Gate of the Sun (50 page)

He said they hadn't really been knocked down, it was just the earthen roofs that had collapsed, and we could rebuild them in days.

He said and he said and he said, his bald patch shining like oil, and I listened to him with half an ear. I thought, People like that never tire of repeating the same thing, they live in the past. Why don't we pay attention to our present? Why must we remain prisoners of a past that overshadows us?

Then he asked me about the base in South Lebanon and said that, if I wanted, he could come down there so we could go to al-Ghabsiyyeh together. “It won't be a military operation,” he said. “Fighting isn't the point. I'll take you there so you can see your village. Wouldn't you like to see your village?”

When he said the words
your village
, we heard a wail from my grandmother's room and realized the woman was dead. None of the men moved, but their tears flowed copiously, as though they'd been waiting for a signal, and the signal had come from my grandmother's room. No one said a word, and no one went into the room. They were sure the end they'd been waiting for had come, and the crying began.

My aunt's husband wiped the tears away with his hand and whispered into my ear his suspect question: “What are you going to do with the house?”

“What house?” I asked, thinking he was continuing the conversation about our houses in the village.

“This house,” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You don't want to sell it?” he asked.

“Why would I want to sell it?”

“Because you live on the base, and my son is coming next year to study at the university in Beirut. I'll buy it.”

“No, I'm not going to sell my house.”

He said he was ready to give me whatever sum I named on the spot.

I told him that I didn't need money, and I wasn't going to sell my house.

The man stood up, joined the men's circle, and resumed his weeping. Then my aunt came out of the room, silenced everyone with a flourish of her hand and announced that the woman wasn't dead. The sobbing came
to a sudden halt, the men returned to their conversation, and my uncle his story. Me, I decided to go back to the base. It seemed the woman was never going to die, and I had to get back.

My grandmother died in my absence, as my father had.

Why does the memory of my father come back when I want to root it out?

The fact is, I did root it out long ago and had forgotten about it, and the only reason it's come back is you, because you want the story to go “back to the beginning.” I don't know the beginning of the story. It's not mine; I didn't move from village to village, or go back to the field in Amqa carrying a bundle of vegetables on my back, or hide among the stalks, and I don't know Aslan Durziyyeh and his son, Simon, or the story of the crime in Wadi Abu Jmil.

All the same, he comes back and haunts me.

It's as though that woman who raised me on the smell of decaying flowers had slipped me into the skin of another man and handed me another name. It's as though I'd become the Other that I'd never been.

My grandmother said the days passed. “I was like everyone else. I worked the land my husband had left me. Actually, I worked the land before and after he died – he, God bless him, was a fighter, meaning that he'd leave me and go off. If I hadn't cultivated the land and looked after the olive trees, well, we'd have died of hunger. God rest his soul, he was full of talk, a peasant who didn't know how to work the land and whose head was stuffed with gunpowder and weapons. We peasants don't fight. I told them we don't know how to fight, that the Arab armies were going to come lead the battles. But he didn't want to listen to me. He would take off and occasionally return from further and further away, and then he died, and that was the end of him. It was my father's fault. He was their commander, and he married me to Khalil without consulting me. One day, he came to say that they'd read the first surah of the Koran, the
Fatihah
, and that the wedding would be the next day. The wedding took place and I had a god-awful time. I lived with him for five years, bore three girls and a boy, and then my husband
went off. The girls worked with me in the fields, and the boy we sent to the school in Acre.”

When Yasin finished his Koran lessons in the village, his mother sent him to Acre, where he joined the fourth grade class of its elementary school. In Acre, he stayed at the house of Yusef Effendi Tobil. This Yusef Tobil owned the oil press in the village and a small shop in Acre, and only came to the village in October and November, when he would press his olives and those of the peasants and then return to Acre.

