My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Khalid Hassouna told him off: “You’re blind, boy. Go back!”

  “I’m not a boy and you have no right to talk to me like that,” Ma’moun answered in a loud voice. “Furthermore, I am not blind, I am bereft of sight, and go I shall,” he continued, in literary Arabic.

  Iliyya Batshoun intervened, mollified Ma’moun, and asked Ghassan Batheish to lead a group made up of four nurses, who appeared with a stretcher that they could fill with food.

  The team’s first accomplishment, in addition to the discovery of large quantities of stored provisions, was to come across eight old men and women who’d hidden themselves in their houses during the invasion of the city and stayed there, terrified and alone. These accompanied the team back to the ghetto, looking like a group of lost children who could no longer talk.

  The provisions arrived and a haphazard distribution started, people taking whatever they wished. Things could not, however, go on like that. The provisions consisted of lentils, cracked wheat, chickpeas, oil, flour, sugar, tea, and soap, so it was decided they should be put in a storeroom, and the room next to the church, which was originally where Deacon Niqoula, who had left with everyone else, had lived, was chosen, and Ibrahim Hamza was appointed as its keeper, to be responsible for the fair distribution of the provisions to everyone. Enforcing this decision wasn’t easy at first. Fear of hunger drove people to hoard provisions in their houses or hide them under blankets close to where their bedding was placed on the ground. However, the abundance of food, and especially of chickpeas, oil, flour, and cracked wheat, convinced everyone that there was no point in storing provisions individually.

  Ibrahim Hamza formed three ladies’ committees. The first was headed by Fatima, wife of the baker Jamil Salama, and its job was to make bread. There were also two cooking committees, one based at the hospital, supervised by Samira, wife of the priest Toma Niama, whose task was to make food for those living in the hospital and the church, and the other at the mosque, under the supervision of Khadija, wife of Khalid Hassouna, which was responsible for making food for those living in the mosque and the houses. As a result, the ghetto began to give an impression of cooperative labor, leading Shmarya Guttman, the city’s military governor, to state to an Israeli newspaper that the Arab people of Lydda had “discovered today the benefits of cooperative life in the State of Israel.”

  In fact, however, the atmosphere of social solidarity and the healing of wounds quickly evaporated as collective life began to dissolve in the face of hardship and the impossibility of finding work or being able to move from one place to another. The ghetto thus came to resemble a prison yard, open to the sky, where people lived in idleness and fear.

  —2—

  HOW AM I to tell a story that appears to me, today, like nothing so much as a tangled skein? And where should I start? With the water, or with the collecting of the city’s corpses? With Iliyya Batshoun’s marriage, or with his son Iskandar’s visit to the ghetto to announce, before all, that he disowned his father?

  How, too, am I to tell the story of Crazy Karim, or the cow that Hatim al-Laqqis came across? And who will believe the joy when four cows were discovered in the cemetery?

  I’m at a loss because I’m incapable of understanding how the people were able to extract from death and despair the capacity to invent a life out of the putridity in the midst of which they lived. What is this amazing power that makes humankind able to adapt to death, and even live inside death itself?

  I might say it’s the instinctive will to live, for life resists death to the end, but I feel, writing these words, that what we call the will to live is just another name for people’s capacity for infinite savagery. The killer is rendered savage by his thirst for blood, the victim by his refusal to die under any circumstances. The Israeli soldiers who guarded the ghetto’s inhabitants were merciless – so said the Friday preacher at the assembly that took place in the square in front of the Great Mosque on Friday, July 23. A little before twelve noon, the people had heard the voice of the muezzin rising from the minaret; it was the first time anyone had dared to climb it. “God is great!” rang out, and tears started to course over the faces of the men, who stood in amazement in the courtyard of the mosque, unable to believe their ears. At that instant, the people beheld God’s hand in the form of a large cloud that blocked the sun’s rays and brought with it a cool, refreshing breeze, and they smelled incense.

  “It’s the hand of God!” cried Sheikh Bilal, the preacher, from the top of the minaret.

