My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Ma’moun recounted that the strange rifle that Marwan had seen was a PIAT, a weapon that fired armor-piercing projectiles, and that soldiers of the Yiftach Brigade had entered the mosque, fired the PIAT projectiles, and followed them with bursts of machine-gun fire, and that everybody in the mosque had died.

  Ma’moun recounted that the members of his work detail that was charged with collecting bodies for their burial were struck with consternation when they entered the Dahmash Mosque. He said he hadn’t understood what had happened. The place was filled with the smell of death. His comrades left the mosque suddenly without telling him and he found himself alone and discovered, without anyone having to tell him, that body parts were stuck to the walls.

  Ma’moun told Marwan’s story countless times. “The doctor called him ‘the Lame,’ but the youth was deaf and went for a whole month only able to hear a ringing sound. When he started hearing again, he discovered that people’s voices no longer sounded as they had in the past and he decided to stop speaking.”

  Ma’moun’s experience collecting bodies and burying them made him a comrade of the dead. That was how his lecture at New York University commenced, after which he moved on to his topic, “The Interstices of Silence,” and said that the key to reading the literature of the Nakba was in what wasn’t said. He said that all the verse of Mahmoud Darwish should be read through its references to the expulsion from the village of al-Birwa and that it hid more than they revealed – it was the role of criticism to give voice to the silence, not the sounds, of the words.

  The massacre at the Dahmash Mosque isn’t the issue, for when all the streets of the city have become a death trap, words turn to stone.

  Lame Ahmad, or Marwan Abu al-Loz, said he was going to look for his sister, who hadn’t taken refuge with the rest of his family in the Dahmash Mosque. He was sure she’d survived, along with her husband and their two children, and was living now in some camp in the West Bank.

  After the two massacres, that by the 89th Brigade and that of the Dahmash Mosque, the Israeli soldiers were seized by bloodlust and started shooting at everything. They ordered the inhabitants to leave their houses and the refugees who had come to Lydda their makeshift camps and pointed to the road leading to Ramallah. “Go to Abdallah!” they shouted as they fired over their heads. They banged on the doors of the houses brandishing their weapons and ordering people to leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs. “Leave everything! Go!” they shouted as they fired. I’m not going to recount the tales I heard of women being raped or of random killings inside the houses as these are all things known to their victims and as they have remained silent, who am I to recount them? Today I understand their silence as pride and grief, and I add my silence to theirs.

  There is no point in telling these tales now, but the members of the teams of Lydda’s youth collecting the corpses came across the bodies of babies, women, and men inside the houses, most of whom had been shot.

  I know I don’t possess the documents to prove my words. My documents are the testimonies of people, most of whom are dead. I’m scared that tomorrow a historian like Dr. Hanna Jiryis will come along with his scholarly discourse that declares that when we cannot prove our words there’s no point in writing them, or an Israeli historian and writer like Tom Segev will turn up with his “irrefutable” argument that the “doyen” of Israeli historians, Benny Morris, made no mention of these events in his book on the refugee problem, and if that historian – who, after all he’d said, made a U-turn and started calling for the Palestinians to be put in cages – hadn’t mentioned them, then they didn’t happen, or as good as!

  I believe that the victims of this massacre didn’t tell its tales because these were etched into their souls and went with them everywhere throughout their lives of misery, and they could see no need to demonstrate the self-evident truth of what they had lived through. Furthermore, they wanted to forget them, and that is their right, for how is a person supposed to carry his corpse on his back while continuing to live an ordinary life?

  (And I had forgotten. I lived my whole life by forgetting and I found my road by substituting another person for myself. I invented my shadow and lost its story, since everyone believed the shadow was the original. It never occurred to me that one day it would desert me; on the contrary, I was certain that, when the time came, it would be my shroud. And when I decided to withdraw from the battle after Dalia left me and I left my love of her, I came to New York to seek reclusion, my shadow at my side, between falafel patties and Waddah al-Yaman. I let lots of people think that I wasn’t who I am – even Sarang Lee thought so – till my secret came out in front of her when the original and the shadow ran headlong into one another in the cinema and then together broke into splinters in the lobby of the Washington Square Hotel. I came in retreat, raising the white flag, and only now I discover that the final battle awaits me here, that I have to enter it with equipment that I haven’t mastered, and that my road to the road’s end will be the restoration of the original through memory.)