“Your father, God rest his soul, would help with the oil pressing and then go back to Acre. He only studied in Acre for two years. He'd come to the village every Friday. He'd pass by the mosque and say his prayers before coming to the house, where he'd open his books and read. I barely saw him. I'd ask him about his life in Acre, and he'd read in a loud voice to make me stop talking. I tried to read his books, but I couldn't. We knew how to read the Koran: We could open the Koran and read easily, but the books your father brought were impossible. My daughters and I tried to read them, but we couldn't, even though they were written in Arabic. In those days, God help me, I used to think there was an Arabic language for men and another for women. Our language was the verses and chapters of the Koran, and God knows where theirs came from. Yusef Effendi, God bless him, persuaded me to send my son to school. He said, ‘Your son's a beacon of intelligence, Shahineh, and he must go with me to Acre.' I told him, ‘The boy'll be scared there because he's never seen the sea in his life.' Yusef Effendi laughed and said the sea was the most beautiful thing in the world, and he'd teach him to swim. ‘The sea of life is harder than the sea of Acre,' he said and took the boy. Yasin lived with them as though he were a member of the family, eating with them and sleeping in their house. He would go to school in the morning and help Mr. Yusef in his shop in the afternoon. I thought the boy would do as well in life as he did in school, but, poor boy, he only studied in Acre for two years. Then the catastrophes began: The war came to Galilee, and we started running from village to village until we reached Lebanon.”

My father, dear Yunes, didn't understand what was going on. He was young and short and plump. He carried the vegetables on his back and stood watching his mother cry, and then resumed the exodus with her until they reached Tarshiha, and in Tarshiha he died. No, he didn't die, but he saw death with his own eyes when the house collapsed on his head as the Israeli planes bombarded the town.

“In Tarshiha we lived in the house of Ali Hammoud, who'd fought with my father,” said my grandmother. “Yasin stopped going to school, and I worked in the olive groves with Ali Hammoud's wives, and we waited for the ALA, of which there was news everywhere, and we said to ourselves, ‘Things are fine.' How were they fine? We lived like dogs. True, Ali Hammoud offered us a house, and true, we worked in the olive groves, but God, we were so hungry. I never slept a night in Tarshiha with a full stomach. You know, Son, from the day we left the village, I've not once gone to sleep with a full stomach. I eat and I don't feel full, like there's a leak at the bottom of my stomach. I have no appetite, and my stomach hurts I'm so hungry.”

My grandmother's appetite was never satisfied. She'd say she wasn't hungry, put the plate in front of me and sit watching me. Then, all of a sudden, she'd swoop down on my plate, devour everything without coming up for air and say she'd eaten nothing. The woman was a strange case. She'd only eat from my plate, devouring every last crumb, would put her hand on her stomach and moan, and then start eating again. I used to think she'd taken to eating that way as a sort of compensation after my father's murder. Then I found out that her hunger came from further back, and that she had treated his food the same way she did mine. I remember the story of the string stew only vaguely, but my paternal aunts, on their rare visits, used to talk about little else, starting with laughter and ending up in a sort of quarrel.

“You loved Yasin more than us,” one of the aunts would say.

“God forgive you,” Shahineh would reply. “It wasn't like that at all. I used to make string stew because the boy was short and we were poor, not like now.”

You hear her? As though we weren't poor now. We say we used to be poor so that we don't have to face our present reality. But the main thing is that she had this strange way of cooking. She'd make a stew the way everyone else did, she'd fry bits of meat with onions before adding the vegetables, but she'd take the bits of raw meat, thread them on a string and tie the ends together before frying them. When the family sat down at the table, she'd pull the meat string out of the pot and say, “This is for Yasin.” I don't know what happened next. Did my father eat the meat while his sisters looked on, their eyes glazed with desire? Or did he distribute the bits of meat among them? Or did he leave the string untouched, to be devoured by his mother?

My grandmother only stopped cooking string stew when my mother left. I vaguely remember those days. I remember how I hated the string on my plate. I remember that I wouldn't touch it, and my grandmother would try to force me to eat it and I'd refuse. Maybe I ate it once or twice, or a dozen times, I don't know, but the taste of string stuck between my teeth has never left me.

