GHASSAN KANAFANI
PALESTINE S CHILDREN
RETURNING TO HAIFA and Other Stories
PALESTINE’S CHILDREN
Z RETURNING TO HAIFA & Other Stories
A THREE CONTINENTS BOOK
PALESTINE’S CHILDREN %
RETURNING TO HAIFA & Other Stories
Ghassan Kanafani
translated by Barbara Harlow & Karen E. Riley, with an Introduction and a Biographical Essay on Ghassan Kanafani
RIENNER PUBLISHERS
Published in the United States of America in 2000 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com
and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU
© 2000 by Anni Kanafani. All rights reserved by the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kanafani, Ghassan.
[Short stories. English. Selections]
Palestine’s children : Returning to Haifa and other stories / Ghassan Kanafani; translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley; with an introduction to the work and a biographical essay on Ghassan Kanafani.
. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-89410-865-4 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-89410-890-5 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Palestinian Arabs—Fiction. 2. Exiles—Palestine—Fiction. 3. Kanafani, Ghassan. 1. Harlow, Barbara. II. Riley, Karen E. III. Title.
PJ7842.A5 A24 2000 892.7'36—de21 00-024783
British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
54321
Contents Z%
Ghassan Kanafani: A Biographical Essay Karen E. Riley
Introduction Karen E. Riley & Barbara Harlow
The Slope Paper from Ramleh A Present for the Holiday
The Child Borrows His Uncle’s Gun and Goes East to Safad
Doctor Qassim Talks to Eva About Mansur Who Has Arrived in Safad
Abu al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car
The Child, His Father, and the Gun Go to the Citadel at Jaddin
The Child Goes to the Camp The Child Discovers that the Key Looks Like an Axe Suliman’s Friend Learns Many Things in One Night
47
vi CONTENTS
Hamid Stops Listening to the Uncles’ Stories Guns in the Camp
He Was a Child That Day
Six Eagles and a Child
Returning to Haifa
Acknowledgments
123 129 135 141
149
197
Ghassan Kanafani: A Biographical Essay
KAREN E. RILEY
¥
My feelings are very strange. They are the feelings of a man who was on his way somewhere in search of suitable work when he died suddenly—on the road. !
Ghassan Kanafani was not yet twenty-four, teaching in a Kuwaiti government school, when he wrote these words in a let- ter to a friend. The image is a precursor of his first major liter- ary work, the novella Men in the Sun, written two years later. It is also sadly prophetic of Kanafani’s actual fate, for at the age of thirty-six he did indeed die “suddenly,” killed when his booby- trapped car exploded in Beirut.
During Kanafani’s brief life he was always “on his way somewhere,’ always searching for the appropriate tool as well as the most effective setting in which to use it. From his birth the circumstances of his life were inextricably enmeshed with the Palestinian cause. His “work” was survival, both his own and that of his people, the Palestinians.
Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre on the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine on April 9, 1936. That same month, the Arab Higher Committee was established in response to rapidly increasing Jewish immigration, and a general Arab
2 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
strike throughout Palestine was called by the committee to protest British mandatory government policies with respect to immigration. The strike paralyzed activity for six months.
Ghassan’s father was a lawyer, and the family belonged to the upper middle class. He had an older sister and brother and three younger siblings. As was common at the time among the middle and upper classes, young Ghassan attended a school run by French missionaries in Palestine and was thus educated pri- marily in French rather than in the language of his own coun- try. In his own words, he “did not have a command of the Arabic language like an Arab,”? and he would later make a con- scious and serious effort to enrich his Arabic and rid it of for- eign expressions.
In 1948, on his twelfth birthday, one of the most egregious events of the Zionist struggle for Palestine took place: the brutal massacre of the residents of an Arab village called Deir Yassin. Anni Kanafani, his widow, writes that Ghassan never celebrated his birthday after that year. Within a month the city of Acre itself fell to Zionist forces, and his family escaped, first to a small village in southern Lebanon, then to the mountains out- side Damascus, and finally to a ghetto in Damascus. There, the family’s position changed dramatically.
In sudden exile and living in extreme poverty, the Kanafanis believed at first, like all the other Palestinians, that it would only be a matter of weeks, months, or a year at most before the situation would be reversed and they could go home. As a child Ghassan heard other Palestinian children playing in the camps and speaking with compassion of Syrian or Lebanese children, saying, “Poor things, they don’t have Palestine to return to.”4
Reality proved otherwise—it proved to be permanent exile. Ghassan took a keen interest in everything around him in the camps and noted the difference between his actual surround- ings and his yearned-for past, and he began to draw and paint as a means of forging a link between that past and his miserable present.
When he was fourteen or fifteen years old, Ghassan broke his leg. He and two school friends had played hooky and gone into the mountains above Damascus, where Ghassan fell while trying
A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 3
to jump between boulders. Not wanting to admit his truancy to his father, he invented a clever story about a minor accident in town, and as a result, the leg was at first not treated properly. His convalescence stretched some six months, and he spent that time studying Arabic literature intensely in an effort to improve his usage and literary command of his native language.
At the age of sixteen he took a job teaching at a United Nations relief (UNRWA) school in a refugee camp, to help sup- port his family as well as to continue his own education. His experiences even then were propelling him toward political involvement, and he would later state that he “turned toward politics at an early stage in life because we were living in a refugee camp.’5
Two incidents while he was teaching are indicative of this propensity and illustrate the basis for his commitment to the Palestinian cause—a commitment that would develop through his life experiences and, in his literature, would symbolize and encompass the cause of all oppressed peoples seeking freedom. For one thing, he noticed that many of his young students were falling asleep during class, which angered him at first. But he then discovered that the children were working late into the night, selling sweets at the cinema or on the streets, to help sup- port their families:
I realized that the children’s drowsiness did not stem from scorn for me or dislike of their studies, nor did it have any- thing to do with my capacity as a teacher. It was simply the reflection of a political problem.°
On another occasion Kanafani was giving a lesson in accor- dance with the official curriculum, which called for the instruc- tor to teach the children how to draw an apple and a banana. While drawing these items on the blackboard, it suddenly occurred to him that these children had never seen either an apple or a banana; such things had no real bearing on their lives. So he erased his drawings and asked them to draw pic- tures of the refugee camp instead. He later described this event as a “decisive turning point” in his life, saying: “I clearly remem-
4 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
ber that precise moment among all the things that have hap- pened to me in my life.”
During this same period, Kanafani enrolled at Damascus University in the Department of Arabic Literature. He began to write short stories that expressed realistically the Palestinians’ desperate situation. He attracted the attention of some univer- sity students who had founded a literary society called the League of Literature and Life, and they persuaded him to join the group. But they were idealists for whom writing was a romanticized activity detached from and elevated above every- day life. Among them was Fadl al-Nagqib, who would remain a lifelong friend and write his memoirs of Kanafani. In describing the difference between Kanafani and the other members of the group, for whom writing was a luxurious activity and publish- ing a dream for the future, al-Naqib says that Ghassan “devoted himself to publishing tomorrow what he wrote today. If he couldn't publish it in one magazine, he would try another. He lived without dreams.”8
While at the university, Kanafani became active in student politics; this led him to Dr. George Habash, the leader of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement, and he began to work in the movement. In 1955 he joined his brother and sister in Kuwait, where there was a large exiled Palestinian community, and took a job teaching in a government school. At the same time he continued his study of Arabic literature, returning to Damascus each summer for examinations.? He was barely twenty when he went to Kuwait, and despite the fact that his brother and sister were with him, he was beset by feelings of isolation, strange- ness, and exile.
While Kanafani was in Kuwait, a personal calamity befell him that was to have a profound influence on his future. He was diagnosed as having severe diabetes; often losing consciousness, he had to learn to self-administer daily insulin injections. Face- to-face with his mortality, he began referring to it constantly in his letters and diaries. From Kuwait he once wrote:
A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 5
When I was twelve, just as I began to perceive the meaning of life and nature around me, I was hurled down and exiled from my own country. And now, now, just as I have begun to perceive my path ... along comes “Mr. Diabetes” who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me.!°
His preoccupation at this stage was also mirrored by his equally pessimistic perception of the Palestinian situation. A diary entry from early 1960 reads:
The only thing we know is that tomorrow will be no better than today, and that we are waiting on the banks, yearning, for a boat that will not come. We are sentenced to be separat- ed from everything—except from our own destruction.!!
Later that same year George Habash founded a new politi- cal magazine in Beirut called al-Hurriyya [Independence], and he asked Ghassan to join the editorial staff. Dropping every- thing, the young man went to Beirut in the summer of 1960 and, as he participated more actively and directly in Palestinian affairs, he managed to turn his absorption with his illness into an insatiable drive to accomplish as much as possible, to express as much as possible, using every available means. In describing his efforts to come to grips with his illness, he wrote to a friend:
I tried to write about my illness, but I couldn't find anything to write. Therefore the matter seems to me to be very simple. The strongest form an illness takes 1s when it causes death, and that only happens to a man once. So as long as | am not dead, | am going to behave as though I am not sick.!?
This matter-of-factness is apparent in an anecdote related by Fad] al-Nagib: Whenever Ghassan realized he needed insulin, he would blithely prepare and administer an injection, all the while talking with his companions, as though he were injecting someone else.!3 His widow has noted his “fantastic sense of humor,’ allowing him to be “rather joking with death—maybe in a tragical/comical way.”!4 On occasion, for example, he would work to the point of forgetting the insulin altogether and
6 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
have to be taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. It is said that after one such bout, Ghassan requested a cigarette. When the doctor refused, he countered:
Doctor, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Other times, the doctor has only given me one needle. I let you give me two needles, so you must let me have a cigarette. Life is give and take.
