Gate of the Sun (31 page)

How can they eat without olive oil? We live on olive oil, we're a people of olive oil, but them, they cut down the olive trees and plant palm trees. Why do they love palms so much?

“Poor little Tanios,” Nuha's father went on. “They killed him right in front of us, and God, what a sight he was. He arrived in the square all puffed up in his uncle's cassock. The uncle was short and fat, but Tanios was tall and slender. Tanios went out with the priest, in his short cassock that ballooned out like a ghost. We could see his legs, covered with thick, curly black hair. He had to take off the cassock and was shivering as he walked; then we heard the fatal shot and everything went dark. Sweat filled our eyes, and we could hardly see – when you're scared, you sweat an incredible amount. Sweat was dripping into our eyes, and Father Jebran wiped the blood from his forehead. He knelt in front of his nephew's body under the tree, made the sign of the cross over the thin young man, then stretched his arms out under the tree as though he'd become a tree himself or as though he were crucifying himself against the air, while the village collapsed.”

Tell me, Yunes, how, why, did you believe Mahdi? Did you have to believe him?

We shouldn't have believed him, you'll say. “We believed him because we had no choice at the time. Only the priest suggested reconciliation with the Jews, but who could guarantee that it wouldn't turn out with us as it did at al-Kabri? The priest said he'd be the guarantor, but he wasn't even able to save his nephew's life.”

Nuha, who told me the story of al-Birwa, wouldn't accept this. Nuha was different from Shams and would only allow me a small peck on the corner of her mouth, whose taste I'd steal as I listened to the endless story of al-Birwa.

One time she said she'd seen the rags in a dream.

Another time she said that Father Jebran had put the cassock on Ahmad Yasin, the grain measurer, who hadn't withdrawn with the others because he wanted to steal one of the harvesters the Jews had left behind on the threshing floor, and that the officer recognized Ahmad and ordered him to take off his cassock and killed him. And that the priest didn't go back to the body under the tree but that an Israeli soldier pushed him and he fell and his head was cut open, so they dragged him away and killed him as well as Ahmad. And her grandmother, who witnessed the scene, swears that Father Jebran didn't have a nephew named Tanios and that the young man disguised in the cassock was the son of the grain measurer.

“Al-Birwa, it's gone,” said Nuha. “All I see are the shadows of the houses drawn in my grandmother's eyes.” This grandmother was the cause of all their trouble. “She turned my father into a stone. She killed him, killed everything inside him. Like all the mothers who kill their sons, out of love. I lived with him. He lay there in our house like a stone.”

Nuha said her grandmother walked and walked until her feet were swollen. When the truck dumped them in al-Jdeideh, she refused to enter the village and started searching for her children. She got down from the truck and walked. She went to al-Damoun and from there to Sekhnen and from Sekhnen to al-Ramah and then on to Ya'thur. In Ya'thur she found her son and his family, and they crossed over into Lebanon, where she found her four other children.

Her grandmother walked alone, entered the villages and slept in the open. She entered the villages a stranger and left them a stranger, and all she ate was bread moistened with water. She ate so she could walk, and she walked so she could look, and she looked but she didn't find.

Nuha said the pain etched on her grandmother's face frightened her. A woman etched with pain and stories. “She didn't love us; she loved only my father. She seemed in a perpetual state of shock that he was still alive. Every day – every day, I promise you – she'd squeeze him to make sure he was still among the living. She didn't want him to work; when they settled in the camp near Beirut and he found work in a chocolate factory, she refused. ‘You stay in the house and we'll work,' she said. ‘You're the pillar of the house; it will fall down without you.' My mother couldn't understand her mother-in-law – a woman stopping her son from working, not wanting him to leave the tin shack, so that no harm might come to him while we were all dying of shame and hunger? He'd sit next to his mother and they would listen to the radio and analyze the news and whisper to one another. She'd make plans, and he'd agree with her. Then they decided to go back to al-Birwa, and so we returned.”

