My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  One evening, as I was finishing my work, and because Sarang Lee was waiting for me so we could go to Fish, the restaurant on Bleecker Street that serves shellfish, octopus, and crab, Murad entered and I apologized to him, saying I had to leave, but told him I wanted to invite him to dinner at a fish restaurant on any day he chose because I wanted to consult him about something. He said he thanked me but that it was he who wanted to invite me to dinner, at home, because his wife was anxious to meet the son of the martyr Hasan Dannoun who owned the falafel restaurant.

  At his home in Bay Ridge, I discovered how this seventy-year-old had turned retirement into an art form – a house surrounded by a green garden, a warm atmosphere, his work in the furniture trade now passed to his three sons, who lived with their families in apartments close by, the voice of Umm Kulsoum flowing quietly and enveloping the place, a bottle of white wine, a wife of around sixty still radiant with traces of beauty, a grilled fish lying on a bed of finely chopped parsley, which the lady, with her exquisite bearing, placed on the table before us before quietly withdrawing.

  When I expressed my surprise that his wife would not be joining us at the table, he said he’d asked her not to because I’d said I wanted to consult him on a private matter, or so he had understood.

  “It’s a misunderstanding,” I said. “I need you to help me to write a novel, and the presence of your wife wouldn’t disturb me in the least. On the contrary, I’d like her to be part of the conversation.”

  “A novel! I’m going to help write a novel?”

  “Perhaps I didn’t express myself very well,” I said. “I mean that I’m writing a memoir and I want your help in remembering certain things.”

  “It seems you’re still not expressing yourself well,” he said, laughing. “How can you expect me to help you remember your life when I know nothing about you? Listen, I don’t know anything about literature. All I know is I like classical poetry and I’ve memorized the poems of the Prince of Poets, Ahmad Shawqi, as sung by Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, plus three lines from a poem by Ahmad Shawqi that no one dared to sing, which is his poem about wine. Being the literary type who wants to write novels, you must know the ones I mean.”

  When I replied that I didn’t know what he was talking about, he looked at me pityingly and declaimed:

  Ramadan’s over – go get it, cupbearer!

  Let besotted maid come running to besotted master!

  Red or yellow, its noblest kinds are

  like young girls, each sweetheart with her special flavor,

  But beware lest its fragrant blood you spill –

  enough for you, harsh tyrant, the blood of the lover!

  He poured a glass for me, one for himself, and an extra one that he picked up and left the dining room with, returning after a few seconds in the company of his wife, Itidal, who raised her glass and said it was a great honor to meet the son of the martyr Hasan Dannoun, whose name was spoken of in Lydda and al-Ramla coupled with that of the hero Abu Ali Salama.

  I seized on the opportunity created by Itidal to announce my objective, and said I wanted to write the story of Lydda and was looking for witnesses to the days of the ghetto.

  Itidal said the Israelis had set up a ghetto in al-Ramla too and that the inhabitants of the al-Jamal Quarter in the old city there still referred to it as such, but that she herself remembered nothing of those days because she hadn’t been born at the time of the Nakba. She looked at her husband and said that Murad remembered everything because he’d been a young boy at the time and hadn’t just experienced the ghetto but had tasted too the terrors of the prisoners’ camp at Sarafand.

  Murad, however, acted as though he hadn’t heard us. He looked at me and asked if I’d memorized Shawqi’s poetry.

  I told him I had memorized the poetry of the ancients but of the moderns I liked the poems of Darwish, al-Sayyab, and Saadi Yusuf, though I’d only learned a little by heart because that sort of poetry was written to be read, not recited.

  “Alright then, let’s hear something – a bit of the verse you’ve memorized,” he said.

  I felt I was falling into a trap and my visit would be a failure because it would go no further than exchanging verses, whereas I’d come with another goal in mind. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to go along with the guy, so I recited a short passage from Saadi’s poem “America, America,” where the poet says:

  God Save America,

  My home, sweet home!

