Yousif did not believe in military heroes, but if he had to name one it had to be Abd al-Qadir—an honest man doing honest work. The Grand Mufti’s cousin, Abd al-Qadir was a seasoned soldier with an impeccable reputation. Basim and his late father-in-law, Maha’s father, had served with him during the Revolt of 1936 and had come to love him for his courage, patriotism, and determination. Yousif grew up linking Basim’s name to Abd al-Qadir’s, knowing that they represented Palestine’s finest fighting spirit. Of late, Yousif had often seen Abd al-Qadir’s picture in the newspapers. Handsome, stout, and with bandoleer criss-crossing his chest, he looked like the Palestinians’ best hope to thwart the Zionists’ pipe dream. A week earlier Abd al-Qadir had gone to Damascus pleading to the Arab leaders meeting there for immediate help. When they balked at his urgent request and condescended to give him only a few guns and a few rounds of ammunition—not nearly enough for his few hundred volunteers—he reportedly stormed out of the room, shouting: “The blood of Palestine is on your heads.”
A fresh wave of morning slumber caressed Yousif’s eyes. Then he heard the muffled ringing of the phone. Another sick call for the doctor, he thought, turning over on his side, wondering how he could help, surrendering to another moment of sleep . . . With all the fighting at Bab al-Wad, only twenty miles away, surely he could run food supplies . . . medications . . .
“Wake up, Yousif, wake up,” his mother said, banging on this bedroom door. “The Zionists are back, the Zionists are back!”
Yousif jumped out of his bed, thinking it was a bad dream. But the banging on the door was persistent, his mother’s voice real. He opened the door, expecting the Zionists to be running through the corridor.
“What are you saying?” he asked, pulling up his pajama pants.
“The Zionists . . . they’re here,” she answered, gesturing for him to hurry.
He followed her to her bedroom. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed talking on the phone.
“It’s true,” the doctor said, hanging up. “That was the mayor.”
His mother told him what she had heard from the milkwoman. What had happened to Abu Ziad’s bus a week earlier happened again this morning.
“You mean the terrorists killed more passengers?” Yousif wanted to know.
“No one has been killed—yet,” the doctor said, rising. “This time we were ready for them.”
Yousif hesitated, surprised. “Ready? How?”
“According to the mayor,” his father said, wiping his glasses with the edge of his pajama top, “Basim and few others have been waiting nights at the same spot for the terrorists to return. This morning they did.”
“I thought Basim was at Bab al-Wad,” Yousif said.
“So did I,” his father said. “But apparently we’re in firm control there and at the village of Kastal overlooking it. So Basim took a few of the men to guard the Ardallah-Jaffa road.”
They walked out of the room, with Yousif pressing for concrete details. But his parents knew very little.
They ended up on the front balcony, facing Uncle Boulus’s house. The roosters were crowing, and the muezzin was chanting the Qur’an. Yousif looked at his watch. It was only 6:30, but the neighborhood was already humming with people. Men and women were outside, jabbering and gesturing across their yards. A few men hurried past the Safis’ gate. Yousif rushed to question them. Men of all ages, even some children, were approaching from the direction of the flour-mill. Some were in slippers, others in pajamas. Some carried broomsticks and axe handles.
“Aren’t you coming, Yousif?” a boy from school asked, his tone cheerful.
“Where?” Yousif asked, bewildered.
“To catch the terrorists,” Ribhi said. “They’re trapped in a field not too far from here. We’re all going to catch them.”
“Basim is already there.”
“He needs help.”
It sounded bizarre. Yet Yousif did not want to miss out on whatever was happening. He ran back to the house, slipped on his clothes, and hurried out. His parents tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. Outside the gate, he headed against the flow.
“Wrong way,” a sixty-year-old shepherd told him, pointing west.
“I’m going to get a friend,” Yousif answered.
Minutes later he ran into Amin and his father. They were rushing along with the crowd.
“I was coming to get you,” Yousif said.
“Hell, the whole town is up in arms,” the stonecutter said.
“How did they find out?” Yousif asked.
