Gate of the Sun (30 page)

After Nuha finished drawing her map, she turned to you and asked, “Why?”

I think I saw a tear suspended in the corner of her eye, and that tear was the start of a love story, a love that began with a teardrop that didn't fall and
ended in the municipal stadium under a downpour of tears that soaked eyes and faces.

But Nuha, when she fell in love with me years later, denied the story of the tear. She said she hadn't cried, but she'd felt pity for all of you because you were living on memories, and the past was your only pillar of support.

Looking at the map, she asked you – her voice halting and punctuated by white spaces, as though emotion were staining her words with silence:

“Why did you believe Mahdi?”

The room exploded in silence.

Is it true, Father, that al-Birwa fell because you believed Mahdi, Jasem, and the ALA division stationed at Tal al-Layyat?

Answer me. I don't want anecdotes but a clear-cut answer.

I know you don't know the answers. I can see you with the eyes of those days. You were an impulsive young man – that's how everyone who knew you describes you. Despite that, or because of it, you succeeded – you and the division from Sha'ab – in breaking through to al-Birwa and taking it back.

But, to be accurate, before the breakthrough and the recovery, al-Birwa had fallen without a fight.

Sun-dust enveloped the fields, the wheat glittering in that golden light that precedes the harvest. And the village was afraid. After the fall of Acre, the villages of al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Julis, Kafar Yasif, and Abu Sinan surrendered, leaving al-Birwa floating in the wind.

And they attacked.

No one was ready. Our ambushes were laughable. Now we've figured out how to do things, and we have an impressive numbers of fedayeen. But then we were forty men and Father Jebran. The priest of al-Birwa didn't negotiate with the Jews for a surrender, that's a lie. He negotiated for our return – this issue has sparked great debate.

Nuha's grandmother, who came to be known as Umm al-Hajar,
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would tell the story and say, “If only!”

“If only we'd believed Father Jebran! We were nothing, my daughter – just forty men and up above, at Tal al-Layyat, more than a hundred soldiers of the ALA under their leader, Mahdi, who used to come down like a monkey asking for chickens. We named him Lieutenant Chicken Mahdi and would hand them over. What are a few chickens? Let them eat and good health to them! The important thing was for the village to survive – better a village without chickens than chickens without a village. But the chickens did no good, my dear, because when the Jews attacked, Chicken Mahdi didn't fight.”

They were forty. They'd sent their wives and children into the surrounding fields and sat in their ambushes waiting. The Jews chose to attack from the west at sunset, so the sun would be in the peasants' eyes. Three armored vehicles advanced under a heavy cannon bombardment but were brought to a halt. Then the Jews retreated and dug themselves in, renewing the attack at dawn.

“We ran,” said Nuha's father. “Yes, we ran. We had no means of defense and the army up above us didn't fire a single shot. I said to Mahdi, ‘Aren't you even going to defend your chickens?' He replied, ‘No orders.' The village fell and we left everything behind. The ALA didn't even try to save the chickens.”

Nuha said her father had always lived with sorrow in his heart: He said his greatest wish was not to kill the Jews but to kill Chicken Mahdi.

It would be lawful to kill Mahdi, isn't that right, Father? It would be lawful to kill him not because he didn't fight with you, but because after you took the village back he gave the order for you to withdraw and join your women and children because the ALA would protect the village. And you believed him.

Why did you believe Mahdi?

Yunes said he didn't believe Mahdi, “but what could we do?”

“Listen, my daughter. They occupied the village, so the fedayeen withdrew and joined their families in the fields nearby. They slept and lived under the olive trees, waiting for an end to their sufferings. When they got
hungry, they decided to take back their village. The Jews occupied the village on June 10, 1948, and we waited in the fields for two weeks. Then we came together – people from al-Birwa, Sha'ab, al-Ba'neh, and Deir al-Asad – and decided to liberate the village. The wheat and maize were waiting to be harvested, and people couldn't find even a dry crust for sustenance.

“The fighters gathered at Tal al-Layyat, and there the Iraqi officer Jasem stood up and made a speech. He said the ALA didn't have orders to help, but they were wholeheartedly with the villagers and would be praying for their success.

“Our attack began. We attacked the village from three directions – Jebel al-Tawil in the north, Sha'ab in the southeast, and Tal al-Layyat in the east – and we won.

“We won because they were taken by surprise and didn't fight. They did just as we'd done: Instead of resisting, they ran away to Abu Laban. So we entered the village. Of course, they fired at us for a while, but it seems their numbers were very small so they withdrew.

“In al-Birwa we found everything in its place and Father Jebran there to greet us.

“He said, ‘You should have agreed with me and given me time to finish negotiating with them, but this is better. God has granted us victory.'

“The priest suggested we harvest the wheat before they came back, and we agreed. We were inspecting the village and the houses when we heard
youyous
coming from the house of Ahmad Isma'il Sa'ad. When we got there, we found everyone's clothes stuffed into bags and placed in the center of the patio. People were attempting to pick out their own clothes from the jumble. I swear no one knows what he took and what he left behind. The clothes were all mixed up, and we couldn't make heads nor tails of them. The priest kept telling us to leave the clothes and go out to the fields. Saniyyeh, the wife of Ahmad Isma'il Sa'ad, let out a celebratory trill and we all laughed; it was a rag wedding – we discovered our clothes were only rags. Why would the Jews take rags? And us, too – why were our clothes rags? We celebrated. I can hardly describe it, my dear – clothes were flying through the air, and
everyone was trying things on and pulling them off. Everyone wore everyone else's things, and we came together and were joyous. That was our victory celebration, but we couldn't enjoy it because we heard gunfire from the direction of the threshing ground, so we thought the counterattack must have begun. Leaving our rags, we ran to get our rifles, and we found Darwish's son, Mahmoud (not the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was only six years old then and hardly knew how to talk – it was his cousin, I think) standing in the middle of the field, firing his gun in the air and pointing to the threshing floor. There we discovered the sacks: A large part of the wheat harvest had been placed in sacks in the middle of the threshing floor. We started gathering the sacks while Salim As'ad stood by in a British police officer's uniform, which he'd never parted with, next to seven harvesters the Jews had left when they fled.

