Gate of the Sun (51 page)

The smoke blinded you, Father. Your incense wasn't incense, it was smoke, which blinded you and made you fall down. Your poverty, however, allowed you to transform olives into an entire way of life. You transformed them into meat, chicken, incense, and medicine. Explain to me now, why
all this nostalgia for those days of poverty? Why did my grandmother hug her pillow and take such care to change the flower heads she stuffed it with, saying it was the smell of al-Ghabsiyyeh? Have you forgotten how poor you were there? Or do you feel sentimental about it? Or is memory a sickness – a strange sickness that afflicts a whole people? A sickness that has made you imagine things and build your entire lives on the illusions of memory? I still remember the song we chanted at our bases in South Lebanon. Listen to these words and think with me about the meaning of illusion:

Imagine with me how Abd al-Qadir saw his life: He'd become a refugee, so he set up his orange groves on top of his tent and sat underneath singing songs. That's how we express our nostalgia. We believe an orange grove is just above the tent and that the homeland was an orange grove! We feel sentimental about our poverty and our demolished villages to the point of forgetting ourselves and, finally, dying.

But not me.

Never! You know my commitment to and faith in our right to our country. I just talk that way. We're not in a meeting or at a lecture. We're conversing, so let the stories take us where they will.

Where were we?

I was trying to pull together for you scraps of the story of my father. They were in Tarshiha, and that's where Yasin died. Not really died but fell beneath death's wing and survived. It was after Qal'at Jeddin fell into the hands of the Jews. “We took refuge at Tarshiha while waiting to return to our villages,” said my grandmother. “But instead of us getting closer to our villages, the Jews got closer to us. Jeddin fell, and Tarshiha was exposed to regular bombardments.”

One day – the day Yasin came to call the day of his true death – the planes started shelling Tarshiha: “I was in the market and suddenly found myself
running with the crowd. I holed up in Ahmad Shirayh's shop, and suddenly the shop started shaking and the walls toppling, and there was smoke everywhere. A bomb fell into the shop and demolished it. Everyone died. I was standing in the only corner that wasn't demolished, with rubble above me, below me, and all around me – and the dead. I started groaning. I don't know if I was in pain, but the groaning emerged from deep inside me. Then I felt a hand pulling me. Everything was on top of everything else. They picked me up, shouting ‘God is most great!' and I found I hadn't died.”

Yasin said that when he discovered he was still alive, he started running in the direction of the house they'd been staying in. The mother had gotten everything ready and was standing with her three daughters, and they'd lifted the woolen blankets and pots and pans onto their heads waiting for Yasin. The second they saw him, their new march began.

“My mother didn't ask me where I'd been or why I was covered with dust. She was in a hurry. She set off, my sisters behind her, and me behind everybody, until we got to Deir al-Qasi. There we couldn't find a house, so my mother set up her tent beneath the olive trees and made up her mind yet again that this life was intolerable and that she'd go to her village to get provisions.

“My sister, Munirah, said, ‘No, I'll go.'

“My mother protested, but the matter was settled, and Munirah and I and a girl whose name I can't remember – a friend of my sister's who lived under a woolen blanket near ours – set off. We went down to the Acre plain and hid in the cornfields. The cornstalks were more than a meter and a half tall. We had just begun picking okra, cucumbers, and tomatoes when, suddenly, a man carrying a rifle came toward us and took the vegetables away from the girls by force. The vegetable guard was Jew named Melikha. We knew him, and he knew my sister – so why did he get out his weapon and threaten us and confiscate the vegetables we'd taken from our own land? I watched my sister hand over everything and raise her hands. Then she looked back to warn me and left. This alerted him to my presence. I'd been standing stock still, preparing myself to put my hands up so Melikha wouldn't kill me, but I found myself throwing my sack to the ground and
running as I heard the sound of shots. I ran and ran, and when I reached my sister and her friend, I felt something hot trickling down my left thigh, which at that moment I didn't know was blood. But my sister tore my shirt and tied up the wound and ran in front of me, crying. It wasn't an actual wound in the true sense of the word; it was gunpowder from the double-barreled shotgun the guard had fired. It had burned through my trousers and several grains of buckshot had lodged in my left thigh. There was blood everywhere. My sister tied up my wound, and we ran back to our tent without picking anything. That was my second heroic deed. The first time I was the only person who managed to get vegetables from al-Ghabsiyyeh, and the second time I returned wounded like a martyr. I can't describe what my mother did when she saw the blood covering my trousers.”

