My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Murad continued: “With the first cow, there was general rejoicing in the ghetto, so the next day we decided we’d finish burying the bodies quickly so as to have time to catch the three other cows. There were four of us – me, a youth called Jamil who’d recently joined our group, Hatim al-Laqqis, and Ghassan Batheish. We hid among the graves until everyone had arrived but were surprised to find Blind Ma’moun with us. Ghassan ordered him to leave the place but the blind man refused, saying we needed him and he knew more than we did about cows. We found the three cows grazing on myrtle near the Shrine of the Angel, so we formed a kind of circle around them to make it easy to catch them. They seemed so docile, though, that it was as if they’d been waiting for us. We approached them and tied them up quietly; their udders too were swollen with milk.

  “‘This is the gift of the angel,’ said Ghassan, bursting into tears. When we began the homeward journey, we discovered Ma’moun wasn’t with us. We decided to look for him and began walking among the graves, leaving the cows in Hatim’s keeping. Then suddenly we saw him: he was walking, carrying a sheep, and it was trying to get away from him. We ran over and took the sheep from him. I have no idea how the blind man had been able to see the sheep, or catch it. Ma’moun indicated that he’d seen two head of goats and that we should look for them on the east side of the cemetery. And sure enough, we found them and caught them, with a lot of effort, because the goats were sly runners. Finally, we returned, bringing with us treasures beyond price.

  “The people of the ghetto welcomed us with ululations of joy. The milk issue was solved and Hatim al-Laqqis took charge of distributing it to the children and the elderly, while Khuloud took charge of souring the milk and making labneh.

  “Our Easter feast was the sheep and the two goats. The committee at first decided that the goats should be slaughtered immediately while the sheep should be kept for the Feast of the Sacrifice, but Iliyya Batshoun decided that the sheep should be slaughtered too, so that everyone in the ghetto could savor the smell of the fat as it cooked. I swear to God, I’ve never in all my life tasted food more delicious than the dishes made by the people of the ghetto from the meat and the bones! Manal made kibbeh nayyeh the way they make it in Eilaboun. Khuloud made tripe, shanks, and heads. Meat with cracked wheat was prepared, people cooked Jew’s mallow using the bones of the sheep, and tables were set. One young guy – I don’t remember his name – even fetched a bottle of arak and many a cup made the rounds.

  “We named that wonderful occasion ‘the Night of al-Khudr’s Angel’ and it entered our memories as the first joyful night. No one dared say the truth, which was that the cows and the banquet of meat were the product of our work in the cemetery. Thus, my dear sir, was life mixed with death as water is with wine, and the ghetto discovered that it could endure, and that we, who had survived the massacre by accident and had lived till then between the fear of death and the gathering of corpses, had stumbled onto life in the form of four cows, a sheep, and two goats. And in the afternoon of the next day, our joy was made complete when the group led by Marwan al-Kayyali, God rest his soul, came across a stray mule, which was brought to the ghetto, where it was hitched to a four-wheeled cart that had been abandoned next to the mosque. This provided us with a means of transportation that would greatly lighten the burden of dragging and rolling the barrels of water.

  “Our joy, however, was short lived, for once we’d finished collecting the corpses, we entered the maelstrom of the arrest and disappearance of the young men. The best of our youth went to Asqalan – they even arrested Blind Ma’moun – where we were put in cages. Some of us returned to the ghetto, but others preferred to go from the detention camp to join their families in Ramallah.”

  (I didn’t ask Murad about the twins because I know about the two men and know from Manal and Ma’moun the strange story of their escape from Jerusalem to Lydda: it’s a story that, to be honest, no one in his right mind would believe – and no one did believe what they told us about the mad Jewish girl who accused them of raping her when she was twelve and they were fourteen, and how the accusation brought upon them the hatred of some Jewish adolescents, who threatened to kill them, and how scared they’d been because they were on their own, orphans, working in a small shop in the Foreign Merchants’ Market where their father had left them. They’d been forced to sell it and ended up here in Lydda. Following their move to the ghetto, the two young men were considered models of cowardice and they felt as if they were living in exile. They left the city for an unknown destination when I was six, according to what Manal told me.

  I didn’t believe the story until I read Amos Oz’s novel My Michael, which tells of Hana Gonen and her tall tales about the two Palestinian boys. Could the story really be true? Could the Israeli novelist have changed the names of the Palestinian twins from Nabil and Jamil to Khalil and Aziz? Instead of recounting the tragedy of the two Arabs obliged to flee Jerusalem and live in the Lydda Ghetto, he transformed his heroine’s delirium and melancholia into a symbol of a city he dislikes. I have no idea – but then the relationship between the heroes of novels and the truth has always puzzled me and will continue to puzzle me to the last days of my life!

  I don’t want to accuse the Israeli writer of bias. When Oz wrote My Michael, he turned Jerusalem into an allegory for his mother’s suicide and he likely heard fragments of the story of the Palestinian twins and the Israeli girl’s delusions and decided they would serve to reinforce his metaphor of Jerusalem as a city besieged by Arab villages. That is his right as an author – even if I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. How is it possible not to see the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of color the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length? Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.)

