Gate of the Sun (13 page)

Everyone looked like everyone else in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they all belonged to the Asadi clan, the Asadis being poor peasants who had come from the marshes of the Euphrates in southern Iraq during the seventeenth century. No one knows how or why they came. The blind sheikh said they weren't Asadis and didn't come from Iraq, but the Asadi name got attached to them because they worked as hired laborers on the lands of a feudal landlord of the Asadi clan who had come from there. It was said that the landlord's descendants had sold the land to the Lebanese family of Sursuq toward the end of the nineteenth century. The question of land sales in Palestine has “no end and no beginning,” as they say. As to how the Asadi came to possess the lands of Ain al-Zaitoun, no one has any idea. Did he purchase these wide and extensive holdings, or was he a brave fighter in the army of Ahmad al-Jazzar – the governor of Acre who defeated Bonaparte – to whom the governor granted lands in Marj Ibn Amir, along with a group of villages including Ain al-Zaitoun, Deir al-Asad, and Sha'ab? Or did he flee Acre with a band of horsemen following the governor's death, and were they the ones who occupied the land? The blind sheikh didn't know, but he preferred the story with the band of horsemen, so he could say that the native inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun were originally cavalrymen with the Asadi sheikh in Acre and had come with him to the village to establish it, and that it came to be known by this name, which had nothing
to do with them because they were originally from the districts surrounding Acre – “though we're all sons of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.”

As for the Sursuq family, it's even more complicated.

Did the Sursuqs buy the land, or was it given to them as a fiefdom because they were friends of the Turkish governor of Beirut?

The inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun never saw anyone from the Sursuq family. It was Kazem al-Beiruti, a man dressed in Western clothes and wearing a fez, who used to come after each harvest, count the sacks of wheat, and take half. The peasants parted with half their crop of wheat and maize without protest. The olives, however, were a different story; Kazem al-Beiruti didn't dare demand the owner's share of olives or oil. “The oil belongs to him who sows it,” the blind sheikh told Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud to his face when he came demanding his share.

When the disturbances in Palestine spread during 1936, the inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun refused to give Kazem al-Beiruti anything. Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud chased him away after humiliating him in public by knocking his fez off his head with his stick, trampling it underfoot and announcing the return of the land to its rightful owners. And Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud al-Asadi declared himself, as head of the clan, sole legal heir of the original al-Asadi, taking the fertile lands belonging to the village and giving the peasants of his family the liberty to cultivate the land without paying the owner's share. However, he tried to take some of the olives and oil, and this was what caused problems between him and Sheikh Ibrahim.

Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud was one of the local leaders of the Revolution of '36. It's said that he met Izz al-Din al-Qassam,
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and that he was injured in the revolution. He declared that anyone who sold land to the Jews was a traitor who must be killed.

Yunes doesn't know why Ahmad was killed, because he's convinced he didn't sell land to the Jews, and that, in fact, he didn't have any land to sell
since he'd taken the land he controlled by force, and the deeds were in the Sursuq family's possession.

When Ahmad was killed by the revolutionaries' bullets, Yunes, who was then seventeen, didn't understand why. Despite the rumors, he wasn't the one who'd killed his cousin, and he was sure that Ahmad, who'd become the leader of the village, hadn't sold land to the Jews. True, he was domineering, arrogant and rude; and true, he hated Yunes and would say that the youth had abandoned his father, mother, and wife to beggary while he worked as a bandit in the name of the revolution; and true, he beat his two wives terribly and treated everyone with contempt, but why had he been killed?

Yunes was convinced that Ahmad hadn't been a traitor. Everyone hated him, even his children. The strange thing was that at his funeral his wives yelled as though they were being beaten. Surrounded by their children, the two women wept, moaned, pleaded with him to get up, swearing they would never leave the house again. Everyone was dumbfounded. No one mourned the loss of this shit (this is what his relatives called him privately), but everyone was amazed at his wives' behavior and how unconvinced they seemed that the man had died. They appeared to be afraid he might rise up, see they weren't weeping enough, and shower them with blows.

