by Elias Khoury
(Why would a person volunteer to live in the humiliation of the ghetto, which would accompany successive generations of Palestinians from the first establishment of the Hebrew state? I confess I have no idea. Even after the move my mother and I made, following her marriage, to Haifa, where I discovered the stories of the dozens of infiltrators who had returned, at peril to their lives from the bullets of the Israeli border guards, I confess I still don’t know! And when Ma’moun alluded in his lecture at New York University to the story of the clandestine return from Lebanon of the family of the poet Mahmoud Darwish to the village of al-Birwa, which had been demolished and bulldozed – a return that I regard as indicative of the instinct to stay put that may be observed in both groups and individuals – I sensed the absurdity of everything, and the impotence of language to express.)
The Israeli officer informed the people of the ghetto that work would commence on the morning of Sunday, July 18. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. The day of rest in this country is now Saturday. No one may work. Work begins on Sunday morning. You will hear three gunshots at 6 AM. The teams have to be ready then, and soldiers will go with you to begin the cleanup of the city.” In a quiet, monotonous voice, the officer explained the tasks of the different teams and said that two armed soldiers would accompany each. He defined the work as falling into three categories: removing bodies from the streets and houses and burying them (two teams); collecting foodstuffs from the city’s shops (one team); clearing the streets of barricades, stones, and earth (one team). The fifth team would have the task of cleaning the Israeli military command headquarters which it had been decided was to be in the houses of Hasan Dahmash – a large house surrounded by a spacious garden – and Said al-Huneidi, opposite.
With the start of work, the people of the ghetto ran headlong into the truth of what had happened. The first days had been like a dream. Even the killing of the sparrow boy and his funeral had taken on, in the memory of the people, the vague shape of a phantom.
“Then, suddenly, we discovered we were living in a cemetery,” said Ghassan Batheish on the return of his group from the fields of death that overlay the city’s streets.
Ma’moun never spoke to me of those days. He abandoned me when I was seven and left the country never to return. Why did he tell me when we met in New York that he’d told me all the stories before he left and had hidden nothing from me except for the detail of how he’d come across me, which he’d left to my mother to tell me in her own way, as she’d promised she would? Was it because of that promise that my mother Manal seemed confused the night I left, when all she did was give me the will, hold back her tears, as usual, and whisper a few barely comprehensible words?
I don’t remember Ma’moun telling me anything. Or at least, I do remember him telling me how Ghassan Batheish had come upon his mother and his crippled father dead in their house. I think – if memory doesn’t play me false – that I’d returned to the house from the school the Israelis had opened after Ma’moun’s was closed. I was sad and said, “I want my father!” and I cried. I don’t remember exactly what had happened: probably one of my fellow pupils had said, “Poor guy! He’s an orphan. His father’s dead.” That was the day that Ma’moun told me about my father’s heroic exploits and his martyrdom and that the fate of Hasan Dannoun had been better than that of those whose bodies had been left to rot under the July sun in the city’s streets because he’d been wrapped in a shroud and buried as a person should be buried. He also told me the story of Ghassan, who still to that day had nightmares because he’d come upon his parents, bloated with death, in his own home. The story etched itself into my consciousness and death for me thereafter was a swelling that afflicted the body. That day, I was very afraid and asked my mother if I too was going to die. She answered that everyone died in the end.
“Including me?” I asked her.
“For sure, son, but it’s still early. You’re still young.”
“You mean children die too?” I asked.
“I don’t know, son, but you aren’t going to die. I’m with you. Don’t be afraid.”
But I was afraid. I remember that when I was six, I announced that I was Lord of the Wind. My favorite game at home was exercising my power over nature. It would rain because I had ordered it to rain. The sun rose because I had ordered it to rise. And my mother believed me, or at least pretended to. When I played Lord of the Wind with my comrades at school, they made fun of me, but that in no way shook my conviction that I could ride the wind and move the clouds however I wished. And I convinced myself that the Lord of the Wind did not die.
Ma’moun claimed to have told me everything. Maybe he meant he’d told Manal, I don’t know! But, here in New York, when I read the few pages in Isbir Munayyir’s book about Lydda in which he briefly describes the removal of the corpses by the teams the Israelis formed from the young men of the city, I sensed that some memory within me had awoken from a deep slumber, I know not how! Are these scenes that I see now before my eyes the sum of what Manal told me about the days of the ghetto when we were living in Haifa after her marriage? I don’t know, but I can recount the entire story, with all its details – which today have become a tattoo drawn with the ink of memory – to any who want to hear. And I shall tell it, mercilessly. Who am I to be merciful to the victims? And what does mercy mean when all of human history is fashioned out of cruelty and savagery?
At six in the morning of Sunday, July 18, the inhabitants of the ghetto heard three shots fired, and in less than five minutes the five teams had assembled in the yard of the mosque, accompanied by Iliyya Batshoun and Khalid Hassouna. Before they set off, Iliyya Batshoun proposed to the Israeli officer that work should begin at seven, because about half the young men took part in filling the water barrels at six. Captain Moshe, however, did not take the question seriously; he raised his eyebrows and said no. Then, with a wave of his hand, the groups went off to their jobs, while Batshoun and Hassouna returned to the home of the head of the committee to discuss how to reorganize the morning barrel teams.