“From the bus driver, Abu Ziad,” Amin said. “At the sound of the first bullet he turned around and came back to alert the rest of us.”
Yousif was impressed. “But the terrorists and Basim’s men are armed. What are we going to do with bare hands?”
“Not every morning do we get our hands on some real terrorists,” the old man answered, with relish. “I want to see us have a go at them.”
Yousif and Amin exchanged looks.
As they walked along with the crowd, Yousif had a hard time reconciling the seriousness of the matter and the unorthodox approach of the townspeople. So many people were in the posse—almost two hundred. What struck him most was their festive mood. The sticks and brooms and pipes and crow bars they were carrying belied the unnatural glow on their faces. What was going on? Was this a celebration? Even Raouf, the town’s only deaf-mute, was walking along with his parents. Even women were in the stampede: young and old, in modern dresses, in native garments, in curlers, some with housecoats thrown on their backs.
The procession reminded Yousif of picking season, when the villagers and landowners would rush to the fields to pick figs or olives. It reminded him of the Saturday before Easter when the burning “light” would be brought from the Holy Sepulchre, when the multitudes would rush to the outskirts of town with their candles. It reminded him of 1946, when many of Ardallah’s men had returned from America and families had rushed to the harbors in Haifa and Jaffa to welcome their loved ones. The same kind of exhilaration was in the people’s walk that morning. He looked around and saw Sami Awad walking fast, dabs of shaving-cream on his face and ear lobe, a towel around his neck and a cane in his hand.
At the outskirts of Ardallah, hundreds more people were already there, mainly watching. Yousif could hear gunshots in the distance. The battle scene was no bigger than fifteen football fields, cut up in squares and rectangles and—more often than not—terraced. On the right he could see two local men chasing an ambusher who had abandoned half of his Arab guise and was running for his life. On the right were men swinging at each other with all their might and tumbling over bushes or piles of stone. The new arrivals dispersed on both sides of the road. The hills seemed dotted with men and women from the other villages. Everyone seemed determined to block every conceivable path the enemy might take. Yousif and Amin did not know which way to go. They turned left and crossed several rocky vine groves. They jumped over stone walls and stood on a low hill to watch.
A hundred yards in front of them were two men hiding behind two crumbling stone walls and firing at each other like cowboys in American Westerns. The boooooom would soon turn into a zzzzzing as a bullet chipped a rock above one of the combatants’ heads. Yousif could hear loud gasps mingled with shouts and see men leaping and chasing each other. A retreating man fell and kept rolling down a steep hill. Some of the housewives in curlers and robes split the sky with their trilling and cheered on those after him.
Yousif’s reverie was shattered by a burst of applause and shouts of joy. He turned to look, nudging Amin. Short and mustachioed Aziz Malouf, the town’s best known hunter, was passing by, flush with excitement, his sleek-looking hound lolling its tongue and panting at his side. How many times, Yousif recalled, he had seen Aziz with quails or pheasants or rabbits attached to his belt, pulling it down to his hips. That was the way he had swaggered after a successful hunt. As Aziz crossed the field below with his shotgun slung over his shoulder,
Yousif noticed the same look about him. He trembled.
“Anyone killed?” Yousif asked the bare-chested Aziz.
“If not, there soon will be,” Aziz boasted.
“It’s better than hunting rabbits, eh, Aziz?” the baker, Abul-Banat, asked.
“You bet,” Aziz said, taking longer strides.
Yousif could see a jeep speeding on a dirt road, a column of dust rising behind it. Suddenly there was a movement close to the stone wall on which Yousif was standing. It sounded like an animal squeezing its way between the wall and the bushes. Yousif looked down but saw nothing. Moments later, he heard a rustle in the dry leaves. Again he looked, but couldn’t detect the source. This time, however, he noticed a bulging curve in the wall and decided to look beyond it. He stepped off the wall and walked around.
A small man was crouching between the wall and the wild overgrowth. Instinctively, Yousif wanted to pounce. But then, what would he do with him? Uncertain, he hesitated a second too long. Sensing his presence, the man started running.
“Here’s one . . . here’s one!” Yousif yelled, going after him.
