by Elias Khoury
“What’s that?” yelled the soldier.
“It’s…it’s from my grove,” Ibrahim stammered.
“Throw everything on the ground and get going!”
However, the bald, fifty-year-old man, his lips glistening orange, refused to throw away the contents of his sack.
“This is my land and my fathers’ land, and this is my grove.” The soldier ordered everyone to stop and offered him a choice between the oranges and the water. “Throw them away!” the soldier yelled. “Either you throw away what’s in the sack or there’s no water.”
“Throw them away and let us get on with it!” yelled Hatim.
But the man sat down on the ground, his sack in front of him, and put his head between his hands. His body began to shake.
Ghassan Batheish approached the sack and pulled it to one side. “It’s okay, mister. Let’s go now.”
The soldier motioned with his rifle and the barrels began to roll but Ibrahim remained seated where he was.
“Go!” the soldier yelled.
The guy rested his weight on his hands in an attempt to get up, but fell to the ground and started to crawl toward the sack.
The soldier went up to the sack and kicked it; the oranges rolled out, and he trod on them. Some exploded beneath his feet but others – the ones whose peel had turned hard – remained resistant and the young men watched Ibrahim as he grabbed the hardened oranges that slipped out from beneath the soldier’s feet and put them down the front of his shirt.
Manal said the arrival of the full barrels was like a wedding. “Everyone was in a state of delirious joy, except for Ibrahim, who went off to one side, cut an orange in two, looked at it, and asked me to come close, with Adam. He took an orange and squeezed it into your mouth, and that was the first drop of orange juice to enter your belly. He gave me all the oranges and told me, ‘Take them for the boy who has no father,’ and went into the mosque.”
Three months after this incident, when the olive-harvesting season began and the head of the committee tried to get permission from the Israelis to allow the owners of the olive groves to pick their harvest, the people of the ghetto realized what it meant when they said that the land had become the property of the state.
The city’s military governor, Shmarya Guttman, whom Iliyya Batshoun and Khalid Hassouna met to ask to facilitate the people’s going out of the ghetto to pick the olives, explained that the city’s lands were now in the custody of the state because they’d been entered in the list of absentee properties.
“What absentees?” Khalid asked. “There are four men in the ghetto who have lands planted with olives and here we are, present, and all we want is permission to get to our land.”
“Out of the question!” the military governor said. “You are, legally speaking, absent.”
“You mean we’re not here?” Iliyya asked.
“Exactly!”
“But we are here! You mean we’ve turned into ghosts?” Khalid Hassouna responded.
“Like you’re ghosts,” the military governor answered. “I believe you are going to be called, legally speaking, ‘present absentees.’”
“I don’t understand,” said Iliyya.
“Neither do I,” the military governor said. “But that’s the law, and you are forbidden to go to the fields and pick the olives.”
“We can pick them and give them to you, but the olives are not allowed to remain on the tree,” said Iliyya.
“That’s none of your business. The state knows how to take care of its property.”
—4—
AFTER FOOD AND water came fear – a fear that traced itself on the walls of silence. The city, which, in the three months before it fell, had lived in the midst of the tumult of the refugees from nearby villages and the sounds of the battles raging on all sides, sank, all of a sudden, into the silence of desolation. During the first days of their residence in that small wire-fenced area, the ghetto dwellers failed to notice how heavily that silence weighed. However, once the celebrations – punctuated by staccato ululations – of the arrival of water barrels and the bringing in of food in sufficient quantities from the houses of the old city were over, the people awoke to the terrifying silence that enveloped their city, now that it had been emptied of its inhabitants. The people’s fear took root in the sounds of silence that occupied the ghetto’s long nights and days, and they were terrified. They began to talk as though whispering.
It is impossible for me to describe the life of the city without using the term “whispers of silence.” Even the crying of infants was transformed into a low moaning. I say infants but I’m thinking of one specific baby, named Adam Dannoun. All the same, as I weave the memory of silence from my mother’s words, I feel that the baby I was then wasn’t alone. On the contrary, he was all the children of the world and those children had been struck dumb and forced to live and die in silence.