Work in the group charged with appropriating foodstuffs from the shops was easy. Ahmad al-Zaghloul, who led this group, recounted how he’d gone with his comrades and two armed Israeli soldiers to the beginning of the street, where Israeli lorries were waiting for them, and that he’d been amazed at the quantity of foodstuffs the city’s shopkeepers had stored away in expectation of war.
“Tinned goods of every kind and grains and oil, and we were dying of hunger and had to load the Israeli lorries, which were headed for Tel Aviv. At the same time, we were forbidden to take anything because the eyes of the Jewish soldiers were trained on us and the Israeli soldier said we couldn’t take even a piece of straw, or else…”
Ahmad al-Zaghloul’s statement was inaccurate: the ghetto’s inhabitants weren’t dying of hunger, as he claimed, because the Israelis had allowed them to take the stocks they’d found in the houses bordering the barbed-wire triangle. They were, however, terrified of running out of food, and it never occurred to them that, four months after their ghettoization and after the city’s houses and stores had been cleaned out, they would be permitted to work as day laborers in the citrus and olive groves. You should have seen what it did to Iliyya Batshoun when, at the end of his days, he was forced to work as a laborer on his own land, and how “Hajj Sababa,” as the ghetto’s inhabitants used to call him, would carry the burden of his sixty years on his drooping shoulders, sluggish in his movements, exhausted by the work, and never ceasing to curse the fate that had turned him into a mere manual laborer standing in the morning lineup next to men who lived in the camps and had been brought in from the area around Nazareth.
Ma’moun said that the committee head, the bridegroom whose wedding had been the moment of greatest joy in the ghetto’s night, had been transformed into a man of despair who trembled from grief and humiliation and cursed the hour in which he had driven away his son Iskandar when he came back to
inquire why his father hadn’t asked to be reunited with his wife – only to find that the old man, not satisfied with acting, at the end of his days, like a child, had also decided to change his religion!
It was Ghassan Batheish who invented the word that was destined to enter the Hebrew vernacular when he yelled in Iskandar’s face, “Enough! Leave the guy alone! Go tell your mother sababa!”
“What do you mean sababa? This is divine anger!” Iskandar yelled, spitting on the ground as though in his father’s face. “Screw sababa and screw this old bastard who’s decided to behave like a child in his dotage!”
Sababa then became a Hebrew word, I’ve no idea how, even though it’s classical Arabic. In Hebrew it’s now a synonym for “pleasure” combined with English “cool” – a word plucked from the Arabic lexicon to which it belongs and which allots it the meanings of “love” and “passionate yearning” to be transformed into a Hebrew word that encompasses the senses of “pleasure” and “everything’s fine.”
Hajj Iliyya Batshoun’s secret name thus became “Hajj Sababa.” Whenever anyone talked about him, they referred to him by his new name – even his wife Khuloud was in on it, though she’d limit herself, when she heard the title, to making a gesture of connivance with her hand and giving an ambiguous smile without saying anything. All of them conspired to make sure that Hajj Sababa went to his grave without knowing his new name.
The story doesn’t lie in this name that became a source of jokes about the old man who’d been stricken by passion and blinded by it to the difference in age between him and Khuloud, who was twenty-six, which is to say forty years his junior. It lies rather in the way the old man addressed his grown son, who’d crossed the border illegally to look for him.
“You’re a grown man and I’m a grown man, so you have to understand me and not listen to your mother’s ravings. See how my hands are trembling?” Hajj Iliyya Batshoun said.
“It’s nerves, Father, and because of your age,” Iskandar said.
“Listen, son, and try to understand,” Hajj Iliyya Batshoun said. “Now, you tell me why, when I hold Khuloud, the trembling stops? Look, son, go and tell your mother I’m dead. I don’t want to upset her, but what’s happened has happened and there’s no going back. I’m married according to the custom of God and His prophet and that’s the end of it. I want to begin my life over again.”
The son couldn’t understand how the man could talk about a new beginning to a life that had reached its end in the midst of the total destruction that had befallen the country and turned Lydda into ruins. “Screw ‘your gray hairs and your foolish airs’! What kind of a person changes his religion at the end of his life so he can get married? You’re going to have a lot to answer to before God!”
