by Elias Khoury
When he read about my grandfather’s death in Manchuria, the historian told me, “I’ve been looking for this man,” but he expressed disappointment when he failed to find in my possession the document he’d been hoping for that would have proved that Arab Bolshevism had begun in the prisoner-of-war camps of the First World War. He said he was hoping to find just one document that would prove his claim, so that he could publish his theory.
He told me of his meeting in Beirut with the son of one of those prisoners, a Damascene from the al-Qarout family who’d told him that his father had become a Bolshevist in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and had joined the Turkish Red Brigades there. When he returned to Beirut he’d started promoting communist thought, then by chance had run into Fu’ad al-Shimali, one of the founders of the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon, and joined it.
The historian said he’d studied the life of the Ottoman Arab prisoners of war, and started telling me about the detention camp at Krasnoyarsk, near the shore of the Yenisei River in central Siberia. He spoke of the cold and the hunger and the torments suffered by the prisoners, who were forced to work in the mines, and of the towers and wire that surrounded the Wayouni Gorduk camp there.
“And then what?” I asked.
“Then nothing,” he replied. “The Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and they fled to join Feisal I.”
“So what’s it all got to do with me?” I asked.
“I want just one thing from you. Try to find something written by your grandfather so I can prove my theory.”
I told him that was all I had and he didn’t need any more, given that he had al-Qarout’s testimony to prove it.
He said that wasn’t enough. History has to rest on written documents, preferably official documents. He said he was sorry Aref al-Aref hadn’t written about these Arab Bolsheviks and that, as a result, he’d be unable to prove his theory.
“What kind of nonsense is that?” I asked him. “The whole history of our Nakba is unwritten. Does that mean we don’t have a history? That there was no Nakba? Does that make sense?” He said those were the rules of the discipline of history and we could only face the Zionist historians if we had a properly documented past that they could recognize. I said I was sorry and suggested we reread my grandfather’s letter and add a passage where he tells how he joined the Red Brigades, was wounded in the thigh, and died of gangrene.
“Is that true?” he asked me.
“It’s as good as true,” I told him.
“That’s writers’ business,” he said, “not historians’.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
He shook his head in disgust and walked off.
Betrayal by the Father
THE HISTORIAN WENT off, leaving me bewildered. I wanted to run after him so we could discuss the meaning of truth, because I’m sure, given the fragmentary stories Manal had told me about her first husband, that my father must have been a Marxist sympathizer even if he didn’t belong to the Communist Party. That would explain why, in the ranks of the Holy Struggle organization, they’d referred to him as the Red Warrior.
If I’m to believe my mother, my father’s presumed communism was the result of the effect on him of what he’d been told of his father’s, the martyr’s, relationship to Bolshevism.
Why had judicious Dr. Hanna Jiryis flown off the handle when I suggested adding a short paragraph to my father’s letter, thus solving the problem of the text he was looking for? That way he could put forward his new thesis that the foundation of the Palestine Communist Party was not the doing of Jews alone: Palestinian prisoners of war in Russia who were members of the Turkish Red Brigades had played a role too.
I wasn’t suggesting faking history, just filling in the gaps. He said imagination was all right for literature but not for writing history; although, if that’s so, how does the historian expect us to write it? Are we supposed to leave it to the Zionists? And who told him that the histories that have been written of Palestine are true and not an out-and-out orgy of fakery?
I should have discussed the matter with him when he came to the restaurant in New York to eat stewed beans, but I’d forgotten the whole thing, and it only came unstitched from the folds of my memory today, as I sat alone trying to gather together the threads of my life.
What do I want, and who am I?
God protect me from the word “I,” as the Arabs say! Looking for myself in these stories that I tell, I find myself in others’ mirrors. Each person is the reflection of another, each story the reflection of another. That’s what my solitary existence in New York has taught me. When I came to this city in flight from a love that had died, I expected to experience solitude, live with myself, forget that world so crammed with people and events, and sit around in idleness.
“Nothing beats boredom!” I told myself as I set my bags down in my small apartment in New York. Even writing the story of Waddah al-Yaman had been part of what backgammon and card players call “killing time.” From the day I let myself into this hell, however, I found myself surrounded by people who’d been hiding in the crevices of my memory, and instead of luxuriating in my boredom, I found myself under duress, forced to set aside time for all these wraiths who hem me in and organize their introduction into this text, so there can be some thread for me to follow.
This world consists of mirrors that, when we break them, shatter into a thousand little pieces that are transformed in turn into new ones that have to be broken. The mirrors that hem me in today are those of my three fathers who abandoned me.
I shall begin at the end, as I was never interested in the issue of the relationship to the father. I came to consciousness as the son of the martyr Hasan Dannoun and a child of the Lydda Ghetto, and that is enough. Even my mother’s marriage to Abdallah al-Ashhal in no way altered that conviction. I am a descendant of the great Sufi, Dhu al-Nun the Egyptian, as I am a son of the city of al-Khudr, and a citizen of the Arab World – or a Palestinian living in the State of Israel. And when I left my mother’s house, I discovered that I was my own son and that all the legends about my father’s heroism that she had planted in my head meant nothing to me. I know the man only as a name and a picture, and names and pictures mean nothing until they are transformed into a voice that takes you by surprise when summoned back from some unknown place.
