by Elias Khoury
“And what does nostalgia mean?” I asked him.
“Nostalgia means nostalgia, meaning the warmth of memory,” he said. “When your soul feels cold, what can you do? The only thing that warms the soul is nostalgia. Even if the memories are hard, it’s the only way to get back to the nest that you left and warm yourself with your memories and find refuge in them.”
I didn’t tell him that his desired refuge was the very cause of my anger, that I had to rid myself of the warmth of memory because it made me feel as though my skin was itching, and that I’d like to rip my memory to pieces so that I could climb out of its cocoon and look toward the future.
“What future are you talking about, dear? The future’s behind me now,” a woman living in Lydda told me when I phoned to ask about Crazy Karim, whom I’d heard had tried to rape her in the ghetto. “He wasn’t crazy or anything, dear. They said he’d gone crazy so that they could let him off the punishment. It was dear old Abu Adnan, God treat him well and have mercy on his grave, who announced that the man was possessed by an infidel jinni, and it ended up with a zikr ceremony and a lot of hullabaloo, and Karim sat there and acted out the jinni leaving him, alive and kicking, and the ululations and the shouting began, and the Jews thought there was an uprising and started firing into the air. Everyone ran away back to their houses, and the jinni didn’t know what to do so he ran away from the ghetto and we were rid of him. That’s what they said, and what could I do? My father said I had to get married, and they married me to Abu Riyad. He was a decrepit old man whose wife and children had fled and disappeared leaving him stuck here. What can I tell you, dear? Days of nothing but bitterness.”
The woman wept on the telephone as though we were at a funeral and began telling me the story as though she were recounting the plot of a melodrama. She told me about her beloved, who’d sneaked back over the border for her sake, and when he found out that they’d married her off, decided to kill himself: “But he didn’t. ‘Life is dear,’ as they say, and he went back to Ramallah.” She told me how she’d been widowed as a girl, and had had to wait on the old man who had become her husband after he was struck down by hemiplegia, and how the Israeli woman conscript had spat on her as she stood in front of the barbed wire waiting for the men to return with the water barrels, and so on and so forth…I wanted something different from her. I wanted her to tell me about the rhythm of daily life, so I asked her about her feelings when the wire was removed, but instead of answering my question, she went on and on deploring her bad luck, as though the Nakba had happened in order to give her, specifically, a hard time; as though all the stories of the ghetto could be summed up in the tragedy of her paralyzed husband.
All that had to be left out so that the text didn’t sink under nostalgia and grief and the experience lose its flavor, for the truth isn’t always believable; sometimes, indeed, it seems concocted and inflated. Writing the truth requires avoiding the melodramatic elements, which have to be eliminated from our life stories if tragedy is not to turn into farce. And just as I’ve eliminated many details of my life, both knowingly and unknowingly, so shall I eliminate a number of details of daily life in the ghetto, and I won’t be any more of a tyrant than memory itself, for memory does the same, continuously and without our realizing.
In my work on filling in the gaps I didn’t resort to inventing events that didn’t happen. Instead, I would move an event from one place to another. Let’s suppose that the woman Crazy Karim tried to assault wasn’t the one who told me the story of her elderly husband and whose name was Umm Jamil. Now let’s suppose that it was my mother Crazy Karim tried to assault and I heard the story from a schoolmate, and that when I asked her about it, she denied it vigorously and said it was just a lot of drivel that Umm Jamil’s husband had claimed to have heard after he went senile.
I wouldn’t have argued about it with my mother, even though I knew that the man had lost the power of speech after he was struck with hemiplegia. But if I were to follow up on my supposition about the attempted rape of my mother, it would give the story I’m writing a deeper dimension, and Ma’moun would come into the picture as the man who accosted his opponent and defeated him. Looked at from that perspective, his relationship with Manal would take on a new dimension.
I’m not sure yet which version to adopt. I’ve put both down so as to clarify what I mean by “filling in the gaps,” which isn’t just a matter of random invention; it’s an operation of the greatest complexity.