The doctor relented.!5
In 1961 Kanafani met Anni Hoover, a Danish teacher who had come to Beirut to study the Palestinian refugee situation; in two months they were married. Since he had no passport at the time, he was forced to go underground in early 1962, and dur- ing this period of hiding he wrote Men in the Sun, dedicating it to Anni. When it was published the following year, it burst into the world of Arabic literature, bringing Kanafani instant and wide recognition and acclaim. It is still considered by many to be his best work.
Men in the Sun is about three exiled Palestinians who make arrangements in Iraq with a fourth to be smuggled over the border into Kuwait, where profitable employment is reputed to be available. The three hide in the empty water tank of a truck. When the driver—an embittered Palestinian exile who was cas- trated by a shell explosion in 1948—is detained at the border, the three men inside the tank suffocate silently under the blaz- ing sun, “for fear of drawing the attention of the outside world to their existence.”!* The driver’s agonized questions, “Why did- n't you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say any- thing? Why?” are echoed back by the desert at the novella’s end, an echo that rang in the ears of the entire Palestinian communi- ty like a provocation.
That same year, Kanafani also became editor-in-chief of a new daily in Beirut, al-Muharrir [The Liberator], which includ- ed a weekly supplement called Filastin [ Palestine], also edited by
A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 7
him. Both were widely respected and quoted throughout the Arab world. From this point on, Kanafani’s work intensified. He was contributing to many daily and weekly publications at the saine time, in addition to writing fiction. Because of the recog- nition Men in the Sun had brought, friends and critics tried to convince him to spend less time on journalism and concentrate on his literary writing. In a letter shortly after the publication of Men in the Sun, Kanafani wrote:
Now the advice from my friends to pay less attention to jour- nalism is growing stronger. In the end, as they put it, journal- ism will destroy my artistic ability to write stories. In truth, I don’t understand this logic. It is the same logic I used to hear in school: leave politics and concentrate on your studies, and later in Kuwait, give up writing and take care of your health. Did I really have a choice between studies and politics, between writing and health, or now between journalism and stories? I want to say something. Sometimes I can say it in the official news of the morning, sometimes fashioned into an editorial, or into a small piece on the society page. Sometimes I can’t say what I want to say in anything but a story. The choice they talk about is nonexistent. It reminds me of the Arabic teacher who at the beginning of each school year asks the children to write an essay on whether they pre- and the children live
fer life in the village or life in the city in a refugee camp!!”
He accepted the fact that all the aspects of his life were inter- connected. Just as politics shaped events, so his work—both what he wrote and how he wrote—was structured by those events, and they were reflected in it.
In 1965, the first armed struggle to regain Palestine was launched, a year after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. These developments reverberated in the Palestinian community, affecting not only Palestinian life but also its literature; the questions pending at the end of Men in
§ A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
the Sun now assumed the shape of political action. For the first time since 1948, the Palestinians were taking their struggle and their future into their own hands, neither relying on external Arab armies nor denying their history and identity by dying silently in exile. Kanafani’s work now had a “relatively more optimistic outlook ... as a result of the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and the launching of armed struggle the following year.”!8
Then came the disastrous war of 1967. On June 5, Kanafani sat listening to the news reports at al-Muharrir’s headquarters. When he noticed that all of the reports were identical, he became suspicious and contacted friends and army personnel, only to learn of the Arabs’ defeat. At the end of the day he was left alone in the office, to write the editorial for the morning paper. He described this moment as being the first time in his life that he lost the ability to write. But even after this defeat, he remained resolute and optimistic, encouraging others even when he him- self felt despair. As Anni Kanafani put it: “In critical moments he was unbelievably strong and tried to give some of that strength to others. Later on he would express his feelings in political and lit- erary writings.”!? One of the literary works to come out of this particular “critical moment” was Returning to Haifa.
Shorty after the June 1967 war, Kanafani left al-Muharrir to join the prestigious daily al-Anwar |The Lights] as editor-in-chief of its weekly magazine. In 1969, he left that position to cofound a new political newspaper called al-Hadaf [The Goal], which became the organ of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the successor organization to George Habash’s Arab Nationalists’ Movement. The PFLP was Marxist- oriented, committed not only to regaining the homeland in Palestine, but also to the establishment of a new secular society based on social reform and social justice both in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.
In 1969 he published Returning to Haifa and Umm Saad [Saads Mother], the latter a vivid portrayal of life in the refugee
A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 9
camps structured as a series of conversations between the nar- rator and a woman from the camp whose son has joined the Palestinian resistance. In both works, Kanafani places the future in the hands of the new generation of Palestinians, whose com- mitment and emotional ties to Palestine are stronger than the more concrete connections experienced by their parents.
In 1970, in the course of a long conversation with a friend, Kanafani was asked whether he was optimistic. He replied that he was indeed. In the past, he said, Palestinians would wait to read the news and then react to it with optimism or pessimism. But now, for the first time, Palestinians could be optimistic because they knew in advance what the news would say. Kanafant’s friend then asked him if he knew the story of the reporter who had asked George Bernard Shaw, on his ninetieth birthday, how it felt to be ninety. Shaw replied that he felt very happy, considering the alternative. Kanafani laughed heartily and at length, then grew serious:
Today isn’t my birthday, but if you asked me how I feel I would not hesitate to say I feel happy, not because | consider the alternative, but because I know we are traveling on a path for which there is no alternative.20
During 1970-1972, political and armed activity intensified. The PLO carried out a number of attacks against Israel from Lebanon and Jordan. Internal political pressures led Jordan to expel the PLO in 1971. In 1972 Red Army gunmen attacked Lod Airport outside Tel Aviv and a telephone caller claimed respon- sibility on behalf of the PFLP.
On July 8, 1972, Ghassan Kanafani and his niece Lamees got into his car. Lamees was his sister’s daughter, and Ghassan had adored her from the moment she was born. Every year on her birthday he sent her a hand-written book of stories or poetry illustrated with his own drawings. When Ghassan started the motor, the booby-trapped car exploded, killing them both. The act was generally considered to be a reprisal for the Lod Airport attack.?!
Anni Kanafani was inside the house with their nine-year-
10 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
old son, Fayez. Their daughter Laila, who was five, was sitting on the steps of the house eating some chocolate her father had just given her. The explosion blew out all the windows of the house. Anni ran down the stairs and saw the wreckage of the car:
We found Lamees a few meters away, Ghassan wasn't there. I called his name—then I discovered his left leg. I stood para- lyzed, while Fayez knocked his head against the wall and our daughter Laila cried again and again: “Baba, Baba. . °=
Anni Kanafani led the massive funeral procession through the streets of Beirut, Fayez by her side. Ghassan’s remains were wrapped in the Palestinian flag, and as his body was lowered into its final place, it is said that his young son raised his fingers in the sign of victory. Many of Kanafani’s characters, including the protagonist of Returning to Haifa, saw victory in the sacri- fice of their sons to the Palestinian cause. In the end, Kanafani’s own son saw victory in the sacrifice of his father.
During the brief and tumultuous journey of his life, Ghassan Kanafani searched. Not for work, for he knew what his work was; instead, he persevered in looking for the best means to carry out that work. He turned his own struggle for survival against illness into a source of energy to fight for the survival of the Palestinian people. First a paint brush, then a pencil, then arms—Ghassan used every weapon available to defend himself and his people.23 Even the insulin needle he wielded so expertly was a weapon in the battle, used to defend himself from death and purchase precious time to lengthen his journey, expand his search.
Fadl al-Naqib said of Ghassan Kanafani: “He wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it”? During a particu- lar twenty-year period in Palestinian history, Kanafant’s uncon- ditional commitment to the survival of the Palestinian people and his tremendous journalistic and literary output made it
A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 1]
possible for him not just to write stories, but to write the Palestinian story, made it possible for that story to continue to be written, and lived, today.
Notes
l. Ghassan Kanafani, “Diary 1959-1960” [sic] (excerpts from diary entries covering the period 1959-1962) [Arabic], Carmel (spring 1981): p. 242. (Hereafter referred to as “Diary.”)
2. “An Interview Published for the First Time: With the Martyr Ghassan Kanafani” [Arabic], Palestinian Affairs 35 (July 1974): p. 136. (Hereafter referred to as “An Interview.”)
3. Anni Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1973), unnumbered. (Hereafter referred to as “A. Kanafani.”) Initially the death toll at Deir Yassin was reported to have been approximately 250, a figure widely held as accurate. Subsequent schol- arship indicates that the number of dead actually may have been around 100 and that the Zionists may have perpetuated belief in the higher figure to further instill terror in the Arab population.
4. Fadl al-Naqib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani” [Arabic], Palestinian Affairs 13 (September 1972), p. 193.
5. “An Interview,” p. 137.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Fadl al-Naqib, Thus Stories End, Thus They Begin [Arabic] (Beirut: Muassassat al-Abhath al-Arabiyya, 1983), pp. 14-15.
9. Personal correspondence from Anni Kanafani to the transla- tor, June 28, 1990. It is sometimes reported, incorrectly, that Ghassan Kanafani was expelled from Damascus University for his political activity.
10. al-Nagib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani,” p. 196.
11. “Diary,” 241.
12. al-Naqib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani,” pp. 196-197.
13. Ibid.
14. Personal correspondence from A. Kanafani.
15. al-Naqib, Thus Stories End, p. 89.
16. Muhammad Siddiq, Maz is a Cause: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassan Kanafani (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), p. 87.
17. al-Naqib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani,” p. 200.
