by Elias Khoury
I don’t feel I can go on writing. After my encounter with Ma’moun, the significations of things changed and I became like a blind man. This time, the stories were true. Ma’moun told me, as he said goodbye, that the story of Lydda had been inscribed on his eyes and that he hadn’t written out the story of his city because the ink with which it was inscribed was colorless, and all we had to do was look into his closed eyes and read.
“I left you, Naji, my beloved, because I had no other choice.”
“And what was the name of the babe-in-arms you found beneath the olive tree on its dead mother’s breast?” I asked him.
“How should I know? That’s why I called you Naji.”
“I want my original name,” I said.
“Your name, Naji, my beloved, is Naji.”
I didn’t believe him. I don’t mean that I didn’t believe the story of the olive tree: despite its symbolic importance, it’s just part of a story of which I cannot claim to be the sole hero and which shouldn’t therefore be allowed to have any impact on what time remains to me. I am I and I don’t want to be made into a symbol. I hate symbols, and that was one of the reasons I abandoned my plan to write the story of Waddah al-Yaman. This is why I have to ignore the tale Ma’moun told me, even though I now believe that it played a large role in Manal’s marriage and her withdrawal from me. But I don’t believe Ma’moun had no choice. Probably the man could not stand being without a job following the closure of his school, so he decided to flee the responsibility for a woman and child with which he had found himself stuck.
But how can I write my story now that Ma’moun has revealed my secret?
My only choice is to return to Waddah al-Yaman, not to follow his story but to bury that of my being found beneath the olive tree in the coffer of love; to leave it immersed there in the water of forgetfulness and never let it float back up to the surface. I shall leave it and go back to my name, for I am Adam of the Ghetto: my father died in the hospital before I was born, my mother conceived me in miraculous fashion when she slept next to the dying man in his bed in the hospital at Lydda, and Iliyya Batshoun, when he saw me swathed in my mother’s arms, cried out my name, saying, “An Adam for the ghetto!”
I have placed the story of the olive tree inside Waddah al-Yaman’s coffer and turned to the story of the Adam of the Ghetto to give me a chance to say that I shall postpone until its time has come the story of Naji, the one saved in the embrace of his despairing mother, who died of hunger and thirst beneath the olive tree. I am Adam, scion of the family of Dannoun, in the name of one of whose ancestors, a Sufi sheikh, a time-ravaged shrine had been built on the edge of town.
I shall leave the story of Ma’moun and his silent love for Manal and go back to the beginning of the story.
All the same, I ought to have asked Ma’moun about his love for Manal. It’s a story that wasn’t told in the alleyways of the ghetto and has remained immured in oblivion. It all comes down to the fact that my imaginative memory (fictional elements always creep into, and in large part fashion, our memories) transformed this supposed relationship into a tempestuous love affair, which ended with its hero’s departure.
I cannot place this story properly in the sequence of the first days following the city’s fall, the expulsion of its inhabitants, and their wandering in the desert. Manal told me nothing, and it would have been unreasonable to expect her to do so. Women are shy, and they prefer to remain, in the eyes of their children, swathed in chastity, the mother being forever a sacred, inviolable figure. This was the image of mothers that prevailed in my childhood and it’s the one that, though it would change with time, has remained firmly embedded in my sensibility.
In those days, the mother had to preserve that halo, created from her love, as something for her children alone. Even the man, or spouse, had to stay somewhere in the darkness. The light was dedicated to the sacred relationship that made “mother” another name for virtue.
Manal said nothing about the matter, and, strangely, I never heard any insinuations from my mates about my mother’s relationship with “Professor Ma’moun.” At the time, I regarded Ma’moun’s presence in the garden room in our house as quite natural. Similarly, I gave no thought to certain mysteries that I witnessed during my childhood and whose implications became clear to me only when I fell in love with Rivka, the daughter of the owner of the garage where I used to work, and felt a tingling in my lips – the same tingling whose effects I would feel on my mother’s as she gave me my goodnight kiss.
I can’t forget a certain stormy winter’s night when I woke up in a panic at the sound of thunder and of the whiplash of the hail striking against the window and didn’t find her next to me in the bed. I got up, shivering with cold, and searched the house for her, but she wasn’t there. I sat, cradling myself, on the couch in the living room and cried. I must have dozed off, and when I woke, found myself borne in the arms of my mother, whose clothes were wet with rain, and put back to bed. At that instant, the sky lit up with lightning and I beheld my mother’s face. It was bright and beautiful. Everything about it shone. She kissed me on my eyes and I caught the taste of her tingling lips.
She took to disappearing, or I began to notice her nighttime disappearances. I wasn’t scared anymore. I was certain she’d come back and didn’t ask her, or even myself, where she went, and I made no connection between Ma’moun’s living in the garden room and her absences.
Is this enough for me to assume a story? Of course not. But I sensed mysteries, from whispers at the dinner table, or the accidental touch of hands, or his insistence when he asked her to stop working in the citrus groves of the Jews because his salary from the school was enough for us all.
