by Elias Khoury
Umm Hasan led the dance, so everyone danced, and death itself danced. Dear God in Heaven, why did You test the woman who picked up the baby Naji and gave him back to his mother? Why did You test her with this shameful dance?
I never asked Umm Hasan why she danced, because I never met her. How could I have met a dead woman? Her death was the opening scene of the novel Gate of the Sun, but, when Khalil told me fragments of his memories of Shatila Camp, he didn’t say anything about the dance of death, and I didn’t ask him about Umm Hasan. He patted my shoulder, saying that the memory of the massacre had been transformed into gaps of silence in his life and he hadn’t even said anything about it to his wife, who was from Hebron, because he had been unable to.
Umm Hasan dances to the rhythm of death. Why didn’t the author of Gate of the Sun say anything about the incident? Was he unaware of it? Or had he too developed gaps in his memory, like Khalil Ayoub? Or was he too embarrassed?
The dance had no effect on my love for and infatuation with Umm Hasan. On the contrary, it made me love and admire her even more.
(For my part, I refuse to write from a deficient or gappy memory. I’m going to fill in all the gaps in the story and when I lack facts, I will look for them in the works of others. This way I’ll construct a mirror, with which I shall make myself whole. But what am I to say about Umm Hasan? Am I allowed to say that, after my encounter with Ma’moun in New York, I wished it had been Umm Hasan who’d picked me up off the road of death at Lydda? If that, or something like it, had happened, my life would have been radically different, and today I would feel that I belonged to a mother who gave birth to me even though she didn’t, and this feeling of being the child of coincidence, and that my life was composed of the dust of delusion, wouldn’t haunt me.)
My reservations concerning this text come to me from somewhere else. Dr. Samara made a hasty comparison between Sabra and Shatila on the one hand and the Lydda Ghetto on the other, and that doesn’t work. One might legitimately compare the Lydda massacres and the Shatila massacre, or the march of dancing and death at Shatila with the march of death on which more than fifty thousand human beings, compelled to leave Lydda by force of arms and violence, were driven. And these cases would allow us to analyze at length how the bloodlust rises to the surface of people’s souls and changes them into monsters, which is why the prophet David, in his Psalms, cries out, “Spare us from bloody men, O Lord!” In and of itself, the savagery is just a trivial matter, since, at the end of the day, it can be regulated by law and held in check, though it comes back, or is brought back, on a regular basis. The larger problem is the canine, cynical mentality that lies behind it. This is where the greater crime lies. The killers at Sabra and Shatila were driven by bloodlust and drugs, but the one behind the curtain who held the thread was calm and rational. He needed the massacre in order to achieve a specific political goal, which was to sear into the consciousness of the Palestinians the conviction that their longing and their nostalgia for their land were pointless and could only lead to death by humiliation.
In Lydda, likewise, the formula was clear – from a massacre to expel the city’s inhabitants to the caging of those who remained. In this case, though, there was no distance between the ignorant, stupid implementer and the planner, as was the case in Shatila. Here, the planner was the implementer, which is why he was obliged to lie and deny, and the truth had to wait many long years to appear.
The greater savagery isn’t a bloody expression of an egotistical reaction. The greater savagery is the organization of killing and repression without being oneself affected and in accordance with a cold rationalism that strives to realize its goals.
(To write this chapter, I had to go back to the issue of the Journal of Palestinian Affairs that I’d read a long time before at the University of Haifa and which I was only able to obtain because Sarang Lee found the issue for me at NYU’s Bobst Library. Supposing I’d relied on my memory alone, I would have written an incomplete chapter, at the heart of which incompleteness would have stood Dr. Khalil Ayoub, who appeared in the article in question sixteen years before he did so in Gate of the Sun. When I read the article in Haifa, the doctor meant nothing to me as a character, and likewise the story of his father, asleep in his coma, failed to stick in my memory. Dr. Samara’s analysis of the smell astonished me, and the dance of death gave me goose pimples, but had it not been for Sarang Lee, I would have missed the significance of my meeting with Khalil Ayoub in Ramallah in 1997 and the story would have been incomplete.)
