Meat was Abu Ahmad’s only joy. He’d leap onto the supply truck, pick up the meat platter, put it under a tree, pull out the knives, and start cutting it up, singing. He sang to the meat because meat was the food, as he would say. I despised him. Or not exactly despised him but felt disgust when he would eat raw meat and invite me to join him.
“That’s disgusting,” I’d tell him.
“What’s disgusting is your not eating it. Don’t you know what Imru’ al-Qais said were the three most beautiful things in the world — ‘Eating flesh, riding flesh, and putting flesh into flesh’?” — he’d say, his tongue, extended to lick his lips, mixing with the red meat that he was chewing.
“All our lives, brother, the only meat we ate was string. We used to fight over the string and the little scraps of meat that clung to it. Now we are really eating. Long live the Revolution — the best thing about this revolution is the meat. It’s the Revolution of Meat!”
He’d chew on the raw meat and start preparing maqloubeh. We ate maqloubeh once a month, when the supplies arrived, and Abu Ahmad would put huge quantities of meat on top of the rice cooked with eggplant or cauliflower; everyone at the base dove into the meat of the revolution. Our revolution was rich while our people are poor, that was the tragedy. The problem’s over today — the revolution’s moved on, leaving nothing here in the camp but a consuming poverty. I don’t know if people have gone back to their old habit of cooking meat on a string because I live on my own, and so do you. And I don’t like meat, I prefer lentils and cracked wheat and broad beans, and you like olives.
I know the story. You don’t have to tell me what your mother did with black olives, how she would slice them over bread cooked in the peasants’ clay oven and say they were chicken breasts and that olives were tastier than chicken. I know the story, and I don’t feel like spelling out the virtues of olives again, or talking about the Roman olive tree that served as a shelter during the winter, inside whose huge hollow trunk you’d spend the day before continuing your journey to Bab al-Shams.
As a doctor, I acknowledge the beneficial properties of olive oil, but I can’t agree with your mother’s theory about dentistry. I’m still not convinced by her belief that ground olive pits make a good painkiller for a tooth-ache. A handful of cloves will act as a painkiller, and arak will do the job, but olive pits — impossible! It seems your mother found a solution to her poverty by transforming olives into something similar to Salim As’ad’s little Ekza bottle. No, my friend, olive pits are useless as a medicine, and olive leaves are useless for fumigating houses. Were we — were you — that poor in Palestine? Were we too poor to buy a handful of incense? Was it poverty that made your blind father take dry olive leaves and use them as incense when he led the Sufi devotions every Thursday night? They’d use dry olive leaves for incense: The men would gather around the blind sheikh, who stood in the middle of the circle clapping his hands and saying, “There is no god but God,” and the circle would start to rotate. Then you’d come, carrying a vessel full of dry olive leaves with three lit coals placed on top of them. You’d give the vessel to your father and step back while he’d try to make you join the others — you’d run away and stand at the far end of the room, near the door, where the women were gathered, and you’d watch for a while before leaving quietly. The sheikh would blow on the coals, the coals would ignite the olive leaves, and the incense would rise. The circle would begin revolving faster, and the men would fall down until the tambourine player himself fell to the ground, shouting “Succor! Succor! Madad!”
The smoke blinded you, Father. Your incense wasn’t incense, it was smoke, which blinded you and made you fall down. Your poverty, however, allowed you to transform olives into an entire way of life. You transformed them into meat, chicken, incense, and medicine. Explain to me now, why all this nostalgia for those days of poverty? Why did my grandmother hug her pillow and take such care to change the flower heads she stuffed it with, saying it was the smell of al-Ghabsiyyeh? Have you forgotten how poor you were there? Or do you feel sentimental about it? Or is memory a sickness — a strange sickness that afflicts a whole people? A sickness that has made you imagine things and build your entire lives on the illusions of memory? I still remember the song we chanted at our bases in South Lebanon. Listen to these words and think with me about the meaning of illusion:
Abd al-Qadir pitched a tent
Above the tent were orange groves
Feyadeen I am, my father too
Together, we go out to battle!
Imagine with me how Abd al-Qadir saw his life: He’d become a refugee, so he set up his orange groves on top of his tent and sat underneath singing songs. That’s how we express our nostalgia. We believe an orange grove is just above the tent and that the homeland was an orange grove! We feel sentimental about our poverty and our demolished villages to the point of forgetting ourselves and, finally, dying.
But not me.
Never! You know my commitment to and faith in our right to our country. I just talk that way. We’re not in a meeting or at a lecture. We’re conversing, so let the stories take us where they will.
Where were we?
I was trying to pull together for you scraps of the story of my father. They were in Tarshiha, and that’s where Yasin died. Not really died but fell beneath death’s wing and survived. It was after Qal’at Jeddin fell into the hands of the Jews. “We took refuge at Tarshiha while waiting to return to our villages,” said my grandmother. “But instead of us getting closer to our villages, the Jews got closer to us. Jeddin fell, and Tarshiha was exposed to regular bombardments.”
One day — the day Yasin came to call the day of his true death — the planes started shelling Tarshiha: “I was in the market and suddenly found myself running with the crowd. I holed up in Ahmad Shirayh’s shop, and suddenly the shop started shaking and the walls toppling, and there was smoke everywhere. A bomb fell into the shop and demolished it. Everyone died. I was standing in the only corner that wasn’t demolished, with rubble above me, below me, and all around me — and the dead. I started groaning. I don’t know if I was in pain, but the groaning emerged from deep inside me. Then I felt a hand pulling me. Everything was on top of everything else. They picked me up, shouting ‘God is most great!’ and I found I hadn’t died.”
Yasin said that when he discovered he was still alive, he started running in the direction of the house they’d been staying in. The mother had gotten everything ready and was standing with her three daughters, and they’d lifted the woolen blankets and pots and pans onto their heads waiting for Yasin. The second they saw him, their new march began.
“My mother didn’t ask me where I’d been or why I was covered with dust. She was in a hurry. She set off, my sisters behind her, and me behind everybody, until we got to Deir al-Qasi. There we couldn’t find a house, so my mother set up her tent beneath the olive trees and made up her mind yet again that this life was intolerable and that she’d go to her village to get provisions.