  America:

  let’s exchange gifts

  Take your smuggled cigarettes

  and give us potatoes.

  Take James Bond’s golden pistol

  and give us Marilyn Monroe’s giggle.

  Take the heroin syringe under the tree

  and give us vaccines.

  Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries

  and give us village homes.

  Take the books of your missionaries

  and give us paper for poems to defame you.

  Take what you do not have

  and give us what we have

  Take the stripes of your flag

  and give us the stars.

  Take the Afghani mujahideen beard

  and give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.

  Take Saddam Hussein

  and give us Abraham Lincoln

  or give us no one.

  “Well done! A forceful poem, though personally I only like the old stuff. Great poetry has to age, like wine, and this poetry of yours needs to be kept in the casks of people’s hearts and breasts so it can mature. Memory is a wine jar for poetry, and poetry that the heart hasn’t memorized isn’t great.”

  I said I agreed, though in fact I disagree entirely with that theory. I seized, though, on what he said about memory being a wine jar for poetry to say that memory was a homeland that had no homeland, and that I wanted him to open the wine jar of his memory for me so I could replenish my own.

  We were saved by Itidal, who told us the story of her parents, who’d lived through the bitter experience of al-Ramla, and recounted how the Israeli army, which had occupied the city, had expelled the inhabitants by forcing them onto buses, and how her father had succeeded in hiding in an abandoned well and had lived in the ghetto in al-Ramla and met his wife there.

  “But Lydda was something else. Murad doesn’t like to talk about it, but at Lydda, the ones who left drank the cup of humiliation while those who stayed behind drank a cup of poison.”

  The talk of Lydda vacillated between silence and speech. It was clear the man didn’t want to say anything. He said that when he’d decided to leave the city and emigrate to America, he’d gone to the shrine of Dannoun, buried his memory at the grave of the prophet Salih, and left. “I decided not to look back and to build myself over again with this woman whose photograph, which my aunt had sent me from al-Ramla, I married before I married the woman herself.”

  All the same, words would seep through the wall of silence. He’d say a little, fall silent…Then he told me the story of the blind man who’d been unable to make it to Naalin, so he went back to Lydda.

  “You’re talking about Ma’moun,” I said.

  “Right, right, Ma’moun. He was a chivalrous and a noble man. I don’t know where in the world he’s ended up, but I’ll never forget his beautiful soul and the Lydda Oasis School that he founded.”

  I told him everything about Ma’moun. I recounted how he’d taken part in the work detail that collected the bodies around the city, how he’d been taken as a prisoner to Sarafand, and then how he’d left for Cairo and completed his studies there. On hearing the stories of Ma’moun, the guy’s memory exploded and he began to talk, jumping from one topic to another, weeping, falling silent, and drinking wine. Between the silence and the wine, my plan of attack began to take shape. I to
ok him back to the Days of the Corpses and questioned him relentlessly.

  The man spoke with difficulty. His voice sank into the depths of his throat and he spoke as though suffocating. He’d look at me like a drowning man appealing for help but I’d lost all mercy. I was like an executioner who gets pleasure from torturing his victim and himself, as though some satanic afreet had emerged from within me. I’d beat him with the whip of questions and shock him with the electricity of words and his head was pushed down under the water of the memory of grief and by the time he got it out again he was on the verge of choking to death. Then I’d soften and tell him things I’d heard from Ma’moun or my mother. The tears would well up in my eyes and the guy’s heart would melt and he’d pull from the well of silence events of which no one had ever spoken. I could see amazement, consternation, and pain sketching themselves in Itidal’s eyes, so I became fiercer because I realized that he’d never mentioned these events, even to his wife, who wept silently throughout that terrifying evening.

  When I recall it, I feel ashamed of myself and sympathize with Murad’s position. He stopped visiting the restaurant after that and didn’t answer my repeated phone calls. I lost a beautiful and a noble friend to gain stories of what I’d lost and of my subjugation!