  The people didn’t pray that day. They stood dumbfounded beneath the cloud that shaded the courtyard, eyes raised. Silence spread.

  Once more the voice of the sheikh rose, and he said that God had commanded humankind to be merciful and show human feeling for one another. His voice was hoarse, as though he were both speaking and not speaking. He said, “Expect mercy from none but the Lord of the Worlds.”

  The sheikh fell silent. He was eighty and during the invasion of the city had fled to one of the citrus groves. Then, when the young men brought him back, he’d taken up residence in the mosque with a circle of his disciples and never again left it, living in the midst of the throngs of refugees who filled the place. He had tried to urge people to pray, but no one had listened to him amidst the chaos of dying that had overtaken the city. Now, today, the sheikh had returned to his minaret, after first lighting incense and asking people to grasp hold of the ropes of God, because all other ropes had been cut and had failed them.

  The people were silent under God’s cloud, but they didn’t pray, and when my mother told me the events of that day, she said that prayer needed hope: “But we had lost all hope.”

  She said all the inhabitants of the ghetto – men, women, children, and old people – gathered in the courtyard of the mosque.

  Even the priest, Toma Niama, came out of his room, which abutted the church, and came running to the courtyard.

  Iliyya Batshoun said that when he heard the sound of the call to prayer, he thought some disaster must have befallen them, so he came running and found himself in the midst of the silence of the cloud that cast its shade over all.

  The sheikh had descended from the minaret and the crowd had begun to fidget, preparatory to dispersing, when Khadija’s voice rang out. “O God! O God!” the woman cried, in a voice full of lamentation. “We want water, O God!”

  Khadija had good reason for her entreaty: the ablutions tank had run dry after two days of use because it was the sole source of water, and all that was left was the well belonging to the hospital, whose water was polluted and gave off a foul smell. When Moshe informed the head of the committee that he was not responsible for ensuring a supply of water for the people and they would have to fend for themselves, Dr. Zahlan suggested extracting the remaining brackish waters from the bottom of the well in the hospital’s back courtyard and boiling it and using it only for drinking.

  This solution, to which the people grudgingly agreed, proved to be unworkable, however. The water was green, as though full of verdigris, and even boiling it several times failed to get rid of the foul smell.

  “We’re dying of thirst!” Khadija cried. “And we’ll soon die of hunger too because we’re too weak to make bread.”

  The muttering of the crowd began to rise in a stifled cry. Khadija walked straight toward the wire and everyone joined her. The brown-complexioned, fifty-year-old woman, who used to cover her head with a black shawl, put her hands on the wire and started to shake it. Hatim al-Laqqis came forward and stood at her side and started shaking the wire too and shouting, “Shake the wire!” Suddenly, everyone was in front of the wire, rattling it violently, as though they meant to pull it free. At that instant, Captain Moshe appeared, and, standing behind him, a tall, bald man with a bandaged head. Moshe raised his rifle and silence fell.

  Iliyya Batshoun and the other members of the committee advanced toward the wire and the people heard Iliyya say
, “We’re dying of thirst, mister.”

  One of the soldiers went up to the gate in the fence, opened it, let the committee members out for a meeting with Moshe, and told the crowd to disperse.

  “We’re not budging from here!” Manal cried. “We have babies. Our babies are drying up. Look at my son, everyone! His body’s like a stick. What am I to give him to drink?”

  Manal said, when she told the story of the thirst, that tears don’t satisfy thirst. “If only tears could quench the thirsty!”

  —3—

  HATIM AL-LAQQIS said that the water gushing from the well was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Hatim, the Lost Lebanese, as Iliyya Batshoun called him, was the first volunteer to go with a group of the young men to look for water in the nearby citrus grove. The young man, who had worked from the age of nine as a newspaper vendor in Haifa, then switched to working as a mechanic in a garage before fleeing Haifa for Jaffa following a disagreement with his father when the latter decided to go back to his village in southern Lebanon, and who found himself alone in Lydda and trapped in the ghetto, came up with the idea that solved the water problem.

