My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  Did Israeli novelist S. Yizhar write Khuloud’s story into his novel Khirbet Khizeh? Israeli sources indicate that the Israeli novel, which was published in 1949 and became the sole Israeli literary record of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country in 1948, recounts a real incident that happened in southern Palestine, in which the writer took part in his capacity as intelligence officer of the battalion carrying out the operation. At dawn on November 27, 1948, a number of units of the 151st and 152nd battalions launched attacks on the Palestinian villages located between al-Majdal and Beit Hanoun, destroying and ethnically cleansing the villages of Hamama, al-Jura, Khirbet al-Khisas, Naaliya, al-Jiya, Barbara, Harabya, and Deir Suneid.

  The village described by the Israeli novelist is probably Khirbet al-Khisas. This is confirmed by the officer in charge of operations at the Coastal Sector headquarters, Captain Yehuda Be’eiri, who signed the expulsion order. In an interview published in Ma’ariv on February 17, 1978, he says, “I have no doubt that ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ is Khirbet al-Khisas itself, or one of the other villages covered by this operation, for which I signed the same order…and by the way, there’s no point in looking for the remains of these villages because, like dozens of other Arab villages in this area and all over the country, they no longer exist and I doubt if any mention of them survives.”

  Yizhar didn’t write Khuloud’s story, but it seems that what he witnessed in Khirbet Khizeh was typical of something that happened in more than one place. I shall reproduce Yizhar’s text here as it appears in the Arabic translation of his novel, which I read in the Journal of Palestinian Affairs, since, no matter how hard I try, I shall never attain the eloquence of an eyewitness who participated in the crime, and who drew an astonishing conclusion, namely, that the Palestinians had become the Jews of the Jews:

  Then a woman came toward us clutching a skinny baby, lugging it like an unwanted object. A gray-hued, gaunt, sickly, undersized infant. Her mother held her in her rags and waved and danced her in front of us as she said to us with something that was neither mockery nor disgust, and not crazed weeping, but, perhaps, all three together: “Do you want her? Take her, take her and keep her!” We screwed up our faces in revulsion, and seeing this, she apparently took it as a sign of success and continued to dangle the pitiful creature, bound in filthy rags, in one hand, while with the other she pounded her chest, “Here, give her bread, take her and keep her!” Until someone thought better and said to her sternly, Yallah, yallah and even raised his hand – I don’t know why – and she fled, half laughing half weeping, until she fell backwards into the basin, baby in hands, laughing and weeping brokenly.

  That is how Yizhar described the woman, whose name he didn’t know. What can I write to cap his text? I know the name of the woman who danced, and made her baby dance – twice – in the Lydda Ghetto. Indeed, I know her whole story after she married Iliyya Batshoun, but what happened? What does dancing have to do with death?

  They told me that Khuloud danced on her wedding day and astonished everyone in the ghetto with her ability to turn and twist to the rhythms of oriental music, but what does the dance of love have to do with the dance of death? Or is dance the most extreme form of expression, used once all others have been exhausted?

  I was doing research on Yizhar, and his novel led me to Dr. Mikhail Samara, who led me to Umm Hasan dancing on the march of death at the massacre of Shatila, and from there I went to Khuloud’s dance, which the Israeli novelist didn’t write about though he wrote about something similar when describing the expulsion of the peasants from their village and the demolition of their houses. What interests me about this novel isn’t its admission of the crime, important though that is, but its ability to trace the outline of the mute Palestinian, who was to become one of the staples of Israeli literature, and to infer the underlying meaning of the founding of the Zionist state, which is that for the Jews to become a people like other peoples – “other peoples” here meaning European peoples – they had first to invent their own Jews. What Yizhar presents in his description of the Khuloud of Khirbet Khizeh, or of Khirbet al-Khisas – call it what you will – is the Old Testament scene to which the Palestinian peasants, in their disaster, were subsumed: “And with all these blind, lame, old, and stumbling people, and the women and children all together like someplace in the Bible that describes something like this, I don’t remember where,” Yizhar writes.