12 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
18. Siddiq, p. 89.
19. A. Kanafani.
20. al-Naqib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani,” p. 203.
21. On January 22, 1973, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli agents were responsible for Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination. Raphael Rothstein, U.S. correspondent for Haaretz, reported the same in World Magazine in an article entitled, “Undercover Terror: The Other Mid- East War.” (Both articles cited in A. Kanafani.) Zeev Schiff, historian of the Israeli military forces, states that the assassinations of Kanafani and others were in response to Palestinian acts, and adds: “Israel is careful not to take credit officially for these actions.” Zeev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army 1870-1974, tr. Raphael Rothstein (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974), p. 237.
22. A. Kanafani.
23. al-Naqib, “The World of Ghassan Kanafani,” p. 201.
24. al-Naqib, Thus Stories End, p. 7.
Introduction
KAREN E. RILEY & BARBARA HARLOW
¥
diplomacy have all failed to resolve the complex, mythified,
and misunderstood clash that since 1948 has come to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Certainly it is not for lack of study; books on the subject in English alone could fill a small- town library. Perhaps what has been missing—or ignored— throughout is the quotidian human reality underlying the vital history that continues to connect Palestinians everywhere to the land once called Palestine. Often, literature can provide the human dimension that the historian’s work alone cannot. The literary works of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani res- onate with precisely that human dimension.
L OR NEARLY A CENTURY, POLITICS, VIOLENCE, AND
* * *
Ghassan Kanafani’s activities as a writer were diverse, ranging from journalism and political essays to historical studies, the- ater, and literary criticism. As a journalist and critic, he played an important role in introducing new authors and their works to Arab readers. It was Kanafani as well who, in his study on the “Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine,’ first employed
13
14 INTRODUCTION
the term “resistance” (muqawamah) in speaking of Palestinian literature. His fiction, including short novels, stories, and chil- dren’s literature—the stories and poems composed for his niece Lamees—represents a major contribution to modern Arabic lit- erature. The stories, however, like Kanafani’s other writings, address specifically the Palestinian situation. Kanafani describes the political, social, and human realities that characterize the lives of his people at a critical period in their history, when the traditional order and structure of their existence are being pro- foundly altered by events on both a regional and international scale. Kanafant’s stories tell of mothers in the refugee camps who proudly send their sons to the fidayeen and who then visit them in the mountains with gifts of food from home, of fathers whose role of authority within the family is being threatened by the transformations in their social world, of children who learn early to fight for a place in that social order, of concern and love and fear and suspicion among neighbors who feel threatened by strangers in their land.
The stories and novella translated in this volume are all set between 1936 and 1967. Many have as their temporal locus the year 1948. The dates mark significant moments in the twenti- eth-century history of the Palestinians, for in 1936 there began in Palestine a widespread popular revolt and 1967 saw a serious check, in the form of the June War, to Palestinian national aspi- rations. In 1948, the state of Israel was founded, an event accompanied by the massive displacement of Palestinians from their homeland and the beginning of the years and then decades of exile. Each of the stories here involves in some way a child, a child who, though victimized by the structures of authority that dominate the social and political world he lives in, nonetheless, by assuming new roles, participates personally in the struggle toward a new and different kind of future.
Kanatani’s stories present a Palestinian perspective on a conflict that has anguished the Middle East and the Arab world for most of the twentieth century. It is a perspective that is vital to understand and to acknowledge, the product of the experi- ence of decades of dispossession and struggle that, although not unique to the Palestinians, finds in them both a real and a sym-
INTRODUCTION 15
bolic expression. It is this experience that must be taken into account in considering the violence and brutal intensity of some of the stories in this volume, a violence that is at the same time rendered problematic in the internal conflicts of the char- acters themselves and in their literary and historical setting.
The stories are told from the point of view of the children of Palestine by a writer who was long involved with their educa- tion and development. Kanafani, who attended the UNRWA schools for Palestinian refugees in Damascus after he left Palestine with his family in 1948, later became a teacher in those same schools. The years he spent as a student and teacher were to have a significant effect on his subsequent development as a writer.
The tension between the political and historical events and their literary transformation distinguishes the writings of Ghassan Kanafani. Through narrative, historical necessities lose their implacableness as faits accomplis and become rich with possibility. According to Fawaz Turki, another Palestinian writer, “If the Palestinian revolution is armed with a philosophy at all, it is armed with the anti-determinist vision of the open- endedness of the future.”! It is the open-endedness of the future that Kanafani creates and that becomes visible in his literary exposition of the events of Palestinian history.
Both “The Child Goes to the Camp” (1967) and “A Present for the Holiday” (1968) are set in the Palestinian refugee camps. These camps were first created in 1950 in order to provide tem- porary shelter and sustenance for those people who were obliged to flee their homes in Palestine in 1948. They were fur- ther populated by another generation of refugees in 1967, fol- lowing the June War, when the areas now known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were occupied by Israel. Life in the camps thus acquired a significance over time and a history that has become crucial to the Palestinian experience. The children who came in 1948 gave birth to children of their own, the awlad al-mukhayyamat or “children of the camps.” This historical sig- nificance of the camp life is unavailable, however, to the child- narrator of “The Child Goes to the Camp.” For him, it was a relentless present, a “time of hostilities,’ in which finding five
16 INTRODUCTION
pounds in the street while he and his cousin Isam were collect- ing leftover produce from the market for the family’s meal was sufficient to mark a turning point in his day-to-day existence. “It was war-time,” the story begins, only to qualify its terms. “Not war really, but hostilities, to be precise . . . a continued struggle with the enemy. In war, the winds of peace gather the combatants to repose, truce, tranquility, the holiday of retreat. But this is not so with hostilities which are always never more than a gunshot away, where you are always walking miraculous- ly between the shots. That’s what it was, just as I was telling you, a time of hostilities.” The conflicts exist within the society and inside the traditional order. “The whole thing is that there were eighteen people from different generations living in one house, which would have been more than enough at any time... . We fought for our food and then fought each other over how it would be distributed amongst us. Then we fought again.” Historical time has collapsed into hostile disorder, and past, present, and future generations vie with each other for immedi- ate control over the administration of five pounds.
In “A Present for the Holiday,” even commemorative time has lost its ritual significance and symbolic value. The narrator has been awakened by a telephone call from a friend who has plans for a project to distribute holiday presents to the children newly arrived in the refugee camps following the 1967 war. “I was half asleep. The camps. Those stains on the forehead of our weary morning, lacerations brandished like flags of defeat, bil- lowing by chance above the plains of mud and dust and com- passion.” The story of the telephone call, interrupted by the narrator’s recollections of his own childhood in the camps, is punctuated by the recurrent refrain: “But all that is beside the point.” Its repetition suspends the movement from past to future in the meaninglessness of the present.
“Guns in the Camp” (1969), still another story that has as its setting the Palestinian refugee camps, describes a transfor- mation within the life of the camps, a transformation motivat- ed by the emergence of a budding resistance movement. The story is one of a series of episodes that tell the history of Umm Saad, a Palestinian mother who, as her husband Abu Saad
INTRODUCTION 17
proudly says of her, “has borne sons who have grown up to become fidayeen. She provides the children for Palestine.” The resistance movement becomes symbolic of a re-entry that would confer meaning on the past and create possibilities for the future. “‘The grapevine is blooming, cousin! The grapevine is blooming!’ I stepped towards the door where Umm Saad was bent over the dirt, where there grew—since a time which at that moment seemed to be infinitely remote—the strong firm stems which she had brought to me one morning. A green head sprouting through the dirt with a vigour that had a voice of its own.” Here the rootedness of the plant in the soil stands as a symbolic counterweight to the historical forces of displacement and dispersion. The alienation of dispossession is made to acquire through the literary and poetic images a creative power of its own.
Through the narrative, however, perhaps even more impor- tantly than through the imagery, Kanafant’s stories contend with chronology and its closures. In telling these stories, stories of the Palestinian people and their children, Kanafani is retelling their history and re-establishing its chronology. The epic flashback no less than the stream-of-consciousness serves to confute the sense of time and temporality. Historical dates become commemorative, “so that people would say,” as in an early story by Kanafani, “‘it happened a month after the day of the massacre’? Works of literature, stories and novels, are brought then to participate in the historiographic process. The political immediacy and historicity of these stories are, howev- er, as much a part of a literary project as it is the case that litera- ture will be used in the service of a given historical vision. Of his own relationship to literature and politics, Kanafani has said, “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisi- ble case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite. I started writing the story of my Palestimian life before I found a clear political position or joined any organization.”