  No one knows how the stocky young man managed to slip through the gate of the ghetto, which had been opened, to find himself attending the meeting between the committee and Moshe, the Israeli officer.

  The meeting began with threats. Moshe said he wouldn’t allow such goings-on. Gathering in front of the wire and shouting would meet with one response, which was bullets.

  “But we’re thirsty, mister,” Hatim said.

  Iliyya Batshoun now suddenly became aware of the presence of the young man at the meeting. He looked at him angrily, but the youth put his finger to his lips to ask the head of the committee not to say anything.

  Hatim said the children would die of thirst and that the committee held the Israeli army responsible for the lack of water in the ghetto.

  “We’re asking for something very simple, mister,” he said. “We want water.”

  Captain Moshe said that from day one he’d told the committee he was not responsible for them and they’d have to fend for themselves. “I told you, sort things out yourselves!” Moshe said in an Iraqi accent, after which he started gabbling in Hebrew.

  “We’re pleading with you, mister,” Khalid Hassouna said.

  “The water in the hospital well is almost used up and it’s not fit even for animals,” Ghassan Batheish said.

  “We’re dying!” Hajj Iliyya shouted.

  “I don’t have any water,” Moshe said. “The city pipes have burst and I’m bringing water in for my soldiers from Ben Shemen.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Khalid Hassouna asked.

  “I don’t know,” the officer replied.

  “I know,” said Hatim, and told them he’d found a solution to the water problem and was ready to supply the Israeli army too with sweet water on condition that…

  “You’re setting conditions?!” the officer asked.

  “Shut up, boy!” Iliyya Batshoun said. Instead of shutting up, Hatim explained his plan. He said he used to work in the Jaffa groves installing electric pumps for the artesian wells. The solution was to send a group of young men from the ghetto to search the groves, at which point the problem would be solved – “and you can send your soldiers with us, mister, to fill up with water for themselves.”

  “No one’s allowed to leave!” Moshe said. “Those are my orders.”

  Ghassan Batheish told Ma’moun, as they bathed in front of the well in the orange grove, that he’d felt the Israeli officer’s embarrassment. “I swear he didn’t know what to do with us. He hesitated and all the time his hand was on his cap, as though he was going to scratch his head, and his eyes wouldn’t stay still. I don’t know what had got into him.”

  Silence reigned over the meeting, as though a sentence of execution had just been issued. “We’re thirsty because we were driven out of the city,” Iliyya said. “Where are we supposed to go, mister? Our families got lost at Naalin and slept in the open country and we’re not leaving here. You want us to die, we don’t want to die. What the lad Hatim said is how it’s going to be, tomorrow, at dawn. Everyone is going to leave for the groves and search for water and that way we can die from bullets and not from thirst.”

  Iliyya Batshoun stood, announcing that he was leaving, and so did all the members of the committee, but Hatim remained seated. “Get up, son!” Khalid Hassouna said.

  “No one leaves,” Moshe said, and he asked everyone to wait for him for quarter of an hour.

  Moshe left the hall and the committee members remained huddled where they were. Hatim now said that Ibrahim al-Nimr’s grove was no more than eight hundred meters from the mosque and had a well and a pump, and that was the only solution.

  When the Israeli captain returned, Ghassan Batheish told him they’d found a way out of the crisis: “Ibrahim al-Nimr’s grove is the solution.”

  The Israeli captain announced his agreement to the plan but wouldn’t take responsibility for the security of the young men who went to fetch the water.

  “Tomorrow morning,” the Israeli officer said, as he ordered everyone back to the ghetto.

  No one slept that night. The young men discovered eleven empty barrels that had been used to store petrol and decided that in the morning they would take them to the grove and clean them. Thus, at 6 AM, eleven young men assembled, Ghassan Batheish and Hatim al-Laqqis at their head, at the gate of the ghetto, barrels ready, awaiting zero hour. The gate didn’t open, however, until ten. As soon as the long wait ended, the young men burst out, rolling their barrels, and Ibrahim al-Nimr led them to his grove. They were accompanied by a squad of four Israeli soldiers.