The story as Nuha related it to me was as distorted as her grandmother's memory. Nuha was a child and her grandmother an old woman. The child couldn't remember, and the old woman couldn't speak. The grandmother would raise her hand and point upward as though invoking the help of mysterious powers and all Nuha would see was dust.

“I was two years old,” she said, “so I can't remember anything. I remember vague images, an old woman speechless in the house, my father looking at her with hatred. My father hardened into stone. He would enter the house in silence and leave it in silence. My brothers and sisters and I called him the Stone, that's what he was. My father spoke in '68, after his son died in Ghour al-Safi in Jordan during the battle for al-Karameh, but his speech was shrouded in silence. He spoke like someone who never spoke, and he would never raise his voice, as though he were afraid of something. My father tried several times to work. He tried at the soft-drink factory. Then
he became a taxi driver, but they put him in jail because he didn't have a work permit. He tried to get that impossible permit, but didn't succeed. As you know a Palestinian can only work clandestinely in Lebanon, and a driver can't work clandestinely. He loved to drive. Since he was a child he'd loved cars, but it was difficult for him to buy one, so he decided he'd work as a driver. He wasted his time running around in pursuit of a work permit that never came. We only survived because it was easier than dying.

“My mother worked as a seamstress. She wasn't a very good seamstress, but she managed to make a living with the women in the camp. She sewed a little and earned a little, and we survived. The Stone would leave the house every morning and not come back until evening. He wouldn't speak to us, and he'd even refuse to eat with us. My mother had a relief card so she'd go at the beginning of each month to get flour, milk, and cooking oil from the agency. But he wouldn't touch it. I don't know how he got by. He wouldn't ask my mother for money, and he didn't steal like most of the men in the camp did. He'd get up at dawn, drink his coffee before we woke up, and leave for the day. My mother would beg him to taste the food she'd prepared, but he'd flatly refuse. He'd turn away from her, open his newspaper, and read. My father wasn't illiterate, he was semiliterate and could sound out words. He'd learned to read from the newspapers. He'd sit and read in silence. We'd see his lips moving but couldn't hear a sound. He would read without a sound and speak without a sound and come and go without a sound.”

“I heard the story just from my grandmother,” said Nuha. “I thought she was rambling like all old people, but it was the truth.”

“We went back, my love, but it was hopeless,” she told me. She said they'd demolished al-Birwa and she couldn't stand to live in any other village, so she decided to move back to Lebanon. Her son left them in the fields outside the village and went to Kafar Yasif; then he came back to tell them that they should all go there.

“But I couldn't agree to live in Kafar Yasif; I wanted al-Birwa. I said we should go back and live with the people of al-Birwa that were left, go back
and cultivate our land. What were we supposed to do for work in Kafar Yasif? Your father said he'd met Sa'ad's son who worked in the building trade, and he'd promised him a job. I said no, and I picked you up and started walking. Your mother caught up with me with your brother, Amir, leaving your father standing there. He screamed at us; he wanted us to stay with him, but we left. We found him again here in the camp. I thought he'd stayed behind. I said, ‘Let him stay, it's his destiny, but I can't,' and your mother caught up with me, and he screamed at us, but we couldn't hear his voice, as though it couldn't make it out of his mouth. I think he caught up with us, and when we got to the camp he went into the bathroom, then he left the house and turned into stone. Our feet were sore, and all we wanted to do was sleep, but he went out. I was right. I mean, how could we go back to al-Birwa when al-Birwa no longer existed? What were we to do? Go to another village and become refugees in our own country? No, my dear.”