“What can I tell you about him, my dear?” my grandmother would say. “Your father was a hero. I saw him and I saw the blood, and I ran to him, my tears flying ahead of me – my only son dying for the sake of a handful of okra – and started screaming: ‘the Jews killed him, I killed him! I've killed my son. Come, everyone, and see!' I didn't stop when I discovered the injury was trivial. I gave him a wedding, as they do for martyrs. I belted out
youyous
and wailed and waved above me his blood-stained trousers. I did what all the mothers of martyrs did, I thanked God. I brandished the trousers over my head, and our neighbor, Umm Kamel, came and sprinkled me with vapors of incense and sprinkled the trousers and sprinkled you. I thought, This is my slice of martyrdom. I did what the mothers of martyrs do so I might spare myself later. I thought, My son has died. That means he'll never die again after today. But he betrayed me and betrayed his wife and betrayed you. He left us and died on the doorstep of this house that I built with my tears. God help me, in Deir al-Qasi I thought death would not come back and that I could escape from it with my children, but it caught up with me here and snatched away my son and left me on my own with this boy who's the spitting image of Yasin. My son was scared of the vegetable guard. He feared for his life – they were killing all the young men. He didn't put his hands up to surrender in order to escape death. At the door, seeing the
revolver pointing at him, he tried to put his hands up, but he didn't have enough time, and they didn't let him surrender. They killed him.”

Why did they kill him?

My grandmother asked you why, and I'm asking you, too.

Wouldn't it have been better if he'd died in the cornfields? Was it necessary for him to go through that long agony from Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif and from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah and from al-Mansourah to al-Rashidiyyeh and from al-Rashidiyyeh to Shatila, and to death?

My grandmother hated bananas.

No one in the world hates bananas, but Shahineh hated them.

You don't know the story of this woman and bananas because you don't know how she would use banana leaves to cover the floor of her tent in the al-Rashidiyyeh camp. Banana leaves were the only thing they could find to protect them from the rain that was inundating them. You weren't there to see how the banana leaves covered them, and you weren't there to see how Nahilah stole her own food and the food for her children from her confiscated land.

You were nowhere. You'd entered your secret world that made you think that things were the way they'd always been, while Shahineh was spreading the floor of her tent with banana leaves and eating dust, and Nahilah was stealing olives from her confiscated land, before your father, the sheikh, returned to his post and started receiving his livelihood from the Deir al-Asad Mosque Endowment. You may or may not know that there was no such endowment or anyone to make one – the Israelis had confiscated all the lands. The sheikh convinced himself about the endowment so he wouldn't have to acknowledge that he'd become a beggar, a beggar living off the donations of people who were poorer than himself but were embarrassed to look into his sightless eyes and by the belly of his daughter-in-law, always swollen with children.

My grandmother hated bananas, and Nahilah hated the endowment and went to work in the
moshav
the Yemeni Jews had built along the edges of the rubble of the village of al-Birwa. You don't know these things. You'll ask
why she didn't let you know. Do you have to be told in order to know? I'd like to believe you and forgive you now, because you didn't know how we lived, how they lived, but tell me, what did you do for them and for us? Why did you let us go through such hell?

I hear your laughter breaking through the veil of your death. You're laughing and dragging on your cigarette until it burns down to nothing, and you raise your hand with a nonchalant gesture. Your voice shouts out, “Hell? You, Khalil, are talking to me about hell? What do you know about hell?”

