My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  “The morning of the next day, we began the work at the cemetery and were told to dig a trench twenty meters in length and five meters in width. We spent the whole day digging it, and then they ordered us to throw the bodies in. What a terrible moment that was! No sooner did we try to lift the first corpse than the flies were everywhere. I swear to God, we were covered by a cloud of flies with wings on fire from the burning sun! But that’s not the point: the flies were a natural part of working among the corpses. The point was the order to pick the bodies up on shovels and throw them into the trench. Dear Lord of All Worlds…can you imagine what that meant? I’m not capable of describing it, and anyway, why should I tell you? Telling is meaningless. My valued friend, you have to realize that at Lydda all telling came to an end.”

  Scene Three

  HE SPOKE OF how they worked in silence:

  “I swear to God, we worked at that job for a whole month, and there was only silence. I know you won’t believe me, and to be honest I don’t know why I’m running on like this. Ask my wife, she’s right there in front of you, ask her! I don’t talk much. I feel like the words won’t come out of my mouth. I don’t talk at home and didn’t at work. Most of the time, I’d give my instructions to the workers with a wave of my hand and they came to understand me. I don’t even know how to talk with my little grandson Umar, God protect him. The boy’s five years old and he thinks his granddad doesn’t speak English, though, in fact, he’s the person I know best how to communicate with without using words. We speak the language of the eyes. Little Umar understands me and I understand him without talking.

  “What have you done to me, man, to make me open the faucet of words? I swear to God, I have no idea what’s going on! Maybe it’s this French white wine. You know, white wine is the best thing in the world! We call it white, but it isn’t really. It’s yellow, or something close to yellow. People couldn’t decide what color it was so they gave it an imprecise name. Words never say what you want them to. That was the first lesson our bitter experience with our cousins the Jews taught us. They put us someplace where there’s no language, and left us in the darkness of silence.

  “I was telling you about the silence. To tell the truth, silence isn’t a darkness, it’s an attitude. We went a whole month, my friend, without speaking. We were like lifeless machines. We’d collect and dig and swat at the flies and no one would let up long enough to look at his comrades. Our eyes were on the ground, our faces like the masks of the dead, and we worked.

  “Just once, in our group, the silence was broken. We’d finished Saladin Street and gone into the side streets and now had to go through the houses. That’s what Sergeant Samuel told us. Sergeant Samuel spoke Yemeni Arabic. He looked like us – brown and tall and with hollow cheeks, and his eyebrows were thick and met in the middle. And he was kind to us, meaning that from time to time he’d let us take a break, we’d sit down in the shade and he’d give us tea and cookies. There was something odd about his movements: whenever he saw a body fall to pieces, he’d touch his forehead to the ground. Once I thought I saw him cry, though I’m not absolutely sure if what I saw were tears or sweat. Anyway, Sergeant Samuel ordered us to go into one of the houses. He said he could smell something in there and we had to search for it.

  “The only time the silence was broken it was by a moaning that rose from deep within us. Nabil al-Karazon cried out, fell to the ground, and started to bellow like an ox with its throat cut, and when we saw what we did, a moaning such as I can’t describe to you came from within us. It seems that people have sounds hidden within their souls that no one knows about and that only come out when it’s time. The three Jewish soldiers who had stayed outside the house, waiting, came running toward us and when they saw what we’d seen, they turned and went back. Samuel started knocking his head against the wall and vomiting. I don’t know how much time passed with us like that, but later one of the soldiers yelled at us and told us to get on with the work.

  “After that, Samuel disappeared and they put a blond Ashkenazi sergeant in his place. His face looked as though it had been sculpted from rock. No breaks, no water, nothing. Just work, and making sounds or weeping was forbidden.

  “Can you imagine? They forbade us to weep! Have you ever heard of an occupation army that forbade its victims to weep? We were forbidden to weep, and when you can’t weep for fear of being killed, words become meaningless.”