  Yizhar proclaimed the need for the Jewish people to fashion their Jews in their own image, an image that they had decided to rid themselves of when they entered the realm of the “civilized peoples.” This is Yizhar’s genius. The matter isn’t one of Aristotelian catharsis, as some have written. Its locus is elsewhere. This Old Testament scene, which now vanishes into the mists of history, had to exist in order for the new Israeli age to begin.

  The narrator of Khirbet Khizeh wonders, “I wanted to discover if among all these people there was a single Jeremiah mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stifled tones to the old God in Heaven, atop the trucks of exile…”

  Do the Palestinians now have to find themselves a prophet of lamentations and defeats like Jeremiah if they are to enter the turning point in history that their catastrophe fashioned for them?

  Yizhar proclaimed us the Jews of Israel’s Jews. That was the message of his novel. But what do I want to get out of this whole story? Should I lament my people as Jeremiah lamented his? Should all Palestinian writing about the Nakba be a variation on the lamentations forged by the prophet of defeat? Or what?

  I feel as though I am writing in an ancient language that dies beneath my pen. All these allusions to legend inspire feelings of disgust in me. Uglier even than the death of language is our inability to find a grave for it to rest in, so that it can decompose and return to dust. Language isn’t formed of dust; it is the opposite of all other creatures that die. The problem of language is its corpse, because it stays with us. We reject it, so it comes back in different shapes and we find ourselves chewing its corpse in our mouths.

  I couldn’t avoid Yizhar Smilansky’s description of Khuloud, or a woman resembling her, any more than I could avoid reading the hidden text in Dr. Samara’s lecture. The Nakba reduced the Palestinian doctor to silence. He wrote about it only in fragments and it was up to the Israeli novelist to finish the story. But, let’s see. The Israeli novelist traced the outline of the mute Palestinian. The muteness of the Palestinian is a necessary condition for what we may call “the awakening of the Israeli conscience,” which means in turn that this preoccupation is in essence a preoccupation of Jewish self-awareness and has nothing to do with its victims. Such literature leads us to equate either the executioner with the victim whose consciousness he now possesses, or the victim with the executioner whose place he has assumed!

  I intended to write about the long night that besieged the people of Lydda in their ghetto, but the story has somehow led me toward the unknown. I don’t want to adopt the Israeli writer’s thesis, assimilate the story to the lamentations of the Old Testament, and tinge the tragedy of the people among whom I lived with the flavor of legend so as to justify their defeat, humiliation, and shame. Legends are no substitute for history, and I’m not going to fall into the trap of supposing that the miracle of the Hebrew state is its ability to turn legend into history and that we must either adopt their legend or find one of our own in which to take refuge. The language leading us back to legend is dead, it is part of the death of language that transforms words from points of light and guidance on a white page into blind words resembling the extinguished stars of the night of Lydda.

  I meant to write about the burial of Mufid’s body in the Islamic cemetery and the story told by Ghassan Batheish about the woman who slept among the graves, but found myself before the corpse of a language for which we can find no grave because it has taken up residence on our tongues, and is killing us. I’m exhausted now. I feel as though words
are no longer capable of saying anything and that I’m like that woman who took refuge in the cemetery for fear of death. The woman hid her life among the dead, and I hide mine among the corpses of words.

  —5—

  WHO WAS THE WOMAN, and what brought her to the cemetery? I never knew the woman’s name, to be able to recall it now. My mother, Manal, gave her the title of “the Old Woman of the Grave” and told me nothing about her. After three days, the young men succeeded in bringing her to the ghetto, where she took up residence in a small room next to the church but lived in constant fear. My mother said that the fear had traced itself in the wrinkles of her neck and that she never stopped yawning. It seems she was afraid of falling asleep, convinced that death would sneak into her slumbers and carry her off. “Strange! Does it make sense? A woman on the verge of ninety behaving as though she was going to live forever? Everyone else had died, but she clung on to the rope of life as though…I don’t know what. And every day she’d ask permission to visit the cemetery, till the Israeli officer got sick of her and said if she liked graves so much, he’d take care of it for her.”

