Let’s go back to the beginning.
You went back to Ain al-Zaitoun only to find the village demolished. At that point you were with Abu Is’af on a mission to carry weapons to Galilee from Syria. I don’t want to hear now about the humiliations you suffered trying to find weapons and about how Colonel Safwat treated you like shit, saying you weren’t a regular army and that he wasn’t about to throw away the few weapons he had on peasants who were known for their cowardice and slyness.
That was how the “general of the defeat” — as he’d become known to the fighters who withdrew to Lebanon to the beat of the Arab leaders’ mendacious war drums — talked to you.
You returned, you and Abu Is’af, empty-handed. You left Abu Is’af in Sha’ab and continued on to Ain al-Zaitoun, discovering that the village had fallen without a shot being fired to defend it, and that your friend and twin Hanna Kamil Mousa had died crucified on an oak tree.
You all ended up in Sha’ab, and you only left after the whole of Galilee had fallen.
Now tell me about the woman. I know that the story of Palestine of your generation is a rough one, and that we can find a thousand ways to tell it, but Sha’ab, and that woman, and the men of Zabbouba: I want to hear about them from you.
You left Ain al-Zaitoun and went running to Sha’ab. You told me you ran there even though you went by car. What matters is that you got hold of a house in Sha’ab because the headman, Mohammed Ali al-Khatib, gave it to you, telling you he’d built it for his son, Ali, and that he considered you another son.
Sha’ab became your new village and it was there that you saw the miracle.
I don’t want to hear the history of the village, because I’m not interested in the brawl that broke out between the Fa’our and Khatib clans in ’35 and how it grew during the great revolt of ’36 when the Khatib clan avenged the murder of Shaker al-Khatib by killing Rashid al-Fa’our, headman of the eastern quarter, and how all of you — you were still very young — took action. You came with the revolutionaries and imposed a settlement, which was concluded on the threshing floor, where they slaughtered more than forty sheep and people came from all the neighboring villages to eat and offer their congratulations.
I don’t want to get into the labyrinth of families and subclans of which I understand nothing. I know you always cited the example of the Sha’ab settlement when you were conducting training courses for fighters. Instead of theorizing about the Sha’ab war, as we did, you’d tell stories and cite examples. And instead of asserting that the family and tribalism had to be transcended, you’d explain to the fighters how you succeeded during the Revolution of ’36 in fusing families together, and you’d cite the example of Sha’ab.
You’d tell them about the moon.
Your moon wasn’t the full moon of my mother’s; yours never became totally full. I think I read the fable of the moon in a Chinese book translated into Arabic, but it sounded more beautiful coming from your mouth than from any book: “The moon is full only one day a month. On all the other days it’s either getting bigger or smaller. Life’s the same. Stability is the exception, change the rule.” You’d ask the boys to follow the movement of the moon on training nights so they could get some practical political culture instead of book culture, which goes in through the eye and out at the ear.
Now tell me about Sha’ab.
Was it Abu Is’af who made the arrangements with the headman for you to have a house, the leader of the Sha’ab garrison thus guaranteeing that you’d stay with him?
You found yourself in the Sha’ab garrison after you’d failed — yes, failed — to form the mobile military unit you’d dreamed of. The war was speeding up, and the Arab armies that entered Palestine in 1948 were being defeated by the larger, better-armed Israeli army in record time. God, who’d have believed it? Six hundred thousand Israelis put together an army larger than all seven Arab armies combined!
You started military patrols, you begged weapons, you took part in the battles of al-Birwa and al-Zib, but the rapid fall of the villages and hamlets of Galilee made it impossible for you to move and turned you into a garrison of not more than two hundred fighters centered on the little village called Sha’ab. Later, the garrison would end up in prison in Syria and its heroic deeds would disappear among the flood of displaced people who invaded the fields and groves.
All the stories of the exodus have collected now in your eyes — shut over the teardrops I put in them — and in place of heroism I see sorrow and hear the voice of my grandmother telling about the woman who sewed up the pita bread. I’m listening to the story of the woman in the fields of Beit Jann, and I see my grandmother miming the story, screwing up her eyes so she can put the imaginary thread into the eye of the imaginary needle, then taking the imaginary pita bread in her hand, cutting it in two and starting to sew it up.
“The woman sewed the pita bread, and the boy was crying. She gave him the whole pita and asked him to be quiet, but he tore it in two and began crying again. So the mother killed her son!”
I see the exodus in your eyes and I hear my grandmother’s voice, which has dwindled into a low mutter full of ghosts.
“We reached Beit Jann, but we didn’t go into the Druze village because we were afraid.”
She tells me about fear and the Druze, and I swallow the pita bread stuffed with fried potatoes and feel the potatoes sticking to the roof of my mouth, as though I’m going to suffocate.
No, I’m not complaining about the potatoes — they were my favorite. I loved fried potatoes and still do. They were incomparably better than the boiled plants my grandmother cooked. She’d leave the camp for who-knows-where and come back loaded down with all kinds of greens, wash them, cook them, and we’d eat. The taste was — how can I describe it? — a green taste, and the stew would form a lump in my mouth. My grandmother would say that it was healthy food: “We’re peasants, and this is peasant food.” I’d beg her to fry me some potatoes; the smell of potatoes gives you an appetite, but those cooked weeds had neither odor nor taste; it felt like you were chewing something that had already been chewed.
You don’t like fried potatoes, I know. You prefer them grilled and seasoned with olive oil. Now I’ve come to like olive oil, but when my grandmother, who cooked everything in it, was around it tasted waxy to me and I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t say so in front of her. How can you say that sort of thing to a woman if she doesn’t see it? She used to live here as though she were over there. She refused to use electricity because they didn’t have it in her village — can you believe it? She didn’t want to get used to things that didn’t exist there because she was going to go back! If only she’d known what Galilee had become! But she died before she knew anything.
You won’t believe the story of the pita bread, just as you didn’t believe the story of Umm Hassan and Naji, whom she picked up and put in the basin. You believe, as I’d like to, that we don’t kill our own children and throw them under trees. You like things clear and simple. The murderer is a known quantity, and the victim, too, and it’s up to us to see that justice is done. Unfortunately, my brother, it wasn’t as simple as us and them. It was something else that’s hard to define.
I’m not here to define things. I have a mission. As usual I’ll fail and as usual I won’t believe I’ve failed; I’ll claim I succeeded or put the blame on others. Ah, habit! If only we could walk away from it! If only I could shed this past that hovers like a blue ghost in your room! Come to think of it, why do I see things as blue? Why do I see Shams looking at me with a blue face as though she were about to kill me?