  Oranges and lemons covered the grove. Fruit, some rotten, some shriveled and wrinkled, carpeted ground that was covered with thorns. Ibrahim bent over and picked up an orange. He cut it in two with his knife and squeezed it into his mouth, the juice, gilded by the sun, dripping onto his beard and neck, the smell spreading everywhere. “These, the shammouti, are the best oranges in the world. God keep us, see how thin the peel is and how the fruit forms a cup overflowing with juice!”

  He took a lemon, squeezed it into his mouth, and said, licking at the golden juice around his mouth, “Go ahead, boys! Help yourselves! Welcome to my grove!” Then he looked at the Israeli soldiers and invited them to pick the fruit.

  As hands reached out to pick the lemons and oranges that nobody had harvested because of the fighting and the war, the young men heard the voice of one of the Israeli soldiers, who had aimed his rifle at them, ordering them to stop.

  “It’s my grove,” Ibrahim said, “and everyone’s invited, including you.”

  “It’s forbidden,” the soldier said. “This is state property.”

  “What state?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Shut up, man!” Ghassan Batheish said. “We’ve come for the water, not for lousy dried-out oranges. Take us to the well, for heaven’s sake.”

  Ibrahim seemed incredulous at what was happening. He began gathering oranges and lemons and piling them into heaps. “The lemons are better, I don’t know why, but a lemon can go for a whole year without anything happening to it.”

  A soldier approached and kicked over the yellow- and orange-colored heaps that Ibrahim had collected, and said it was forbidden. “All land is now state land,” he said, and ordered the group of young men back to their places.

  At that moment, Hatim al-Laqqis shouted that he’d found the pump. Everyone, including Ibrahim, forgot about the lemons and they rushed toward the well, only to discover that the pump didn’t work. Hatim tried in vain to fix it but said it was no use, because some parts had been stolen, which meant there was no hope of repairing it.

  The young men returned with their barrels, carrying their disappointment to the inhabitants of the ghetto. Iliyya Batshoun, howev
er, did not despair. He stood at the iron gate, asked to see the Israeli captain again, and told him the solution was to allow Hatim and two or three other young men to go to the groves that were scattered around the city and look for spare parts so that they could make the pump work.

  And that is what happened. At 6 AM the following day, and in accordance with an agreement made with Captain Moshe, Hatim put on first-aid clothing and left with two young men on his watch, to look for a working pump from which they could take the missing parts. The captain said he wouldn’t send soldiers with the group because the area was still unsafe and he wasn’t obliged to expose his soldiers’ lives to danger.

  Hatim returned at 8 AM, his clothes soaked, to tell everyone that the problem had been solved and they should take the barrels to the grove.

  Ma’moun, who insisted on going with the young men, said he’d beheld the beauty of water. “Dear God, the most beautiful thing in the world is water, especially when it bursts out of the ground. It’s amazing. It explodes in front of one’s eyes like laughter and it flows and everything starts dancing.”

  “We have to clean the barrels first!” Ghassan Batheish shouted.

  The young men though had been struck by water madness and the moment the pump began working and the water burst forth, they started leaping about around the pump, drenching one another, drinking, bathing, washing their clothes, and laughing. The water even seemed to cast its spell over the four soldiers who accompanied the group and two of them began playing in the water with the young men, and the games only stopped when the sound of a bullet, fired into the air from the rifle of the corporal in charge, was heard and he ordered everyone to get back to work.

  Cleaning out the barrels was hard. Getting rid of the smell of the petrol required large quantities of soap and water, and Hatim, Ghassan, and the others had to take off their shirts to clean the barrels from the inside. In the end, they were filled with drinking water but before the young men could begin rolling them toward the ghetto, they saw Ibrahim rolling his barrel in front of him with a large jute sack that he’d filled with lemons and oranges on his back.