My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  ‘“What’s wrong with the table?’ he said.

  “‘The table…it’s our table.’ I tried to explain to him, stammering with fear, that it had been made by my father with his own hands and that we’d put it in the dining room, it was made from the wood of an aged olive tree that had dried out in our field and my father had wanted the table to be with us for the rest of our lives because the smell of olive wood wafted off it…’That smell, sir, is our smell. You’ve stolen the smell of my father.’” (Did the boy really say those words, or had Murad’s memory rearranged them in its own way? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the smell filled where we were, and I too suddenly smelled the smell of Lydda welling up from my childhood. I shall never be able to describe it, for the aromas of memory are hard to put a name to, but the colored undulations in which silver blends with the green and blue that rise from the leaves of an olive tree under the sun took me back to the scent embedded in my depths, and I smelled the color – a mixture of the scents of the olive and the fig, the two trees by which God swears in the Koran, when He says, By the fig and the olive and Mount Sinai and this land secure! The two trees occupy a special place in the memory of my childhood, especially of when I was arrested at the age of six for picking figs from a nearby garden that was part of the land owned by my grandfather and was put in jail for stealing state property and spent a whole night at the police station before being got out by my mother, who explained to me that I had to think of everything as lost and start from zero. The words “lost” and “zero” remained engraved on my memory even though I didn’t understand. How can a child at the outset of his life understand that he has to begin from zero and from loss?) The boy said the Israeli officer ordered him to pick the table up and take it home.

  “The officer told me, ‘Take it, boy!’ and picked up his papers and files and put them on a small table that stood out of the way near the wall. He said he didn’t believe my story: ‘You’re a nation of liars, but take it! It’s not your table, but I’m going to give it to you. Tell your father that it’s a gift from the Israeli army. Take it and don’t let me see your face again!’”

  But the boy said that this wasn’t the end of the story.

  “My comrades had stopped outside the Israeli officer’s door to wait for me, and when they heard me say, ‘I’ll never take it!’ they came in and carried off the table, and I found myself running with them outside, our feet barely touching the ground we were so happy. When we reached the hospital, Dr. Zahlan took the table and announced that it would be put in the hospital’s lobby because the hospital needed it, and that it would be safe there and would be returned to its owner as soon as the present mess was cleared up.”

  Murad said he’d told us these two stories to delay having to tell the one he was afraid of. He said that every morning he still smelled the smell.

  “Can you imagine starting your day with the stench of burning corpses? I’m seventy years old now and it still goes with me everywhere. Every morning I have to go out into the garden, even if it’s fifteen below zero. I go out to breathe in the air and get rid of the stench. The youth said they’d stolen the smell of his father when they stole the table, but my smell is the stench of death. What more can I say? I think that’s enough.”

  Murad leaned his chin on his hand, closed his eyes, and a voice unlike his own, the voice of a sixteen-year-old choking on the tears in his throat, came out of him, and through that strange voice I beheld the scene and smelled the fire and felt that I was choking and had to get out of there. I try now to recall what the man said the way I heard it and am smitten by a cold shiver, accompanied by a feeling that I am about to choke on the smoke that veils the vision from my eyes.

  Murad said, “It was six in the morning of Thursday, the eighteenth of August. I’m not certain of the date but I’m sure it was a Thursday. The Israeli officer gathered the youth of the four teams that were working on collecting the bodies and informed us that today would be the last day of work. He ordered the leader of each team to have the bodies gathered together in the garden closest to where he was working.

  “‘There’s no need to move them to the cemeteries or dig mass graves in the gardens of the various quarters. All you have to do is gather the bodies together in the place the soldiers who are with you specify. Your job will be easy and once it’s done, this unpleasant and difficult work will be over.’ The officer didn’t forget to thank us in the name of the Israel Defense Forces, saying that through this work we had proved our loyalty to the Jewish State and our worthiness to be citizens of that state, which had been established to restore to those in exile their right of return to the land of their fathers and grandfathers.”