The terrorist ran up the hill, where the field was full of olive trees.
Yousif chased him full tilt, but the man was faster. Afraid of losing him, Yousif looked back for help. Several men had jumped off the stone wall and were now joining the chase. Mehdi, a lean fellow of about thirty, passed Yousif and gained on the fugitive. They zigzagged behind each other, and circled around a tree. The terrorist tricked Mehdi and ran off again. But to Yousif’s surprise he climbed a dark, silvery olive tree. What a mistake, Yousif thought.
Within seconds, several Arabs were under the tree waiting for the terrorist to come down. Middle-aged Jubran, the quilt maker, tried to climb after him. But the fellow stomped on his hand, forcing him to release the branch. Yousif shook the tree but the frightened man wrapped his arms around the tree trunk. Hanania, the jeweler, broke off a long, thin limb and started switching him on the leg. The man climbed another notch until he became unreachable. More people gathered around, knowing that the enemy was as good as caught. A pretty young girl in a blue tunic picked up a pebble and threw it. She gave the men an idea, and they started pelting him. The terrorist began to cry, but clung to the tree.
“You’ll get hurt a lot worse if you stay up there,” Yousif cautioned. “It’s safer for you to come down.”
Instead of answering, the terrorist climbed one more notch.
Yousif saw Abul Banat jump and get a good hold on a branch. The jeweler and a bricklayer helped him bend it down. Now the terrorist was exposed and within reach. A toothless old woman tried to hit him with a long broom. But she was too short. A stranger, a thin, pockmarked man, took the broom from her and did the same. Still the terrorist—whom they could now see was no more than a teenager—would not surrender. The thickset bricklayer lifted to his shoulder another man who grabbed the boy, forcing him down.
The sky was velvety blue. The sun was shining brightly when all the terrorists who had been captured were rounded up and brought back to town. First they were toured around in a truck. Basim and his men led an awesome two-mile parade. It stopped at every major intersection. It stopped in front of the mosque where a muezzin circled the minaret and chanted from the Qur’an. Church bells were rung in triumph. In front of the Municipality, the rotund mayor stood on the balcony and delivered his impromptu congratulations to all the captors.
“People of Ardallah,” the mayor declared at the top of his voice, “I’m proud of every single one of you. With this kind of spirit, Ardallah is safe, Palestine is safe . . . Death to the enemy.”
The crowd roared with approval. After the speech, it began to move again, winding itself through narrow streets. Hundreds stood on their terraces and balconies, or leaned against their windows, gazing at the spectacle.
An hour later, the sea of relieved but angry demonstrators stopped at the five-point saha. Many gloated over their victory; others bristled from insult. How dare these Zionists, they all said.
“They don’t worry me,” one cobbler said to another. “Even with a gun in his hand, a Jew is nothing but a chicken.”
Yousif wondered about the fate of the terrorists after the “show” was over. Who would take charge of them? The British were too busy packing to bother. The Zionist underground would ask for them. The British might act as intermediaries and hand back all the prisoners—living or dead. Damn the British! They caused all this.
“Power to the masses,” Basim shouted, both his hands forming “V” signs. “Glory to those who seek freedom. Glory to those who rise and defend themselves. Glory to every man, woman, and child who has participated in this victorious morning.”
Men cheered, shaking their fists at the terrorists. The sidewalks and rooftops were congested. Children stood on top of parked cars or window sills. A mother balanced her baby on her hip, looking stunned. A shriveled old man leaned on his cane.
“Brave people of Ardallah,” Basim continued, scanning the attentive crowd. “And brave brethren from the surrounding villages. Last week they came and killed two of us—and they became emboldened. They thought we were easy picking. They thought by hitting the villages on either side of the highway, they could stop our recruits from joining Abd al-Qadir, who’s heroically defending our sacred land.”
The roar was deafening. “Long live Abd al-Qadir,” someone shouted, waving the Palestinian flag.
“Long live Abd al-Qadir,” someone added, his voice hoarse. “Long live Basim.”
