“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.
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.”