by Elias Khoury
He was an enthralling speaker, and his ability to switch between Arabic and English was amazing. He approached the podium with hesitant steps, but as soon as he’d taken his place there, with his dark glasses, he was transformed into a combination of Taha Hussein and Edward Said. The blind man’s hesitancy disappeared, to be replaced by an absolute command of the language. He began by speaking about the city of Lydda, where he had lived until he was twenty-five, saying that the tragedy of Lydda had taught him how to read the silence of victims, and he said that Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was fashioned from the gaps of silence that provide the foundations for the rhythms of the meanings.
Instead of listening to him, I heard the voice of my memory, discovered that only poets can awaken the voices of the departed, and saw the child I was in the lanes of Lydda return to me in a pall of tears that gathered at the corners of my eyes and would not fall.
No sooner, however, had I happened across Ma’moun – the friend of my childhood and my teacher who’d betrayed me when I was seven and gone to Egypt to finish his university studies, leaving me on my own with my mother – than I lost everything again, and felt that that “I” on which I had stumbled was a delusion, because, as far as Ma’moun was concerned, I was no more than a story that deserved to find a writer.
That’s what he told me, word for word, when I accepted his invitation to have a drink in the lobby of his hotel after the lecture. He told me I’d been with him all these years as a story that would make a good metaphor, one he’d tried to write several times but without success.
He said most stories find no one to write them and that he was sorry he’d never be able to write mine, even in his memoirs, which he’d decided to get finished soon, before the final parting, which was at the gates.
I didn’t ask him for any further clarification as I was overcome with gloom and thought it pointless to look further into a story whose every witness had died, with the exception of this last, who was unable to write it.
Ma’moun recounted my story, which was known to no one except Manal and himself. When he found out that I was surprised by it, he expressed his astonishment that Manal hadn’t told me.
He said he’d made her promise to tell me the truth when I reached fifteen, because a person ought to know the truth about himself, not live a delusion.
And he told me.
I listened to him with my eyes, and saw myself as a baby, lying there sleeping on my mother’s breast.
Dear God!
Where did the blind man get that story?
Dear God! Suddenly, at the end of my life, I find out that I’m not me and that the “I” seen reflected in others was nothing but shards of a broken mirror.
Ma’moun said he’d left the town with the rest of those who fled and walked in the column of death under the bullets, the sun, and the thirst, but before reaching Naalin he saw me lying there under an olive tree, on the breast of a dead woman.
He said I was still a babe-in-arms (Manal estimated that I was no more than a few weeks old), so he decided to pick me up and take me to my family and set off back toward Lydda again, but none of the throngs of displaced people suffering the thirst and the hunger, many of whom disappeared forever in the wilds, paid me any attention, or claimed me. He said he’d held me high up, shouting to everyone that he’d found this child lying under an olive tree in the arms of its mother, who had departed this life, but no one stopped to ask questions or take the child from the blind youth’s hands. When he reached the city of ghosts that was called Lydda, and found himself at the hospital, a young nurse called Manal came up to him, took me from his hands, and said I would be her son.
“So Manal isn’t my mother?” I asked.
“And Hasan Dannoun isn’t your father!” he replied.
“And no one came looking for me?”
“Your real mother was dead, and they probably thought you’d died with her, in the wilds.”
“So why you?”
“How should I know? I swear I just picked you up without thinking, and went back to Lydda and got stuck in the ghetto.”
“So you’re my father.”
“If you like, but how should I know? You’re the child of the olive tree.”
He said he’d given a lot of thought to writing a novel called The Child of the Olive Tree that would tell, through me, the story of the terrible tragedy suffered by the people of Lydda, but he couldn’t do it. He said he was a critic, not a novelist, “And this is a story that needs a novelist, like Ghassan Kanafani or Emile Habibi.”
“But how could you see me? You’re blind!”
He said the one who’d seen me was his friend Nimr Abu l-Huda, who’d held his hand the whole way, and that when he’d bent down to pick me up, he’d heard Nimr telling him to leave me and go, but he’d taken me and gone back on his own because his friend Nimr had disappeared into the crowds.
I said I didn’t believe him, though in fact I did, and the truth is that I felt nothing. All I felt was that Ma’moun had abandoned me when he went to Egypt and that he’d had no right to.
“It’s Manal’s fault. I said to her, ‘Let’s get married and leave, and take the boy with us,’ but she said she wouldn’t leave Palestine.”
The story seemed meaningless to me. I don’t care whose son I am. Better the son of the olive tree in whose shade my true mother, whose name I don’t know, died than son of a martyr who fell in the war of the Nakba and grandson of a hero of the First World War.
I told Ma’moun that Manal had been right not to tell me and I didn’t hold it against her, but that now I’d begun to understand her, though I couldn’t understand Ma’moun’s own behavior. How could he have left his son and gone off and never asked about him?
He said he regretted it, but that he hoped I’d accept his invitation to visit him in Egypt.