Nuha said she'd pieced the story of their return together from scraps of stories. She could picture the scene as though she were remembering it herself. Going back, her mother told her, was difficult, but people did return. “Suddenly, all the members of a family would disappear, and we'd know they'd returned. Your father was like a madman, hunting for scraps of news and abusing your mother. One morning in April of '51, he told us, ‘Come on, we're going back.' We didn't take anything with us. We returned as we'd left, with nothing but our clothes, two flasks of water, a bundle of bread, some potatoes, and some boiled eggs. We got a taxi to Tyre and another to Rimeish, and from there, we started our march to al-Birwa. Going back was easy. We went around the villages and walked in the rough. The Stone walked as though on the palm of his hand – he'd stretch his hand out in front of him and read from his palm, he said everything was written there. We walked behind him in silence, your grandmother carrying you, me carrying your brother, and the Stone walking ahead of us. Finally we arrived. We'd walked the whole night and arrived at dawn. At the outskirts of the village, he told us to wait under an olive tree.

“There, the Stone started walking in an odd way. He bent over as though
he were getting ready for a fight and started leaping until he disappeared from our view. Your grandmother went crazy. She started to go after him, but he waved her off, placing his finger on his lips to ask her to be quiet. Then he disappeared.

“And us, what were we to do? How could I wait when I had this half-paralyzed old woman with me? Suddenly the strength left your grandmother. All the way there, she'd been like a horse, but at the outskirts of the village her knees gave out and she collapsed, dripping with sweat. She was carrying you in her arms and the sweat dripped onto you. You started crying, and I took you from her and gave you my breast. No, you weren't still breast feeding, you were two years old and I'd weaned you more than a year before, but for some reason, I took you from her arms, wiped the old woman's sweat off you and gave you my breast. You stopped crying and fell into a deep sleep.

“The Stone returned.

“The sun was starting to set and your grandmother was sitting on her own under an isolated olive tree. Upon seeing her son, she struggled to stand up but couldn't, so she crawled. We helped her to sit up; her eyes fixed on her son's lips.

“We sat around him. He drank some water, ate a boiled egg, and asked us to wait for him before making his way toward the olive grove and disappearing again.

“He came back the next morning and said he was going to Kafar Yasif.

“We understood.

“The old woman bowed her head and began sobbing. I tried to question him. I asked him about my father's house – I thought, Never mind; if our house has been demolished, we can go and live in my father's house. ‘Listen, woman,' he said, ‘I'm going to Kafar Yasif.' And we understood. I said to him, ‘They demolished all the houses, right?' And he said, ‘Yes.'

“When I heard the word
yes
I fell to the ground. I couldn't see; everything had gone black. The Stone tried to bring me around.

“He explained everything to me.

“‘Al-Birwa is dead,' he said. ‘You stay here, I'll go.'

“He didn't wait for nightfall. He said he'd go, and he went. His head must have been hurting him because he kept putting his hands to his temples and pressing. He ordered us not to move from where we were.

“We waited for three days and nights. April was cold, and we had only brought two woolen blankets. The four of us slept under them, the old woman shivering and talking in her sleep. We weren't hungry. I had brought some bread, and your grandmother gathered thyme and some seeds from the land that we ate also.

“On the third night, the old woman disappeared.

“I woke up and didn't find her with us under the blankets. I looked everywhere, but she'd disappeared.

“The Stone came back to tell us that we had to go to Kafar Yasif in the night, everything was arranged. Al-Birwa had been completely demolished, and the Jews had built the settlement of Achihud on top of it. Kafar Yasif was the only solution.

“I told him about his mother's disappearance.

“‘She's over there,' he said. ‘I know her. I'll go and get her, and don't you move from here.'

“I wanted to tell him not to go, but I didn't dare. How can you tell someone to abandon his mother? I begged him to wait for night to fall, but he didn't answer. He left and didn't return until sunset. He said he'd seen her and that she'd refused to come back with him. She was sitting alone on top of the ruins.

“A ruined village, and a woman sitting on top of the remains of her house, and a man trying to persuade her to go with him, and her stubborn silence. He talked, and she remained silent. He'd ask her to come with him, but she'd pay no attention.