  The people left surrounded by screaming and terror. “Lydda leaves Lydda as the soul leaves the body” – this is how I see it through the eyes of Ghassan Batheish, who stood in front of the hospital as the column took on the form of a spate of people rushing through the bullets, the terror, and the blood. The nurse, who hadn’t dared leave the hospital to make sure his father and mother were all right, searched for his parents among the faces of the fugitives, which were obscured by the sound of bullets interspersed with moaning. Suddenly, he saw his mother’s face bobbing among the others and he rushed forward, only to find himself in the midst of a maelstrom of lost people. The wave of humanity swallowed the face, which had appeared to him at a distance, his mother vanished among the throngs, and he decided to return to the hospital, but the pressure of the crowd was pushing him toward what seemed to be a slope. He stretched his arms out in front of him, like someone trying to swim, and fell to the ground, where he felt that he was suffocating and that feet were treading on him. He cried out for help, but his voice was lost among the other jostling voices and he began to sink into the stickiness of the blood that lay in pools on the asphalt. He saw a hand stretched out toward him, grasped it, and raised his head above the waves, then fell back to the ground, discovering that he was sliding and that the blood was about to swallow him. He tried to stand but couldn’t. He began crawling on his hands and knees. His eyes drowned in the sun spots that were reflected off the blood that had spread over the street and from which burst fiery red skewers. He wept. He fell on his left side and felt feet tread on his face. He fell into a deep slumber, then came to to find two hands holding on to his and trying to pull him up. He saw that he was standing once more in the middle of the current of screams blended with firing and started rowing with his arms in an attempt to move over the surface of the current of moans in the direction of the hospital.

  Ghassan Batheish remembers only the river of people and the moaning rising from the stones of the places through which they passed. He didn’t witness the massacre and would realize what had happened only when he was assigned to one of the teams collecting the corpses from the streets and houses. When he entered his house, on Wednesday, July 21, 1948, he would discover that the face that had appeared to him among the throngs hadn’t been that of his mother. Ghassan’s mother had remained in the house and had disobeyed the invading army’s orders to leave the city because she couldn’t leave her disabled husband, who had suffered an immobilizing stroke. Ghassan hadn’t thought of that fact and would say that he’d forgotten his father when he leaped into the midst of the human river and almost drowned beneath its feet. His mother wasn’t among the throngs that were organized into the column of the lost, and what he’d seen was just his hopes, which would be dashed when he smelled the strange smell in the house. He stood there hesitating, as though lost, and refused at first to enter, but when the young men went in, Hatim al-Laqqis pulled him by
the arm and he found himself inside. There he saw his mother, with no face. She was lying on the tiles, wrapped in her own remains. His father was lying on the bed, covered in his black blood.

  The Maze

  BY THE TIME three days had passed, the people of the ghetto had discovered they would have to get used to a new and strange way of life. Things started to take on a familiar form, and the sense of loss began to disappear in the face of the facts of the present. People recovered from their shock to find that this ghetto was now their home. The barbed wire that surrounded the place became a part of the scenery through which they became acquainted with the boundaries of their new city, which now consisted of a small fenced rectangle with a single gate guarded by three soldiers. The scene of young children being bathed by their mothers in front of the tank at the Great Mosque became the only source of relaxation, when laughter would ring out, accompanied by the shouts of the mothers.

  Manal didn’t know what the word “ghetto” meant or where it came from. All she knew was that the people of Lydda heard it from the Israeli soldiers, so they thought it meant “the Palestinian Quarter,” or “the quarter of the Arabs,” to use the name employed by the Israelis to describe the country’s original inhabitants. Only Ma’moun knew. He recounted that he’d explained the matter to Iliyya Batshoun, but the guy had laughed at him and thought he was being a smart alec.

  “The ghetto is what they call the Jewish districts in Europe,” said Ma’moun. “These idiots don’t know that we don’t have ghettos in our towns and call the Jewish districts ‘the Jewish Quarter,’ just like any other quarter of our cities, so it makes no sense.”

  “You’re telling me we’re Jews now?” Manal asked him naively. “Impossible. God forbid! We’re Muslims.”

  “And Christians,” added Iliyya. “Listen, guys,” said Ma’moun. “These people know nothing. They think they’re in Europe. They’ve come and they’ve brought the ghetto with them so they can put us in it.”

  Nevertheless, even though everyone was convinced that Ma’moun knew what he was talking about because he had his matriculation certificate from Amiriya College in Jaffa, the general conviction among the fenced-in city’s people continued to be that “the ghetto” meant the Arab Quarter and that as of now, following the forced migration of the majority of the city’s inhabitants, they had become merely a small minority living in a closed ghetto that the Israelis had decided was to be the cage in which the Palestinians would have to get used to living.

  And in fact, after leaving my mother’s house in Haifa and going to live in Wadi al-Nisnas, I discovered that what had happened in Lydda had been generalized to all the Palestinian cities, and that the inhabitants of al-Ramla, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre had lived in closed ghettos for a whole year before the Israeli army decided to remove the wire. That year fenced in by fear etched itself so deeply into the Palestinian consciousness, however, that the ghetto became the hallmark of an entire people. Similarly, while the cities were ghettoized by the closing off of the Arab districts, into which everyone had been corralled, the villages of Galilee and the Triangle were transformed into closed spaces under military rule, which was only lifted eighteen years after the foundation of the state and whose objective – in addition to humiliating and impoverishing – was to paralyze movement and prevent people from going from one place to another in search of work without the permission of the military governor. By these means, they were to submit to their new fate and be rendered incapable of resisting the confiscation of their lands, which continued uninterrupted.