He told me the whole story and I listened as one listens to a fairy tale, and when I got up to go at three o’clock in the morning, he repeated his invitation to visit him in Cairo.
* * *
—
I flee from a book that was never written and discover that I don’t know who I am.
Am I a child of the story?
The children of stories grow up fast and die fast, and I’m the same. All of us are children of the story, because life itself takes us where it will, just as stories do their heroes.
I was part of one story and tried to escape from it, and I found myself instead the captive of another. My new story turned the whisper of the first into silence.
In order to exist, I was supposed not to have existed. That’s the trick that fashioned the beginnings of my life and has stayed with me for fifty years. I’ve put my life together anew six times – once by fleeing my mother and taking a job at the garage of Mr. Gabriel, a Jew; a second time by going to the University of Haifa and living in the company of religious Jews; a third time by reading and analyzing Israeli literature; a fourth time by turning myself into a journalist writing on oriental music and Umm Kulsoum; a fifth time through my relationship with Dalia; and a sixth time by emigrating to New York and leaving everything to work in the restaurant. Today is the seventh time, and I’m putting my life together by collecting its pieces, unpicking it and reweaving it, so as to make a new garment that can only be my shroud. Such is writing. Don’t believe the claims of littérateurs and artists: art doesn’t conquer death, regardless of what Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Art weaves us a shroud of words and colors in which we wrap ourselves, pretending to find hope where there is none.
When a person reaches the moment at which he claims that he’s gathering together the pieces of the life, or lives, that he has lived, or supposes himself to have lived, he discovers that his days have streamed by like an elusive dream.
I am a child of the story and of thirst. My story’s water never runs dry and my thirst is never quenched.
Thirst
AS MY MOTHER told the tale, I was born in thirst. Now, as I write about that woman who vanished from my life when I was fifteen, I don’t know whether her lips were indeed cracked in parallel, straight lines, or if it is the image of thirst, which has pursued me since childhood, that transforms her thirsty lips whenever I recall her.
She was my mother, and she was Manal, daughter of Atif Suleiman, of the village of Eilaboun in Galilee. When I remember her, I say, “Manal was…” for to me she’s like the first word in a sentence that was never completed. After I left the house at fifteen to work in Mr. Gabriel’s garage in Haifa, I discovered that the woman had passed through my life like a sigh of wind, leaving behind her nothing but her world of stories, and that the only things I could remember of her were her cracked lips, her wide almond-shaped eyes deep inside whose pupils trembled a hint of dark brown, two fine, almost invisible, lines on her cheeks, and a deep feeling that I had been abandoned so that I could live alone.
I don’t know what brought this woman of Galilee to Lydda, or why she fled from her village to join a hot and humid city under siege. Is that what love is?
She said that one look from Hasan’s eyes had been enough to change the course of her life. When she talked to me about Hasan, she would look at me with pitying eyes and say she’d been surprised that “that boy Adam” (meaning me) did not look like his father.
Hasan was tall, dark skinned and broad shouldered. His honey-colored eyes held a flash like lightning, and his smile, which lit up his face, signaled his attitude to life.
She said she’d met him in Eilaboun. He was with a band of the Holy Struggle fedayeen. He asked her about the village spring, so she walked with him, and instead of her taking him to the spring, he took her to his city.
The woman loved only one man. When she married Abdallah al-Ashhal and we went to live with him in that house – more of a shack – on the flank of Mount Carmel, she told me she didn’t love him and that she’d done it for the respectability. I looked at her with strange eyes and said nothing but decided to leave.
I was ten when I decided to leave the woman forever. I don’t know where that “forever” came from! I do, however, remember that I whispered it to myself and only put my decision into effect five years later. That’s another story, the beginning of my own story.
My mother was a woman fashioned of words, the first word of a sentence with no last word but the ghetto, as though she’d been born there. She had no family, no village, and no memory. She didn’t talk about Eilaboun or her people and only mentioned her earlier life once, when she told me that I looked like Daoud, and my fate would be like his. She said it with dissatisfaction, because I didn’t resemble the man she had loved.
“And who’s Daoud?” I asked her.
I was seven. I was standing in front of her as she cut my hair.
“You call this hair?!” she asked.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“Fair,” she replied, and said she was sad for me because I looked not like my father but like Daoud.
When I asked her who Daoud was, she said my father had been a hero and when she gave birth to me, she’d felt that Hasan had come back to her. She’d wanted to call me Hasan, after him, but Hajj Iliyya Batshoun, head of the residents’ committee in the ghetto, said I was the first child born to the ghetto so they had to call me Adam, and that’s what happened, against her wishes.
I asked her again about the Daoud whom I looked like, but she didn’t reply and I had to wait eight years to listen, on that rainy Haifa night, to the tale of Daoud and his endless wanderings.
I don’t know why I didn’t ask her more! At that moment, I felt poised to escape the trap of the life my stepfather, Abdallah, had forced on me and was terrified by the violent sea winds that made the entire hovel shake.