  Scene Four

  HE SPOKE OF the moaning:

  “When we heard Nabil al-Karazon shouting and bawling, we ran toward him and found him kneeling on the floor by a bed on which lay a baby girl, her face distorted by death. ‘My sister Latifa!’ screamed Nabil, as he moaned. The scene was terrifying. I ran to cover the little girl, pulling off my keffiyeh and placing it over her fragile, rigid body, but Nabil removed the keffiyeh and started shouting, ‘Behold the angel! Is this it, God? Is this what you do to us? Ahhh!’ and with this ‘ahhh’ that emerged from his guts, our moaning rose toward the heavens. The eaten-away face of the young girl became imprinted on my heart and has remained with me throughout my life. This is what people are. People are cadavers. Even children who look like angels are cadavers. Screw life and screw humankind!

  “Then, after we’d calmed down a bit in the face of the sternness of the soldier, who cocked his rifle and ordered us to pick the child up and take her outside, Nabil was overcome by a fit of hysteria. He said, ‘No one is to carry her except me!’ He went over to the little girl and picked her up, but her arm fell off. Nabil put her back on the bed, where she looked like a doll that had come apart. I went toward the bed, wrapped her in the sheet, and picked her up. I held her close to my chest and felt death beating inside my heart. My tears fell on her corpse as though I was giving them to her to drink. They were my gift to the young girl who had died of thirst. I gave her my tears so that she could pull the earth over herself and sleep quietly while the grass sucked her up.

  “We placed the body of the child whom Nabil insisted was called Latifa and was his sister on the stretcher and set off toward the cemetery. Without saying anything, we decided to stop work and take the little angel to the grave. We found ourselves walking and didn’t look at the soldier, who had raised his rifle and was ordering us to go on with our work. We turned our backs and raised Latifa on our shoulders, reciting the first chapter of the Koran and walking through the desolation. I don’t know why the Israeli soldier didn’t shoot us when we disobeyed his order. We heard shouts in Hebrew; the Ashkenazi sergeant was probably ordering the two soldiers not to fire and to go with us. We walked in a funereal procession, having first covered the body of the child with a white sheet like a shroud. When we got to the cemetery, one of the soldiers ordered us to throw her into the big trench that was used as a mass grave (I forgot to say that we’d dig a new trench every time the one we were using filled up and that our different teams took turns at doing the work), but Samih al-Kayyali screamed that we were going to dig her a grave and bury her as an angel should be buried, and that’s what happened. We dug her a little grave and al-Kayyali led the prayer over her mortal remains. Then we settled her head on a stone and sprinkled dust over her.

  “The weeping of Nabil al-Karazon filled the heavens, but nobody paid any attention to the fact that we’d buried a Christian girl according to Muslim rites. Even Nabil, who’d said she was his sister, made no comment on the matter and raised his hands as he recited the Koran.

  “When we returned to the ghetto, we were surprised to hear Hajj Iliyya Batshoun rebuking Nabil and telling him to stop crying. ‘That wasn’t your sister, lad. Why are you making such a fuss over her? You don’t have a baby sister. Your sister Latifa is a young girl now, thirteen years old, and that’s not your house. You know your family were all scared away and are in Naalin now, and your sister’s with them. There’s nothing for you to worry about, lad. You seem to have gone mad.’

  “Everyone was convinced Hajj Iliyya was right, for the youn
g man was odd and a loner and hardly spoke to anyone. He was always saying he wanted to leave and join his family in Naalin but was scared of the Jews’ bullets. After the event, Khalid Hassouna encouraged him to go and reassured him that the soldiers didn’t shoot at people who were leaving; in fact, that’s what they wanted everyone to do. ‘Put your faith in God, son, and go!’ And that’s what happened. The following morning Nabil disappeared. It seems he ran away from the ghetto, and he was never heard of again.

  “But this story isn’t about Nabil, or about the story he made up about his sister Latifa. This is about that little girl whose name no one knew, and who became a holy woman whose grave people visited, because Our Master al-Khudr (or St. George) appeared before her tiny grave, riding his horse and brandishing his sword.”