Kanafani’s stories and literary histories are located within a specific historical context. It is a context, however, whose very
18 INTRODUCTION
determinism the stories call into question through their narra- tive examination of interpretation and the parameters of story- telling. The questioning is undergone as well by the characters themselves in each of the stories. Four of these stories recount the coming of age of Mansur, a child from the Galilee village of Majd al-Kurum, who participates in a series of armed conflicts surrounding the establishment in 1948 of the state of Israel. Mansur’s stories (1965) are: “The Child Borrows His Uncle’s Gun and Goes East to Safad,” “Doctor Qassim Talks to Eva About Mansur Who Has Arrived in Safad,” “Abu al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car,” and “The Child, His Father, and the Gun Go to the Citadel at Jaddin.” Mansur must find someone from whom he can borrow a gun in order to join the battle being waged by the villagers at Safad. Guns, however, are the possessions of adults, his father, his uncle, the older men of the villages, and Mansur is subject to their authority. If his father is not interested in his ideals of resistance and patriotism, Mansur’s uncle, Abu al-Hassan, tells him that he is too young, that he is just a child. And Hajj Abbas wants to negotiate a financial arrangement. Doctor Qassim, Mansur’s older brother, meanwhile is having breakfast with Eva, a Jewish girl in Haifa. In telling the story of the child Mansur’s role in the 1948 struggle, Kanafani narrates the larger political and social con- flicts created within the Palestinian community from outside. According to Ann Lesch, a political historian of Palestine under the British Mandate, “the generational differences within the Arab political leadership played an important political role. The older politicians tended to be more conciliatory, more willing to work within legal channels than the young men, [but] the impact of the generational division was reduced by the Arabs’ deferential culture. Respect for one’s father and for an elder statesman who consulted the other leaders and expressed the general consensus remained powerful forces, drawing together the differing drives of young and old in a politically effective manner.’? At the same time, then, that the social order of Palestinian life is being attacked by foreign forces, the tradition- al structures of authority serve to sustain vital elements of the sense of community and solidarity. The authoritative struc-
INTRODUCTION 19
tures, however, are being radically modified by the forces of cir- cumstance and the political coming of age of the child. When Mansur at last reaches the citadel at Jaddin, his second expedi- tion following upon the skirmish at Safad, he finds his father present there in the circle of armed men. In the moment of retreat, however, Abu Qassim is left behind. It is Mansur who returns for him, only to find him fatally wounded. “Mansur stood in the wet emptiness watching his father slowly dying, impotent and unmoving except for the deep throbbing which shook him. His veins were like taut wires bulging from his hands and extending around the torso of the gun. Finally they all began to blur together: the tree, the man and the gun, from behind the darkness of the angry rain, and through his tears. But to Mansur, they were not together. There was only the quiet corpse.”
Mansur, on his way to participate in the events of Palestine’s history, has traversed the Galilean countryside, visit- ing its villages, skirting its fields, and making his way across the junctions of its thoroughfares. Like other of Kanafani’s stories, including “Paper from Ramleh” (1956) and “He Was a Child That Day” (1969), the fictional narratives provide not only a historical account of Palestine, but a topographical record as well. Much of the area and its villages no longer exist as they once did; they have been not only obliterated by the passage of time, but destroyed, rebuilt, and renamed by political events. What James Joyce did for Dublin or William Faulkner for the U.S. South, Kanafani in his stories has provided for Palestine. The intimate connection between history and the land is essen- tial to Palestinian political and cultural ideology, its poetry, its processes, and its praxis. Despite the transformations and re- interpretations to which it has been subjected, the stories’ record is there.
Returning to Haifa has two historical settings, roughly twenty years apart: 1948 and 1967. The primary action takes place a few weeks after the end of the June 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza, and the Golan. For the first time since 1948, the borders between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank and Gaza are opened-by the Israelis for pas-
20 INTRODUCTION
sage by Palestinians. As the novella’s protagonists, Said S. and his wife Safiyya, make their way from their West Bank home in Ramallah back to Haifa, their former home, their thoughts are interwoven with memories of the events of April 21, 1948, when they, along with thousands of Haifa’s Palestinian resi- dents, left the city in a panicked exodus as it changed overnight from British to Jewish control. The dramatic flight of Palestinians during the battle for Haifa forms the central image of Returning to Haifa’s opening chapter and also the axis around which the protagonists’ lives develop and much of the novella’s later dialogue revolves.
In February 1947, Great Britain, the mandatory power gov- erning Palestine since the aftermath of World War I, announced that the mandate had become unworkable due to the increas- ingly violent and uncontrollable conflict between the native Palestinians and Zionists intent on their goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Britain’s decision to relinquish Palestine upon expiration of the mandate pushed the matter into the hands of the United Nations, which recommended par- tition into Arab and Jewish states.
From that point on, fierce struggles ensued for control as the British began to evacuate city after city and the Jewish forces sought to secure not only the territory allotted for a Jewish state but also territory allotted for an Arab state by the United Nations partition plan. By May 14, 1948, the day on which Israel declared its statehood, at least 200,000 Palestinians had fled Palestine; by the end of the war that ensued, some 700,000 had become refugees. Many settled in West Bank towns, and approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained within the borders of what became the state of Israel. In the aftermath of the war, Jordan annexed the West Bank, and the Palestinians living there came under Jordanian rule. The situation remained thus for nearly twenty years until, in June 1967, the borders between the original state of Israel and the territories captured in the Six Day War were opened to Palestinians for passage. Refugees who had settled in the West Bank or Gaza could now return to see their old homes. Children too young to remember 1948, and children born in exile, were now able to see for the
INTRODUCTION 21
first time the homes they knew of only from their parents’ reminiscences.
The opening of the border between Israel and the newly occupied territories in 1967 allowed the exiled Palestinians to confront physically their past lives, and at the same time forced a psychological confrontation with the reasons for that exile. It Is not surprising, therefore, that Ghassan Kanafani should explore this collision within the framework of a novella, since all of his fiction is intimately tied to the emotional heart of the Palestinian community, not just reflecting it but actually consti- tuting a vital part of that community’s psychological evolution.
In Returning to Haifa, that psychological evolution is reflected by Kanafani’s juxtaposition of the events of 1948 and 1967. Radwa Ashur points out that Said’s and Safiyya’s journey back to Haifa is representative of the Palestinian people as a whole at that stage facing up to its responsibility for losing, or “abandoning,” Palestine and the fruitlessness of having spent twenty years doing little more than crying over the loss.¢ Kanafani recreates that sense of loss and fruitlessness by paral- leling the political events of 1967 with the “abandonment” of the infant Khaldun in 1948. By layering the two settings, he captures the fundamental influence that the loss continued to exert on the Palestinians’ existence, remaining with them “in every bite of food” they took throughout the intervening twenty years. This duality of psychological and political exile 1s also projected by Kanafani’s narrative style. Referring to Men in the Sun, Edward Said writes:
Kanafani’s very sentences express instability and fluctua- tion—the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another—in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished fragment of the past.’
His commentary is particularly applicable to Returning to Haifa, since the novella’s very structure is based on reliving in the present a past event at the site where it first took place. Transitions from past to present and vice-versa occur seemingly
Lo i)
INTRODUCTION
arbitrarily, in the same way that memory and reality intermin- gle, giving the novella a sense of temporal ambiguity.
The present itself is experienced as if it were already a memory, already lost, such as when Safiyya, in the midst of her desperate flight through Haifa, realizes that she has left her infant son behind. She feels she will never again be able to face her husband, and is frightened that she is “about to lose them both—Said and Khaldun.” She becomes aware that the memory of the present moment will have bitter repercussions on the future. It is a poignant portrayal of the sense of loss, brilliantly fashioned by Kanafani.
The imagery in Returning to Haifa is also marked by this relationship between time and space, between loss and memo- ry, concretizing the pivotal role played by memory in the emo- tional and physical condition endured by the Palestinian exile as a result of the cataclysmic loss suffered in 1948. When, for example, Said first catches sight of his former house in Haifa, he sees it not as it is, but as he remembers it, and instantaneously he imagines that his wife, “young again with her hair in a long braid,” will step out onto the balcony. Immediately upon the heels of this interplay of memory inside Said’s mind, Kanafani inserts a statement describing something new and different about what Said is looking at, skillfully looping past, present, and future together: past, because of Said’s memories; present because he is pulled back from recollection; and future, because the vivid detail heightens the expectation that something “new and different” may happen to Said. This congruence of imagery and temporal interaction simultaneously evokes the loss of Safiyya’s youth as well as the loss of the home in which they once lived and, by extension, the loss of Palestine. At the same time, it foreshadows the change in Said, his ultimate recogni- tion that man is indeed a cause and his discovery of “the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs.”
Such images are implicit, in that they convey a multidimen- sional unit of time triggered by the sight of the house. Other images are explicit, such as when, near the novella’s conclusion,
INTRODUCTION 23
Said reflects that his memories of his child are nothing more than “a handful of snow” melted by the sun. Forced to confront the reality of the past—the old/new house, the old/new inhabi- tants, the old/new son—Said recognizes that the past has “melt- ed” and been replaced by a new reality. He has made, in effect, a judgment, and with it, a new commitment.
There is, in addition, a certain dissonance in Kanafani’s imagery that serves to highlight not only the violence of 1948, but also its brutal abruptness and the powerlessness felt by the Palestinians in the face of it. There is little sense of the normal passage of time, for example: events occur “suddenly” or char- acters “suddenly” become aware of something—such as the sound of the ocean—or of events or feelings that normally one would perceive gradually. There are images of violence and destruction: “walls collapse” in conveying the recall of a memo- ry; people are “hurled down” or struck by an “electric shock” as a result of verbal exchanges that cause mental rather than physical confrontation. Frequently, these images are internal- ized, as when names “rain down inside” a protagonist’s head.
All of these aspects of Kanafani’s style make translation especially difficult because an exact rendering can result in unconventional or even awkward English. Yet it 1s critical to accentuate such ambiguities of tense or image in order to main- tain the integrity of the original as an expression of the Palestinians’ emotional, psychological, and political conflict and frustration.
Politics imposes itself on Kanafani's style in yet another, but more indirect manner. He wrote extensively—indeed, daily in later years—for newspapers and political and news magazines or journals. His commitment both to the Palestinian cause and to the craft of writing was so strong that he felt compelled to capture each moment of Palestinian experience by expressing himself in every genre available to him, despite advice from friends and critics that he put aside journalism and concentrate on literature. The year in which Returning to Haifa was pub- lished, 1969, was one of intense journalistic activity for him, as he founded and became editor-in-chief of al-Hadaf. In Returning to Haifa certain repetitive expressions appear fre-
24 INTRODUCTION
quently, paralleling journalistic Arabic, which tends to employ formulaic expressions that are recognizable as the accepted way of making certain statements. As such, notably in a late work like Returning to Haifa, these recurrences constitute an element of Kanafani’s style that is directly related to the circumstances of his own life as well as his political position.