Naturally, Dr. Hanna Jiryis would consider such talk “literature.” The man used the word to indicate contempt because he believed literature wasn’t something serious. I don’t know what he meant by serious, but it would seem that his point of departure was the arrogance of the scholar who can see only facts. The man isn’t working in the exact but in the human sciences, which remain, in my humble opinion, not far removed from speculation and which resemble literature in many aspects, though they lack its magic and beauty. Enlarging on his idea, Dr. Hanna showed himself up by saying, derisively, that the majority of novel readers were women. I reject that male-supremacist position, even though it is, to some degree, true. Dr. Hanna considers this a fault because, in his view, reading literature is just filling emptiness with more emptiness, while life has taught me that women are the light of the world and for literature to exist it must become feminine and seek inspiration at its Scheherazadian wellspring.
Scheherazade was the first narrator. She gave birth to children and told a thousand stories, every one of which became a person who narrates. I wanted to explain to the judicious scholar of history that Cervantes found his novel written in the language of Scheherazade, and the novel was thus born at his hands through a translation from “the language of the ‘ayn,” a language that a bewitching woman had turned into that of storytelling. Such was the claim of the author of Don Quixote. Maybe he was lying; indeed, he probably was lying when he claimed to have bought the manuscript of the book from an Arab bookseller in the market at Toledo, but his lie was truer than the truth itself.
(I don’t know why the ancient Arab linguists called their language “the language of the ḍād“: the ḍād isn’t a beautiful or evocative letter, and my admiration for al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, founder of the science of prosody, has led me to adopt the suggestion he makes in his dictionary The Book of the ‘Ayn, where he proposes that the ‘ayn should be made the first letter of the alphabet. The same supposition that led to the language being called the language of the ḍād holds true for the ‘ayn, as the letter ‘ayn isn’t to be found in any other language in the world either, not to mention that it has numerous meanings, ranging from the ‘ayn (“eye”) with which we see to the ‘ayn (“spring”) that we drink from, and so on and so forth.)
What can be done about this accursed dream that has appeared three times? I will not allow it to appear again. I’ll write the story of the ghetto, not because nostalgia for my country impels me to do so. I am a stranger here in New York, as I was there, in Lydda and Haifa and Jaffa. I’ll write of my being a stranger, not of my nostalgia.
THE DAYS OF THE GHETTO
Where Did the Ghetto Come From?
THE INHABITANTS OF the ghetto woke at six in the morning to a burst of gunfire. Bullets slammed into the walls of the houses, competing with the echoes of the loudspeaker that summoned the people to assemble in the square in front of the Great Mosque.
It had been their first night inside the fence built by the victorious Israeli army around the quarter embraced by the mosque, the church, and the hospital. They didn’t know their quarter was called the ghetto. All they knew was that they were still alive and all that remained of the city’s inhabitants after the great expulsion. They were a strange mixture of humanity – doctors, male and female nurses, shopkeepers, peasants, refugees from neighboring villages – whom the sudden onset of fear had brought together and caused to hide in and around the hospital as they fled the bullets that flew over p
eople’s heads, driving the city’s inhabitants to leave it, on foot, for nowhere.
The people awoke in fear. After the three days of random killing that they called “the massacre,” they spent their first night surrounded by a strange silence that was disturbed only by the barking of stray dogs aimlessly roaming the city’s streets. The people of the ghetto slept their first night without bullets. Exhaustion, hunger, and thirst made them unaware of the extraordinary numbers of flies that had spread everywhere and were swarming over bodies swimming in sweat and the summer’s heat. Later, Manal would call that first night on which she slept without being woken by the sound of machine-gun fire “the night of the flies.” She said that were it not for her little child, whose face she was obliged to cover with her headcloth to prevent the flies from eating its eyes, she would have slept like a log and would not have been bothered by the blowfly bites. “Everyone slept. As they say, son, ‘Sleep is an imperious master.’”
