has passed and will not return?

  I told Dalia that our greatest problem was our fear of criticizing the past, on the grounds that if we were to lose the delusion of descent we would lose everything.

  The woman, who hid her love behind her bewildering smile, said, however, that all peoples were that way, that politics was simply the offspring of myth, and that the blessing bestowed by the past was a condition for the construction of the monuments of the present.

  I meant to say one thing but have slid off into another. Words slide us around wherever they want. They are the soap of the soul, with which we wash ourselves and on which we slip. On my visit to Lydda with Dalia, we met an elderly Yemeni Jewish man who’d found the Promised Land in the village of Deir Tarif, now named Bet Arif. While the man was pointing out the demolished houses of the Palestinian village and how the old names had been expunged to be replaced by new, Hebrew, names, Saladin popped up from I know not where. The man was telling me about Tsahal Street in Lydda, where his only son lived. I told him that the name of the street to which he referred was Saladin Street, not Tsahal Street, and when I pronounced the name, the man regarded me disapprovingly. The sympathetic look disappeared from his eyes to be replaced by one of suspicion and grimness, and I heard Dalia saying we had better go now.

  “What’s Saladin got to do with this place?” she asked. “You cost us the chance of talking to the guy.”

  I said, “I don’t know.” I tried to explain to her that I’d just wanted to put the record straight: Herzl Street was Umar ibn al-Khattab Street, Tsahal Street was Saladin Street, and so on and so forth. Saladin had returned not as the liberator of Jerusalem but as the site of the massacre that scattered its victims’ bodies along its sides – those bodies whose remains had to be collected and buried by the people of the ghetto, before the military governor forced them to burn them.

  As you can see, my resentment at the idea of rebirth, with which the poets of Arab Modernism slew us and which played a role in the rise to power in more than one Arab country of a tyrannical nationalism, does not mean accepting the abandonment of the name of Saladin Street. In my memory, it has become the street of the dead, and I dare not abandon the dead. I just wanted to tell our ancestors to leave us alone, so we can live and pull together what vestiges of life the world has left to us.

  Adam, which is to say me, speaks here as a Palestinian, which is something that puzzles me now because my life’s journey – and life, as Sinbad taught us, is just a journey from death to stories and from stories back to death – was supposed to be less confused and to unfold along the trajectory I’d planned for it from the moment I started work at Mr. Gabriel’s garage. It took, however, an unexpected turn. Dalia did not awaken the sleeping Palestinian in my soul, but she saw him. It was enough for this hidden being that I had deliberately concealed to be seen with the eyes of love for it to awake from its long coma and bring me back to the beginning of things.

  What does it mean, “the beginning”? Is there a pattern that unites the child I was with the older man I have become? I think again of the child who was born in the midst of the massacre of the ghetto and feel he’s a stranger to me. Then I look at the youth who studied contemporary Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa and remem
ber his adventures and these things look to me like half-erased scenes from a movie I saw long ago. I try to restore the image of the journalist, marginal intellectual, and bohemian who lived in the Ajami District in Jaffa but ended up living semipermanently in the Yemeni District in Tel Aviv, but find its limbs have been amputated, and on and on…up to my new period in New York, where I try, with the indirect help of Sarang Lee, to convince myself I’m writing a novel unlike any other because it belongs to a literary genre for which I do not know a name and of whose very existence I am unsure.

  I don’t think I’m telling the truth now – its sister, perhaps, meaning that I’m trying to use my writing to get out of the fix I’m in. Things are simpler than all this meaningless sophistry. If I had it in me to say things directly, I’d say that my crisis began not with Dalia’s leaving but with her appearing. The departure was nothing but a frank proclamation of my personal crisis. With her, and with her grandfather, the Polish survivor of Auschwitz, I’d taken the lie to its peak, and after the peak can only come the abyss. In the end, I discovered my inability to reconcile the two persons that I was and rearrange them into a single person. Dalia told me, as she watched the movie she’d made about Assaf, that I had to choose, as there was no longer space to treat life as a game. She’d made her choice and was passing into silence.

  That’s how she left. And she made me discover in her silence, which covered the final chapter of my life, that the love that was born in the course of a game had come to an end, and that I had to go, so that my soul would not dissolve in grief.

  The beginning of life was the massacre, and I have to gather together the scraps of its stories just as Ma’moun gathered the remains of the victims in the ghetto’s long night, and to draw the map of pain as it was drawn on the face of Manal, my mother.