My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  The Map of Pain

  MANAL’S FACE APPEARS, forming the first image on the map of pain that I am trying now to summon up – a map drawn with the barbed wire that marked the borders of the ghetto in which the remaining inhabitants of Lydda lived in a cage whose limits were set by echoes of death from all four directions. Even the sky looked as though it had been covered with an invisible film that blocked the light.

  It is a map that starts in the Hospital District, which embraces the Great Mosque and the church, extends to the body parts stuck to the walls of the Dahmash Mosque and the corpses that were scattered along the roads, turning Saladin Street into a street of blowflies, reaches the cemetery, and makes a turn into the interiors of the houses in which decomposing corpses and children whose bodies were bloated with hunger and death were to be found.

  The map of pain is a story of thirst, of barrels of water rolled from Ibrahim al-Nimr’s citrus grove, of the wounded waiting for medicine, and of the warmth of mourning that became a substitute for a life devoured by the unknown.

  This map begins at the face of my mother, at Ma’moun’s closed eyes, at Khuloud’s dance, and Hatim al-Laqqis’s calls for help before he vanished, at the stories of the captives returning from the cages, at the people bowing in front of the military governor, at the houses occupied by strangers, and on and on.

  All I know of these stories is that accursed “and on and on,” because I experienced them only as my first days of life and we never remember the beginning of things, which is why we resort to inventing them. Here, however, I am not inventing anything. On the contrary, I remember the stories as I heard them and felt them, and fill the large gaps by looking into the memories of others, mixing all of this with my own words and a certain amount of imagination, which serves more to throw the gaps into prominence than to erase them.

  I want my story to uncover its own gaps, because I’m not writing a witness report, I’m writing a story derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory. This ghetto, in which I was born and which I believed in my youth to be the card up my sleeve and my passport for a flight from my fate, has ultimately become the be-all and end-all of my fate.

  I’m not a historian and don’t pretend to be one – despite my respect and esteem for the works of the historians – for I feel that history is a blind monster. When I think now of the things that my friends the communists used to say about the historical inevitability that leads to the liberation of peoples, I feel pity, for anyone who lived his childhood in Lydda and came to awareness in Mr. Gabriel’s garage in Haifa can only see historical optimism as a form of stupidity. This doesn’t mean I’m against popular uprisings. On the contrary, I’m against those who are against them. But with years and experience I’ve discovered that the revolutionary is a person of despair and that despair is the most noble of emotions because it liberates us from illusions and makes of our revolutionary vision a gratuitous act, like art.

  I write the story to restore my memory and engrave it on that of an imagined reader whom these words will never reach, because I’m not sure I want them to go that far. What, though, is the meaning of memory? For an incident, or a person, to remain in our memory, it must be transformed into a line of writing wrapped in a kind of fog. What do we remember of our loved ones who have departed? What do we remember of stolen moments of love?

  All we remember is death, because death too is a book. Indeed, it is the book.

  All we remember are states of opacity such as pain. Pain is a half-erased memory that we recall with pleasure because all that remains of it is a word made up of four letters that refers only to itself, a word drawn on the paper of memory or fashioned from its echo.

  Engraving on memory is a way of forgetting. In the course of forgetting we remember, so memory floats on the surface of our life like words stammered and interrupted.

  The map of pain begins at the face of Manal, my mother. That is where I have to begin, though I find great difficulty in writing about it – not because I’ve forgotten it but, on the contrary, because I’ve been unable to. A face limned by grief – wide brown eyes, long black eyelashes, eyebrows drawn by a thin black pencil, and lips pressed together as though biting back the pain.

  The two small grooves etched on the cheeks were, and will ever remain, the whole story. I saw them and I see them now. Two lines resembling the course of a river whose water has dried. Two thin lines that I’m now sure no one else ever noticed. My mother never gave away the secret of those lines to any but me. I’m the only one who saw, and despite this I turned my back and left Manal, my mother and my little darling, to her fate.

  I had to go: I read my departure in her eyes. She was certain her marriage would lead to the destruction of us both and made no objection to my leaving to save myself. I did not, however, understand her eyes. Now, I can make justifications and find an excuse for myself in my youth, but it’s not true. I must have read her death in her eyes but I was a coward, so I fled. Instead of suggesting that she leave with me or forcing her to do so, I took the will and went on my way.

  I’m not a traitor. Or yes, perhaps – the day I left her I wasn’t a traitor but now I feel the prick of betrayal. “The woman’s eyelashes pierce my soul,” as Adonis wrote in one of the most beautiful of his early poems. I wish I’d recited the poem to her, so that I could see the cherries dripping from her lips! When I was with her, though, I was speechless and incapable of expressing my emotions.

  They said: She left, the field by rapture

  confused, the wheat swelling plump.

  Harmony was reborn through her gait

  and her canter and her strutting, and her quivering legs

  beckoned, so that the sunset turned toward her

  with yearning and the goats bleated.

  What the branding mark? What the strung beads?

  Why did the brown ancients not insist

  on riddles, not play the soothsayer, not use symbols?

  Her glances pierce,

  her eyelids are a chord and a summer

  song, and her shift is cherries.