  Murad said, “What awaited us was more appalling than anything that had gone before. Two days after the end of the work, we found ourselves herded into detention camps, so we moved from a large cage into small cages and experienced the torments of the prisoner and the pain of the exile. As you know, the condition for immediate release was that we shouldn’t return to Lydda but leave and go to Ramallah. Most of us refused, but I felt a loss when I saw Hatim al-Laqqis leave. With his cheerful spirit and amazing capacity for problem solving, Hatim was more than a friend and a brother. He told us that Comrade Emile Toma, who visited us in the camp, had advised him to go back to Lebanon and had given him the addresses of some of the Lebanese communist comrades and that he’d agreed because he couldn’t bear any longer to live in the ghetto as ‘a broken-off branch’ – with no parents and no family.”

  Of that day, when the sky poured down rain, Murad said, “Usually, it doesn’t rain in August, but it did that day. It was rain unlike any other. It went on for just half an hour, as though the sky had opened a faucet and then turned it off. We’d piled the bodies in the garden, and the rain poured down, and you can imagine what happened to the thirty corpses or parts of corpses that our team had piled on top of each other. When the rain stopped, the two Israeli soldiers told us to gather the scattered parts together again with the shovels and then one of them gave me a gallon can of kerosene and ordered me to splash it over the parts and the fire started and the air filled with thick black smoke, to the sound of the crackling of the fire. And we, my dear sir, had to wait while the ashes dispersed into the air and then gather the bones and bury them in a small hole.”

  That was the end of what he had to say.

  After a long silence, Murad filled his glass with white wine, raised it to me, and said, “Look, and tell me what you see!”

  I didn’t understand what he meant, but I regained my voice, with difficulty, to say that I saw a glass filled to the brim with white wine.

  “Do you know the poems of Suhrawardi the Slain?” he asked me.

  I said I knew he was a Sufi and that he must have written verse, like all the other great Sufis.

  The glass was fine, the wine was pure,

  the limits of each, in their resemblance, hard to divine –

  As though there was wine but no cup,

  and a cup that held no wine.

  I said it was beautiful poetry but I didn’t understand what it meant.

  He downed his glass in one go to announce that the meeting was over. I stood up.

  He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t rush things. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  Sonderkommando

  I ADMIT I felt something strange as I listened to the popping of the bones as they were devoured by the fire: Murad spoke, and I saw. It was grief. Grief squeezes the heart till you feel you’re about to die and your heart bleeds tears into your eyes. Thus it was, good folk, that I discovered a new source of tears – tears that don’t emerge from the glands of the eyes accompanied by a gulping for breath but that emerge directly from the convulsing of the heart, so that they’re as hot as blood and dig a groove down the cheeks.

  My tears gushed without weeping, and I thought of my mother’s face and
the grooves of tears on her cheeks that nobody saw but me. And I understood everything.

  Now I can say that I have understood the language of silence that was Manal’s way of concealing her tears in the hidden grooves on her cheeks.

  When I saw Claude Lanzmann’s movie Shoah, I was struck dumb. It was in 1991, at the house of an American doctor called Sam Horovitz who had decided to return to the Promised Land and had taken up residence in Ramat Aviv. The guy was a model of courtesy and good nature. He called me up to discuss an article of mine about Umm Kulsoum’s song “Ahl al-Hawa” that had been published in Kol Ha’ir. Sam and his wife, Kate, were lovers of Arabic music and regularly attended video screenings of Egyptian movies. He called me and we met more than once. He declared his admiration for my articles, with their openness toward Arab culture, and said he’d never met another Jew so open to the culture of the region.

