All the same, he comes back and haunts me.
It’s as though that woman who raised me on the smell of decaying flowers had slipped me into the skin of another man and handed me another name. It’s as though I’d become the Other that I’d never been.
My grandmother said the days passed. “I was like everyone else. I worked the land my husband had left me. Actually, I worked the land before and after he died — he, God bless him, was a fighter, meaning that he’d leave me and go off. If I hadn’t cultivated the land and looked after the olive trees, well, we’d have died of hunger. God rest his soul, he was full of talk, a peasant who didn’t know how to work the land and whose head was stuffed with gunpowder and weapons. We peasants don’t fight. I told them we don’t know how to fight, that the Arab armies were going to come lead the battles. But he didn’t want to listen to me. He would take off and occasionally return from further and further away, and then he died, and that was the end of him. It was my father’s fault. He was their commander, and he married me to Khalil without consulting me. One day, he came to say that they’d read the first surah of the Koran, the Fatihah, and that the wedding would be the next day. The wedding took place and I had a god-awful time. I lived with him for five years, bore three girls and a boy, and then my husband went off. The girls worked with me in the fields, and the boy we sent to the school in Acre.”
When Yasin finished his Koran lessons in the village, his mother sent him to Acre, where he joined the fourth grade class of its elementary school. In Acre, he stayed at the house of Yusef Effendi Tobil. This Yusef Tobil owned the oil press in the village and a small shop in Acre, and only came to the village in October and November, when he would press his olives and those of the peasants and then return to Acre.
“Your father, God rest his soul, would help with the oil pressing and then go back to Acre. He only studied in Acre for two years. He’d come to the village every Friday. He’d pass by the mosque and say his prayers before coming to the house, where he’d open his books and read. I barely saw him. I’d ask him about his life in Acre, and he’d read in a loud voice to make me stop talking. I tried to read his books, but I couldn’t. We knew how to read the Koran: We could open the Koran and read easily, but the books your father brought were impossible. My daughters and I tried to read them, but we couldn’t, even though they were written in Arabic. In those days, God help me, I used to think there was an Arabic language for men and another for women. Our language was the verses and chapters of the Koran, and God knows where theirs came from. Yusef Effendi, God bless him, persuaded me to send my son to school. He said, ‘Your son’s a beacon of intelligence, Shahineh, and he must go with me to Acre.’ I told him, ‘The boy’ll be scared there because he’s never seen the sea in his life.’ Yusef Effendi laughed and said the sea was the most beautiful thing in the world, and he’d teach him to swim. ‘The sea of life is harder than the sea of Acre,’ he said and took the boy. Yasin lived with them as though he were a member of the family, eating with them and sleeping in their house. He would go to school in the morning and help Mr. Yusef in his shop in the afternoon. I thought the boy would do as well in life as he did in school, but, poor boy, he only studied in Acre for two years. Then the catastrophes began: The war came to Galilee, and we started running from village to village until we reached Lebanon.”
My father, dear Yunes, didn’t understand what was going on. He was young and short and plump. He carried the vegetables on his back and stood watching his mother cry, and then resumed the exodus with her until they reached Tarshiha, and in Tarshiha he died. No, he didn’t die, but he saw death with his own eyes when the house collapsed on his head as the Israeli planes bombarded the town.
“In Tarshiha we lived in the house of Ali Hammoud, who’d fought with my father,” said my grandmother. “Yasin stopped going to school, and I worked in the olive groves with Ali Hammoud’s wives, and we waited for the ALA, of which there was news everywhere, and we said to ourselves, ‘Things are fine.’ How were they fine? We lived like dogs. True, Ali Hammoud offered us a house, and true, we worked in the olive groves, but God, we were so hungry. I never slept a night in Tarshiha with a full stomach. You know, Son, from the day we left the village, I’ve not once gone to sleep with a full stomach. I eat and I don’t feel full, like there’s a leak at the bottom of my stomach. I have no appetite, and my stomach hurts I’m so hungry.”
My grandmother’s appetite was never satisfied. She’d say she wasn’t hungry, put the plate in front of me and sit watching me. Then, all of a sudden, she’d swoop down on my plate, devour everything without coming up for air and say she’d eaten nothing. The woman was a strange case. She’d only eat from my plate, devouring every last crumb, would put her hand on her stomach and moan, and then start eating again. I used to think she’d taken to eating that way as a sort of compensation after my father’s murder. Then I found out that her hunger came from further back, and that she had treated his food the same way she did mine. I remember the story of the string stew only vaguely, but my paternal aunts, on their rare visits, used to talk about little else, starting with laughter and ending up in a sort of quarrel.
“You loved Yasin more than us,” one of the aunts would say.
“God forgive you,” Shahineh would reply. “It wasn’t like that at all. I used to make string stew because the boy was short and we were poor, not like now.”
You hear her? As though we weren’t poor now. We say we used to be poor so that we don’t have to face our present reality. But the main thing is that she had this strange way of cooking. She’d make a stew the way everyone else did, she’d fry bits of meat with onions before adding the vegetables, but she’d take the bits of raw meat, thread them on a string and tie the ends together before frying them. When the family sat down at the table, she’d pull the meat string out of the pot and say, “This is for Yasin.” I don’t know what happened next. Did my father eat the meat while his sisters looked on, their eyes glazed with desire? Or did he distribute the bits of meat among them? Or did he leave the string untouched, to be devoured by his mother?
My grandmother only stopped cooking string stew when my mother left. I vaguely remember those days. I remember how I hated the string on my plate. I remember that I wouldn’t touch it, and my grandmother would try to force me to eat it and I’d refuse. Maybe I ate it once or twice, or a dozen times, I don’t know, but the taste of string stuck between my teeth has never left me.
My grandmother stopped threading the meat after my mother left, and I didn’t think of it again until one of the fighters with us at Kafar Shouba told us about his mother’s string stew, which was just like my grandmother’s. In the fedayeen camps we ate lots of meat, and Abu Ahmad used to take my share, saying that I didn’t understand anything about food because I hadn’t tried string stew, and I’d say that I hated the taste of meat precisely because of string stew. Abu Ahmad would eat in an extraordinary way — but was his real name Abu Ahmad? In those days, our names were all made up anyway. I wasn’t called Khalil, I was Abu Khaled, even though I’d wanted to call myself Guevara. The fact is, I love Guevara, and whenever I see his picture, I see the light in his eyes as something holy. I think that he, like Mohammed or that Talal you told me about, had his death lurking in his eyes, which is why they were beautiful and radiant. I wanted to call myself Guevara but discovered someone else had beaten me to it. Amir al-Faisal said, “We’ll call you Abu Khaled.” Then the Abu Khaleds multiplied. Gamal Abd al-Nasir was the first Abu Khaled because he called his oldest son Khaled, and when he died in ’70, the young men all wanted to name themselves after him, so we were everywhere. I was the first Abu Khaled in South Lebanon, but following the September massacres in Jordan, a wave of fighters fleeing from there swept in and we couldn’t distinguish among all the Abu Khaleds anymore. My name thus became Abu Khaled Khalil, and gradually the Abu Khaled part dropped off. To this day, however, I still turn when I hear the name Abu Khaled, even though I know people have forgotten that’s what I used to be called.