  Scene Five

  HE SPOKE OF AL-KHUDR:

  “Thus it was that we came to possess a new tomb for a holy woman, one of God’s righteous wards. None of the inhabitants of the ghetto knew the girl’s name, so ‘Latifa’ quickly vanished, along with Nabil al-Karazon, to be replaced by something strange, for the girl-child came to be known as the daughter of Our Master al-Khudr, and had a shrine built for her, which people called by different names. Some called it ‘the Shrine of al-Khudr’s Daughter,’ others ‘the Shrine of the Angel.’ As time passed, the second won out over the first and there appeared in our city, alone among all the cities of the world, a shrine to an angel, whose name no one knew but which was always uttered with the definite article.

  “Khuloud was the first to see al-Khudr guarding the grave. She said al-Khudr had appeared to her in a dream, standing in front of the girl-child’s grave and brandishing his sword, and had ordered Khuloud to tell Hajj Iliyya Batshoun to build her a tomb, because al-Khudr had taken this angel to be his daughter. The clock said one in the morning. Khuloud awoke from sleep shivering with cold, her teeth chattering. Hajj Iliyya woke at the sound of her calls for help and hurried to the second bedroom, where Khuloud slept with her daughter. He pulled up the woolen blanket and covered her, rubbing her body to drive away the shivering fit. ‘It’s a summer cold,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll go and see Dr. Zahlan. You calm down now,’ and he made her a cup of hot sage tea and sat down next to her, wiping the cold sweat from her forehead.

  “When the shaking stopped, she told him that Our Master al-Khudr had come to her in her dream and ordered that a tomb be built for the angelic child and that he’d said he’d guard the tomb till the Last Hour. Hajj Iliyya told her to go to sleep and that things would be clearer in the morning and that they’d have to find a way to persuade the military governor to let them build the tomb. The next morning, Khuloud told her dream to everyone, and everyone believed her. Our Master al-Khudr appears only to women, and his orders have to be carried out. Of course, there was nothing we could do. The only thing that Ghassan Batheish managed to get done was to have a pile of rocks placed on top of the grave and plastered over with mud. In this way, the angel acquired a shrine unlike that of any other holy person – a heap of rocks that grew in size with time because people would fulfill their vows to the angel by placing more on the grave, leading to the growth of a shapeless cairn. And when, following the death of her husband, Khuloud suggested building a room over the grave, so that the place would look like a shrine, most people rejected the idea, saying that it had taken on its strange appearance because Our Master al-Khudr wanted it that way and that it mustn’t be touched or a curse would fall on them.

  “Imagine, my friend! We were afraid a curse would fall on us – as though we weren’t living in the middle of a curse, or there could have been a disaster greater than the one we were suffering. But people are dogs. They’re called ‘human’ because ‘humiliation’ is what they’re used to, and they accept it and justify it. Imagine, we used to think that a pile of stones that we’d placed on top of the grave of an unknown girl-child was a sign of what Hajj Iliyya Batshoun used to call ‘divine visitation.’ I never believed the guy had really become a Muslim. Hajj Sababa, as we’d come to call him, had been love struck when he saw Khuloud dancing her little girl that savage way in front of the Israeli soldiers, and the only way open to him to marry her was to become a Muslim. But he used to use pious expressions that were strange to our ears, till we discovered they were used by our Christian brothers. Don’t get me wrong! I respect all religions. All of us in the end worship God, but I don’t like cozying up to holy men. To be honest, I was never comfortable with Khuloud’s story and never believed that the prophet al-Khudr had appeared to her, but I was forced to pretend to believe. In those terrible days, clinging to the ropes of illusion was all we could do. All the same, I told Ghassan Batheish that I had my doubts about how truthful Khuloud was, and the strange thing was that Ghassan, who, like me, expressed his doubts about the appearance of al-Khudr to such an eccentric woman, who’d become the semipublic mistress of a man forty years her senior, began the custom of lighting candles in front of the stone cairn we’d erected.

  “The appearance of al-Khudr to the young widow was a successful way to silence evil tongues, which had impugned the honor of the woman who’d lived under the protection of Iliyya Batshoun as though she was his adopted daughter, and who, the very day she completed the period she had to wait before she could legally remarry, switched from the status of daughter to that of wife.”