And I hear, coming from the depths of your voice, the voice of Yasin, bringing with it the stories of the banana leaves that covered the ground and the roof of the tent so that those inside wouldn't drown.

My grandmother said she entered Lebanon on a donkey. “We hired a donkey to cross the Lebanese border. We had to abandon everything on the spot, we weren't allowed to bring anything with us.” But in fact, my grandmother brought her jewelry, which allowed her to live reasonably during the first few years in Lebanon.

She said she'd been in Deir al-Qasi. All the people were asleep in their tents, but she couldn't get to sleep. She said she felt as though everything were lost. It was night and the stars were like red spots in the sky, and the sounds of distant howling mixed with scattered gunfire and silence. The armed young men who guarded Deir al-Qasi's tents stuck close to the olive trees as though fear had petrified them to the spot.

A woman on her own, sitting in front of her shelter of olive branches, seeing nothing but darkness. A dead husband, four small children, a father whose whereabouts were known only to God, an unsure future, and a village that had died. My grandmother said that during those moments, when night was concealed in her eyes, she realized that al-Ghabsiyyeh was dead and that she had to do something to save her own life and that of her children, and she remembered that she'd left her gold jewelry and twenty Palestinian lira, which were her entire dowry, in the bottom of a chest.

The woman sat in front of her tent, the howling around her, the night
covering her, the tears flowing from her eyes. Then she found herself in front of her eldest daughter, Munirah. Munirah was sixteen years old and greatly resembled her mother. Shahineh went up to her sleeping daughter and shook her gently. The girl woke with a start.

“Get up! Get up!” said her mother.

The mother took her daughter's hand and led her out of the tent. Outside the girl listened to her mother but understood nothing.

“I don't understand a thing,” said Munirah.

The mother explained her plan to her daughter. She hadn't had a plan when she'd awakened her, she hadn't known what she was going to say to her; she just wanted to break her solitude and speak to someone about the loss of her dowry. But instead of complaining, she found herself laying out the plan to her daughter. She said she was going to go there at dawn to get her money and her jewelry, and that if anything bad should happen, God forbid, she was to go with her brother and sisters where everyone else went. If they go to Lebanon: “Go with them and ask about your grandfather, Rabbah al-Awad. You grandfather's still alive, he's fighting now with the others, I don't know where. Look for him, and he'll take care of you.” Munirah proposed that she go instead of her mother, but her mother refused. “No, Daughter. I'll go on my own. You're still young, and your life's ahead of you. Just don't forget to ask for your grandfather. His name's Rabbah, Rabbah al-Awad, and he's with the Sha'ab garrison now, and everyone knows him. Wait for me until tomorrow night. I'll come back tonight, but something may hold me up. Wait two nights for me. If I'm not back, something will have happened. Forget me, go with the others, and put your trust in God.”

Munirah said she understood and went into the tent and fell into a deep sleep. Shahineh couldn't believe her eyes. How could the girl sleep after what her mother had just told her? Shahineh went into the tent again and bent over Munirah, who was breathing quietly.

Shahineh put a crust of bread inside the front of her dress and set off. It was dark. Shahineh didn't know what time it was, but the veil of night was
breaking to reveal dim colors. She walked and walked, and no one appeared to stop her – not the camp guards, who kept close to the olive trees, nor the Jews, who had invaded the villages and spread out over the hills. She walked alone on paths she knew. She bent over and stumbled and almost fell but caught herself. She walked for about two hours. Distances in Galilee aren't great – as you once told me, Galilee is like the palm of a hand. She walked until she reached the Bubbler. She bent over the water, washed her hands and her face, drank, and entered the village.

The spring called the Bubbler isn't more than two kilometers from al-Ghabsiyyeh, but it was the longest leg of her journey. She walked and walked and never arrived. Shahineh knew the road and could have done it with her eyes closed since she was used to fetching water from the Bubbler every day – but what did every day have to do with that day? Her head felt heavy, as though she were carrying three water jars on it. She kept going, weighed down by her head; her fear welled up and out of her mouth in the form of labored breathing.