My question, dear master, is: Why?
Why are we here? Why this prison? Why do I have no one left but you, and you no one but me? Why am I so alone?
I know you’re not able to answer, not because you’re sick or because you’re suspended between life and death, but because you don’t know the answer.
Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me, why didn’t you insist that your wife come with you to Lebanon? Why did Nahilah refuse to come?
She said that she wanted to stay behind with the blind sheikh but you didn’t believe her. Yet you abandoned her and left. You left her and you left your oldest son, who died. It’s because your father told you, “Go, my son, and leave her here. We’re drained after so many moves; we don’t have the energy to pick up and move again.”
The old blind man, who’d moved from village to village and from olive grove to olive grove until fortune brought him to Deir al-Asad to die, told you he didn’t have the energy to move, and you believed him?
Why did you believe him?
Why didn’t you tell them?
Why did you turn your back on them and go?
I know you were one man straying from village to village along with the other lost souls, that you were wanderers in despair. But what did you do after the fall of Tarshiha? Why didn’t you go to Lebanon with the fighters? You made your way into the hills of al-Kabri and fought with the Yemenis, and then returned to Sha’ab and found the village empty. You looked for them everywhere. A month later you found them in Deir al-Asad, living in half a house, and instead of looking after them you left again, abandoned them.
Tell me, what came over you?
Fill me in.
Whenever I ask you what happened, you start mixing events up, jumping from month to month and from village to village, as though time had melted away among the stones of the demolished villages. My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart, and I understood nothing. I never was able to understand why our village fell or how.
I can understand my grandmother, I can forgive her her pillow that reeks of decay. But you, you who fought in ’36, who took part in all the wars, why don’t you know?
Do you want me to believe my grandmother, to lay my head on her pillow of dried flowers and say, “This is al-Ghabsiyyeh”? Do you want me to be like her and close my eyes? Her only son came back, and she didn’t see him at all. She was standing under the olive tree, undoing her hair and swaying in sorrow, when her son, my father, came back carrying a sack of vegetables, but she didn’t see him. The boy, who had just slipped through a shower of bullets, grasped his mother’s dress, and the two of them burst into tears together, she because she’d lost him and he from seeing her weep that way.
I won’t tell you about my father who died in a heap on the threshold of his house. They assassinated him and left him there. I didn’t see it myself. My mother and his mother were there, and when I see him now it’s with my mother’s and my grandmother’s eyes. I see him dying in a pool of his own blood like a slaughtered lamb, and I see white.
But no, it didn’t happen that way.
The sky fell to the earth, my grandmother told me, describing the terrible exodus into the fields. The sky fell to earth, the stars turned to stones, and everything went black.
Tell me about that blackness. I don’t want the usual song about the betrayal by the Arab armies in the ’48 war — I’ve had enough of armies. What did you do? Why are you here and they’re there? And why did fate finally bring us together now?
I won’t go back as far as Ain al-Zaitoun because our story begins where the story of Ain al-Zaitoun ends.
That was on the night of May 1 of ’48. You’ll never forget this date because you tattooed it with a piece of smoldering iron onto your left wrist. On that day Ain al-Zaitoun was wiped out of existence. The Israelis entered the village and demolished it house by house. It’s as though it had never been. Later, they planted a pine forest on the site of the village.
Where were you on May 1?
I know you were organizing the defense of Sha’ab. You had been summoned by Abu Is’af and you’d gone, not expecting an attack on the village. The sacred jihad battalions were reorganizing themselves after the volunteer Arab Liberation Army, led by the Lebanese Fawzi al-Qawuqji, decided to enter Galilee.
Suddenly the village was overrun and destroyed; you couldn’t find it.
As you were coming home, with your English rifle slung over your shoulder, you saw Palmach men everywhere but you didn’t do a thing; you didn’t fire a single shot. You took a bit of iron, heated it in the fire and scratched the date on your left wrist. Then you ran off to the fields, heard how the village had fallen, and swore vengeance.
Ain al-Zaitoun marked the major turning point of the war in Galilee. On the night of May 1, 1948, a Palmach unit with mules carrying ammunition advanced on Ain al-Zaitoun via the hill of al-Dweirat, which overlooks the village from the north, and from the hill the Palmach men rolled barrels of explosives down onto the village.
Umm Suleiman said, weeping, that they’d killed your father.
In the olive grove, you saw their forlorn wandering ghosts. You grabbed Umm Suleiman by the shoulder, but she didn’t stop. She kept going, and you kept trying to catch up with her.
“Umm Suleiman, it’s me, Yunes,” you yelled.
Then she turned around and saw you, but she didn’t stop. She said, “They killed your father. Go look for your mother and your wife up ahead.”
You took off running and spotted your mother and Nahilah in the crowd. Drops of salty sweat mixed with your tears as you searched for your son. You got close to them and saw that your mother was leading the blind sheikh and Nahilah was walking next to them, carrying the child.
You walked beside them and didn’t say a word. You didn’t ask about your father’s death because you could see he was alive. You’ll tell me you were lost, mistaking the living for the dead and the dead for the living. Everything got tangled up, and you spent years after this first great disaster, the Nakba,* trying to draw a line between the dead and the living.
Your father didn’t die. Umm Suleiman was mistaken, and you didn’t ask about it. But when you reached Sha’ab and the Khatib family house, you tried to discover what had actually happened. Upon seeing Umm Suleiman sitting in the doorway of the mosque with her hands clasped like a young schoolgirl, you told her that the sheikh hadn’t died, and she looked at you as though she didn’t know you. People began gathering in the courtyard of the mosque and Hamed Ali Hassan arrived.
Hamed Ali Hassan’s clothes were dripping with blood when he reached the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab. Hamed was in his early twenties with green eyes like those of his dark-skinned Bedouin mother. He left the village when he’d found himself alone with bombs exploding around him.
Hamed Ali stopped in the courtyard of the mosque and said that Rashid Khalil Hassan had been killed.
“We went back,” said Hamed. “We were six young men from the Hassan family. We wanted to get the money buried in the courtyard of our house. Rashid was the first to enter the village: He was hit by a bullet in the neck and fell. Bullets rained down on us from all sides, and we were driven off. We have to go back to bury Rashid.”
He sat down. Your mother ran over and gave him some water. No one else moved. No one got up and said, “Come on. Let’s go get the body.”