With Khuloud, the old, would-be-young, man discovered the meaning of “the pleasures of married life,” which his shyness and sense of guilt before his wife when they made love had hidden from him. With Khuloud, the man felt he’d never made love before and that his previous marriage had been a kind of bachelorhood. Khuloud, whom the inhabitants of the ghetto had seen in ripped clothes, her matted hair covered with dust, and who had performed her sad dance in front of the soldiers, carrying her daughter, whose feet were covered with feces, had become another woman. Her wedding to Hajj Iliyya was the ghetto’s greatest moment of joy. It was autumn, and the city was preparing to celebrate the “Lydda Feast,” meaning the feast of St. George, or al-Khudr, on November 16, which was shared and which Christians and Muslims celebrated together. At this moment, people heard Iliyya Batshoun ask for the hand of Khuloud in the courtyard of the church. No one remarked on the decision by the man who formerly had dedicated himself to his family and was known for his infatuation with the rites of the Christian religion, especially those of Easter. How did it come about? Why did no one stand up to “Hajj Sababa” and tell him, “This is shameful! You’re an old man! At your age, one should be looking to make a good end and devoting himself to worship, forgetting the lusts of the body.” Even the priest kept his mouth shut before Hajj Iliyya’s decision to make a public declaration of his conversion to Islam so that he could take a second wife. Everyone indulged Hajj Sababa because they were looking for a moment of illusory joy.
During the Lydda Feast, the first to be held after the destruction of the city and the creation of the new state, the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem did not come. The patriarch was in the Old City of Jerusalem, which had come under the control of the Jordanian army, and his displacement to Israel would have called for special arrangements, so the matter was overlooked. At the same time, the Lydda church was packed with the refugees who were living in it and wasn’t fit to receive the solemn patriarchal procession. On top of that an inflow of people from the various parts of their new country to Lydda was impossible in view of the military rule that had been imposed on the villages and fenced-in ghettos that had been set up in the cities. So no one came. All the same, and in spite of everything, the feast of St. George was not a sad occasion. The chivalric saint who slew the dragon proved capable of creating a festive atmosphere, and all the more so because the Israelis allowed the inhabitants of the Station District to come to the church – at which point the inhabitants of the ghetto discovered that they were not the only ones who had stayed behind. There was, in fact, another ghetto in the city, also holding about five hundred souls and made up of the men who worked on the railway, along with their families. It had been decided to allow them to stay because Israel needed to have the trains working.
St. George brought the two ghettos together. Three buses arrived at the entrance of the ghetto and the passengers got out and mixed with its inhabitants, who’d gathered at the gate. At that instant, the church bells began ringing and instead of the procession of priests that used to walk in front of the patriarch and cut a path through the crowd, dividing it into two halves, a phalanx of young men and boys formed in front of the priest, and scents of incense blended with Byzantine chants.
Amidst the sounds of the hymns, Iliyya Batshoun turned to Khuloud, who was standing at his side, and asked for her hand. The words, “Marry me, Khuloud, I love you,” pronounced in a loud voice, came as a shock to Khuloud, who’d been living under the man’s wing like an adopted daughter. However, the smell of life that erupted along with the incense and the ringing of the bells had inspired a sense of new beginnings in the sixty-year-old. He told Khalid Hassouna that life began with Woman, that life was female, and that this woman “has brought me back to life.”
Khalid Hassouna tried to explain to his friend that people would make fun of him and that he would end up a wreck.
“Khuloud is a frisky mare and you’re not the man to ride her. You’re old and you’ll never do it!”
But Iliyya asserted that a true horseman died in the saddle. He said he was going to die, because death was a reality, and he’d rather die with his head on his young wife’s thigh than alone.
People said that Khuloud married him because she wanted his money and land, but the young widow would later recount, when she told Manal about her husband, who had indeed died in the saddle, that when she heard him asking her to marry him, she felt a frisson of passion. “I swear, Manal, I’d never felt anything like it before. I’d married my cousin because he was my cousin and we had children because having children is part of being married but – I don’t know how to tell you this exactly, it’s mad – but with Hajj Iliyya, I went nuts. I swear I’d never seen anything like it – tenderness, and kindness, and then, when he screwed me and lay on top of me, I’d feel like I was a queen. Do you know what it means to be a queen? And he’d act like a young man and tell me stories and we’d laugh. Let me tell you a secret: laughter’s the secret. Love means when you feel you want to laugh with the man. Like you were a tree, and the man is plucking fruit off you, and you laugh.”
Khuloud told my mother the secret of Hajj Sababa’s death in her arms – a secret that was known to all, b
ut that, in my mother’s book, could never be divulged.
Even the business of Hajj Iliyya becoming a Muslim went off without difficulty, as though he’d become a Muslim and remained a Christian: instead of going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, passing the three days of Christ’s death there, and coming back carrying the holy flame from the tomb of the Messiah (which had become impossible after the establishment of the Hebrew state and with East Jerusalem remaining under Arab control), he took to spending the same three days in the church of Our Master al-Khudr and returning home filled with the joy of the resurrection.
The story of Hajj Iliyya’s funeral, five years after he married, perhaps sums up the man’s life best. The wire had been taken away a year after being put in place, some of the ghetto’s inhabitants had returned to their original houses and others had found themselves renting from the Jewish National Fund a house that had belonged to one of the city’s inhabitants who had been expelled. Most of the inhabitants of the ghetto, however, stayed there, as though they’d come to belong to a single tribe. Lydda, which filled with Jewish settlers coming from Eastern Europe, would be divided into two cities and would remain so: the city of the ghetto alongside the city of the immigrant Jews.