Running into Blind Ma’moun here in New York, and the fragmented stories he told me about my other, real, father, stirred up lots of questions. When those questions encountered the movie that presented a forgery of the truth about Dalia and her friends and made no reference to my grandmother’s village of Yibna – as would be proper for a village whose inhabitants were brutally expelled in 1948 – my soul exploded and my memory burst open.
To keep it short, I will just say that when I was taking classes in psychology at the University of Haifa, I read avidly about the Oedipus complex as fashioned by Freud, not because I felt the father had to be killed, but because, on the contrary, I felt I was devoid of the complex, as someone had taken it upon himself to kill my father before I was born.
Even when my mother married (I was eight at the time, that is to say past the penile stage presided over by the Oedipus complex), I didn’t feel jealous of the man. On the contrary, I felt disgust, which has nothing to do with jealousy. I felt pity for my mother and wondered how she could bring herself to sleep next to him.
They don’t, however, teach the Oedipus complex’s twin – the Abraham complex. I now, based on my personal experience, believe that the Abraham complex is the more firmly rooted in the collective human unconscious. The only place I have come across it is in contemporary Jewish Israeli literature, which has a strong focus on the sacrifice of the son.
(Note: Oddly, the Jewish religion has no feast day dedicated to the sacrifice of Isaac, even though there are so many feast days and despite the foundational centrality of this story of son sacrifice. The Muslims, on the
other hand, have transformed the tale into their greatest celebration, which they name the Feast of the Sacrifice, and at which they perform the duty of pilgrimage and slaughter sheep as a ransom for the son who was saved at the last moment – the eldest son, called Ismail, grandsire of the Arabs. Christians, for their part, have combined the sacrifice of the human son with that of the divine son, Easter – which we call the Great Feast – commemorating the killing of the son and his resurrection from the dead.)
Returning to the Abraham complex, I would say the essential point is that of the slaying of the son, while the slaying of the father in the Oedipus story is no more than a reaction to the father’s having nailed his little son’s feet to a piece of wood and cast him aside to die. Oedipus killed his father only because the father had wanted to kill the son, for fear of the oracle’s prophecy and as a step toward its fulfillment.
Now, in my solitude, I discover that all three of my fathers wanted to do away with me. Indeed, symbolically speaking, they did kill me, and I ought to have killed them, in defense of my very existence. I am the murder victim who has to turn into a murderer while feeling pity for his own wretched victims.
I know nothing of my first, meaning my biological, father (according to Ma’moun’s account of how he found me lying on my dead mother’s breast), not even his name. It seems that the wife, with her baby son, waited too long to join the march of death, so the man kept going, like all the rest who’d lost members of their families but were sure they’d meet up with them once they got to the areas under Jordanian Army control. And when he reached Naalin, he looked for his wife but couldn’t find her, so he joined the ranks of the searchers, who were made more miserable by the indifference of others to their plight. On that terrible July day, people lost their souls and were transformed into living corpses. Heat and thirst devoured them, and they felt the great fear that frees the survival instinct from all constraints. Sons abandoned fathers, fathers sons. Small children got lost underfoot and people died of heat exhaustion and thirst.
People talk of fear as though it were an individual experience. They speak of knees giving way, of the void within the heart, of annihilation. But it is the fear that turns into waves that is the greatest – the fear that undulates through thousands who have been cast into the wilderness beneath the lead of bullets and among the faces of soldiers gloating at their misfortune, soldiers scattered along the length of the rocky road who take everything the stream of fugitives possesses by way of money and jewelry and gaze at the wandering throngs with indifference.
A wave of fear rises and my father walks alone, a youth of twenty-five who has lost his wife and only child. He walks next to his aged father and keeps turning around to look for his wife. Then the wave sweeps him up and he finds himself alone, wrestling with fear. His thirst is transformed into a choking feeling. He raises his head above the wave to breathe and then is swallowed up again.
I don’t want to go looking for excuses for this man of whom I know nothing. The truth is that, ever since I found out about what happened between us, I’ve felt nothing but pity and contempt for him. I mean, tell me – tell me how he could have abandoned his son, who was no more than two months old, to save his own skin?
I am assuming here that my first father escaped death on that march of death, that he reached Naalin safely and that from there he kept going with the caravan of refugees to Ramallah, but it’s not certain, and I am not prepared to go looking for him. Most likely he’s dead now, or on the brink of the grave. Meeting him would do neither of us any good. It wouldn’t, in fact, even have the savor of a meeting in a melodrama, at which tears flow. It would, in fact, be a meeting of strangers.
Let’s suppose the blind youth hadn’t rescued me and given me to Manal. Probably, I would have died of hunger. I prefer not to go now into Ma’moun’s description of the stiffness of the child he picked up; it makes my skin crawl. Moreover, since Ma’moun told me the story, I’ve had strange headaches and feel as though my “I” is drowning in fog, as if I weren’t I.