Manal would always answer him by saying that she wasn’t working in the groves of the Jews: “This is our land,” she would say, “and soon we’ll get it back.”
What happened, then, and why did the relationship end as it did?
It isn’t true that when I met Ma’moun in New York I didn’t ask him about his relationship with my mother because I was embarrassed. I didn’t ask because I lost the capacity to speak when I discovered that the man had been dealing with me not as the son he’d abandoned but as a story. I felt anger and grief. I’m a person, not a story – though look at what I’m doing to myself right now! What irony! I’m sitting in my little apartment in New York, piles of writing paper before me, transforming myself into a story and becoming what Ma’moun wanted me to be!
It’s pitiful, and takes me to the verge of the melodrama that I eschewed when I pooh-poohed the story of the child lying on its mother’s breast, abandoned to a wretched fate, saying it was a truth that changed nothing – I had read dozens of similar stories about the children of the Nakba, not to mention that of the child whom Umm Hasan named Naji in Gate of the Sun, and I’d heard the story about the baby abandoned to death and worms in a house in Lydda that Saleem told every time my mother spoke of her nostalgia for the days of the ghetto.
Ma’moun said I was a story, but failed to realize that he too might become one and that in order for me to renovate my own story, I would have to reassemble the passages missing from his with my mother, passages I would never be able to find anywhere.
How did the love story of Manal and Ma’moun begin?
It was a love without a story, for stories, if they are to exist, must have a beginning. My mother never tired of recounting the beginning of her love for Hasan Dannoun, the martyr. She said that when she walked ahead of his horse to lead him to the spring, she felt her feet could no longer hold her up. “In his eyes was an irresistible brilliance. He was on the run from the British army, who were rounding up the revolutionaries, and he passed through our village, and I was with a crowd of girls. He stopped and looked at me. He chose me from all the rest to guide him to the spring.”
All I could gather from her was that the story of her love for Hasan remained at the beginning,
since it ended the moment the girl from Eilaboun thought it had begun. The man, with whom she went without a backward glance, took her to his mother’s house, and left. He married her in a hurry and left, and when he came back, so that the story could begin, he took a bullet in the back and died.
Ma’moun’s story, on the other hand, never began because Manal found herself in the middle of it without realizing. I can imagine the story the way it appeared to me during the New York nights. Here in New York, when I found myself on my own, I grasped that my mother had lived two aborted loves – the first had died, and the other she was afraid of, so she’d let it go. Two aborted loves – the first born of admiration for the knight riding a hero’s horse, the second of pity for the blind man who’d come back, bringing her the present her horseman hadn’t been able to give her. Two men combined in the woman’s emotions and became one man living in two darknesses – the darkness of the grave for which her horseman had left, and the darkness of the eyes in which her new man lived.
Ma’moun saw things differently, though. Once he asked me to describe colors to him and I was at a loss as to how to answer. Colors are resistant to language because they bear their own language within them. I was a child, and didn’t know how to describe things, and with Ma’moun I was astonished at the blind man’s ability to describe them down to their finest details.
He said the Arabs were the masters of description: “Our pre-Islamic poetry is an epic of description without equal among the literatures of the world.” He also said he was obliged to translate shapes into words in order to be able to interact with them but had no idea how to translate colors into words that could give voice to their descriptions.
This was, as far as I remember, a few months before his departure. I closed my eyes and saw the color black, cracked apart by white infiltrating from the daylight. I screwed up my lids so as to drown my eyes in it and told him that at least he knew one color for sure, which was black.
I remember he didn’t reply but muttered something indistinct.
When we met in New York after his lecture at the university, he reminded me of that conversation and said I’d been wrong.
“It’s a mistake,” he said, “that most writers fall into when they write about the blind. I don’t live in the color black because I don’t know what you mean by that word. I live in my world, which is unlike yours and which you may, if you wish, describe as a world without colors, though that description has no meaning for me.”
He said he could see: “I am the only person in whose depths the tragedy of Lydda is engraved. When the great Lydda massacre of July 1948 occurred, it took a blind man to see it. History is blind, Naji, my beloved, and it takes a blind man like me to see it. Now do you understand? I didn’t abandon you; I had to go so that the blindness of history could be realized to the full through the three of us – me, you, and Manal.”
I felt like telling him that Ismail Shammout, who painted the bodies of Palestinian men and women aghast before the terror of the massacre and the expulsion from Lydda, was the one who’d seen, but I didn’t. At that meeting, at which we were joined by another man, who caught up with us in the lobby of the Washington Square Hotel at eleven o’clock that night, I found myself powerless to speak.
I’m not going to talk about that other man now. I’m sure Ma’moun invited him so he could wrap the rope of the mirror around my neck and show me the other image of myself, the one embodied in a university professor teaching philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, whom he introduced to me as Dr. Naji al-Khatib. Ma’moun had told me about this other Naji, whom Umm Hasan had picked up from where he lay beneath an olive tree and restored to his mother in the village of Cana.
“You’re like facing mirrors. Anyone willing to look will see in you two all he needs to read the Nakba,” said Ma’moun.