  That night I drank wine mixed with sorrow and understood why our people call arak “the Virgin’s tears.” When wine mixes with tears, or turns into them, it opens the doors of the soul. I drank a lot that night and ate nothing. Not one of us took a bite of the sea bass (the American name for luqquz or “sea-wolf”) lying there in front of us, and even though Mrs. Itidal cast a look at the fish every now and then, she didn’t dare invite us to eat.

  At one point, Murad stood up from his seat, took the fish into the kitchen, and returned empty-handed.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Itidal asked.

  “I threw it away. It looked like a corpse to me, and I can’t eat corpses.”

  The night the fish was transformed into a corpse, Murad told story after story. He would speak and then fall silent, close his eyes as though looking into the past, then open them, get up, and fetch a new bottle of wine. He said he’d forgotten everything.

  “Lydda, my friend, has become like a blank page in my memory. I’ve erased it and I’ve erased Palestine, but it’s old age – old age takes you back to your childhood, life’s end takes you to its beginning, and the memory of the past begins to take on incomprehensible shapes.” He said his visits to the Palm Tree restaurant and his sudden devotion to falafel and hummus were the first signs of that return. “And now you want me to talk and I don’t want to, but I’m talking all the same. See what I mean?”

  Murad sketched with his words the details of those days. He gathered the bits and pieces that I’d heard from many people into a single narrative, and I saw the story as though it were unfolding before my eyes and forming itself into a succession of scenes. I shall, therefore, recount the story as I saw it and will not let my pen go near the tattered details with the intention of tying the different elements together in a logical way; on the contrary, I shall leave the scenes to speak for themselves, the way I saw them that night. I listened to him as though watching; as though I was before pictures that intermingled, intertwined, and broke up in a series that had neither beginning nor end.

  Scene One

  HE SPOKE OF how people lost their features. “The cruelest experience is seeing the body of one of your relatives and not recognizing them. Death is a mask. The features suddenly disappear from the face when the soul leaves it. That’s why the dead have to be buried immediately: ‘The dead are honored in their burial.’ When I think of those days, I don’t see myself, I see someone who had lost his features just as the corpses had lost theirs – faces like masks, and smashed bodies breaking apart, as though a person was a wooden toy. Where had the succulence of the body gone? I swear I don’t know! We were unable to recognize people: they were all wearing such similar masks that I could no longer tell whether death is a mask or our faces are masks for death.

  “Listen, friend. You wanted to hear, so listen, if you can take it. It was hard at the beginning, then we got used to it, and the only barrier that remained was the smell. We could never get used to the smell, even though we covered our noses and mouths with cloth. An odd thing was that Jamil al-Kayyal, who would be killed later in the detention camp at Sarafand, had covered his face with a keffiyeh and an Israeli soldier ripped it off and yelled at him that that was Palmach gear. At the time, we didn’t know who Palmach were or why its troops wore the Palestinian keffiyeh (before later deciding that the headgear of the Palestinian peasant wasn’t appropriate for them). Jamil al-Kayyal struggled desperately to defend his keffiyeh and ended up being beaten with the butts of their rifles and left lying for a whole day on top of the pile of corpses that we’d collected, so his features disappeared and till the day he died he wore the face of a dead man.

  “Death isn’t just dying. Death happens when faces are erased and we can no longer distinguish between people, and all the dead resemble all the other dead.

  “No! I bear no grudge against the Jews. They too die and as soon as they die become dead people just like us and cease to be Jews. We stop being us and they stop being them, so why the killing? I swear I don’t get it. I don’t have a grudge against anybody, but why?

  “We were young and didn’t understand what was happening. Or at least, I remember that there was just one thing in my head, and that was that I didn’t want to die. Strange are the ways of humankind! We lived among the dead and all we cared about was not dying. I don’t understand this instinct that we have inside our souls that will make a person trample on the bodies of his own parents to escape death.”