  When Dalia reproached me during the final phase of our relationship for having lied to her and everyone else when I’d said I came from the ghetto, and insisted on being introduced to my true self, I explained to her that I hadn’t lied to anyone. I really was a son of the ghetto, and my claims to Polish origins and to being from Warsaw were no more than an appropriate metaphor to describe my childhood in Lydda, my youth in Haifa, and my life in Jaffa.

  The ghetto at Lydda consisted of a small piece of land fenced with barbed wire in such a way that it looked like an unroofed cage. It was set up in the area extending from the Great Mosque to the Church of St. George and from there to the hospital, and a census of its inhabitants would show five hundred and three individuals, of whom two hundred were in the mosque, one hundred in the church, and one hundred and fifty in the hospital, these being the wounded plus the doctors and nursing staff. A further fifty persons were in the small number of houses next to the church. Manal was lucky, because Ma’moun was the first to react, and he asked her to join him at the Kayyali house, which remained her home for the next seven years. The other houses were occupied haphazardly, and the committee’s decisions on redistributing them according to the needs of the inhabitants and the number of family members made no difference. Such a distribution was impractical because the ghetto was composed not of whole families but of individuals whom fate had led to remain in one of the three places where people had gathered and where they stayed, because after the massacre the Israelis didn’t know what to do with all those people, so the military governor decided to fence the place in while waiting to see what would happen next.

  Food was available from the stores of the houses in which people took up residence, but it soon started to run out. The only source of water was the ablutions tank. The people, though, were incapable of adapting to the new geography of the place. Many refused to live in the houses that had been deserted by their owners and preferred to stay in the hospital, the church, or the mosque. It’s said that people thought that by moving into these houses they might lose their original homes, while Najib Nafia yelled that he rejected the option because the houses had owners, who would return to them. Despite the insistence of committee head Iliyya Batshoun that their residence there would be temporary, as he had been assured by the military governor, and not last more than a few weeks, after which everyone would go back to his own house, Najib Nafia wasn’t persuaded. He decided to stay in the mosque, as did many others. The ghetto’s inhabitants were thus divided between two categories: the first, to which my mother belonged, decided to move into the deserted houses, and the second stayed at the Great Mosque, the church, and the hospital. In these places, families set up boundaries between each other using woolen blankets fetched from the deserted houses. When winter set in, however, the inhabitants became conscious of how cramped the place was and how impossible it would be to go on living like that. It was a cause of conflict within the ghetto that was solved only a whole year later, when it was decided to ease military rule over the city and remove the barbed wire.

  What I know is that we stayed on in the house Ma’moun found for us: Manal enjoyed the distinction of being the wife of a martyr who had fallen defending the city and none of the committee members dared to compel her to take a second family in with her. It is also said, though God alone knows if it’s true, that Khalid Hassouna had his eye on my mother and had made up his mind to marry her a week after Iliyya Batshoun got married. This would explain why he refused vehemently to let anyone touch the house where she was living and convinced the rest of the committee of his view, claiming that this should be regarded as a way of honoring the martyr Hasan Dannoun, who had fallen at the side of the hero Abu Ali Salama.

  The only thing I know for sure is that Khalid Hassouna hated me – it’s something I was aware of throughout my years in the ghetto – and that he blamed me for Ma’moun, whom he called “the lady’s young man.” Naturally, I understood nothing about such things then, but I avoided the guy and was careful not to cross his path. It was only in our shack in Haifa that I heard the story of his attempt to marry my mother: after a beating from her husband, I heard her crying and bewailing her wretched luck for having refused to marry the respectable man who’d asked for her hand so as to take care of her in a decent way and be her second husband, and how it had all ended up in the misery she was living through with her husband Abdallah.

  The
inhabitants of the ghetto awoke to the fact that they would have to look after themselves, because the military governor had informed them that the state wasn’t responsible for them, that they would have to make provision for food, water, and medicines on their own, and that he wasn’t prepared to listen to any more complaints on that score.

  It was at this moment that the ghetto’s first miracle occurred. The people decided to ransack the houses and search for food stocks. The head of the committee asked permission from Captain Moshe for the inhabitants to leave the ghetto for the old city and fetch provisions because he knew people had stocked up in preparation for the war. The captain hesitated and said he couldn’t, because his orders said that the army wasn’t responsible for feeding the inhabitants.

  “I can’t,” Moshe said.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Iliyya Batshoun said. “The people are hungry and soon they’ll be eating each other. I can’t control the situation.”

  “Okay, okay! Wait till tomorrow,” Moshe said.

  The morning of the next day, Iliyya Batshoun received the same answer. He then started shouting and seemed to forget he was a prisoner, and his pride came back to him, so he started to make threats. As soon as people saw the head of the committee raise his hand menacingly, they gathered in front of the gate to the ghetto and their voices began to rise. Moshe retreated and fired a shot from his pistol into the air. He also said that he’d allow four young men to leave to search for provisions – in the houses of the old city only and on condition that they wear Red Cross signs and that he wasn’t responsible for their safety.

  Ma’moun was the first to volunteer.