My grandmother stopped threading the meat after my mother left, and I didn't think of it again until one of the fighters with us at Kafar Shouba told us about his mother's string stew, which was just like my grandmother's. In the fedayeen camps we ate lots of meat, and Abu Ahmad used to take my share, saying that I didn't understand anything about food because I hadn't tried string stew, and I'd say that I hated the taste of meat precisely because of string stew. Abu Ahmad would eat in an extraordinary way – but was his real name Abu Ahmad? In those days, our names were all made up anyway. I wasn't called Khalil, I was Abu Khaled, even though I'd wanted to call myself Guevara. The fact is, I love Guevara, and whenever I see his picture, I see the light in his eyes as something holy. I think that he, like Mohammed or that Talal you told me about, had his death lurking in his eyes, which is why they were beautiful and radiant. I wanted to call myself Guevara but discovered someone else had beaten me to it. Amir al-Faisal said, “We'll call you Abu Khaled.” Then the Abu Khaleds multiplied.
Gamal Abd al-Nasir was the first Abu Khaled because he called his oldest son Khaled, and when he died in '70, the young men all wanted to name themselves after him, so we were everywhere. I was the first Abu Khaled in South Lebanon, but following the September massacres in Jordan, a wave of fighters fleeing from there swept in and we couldn't distinguish among all the Abu Khaleds anymore. My name thus became Abu Khaled Khalil, and gradually the Abu Khaled part dropped off. To this day, however, I still turn when I hear the name Abu Khaled, even though I know people have forgotten that's what I used to be called.

Meat was Abu Ahmad's only joy. He'd leap onto the supply truck, pick up the meat platter, put it under a tree, pull out the knives, and start cutting it up, singing. He sang to the meat because meat was
the
food, as he would say. I despised him. Or not exactly despised him but felt disgust when he would eat raw meat and invite me to join him.

“That's disgusting,” I'd tell him.

“What's disgusting is your not eating it. Don't you know what Imru' al-Qais said were the three most beautiful things in the world – ‘Eating flesh, riding flesh, and putting flesh into flesh'?” – he'd say, his tongue, extended to lick his lips, mixing with the red meat that he was chewing.

“All our lives, brother, the only meat we ate was string. We used to fight over the string and the little scraps of meat that clung to it. Now we are really eating. Long live the Revolution – the best thing about this revolution is the meat. It's the Revolution of Meat!”

He'd chew on the raw meat and start preparing
maqloubeh
. We ate
maqloubeh
once a month, when the supplies arrived, and Abu Ahmad would put huge quantities of meat on top of the rice cooked with eggplant or cauliflower; everyone at the base dove into the meat of the revolution. Our revolution was rich while our people are poor, that was the tragedy. The problem's over today – the revolution's moved on, leaving nothing here in the camp but a consuming poverty. I don't know if people have gone back to their old habit of cooking meat on a string because I live on my own, and so do you. And I don't like meat, I prefer lentils and cracked wheat and broad beans, and you like olives.

I know the story. You don't have to tell me what your mother did with black olives, how she would slice them over bread cooked in the peasants' clay oven and say they were chicken breasts and that olives were tastier than chicken. I know the story, and I don't feel like spelling out the virtues of olives again, or talking about the Roman olive tree that served as a shelter during the winter, inside whose huge hollow trunk you'd spend the day before continuing your journey to Bab al-Shams.

As a doctor, I acknowledge the beneficial properties of olive oil, but I can't agree with your mother's theory about dentistry. I'm still not convinced by her belief that ground olive pits make a good painkiller for a tooth-ache. A handful of cloves will act as a painkiller, and arak will do the job, but olive pits – impossible! It seems your mother found a solution to her poverty by transforming olives into something similar to Salim As'ad's little Ekza bottle. No, my friend, olive pits are useless as a medicine, and olive leaves are useless for fumigating houses. Were we – were you – that poor in Palestine? Were we too poor to buy a handful of incense? Was it poverty that made your blind father take dry olive leaves and use them as incense when he led the Sufi devotions every Thursday night? They'd use dry olive leaves for incense: The men would gather around the blind sheikh, who stood in the middle of the circle clapping his hands and saying, “There is no god but God,” and the circle would start to rotate. Then you'd come, carrying a vessel full of dry olive leaves with three lit coals placed on top of them. You'd give the vessel to your father and step back while he'd try to make you join the others – you'd run away and stand at the far end of the room, near the door, where the women were gathered, and you'd watch for a while before leaving quietly. The sheikh would blow on the coals, the coals would ignite the olive leaves, and the incense would rise. The circle would begin revolving faster, and the men would fall down until the tambourine player himself fell to the ground, shouting “Succor! Succor!
Madad!
”