  Murad said he’d never forget the taste of the cauliflower maqlooba prepared by Hasaniya, the fifty-year-old woman who lived by herself in the mosque, behind a partition made out of a woolen blanket, and who spoke only to herself.

  “If only I were a painter, I could show you the beauty shining from the woman’s eyes as she fried the cauliflower and fluffed the rice and how it was her platter of food that was the talk of the ghetto for ages! She would always ask us to bring her meat so that she could make the pie, but where, oh where, were we to find meat, when we were lucky to taste it once in a year?”

  Scene Seven

  HE SPOKE OF the fire and of the burning of the bodies, saying it was a moment he neither wanted to remember nor talk about.

  The guy choked on his words. He wrestled with meanings, so that he could speak of how he experienced the fire that burned the last of the bodies and their remains. He produced the words like one who has lost the ability to produce words and wept like one who has no more tears.

  (When I tried to write about this moment, which I did several times, I’d suffer a complete collapse. I’d be drenched in cold sweat and feel as though my heart had stopped beating. I’d be overcome by exhaustion, stop writing, throw myself on the bed and doze. This is my seventh attempt to write down what I heard. I drank half a bottle of vodka, sat down at the table, and decided to forget all the dreams I’d have when such exhaustion struck me. But I couldn’t forget one dream that pursued me for seven days and seven nights: We three – Itidal, Murad, and I – are sitting down. Murad drains his glass to the dregs and gets drunk. He pours another glass and drinks it, and the words come out of his mouth and turn into a rope that winds itself around his neck. The man cries out for help in words that come out as separated syllables, and with each cry the rope tightens around his neck and his words turn into a sort of rasp. Itidal and
I never move from our places. We’re like people watching a horror movie. The dream begins and ends without anything happening: the guy doesn’t die and we make no attempt to save him. I’d wake up from this dream, light a cigarette, and open my eyes as far as they’d go so that I wouldn’t fall asleep again. Then, when the heat from the cigarette’s little glowing tip reached my fingers, I’d get up in panic, then fall asleep again and enter a world in which delirium blended with the memories of that night. I became convinced that if I went on that way, I’d end up dying in a fire caused by my cigarette, so I decided to stop writing temporarily, but the decision did not release me from the maze of fires that Murad described as he choked on his words.)

  Murad spoke of those days: “Look, it’s true that collecting the bodies and burying the remains were the hardest parts of the work, but during those days there were two teams of young men working on looting the city and clearing the roads. You were a baby and don’t remember anything, so you can’t help me remember the names, and you know that old age has its claims, which begin with memory, and memory forgets, and the first thing it forgets is names. First, the name disappears, then little by little the features evaporate, and finally the person vanishes into his name.”

  (I wanted to interrupt him to say that in that case the name was, finally, its bearer’s grave, and that when the name was forgotten, its bearer disappeared and the person along with it. However, I said nothing. I felt that the transformation of our names into our graves was the height of abomination.)

  He recounted what the youth whose name he couldn’t remember had told him about the orgy of looting that took place at the direction, and under the supervision, of the Israeli army.

  “The youth whose name we’ve forgotten said his team was made up of five persons and that its job was to clear the commercial establishments of their contents: ‘We entered the stores, whose doors had mostly been ripped off, and we emptied them of everything. We had to fill the small army trucks with canned goods, grains, flour, sugar, milk, everything. At first, we felt ignominy and shame. Why did we have to loot ourselves? Why did we have to rob our city for the benefit of these people? We knew that the trucks would go to Tel Aviv, and we worked with gritted teeth under the pressure of fear. After a couple of days of work, though, everything changed. We became full of enthusiasm and felt the ecstasy of thieves. We stole fearlessly because the army was protecting us and began to enjoy the looting.’

  “Screw us and what we’d become!” said Murad. “Can you believe it? You have to because I did. That’s what puzzles me: how did we become looter and looted, thief and victim? It’s amazing! Did you ever experience such a thing? No one but us has ever tasted the moment of ecstasy felt by the victim when he flogs himself, and no one can understand the feeling. Even I, who am telling you about it, can’t understand it!”

  The young man whose name we’ve forgotten said that after they’d finished the commercial establishments, the more difficult job began. This required joining the team that had cleared the streets and cleaned the military governor’s office with theirs.

  “That morning, we discovered that a new team had been added to ours and we were given orders to the effect that our new job was to empty the houses of every piece of furniture. The Israeli officer told us he wanted everything that was inside the houses and made it clear that we must leave nothing behind. We were to go into each house, clear it out, and clean it; even the doors and the windows we were to unhinge and load onto other, larger, army trucks. This new job was more difficult than the first. You might say we’d become porters, and we would return in the evenings, our backs broken from carrying furniture, all of which the trucks took away. The work was exhausting, but we didn’t face any difficulties worth mentioning, and if we came across a bloated body in any of the houses, the order would come from the officer to get out of the house right away, and he’d splash kerosene around and set fire to the house, saying that it was better for the health of the city. We knew there were teams for collecting the bodies, so we couldn’t understand why the officer would set fire to the house; he could just have ordered us to take the body to the cemetery and get on with the looting.”