I want to forget about that other Naji for now. I don’t like playing games with life. We aren’t heroes of novels that our fates and stories should be played around with like that. I’m not a child and I hate heroes. I’m just a man who has tried to live and has discovered the impossibility of doing so. I’m not saying life has no meaning, because meaning has no meaning and looking for it seems to me boring and trivial. I’m a man who’s lived all his life in the postponed and the temporary.
Ma’moun left me, which is understandable. It’s what fathers usually do. Some of them, in fact, kill their children, which is to be expected and should come as no surprise. Since the story of Our Master Abraham (peace be upon him) and his son, fathers have repeated the act of killing. But not mothers!
Why did Manal let me go? Why didn’t she come with me and leave her husband Abdallah al-Ashhal, who was going to divorce her anyway?
Was she afraid of him and his complexes about women? His first wife had left him after they were driven from Haifa to Lebanon. She took his three daughters and slipped over the border and took them back to Haifa. When he himself slipped over the border four years later and caught up with her, he felt miserable because he discovered that his wife was no longer his wife, his daughters had become another man’s daughters, and his house was occupied by strangers. He had to live like a thief on the outskirts of the city in which he’d been born, and work at the garbage dump, where he lived and picked his daily bread from leftovers. And in Manal he found the refuge that could never replace his life.
What have I to do with this man’s story? His time will come, and what I want to say now is that I don’t understand why Manal abandoned me! Did the young woman think she was living a Greek tragedy, whose last word has to go to Fate, not its victims? We Arabs, though, are ignorant in our classical tradition of anything one could call “tragedy.” The blind Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges scoffed at us for translating the words “tragedy” and “comedy” as though they meant “panegyric” and “satire,” translations that cost our philosophers an understanding of Aristotelian aesthetics, which they distorted. The blind Argentinian scoffed at all the sighted Arabs but didn’t dare to go near Abu al-Alaa’ al-Maarri, not just because the blind man of Maarra understood the meaning of the two words and translated them beautifully but because he sailed off to a faraway place and, in The Epistle of Forgiveness, charted the path for literature’s magic journey to Heaven and Hell, initiating the discussion between the dead and the living that lies at its heart.
Manal’s behavior probably wasn’t tragically inspired but might rather be described as pushing melodrama to its limits. The silence of women in Egyptian movies is a gateway to melodrama, and Manal kept silent and sank deep into melodrama, thereby losing everything. We’re not in a movie directed by Adel Imam that has to have either a happy ending to make the audience happy or a sad one to make its tears flow. Here, the ending that a director might imagine in order to bring me, her, and Ma’moun together doesn’t exist. We’re in a real tragedy, whose elements have become twisted together so as to form themselves in our consciousness into a melodrama. It isn’t beautiful and leaves no doors open to hope. On the contrary, the story opens onto an unending hell of further stories.
I imagine the love story that brought Manal and Ma’moun together, and become frustrated because my imagination refuses to help me. Ma’moun told me he loved her and left it at that, adding not a single word. She herself said nothing, not because I didn’t find the courage to ask her but because her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashhal made her wrap herself in the cloak of silence.
How should I describe her silence?
I was a child living off the crumbs of stories told only in whispers, and after Manal married, the whispers stopped. The woman came to be surrounded by a wall of silence. My memories are probably inaccurate, because her muteness in fact began when Blind Ma’moun left. That day, I watched as a pall of sorrow enveloped her, and when I asked her about him, she’d always answer by saying, “He went home. They all went home.” I discovered her silence after her marriage and our move to Haifa. The only way
I can explain her marriage today is to say that it was revenge: Manal couldn’t find anyone to take revenge on, so she took revenge on herself.
I hated her, felt that she’d abandoned me, and found myself a stranger in the new house we moved to. At the time, I had no idea that we’d been obliged to vacate our house in Lydda. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the one time Manal told me about why we had moved to Haifa, she said that “they wanted to take the house.”
I didn’t ask her to whom the pronoun referred, for in those days “they” meant one thing. “They” meant the Jews.
They took her first house, then expelled her from her job as a nurse at the hospital because she didn’t have a nursing certificate. Then she worked in the olive field and citrus grove that had belonged to her husband Hasan, both of which were then registered as absentee property. And in the end, they took the second house, next door to the hospital, in which she’d taken refuge during the days of the ghetto.
Now, after her death, when I remember her silence, I’m struck by something akin to passionate love. When I tried to describe Dalia as being “as beautiful as silence,” she, my Jewish girlfriend, looked at me in amazement and asked me if it was an Arab thing to describe beauty in this way. I replied that I’d read the comparison in a poem whose writer’s name I could no longer remember, but she said she didn’t like the strange simile. “Silence is the opposite of love,” she said.
I don’t know why Dalia misunderstood me. I wasn’t describing love, I was describing silence. All the same, I told her she was right. That’s how lovers turn into idiots, or become naive and agree without thinking. Love for Dalia took me to the gardens of speech but didn’t change my opinion on the aesthetics of silence. Beauty has no name, and Manal was beautiful the way she was. Despite which, I lost Manal just as I lost Dalia.