“Long live Palestine,” Basim corrected, motioning with his arms for them to quiet down. “But, dear brothers and sisters, not every time will we be this lucky. Today we managed to stop them. Tomorrow we might not be able to. Unless we stay alert, unless we remain united, unless we become strong, we will face threat after threat from a relentless enemy bent on usurping our land. Today let us be satisfied that we can send the enemy this message: woe to him who will trespass against us, for he will not be forgiven or forgotten. Woe to him who will dare provoke our ire—dare provoke our wrath.”
“Woe to him,” the crowd shouted.
Yousif counted fifteen terrorists on the truck, but he had been told there were seventeen. Two terrorists had been killed and thrown on the floor. He saw men climb on the truck and strip the terrorists of their Arab disguise. As the unveiling proceeded, Yousif heard the mob gasp and fall silent. All the invaders were teen-agers, shaking with fear. The demonstrators became motionless. They thought they had seized a band of fearless fighters. What they had captured were mere boys. The victory was now hollow. Looking at the pale, smooth, pimpled faces of the raiders, Yousif felt sorry for them. They did not seem anything but helpless.
“Look at them,” Basim thundered. “Kids who should be home with their mothers are already killers. Don’t let their young looks deceive you. Don’t let their innocent eyes mislead you. Look what they’ve done. They’ve killed Mitry Freij and Hani Mahmoud—”
“—and blinded Suha Badran,” Shafiq, Salwa’s cousin, shouted.
“—and wounded Taher Khalifeh,” added Shukri, who had once picked on Moshe Sha’alan at the cemetery.
“And God knows what else they would’ve done if we had given them half a chance,” Basim thundered again. “They have come to kill and they have killed. They have come to maim and they have maimed. If we let them, they’ll kill and maim again. Again and again until we and our children are all dead. And what’s our crime? Our crime is that we were born here.”
With a few words Basim canceled any sympathy the crowd might have had toward the young raiders.
“Kill them!” somone shouted.
“Kill them!” the crowd echoed.
Yousif was terrified. “No,” he begged. “Basim, please, listen . . .”
“Kill the bastards,” shouted Aziz, the famed hunter, unslinging his rifle.
“No . . .” Yousif pleaded, his arms stretched toward Aziz.
“YEEEES!” the crowd shouted.
One of the invaders attracted attention to himself by trying desperately to hide. Yousif noticed that every time a man reached to remove the Arabic headdress, the boy would get on his knees and double up. He had tied the hatta around his neck and face and secured it further by pressing the iqal around the top of his head. His eyes only showing, he stood behind the others and never looked directly at the crowd. Maurice, a lisping hairdresser, climbed on the hood of the truck, then lay flat on his stomach on the roof above the driver’s seat. From there Maurice reached for the camouflaged boy’s head and uncovered it. The crowd gasped again. It was Isaac without his glasses.
“Look!” Salman exclaimed, pointing his finger.
“Can you believe it!” Abla, Salman’s wife, added.
“Isaac? My God—” said midwife Hanneh, who had delivered him.
Saadallah, a waiter at Zahrawi’s cafe, jumped on top of the truck. At the urging of the crowd, he pulled Isaac to stand at the back of the truck where everyone could see him. Yousif was shocked. He sensed Isaac’s humiliation and feared for his life. Looking around, he found Amin wide-eyed and gaping. People stared at Isaac with hate in their eyes. Isaac raised his two hands to hide his face. But Maurice forced them down.
“Isaac, you came to kill us?” seamstress Zahiyyeh said, her hand going up to her lips.
“Shame, shame on you,” a rosy-cheeked woman blasted.
Yousif felt a lump in his throat. This same woman had given the three boys a loaf of bread on the last day of bird hunting—the day Yousif wanted the three of them to make a pledge of friendship.
“You dirty dog.”
They cursed him. They spat on him. They chewed him with their eyes.
“Isaac, this can’t be true,” rang Yousif’s voice.
Isaac raised his eyes to seek out Yousif standing in the middle of the street next to Amin. Their eyes met, and Isaac’s lips trembled. Yousif and Amin waved their hands and tried to move forward. Isaac couldn’t face his friends and began to cry.
On the Hills of God Page 26