At the time Kanafani wrote Returning to Haifa, he was for- mulating a sense of the Palestinian struggle as one of social and political justice. In an interview he once stated:
At first | wrote about Palestine as a cause in and of itself... . Then I came to see Palestine as a symbol of humanity. .. . When I portray the Palestinian misery, | am really presenting the Palestinian as a symbol of misery in all the world.’
As noted earlier, in 1969 he became the official spokesman of the Marxist PFLP, and his other fictional work of that year, Unit Saad, explores the issues of oppression and class struggle that lead to political action and social revolution.
In Returning to Haifa, he approaches these philosophical explorations differently. The two Jewish characters, Iphrat Koshen and his wife Miriam, far from being Zionist zealots, are portrayed instead as ordinary Jews fleeing Nazi Poland, misled by idealized Zionist literature into expecting something quite different from the reality they found upon reaching Palestine. Ashur credits Kanafani with the first attempt in Arabic litera- ture to portray Jewish characters as sensitive human beings rather than as caricatures of the enemy.? When Miriam sees a dead Arab child being tossed into the garbage by a Jewish sol- dier, she identifies the child with her own young brother, killed before her eyes by the Nazis, and she wants to leave Palestine immediately. Of Miriam, Ashur notes:
Ghassan Kanafani relates, by means of this character and her history, for the first time in Arabic literature, the agony of oppressed peoples in all places, the agony of Palestinians at the hands of the Zionists and the agony of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.!°
INTRODUCTION 25
Miriam and Iphrat, however, do not leave Palestine, despite their initial moral misgivings. The justifications for their remaining, along with the reasons for the Palestinians’ depar- ture, are explored by Kanafani through the device of a conversa- tion among the Arab and Jewish protagonists, set in what had once been Said’s and Safiyya’s house. According to critic F. Mansur, the dialogue between these characters represents
the first time the Palestinian and the Jew meet each other, not on the battlefield but in a normal room, where each of them puts forth his point of view and discusses it with the other.!!
The discussion is as thought-provoking to the reader today as it was to the Palestinian community at the time it was written.
Kanafani was a highly successful journalist, widely pub- lished and read. Yet, he continued to write stories. If his only aim had been the expression of political ideology and analysis, he would have had ample opportunity to do so without under- taking the additional task of creating an artistic framework for his ideas. To concentrate, therefore, exclusively on the symbol- ism or the political or ideological posture of Returning to Haifa is to lose sight of an important aspect of its value and impact. Like all of Kanafani’s works, Returning to Haifa is realistic, filled with the physical details and vital turns of emotion of both everyday life and momentous historical events. According to Ashur, it is this “piercing grasp of reality” that distinguishes Kanafanti’s works from the greater part of Palestinian fiction which, up to that point, tended to rely on the sympathy it might arouse in the reader but which inevitably presented a false or flat picture that “ignored the full dimensions and complica- tions” making up the reality of the situation.!”
Kanafani himself on numerous occasions expressed the importance of realism: “In my novels I express reality, as | understand it, without analysis.”!3 In an interview given shortly before his death and published posthumously, several of his comments shed light on the importance he gave to this aspect of his writing:
26 INTRODUCTION
I think the greatest influence on my writing goes back to real- ity itself, what I witnessed, the experiences of my friends and family and brothers and students, my life in the camps with poverty and misery.
I didn’t choose my characters for artistic literary reasons. All of them came from the camp, not from outside of it.
When I review all the stories I have written about Palestine up to now, it seems to me that every story is tied, directly or indirectly, by a thin or strong thread, to my personal experi- ences in life.!4
An earlier statement about his aims sums up the relationship between realism and symbolism or ideology in his fictional works: “I want my stories to be one hundred percent realistic while at the same time presenting something unseen.” 15
In Returning to Haifa it is the realistic details that lead to the “something unseen.” The portrayal of the mass exodus from Haifa is gripping and vivid not only because it is grounded in historical fact, but because Kanafani renders it with acute sensi- tivity. The minute details of Said’s and Safiyya’s house in Haifa, and their “rediscovery” of those details, vibrate with feeling and reveal their relationship to the house now and in their memo- ries. The atmosphere is emotionally charged and builds up as the novella unfolds with quiet intensity, preparing the reader for the climactic dialogue that explodes into the “something unseen’: the human and emotional dimension underlying the political dilemma of the Palestinian question for more than forty years.
Mansur states that Returning to Haifa is Kanafant’s “master- piece... his most mature work,’ and goes on to postulate that “after Returning to Haifa, there was no room to doubt that when the definitive Palestinian novel was written, its author would be Ghassan Kanafani.”!* These statements have validity precisely because this work is more than a “historical political document.” The political dynamics have changed in the inter- vening years since it was written, but the social dynamics that characterize the Palestinian conflict have not. Two generations
INTRODUCTION Dae
after 1948, people’s lives continue to be disrupted at the most elemental levels as a result of what happened in 1948. The human dimension is what Ghassan Kanafani succeeds in expressing through the images, the narrative style, and the com- pelling realism of Returning to Haifa, and it is what continues to make his work so compelling today.
Notes
l. Fawaz Turqi, “Meaning in Palestinian History: Text and Context,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, 4 (1981); p. 381.
2. Ghassan Kanafani, “Al-bu’uma f1'l-ghurfa al-baida,” in Maut sarir raqm 12 (Beirut: Institute for Arab Research, 1980); p. 20.
3. Ghassan Kanafani, Interview in al-Siyasah (Kuwait). Cited in Stefan Wild, Ghassan Kanafani: The Life of a Palestinian (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975), p. 13.
4. Ann Lesch, “The Palestine Arab Nationalism Movement Under the Mandate,” in The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism, edited by William Quandt (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 19-20.
5. In two climactic passages of Returning to Haifa, Kanafani uses the word irtitaim, a term that has provided many hours of unre- solved discussion with experts as to its exact meaning as well as Kanafani’s intent. In context it can best be translated as “collision” or “clash,” and it seems to be a way of effecting a sense of inevitability in the confrontation between past and present. Its very ambiguity con- veys the manner in which this conflict is internalized in Kanafant’s protagonists.
6. Radwa Ashur, The Way to the Other Tent |Arabic] (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1981), p. 139. This contrasts with Mansur’s interpreta- tion that the “abandoned” child represents a Palestine seized by force and given no choice, neither with respect to its fate at that time nor with respect to its present character as a result. Mansur, 220. Ashur's analysis would seem to be borne out by the fact that in the fourth and fifth chapters of the novel Kanafani several times uses the second per- son plural (Arabic has a singular, dual, and plural in the second per- son), a device that denotes that the speaker is addressing his state- ments rhetorically to the Palestinian community in general rather than to the one or two specific individuals.
28 INTRODUCTION
7. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 38.
8. “An Interview Published for the First Time: With the Martyr Ghassan Kanafani” [Arabic], Palestinian Affairs 35 (July 1974): pp. 137-138. {Hereafter referred to as “An Interview.”)
9. Ashur, p. 145.
10. Ibid., pp. 145-146.
11. F. Mansur, “Ghassan Kanafani in his Eleven Books” [Arabic], Palestinian Affairs 13 (September 1972): p. 220.
12. Ashur, pp. 178-179.
13. “An Interview,” p. 138.
14. Ibid., pp. 137, 139.
15. Fadl al-Naqib, Thus Stories End, Thus They Begin [Arabic] (Beirut: Muassat al-Abhath al-Arabiyya, 1983), p. 27 [emphasis added].
16. Mansur, p. 220.
PALESTINE’S CHILDREN
ve RETURNING TO HAIFA & Other Stories
The Slope g
UHSIN WALKED WITH SLOW HESITATING M steps along the corridor leading to his classroom.
This was to be his first experience in the world of teaching and he did not see why he had to go in just then. He was doing his utmost to postpone the moment as long as possible.
He had spent the night before tossing and turning in his bed until morning thinking about one thing: how hard it was for someone to stand up in front of people... and for what? To teach them! Who do you think you are? he asked himself. You’ve spent your miserable life without anyone teaching you anything useful. Do you really think you have anything to teach others? You, of all people, who have always believed that school was the last place where a man learns about life? And now youre going to be a schoolteacher?
In the morning he dragged himself off to the principal’s office where he sat listening to the other teachers discussing much the same question, only it was from another point of view...
“What are we supposed to do in this class when the children have no books?”
3]
Le) to
THE SLOPE
The principal’s reply was short and even disdainful: “A qualified teacher knows how to conduct his class without books!” Then he added nastily: “Just ask one of the children to take care of the class for you if you can’t do it yourself.”
Muhsin thought to himself: “It seems this principal wants to give his teachers a lesson in discipline and obedience right from the start. He’s had our salaries for a week and now he wants to get our souls as well.” He gulped down his tea and stood up...
The long corridor was filled with the shouts and clamor of children. It seemed to Muhsin, with his heavy steps, that he was moving through an eddying whirlpool leading him into a meaningless future, a future of nothing but more noise and more nonsense.
“I have a good story, teacher! ...” This was shouted out by a child stumped in one of the last seats who saw the confusion as a likely opportunity to tell his story. And before Muhsin could even object to the suggestion the child had left his seat and was facing his comrades. He was wearing short pants that were far too large for him and a shirt made out of old material, the kind women wear. His thick black hair hung down to his eye- brows.