  And when she died, the people of the ghetto discovered that they knew nothing about her or her family, though the Lebanese boy, Hatim al-Laqqis, discovered her secret and the secret of the jewelry that was buried in the grave where the woman had hidden during the massacre and where the young men had found her before bringing her to the ghetto. The trove that Hatim brought and set before the members of the committee led to his being detained, interrogated, and added to the second detachment of prisoners who left for the detention camp two months after the ghetto was set up.

  Ma’moun said that the uncovering of the secret of the treasure, which consisted of around fifty Ottoman golden guineas that Hatim al-Laqqis found by chance buried in the tomb of the Yahya family, opened the ghetto’s eyes to the growth of the phenomenon of collaborators among them. Iliyya Batshoun attributed the publicizing of his marriage to Khuloud, and the insulting letter he received from his son Iskandar, to a collaborator having leaked the news to his family. He suspected Crazy Karim, the one who was said to have tried to rape my mother, though Manal denied it vehemently and said Karim was to be pitied and couldn’t possibly be a collaborator.

  When Ghassan Batheish and the four young men who’d buried Mufid Shahada in the cemetery returned, their faces were pale and long. None of them could speak; they appeared dumbstruck. Iliyya Batshoun and the other members of the committee went to Ghassan Batheish to hear the details of the burial. No one knows what they heard but on leaving the short meeting, which lasted no more than half an hour, they too were struck dumb. Khalid Hassouna was unable to tell his wife anything, and Iliyya Batshoun went to Khuloud and sat in silence the whole night long; the woman said Iliyya didn’t sleep at all that night and that his body shook with horror from what he had heard.

  The woman of whom we speak wasn’t the reason for the terror that traced itself on the faces of the ghetto’s people the next morning. Her story was just one of those of eight aged women and men who had hidden in the fields and cemeteries and whom the young men came upon while working in the city and brought to the ghetto.

  Ghassan Batheish couldn’t recount what had happened. The words emerged from between his lips broken and stammering, and when he managed to pull himself together and speak, he uttered just two words: “flies” and “corpses.” He said the streets were full of bodies, bodies scattered here and there, bloated by death and stiffened beneath the rays of the sun, and that when they passed the Dahmash Mosque, swarms of blowflies had fallen upon them, flies that stuck to the body and refused to go away, stinging and sucking blood. The committee members saw the blue spots on the man’s arms and he said he’d treated himself with spirit and that his whole body was on fire. He said he was afraid of the flies and asked Iliyya Batshoun to talk to the military governor and find a way for the inhabitants to leave the city.

  “If we stay, the flies will devour us and we’ll be afflicted by deadly diseases,” the nurse said.

  When Hassouna asked about the number of bodies, the youth began to emit a strange sobbing sound, his body shook, and he raised his hand and said, “Everyone died. All of us are dead, uncle. Bodies too many to count. We couldn’t count the bodies. Dear God, dear God, what are we to do?”

  “There is no god but God,” said Hassouna, and he left with stumbling footsteps.

  Iliyya Batshoun said he’d go and ask Dr. Zahlan to come and treat the young men for the fly bites, and he left.

  Everyone would forget the fly bites the next morning, when the young men were rounded up and divided into five work teams. From then on, the people would get used to the fly bites, and spend long days in daily encounter with the disintegrating victims.

  Memory Gaps

  FROM HERE, IN my little apartment in New York, things seem simpler, but it is a simplicity full of cruelty and meaninglessness. What does it mean for a city to die flailing in the blood of its sons and daughters?