I didn’t die. My mother told me that I’d been on the verge of death because I hadn’t tasted milk for two weeks – the period from the fall of the city to the discovery of Abu Hasan’s cow. She said that discovering clean water and bringing it back from Ibrahim al-Nimr’s citrus grove had saved my life; my body had gone dry and my crying was without tears. I had closed my eyes and entered the night of death, and when the water came and she sprinkled it on my face and gave me the juice of an orange and lentil water to drink, I opened my eyes and cried.
I didn’t ask why she hadn’t suckled me. The question didn’t occur to me and I took it on trust when my mother told me that the ghetto had drained eyes of tears and breasts of milk.
The water was the first joyful moment after the days of fear and loss that followed the fall of the city and the fencing in of the ghetto. With the chuckling of the water in the rolling barrels, the people of the ghetto felt that in spite of everything that had happened, life had begun to flow again. They wiped their eyes with the water and saw they were still alive. At a meeting of the ghetto committee, Hajj Iliyya Batshoun wept as he said that the decision to allow the young men to fetch the water meant that “we will be staying where we are and not driven like cattle into the wilderness” that had swallowed the inhabitants of Lydda when they were driven with bullets from their city.
“When the young men saw the explosion of water,” Ghassan Batheish said, “they went mad.” Hatim al-Laqqis took off his clothes, knelt in front of the pump, and began writhing around under the cold, gushing water. He took a stone and scraped his body, emitting gasps that stirred in everyone the shuddering thrill of the encounter with water. Instead of cleaning the barrels, they rushed to strip off their clothes and began issuing mysterious noises from between their clenched teeth, as though they’d lost the faculty of speech.
Two Israeli soldiers threw themselves under the water fully dressed in their khakis, as though they too had fallen under the water’s spell.
“Drink!” yelled Ma’moun. “It’s the best-tasting water in the world!”
Two bullets were fired into the air. The Israeli soldiers withdrew from the Lyddan baptismal celebration and silence reigned.
“Quickly! Quickly!” Corporal Naftali shouted at the half-naked Palestinians.
“Quickly, lads!” Ghassan Batheish said.
And the cleaning of the barrels began.
“Enough!” yelled the Israeli corporal, who ordered the young men to fill the barrels.
Then they started the rolling of the barrels, which proved to be exhausting. The distance separating the grove from the ghetto was no more than eight hundred meters, but it was an uneven earth track, full of stones. When the young men reached the ghetto, their naked chests were covered with sweat, and they felt the need to bathe again.
The barrels were placed at the three places of assembly – the mosque, church, and hospital – and the people formed lines to the water, and drank and filled their containers.
Ma’moun was heard shouting that the barrel that had been placed in front of the church-bell rope was for children only.
The people of the ghetto lived this way for an entire year. The young men would rise at 6 AM, fill the barrels and roll them back, and at 5 PM they’d take the barrels back to the grove to fill them again.
There, in the water grove (as the people called Ibrahim al-Nimr’s citrus plantation), they would rub their bodies with herbs and wash off the city’s smell.
—5—
WHEN DID THE smell go away? Or did it not disappear and the people just got used to it?
“People are dogs, son, they’ll get used to anything,” said the elderly man who’d been hiding out in the garden of his house when he heard the voices of the young men speaking Arabic and pushed himself over the ground toward them, supporting himself in a sitting position, using his arms.
“Get up, old fellow,” Isam al-Kayyali said.
“I can’t, son,” said the old man, who was called Ahmad Hijazi, and when Isam took him by the arm in an attempt to stand him up, he heard him moan and whisper hoarsely, “Mother!” but he couldn’t move. The young men put him onto the first-aid stretcher that they used to transport the corpses and brought him to the mosque.
Isam told the members of the committee how they’d come across the man hiding underneath a sweet acacia tree, living off weeds he collected from the land and drinking dirty water that had collected in a small basin in the garden. The young man burst into a hysterical laugh as he recounted how the elderly man had called out for his mother, like a small child.
