My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Hajj Sababa’s funeral saw the strangest rites performed. The Hajj was wrapped in a shroud in Islamic fashion and placed on a wooden bier, and the people prayed over him in the mosque. Then the young men carried the bier to the Greek Orthodox cemetery and there, at the grave, the mourners burned incense and the sound of chanting was heard. The priest came forward, sprinkled holy water on the body that lay on the ground, and said, “You are from dust and to dust you return.” The sound of the hymn “May His Memory Remain Forever” arose and he was buried in the family grave.

  At the Lydda Feast, when Iliyya Batshoun announced his decision to marry Khuloud, joy blended with astonishment. It was the ghetto’s first wedding, and the groom was the head of its Popular Committee, while the bride, radiant with love, looked “like the moon at its fullest,” as they say, and everyone was amazed at her beauty, her delicacy, and her astonishing oriental dancing.

  Ma’moun said that Khuloud’s dancing had amazed him. He said he’d felt the undulations of love emanating from her full body and its curves. “True, I couldn’t see anything, but I felt it. Circles of joy and desire scattered from her body and filled the place.”

  Khuloud said that she’d felt the man’s heart beating in his fingers as she held his hand under the handkerchief with which the sheikh covered their hands, and said, “I give myself to you in marriage.” At that moment, the woman’s heart began beating in the soles of her feet, so she stood up, the sounds of the distant music tickling her ears. Suddenly, the sound of the rababa arose, and the bride drew herself up to her full height and began to dance.

  She twisted to the still-distant music, her body fashioning its rhythms from its own curves and its sinuosity, and as the music grew louder everyone watched while the long red dress that she was wearing, embroidered with gold thread at the upper chest and the shoulders, was transformed into a fine shift that revealed rather than concealed, as though it had become a part of her – bending, retreating, clinging as she turned in the middle of the circle, she too kneeling, halting, her torso pulling back till the sky embraced her navel, then hunching over herself, then stretching her arms upward and climbing the air. Her feet turned, and with them the world. The robe rose a little to reveal translucent calves. A pulse ignited her eyes, tremors extended from the tops of her shoulders to the bottoms of her feet, colors fled from her long robe to the onlookers’ eyes. It was as though Khuloud was not Khuloud but a woman intoxicated by her own body and intoxicating the people who stood, amazed, watching in silent ecstasy as they felt life begin to flow through their bodies and souls once more. Ghassan Batheish stood and entered the circle, and then everyone suddenly started dancing, the ululations rose, and Manal sprinkled rice over all their heads.

  I close my eyes and see her now, the woman who danced twice, the first time for death, the second for love. Both times she traced with her dance the bewilderment, fear, and promise of life. I sit behind the table, watching the blackness occupy the white paper in front of me, and from the viscous darkness Khuloud emerges with her radiant whiteness and her long black hair covering her body. I see the woman who has become engraved on my memory with her long black robe, which she went back to wearing on the death of her husband Iliyya Batshoun and never took off again – a woman bursting out of the blackness radiating the love of life that she never betrayed, which is why, following her husband’s death, she turned to worship and chose to be the keeper of the shrine of Sheikh Dannoun, cleaning it, lighting candles, and living off the offerings of the poor, who found in the shrine of that Sufi sheikh a refuge and a cover for their nakedness.

  As for me, I discover, as I write the story, that my years have been lost to me, that my wounds will never heal, and that as Dalia and I grew closer to the long-awaited moment of beginning, I feared, and she feared, and the two of us together were powerless to combine grief with grief.

  Is not writing both a celebration of the years that have been lost and an elegy for them?

  Only an elegy can stir sorrow, ignite the imagination, and toss a brand into the darkness of the soul. I, Hasan Dannoun of Lydda, now summon up the memory of another Omayyad poet, to elegize myself and to elegize and be elegized by my friend Waddah al-Yaman. Malik ibn al-Rayb was a poet – a dandy, handsome and murderous, and a thief who slept with his sword slung in its belt across his chest. When the angel of death came for him, he found none to weep over him, so he composed his own elegy, which has become my companion in exile and whose words will be with me when the moment comes:

  I thought, “Who’ll weep for me?”

  and found none but my sword and my well-straightened spear.

  They say as they bury me, “Go not far!”

  but could any place be further than here?

  —7—

  THE STORY OF all stories, though, will be the one whose heroes and victims are the young men of the two teams charged with gathering up and burying the corpses. Their number was increased during the second week to become four divisions, composed of twenty youths. This story continues up to what Ma’moun named “the Appalling Moment,” which was that of the implementation of the Israeli decree that the bodies, which had begun to disintegrate under the sun, should be burned.

  The story says that two teams were charged with gathering up and burying the corpses, the first under the command of Ghassan Batheish, the second under that of Murad al-Alami. Both were young men who worked at the hospital, the first as a nurse, the second, sixteen, as an orderly. The first had been unable to reach his family at the moment of the exodus, which was total chaos; the second had come to the hospital to give blood and stayed on, pretending he was an orderly; he hadn’t left the hospital and he hadn’t tried to look for the members of his family because he’d been seized by a fear that had left him too paralyzed to take any action.