  He said the first day was terrifying.

  “We assembled. I was the leader of the team and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was sixteen years old. Maybe my athletic appearance and muscles attracted the Israeli officer’s attention, so he appointed me head of the second work detail. I was into bodybuilding and used to do it at the club in Jaffa. I was scared and couldn’t think, but I had to take charge of a group of youngsters, none of whom I knew. The fact is, I didn’t know anybody in Lydda. I’d been living in Jaffa at my maternal grandfather’s house. He was from the al-Hout family, who were originally Lebanese but lived in Jaffa. I was staying at my Lebanese granddad’s house because the schools in Jaffa were better, and just before the city fell, my father came and took me to Lydda. My father, my mother, my brother Sadiq, and my three sisters Hind, Sumayya, and Rihab fled along with everyone else and I got stuck in Lydda. I was at the hospital to give blood and I stayed there. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t move. I was frightened and halfdead with terror at the sound of the bullets and the news, especially the news of the massacre at the Dahmash Mosque. My grandfather and his family stayed in Jaffa, then later went to Beirut by sea. My family went to Naalin and from there ended up in Beirut, and I stayed in Lydda, by accident. I felt I’d got stuck and I remained stuck to the end.

  “I had to lead the team, and our first job was on Saladin Street. The bodies and the swarms of flies took us by surprise. People’s bodies were strewn down the middle of the street and had bloated and gone rigid. The features of the bodies’ faces had been erased and the smell clung to our skin. We were supposed to put the bodies on stretchers and move them to the cemetery, where they’d be buried. Our day began with sounds of moaning. I approached the first corpse with Samih, son of Sheikh Khalid al-Kayyali. It was a woman and her clothes were in tatters. Samih began by reciting the opening chapter of the Koran, while the soldier cursed him and told him to get on with the job. Samih recited the first chapter, and then we heard him sobbing and I don’t know how it happened but we all started crying. We cried and sobbed and our bodies shook with fear. Feelings of nausea devoured us. ‘There is no god but God!’ yelled George Samaan, tracing the sign of the cross on his chest. The woman’s bod
y slipped out of our hands and hit the ground hard. We picked her up again, put her on the stretcher, and set off with her. And that, sir…that is how I came to know the people of Lydda. I met them corpse by corpse.”

  He said the work in the streets was the easiest.

  “In the streets we didn’t have to look for the dead. The bodies were strewn down the road, and by the end of the first day we’d got used to it. How can I put it? We’d learned how to pick up corpses without the limbs coming off. First, we’d get them together, meaning we’d gather them so that they didn’t fall to pieces, placing the hands over the stomach, closing the legs, and lifting them by the shoulders, the torso, and the legs. A body took three people to lift it and there’d be two waiting with the stretcher to take it to the cemetery. In the time that they were away carrying one body, we’d have got another ready, and so on. After some terrible experiments, when three broke into pieces, we discovered a technique for loading them, though when a body fell apart, with an arm for example coming off, the process of gathering it together again and tidying up its parts was painful and difficult, especially when more than one bit was disintegrating. Because of this, the work took a long time, which made the soldiers angry.”

  Scene Two

  CONCERNING BURIAL OF the bodies, he said:

  “We discovered that burying the bodies was no easy task, especially as Samih al-Kayyali had decided that they were to be buried in the Islamic way, meaning we had to dig a grave for each one and place a stone under its head, which had to be pointing toward Mecca. I didn’t object to the decision, even though I was convinced it would be impossible to implement given the circumstances in which we were working: the Israelis had given us only primitive implements for digging, and we had thirty bodies to bury on the first day of work. When the soldiers saw what we were doing, after we’d completed the burial of three of the corpses, they got angry and began cursing us out, and they ordered us to leave the bodies at the cemetery and took us back to the ghetto.