“Come on now! Could he really have thought he was still a child? Damn it, who clings on to life like that? It’s ridiculous! I swear I couldn’t believe it.”
Dr. Zahlan, who was making an inspection at the mosque, rebuked the youth and told him to be quiet. “We’re all children, son. One is born a child and dies a child.”
(Going over Dr. Zahlan’s words now, I feel terror. I write about a collective disaster only to discover in the end that what I’m doing now, which is restoring a memory that cannot be restored, is preparing to meet my second childhood here in my old age. My first childhood appears as though drowned in the fog of memory. Despite all the tragedies surrounding it, I feel tender toward it, as though the fog has served to veil its bitterness. The fog of memory veils pain, no matter how serious it may have been. But this second childhood, at whose threshold I have now arrived, has been overwhelmed with so much grief and suffering that I am left to face death alone. It seems that true death cannot be collective even if it occurs in the middle of a massacre. Every death is a unique event, and it may be that death’s most eloquent statement is that its protagonists cannot recount it. I do not write of collective death in Lydda in order to gloss over individual pain: I ought to write each separate death as a particular experience, which is why, to be true to my project, I should write a book that has no end, each name that occurs in it forming a complete story with its many details, which is something neither I nor anyone before me has known how to do. That is why the prophets chose to write wise sayings and proverbs and why men of letters have ended up claiming to be prophets who write about others. Not me though. I, in all modesty, am writing my own story, and all these stories that I am recalling are my mirrors – and woe betide me, for my mirrors begin and end with death!)
I don’t know the name of my biological mother. I’ll call her Rawd so I can tell my Yemeni poet that even though I’ve abandoned the attempt to tell his tale as a metaphor, I’ve still taken him as a friend and a comrade. I won’t allow the story of this woman to be merely a line in Ma’moun’s narrative about a child moaning on the breast of a woman who looked as though she were sleeping. Ma’moun didn’t pay the woman enough attention to be able to describe her to me, but I’ve decided she looked like Dalia, with her translucent duskiness, her thick eyebrows, her large honey-colored eyes, and her lips pursed like a rose. And now, as I write these words, I see myself as a child with pus-filled, half-closed eyes and small hands clasped about her long neck, whose crying only she can hear. My real mother is a woman of stories, who vanishes into words, and my childhood, which began on her dry breast, will lead me to a death resembling hers. My mother Rawd died alone, a stranger surrounded by the throngs and the clamor of the displaced, while I shall die here, alone, a stranger in the midst of the clamor of this extraordinarily beautiful city that has decided to expel me from the circle of those who deserve to live.
I have, I swear, no desire to disparage New York: it is a home for those who have no home. But I feel the loneliness of longing. Only those who yearn can understand how longing splits their souls in two and casts them into loneliness.
I long for her so much I could cry out “Mother!” like Ahmad Hijazi when he saw the young men and understood that he was powerless and alone. I want to cry out “Mother!” so that I can die, my mouth filled with the taste of the juice of the oranges that Ibrahim al-Nimr gave me to drink when he returned from the water grove.
Ahmad Hijazi, who was sixty-eight years old, recounted how everyone fled and he’d found himself alone in the house. He said they’d forgotten about him in the terrified stampede.
“I heard shouting. I was sitting alone in the garden, picking up the sweet acacia blossoms that had fallen on the ground. Of course I was scared. I was scared because I couldn’t understand what was going on around me. My blood seemed to have frozen in my veins, so I stayed put and listened to the ruckus and the noise. Israeli soldiers must have entered the house. I knew that from the wailing of Hasaniya, my son Maarouf’s wife. I heard her crying, ‘I beg you, mister!’ I don’t know what happened exactly but I heard a shot and the sound of running feet and then everything went quiet. Somebody in the house must surely have been hurt, because when I went in I saw the tiles were covered with red spots, but I couldn’t find anyone. I sat down alone not knowing what I was supposed to do. My sons had forgotten they had a father and had run away with everyone else and I was here, with sounds of firing starting and stopping around me, and fear. I was afraid to stay on my own in the house and afraid to go out onto the street, so I went back to the garden and lived on my own.”