Everyone slept to the sound of the barking, broken only by a mysterious moaning, then woke to the sound of bullets flying and a summons to assemble in the square in front of the Great Mosque. Once the sleep had begun to lift from their eyes, leaving skewers from the pain of darkness interspersed with threads of light, they walked with the sluggishness of the terror-stricken to the square in front of the mosque, certain that their fate would be no different from that of the fifty thousand inhabitants of Lydda who had been compelled to leave over the past three days. They saw wire surrounding them on all sides and heard the voice of Dr. Mikhail Samara exclaim, “It’s a cage!” Then they heard him turn to his wife, who was holding her small daughter’s hand, and say, “Don’t worry. They aren’t going to expel us. They’ve caged us, like animals.”
The people emerged, pushing one another out of the way to get to where they had been ordered to assemble. The remaining inhabitants of Lydda had learned their lesson well: these soldiers didn’t joke about and were willing, and indeed eager, to kill. The smell of blood had given them an appetite for more.
Dr. Samara noticed that the ground was spattered with a mixture of blood and dust, and he smelled death. He turned to Nurse Manal, who was walking next to him, carrying her baby, and asked her to take care not to walk in the blood. “We’ll have to hose the ground today with water and clean it away. It’s not right to walk on blood.”
The people arrived in groups from where they had been hiding in the church, the mosque, and the hospital. They looked around them, eye meeting eye, and the only sound was that of footfalls on the ground. The firing stopped and the loudspeaker fell silent. The people squeezed into the square in front of the Great Mosque, where a detail of about ten soldiers was disposed around them, rifles at the ready.
The soldiers had a bizarre appearance – unshaven young men, eyes half closed as though they had slept badly, their khaki uniforms hanging loose on their bodies, smoking voraciously, and looking right and left, as though afraid. Some had covered their heads with Palestinian keffiyehs to protect them from the heat, while others wore beaten-up military caps.
The heat was extreme that July dawn. The phantoms walking sluggishly toward the assembly point stuck close to one another, like frightened chickens. About five hundred men, women, and children met at the corner of the mosque square. The scene was comical, or so at least thought one of the bearded Israeli soldiers. He pointed, laughing, at the people huddled together at the corner of the square and said in Hebrew, “Khavasim, kmo khavasim!”
“What’s he saying?” Manal asked the doctor, who was standing next to her.
“He’s just jabbering in Hebrew,” Dr. Samara said.
“He’s saying we’re like sheep,” said Mufid Shahada, who’d learned Hebrew from working at the nearby Ben Shemen colony. At that moment, the crack of a bullet was heard, fired close to where the people were assembled, and a large bird fell from the sky and thrashed about as it died in the middle of the stunned crowd.
It was the soldier who had described the assembled people as sheep who had fired into the air, hitting a bird that had been hovering in the sky over the city. Dr. Samara bent over the bird, whose death throes were now over, picked it up by its feet, and carried it away from where the people were gathered, only to hear the soldier yelling at him. The doctor came to an immediate standstill and looked right and left, not knowing what he was supposed to do, and the soldier let off a burst of gunfire at his feet. The doctor shuddered, then squatted down and threw the bird from his hand.
The soldier came up and ordered him, with a motion of his rifle, to stand, but the doctor, whose body was still quivering, didn’t move. He remained in a squatting position, his eyes closed and his teeth chattering.
The soldier aimed his rifle as though about to shoot, approached the doctor, and grasped him by the arm to make him get up, but the Palestinian doctor refused to be budged. Two other soldiers now came up to him, pulled him by his arms, and made him stand. At the same moment, the Israeli soldiers burst out laughing.
“Asa bamikhnasayim!” (“He’s pissed himself!”) the first soldier yelled.
“Magia lo lamut!” (“He’s a coward and deserves to die!”) the second said.