  Ghassan Batheish’s courage quickly evaporated when he returned from the first day’s work unable to speak, his skin all swollen from the bites of the blowflies, which had followed his group from place to place. Murad al-Alami, on the other hand, appeared unconcerned, as though he were just a machine for burying bodies. Ma’moun was in Ghassan’s team. When my mother asked him why he’d got himself involved, he replied that he’d joined because he wanted to see everything.

  “So what did you see, you poor thing?” she asked.

  “I saw everything,” he replied.

  Ma’moun spoke of that period during his New York University lecture, referring to the month when the corpses were collected as “the Days of the Corpses.” I don’t know how he managed to combine his personal story with literary criticism or how he entered Lydda’s night via his analysis of the words “wherever the wind blows” in the poem of Mahmoud Darwish (the boy asks where his father will take him in their exile from his village, to receive the answer “wherever the wind blows, my son”).

  Ma’moun said that he’d discovered where the wind blew while collecting the remains of the dead from the alleyways and houses. “Death and exile are two sides of the silence that creeps into the words of Palestinian literature. Take, for example, the story of the woman from al-Tantoura to whom Emile Habibi, in his novel The Pessoptimist, gives the name Survivor. In Habibi’s novel, Survivor never tells her husband Said the story of the massacre to which dozens of the men of that Palestinian coastal village fell victim. She contents herself with talking of the treasure in the cave, thus proclaiming the language of silence to be the Palestinians’ new language.” Ma’moun’s underlying thesis was that the issue was not the events of the Nakba, which were simultaneously well known and concealed.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, ladies and gentlemen. I shall not fall into the trap of saying that the Nakba was a unique historical event. History, ancient and modern, is a series of catastrophes afflicting numerous peoples. I might tell you the story of the corpses we had to collect from the alleyways, fields, and houses of Lydda, or I might tell you about the men who were executed in al-Tantou
ra and how the soldiers of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade ordered the Palestinian men of the village to dig their own graves using their hands – but what benefit would there be in that? The issue isn’t just the crime of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, because a bigger crime followed – the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. I do not speak here of the silence that follows what in the language of psychiatrists is called a ‘trauma,’ but of the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazi Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to ‘wherever the wind blows.’”

  Ma’moun was right. Collecting reports of his “Days of the Corpses” was arduous and extremely difficult work, and I don’t know why I got myself involved in that exhausting excavation of memory. People see no meaning in talk, and excavation of the memories of victims is a kind of gratuitous torture. I don’t claim that memory is meaningless but I am convinced that memory is a process for the ordering of forgetfulness, and that I have to respect Manal’s silence, as well as Ma’moun’s. The man passed over the story in silence in his lecture, and I didn’t get the chance to ask him on that tumultuous evening when I met with him at the hotel for the details of that time.

  Despite which, I find myself obliged today to traverse Lydda’s streets and alleyways because the story that I have been driven, in my folly, to write forces me to pass through the night of the corpses.

  What took place during those days?

  It is said, though God alone knows the truth, that the ghetto lived the Days of the Corpses in a strange mixture of grief and joy. I use the word “joy” well aware that it is inappropriate. How dare I speak of “joy” accompanying the fly-filled sky that covered the city?

  For Manal, those days had one name only – “the blowflies.” She said she covered every one of her child’s limbs out of fear for safety, and eventually had to cover their faces.

  “I swear, it was like I’d wrapped you in a shroud, and it wasn’t just you, my dear: all the children were wrapped in shrouds and even the men put masks on their faces. Instead of being coverings for just the head, keffiyehs became coverings for heads and faces alike.”

  Despite this, Manal couldn’t hide, even while telling the story of the blowflies, the moments of joy she experienced along with the other inhabitants of the ghetto during those somber days, which were given tangible form in three incidents: the finding of the four milking cows; the finding of the sheep and goats and the stray mule and the cart; and the finding of the elderly persons who had hidden themselves in houses or gardens and were brought back to the ghetto. These moments of joy would have been impossible if the Israeli officer hadn’t decided to employ the youth of the ghetto in the tasks of cleaning up the roads, looting the city, and collecting and burying the bodies.

  I shall begin with the issue of the corpses because it lies heavily on my heart and I want to get it over with quickly so that I can get away from its nightmares, which paralyze me. The first puzzle I face is the number of bodies that were found. All the reports I’ve read speak of around two hundred and fifty dead, and that figure is reasonable for a military operation that lasted only two days. The information provided by Isbir Munayyir in his book on Lydda, however, indicates that the two corpse-collection and burial groups had become, after two weeks, four, and that the number of young men doing that work had risen from ten to twenty, not to mention that the work took an entire month! These items of information intersect with the expression that Manal repeatedly used when telling me of the torments she went through during my childhood and referred to those days as “the month of the flies,” which is something Ma’moun confirmed when he recounted that he’d worked for a month burying bodies and remains. Twenty young men worked for four weeks to remove the bodies, meaning that what we have is a major massacre and that the number of the victims of the Lydda bloodbath in all probability exceeds the official number many times over.