Ahmad died without anyone knowing who killed him, but the way he was killed seemed to indicate that he was a collaborator or had sold land. The killer came to his house at night, knocked on the door, shot him, and left. Then, when the killer got to Nab' al-Asal, he fired two shots into the air. The two shots gave the impression that Ahmad had been executed rather than murdered for some personal or family reason. Suspicion hung over Yunes because of the quarrel between Ahmad and Sheikh Ibrahim, which had ended with the sheikh's being expelled from his position at the mosque.

It was Ahmad who engineered the replacement for Sheikh Ibrahim, convincing everybody by saying that the sheikh was blind and unable to teach his pupils reading and writing, that he'd begun forgetting the names and verses of the Koran, and could no longer conduct prayers decently. Once
shamefully dismissed from his responsibilities, Sheikh Ibrahim became a beggar, at a loss as to how to provide for his family.

Into the house of Sheikh Ibrahim came Nahilah, the twelve-year-old daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah. They had asked for her for Yunes because her family was the poorest in the village. Her father, who had died when she was six, had had only girls, and her mother had inherited nothing from her husband. She took up work in the fields, and Ahmad didn't let her keep the land her husband had worked because women, in his view, “should never be entrusted with land.” So she ended up working on Ahmad's land and as a servant in his house and was beaten along with his wives. When Yunes' mother decided to arrange a marriage for her son, she consulted one of Ahmad's wives, who advised her to go to Nahilah's mother: “Go and take your pick – five poor, fatherless girls who need someone to give them a respectable home.” She went to choose, but Nahilah's mother wouldn't let her.

“If you want a bride for your son, take this one,” she said, pointing to Nahilah, and there was no further discussion.

“This one” was Nahilah.

Yunes will never forget the wedding, and the wedding night.

How could he forget when he could smell the blood for days and days and would hate himself until the day he died?

How could he forget the girl's face as she shook with fear?

How could he forget his mother closing the door behind them and waiting?

How could he forget that he fell asleep with the girl next to him in the bed, and didn't take off his clothes?

How could he forget the high-pitched
youyous
of joy outside and the mother waving a white handkerchief with a spot of blood on it to announce the girl's virginity and purity?

How could he forget that room, with its bittersweet smell?

The mother took the girl without argument. She wanted a wife for her son. Marriage would steady the boy and force him to come back home.

The sheikh took the girl without argument, because he'd grieved over his son and wanted a grandson. He had wanted his son to be a sheikh, a scholar and a Sufi, but all the boy could cite from the Koran was the first chapter. He sent him to the elementary school in Sha'ab, but instead of studying he made off with the others into the mountains. He'd picked up a rifle and started moving from village to village, taking part in attacks on British army patrols.

Yunes could see that his father and mother were sunk in poverty, but he had no concept of what that meant. He must have wanted to escape from the company of that old man who cursed fate and sat all day in front of his house, and who'd go every Friday morning to the mosque of Salah al-Din in the village square, where, without fail, an incident would arise that would result in his being thrown out. During that time, Kamel al-Asadi led the worshippers. This Kamel was neither a sheikh nor a scholar. He hadn't learned the Koran by heart, he hadn't studied in a religious school, and he didn't take part in the devotions of the Sufis who'd built themselves a modest mosque in Sha'ab dedicated to the Yashrati master of whom Sheikh Ibrahim was one of the first disciples.

They said, “Let's get him married,” so they got him married.

And Yunes accepted. He heard the name Nahilah and accepted. He gave his mother ten Palestinian lira – God knows where he got them – for the wedding, the dowry, and the rest.

And the wedding took place.

The boy sat down among the men. The ceremony almost got ugly: Sheikh Ibrahim threw Sheikh Kamel out and performed the rites himself, after which there were
youyous
of joy. Nahilah entered the house. The
youyous
mounted, and the young man was receiving congratulations when the door opened and the girl entered, holding her fingers out in front of her with a lit candle on each one. She was covered from head to toe by a robe behind whose colors her face was lost.