  He asked me to explain oriental musical modes and the concept of the quarter tone, and I was astonished by his love of Arabic culture. He said he’d read Diary of a Country Prosecutor by the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, translated into English by Aba Eban (sometime Israeli minister of foreign affairs), and had fallen under the spell of that writer, who had managed to present the social issues of the poverty-stricken Egyptian countryside in the form of a detective novel. He had daring ideas on the necessity of Israel’s integration into the Arab region and showed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian refugees living in wretched camps. Once, after a long discussion over coffee, I told him I wanted to ask him a question but was hesitant to do so and afraid of upsetting him.

  I asked him why he had gone there. “You love Arabic culture but Israel is a project with a Western bent that despises the culture of the country’s original inhabitants, so why did you come here?”

  He answered me that he’d come because of Claude Lanzmann and spoke at length about the genius of that great leftist man of culture, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He said Lanzmann’s movie Shoah had changed his life and was one of the reasons for his adoption of his Jewish identity and his decision to return to the Promised Land.

  “Lanzmann was the portal to my identity. Umm Kulsoum, though, is the magic of the East that captivated my heart when I came here. Have you seen the movie?” he asked me.

  “No. I’ve heard of it, but the hype here in Israel made me reluctant to go and see it. I don’t like blockbusters.”

  “This time you’re wrong,” he said, and he invited me to his house, where I spent six hours transfixed in front of the small screen witnessing savagery in its most extreme manifestations.

  “I’m bowled over,” I told Sam.

  A movie unlike any other, stories unlike any others, and one tragedy giving birth to itself inside another.

  Despite Lanzmann’s Zionism, his peacock-like personality, and his later movie Tsahal, in which he glorifies the Israeli army with a blind partiality informed by a loathsomely romantic attitude toward an armed force that hides its amorality under claims of morality, my admiration for Shoah has never gone away. I regard it as a humane work in which the content is greater than the form, and one that succeeds in telling what cannot be told.

  Nevertheless, I feel perplexed when faced with fate’s coincidences and try to find an explanation for them, which I cannot. The coincidence of my meeting with Murad is understandable and logical: falafel, hummus, and nostalgia led the seventy-year-old to the Palm Tree restaurant. But what possessed Claude Lanzmann to bring a group of Holocaust survivors and men who’d worked in the Sonderkommando teams to the Ben Shemen colony, just outside Lydda, to tell of their suffering when burning the victims, victims who were of their own people? We may be sure that Lanzmann was unaware of the existence of a Palestinian ghetto in Lydda. Even if echoes of the great expulsion of 1948 ever reached him, it’s certain that, if he’d had to choose between it and the stories of the Nazi Holocaust that he decided to tell in his movie, he would have granted that marginal event no consideration. All that is understandable – or, let us say, something that I try to understand, having drunk that experience to its dregs, and adopted its identity; indeed, at one stage of my life I believed I was Jewish, the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, my recall of scenes from that coincidental event fifteen years before my encounter with Murad al-Alami, who witnessed the transformation of the Palestinian youth of the ghetto into a new form of Sonderkommando, shook me to the core.

  Why did Claude Lanzmann bring the Jewish men of the Sonderkommando to Lydda?

  And would the Franco-Jewish writer and filmmaker have been able to imagine a possible encounter between those poor men and Murad and his comrades, who carried out the burning of the corpses of the people of Lydda in obedience to the orders of the men of Tsahal?

  I have no idea, but what makes me angry is that no one confronted the French director with this truth, which was known to all the young people of the Lydda Ghetto. Maybe the tragedy has to remain enveloped in silence, because any discussion of its details would disfigure the nobility of that silence.

  Murad was right to be silent.

  Murad’s silence resembles that of Waddah al-Yaman. Now I understand why Murad severed all ties with me and why Waddah al-Yaman rejected my attempt to identify with his story.

  It’s the story of the sheep that was driven to slaughter and never opened its mouth.

  That is the story of the children of the ghetto.