  The young man told Murad that their group had faced two hard cases. In the first, the officer had almost shot the young man called “the Egyptian,” and the second case was his own.

  “We called him the Egyptian because he was dark skinned, but he wasn’t Egyptian. He lived with his parents and three sisters in the church and never stopped telling jokes. When we went in to loot one of the houses, though, the Egyptian discovered that it was his own. At first, he led us through the rooms showing off the beauty of the furniture, which his father had brought from Damascus. We began loading up, as usual, and got to a large mirror in the living room, about two meters tall with an oak frame topped by a wooden triangle resembling a crown that was inlaid with Damascene mother-of-pearl. The Egyptian held on to the mirror and shouted, ‘No! I’m taking this to my family.’

  “The soldier who was accompanying us inside the house didn’t understand what was happening. He went up to the Egyptian, said something in Hebrew, and left the house. I, as head of the team, asked the Egyptian to step back and let go of the mirror, but he just clung to it more fiercely. The four of us formed a circle around him in an attempt to persuade him that such carrying-on was pointless. I told him we’d looted the whole city, ‘so why not this mirror? In a moment they’ll make some dumb problem for us,’ but instead of us convincing him, his attitude started to get to us, and the mirror became a symbol of all the impotence and shame we’d felt during those days of looting.

  “The soldier came back accompanied by a sergeant who spoke Arabic and who asked us what was going on. I replied that we’d decided the Egyptian was right and we weren’t going to take the mirror to the truck, we were going to carry it to the ghetto because they had no right to take it to Tel Aviv. I don’t know where I found the courage to say what had to be said. Sergeant Roni – I think that was the name of the blond, blue-eyed sergeant – told us to load the mirror onto the truck immediately, plus a lot of stuff along the lines of our not having any right to take state property. He raised his stick and advanced with the soldier, who also had a stick, behind him, but instead of retreating, the Egyptian glued himself to the surface of the mirror, blending into its image, and we saw all of us inside it – five Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers inside a Damascene mirror. The soldiers fell on us and started beating us. Our concern was to protect the mirror from them, so we too glued ourselves to its surface, the blows from the sticks raining down on our heads while we screamed and cursed. The living room filled with Israeli soldiers who beat us with sticks and rifle butts and blood began to flow. Suddenly the mirror started to break into shards. I couldn’t see clearly because my eyes were filled with blood, but I saw how our images in the mirror began to splinter and the color red to consume us, and how when the Egyptian fell to the ground, the mirror fell on top of him and broke into little pieces. Our image disappeared and we and the Israeli soldiers were covered with blood, which oozed from our splinter-filled bodies.

  “We ended up handcuffed, walking down the empty street, our heads bowed, and surrounded by the soldiers, who had their rifles trained on us. We weren’t taken to the ghetto. They took us to an underground room which had been used in the past to store food supplies, in the house that had become the Israeli military command’s headquarters in the city. We spent the night there without food or drink. I was convinced they’d throw us out of the city the next day, but the morning brought something unexpected.

  “And the surprise took the form of three nurses, who came in and cleaned our wounds. They put on them a yellowish medication that stung and that we discovered later was iodine. Our wounds were bandaged and we drank coffee that tasted like straw, made in the Israeli way, the kind they call boost caffe, meaning ‘mud coffee,’ which is a term for putting coffee grounds into a cup in the Arabic way,
then pouring boiling water over them and stirring. The coffee doesn’t dissolve but turns to mud. Even though we didn’t find its taste to our liking, it was a good start and we took it as a positive sign, which would have been right, if I hadn’t caught sight of that table.”

  Murad told us about the table:

  “You know that they’d taken the houses of Hasan Dahmash and Said al-Huneidi as their military command headquarters. In the morning, we discovered we were in Hasan Dahmash’s house, which was large, recently built, and distinguished by high ceilings and a spacious living room where Captain Moshe, to whom they led us, was sitting, behind a rectangular wooden table. Moshe began by telling us off. He said he could refer us to a military tribunal on a charge of assaulting the soldiers, but that Sergeant Roni had interceded on our behalf. ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? Sergeant Roni, over whose head you broke the mirror with the intent to kill him, is the one who has asked me to pardon you! The condition is, though, that you apologize to me, because you broke a valuable mirror that is the property of the state. And to him, because you were rude to him. And Roni and I have accepted your apology.’”

  The boy said that at a gesture from the captain the young men began to leave the large room, without a word of apology passing their lips. He, though, remained frozen in place: “I didn’t move. I was staring at the table at which the Israeli captain sat and could scarcely believe it. Everyone left and I stayed. The captain raised the back of his hand and said, ‘Goodbye!’ and when I didn’t move he yelled at me, ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ but I didn’t answer. What could I say? I was devoured by fear and felt as though my tongue had stuck to the roof of my mouth. The officer stood up, came toward me, shook me by the shoulders, and asked me what I wanted. With difficulty I managed to get out that I didn’t want anything, but the table…