“My father was a good man. His hair was white and he had only one eye. His other eye he had poked out himself one day when he was stitching the thick sole of a heavy man’s shoe. He was trying hard to get the big needle into the leather, but the sole was very tough. He pushed on the needle with everything he had in him, but no luck. He pushed harder and still it didn’t go. Then he put the shoe to his chest and pushed with all his might. All of a sudden the needle went through one side and out the other straight into his eye.
“My father was a good man. He didn’t have a long beard, but then it wasn’t so short either. He worked very hard and he was good at his work. He always had a lot of shoes to repair and make like new.
“But my father didn’t own his own repair shop and there was no one to help him in his work. His shop was really not much more than a box made out of wood and sheet metal and
THE SLOPE 33
cardboard. There was hardly even enough room for him, some nails, and the shoes and the anvil. Any more and there wouldn't even be room for a fly. If a customer wants his shoes repaired he has to wait outside the shop...
“The shop was on the side of a hill, and at the top of the hill was the palace of a rich man. No one who looked for the shop from the balcony of this rich man’s palace would be able to see that it was there, because there were plants growing all along the ground. And so my father was not afraid that the owner of the palace would discover his hiding place and make him leave. The rich man never left his palace. His servants took care of bringing everything he wanted to the palace. They all agreed that they would keep my father’s secret from their master on the condition that he would repair their shoes in return.
“So my father went on about his work and wasn’t afraid. People found out that he could repair shoes so well that they came out looking like new. More and more shoes were brought to him every day. He worked without stopping all day and half the night. And then he said to my mother: “Tomorrow the chil- dren are going to go to school. To which my mother answered: ‘Then you'll rest a little from all this work.”
When the child went back to his seat, his comrades sat absolutely still, so Muhsin asked: “Why don’t you clap for your friend? Didn't you like his story?”
“We want to hear the rest of it...”
“Is there any more to your story?”
“A month ago or maybe more it got to be that my father had so much work piled up that he couldn’t even come home any more. My mother told us that he was working night and day and couldn't leave his shop. He had no time to go out. Meanwhile the rich man sat on his balcony all day long and all night eating bananas and oranges and almonds and walnuts and throwing away the peels and shells. He threw them over the rails of the balcony of his palace and onto the side of the hill. One morning the hillside was so covered with all these peels and shells that the servants couldn't even find my father’s box in the middle of all of them. My mother says that he was so absorbed in his work that he never even noticed all the stuff
34 THESLOPE
that was thrown on top of his box. He worked just as he always did. Probably he is still sitting in his box, working away at repairing all the shoes he has so that he can finish them on time and go home. But what I think is that he died there.”
The pupils all clapped when the child returned to his seat, where he sat quietly. Sixty staring eyes, a twinkle, but Muhsin
Muhsin took the child to the principal’s office, and on the way there he asked him: “Do you really think your father is dead?”
“My father didn’t die. I only said that so that the story would end. If I didn’t, it would never end. Summer is coming in a couple of months and the sun will dry up all the piles of peels and shells, so they won't be so heavy and then my father can move them away from on top of him and go back to the house.”
When Muhsin reached the principal’s office he said to him: “I have a genius in my class. He’s incredible. Ask him to tell you the story of his father...”
“What’s your father’s story?”
“His shop is very small and he is very skillful. One day his fame reached the owner of the palace that looks out over his lit- tle shop, and the rich man sent my father all the old shoes he had and told my father to repair them and make them like new again. All the servants set to work carrying the shoes to the little shop. They worked for two whole days, and when they had fin- ished bringing all the shoes, my father was completely smoth- ered under the huge pile and there was not enough room in the shop for all the shoes...”
The principal put his thumbs in his vest pockets, reflected a moment, and said: “This child is crazy. We had better send him to another school.”
The child said: “But I’m not crazy. Just go to the rich man’s palace and look at his shoes and you'll find little pieces of my father’s flesh on them. Maybe you'll even find his eyes and his nose in the sole of one of the shoes ... Just go there...”
The principal interrupted: “In my opinion this child is crazy.”
Muhsin answered him: “He’s not crazy. I myself used to
THE SLOPE 35
bring my shoes to his father’s to be repaired. The last time I went, they told me he was dead.”
“How did he die?”
“He was pounding the sole of an old shoe. One day he pounded a great many nails into an old shoe to make it absolutely firm. When he had finished he found that he had nailed his fingers between the shoe and the anvil. Just imagine! He was so strong that he could pound a nail through an anvil. But when he tried to get up, he couldn’t. He was stuck right to the anvil. The passers-by refused to help him and he remained there until he died.”
The principal looked again at Muhsin, who was standing beside the child, one next to the other as if they were one. He shook his head several times without saying anything. Then he went back and sat down in his soft leather chair and began to leaf through his papers, looking from time to time out of the corner of his eye at Muhsin and the child.
—translated by Barbara Harlow
Paper from Ramleh
%
at the side of the road which leads from Ramleh to
Jerusalem. They ordered us to raise our hands in the air and cross them. When one of the soldiers noticed that my mother wanted to put me in front of her so that her shadow would protect me from the July sun, he dragged me roughly from her hands and ordered me to stand on one leg with my arms crossed above my head in the middle of the dusty street.
I was nine years old that day. Only four hours before I had seen the Jewish soldiers enter Ramleh. Now, standing there in the middle of the ash-grey road, I watched the Jews look over the jewelry of the old women and the young girls, and then brutally snatch it from them. The tanned female recruits began to do the same thing, but even more enthusiastically. I saw too how my mother looked in my direction, crying silently, and I wanted at that moment to be able to tell her that I was alright, that the sun didn’t bother me, in such a way that she would understand...
I was one of the ones she still had left. My father had died a full year before the onset of these events. My older brother they took when they first entered Ramleh. I didn’t really know what |
T WO DIVISIONS OF JEWISH SOLDIERS HALTED US
38 PAPER FROM RAMLEH
meant to my mother, but I could imagine now what would hap- pen if I wasn’t with her when we reached Damascus, to sell the morning papers, shivering in the cold, near the bus stations.
The sun was beginning to melt the stamina of the women and old men, and from here and there cries of anguish and des- peration arose. I saw faces I was used to seeing in the narrow streets of Ramleh, but which now wore the signs of unmitigated sorrow. Never will I be able to explain the strange feeling that came over me when I saw a female Jewish recruit mockingly pull the beard of Uncle Abu Uthman...
Uncle Abu Uthman wasn’t really my uncle. He was Ramleh’s barber and its unassuming doctor. We had got into the habit of loving him ever since we knew him. We called him “uncle” out of respect and esteem. Standing upright now, he held his youngest daughter at his side. Fatima. Small and brown, she looked with her wide black eyes at the female Jewish recruit...
“Is she your daughter?”
Abu Uthman shook his head nervously, but his eyes flashed a startling black prophecy. The female recruit simply raised her small gun and aimed it at Fatima’s head. The little brown girl with still wondering black eyes...
Just at that instant one of the Jewish patrol moved in front of me. The situation had attracted his attention. He stood con- cealing the scene from me, but I heard the sound of three sepa- rate shots. Then he moved and | saw the face of Abu Uthman fill with grief. | looked at Fatima. Her head was hanging for- ward and blood dripped from her black hair to the warm brown earth.
A little while afterwards Abu Uthman passed by me. He was carrying in his aged arms the small, brown body of Fatima. Rigid and silent, he looked straight ahead with a terrible quiet- ness and hurried past without even glancing at me. 1 watched his stooped back as he passed silently through the rows of sol- diers towards the first narrow street. I kept looking at his wife who was sitting on the ground with her head in her hands cry- ing. At her moans of grief a Jewish soldier turned to her and ordered her to stop. But the old woman didn’t stop. She was beyond the limits of despair...
PAPER FROM RAMLEH 39
Now I could see clearly everything that happened. With my own eyes I saw the way the soldier kicked her with his foot and how the old woman, her face bleeding, fell on her back. All too clearly I saw him thrust the barrel of his rifle at her chest. One shot rang out...
The next instant the same soldier turned towards me. Calmly he ordered me to raise my leg which I had lowered again, without noticing, to the ground. Then, when I had raised my leg, he slapped my face twice. With my shirt, he wiped the blood from my mouth from the back of his hand. Helpless as I felt, I looked at my mother standing among the women, her arms raised in the air, crying silently. But just at that moment, through her weeping, there came a small, tearful laugh. I felt my leg twist under my weight and almost give way from the excru- clating pain. Even so, I laughed too. I wanted to be able one more time to rush to my mother and tell her that the two slaps hadn't hurt very much at all and that I was alright. I wanted her not to cry and to behave the way Abu Uthman had just behaved.
But my thoughts were interrupted when Abu Uthman passed in front of me on his way back to his place after burying Fatima. When he was just opposite me, and even though he didn’t look at me at all, I remembered that they had just killed his wife, and that now he was going to have to face still another grief. I watched him in pity, fearful of something, until he had reached his place where he stood for awhile with his back turned. It was hunched and soaked with sweat. But I could imagine his face anyway: frozen, silent, and dotted with shiny beads of perspiration. Abu Uthman stooped down to pick up in his two aged arms the body of his wife. How often I had seen her sitting cross-legged in front of his shop watching him finish his lunch, so she could take the empty dishes home again. It was not long before he walked past me, for the third time, breathing long and heavily, the beads of sweat still shining on his lined face. He was directly opposite me, but didn’t look at me at all. Once again I watched his hunched back soaked in sweat as he walked slowly between the rows of soldiers.
The people held back their tears.
40 PAPER FROM RAMLEH
A painful silence settled on the women and old men.