It was two in the morning. I hadn’t slept that night and was overwhelmed by anxiety; then the rain came, to make me feel entirely alone in this world. I was sitting in the room with the wide rectangular window that my mother used as her sewing workshop, listening to the shloosh of the rain against the glass. I saw her come in wearing her long, light blue nightdress and stand next to the window. She looked at me with half-closed eyes and said in a whisper that she knew I was going to leave.
“From the day I bore you, I knew you were like Daoud.”
She told the tale of the man’s endless wanderings. She said they’d lost him because the road had swallowed him.
They were driven out of Eilaboun. They walked and walked till they came to Lebanon and at Tyre they looked for him and couldn’t find him. They were told he’d been seen in Sidon. His brother went to Sidon and was told he’d been seen in Beirut and in Beirut he was told he was in Tripoli and in Tripoli they said he was in Aleppo and in Aleppo they said he was in Latakia and in Latakia they said he was in Antioch. His brother went back from Latakia to Sidon, saying he could not go on. “Where should I go? Maybe he’s at the ends of the earth now. Am I supposed to go to the ends of the earth to catch up with him?” And when it was decided that the inhabitants of Eilaboun should go back to their village, a year after they’d been driven out of it, his brother Subhi stood in the midst of the families that had gathered to wait for the buses and wept and moved others to weep. He said Daoud must still be walking northward and would keep walking till he reached the end of the world.
Manal said the people of Eilaboun had returned to their village, but Daoud was still lost, “And you look like him. You too will walk to the end of the world and I can’t stop you, because you are following your destiny.”
She came close to me. I thought she was going to bend over and hug me to her breast but she remained frozen in place. I thought I saw tears on her cheeks but wasn’t sure. The combination of the darkness and the pale light from the electric lamp made me see things as shadows.
Now too I see Manal as a shadow drawn in black, and I see that her lips are cracked and thirsty. In the past, I thought her cracked lips were an indelible trace of the days of thirst in the ghetto, but now I see things differently. I believe her lips cracked out of thirst for a kiss. I’m certain that her relationship with my father was a thirst for love that was realized only on the deathbed, and that the other man, who married her because he was desperate for a house in Lydda that he believed she owned, only to discover she owned nothing – that man never once planted a kiss on her lips because he had no idea how to kiss a woman, or he thought that to kiss one was to make her the equal of a man. When I learned that she’d died alone in Eilaboun after her divorce and that in those last days she’d asked to see me, I didn’t cry. I was getting drunk in a bar in Tel Aviv and I don’t know what devil possessed me but my reaction to the news was to laugh. A grimace of contempt passed over the face of the man who told me he’d been looking for me for ages because they wanted me there in the village to receive condolences, and he turned his back and left, muttering insults.
Now, when I recall the story, I feel water filling my eyes and taste tears on my lips. I cry without crying and my crying has no meaning, for crying too has its time, and its time had passed.
I got up, filled my glass with French red wine, lit a cigarette, opened the window so that I could breathe in the hot New York summer air that pricks the face like needles, and decided to forget the woman again.
I can say that I’ve lived alone inside the cages of the ghetto made out of my mother’s words and stories and her nostalgia for the days of the barbed wire. That story planted itself in my memory as firmly as if I’d lived it and as if the wire that encircled the Sakna Quarter, where the hospital where I was born was located and where Lydda was transformed into a detention camp surrounded on all sides by graves, had been my life; it would become my secret story for more than fifty years. When I was asked at the University of Haifa where I was from, I’d always reply with a single word – the ghetto – thinking my colleagues, male and female, wo
uld look at me with pity as the son of a Warsaw Ghetto survivor.
I wasn’t lying. I know the stories of the Warsaw Ghetto as well as I know the stories of the ghetto of Lydda. Such stories resemble each other, like the dead. The stories of the first I read innumerable times, till they were engraved on my memory, and those of the second were like a brand stamped on my soul – stories I read and stories I heard, not just with my ears but with my body, on which my mother’s words were traced.
All the same…
I don’t want to lie now as I did during my childhood and early youth. Or rather, I didn’t lie: when I was asked who I was, I’d run my fingers through my fair curly hair and say one word, and the listener would understand that I was assigning myself to his memory, not my mother’s. It was, of course, a silent lie, but only if we believe that the clouds are lying when they don’t bring rain. Silence has been the distinguishing mark of my life, and that is what I have in common with my mother. Now, I call the woman my mother, but I don’t remember ever calling her by anything but her name, devoid of the water of motherhood.
Manal was young and will remain so forever. If I were to meet her now, I’d treat her as a child. She was a child who had never left her childhood behind her. She’d fallen in love with a man twenty years her elder as though it were a game, and the game had led her to a tragedy that would draw a permanent mask of childish pain over her face.
I told her I was going. I was a young man. Down had begun to trace the outline of a moustache and I’d decided I could no longer stand life there, next to the garbage dump, where Abdallah al-Ashhal lived with his wife and her son.