(I’m not trying for a complete story, not to mention that what I’m writing here isn’t a story but my final rehearsal for death. I’m not probing the past because I feel nostalgia for it – I hate nostalgia. I am, rather, surrendering to my memory, which is settling accounts with me before it too becomes extinct, at the moment of my own extinction and demise.)
— 2 —
AFTER WHAT HAPPENED to Dr. Samara, silence reigned over the crowd of people that had assembled at the northern corner of the courtyard in front of the Great Mosque, a silence disturbed only by the buzzing of the flies that hovered above them and came to rest on their faces and necks, and the sound of one or other of the young children, which would die down as soon as it arose.
Time passed slowly over their bodies, which swayed discreetly under the leaden July sun. Long hours, during which the soldiers paced on the other side of the wire with their rifles, watching the mass of humanity.
Manal said she heard the sound of a body hitting the ground. She turned and saw an elderly woman writhing on the earth. No one dared leave their place. Suddenly, the boy Mufid Shahada went to her, bent over her and tried to revive her. Then he retreated, leaving the ranks of the crowd, and walked toward the barbed wire.
“Go back!” one of the guards shouted, pointing his machine gun at him.
“The woman,” said the young man. “The woman’s about to die and needs a drop of water.”
“I don’t have any water,” shouted the soldier. “Go back!”
“The ablutions tank, sir! The ablutions tank is full of water. I’m going to go and get a little of it to drink and sprinkle on her face.”
“Don’t take another step. Go back where you were!”
“But she’ll die,” muttered the young man as he returned to his place among the crowd.
A wailing arose from the women. It wasn’t shouting or weeping, it was a half-suppressed sound that burst out from inside their chests. Manal said it had scared her at first. “Something no one had ever heard the like of, like the sounds made by jinn and afreets. A sort of moaning coming from I don’t know where. And then suddenly, dear, I swear I don’t know how, the moaning started coming from me too without my realizing, as though the air we breathe had turned to sound and was coming out of all the women’s chests.”
At that moment, Ma’moun emerged from the crowd and walked toward the wire. No one knew the name of this youth, who was eighteen years old, or how he came to be at the hospital, or how he’d found himself in the ghetto.
Ma’moun was wearing shorts and had a black-and-white keffiyeh that Manal had given him as they left the hospital tied round his head, and his eyes were covered with dark glasses. He walked toward the barbed wire, to the accompaniment of the shouts of one of the soldiers, who aimed his rifle at him. A slim youth walking with slow steps that tested the ground, with which his feet had no previous acquaintance. He approached, his shadow moving behind him, his arms stretched out before him, and walked toward the soldier who was shouting at him to stop. People heard the sound of the rifle being cocked as it was raised. A cry of “God is great!” came from the throat of Hatim al-Laqqis, to be taken up, spontaneously and without thought, by Manal, and the whole crowd was transformed into an ad hoc chorus, all shouting, “God is great!” with even Dr. Samara raising his voice and joining in. The soldier stepped back, and the ten soldiers guarding the wire took up fighting positions. The calls
of “God is great!” gradually died away into murmurs. Ma’moun, who could see only through his ears, had felt, at the moment when they had all cried out, that he was the stronger and that no power on earth could prevent him from going wherever he wanted.
The soldier, who had never stopped shouting orders at the blind young man to go back to his place, dropped on one knee and aimed his gun at Ma’moun, but before he could fire, Ma’moun felt a hand shoving him and throwing him to the ground. He fell, and found a voice at his side asking him in a strange accent to go back.
“Go back. They’re going to shoot you,” said the voice.
“The woman’s dying of thirst and we all want to die with her,” screamed Ma’moun, as he gathered himself up, shook his hand out of the grasp of the owner of the voice, and ran toward the barbed wire.
