by Elias Khoury
I don’t know why, but I’m sad! Sorrow isn’t regret but memory, just as memory isn’t nostalgia but the mark of a branding iron planted deep within us.
The Will: God’s She-Camel
I DON’T KNOW why every time I tried to ignore the papers Manal had given me as my father’s will I’d find myself stuck in the same trap: I’d rush to the papers, read them, reread them, and then decide there was no point in bothering with them; they were worthless, and I should tear them up. But instead of doing so, I’d put them back in the folder and decide not to write about them, because they didn’t deserve to be part of my life.
Today I’m at a loss: it seems the price of ridding oneself of the delusion of belonging is to belong.
I remember I was sitting alone one night in the garage where I worked and lived when an obscure sadness swept over me. I shall give the sadness that has dogged me all my life its own special name – “the sadness of Haifa.”
The sadness of Haifa has no cause. It doesn’t come from anger at anything or from the loss of something and it in no way resembles depression. It’s a state that afflicts the soul, palpating its darkened chambers and settling there, making my solitude and self-sufficiency part of the translucence of the sorrowful moment, a moment that may dissipate after a short while or go on for days.
I connected Haifa with this state because of the sea. During the part of my childhood that I spent in the ghetto, I never saw the sea. When I went with my mother to Haifa and felt my heart gasp before the blue-streaked whiteness, an obscure feeling struck me that robbed me of the power of speech. Later, I discovered that the only name to fit that feeling was “the sadness of Haifa.”
A sadness unlike sadness: the Haifa sea mirrors the sadness of this city that sweeps down from the top of Mount Carmel and then stretches out its wings like a dove swooping over the vastness of the water.
In the midst of this sadness, I went back to my bag, read what Manal called “the will,” and decided to forget about it, because it meant nothing to me.
Back then, I believed that it meant nothing to me, but today I don’t know.
Today, having drunk my ration of French red wine, I decided to go back to the folder and try to understand.
I contemplated the photo of my father, wrapped in white paper. I couldn’t fail to be entranced by the magic of his smile and his wide-open eyes. I put the photo aside and went back to the papers.
I read the four pages, whose edges had crumbled from the damp, and fell into a deep slumber from which I was rescued only by the rain, which had made its way in through my window, open to the humid and stifling heat of New York.
How am I to rewrite this “will,” which in no way resembles a will, to make it a part of my life? Why do I have to? Is it because the headline on the newspaper cutting placed inside the folder as part of the will held an irresistible magic? It was the front page of a newspaper put out by captive Ottoman Army officers in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and called God’s She-Camel. At the top of the page was a picture of a camel lost in Siberia and beneath it was written, “A Satirical Literary Critical Weekly.” To the right of the page was written a verse from the Koran referring to the miraculous story of God’s She-Camel, which the prophet Salih used as a demonstration of his powers when his people challenged him to show them a sign, which in this case took the form of a she-camel producing milk: “O my people, this is the She-Camel of God, to be a sign for you. Leave her that she may eat on God’s earth, and touch her not with evil, lest you be seized by a nigh chastisement.” (Hud, verse 64.)
The only explanation for my going back to the papers is the magic of words. Magic began with words, and when words are written down they pulsate with life’s possibilities. So here I am, gazing dumbstruck at words from the past’s own past, and finding myself before a story to which I feel myself to be heir simply because I’m its only reader.
This, of course, takes me back to my relationship with reading, which I can’t reveal to anyone because it’s so hard to believe. Despite the conviction of my teachers at the Wadi al-Nisnas school that I would become a poet or a writer, I have spent the whole of my life unable, or, let us say, unwilling, to write. I satisfied myself with writing articles in Hebrew on the aesthetics of the Arabic musical modes and never attempted to write a single short story; even though my head was awash with stories that I made up for myself, I never wrote them down.
The reason was my infatuation with reading. Don’t misunderstand me: my infatuation with reading doesn’t imply any feelings on my part of inadequacy before the creations of the writers whose novels and verses I love. On the contrary, the feeling that affects me when I read a beautiful text is of being a partner in its writing or, more accurately, of being its true author. The actual writer becomes no more than a meaningless name or signature.
This feeling took me to faraway places of whose existence I had never dreamed. I am a writer full of the texts that I have read/written and that I treat as though real, and I exploit the imagination of others to serve my own. From this perspective, I’m the writer who never wrote anything because he wrote everything, and so I rise above all the rest of the world’s writers, who sense that an arid emptiness surrounds them, while I feel pleasure and a thirst for yet more of the water of words.
You may find what I’m saying strange, and you’re right. Even I, to be honest, find it strange, and hard to believe. But your more legitimate question would be, why did I decide, at the end of my life, to write, abandoning the pleasures of fullness for the desert of emptiness?
(I write as though I were addressing someone, even though I know that what I’m writing isn’t publishable and will never be published: I have reached such a degree of despair that I will never try to have it printed, no matter how much the glory of being called “a writer” urges me to seek that glory for my own name. All the same, I write like this because I feel I can speak to words, for words are living creatures, capable of listening, provided we address them in the proper way.)