Yunes didn't see her.

He saw a girl on the verge of collapse, swaying as though dancing,
approaching the chair on which her husband was seated, and then kneeling. The candles shone in Yunes' face, the flames dazzled his eyes, and he didn't see.

Yunes doesn't remember how long she knelt, for time seemed eternal that day; his eyes burned with something like tears, his shadow swayed on the walls, and the
youyous
pounded in his ears.

He would never say he was afraid. He would say instead that when his shadow leapt up in front of him that night he didn't recognize it, as though it were the shadow of some other young man, lengthening and breaking off and barging around against the ceiling and among the guests and against the walls. And he would say too that when he bent over to extinguish the candles, his mother stopped him and made him sit still again and asked him to smile. Then his mother knelt next to the girl, took hold of her right arm and pulled her up, and the two of them walked among the guests as the showers of rice started to fall on them. Sheikh Sa'id Ma'lawi stood up, struck his tambourine and shouted, “God lives!” and the cry was taken up by five bearded men who had come from Sha'ab at the behest of the great Yashrati, sheikh of the Yashrati Shadhili order, to bless Sheikh Ibrahim's son's marriage and recite the prayers that would help him follow the path of righteousness like his father before him.

The woman and the girl disappeared into the bedroom. After what seemed like a long while, they returned carrying olives and grapes. The girl tossed the olives one by one to the guests while the woman bent down and laid a large cluster of white grapes before the girl's feet and asked her to walk on them. The girl took off her slippers, raised her right foot with care and stepped on the grapes; then she raised the other foot and walked on them.

Yunes, telling me of his love for white grapes as we drank a “tear” of arak once at his house, said that the women sitting in the reception room rose from their places and started laying clusters of white grapes before the bride, and that she walked on them, the tears of the grapes soaking the ground.

He said he saw the tears. “Wine is the tears of grapes. That's why we say
‘a tear of arak' – not because we want to drink it in small quantities, and not because we put the arak in the small flask we call a
batha
, which is tear-shaped, but because when the grapes are pressed, the juice oozes out like tears, drop by drop.”

Years later, when Yunes and Nahilah were in the cave at Bab al-Shams and night fell, Nahilah lit a candle she had hidden behind a rock she called the pantry. Yunes leapt up and brought out ten bunches of grapes he'd cut from the vines scattered around Deir al-Asad, and he spread these on the ground and asked her to walk on them.

“Take off your shoes and walk. Today I'll marry you according to the law of the Prophet.”

She said that that day the man was mad with love. She bent over, removed her head scarf, placed the grapes on it, wrapped them up and pushed the bundle to one side. She told Yunes that at the wedding, she'd only stepped on one bunch, that she hated walking on grapes, that she'd slipped and narrowly escaped death because the grape juice had clung to her heels, and that when it came time to marry her daughters, she'd never ask them to walk on grapes – what a shameful idea!

Nahilah walked on the grapes, which exploded beneath her small, bare feet, then went into the bedroom and did not come out again.

“You know the rest,” Yunes said. “My mother right by the door and me inside. What are these awful customs? You have to fuck for their sake, strip off your clothes and get it over with in a hurry so they don't get bored waiting outside.”

But I don't know the rest, Father, and you're lying when you say the rest was the way it usually is.

You didn't tell me everything; I know, because Abu Ma'rouf filled me in.

Abu Ma'rouf was a pleasant man I met in 1969 in the Nahr al-Barid camp in northern Lebanon, after the commander of the base at Kafar Shouba had thrown me out for being an atheist. I had gone to Nahr al-Barid as political commissar for the camp militia, when clashes broke out between us and the Lebanese army. The November cold was intense and made our bones ache. They put me and Abu Ma'rouf on the forward road block, which was
supposed to be a lookout position. We were opposite a hill occupied by the army, and it was our job to engage the enemy briefly if the camp were attacked before withdrawing, in other words, to delay their advance as much as possible so that the other groups could block the roads leading to the camp.