It was as if the memories of Abu Uthman were eating per- sistently away inside the people, all those little remembered sto- ries which Abu Uthman used to tell to the men of Ramleh when they came and sat in his barber’s chair ... memories, each of which seemed to be eating remorselessly away at all the people here.
His whole life Abu Uthman had been a gentle and loving man. He believed in everything, but most of all he believed in himself. He had built his life from nothing. When the revolt in Jabal al-Nar cast him into Ramleh, he lost everything. So he began anew, just as friendly as any plant in the good earth of Ramleh. He won the love and approval of the people. When the last Palestine war began, he sold everything and bought weapons, which he distributed among his relatives so that they would be able to fight in the battle. His shop was transformed into a depot for explosives and arms and he wouldn't take any payment for his sacrifice. The only thing he asked was that he be buried in the beautiful Ramleh cemetery filled with its large trees. This was all he wanted from the people, and all the men of Ramleh knew that Abu Uthman wanted nothing but to be buried in the Ramleh cemetery when he died.
It was these small things which brought silence to the peo- ple. Their perspiring faces were heavy with these memories .. . I looked at my mother standing there, her arms raised in the air. She was standing erect, as if she had stopped now, leaden, fol- lowing Abu Uthman with her quiet eyes. I continued looking into the distance, where I saw Abu Uthman standing in front of a Jewish soldier, talking to him and pointing towards his store. Then he walked alone in the direction of the store. He returned carrying a white towel in which he wrapped the body of his wife... then he took the road to the cemetery.
I next saw him from a distance coming back with slow heavy steps. His back was bent and his arms hung helplessly at his sides. He drew slowly near me, walking, older now than he had been before. He was covered with dust and breathing heavi- ly. On his chest were drops of blood mixed with dust...
When he was directly opposite me, he looked at me, as if it
PAPER FROM RAMLEH 4]
were for the first time that he were passing by and seeing me standing there in the middle of the road under the blazing July sun, dusty and soaked in sweat. His lip was hurt and there was blood coming from it. Breathing hard he continued to look at me. There were in his eyes many meanings that I didn’t under- stand but rather felt instead. Then he went on his way, quiet, dusty, and breathing heavily. He stopped, turned his face to the street and raised his arms in the air and crossed them.
The people could no longer bury Abu Uthman as he had wanted. When he went to the mayor’s office to confess what he knew, the people heard a dreadful explosion that demolished the whole building. The remains of Abu Uthman were lost amongst the rubble.
They told my mother, while she was carrying me across the hills to Jordan, that when Abu Uthman went to his store before burying his wife, he did not return with only a white towel.
—translated by Barbara Harlow
A Present for the Holiday
x
WAS SLEEPING VERY LATE. THERE IS A CHINESE
writer whose name is Sun Tsi and who lived hundreds of
years before Christ. ] was very attracted by him. He relieved my weariness and held my attention. (However, all that is beside the point of what I am going to write about.) He wrote that war is subterfuge and that victory is in anticipating everything and making your enemy expect nothing. He wrote that war is sur- prise. He wrote that war is an attack on ideals. He wrote...
But all that is beside the point...
I was sleeping very late and the telephone rang very early. The voice that came from the other end was completely refreshed and awake, almost joyful and proud. There were no feelings of guilt in its modulations. Half asleep, I said to myself: this is a man who gets up early. Nothing troubles him at night. The night had been rainy, with thunder and strong winds. Do you see what men do in times like this, the men who are march- ing in the early darkness to build for us an honor unstained by the mud? The night was rainy, and this man, at the other end of the line...
But all this is also beside the point.
He said to me: “I have an idea. We'll collect toys for the chil-
43
44 A PRESENT FOR THE HOLIDAY
dren and send them to the refugees in Jordan, to the camps. You know, these are holidays now.”
I was half asleep. The camps. Those stains on the forehead of our weary morning, lacerations brandished like flags of defeat, billowing by chance above the plains of mud and dust and compassion. I had been teaching that day in one of those camps. One of the young students, called Darwish, sold cakes after school was out and I had chased him in between the tents and the mud and the sheets of tin and the puddles in order to get him into the evening class. His hair was short and curly and always wet. He was very bright and he wrote the best creative compositions in the class. If he had found something for him- self to eat that day, his genius knew no bounds. It was a big camp. They called it...
But that too is beside the point.
The man at the other end of the line said to me: “It’s an excellent idea, don’t you think? You'll help us. We want a news campaign in the papers, you know.” Even though I was half asleep, just the right phrases leapt to mind: “Mr. So-and-So spent his New Year holiday collecting toys for the refugees. High society women will distribute them in the camps.” The camps are muddy, and dresses this season are short and the boots are white. Just yesterday I had torn up a news story and photo: the lovely Miss So-and-So spent the evening in such-and-such a nightclub. The young man sitting with her spilled his drink on her dress and she emptied a bottle on his suit. I said, that must have cost at least a hundred pounds. I said, at that price...
But all this is beside the point.
Going on, he said to me: “We'll put them in cardboard boxes and find trucks to bring them free of charge. We’ll dis- tribute them sealed and that way it will be a surprise.” A sur- prise. War is surprise too. That’s what the Chinese writer Sun Tsi said five hundred years before Christ. I was half asleep and I couldn't control this folly. Such accidents occasionally happen to me, especially when I’m tired, and then I can’t believe my eyes. | look at people and ask: are these really our faces? All this mud that June has vomited on to them, how could we have
A PRESENT FOR THE HOLIDAY 45
cleaned it off so quickly? Can we really be smiling? Is it true?...
But this, too, is beside the point.
As the telephone receiver slipped from my hand, he said: “On the morning of the holiday, every child will get a sealed package, with a surprise toy inside it. It will be luck.” The receiver fell. The pillow carried me back nineteen years.
It was the year 1949.
They told us that day: the Red Cross will bring all you chil- dren presents for the holiday. I was wearing short pants and a gray cotton shirt and open shoes without socks. The winter was the worst the region had ever seen and when I set out that morning my fingers froze and were covered with something like fine glass. I sat down on the pavement and began to cry. Then a man came by and carried me to a nearby shop where they were lighting a wood fire in some kind of tin container. They brought me close and I stretched my feet towards the flame. Then J went racing to the Red Cross Centre, and stood with the hundreds of children, all of us waiting for our turn.
The boxes seemed very far away and we were trembling like a field of sugar cane and hopping about in order to keep the blood flowing in our veins. After a million years, my turn came. A clean starched nurse gave me a red square box.
Į ran “home” without opening it. Now, nineteen years later, I have completely forgotten what was in that dream box. Except for just one thing: a can of lentil soup.
I clutched the soup can with my two hands red from the cold and pressed it to my chest in front of ten other children, my brothers and relatives, who looked at it with their twenty wide eyes.
Probably the box held splendid children’s toys too, but these weren't to eat and so I didn’t pay any attention to them and they got lost. I kept the can of soup for a week, and every day I gave my mother some of it in a water glass so she could cook it for us.
I remember nothing except the cold, and the ice that mana- cled my fingers, and the can of soup.
46 A PRESENT FOR THE HOLIDAY
The voice of the man who wakes up early was still ringing in my head that tired gray morning when the bells began to clang in a dreadful emptiness. I returned from my trip into the past which continued to throb in my head, and 1...
But all of that too is beside the point.
—translated by Barbara Harlow
The Child Borrows His Uncle’s Gun and Goes East to Safad
%
E LEANED HIS WET BACK AGAINST THE ROCK
and stretched out his legs in relaxation, looking up at
the sky. Dark clouds, their edges incandescent in the sunlight as if aflame, fought with each other above his head. A heavy silence hung all around him. Not once had it occurred to him that such rugged terrain as this might actually exist. When his uncle had told him that the path from Majd al-Kurum to Safad was difficult even for goats, he hadn't believed him. Smiling quietly, he had just stretched out his hand and taken the ancient Turkish gun. While he stood there clutching it to his chest, his uncle had repeated to him once more: “The path between Majd al-Kurum and Safad is so rocky that even the goats find it difficult. A child like you will die in the thorns before he gets halfway there.”
Without looking at his uncle, he repeated for the tenth time that morning that the word “child” which his uncle kept insisting on using did not apply to him: “I’m not a child.”
“You're seventeen years old and the gun you're carrying weighs more than half as much as you do. And the way is long and fierce.”
47
48 THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN
Fear overcame him for just a moment, but he held the gun even tighter to his chest and turning around he stood face to face with his uncle again: “If you're worried about your gun, why don’t you just say so?”
“It’s you l'm worried about. Even though you're a crazy kid, I don’t want to discourage you. Why don't you stand out on the road and catch a car that will take you to Safad? Why do you want to go to Safad anyway? Are there so few men there?”
His uncle didn’t really seem to want an answer to all these questions, since when he finished talking he stretched out his hand and patted his shoulder, thus putting an end to the con- versation which had been going on for an hour or more. “Farewell. Watch out that this beast of a cannon youre carrying doesn’t go bad on you. Don't put too much faith in it. It’s pretty old, but it still works.”
What a strange uncle this is who gives things all different names, who says “child” to him instead of calling him by his own name, and who refers to the old rifle as a “cannon.” He must really know more things than any other creature on the face of the earth. When he had knocked at his door early that morning hoping to borrow his gun, his uncle hadn't hesitated even for a single minute, but then he had spent over an hour warning him about the path and its savageness. His warning was absolutely right though. The day was half gone and he was still only halfway there. Now he was afraid that he wouldn’t get to Safad until it was dark. If he got there at all!