The soldiers seemed to have been taken aback by the moaning that had turned into “God is great!” and were then stricken with paralysis before the boy who ran, stumbling over his feet like a blind man, and reached the barbed wire, where he raised his arms, snatched off his dark glasses and screamed at the soldier, “Kill me!”
Hatim, who had run after Ma’moun and knocked him to the ground to protect him from death, told the story more than once, and at each telling his voice would choke when he got to Ma’moun’s cry of “Kill me!” and he’d stop speaking, taking deep breaths before continuing.
The story of Hatim al-Laqqis and how the fates brought him from his town of Maroun al-Ras in Lebanon to the Lydda Ghetto is itself strange. I’ll write it down when it comes back to me.
Hatim said that all he saw was Ma’moun’s back and his shadow. He watched, via that shadow, the movement of Ma’moun’s hand, stretched out beneath the rays of the July sun, snatching off his glasses. “I heard nothing, I swear. After Ma’moun had screamed with all the strength his throat could muster, he brought his face close to the barbed wire and said something in a low voice. I saw fear on the face of the Israeli soldier, who retreated, then left the place for a few minutes before returning and talking with Ma’moun. Ma’moun then turned toward us, raised his hands in the air, telling everyone, ‘Drink!’ and moved in the direction of the throng with rapid steps, soon, however, stumbling and tumbling over, his glasses falling from his hand. I ran toward him and he said, ‘Please, my glasses.’ I picked them up and gave them to him. He took them, wiped the dust from the lenses, and put them back on before standing. In that instant, I saw the whiteness of his eyes, which opened onto whiteness, and guessed that what had scared the Israeli soldier and made him give the order to let us drink from the ablutions tank was that absolute whiteness, unrelieved by a single black spot.”
Manal said the crowd ran toward the tank, “And then we discovered, dear, that we didn’t have anything in which to scoop the water up so that we could drink, so we started scooping it up in the palms of our hands, and people bent their heads over the water and gulped and gulped. We did it like animals and only noticed at the end, when we had quenched our thirst, and we started laughing at ourselves.”
There was only one tap, which Ma’moun stationed himself next to, warding people off because it was, he said, set aside for the sick and the elderly. Ma’moun asked Hatim and some of the other young men to lift the woman who’d fainted, so she could be given water. Strangely, Dr. Samara never moved from his place to help her, so a fifteen-year-old boy called Ghassan Batheish, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, took care of her, first sprinkling water on the woman’s face, then giving her water to drink from his hands and standing her up.
Gathered around the ablutions tank, the people looked as though they’d escaped from the ring of terror that had encircled them and forced them to stand unmoving for long hours under a merciless sun that had burned their faces and bodies. The masses of humanity that had emerged from their hiding places in the hospital, the mosque, and the church found themselves in a cage fenced in with wire, and discovered that their fate now lay in the hands of a troop of soldiers who seemed not to know what they were doing.
The solid, unspeaking mass, which swayed like Phoenician statues set next to one another in rows, exploded at once into speech and movement. The people felt they’d recovered something of their souls, which had been swallowed by fear, and the din grew louder till the voice of Fatima, the wife of Jamil Salama the baker, arose, calling for bread. The word “bread” carried with it a magic charge, because the people, whose thirst was now assuaged, suddenly felt hungry. They had risen in panic in the morning to the bullets and the loudspeaker, and it hadn’t occurred to any of them to put a mouthful of food into their mouths. Fatima’s voice awakened the voice of hunger, and they began calling for bread. Ma’moun’s hand went up, asking them to be quiet so as to give him a chance to go to the wire and speak with the soldier, but he was rebuked by the voice of Iliyya Batshoun ordering him not to speak.
“This isn’t the time for kids’ play and nonsense!” shouted the short sixty-year-old with the big belly. “First we have to form a committee to represent the people of the town.”
“Before a committee,” said Ma’moun, “we want to eat.”
“Who’s that?” shouted Iliyya. “You can’t be from here. We don’t know you. What’s your name, boy?”