  But what have I to do with this numbers game? We have no Palestinian document relating to the number of dead, while the Israelis, from their side, weren’t interested in documenting the numbers of their Palestinian victims. We find ourselves, therefore, faced by greatly varying estimates. For the single zero to the right of the number, we should perhaps write two, in which case we would be faced with a terrifying total, by the criteria of the day.

  I will not, however, do that. I am both incapable of and unwilling to get into this game of numbers. It may be important to historians, but can never be more than a theoretical issue arousing much debate, given the absence of Palestinian documents, not to mention the disappearance of Palestine itself from the map. I also hate using the language of numbers when referring to the victims, because it robs the dead of their names and individual characteristics.

  Murad al-Alami told Khalid Hassouna that he’d stopped the counting and the recording of names on the third day after the start of the operation. The deputy head of the local committee was the author of the idea of keeping tally of the dead and recording their names, but the difficulty of the task, the all-pervading smell, and the impossibility of identifying the victims because of the disintegration of their bodies, along with the Israeli soldiers’ insistence that the young men finish the work quickly, made keeping count an impossible task that was quickly abandoned.

  I indicated that each team had a leader, but that is inaccurate. Ghassan Batheish’s nervous collapse made him incapable of exercising command, so leadership of his group passed automatically to Hatim al-Laqqis, who collapsed completely when faced with the scene of the incineration of the corpses during the final week, at which point Ma’moun took charge, and so on.

  The third week of work was the great turning point, as Murad al-Alami related to Manal when he was telling her about the dead angel they’d found in one of the houses. Manal was anxious to know what had happened to Umm Hasan, her husband’s mother, and questioned the young men daily about the progress of their work; it was this that allowed her to store away in her memory many of the details of those days, which passed in a fearful silence that enveloped the entire ghetto.

  The things that are reported of those days are incredible. The work was debilitating and turned with time into a routine of exhaustion, sun, and stench. Murad al-Alami recounted that the young men lost all feeling and that for them death became a tiring job, nothing more.

  My main source for the following account is Murad al-Alami, whom I met in New York by chance. He was seventy, spoke fluent Americanized English, and lived with his wife in Brooklyn. The guy came to my restaurant to order a falafel sandwich. The clock said 4 PM, and the restaurant was half empty. He sat on his own behind the wooden table and began taking small bites from his sandwich. When he saw me smiling at his way of eating, he smiled and spoke to me in Arabic, saying he loved falafel but had stopped eating it in America because it gave him stomach pains. Then he added that he didn’t like eating it in the Israeli restaurants that were all over the city because the Israelis’ ability to fake everything, including the origins of falafel, made him furious.

  “You know?” he said. “They stole the country with their smarts and their strength – good luck to them, they can keep it! But falafel, no way! That’s downright dishonest! Can you beat it – they call tabbouleh ‘kibbutz salad’ and hummus ‘khummus’! Come on now! That’s just low!”

  I was amazed at a logic that could say “good luck to them!” at the theft of an entire country and then choke on a dish made from chickpeas. I made him a plate of hummus, fetched two bottles of orange juice, and sat down beside him.

  “I didn’t order hummus and juice,” he said
.

  “They’re on the house. Welcome to you and to the scent of Palestine!”

  After a moment’s silence, I told him, “But you’re in an Israeli restaurant.”

  “Israeli Shmisraeli,” he said. “I asked, and they told me you were Palestinian, so I came.” Then, when he knew I was from Lydda and was Adam, son of the martyr Hasan Dannoun, he rose and gave me a hug and said he’d made up his mind to forget everything about his city but he could never forget my mother with her baby in her arms and the blind youth standing next to her.

  “Your mother was beautiful, my friend, beautiful and amazingly smart. What are you doing here?”

  And so we got talking. In fact, we didn’t talk about anything much. The words and the traditional phrases that say nothing beyond expressing the yearning for talk flowed. The guy finished his sandwich, I went back to my work, and the customer rush began so I didn’t notice that Murad hadn’t left. He remained sitting at his table, slowly sipping his glass of orange juice. At around 6 PM, he came up to the till, where I was seated, and said goodbye, with thanks.

  Murad became a regular customer and I came to find in him, as he ate in his birdlike fashion, a comrade come to me from my memory. I’d speak in what one might call “word crumbs” and he’d answer with signs from his eyes. I don’t know why, but he was cheerful and courteous and that was enough for both of us. He never asked me anything about my past; even his question about why I’d come to New York was one of those things one says without expecting an answer. Our friendship began to change, however, as a result of the crisis I went through and my decision to stop writing my allegorical novel about Waddah al-Yaman and turn to writing this present text.