  Such poetry is inappropriate for mothers; nevertheless, every time she returns to my memory, I smell the wheat that would be scattered from Manal’s clothes and lodge itself in my soul.

  Women are like cities: each has its own smell, which rises from memory, and Manal’s was that of wheat, maybe because my mother carried with her from her forebears the smell of the black earth of the plains of Houran, or perhaps because her duskiness, which shone in the sun, made one think of wheat fields, golden-glowing and swaying.

  Do I have the right? Can I permit myself to write you the way I want to, now?

  Now I admit what I didn’t dare admit to Dalia: when I told her she was “as beautiful as silence,” I was thinking of Manal. Dalia bears no resemblance to Manal, yet somehow she reminded me of my mother. That was the reason for my fear and my endless flight from her. I disagree with the theory that says men seek their mothers in their sweethearts, which is bullshit. I wasn’t seeking anything when I met the woman. I was messing around with love and love fell upon me and I became a captive, a lovesick swain.

  Dalia could never have been Manal, but my idiotic memory now blends the two women and makes me say things about my mother that are inappropriate for a son and that, in the end, are just nonsense.

  I have to be careful now. I don’t know if my emotions are real, or just a lust for writing. I recall that woman on whose face the map of pain was drawn and feel an irresistible desire to gaze into the depths of her eyes and clasp her to my breast.

  Manal, today, is a lost child, and I am the man who abandoned her in a heedless moment. I am growing old, and her absence, followed by her death, left her a child, one like the virgins of Jerusalem of whom Solomon the Wise speaks in his Songs. A virgin whose heart had dri
ed up, whose tears had turned to stone upon her cheeks, whom the three men she had loved had abandoned, and who then fled from her husband after she had divined that her son would depart.

  (I have spoken of Abdallah al-Ashhal as a monster, but I’m being unfair to him. I’m unfair to him and know that it must be so: we have to be unfair to someone if our lives are to resemble lives. Yes, I’m unfair to him, for “injustice is a trait of men’s souls,” as al-Mutanabbi wrote. With his daughter Karma, the monster that appeared to me as Abdallah al-Ashhal seemed more like a human being deserving of pity and regret, and my unfairness to him, like his to me, as simply an expression of impotence and frustration. That, however, is another story.)

  I just wanted to describe, today, the longing I feel for my mother, accompanied by an overwhelming tenderness toward her pain-spattered silence – only to discover that here too I was playing a part, through my reliance on a language that has been exhausted by repetition.

  The essence of the matter is that I wanted to talk about what came after the tears that drew the map of pain on Manal’s face, and I spoke drivel because my inability to express myself made me resort to words that have become stuck in the language.

  I never saw her cry. Her voice would quaver and take her to the verge of tears, though I never saw them. It was as though the woman had gone to a pain beyond weeping and therein lay the relationship between her eyes and a city that had lost its smell.

  She said she’d come from the smell of wild thyme in Eilaboun to the smell of lemon-and orange-blossom in Lydda. “I traveled, my dear, from smell to smell. I was accustomed to the smell of thyme, which opens the heart, but when I came here I discovered lemon and encountered ‘the perfume of the soul,’ as your poor father used to call it.”

  Manal said the city had lost its smell after the killing of Hasan Dannoun and the entry of the Israeli army over the slain bodies. “Can you imagine what it means, a city without a smell?” She said that when a person dies they lose their own smell and a different, strange, one settles upon them. Thus the dead are rendered identical in their odorlessness, and then are taken over by a smell that is everywhere the same – the smell of death.

  She said Lydda lost its smell. “When they gathered us in the square in front of the mosque inside the barbed-wire fence, the smell of the city died. The perfume of lemon blossom disappeared and the smell of the dead, which arose from all four directions, settled upon us.”

  She said and she said. I try to recall her words but cannot. However, I read her secret in her eyes and the name of that woman’s secret is “beyond weeping.”

  I only understood what “beyond weeping” meant when I watched on television the pictures of the corpses that had piled up at the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. I admit I felt unable to weep that day. The tears turned to stone in my eyes and a fire, which ignited in my intestines, swept through me. The words stuck in my throat, and I became feverish, everything in me shaking: I shuddered with the cold that spread through my joints and I suffocated from the heat that paralyzed me.

  That is “beyond weeping.” The eyes are so dry they grow hard, the saliva in one’s mouth disappears, and the ears ring with echoes.

  Manal lived her whole life beyond weeping.

  She said she’d wept a lot, but that weeping isn’t mute because it can exist only through language. One weeps because one wants to communicate a message to others, and when the weeper is met with gloating eyes and indifferent, expressionless faces, the water dries in his eyes.

  “Not us, I swear! We couldn’t weep because the tears in our eyes had dried up. They disappeared because there was no medicine for the pain we were living. Tears, my dear, are a medicine, like olive oil. We rub the body with oil and the soul with tears.”

  Manal didn’t actually say this, though not because she took pity on her young son and wanted to protect him from the impact of her words – in the ghetto, there was no room for pity to spread its wings: the people there had snatched their lives from the mouth of death, and those who have survived death feel no pity.