Isam al-Kayyali said the elderly man was like a skeleton because he weighed nothing, and he rocked back and forth on the stretcher, moaning quietly.
At the mosque, he sat next to a pillar and spoke to no one. At first, he refused to eat, claiming, when they brought him a plate of mjaddara, that he wasn’t hungry. He dozed off for a few minutes, then he opened his eyes and quickly devoured the plate of food before curling up and going to sleep again.
In this first month of life in the ghetto, there was a corner in the mosque that the young people called “the old folks’ corner,” where there were three men and five women. Ahmad Hijazi was the youngest of them, and the guy, who recovered his strength within a few days, started behaving as though he was the only competent person in the group. He would negotiate on their behalf and take care to see that they were ensured enough food and water. Umm Fawwaz, who was eighty-eight, played the role of both mother and child. Those living in the old folks’ corner called her Mama but this mother was as naughty as a little girl. Her senility had no impact on how energetic she was – a woman tall and slim, who, despite the slight stoop to her shoulders, walked with her back straight, got up early, prepared breakfast for her new family, and spent most of her time singing, weeping, and wailing. No one knew anything about her family because the only thing she could remember was her name, which was Umm Fawwaz, and when they asked her about her son Fawwaz, she would look into the distance and shrug as though she didn’t care.
The young men had picked the group of old people up one by one from the roofs of houses or the gardens where they were hiding, and when Khalid Hassouna tried to question them about their families in order to fill in the Red Cross forms so that a search could be made for their families, they all refused to cooperate. Ahmad Hi
jazi said he’d decided to stay in the city because it was their city and none of them would ever leave the motherland to become refugees.
When Ahmad had finished his patriotic speech, Munib al-Shayib, who was eighty years old and semiparalyzed, spat and yelled, “Screw the motherland and screw this life! Screw the children who leave their parents behind like dogs! No, I swear to God I don’t want anything – not the motherland, not Palestine, not children, and not all this shitty food!”
—6—
THE STUPEFACTION THAT accompanied the first two days of the “ghettoization” of the population and their corralling into a narrow, barbed-wire-enclosed space quickly dissipated in the maelstrom of the shift to forced work that Captain Moshe imposed on the ghetto’s young men and boys.
At 10 AM on Friday, July 16, Moshe arrived at the mosque courtyard, fired three shots from his revolver, took the loudspeaker in his hand, and ordered all men and youths over the age of fifteen to assemble.
Moshe announced that five teams were to be formed to clean the city, each consisting of five persons. Two of the soldiers standing in the yard advanced and picked out the twenty-five youngest men and divided them into groups. The captain ordered all the other men to leave except for the head of the local committee, Iliyya Batshoun, because he was to be held accountable for the youths’ good conduct; he made it clear that any shortcomings in their work performance would have dire consequences.
The people understood that “dire consequences” meant they would be expelled from the city, and they made up their minds to remain. I, today, feel the same bemusement that the Israeli troops must have felt when faced with the mass of the ghetto’s inhabitants. Why did they stay? Suppose they stayed by accident when they found themselves in the square formed by the Great Mosque and the church, which Israeli troops hadn’t approached following the appalling massacre they had carried out at the Dahmash Mosque. All the same, why did they insist on turning the accident of their presence into a matter of life or death? In fact, those who left voluntarily following the establishment of the ghetto were a minority whose number could be counted on the fingers of one hand, while those who came to the ghetto after its establishment amounted to around a hundred, some being brought from houses where they’d been hiding, others coming from caves in the neighboring villages, and some – the smallest number – sneaking in across the new border. They came to live the life of the ghetto and of exile within their own city. They preferred to stay there; indeed, they actually chose that particular “here,” as though the homing instinct was stronger than any fears or the harsh conditions of life.