The soldiers moved away from the doctor, their rifles trained on him. The man collapsed onto the ground again and sat there, making a choking sound as though he was weeping. At that moment, the soldiers heard the voice of the officer telling them not to shoot him. The doctor sat where he was, without moving, through the long hours that the people of the ghetto spent in the courtyard of the mosque waiting for the Israelis’ orders.
When the soldiers backed away, leaving the doctor, who had wet himself from fear, sitting where he was, the people looked up and took note of the strange birds circling in the sky, and an obscure fear, unlike that which had drawn itself on their faces during the invasion of the city, seized them. People would remember those birds as one of the signs of the Last Hour. They would feel that they were about to become food for birds of prey and that their fate would be similar to that of the corpses that lay strewn through the city’s streets.
The Israeli officer’s orders were strict: “Lo rotseh leshmoa milah,” which one of the soldiers, shouting, translated as “Not a word! Not a sound! Got it?” Silence reigned over the men and women who had gathered in the square in front of the mosque. Nothing cracked the wall of silence that surrounded the people standing there until a baby burst out crying, quickly joined by a group of other children, who turned the place into an orgy of weeping.
(Manal boasted that I was the leader of the band of weepers who broke the silence. She said she didn’t know what to do, I was hungry and the milk had dried in her breasts. She pushed her nipples into my mouth but I refused them. She said that the night before she’d cooked me a meal of boiled lentils and made me lick her finger, which she’d wet with the water from the lentils, and I’d fallen asleep, exhausted from crying, but it hadn’t occurred to her in the morning to bring any lentil water because she’d left in a hurry with everyone else to go to the square in front of the mosque. Manal said my crying had severed her heartstrings and, instead of silencing me, she stood there as tears began to pour down her cheeks, to mix with those of her hungry child.)
A soldier came up to Manal and tried to pull the child out of her arms, so Umm Yahya ran up and took the child and began rocking it and gave it her breast. The child suckled and fell silent, and the sound began to die down. Manal wept as she thanked Umm Yahya.
“After that wretched sunbath, some of the inhabitants of the ghetto fled. I don’t know how they managed to slip through the barbed wire. The doctor, Mikhail Samara, disappeared with his wife and daughter, and Umm Yahya disappeared with her husband and her four children, and there were others I don’t know. It’s said they bribed the soldiers, but no one knows. We didn’t give any thought to it at the time, and I don’t think there was any bribery. They said they wanted to go to Ramallah, so they opened the gate for th
em and they went. You, though, poor thing, suckled only once at Umm Yahya’s breast, and were raised on lentil water till things got better.”
Mothers cradling their babies, men exhausted by exertion and fear, and the smell of death. Later, Dr. Mikhail Samara, in a paper he published in the Journal of Palestine Affairs, would dwell at length on the smell that spread through the city.
(I remember reading Dr. Samara’s text in the library at the University of Haifa, where I came across it by chance when I was preparing a paper for the seminar in which I participated on S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh, which the Palestinian novelist Tawfiq Fayyad had translated into Arabic and published in the Journal of Palestinian Affairs, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.
I thought then and, despite the passage of all these years, still do, that Yizhar’s novel is a masterpiece, because it was able to arrive at a deep Aristotelian catharsis in a language appropriate to its day. In it I beheld the image of the New Jew, without the burdens of the ideology of the period of the sabra and the pioneers – an existential Jew creating himself and his mistakes without any guilt complex. It’s a pity that the novel has only recently been translated into English; it remains a witness to the depth of the relationship with death that unites the Arabic and the Hebrew languages. Recently, though, I’ve discovered in this novel new depths and multiple levels – but that’s another matter and requires a different context.)
Dr. Samara’s paper was published, by coincidence, in the same issue of the journal as Yizhar’s novel. The paper was devoted to an analysis of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, carried out by the Lebanese Forces under Israeli supervision during Operation Peace for Galilee, which reached its climax on September 15, 1982, when the Israeli army invaded Beirut following the departure of the fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The paper focuses on two things. The first is the smell, the second the “dance of death,” when the victims were forced to dance before being killed.