“Ma’moun. Ma’moun Khudr.”
“You’re the son of Salim Khudr, right? Where is your family, son?”
“They went to Naalin.”
“So what are you doing here, blind and with no family to look after you? You should have gone with them.”
“I didn’t want to go,” said Ma’moun.
Ma’moun felt a hand patting his back and heard Manal’s voice saying, “Ma’moun’s one of us, Hajj Iliyya, and we’re hungry. This won’t do, making us stand in the sun all day without water or bread.”
“You’re right, sister,” said Iliyya Batshoun, called “Hajj” because every year he insisted on spending Easter Sunday eve in Jerusalem and making a pilgrimage to the Cave of Light in the Church of the Resurrection, where he would spend the whole night in vigil, waiting for the outburst of divine light that announces the Savior’s resurrection.
Hajj Iliyya bent over the child Manal was carrying in her arms. “God be praised! That’s the son of the martyr, God have mercy on his soul. How old is he?”
“A week,” said Manal.
“And what have you named him, God preserve him?”
“I have to name him after his father, the martyr Hasan.”
“He’s the first child to be born here,” called out Mufid Shahada.
“We should call him Naji,” said Ma’moun.
“He’s the first child, so it’s like Adam in the Garden of Eden. We should call him Adam,” Iliyya said.
“The Garden of Eden?!” Ma’moun said, laughing. “This is Hell, not Heaven, Hajj. His name has to be Naji because God saved him from the massacre.”
“Adam’s a nice name,” Manal said, “but what are we going to do about his father’s name?”
“Adam was his father too,” said Hajj Iliyya. “All of us are children of Adam, sister.”
In the midst of the chaos around the ablutions tank, the inhabitants of the ghetto managed to give the child, as to the manner of whose birth all were ignorant, a name appropriate to the ghetto, which had become the city’s new emblem. “His name is Adam,” said Hajj Iliyya Batshoun, and when Manal said no more, everyone took it to mean that she had agreed to be mother to him who has no mother. Our Master Adam, peace be upon him, was the first human, the first prophet, and the first poet. He was born without a mother and it was his job, as the story goes, to give birth to his mother and wife, from his ribs. That is why no one called Manal “Umm Adam,” or “Mother of Adam,” as our customs dictate, with the name of the woman disappearing and being replaced by “Mother” followed by the name of her firstborn son. On the contrary, she retained her original name, thus remaining forever young, the years gr
owing older within her while she herself remained unchanged.
In the midst of the chaos around the name that had been given the boy-child who was the firstborn of the ghetto, people heard the sound of renewed shooting. The voices faded away, everyone froze in place as they saw an Israeli officer, surrounded by three soldiers, passing through the gate in the wire, which he opened with his hands, and advancing.
The officer took hold of the loudspeaker, brought it close to his mouth, and spoke in Arabic: “I am Captain Moshe. You are all required to move away from the water tank immediately.”
The crowd began moving as though hypnotized, and no one opened their mouths. As soon as they had moved away from the tank, Moshe’s voice rose again: “Men aged fourteen and over to the right, women to the left.”
The men and women began moving. A soldier approached Dr. Samara to order him to join the men, but the officer shouted in the face of the soldier, who retreated, and the doctor remained where he was, at a distance from the two groups.
“Bread, sir.”
Captain Moshe turned toward the source of the voice and saw Manal holding on to Ma’moun’s arm, while Ma’moun tried to escape her grip.
“To the right!” the officer yelled at Ma’moun.
Ma’moun moved in the direction in which Manal led him and said nothing.
The officer passed in front of the crowd of men and chose thirty of them. They were in their early twenties, and he ordered them to step forward and go, with two soldiers, to an army truck that was waiting for them outside. Then he noticed Ma’moun, who was moving slowly, and ordered him with a wave of his hand to join the thirty. Ma’moun, however, kept walking toward where the other men were gathered, as though paying no attention to the officer’s order.