by Elias Khoury
The years and their people, who have become dreams, take me to the abandoned encampments of Lydda, and when I stand before the encampments of the city, I feel as though I were standing before those of time. All cities are subject to desolation, but the desolation we lived, and still live, is that of time. This is the story that I have attempted to tell through the voices of its heroes and victims. It is a story that I had to tell in order both to remember it and to forget it, as a past that has passed but does not want to pass.
Lydda now has come to be as though it were not Lydda. Manal said that she had only left the city after she was sure that Lydda itself had left, and I believed her. We left the stricken city after my mother’s marriage to Abdallah al-Ashhal and went to live in Haifa. But Haifa left Haifa too. That is what Abdallah reported, bitterly, as he bore witness to the loss of his first wife and his three daughters. There is nowhere left in Palestine that has not left its place. Even Nazareth, whose inhabitants weren’t forced to move, left in a different sense, when it filled up with those displaced from the demolished villages. Mounted over it was the settlement of Upper Nazareth, which, instead of being a barrier between Nazareth and the sky, began to turn into an extension of the old Arab city.
I shouldn’t have believed Manal, but I was young and incapable of crystalizing words into speech. My sole reaction when leaving Lydda was to cry, but Manal refused to read my tears. She satisfied herself with taking me in her arms and weeping for my weeping.
The people of the ghetto watched as the Israelis took control of the time of the city. Their youth were driven into detention camps while the military administration imported young men from Nazareth and its villages to pick the olives and oranges – the poor stealing from the mouths of the poor, living in a camp on the outskirts of the city, and struggling to make a living when all other doors had been closed in their faces and the collaborationist class used them as a base for their political leadership. That’s what Seif al-Din al-Zoubi says in his memoirs. The guy doesn’t mention collaboration, but he explains at great length how he helped people to get work in Lydda through his relations with the Israelis. He doesn’t refer in his memoirs to the desolation of Lydda. Maybe he didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it, and that’s an issue that deserves study, because no one, as Ma’moun said in his lecture, was able to see things as they were.
And so the city became a kind of Tower of Babel. Languages barged into one another, strangers trod strangers underfoot, and the influx into the city of Bulgarian Jewish settlers began, followed by that of poor Jews from everywhere. They took over the houses and lived in them, and Lydda became a “development city,” to use the Israeli authorities’ term, meaning a marginal city. Even the airport, which was expanded and modernized, came to be known as “Tel Aviv Airport” and “Ben Gurion Airport.” Jewish settlers, and Bedouin too – because in 1950, the Israeli authorities expelled dozens of the Bedouin families of al-Majdal from the city and resettled them in Lydda. Bulgars, Bedouin, and a ghetto. When they allowed the inhabitants of the ghetto to go to their homes in November 1948, to get blankets and winter clothing, the ghetto-dwellers discovered that their houses had been looted of everything.
The story isn’t the emptying of the city of its original inhabitants, because an influx of people from the neighboring villages in search of work began, and Lydda never became a purely Jewish city. It became a mongrel, its old quarters full of drug pushers, with things reaching a climax when the Israeli authorities settled Palestinian collaborators and their families in Lydda following the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994.
Neither my memory nor that of my mother can help me to describe the city’s future. What I’ve written is merely an attempt to understand the beginning of things and, as you can see, what I call the beginning of things was the end of them for the vast majority of Lydda’s people, who set off on a journey into the wilderness that continues to this day.
I’m not justifying anything here. I’m trying to describe what I saw and what I did not see, so that the words can help me to see better. But the fog of time surrounds me.
How am I to describe it all, and why?
Stories that I thought I’d forgotten resurface now. Stories that seem like ghosts wandering in the night of the memory turn into words, and words turn into memory.
I want to sleep, and I want these words to sleep too. I’m worn out, and so are they.
But how?
I have no idea. The ghetto’s stories have no end, and if I were to keep digging away at the memories of others to reconstitute my own forgotten memory, I’d have to write thousands of pages, which I am incapable of doing. Also, the imagination to which I resorted to write a truncated novel about my murdered poet Waddah al-Yaman aside, my creative powers collapsed when I reached the beginnings of my life, and I resorted to others to tell me their stories, or summoned up the fragmented stories that my memory had learned by heart from Manal and Ma’moun, and reconstituted what I needed to.
Now I understand the seductions of Scheherazade: the woman did not seduce King Shahriyar with her story so that he would spare her life, as is commonly supposed; she told stories to quench her thirst, which grew with the telling, causing her to start again and tell new stories. I think the character of the king with his insane desires is merely an excuse that became transformed into a fact with the construction of the frame story, which some writer must have added in recent times in the belief that by so doing he would give the stories meaning.
The meaning is the mistake. Scheherazade fell in love with her stories, and when she was victorious and, after giving birth to three sons, won the king’s goodwill, she entered the lethargy that leads to death. Scheherazade discovered that the world of stories is the real world, that the story is not a substitute for life but life itself, and that victory and defeat are the same, both meaning the end of the story and the death of the storyteller.
I too wrote so as to delay my death, only to find myself horror-struck, because instead of moving away from death, I came closer to it.
The writer who added the frame to the stories of Scheherazade was as footling as every other writer who fears the story that comes to us for nothing, that explodes inside us as water explodes inside the belly of the earth. Who said we need meaning to tell stories? My never-ending ambition is to arrive at a meaningless text, like music, one whose meaning comes from the rhythms of the soul within it and which is susceptible to a variety of interpretations – but that’s impossible. Language, from the day it became a means for the gods to communicate with man, has been a prisoner of meanings, and the one who uses it has been obliged to lean on meaning to reach the heart, which is literature.
I am incapable of doing that, which is why my beautiful poet Waddah al-Yaman abandoned me. I put him in the coffer of meanings and no longer knew how to get him out, so he escaped from me and hid within his story.
I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me, for who am I to write my memoirs? I am no one. I fear death and run toward it and for that reason have decided to fill the vacuum with a vacuum and write whatever I wish, which would not have been possible without this frame made from the memories and the imagination of others. As for the stories themselves, they are free to flow where they will and take the course they desire. I shall be just the reporter of what I saw and experienced. I shall bathe in words as I did when I was small, when I used to tell my mother, as I ate grapes and squirted the juice all over my clothes, that I wasn’t eating grapes, I was taking a bath in them.
And now I find myself at the threshold. The story awaits and I have to set off.
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; Elias Khoury, My Name is Adam