  Manal didn’t say it because she didn’t express much, even when she spoke! What I’m telling you on her authority is just what I was able to gather from the crumbs that she uttered. Manal would listen to what she’d said through the echo of her voice, which would then turn, on Ma’moun’s tongue, into words. Ma’moun would talk, recounting excerpts from my mother’s memory, and I became accustomed to accepting the game of attributing his words to her. The echo, not the voice, recounted my story. Now, when her voice brings the rhythms of silence, I hear the voice of Ma’moun and I weave the beginning of the story.

  Listening to Ma’moun at his lecture at New York University, however, I could no longer recognize his voice. The voice of the blind academic, issuing from a microphone placed in front of him, sounded strange. It was a voice full of the hoarseness of age, coming from inside a throat in which whispers blended with shouts and which seemed to emerge from a deep well.

  At that moment, I knew for sure that Ma’moun’s ghetto voice had not been real. It too had been an echo of pain.

  The Abyss

  THE INHABITANTS OF the ghetto awoke from the coma into which they’d fallen after the long day of sun in the courtyard of the Great Mosque to find themselves in the abyss. There is no more precise word than that, which Ma’moun used constantly when he delivered his lessons to his students.

  “Read, you son of the abyss!” he used to shout at Salim, who would stumble when reading excerpts from Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels, which our teacher assigned as some of our set texts, believing as he did that our Arab identity was threatened with extinction in the new state.

  There was no relation whatsoever between Salim’s inability to read as a result of his obsession with football and the words “the abyss” as spat out by Ma’moun, who would grind his teeth when saying them as though cursing the world and everyone in it. Ma’moun’s “abyss” was another name for the cage in which lived the inhabitants of what would later be known by the single term “the ghetto,” or “the Arab ghetto.”

  The ghetto was fenced with barbed wire and had a single gate, guarded by three soldiers. Some of the inhabitants had been distributed among the houses that had been left behind by their owners, Iliyya Batshoun supervising what he called “the fair allocation of dwellings.” There weren’t enough private residences, though, so the head of the committee decided to put families in the houses and ask individuals to live in the hospital, the mosque, and the church. Things were more complicated, however.

  This distribution plan was simply a proposal. Some families, finding themselves without shelter, were forced to live in the mosque and the church. As a result, a number of apartments, divided from one another by no more than a few sheets and blankets, were created within the courtyard of the mosque and the church compound.

  It was a society in which everything was mixed up with everything else. Even the houses were somehow shared with everyone, since, because of the shortage of food and the crippling water crisis, the inhabitants of the ghetto were obliged to live communally. The result was the creation of a community, peculiar to the Arabs of the ghetto, in which boundaries were erased.

  This description of the situation in the shadow of whose stories I lived may seem deceptive, in that it may give the impression of a harmonious communal life – and indeed, one of the Israeli soldiers, observing it, was led to say that the ghetto was “like a kibbutz.” The reality, however, was as far as could be from such an ideal communal life, since the people of the ghetto, despite their attempts to adapt to the cage into which they had been placed, were constantly discovering, to their surprise, that their disaster had no bottom to hit and that they were forced, each day, to find new ways to eke out their existence.

  The rehousing took place without disputes, as they were convinced that they were living through a temporary situation that would quickly come to an end and that
nothing was real, as though the ghetto was just a nightmare from which everyone was trying to wake.

  How did the nightmare begin? What happened on that sunny day in the month of July, 1948?

  Lydda fell on July 11 and 12, 1948. When I write “fell,” I feel as though the city fell into a chasm. In fact, I don’t regard that word as appropriate for the occupation of cities in war. Armies invade cities, they don’t make them fall. In the case of Lydda, however, the city wasn’t occupied: it toppled, fell to pieces and was wiped out. The city that I left for Haifa as a boy bore no resemblance to what people described to me. Lydda was once a city. The place I left consisted of its mortal remains, limbs severed.

  People remember that the weather was hot and humid and that they understood nothing. Suddenly, they saw Israeli armored columns moving through the streets, shooting. The city’s defenders vanished in a flash and the people were turned into a wave of humanity staggering in the face of bullets and death.

  In order to be objective and truthful, I have used exclusively Israeli sources to understand how the city fell, and anyway there is no Palestinian military source in existence that documents the battle for Lydda (which is not surprising given how scattered the Palestinians were in exile). The attacking Israeli army consisted of an organized force numbering six thousand armed men, while the defenders consisted of armed groups, haphazardly organized, drawn from the city and surrounding villages.

  After the fall of Jaffa on May 14, 1948, the people of Lydda were convinced they had been left to their fate in the path of an army that was their superior in every way. The question that puzzles me now is why didn’t the people flee and thus avoid the massacre, given that they knew they had no practical possibility of repulsing the impending attack. As you can see, this is the opposite of the question that used to keep me awake in my youth, when I felt shame at the story of the displacement of the refugees, which was one of the reasons why I deliberately disguised myself and my identity. I don’t want now to discuss the issue of how I played around with my identity: that kind of behavior is the story of my life, not one that I’m writing as an example or a symbol the way our mentor Emile Habibi did with the pessoptimism of his hero Said.