  I don’t want to draw a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba. I hate such comparisons and I believe the numbers game is vulgar and nauseating. I have nothing but contempt for Roger Garaudy and others who deny the Nazi Holocaust. Garaudy who walked the tightrope of ideology from Marxism to Christianity to Islam and who ended up a mercenary at the doorsteps of the Arab oil sheikhdoms, committed the crime of playing with numbers, reducing that of the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis from six million to three million. No, Monsieur Garaudy, in the Holocaust everybody died, for whoever kills one innocent person is like someone who kills all humankind. As it says in the Mighty Book, Whosoever slays a soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, shall be as if he had slain humankind altogether.

  That said, what is the meaning of the chance encounter of these two incidents? Did they meet so that the banality of evil, the naivety of humankind, and the insanity of history could be laid bare?

  Or does their encounter point to the apotheosis of the Jewish issue at the hands of the Zionist movement, which transformed the Jews from victims into executioners, destroyed the philosophy of existential Jewish exile, and indeed, turned that exile into a property of its Palestinian victims?

  I swear I have no idea! But I do know that I am sorrowful unto death, as Jesus the Nazarene said when he beheld the fate of humankind in a vision.

  The Threshold

  THE GHETTO DIDN’T cease to exist when the wire was taken away toward the end of 1949: the wire remained engraved on people’s hearts and the common name of the two Arab quarters – the Sakna Quarter, where I was born, and the Station Quarter, where the Israeli army allowed the railroad workers to stay and made them a ghetto like the one they made us – continues to be, to this day, “the Arab ghetto.” And because the ghetto remains, its stories have remained along with it. Its men and women have today become the shadows of the memory of a crime and its stories have lodged in the walls of the city, which is now a city unlike itself.

  All cities, and not just the occupied cities of Palestine, change. This was the lesson I had to get used to. Nazareth has changed, and New York, and Cairo, and Seoul, and Beijing, and so on. I have to pretend to myself that Lydda was subjected to a devastating earthquake and a rapid demographic shift. But why then does this city, which I left forever when I was young, come awake again inside me at the end of my days? I am not a native of Lydda. True, I was born in that stricken city, whose old quarters, where the Palestinians live,
are now overgrown with weeds, but my father’s family has its roots in the village of Deir Tarif. Deir Tarif has been erased and in its place has been built the moshav of Bet Arif, meaning House of the Cloud, which was founded by Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria and then converted into a cooperative village for Yemeni Jews.

  “My family lived in the House of the Clouds,” I used to tell anyone who asked, “so why does the memory of my childhood drag me down today from my cloud and throw me into the alleyways of Lydda?”

  I’ve visited Lydda only twice in my life since I left. Once to help the nurse from al-Ghabsiya, who lives in Ramallah, to sell the house she’d inherited from her Bedouin husband, who was killed in a feud, and the second time with Dalia, who had decided to return me to myself.

  Writing about Lydda, I have to adopt the stance of an observer and stop writing laments. Enough! The past is dead and I must deal with it without emotion. That is something I learned from the Abbasid poet Abu Tammam, who described the relationship between humankind and time in terms of a dream:

  Then that age and its people were done

  as though both it and they were dreams.

  In “the language of the ‘ayn,” which is to say, the language of the Arabs, the “particles that are analogous to verbs” and the “defective verbs” occupy a magical status, as though they were somehow congruent with one another. Thus ka’anna (“as though”), a particle analogous to a verb, exercises government over both the inchoative and the predicate, the first being written with final -a and referred to as the “noun belonging to the particle,” the second with final -u and referred to as its “predicate,” while kāna (“to be”) is a perfect defective verb that exercises government over the inchoative and the predicate, the first being written with final -u, the second with final -a! The act itself falls somewhere between kāna and ka’anna but it is an act replete with confusion: most of the time kāna turns the imperfect into the perfect, while ka’anna makes the perfect imperfect. A verb’s consonantal root is, for the Arabs, a perfect verb, even if the act itself takes place before our eyes! In this language, verbs are used only in the past perfect in speech and writing. When our forefathers wept over the abandoned encampments of their beloveds, they wept over the time, not the place.