Where were we?
We were trying to tell the story of the will and then we stumbled over the question of my decision to write, at the end of my life.
The question does not, of course, concern itself with these personal stories of mine, because they have no shape, and when a text has no shape, it can never be put into a particular literary pigeonhole and, consequently, never be a source of existential anxiety to its writer.
The question, then, concerns itself with my project to write the Waddah al-Yaman novel, the truth of which is that it was never more than a passing urge that I got over quickly, since I’m not the right person to write a major Palestinian metaphor based on the story of that eternal lover. It was an urge through which I thought I’d be able to fill the emptiness of my days by writing the Long-Awaited Novel.
There’s always a Long-Awaited Novel, and it takes a courageous author to decide to stake his reputation on writing it. Palestine has been waiting for such a novel for more than half a century and I’d lose nothing if I gave it a try, so why not let me, Adam Dannoun, son of Hasan, bearer of the will of God’s She-Camel, be that writer?
The truth is that a much more urgent motive to write was personal and sprang from my relationship with Dalia. It was the idea of the end of love, not its beginning.
However, I’ve discovered I’m not the writer who has the right to pen the Long-Awaited Novel, because there is no Long-Awaited Novel. All things are vanity. Even the story of Waddah al-Yaman, with all its symbolic incandescence, will never be more than one among hundreds of stories, and not even, for sure, the best of them.
I have decided to devote myself to writing about the transformation of writing into a personal game, using this text, with which I feel, as I write it, that I’m rewriting all the novels that I have ever loved, freed of the burden of form and avoiding the need to cross the desert of emptiness that encircles literary writing.
(T
his ends my response to that question, which I must never bring up again.)
Full stop.
At the bottom of the first page of the newspaper called God’s She-Camel is an article with the title “The Shrine of the Prophet Dannoun the Egyptian in Palestine.” Unsigned, the article gathers some of the sayings of the Sufi for whom the people of Lydda built a shrine in their city. I suspect that the author of the article was my grandfather, the page having being added to the letter that the man wrote on his deathbed in Manchuria and that was delivered to his family by the famous Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, when he returned from captivity on the Russian front during the First World War.
Next to the newspaper there were two handwritten pieces of paper in which the man tells of his sad death in a strange land, longing for his wife and children, with prayers to God to help the poor so that justice may spread throughout the world, along with stuff about Arabdom, Islam, and Palestine.
The writing is so faded as to be almost indecipherable, and the whole story can be found in summary form in the letter’s first paragraph:
After the torment of our captivity and hunger in the wilds of Siberia, and accompanied by noble brothers from Syria and Palestine, God decreed our release at the hands of the Bolsheviks who no sooner had they succeeded in their revolution than they released us from our captivity. We left the camp, free to wander as we wished, and traversed countries and cities in our desire to return home. Now I am here, afflicted with fever, in a small village in Manchuria, looked after by my dear brothers, but I feel the death tremors passing through my body, and it seems that I am not destined to see my beloved son, Hasan, whom I left a babe-in-arms when they forced us into the army. I ask God, the Mighty, the Omnipotent, to consider me a martyr and have requested that I be buried where I die.
We walked them as steps written for us
And he for whom steps are written will walk them,
And he whose end lies in one land
Will not meet his with death in another.
You will not read this letter now, Hasan, but when you grow up, your grandfather will give it to you so that you do not forget that your father died a stranger and a wanderer over God’s earth, and that before he died he saw a wonderful vision and understood that God, Glorious and Sublime, had chosen him to die in a foreign land. I saw myself bending down to drink milk from the udder of a she-camel wandering aimlessly in Siberia’s snowy desert and when I stood up again, saw characters written in light saying, “God’s She-Camel.”
After the vision, there is stuff about the olive field and the small citrus grove and a request to his son that he visit the shrine of the Prophet Dannoun once a year and take part in the feast of Lydda that was held in the Church of St. George, also known as al-Khudr.
Where was the “will” in all this?
What was the significance of the story of a man who was conscripted into the Ottoman Army, taken prisoner, and died of fever in Manchuria?
Why did Manal give me this letter as my father’s will, even though my father wrote none of it and left me nothing?
(Now I understand how the whole game works. Novelists, when they begin writing a new work, are quite sure that they’re making the story up from their imaginations. In no time, however, they find themselves faced with events and emotions coming from a hidden place within them and bursting out of their memory. They try to trick their memory by using the imagination or, let’s say, they dissolve memory in their imagination. This is the whole secret of Emile Habibi’s game: the man wrote exclusively from memory, having first cut it up into little pieces, which he used the way a mechanic uses secondhand spare parts to mend the engine of a car that has broken down. I’m now at that same place. I decided to write a novel of the imagination about the poet of love in the Omayyad period, making use of the memories of others that I found in books, only to find myself faced with the explosion of my own memory. This is what drove me to abandon the story of al-Waddah, along with the other reasons that I mentioned earlier.