My first father killed me. He left me to die on a dead woman’s breast and fled toward his life. That’s my first story with fathers – a cowardly and impotent one, a people herded like sheep toward the wilderness and death, and a child, its body rigid with thirst, lying on its mother’s dry breasts.
All I needed was a drop of milk. One drop, which my mother’s breasts were incapable of offering me, so I lay on top of them waiting to die. My relationship with death began that torrid day in July, the day I died and Manal had to rub my body with oil and feed me boiled ground lentils with her finger, which she continued to do until the people of the ghetto came across the cow whose milk saved me and the rest of the children from death.
Ma’moun said that the moment they found the cow was the most beautiful of his life. “Imagine, lad, how we were! To this day I’m convinced that cow was a gift from God, Great and Glorious.”
I don’t want to submerge myself in the days of the ghetto now: that’s a story I need to write from beginning to end, at one go and without digressions. Instead, I’ve told Ma’moun’s version of my first father’s story, which has no story, apart from my feeling that I’m a murdered son and that my murderer was my father.
Perhaps in saying this I’m being a bit unjust toward the guy, whom I never knew: he was a victim and I’m the victim of a victim. It’s a kind of justification I don’t care for. Being a victim doesn’t grant one the right to make victims of others – on the contrary, it makes one doubly responsible for them. I tried to explain this so many times to my Israeli Jewish friends, though with no great success. True, to be honest, my beloved Dalia once surprised me by adopting the same idea and, indeed, expressing it eloquently when she said, “The Palestinians are the victims of the victims, and the Jewish victims have no right to behave like their executioners. That’s why I’m not just Jewish, but Palestinian too.”
We were walking that day on the shore at Jaffa, close to the Sea Cemetery, where the Palestinian academic and writer Ibrahim Abu Lughod is buried. I told her about this man whose voice still rings in my ears and of how, when he died, his daughter Leila drove him from Ramallah to Jerusalem so that his death could be announced in that city and he could claim, as a non-Jewish American, the right to be buried in Israel, which is to say, in the cemetery where his fathers and forefathers lay. An expression of grief passed over Dalia’s brown, oval face, and she announced that she’d become a Palestinian.
How and why Dalia came to abandon me and her Palestinian identity is another story, woven from sorrow and ambiguity.
My first father didn’t look back, and thus failed to see me being pulled from my mother’s womb a second time so that I wouldn’t die. I can imagine the man weeping, or pretending to weep, for his only child and proclaiming me a martyr, then marrying a relative, having a boy, and giving him my name.
Though I don’t know and don’t want to know what that name was.
My name is Adam and I don’t care that my first father doesn’t know that, because the man means nothing to me. He appeared on the screen of my life as one made up of words spoken by the blind man – without features, like a black spot in my eye.
Maybe I’m doing the man an injustice! I’m basing everything on the assumption that he kept going and didn’t make a serious search for me. But what if he had already been killed? What if he was one of the victims of the massacre that took place at the Dahmash Mosque? If that were so, it would mean my mother fled with me on her own.
It’s a serious possibility, but I’m in no position to prove it, which is the case with all the other possibilities concerning my first father. All the same, I’d rather not set him among the ranks of the martyrs, because one martyred father is enough.
My second father, Hasan, son of Ali, Dannoun, was a real human being, who became familiar to me as a photograph hung on the wall. A young man in his midtwenties, broad shouldered, with coal-black ha
ir, eyes so wide they seemed to be drinking in the whole world, and a thick black moustache that covered his upper lip. Manal always spoke of how beautiful he was, and of the magic hidden in his glances. I lived my childhood as the son of this martyr, whose lungs were ripped open as he fought to defend the city of Lydda, and I was supposed to feel proud of being an heir to blood and heroism.
I was supposed to have been given the name Ali, after my grandfather, who was also a martyr, because my father was “Abu Ali” or “Father of Ali” – that’s what everyone called him when they came to visit us and stood before his photograph, which was draped with black and topped with the Palestinian keffiyeh.
My mother wanted to name me according to my father’s wishes but changed her mind and decided to give me the name of the martyr Hasan. The fates, however, had other plans. Ma’moun told me that when I was a child I had three names: I was Hasan to my mother, Naji to him, and Adam to the people of the ghetto. In the end, it was the third that stuck and that I feel adhering to my skin and my soul. The story of how “Adam” came to stick to me wasn’t just a matter of the headman’s registering me with that name, following my mother’s more-or-less coerced agreement to the ghetto’s decision, but because I wanted it. It fit me and I fit it.
Adam is the name that best expresses the truth. I grasped that many years later, so it was as though my intuition had told me I wasn’t the right person for any other name, or that all names were wrong for me except for this, which refers to the skin, or adim, and to the earth’s soil (or so the books say). This way, I am a son of the land and have no other fathers.
When I learned the story of my first father, I was shocked, I can’t deny it. Then I got over the whole thing, as I could think of no convincing reason for switching my affiliation from the Dannoun family. I had lived my whole life as the son of a man who didn’t know he’d become a father because he died before I was born. This spared me the complications of relationships with fathers, especially those who are heroes, like mine.