“We climbed over the harvesters, but then the shooting started, and the dying, too.

“We left the harvesters, picked up the sacks of wheat, and rushed toward the village; the women began to leave ahead of us.

“Bullets, women leaving with sacks of wheat on their heads, men spreading out to their positions – the men decided to stay in the village after they'd been joined by eleven fighters from the village of Aqraba who announced they were deserting the ALA.”

“We were like drunkards,” said Nuha's father.

He said he was drunk on the scent of the wheat, on the sun-dust.

“Can you get drunk on dust?” she asked Yunes.

Yunes said that Mahdi committed suicide in Tarshiha. “It wasn't his fault, my son. Mahdi was just carrying out orders. In Lebanon we found out that Mahdi had died. When he heard the final order to withdraw, he said, ‘Shame on the Arabs,' pulled out his revolver, shot himself in the head, and died.

“At some point, Mahdi came and said, ‘Okay. Go away and rest up with your families.' And Mahdi was right – the big push was over. We rushed to al-Birwa and liberated it, and then we returned to our villages. Thirty-five men, too exhausted to move.

“When we talk about these battles, you think of us as disciplined soldiers, but that wasn't at all the case.

“Listen.

“After we liberated al-Birwa, three United Nations officers arrived carrying white flags and asked to negotiate with our commanding officer.

“‘But we don't have a commanding officer,' said Salim As'ad.

“‘We're just peasants,' said Nabil Hourani. ‘We don't have a leader, we're just peasants who want to harvest our crop and go back to our houses. Would you rather we died of hunger?'

“‘But you broke the truce,' said the Swedish officer.

“‘What truce, Sir? We've got nothing to do with the war. We wanted to go back to our village, so we went.'

“The Swedish officer asked our permission to search the village and go to Tal al-Layyat to meet with the commanding officer of the ALA, but we refused. We were afraid of spies working for the Jews, so we insisted that the officers leave the village.

“We weren't an army. We were just ordinary people. More than half the fighters knew nothing about fighting, I swear. For them, war was shooting at the enemy. We'd stand in a row and fire; we knew nothing about the art of war. That's why, when Mahdi came and asked the fighters to withdraw and leave the village in the hands of the ALA, we agreed without thinking. The peasants did what they set out to do, took part of their crop and handed the village over to the regular army.

“Forty aging men and women who refused to leave their houses was all that was left in al-Birwa, plus a young man named Tanios al-Khouri, who wanted to stay with his uncle, the village priest. Later he was killed when the Jews came back to occupy the village.

“The shelling started and no one knew what was happening because they found the Israelis in the village square, but there was no sign of the ALA. The Jews started blowing up houses and then asked everyone to assemble in the square. They discovered that there were only old people, the priest, and his nephew left in the village. Tanios had been helping his uncle in the church and was preparing to join the order himself, and when the village
fell, the priest dressed him in a black cassock identical to his own, and they joined the others in the square.

“An Israeli officer came forward and took the youth by his hand, dragged him out of the crowd and ordered him to take off his cassock. The youth hesitated a little, then took it off under the officer's steely gaze and stood trembling in his underwear. The July sun struck their faces, the dust spread over the village while Tanios trembled with cold. The priest tried to say something, but the shots tore over their heads.

“The officer ordered Tanios to walk in front of him. He walked until they reached the sycamore tree at the edge of the square. There the officer fired a single shot from his revolver. Returning to the little clump of people, he ordered them to get into a truck. Everyone rushed toward the truck; not even Father Jebran looked back at his dead nephew. But before the priest reached the truck, he fell, striking his head on a stone. He started bleeding, and the blood seemed to rouse him from his stupor. He stood, or tried to stand, staggering as though he were about to fall, and then regained his balance. Instead of continuing his dash for the truck, he turned and walked back to the tree, where he knelt and started to pray.

“The truck took off, and no one knows what happened to Father Jebran. He wasn't seen again. He didn't catch up with everyone at al-Jdeideh, and no one saw him at the village of Kafar Yasif. Maybe he fell near his nephew. Maybe they killed him. We just don't know. Some say he went to stay with the Shufani family (who were distant relatives) in Ma'aliyya, where he changed his name and stepped down from the priesthood.

“The old people were dumped at Kafar Yasif, and the priest disappeared.

“When the Israelis entered al-Birwa, they blew it up house by house. They didn't take our clothes and rags. They were like madmen. They blew up the houses and began bulldozing them; they trampled the wheat and felled the olive trees with dynamite. I don't know why they hate olives.”

Actually, why do they hate olives?

You told me about Ain Houd and the peasants they chased out of their village, which was renamed En Hud. The peasants wandered the hills of
Jebel Karmal, where they built a new village, which they named after their old village.

You were telling me about them because you wanted to explain your theory about the secret population that stayed behind over there.

“I wasn't the only one,” you said. “We were a whole people living in secret villages.”

You told me how the Israelis changed the original village into an artists' colony and how the peasants live in their new, officially unrecognized village with no paved streets, no water, no electricity, nothing. You said there were dozens of these secret villages.

And you asked yourself why the Israelis hate olive trees. You mentioned how they planted cypress trees in the middle of the olives groves at Ain Houd, and how the olive trees were ruined and died under the onslaught of the cypresses, which swallowed them up.