Memory loss is the enemy of the imagination. When a person loses his memory, he becomes incapable of imagining, because the imagination exists as primary material in the memory. Herein lies the secret of my admiration for Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques: the writer doesn’t trick us or himself; he lets memory gradually expand until it brings him to the peak of the imagination, where he writes that amazing encounter between Michael Abyad and Anton Shammas, whom he treats as the two halves of one man or, let’s say, as the completion of the first hemistich of a line of poetry by its second, and in so doing manufactures that amazing moment called literature.)
To get back to my father’s will: it actually isn’t a will nor did my father write a word of it. It seems Manal found the papers in the famous little bag from which he was never parted during his travels during the Holy Struggle days in Palestine, so she kept them and decided in her own mind that they were his will. These papers were also the only thing of value she possessed as a memento of the martyr Hasan Dannoun, so she decided to give them to me, to be a thread tying me to my father and grandfather, and so that I’d have a story, like other people.
The story says that my grandfather, Ali son of Hasan Dannoun, born in the village of Deir Tarif in 1888, resided in the city of Lydda, where he owned a small orange grove and a field of olives. In 1913, he married a girl from Yibna called Najiba, who was eighteen years old, and she bore one son, whom his father named Hasan after his grandfather. Hasan’s date of birth was July 2, 1914.
When mobilization was announced, my grandfather and grandmother fled with their only child and stayed in Yibna with my grandmother’s family. He believed that by escaping he would avoid conscription into the Ottoman Army, but he was wrong. One month after his arrival in Yibna, a company of Ottoman soldiers arrested him and he was conscripted, and bad luck took him to the Russian front, where he died.
That’s all I learned from Manal. Or rather, I found out too that my grandmother Najiba returned with her son to Lydda after her husband’s death. The woman refused, with amazing vehemence, her family’s decision to marry her to her husband’s younger brother, Kamil, as was the custom in those days, and as a result was repudiated by the other members of the family. She worked on the land that her husband had left her and lived in poverty, on her own.
Manal said she wasn’t sure if Najiba ever learned of the death of her son, as the man died on July 10, 1948, while Lydda fell two days later.
“I don’t know what happened to my mother-in-law. I went to the hospital and stayed there. My man was very sick, and a doctor there, from the Habash family, I’ve forgotten his name, told me they needed nurses, so I volunteered and put on the white gown and spent my time next to Hasan until his soul departed, and I stayed there. Your grandmother fled with the rest, I don’t know how. Everyone went to Ramallah but no one saw her there. Your grandmother was stubborn, had a head like a mule. That’s what everybody said. I really only knew her for a few months and there was shooting going on. Then we found out that she’d gone to her family’s house in Yibna and that was the last we heard of her.”
As for the business of my grandfather Ali Dannoun and what happened to him in Siberia, these were things I would never have known if I hadn’t run into a man from Ramallah called Dr. Hanna Jiryis, who worked at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut before going back to Ramallah and becoming a professor at Birzeit University. Dr. Hanna found out, I don’t know how, that my grandfather had died in Manchuria during the First World War, and he contacted me and came to see me at my house in al-Ajami in Jaffa. He said he was preparing a study on Aref al-Aref and wanted to ask me some questions about my grandfather.
When the man discovered that I knew nothing, he asked me if my grandfather had left any handwritten papers, and I remembered the will and showed him the newspaper cutting. The moment he saw it, the man was overcome with astonishment. He pleaded with me to give him t
he cutting and said it would be preserved in the university’s archives, where it would be a document of importance for researchers into the history of the Palestinian cause. I refused, however, and told him I couldn’t give up my family’s heritage. He said I was wrong, because it wasn’t a personal heritage but belonged to the memory of the Palestinian people. Faced, however, with my insistence, he accepted that he’d just photocopy the cutting, and things were left at that.
Of course, I regret it now. I shouldn’t just have given him the cutting, I should have given him the letter too, since, if I’d done so, my grandfather would have been guaranteed a place, albeit as a footnote, in the history of Palestine. No doubt, the study that was to be published would focus on the great historian Aref al-Aref and not even mention an unfortunate soldier called Ali Dannoun, who died alone, a stranger in a strange land.
When I told the man that it was Aref al-Aref who’d brought my grandmother the letter, his face lit up, and instead of passing things on to him, I listened to him tell me one of the strangest of all Palestinian stories.
The story I heard transported me to the First World War. The Palestinian historian doing research on the life of another historian ran slap into my grandfather Ali Dannoun, the Ottoman soldier who died as a vagabond as he tried to get back to his country after the torments of captivity in Siberia.
The man wanted an answer from me to one question: had my grandfather joined the Turkish Red Brigades (Türk Kızıl Alay) that had brought together around a thousand fighters, made contact with the Bolsheviks, and taken part in the fighting against the Whites?
From the letter, I’d gathered that Dannoun sympathized with the Bolsheviks, who had released the prisoners after the victory of their revolution, but I was unaware that Red Brigades had been formed among the prisoners’ ranks. All I knew was that my grandfather had left Russia and joined a convoy of Arab soldiers after he’d been hit in the thigh by a bullet, but the man said nothing about the reason for his injury or where it occurred.