  Scene Six

  HE SPOKE OF the sheep:

  “I don’t want to give a false impression of the first days of the ghetto. True, they were a tale of grief and silence, but nothing breaks silence better or makes people feel they’re more alive than life’s gifts.”

  He said that they’d often been forced to bury the dead where they found them because the corpses were too eaten away to move from one place to another.

  “But we would call on al-Khudr for help. His appearances to women in the ghetto became the talk of all. Each evening, on our return from our exhausting work, drowsiness would steal over us to the rhythm of women’s voices relating the appearances of al-Khudr and his angels. The ghetto now had its saint and righteous holy woman, and Muslims and Christians competed to tell their stories of the appearance of al-Khudr, or of St. George, and to tell of the light that poured from the wings of a small angel that would stand on top of the mound of stones and dispel the darkness.

  “We quickly began to forget the story of the miracle of al-Khudr, though, when the Lebanese boy, Hatim al-Laqqis, brought us the miracle of the first cow.

  “Iliyya Batshoun said the cow was the gift of al-Khudr and we ought to slaughter it and present it as a sacrifice at the Shrine of the Angel.

  “‘The guy’s nuts!’ Manal shouted. Your mother was a brave woman. She stood up to Iliyya and the members of the committee and led the cow to her house, saying that al-Khudr had sent the cow as a mercy for the children, so they could drink milk.

  “Hatim al-Laqqis wasn’t part of our team, so I only know the story of how they found the first cow from what he told me. He said that after his team had finished burying its dead and was getting ready to leave, he’d heard a strange sound, so he decided to stay. He tricked the Israeli soldiers and disappeared among the graves. When everyone had left, he took his shirt off and waved it, to give a signal to the source of the sound. Suddenly, in the distance, he saw two phantoms coming toward him. They looked like two old men covered in dust. The phantoms drew closer to him and, sure that they were jinn, he exclaimed, ‘I seek refuge with God from the devil,’ and began reciting the Throne Verse in a loud voice, and the phantoms heard and began reciting along with him.”

  God! There is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows what lies before them and what is after them, and they comprehend not anything of His knowledge save such as He wills. His Throne comprises the heavens and earth; the preserving of them
oppresses Him not; He is the All-high, the All-glorious.

  “At first,” Hatim said, “I’d been afraid they’d turn out to be Jews, then I thought they were jinn and became rooted to the spot; I couldn’t even get to the end of the Throne Verse, so they finished it for me and then I understood.” He said they’d come to him, each supporting the other so that they looked like one man divided in two. “‘We’re from the al-Hadi family,’ they cried out, before sitting down on the ground. I pulled myself together, went toward them, and sat down next to them. They couldn’t believe that I was living in Lydda and that there was a large group of people living in the ghetto.

  “They were twins, alike as two drops of water. The first was called Nabil and the second was called Kamil. They said they were from the Jerusalem area and that the fates had determined that they should flee their city for Lydda. They were about thirty but looked like old men. They said they’d bought a house in Lydda and opened a fabric store in the market, and when the Haganah invaded the city they’d escaped from their house and hidden in the citrus grove next door, and that that day they’d made up their minds to return, via the cemetery. They said they’d hidden among the graves when they heard the sounds of strange activity and hadn’t understood what was going on. Then, when everything was quiet again and they’d decided to continue their journey, they encountered a stray cow grazing on the weeds that had sprung up around the graves, so they caught her and tied her to a gravestone.

  “‘And then we saw you.’

  “A cow? ‘And where’s the cow?’ I screamed at them, so they led me to her. I swear, the first thing I looked at was her udders, and I could see they were swollen with milk. ‘It’s a blessing from God,’ I said. I bent over the cow and kissed her on the forehead. I took hold of the rope she was tied with and told the two men to follow me to the ghetto. They said they’d seen three other cows but hadn’t been able to catch them. I said, ‘Never mind. We’ll come back tomorrow,’ and I set off, holding on to the cow, and the men set off behind me.”