“Give it to me. I’ll take care of it,” said the old man.
He went toward the child, whose screams grew louder and louder. The woman took a wool blanket, wrapped her son in it and picked him up. She put his head on her shoulder and kept pulling him down onto it as she walked, stifling the child’s cries with the blanket. The old man walked behind them; my grandmother said he walked behind the woman and kept pushing the child’s head down onto its mother’s shoulder.
In Tarshiha the mother put her son down on the ground. She pulled back the blanket and started weeping. The child was blue. But the old man changed when they reached the last Palestinian village and started looking for his daughter, eagerly asking people about a short, fat woman with five children.
My grandmother said the people of Tarshiha brought them food, but the man refused to eat. He became a different person. The veins disappeared from his face and hands, his body slumped, and he started weeping and asking to die.
“And the child?” I asked.
“What child?”
“The child with the pita bread.”
“I don’t know.”
She said she didn’t know, though she knew the boy had died.
Its mother killed it — do you hear, Father? — its mother killed it because she was afraid of the old man, who was afraid of the Jews. The mother didn’t carry her child on her breast, and she didn’t support his head on her shoulder the way my grandmother had told me. She wrapped him in the blanket and sat on him until he died.
That’s the way our relative, Umm Fawzi, told it. Umm Fawzi said they walked for five days without a sound so the Jews wouldn’t hear them, and when the boy cried his mother killed him because the old man threatened to kill them both.
“Umm Fawzi’s raving,” said my grandmother.
You’ll say I’m raving, too, because you don’t like hearing the story about the boy, or the story about the people of Saleheh, who were executed wrapped in their bed sheets. The Jews wrapped more than seventy men in the white sheets they’d been carrying as a sign of surrender and fired on them, and the sheets spurted blood.
You don’t want to hear about anything except heroism, and you think you’re the heroes’ hero. Listen then to the story of another hero, a mixture of you and your father, a hero who didn’t fight. A man from a village called Mi’ar. It’s close to your new village. His name was Rakan Abboud.
When Mi’ar fell, after the rest of his family had gone, the man refused to leave his village and stayed on with his wife. This is what Nadia told me. Do you know Nadia? Didn’t you meet her? She was in charge of the People’s Committee in the camp. Nadia said the Jews drove her grandfather out along with two other men from the village three months after they’d occupied it. The two men died on the road, near Jenin, but Nadia’s grandfather, who was in his eighties, went to Aleppo and stayed with someone he knew there. Then he joined Nadia’s father in the camp in Baalbek. “My grandfather had become unbearable,” said Nadia. “He hated Baalbek. He hated its snow and its cold. He used to scream that he didn’t want to die there, so my father decided to move to the camp in Burj al-Shamali near Tyre. We lived in a shack there, like everyone else. His condition got frighteningly worse. He’d go out at night and only come back at dawn. Then he informed my father he’d decided to go back to Mi’ar to look for his wife. That was in 1950, and we were waiting. All my father did was listen to the radio and set dates for the Return. Each month he’d say our time would come next month. My father tried to stop him and begged him to wait one more month, but the man had made up his mind. One day, he managed to hire a guide and a donkey and left.
“He made it to his house — imagine! — knocked on the door, and a woman opened it. The poor man thought she must be a spirit and ran off, tripping over himself. He left Mi’ar, never to return. He spent what remained of his life in the fields. My grandmother, who lived in Majd al-Kuroum, found out and began her long search for him. She looked for him for more than a year. When she found him, the poor man had completely lost his sight, so she took him to Majd al-Kuroum, where he died.”
Nadia went on at great length about how her grandfather died. She told how he lived his last days like a thief, a blind, feeble thief. Despite this, his wife had to hide him from the police so he wouldn’t be expelled like others who’d got back in. He’d gone to see his village and his wife, but he saw nothing. He lived in secret, and his presence was made public only when he died.
Blind and feeble, living in secret — but when he died, people wept openly. All those people who’d now become the people of Majd al-Kuroum wept. You know the villages aren’t the old villages anymore: They’ve become full of abandoned houses inhabited by refugees from other villages. The people were all mixed together. The people in Majd al-Kuroum didn’t know the blind old man. They knew that Fathiyyeh Abboud was hiding “Lebanon” in her house. They called him Lebanon because he’d come from there. When the secret got out, the whole village wept for the blind man. He didn’t die in his own house surrounded by children and grandchildren; he didn’t die, as most die, in the platitude of memories. He went back and died in the secrecy of that town living under the secrecy of military rule, curfew, and the footprints of those who slipped back in.
“That was a blind old man, nothing like me,” you’ll say. “I didn’t go back to end my life wrapped in memories. I went back to start again, to remember the way, so I could love my wife.”
Nice words, my dear friend, and everything you say is correct. And I’m not going to talk to you about the beginnings of the fedayeen, which coincided with your journeys to Deir al-Asad and the routine births of your children.
Tell me, how did Sha’ab fall?
Very well, tell me how Sha’ab didn’t fall.
Without heroics, please. I’d like to find out who the woman of Sha’ab was.
Nahilah, or who?
Who was that woman who stood up six days after the village fell and said she was going to go back? The men tried to stop her, but she’d already left, and you had to catch up with her.
Did people get confused and mix up the woman who carried a jerry can of arak on her head with the woman who led them in liberating their village?
And why didn’t you tell me about the smuggling of arak? Because it was shameful? What’s shameful about smuggling arak from Lebanon to Palestine? Is it because you don’t want to acknowledge that the Lebanese arak they make in Zahleh is the best in the world? Or are you embarrassed because the smugglers made use of the Revolution of ’36 and became revolutionaries in their own way?
Reem belonged to the Sa’ad family, which was famous for smuggling. It was the smugglers’ sheikh, Hassan Sa’ad, who came up with the brilliant idea to smuggle arak on the heads of women. He’d place jerry cans of arak on the heads of the women so it appeared they were carrying water.
The column set off, crossed the Lebanese border, and came to the outskirts of Tarshiha. The column was composed of eight women in long peasant dresses and, for protection, three armed men, Hassan Sa’ad at their head.
A column of eight women, moving rhythmically as though they were coming from the well, armed men at the rear, and Hassan Sa’ad about three hundred meters ahead to scout out the unpaved road joining Tarshiha to al-Kabri.
Hassan came back suddenly, having spotted a British patrol. He ordered the women to scatter in the fields, and the women began to run. All of them ran except Reem. It appears she was paralyzed with fear. Hassan shouted, but Reem stayed frozen to the spot. Hassan pulled out his revolver and fired at the jerry can. Reem bolted, the arak pouring down over her face and clothes. Then she fell. Apparently she’d drunk a large quantity of the triple-strength arak, or maybe it was just the fumes. The girl staggered and fell. Hassan tried to hold her up, but he couldn’t, so he left her and hid in the field by the road. Having heard the shot, the patrol approached and found the girl awash in arak. They tried to question her and searched at the sides of the road but didn’t find anyone. One of the soldiers went over to her, held out his hand to help her up. . and bullets rang out. Hassan had seen the soldier going up to Reem so he fired, and the battle was launched.