  In the beginning, meaning during my childhood in Lydda, the fall of the city meant the end of the world. Tales of the massacres and of the disintegrating bodies and body parts strewn over the walls of the Dahmash Mosque were, in the lexicon of the people of the ghetto, an indirect reference to the end of the world. The city had had its limbs chopped off, and its inhabitants and those who had taken refuge there were now like orphans.

  “We are the Orphans of the Ghetto,” I said to the Hebrew teacher at the school in Haifa, when he asked me who I was. The teacher smiled and asked me to reformulate the expression. “We, my dear child, are the Children of the Cactus. That is how we should introduce ourselves.”

  My mother used to say that cactus tasted bitter.

  I am not speaking here of my personal status as an orphan owing to my father having been killed. I am speaking of the people of the ghetto, old and young, who came to resemble nothing so much as orphaned children.

  An orphaned people, lost, its tragedy its inability to forget because it has no present.

  However, after going to Haifa, working in Mr. Gabriel’s garage, and perfecting my Hebrew, the issue changed. I decided to forget. I had left my memory hanging up in our shack in Haifa, fled the slopes of Mount Carmel where my mother had gone to live with her husband, and decided to be someone else. In the word “ghetto” I found my own special way around the problem of acquiring a shadow in a country whose inhabitants had lost theirs. Don’t ask me how I survived, how I reinvented myself and adapted myself to the mirror that I constructed, piece by piece, sticking the little bits together with the glue of forgetfulness, and how I lived my life as though it was my own. I decided to neither inherit nor bequeath. I decided there would be no wife and no children, and lived as though I was my own phantom, appearing only to disappear, my single pleasure being to put one over on life with my articles on Arabic music, which had become fashionable owing to what I call “the identity pangs” felt by oriental Jews, especially those of Arab origin. Then Dalia appeared in my life and smashed the mirror and ground its splinters underfoot and said she loved me as I was and wanted me with my memory intact and would marry me. And after I’d come to believe her and allowed myself to be swept away by love, she left me and went off to join her sorrows and made me discover the death of love so that I went from one extreme to the other – from the terror of memory to the beauty of forgetfulness. Now the stories of the Lydda Ghetto turned out to have been only a rehearsal for the fiction of the Warsaw Ghetto, in which I played the son of one of its survivors, who’d died when I was a baby, after which my mother, having suffered a nervous breakdown in whose aftermath she had been taken to a psychiatric hospital, had abandoned me while still a child.

  I invented a father called Yitzhak, who’d escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto when he was seventeen, leaving behind an aged, ailing mother, then found himself in Istanbul, and finally came to a stop in Tel Aviv, where he married the daughter of a Russian immigra
nt and had me. My father died in the so-called War of Independence and left my mother alone with her madness, which was full of nightmare. The story I made up said that Sarah, my mother, spent her remaining years in the psychiatric hospital in Acre and that I never saw her again. I didn’t even know she’d died until three years after the event, when the woman who looked after me at Kibbutz Zippori in the north told me the news. The woman’s name was Rachel Rabinowitz and she became a mother who hadn’t borne me. This woman taught me to stop asking questions about my family and turned me into a boy who’d come from the sea and become the adopted son of this land, his muscles suckling at the sun, which tanned his body with a dappled brown, like a brand on his white skin.

  (As you can see, I’ve turned my own story upside down and transformed it into a Jewish one: my father, Hasan Dannoun, died in the War of the Nakba; my mother lived in a shack in Haifa with her husband – her silence was a sign of the madness of regret that devoured her life – and I became my own son. It was enough for me simply to turn one story upside down to find I’d landed in another. I didn’t even need to make up the details because as far as I could see they were identical.)

  I decided to write about the fall of Lydda because my story has to begin somewhere, even though I have no memory of the city’s fall on July 12, 1948. The tales I heard from others won’t serve to present a complete picture of that terrible day, which Dr. Mustafa Zahlan used to call the Day of Desolation.

  None of the people of Lydda has a complete picture of the city’s fall, but I decided to collect the fragments and write a story full of bloody stains and memory gaps.