Last night’s rain had soaked the soil and washed the deso- late mountain rocks. Even so it had still looked dry when his mother saw him slip out of the door of the house at dawn. She didn’t ask where he was going, but just told him to put on his overcoat. There was no discussion. Did she know somehow about his plan that he had been chewing over by himself for three days now?
A quarter of an hour later an old bus on its way from Acre came by. He squeezed himself in among the crowd of silent pas- sengers all bundled in their overcoats and handed his last two plasters to the driver who put them in his pocket without even looking at them. When he got out at the Nahaf intersection, the
THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN 49
other passengers just stared at him with their silent eyes. The sun was shining weakly by the time he began to climb the dusty road separating Nahaf from the main thoroughfare but the mountain frost still cut him harshly to the bones.
He pounded with his fist on the wooden door of his Uncle Abu al-Hassan’s house, knowing that his uncle would have fin- ished the dawn prayer and returned to his bed to get some more sleep. It was a habit of his that hadt changed for as long as he could remember his uncle and his uncle’s house. The door opened and two surprised eyes wished him good morning. Even before entering, he blurted out his brief story: “The men in Safad are surrounding the citadel and I came to borrow your gun so I can go there. Will you give it to me?”
“And where are you going to get the cartridges?”
“I bought them.”
“How many did you get?”
“About twenty.”
“And so with twenty cartridges you're going to storm the citadel in Safad?”
“Will you give me the gun? I'll bring it back in two days.”
“And what if you get killed?”
His uncle was smiling when he said this, as if he didn't real- ly believe the story anyway. His nephew, however, didn't smile back, nor did he hesitate in answering all these questions: “If I die, Hisam will return it to you. I know he’s there and I'll get him to do it.”
His uncle turned on his heels. Stepping inside, he disap- peared down the passageway, where his voice was heard calling: “Come in, child, and have some breakfast.”
But he didn’t go in—that much he had decided from the beginning—and shouted instead: “Are you going to give me the gun?”
“Did you dream all this up at night? Hadn't you better call now on the Provider and Omniscient One?”
“I want to know if you'll lend me your gun, not waste time, because if you wont lend it to me, then I have to go right away to Kisra. Abu Mustafa has another gun and he may let me bor-
erie row ıt.
50 THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN
Several long minutes had passed in silence when his uncle reappeared at the end of the passage and began looking him over carefully. The old man was tall and the years had not nar- rowed his shoulders. He bared his arms covered with thick graying hair and placed an embroidered skullcap on his short white hair. Another minute passed in which they exchanged looks, as if it were some kind of examination. Then came the question he had been waiting for: “Have you told this story to the old woman?”
“My mother does not like being called an old woman.”
He smiled. His uncle, however, repeated his question. His frown showed that the joke had been unintended: “The old woman, does she know what her son is planning?”
A sudden happiness came over him as he realized, much to his surprise, that he was serious and that his uncle was not just going over the details. This meant that, when all was said and done, he would get the gun.
He took off his shoes and walked in, while his uncle made way for him in the passage which he had been blocking with his arms. He looked at him with his narrow eyes as he entered the room furnished with woollen carpets and cushions of straw. When he had sat down his uncle shook his head sorrowfully. He had given up expecting an answer, and it was not long before he came to a decision.
“Umm al-Hassan is making tea. Don’t tell her anything. PH give you the cannon.”
“I knew you would.”
“Youre taking advantage of the kindness of your uncle’s heart, but you’re a mischievous child... Where did you buy the cartridges?”
“In Majd al-Kurum.”
“How much did you pay?”
“A pound and a half.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Legally, you know, every single piastre.”
“Anyway, stolen bullets can kill just as well
The gun was under the bed, as he well knew. Nearly every Friday for four years his uncle had allowed him to shoot it, just
”» .
THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN 5l
one or two bullets, out in the field. Afterwards it was cleaned and oiled and hidden under the bed again.
It was a heavy rifle, but he carried it lightly without even noticing. When his uncle had opened the door for him, softly so that Umm al-Hassan wouldn't see him, he slung it to his shoul- der. He walked slowly at first, but soon moved faster until he was almost running. He turned east and climbed over the few rocks in the fields that obstructed him. Then he began to strike the really rugged terrain. His uncle had told him to keep out of the way of the fields of the settlements at Rameh which he would run right into on the road. But if he kept going east and just slightly north he would meet only Arab villages and then come to the valleys around Safad.
He walked half the day and the gun began to weigh heavier and heavier on his shoulder and kept banging mercilessly against his thigh. He decided to rest awhile and leaned his back against a rock at the side of the narrow path that had been dug out by men’s feet in a short cut over the hills. He felt the mus- cles in his legs snap and once again was taken by a sudden fear. But the gun was there, resting on his legs, like some legendary thing, quiet and unknown, awakened in the heart of man.
“Anyway, its better than losing the gun.” He said this out loud, just to give himself confidence. “The easy road is full of English patrols. If they ever saw me with a gun, they'd take it away.”
He stroked the gun’s stock and smiled weakly: “The piastres went for cartridges ... you know that.”
He stood the gun up in front of him with its butt fixed between his feet and continued pushing it with both hands into the moist ground. He pulled his hands back greedily and joined them together behind his head. He leaned back against the rock, looking at the gun.
“Soon I'll get a special rifle. It will be only mine and you'll go back to your house under the woollen mattress. If they let you out, it will only be to hunt birds and squirrels, maybe sometimes foxes, but only sometimes.”
The gun had a long barrel but the opening at the end was missing its pin. Its leather strap was broken and in place of it
52 THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN
his uncle had attached a fibre rope moistened with oil which blackened his hands, already dirty from working in the soil year after year, giving them a heavy, dark color. The firing chamber took only one cartridge which was loaded from an opening on the side. He didn’t know, however, if the rifle was originally made like this or if it hadn’t simply ended up this way with the passing of time. Probably instead of it taking a cartridge clip of five or six cartridges, you had to remove the breech, first from on top, then from behind, so that you dropped one cartridge after another into the firing chamber, or something like that, which was no longer there. Maybe it was just a matter of work- ing out the original form of this rifle from experts specializing in the history of weapons and arms. His uncle probably treated this gun the way he treated the trees in his little field, trimming the roots and stripping off the branches in order to graft on new ones, raising and pruning and filling in the gaps, until the whole thing seemed to have been made over. You see what he did with this rifle in the last quarter of a century. Maybe this had something to do with why he called it a cannon, but for whatever reason it had lost most of the distinguishing charac- teristics of a rifle. It sounded like thunder when you fired it.
“Even so, youre a good rifle... and your aim almost never misses. The important thing is that you're faithful. And your bullets come out of only one place. I hope.”
The rifle stock was a dark brown color and seemed to be made in one piece. Except that it wasn’t. Once he had seen his uncle patch the stock with a piece of olive wood which, after sawing and sanding it with unbelievable care, he had nailed with real first-rate skill to the stock. The piece of the stock had been damaged one day when his uncle had been obliged to use the butt of his rifle to kill an adder that had surprised him on the way home. That day he crushed the adder’s head and part of his rifle stock at the same time. The incident couldn’t have made Abu al-Hassan very happy, since it had almost put an end to the life of the rifle.
“If I wanted to own a gun of my own, why did I borrow you from Uncle Abu al-Hassan? You better be really good with me if
THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN 53
you want me to borrow you again. Strange, isn't it? I mean that I went from Majd al-Kurum to Nahaf just to borrow a gun so I could go and fight in Safad ... of course, Abu Mustafa has a rifle in Kisra, a good rifle, with a cartridge clip and a strip and everything a rifle is supposed to have to make it a good weapon. Only Abu Mustafa wouldn’t lend it to me. Anyway, Kisra isn’t on the way from Majd al-Kurum to Safad, but even so it would have been worth going out of the way for...”
Less than a minute later he was standing up. He grabbed the gun and struck out quickly along the valley towards the east: “Damn imagination. Damn daydreams,’ as the professor once said.
He tried to think of the professor, but then shook his head violently, driving the thought away. He slung his gun to his shoulder, and tightening his fist around the bullets in his pants pocket, began to hurry. The sun was already directly overhead, although hidden by clouds thickening under it like balls of cot- ton.
“So with twenty cartridges you're going to attack the citadel at Safad.”
He repeated his uncle’s mocking sentence which kept com- ing back into his mind. He pushed back a bunch of boxthorn with his hand and started to climb over a pile of stones that was blocking the way. All the while he was thinking: “If every man in Galilee took twenty cartridges and went to the citadel in Safad, we’d smash it to pieces in a minute.” He picked his way carefully down the pile of rocks. His legs were tight and he was clutching the gun in his hand behind his back. He held it away from his body in order to keep his balance.
“It takes a lot of effort. And leadership. Just like the hajj said.” For a few moments he tried to imagine what this word meant. Leadership. But he didn’t get anywhere. First of all, he imagined that the importance of the leader must be to go around to all the fighters one by one and guide them in what they had to do. But he got rid of this image: “All that is just a lot of empty talk. It’s not simple.” When he had still further weak- ened the image by adding details he ended by getting rid of the
54 THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN
thought altogether, and started instead to calculate how many hours he still had left in these rocks. “It must be six or seven.” He thought of resting again, but then decided to keep going.
His father and mother were waiting for him to come and have lunch. Today was Friday and prayer time was already sev- eral hours ago. On Friday he usually ate lunch with his parents. They would miss him. Then his father would begin to eat, say- ing while he chewed his first mouthful: “While your heart wor- ries about your son, your son worries about the rock. This trou- blesome child...”
His mother would hesitate for a moment before her sixth sense would begin to vex her, or her afreet, as she used to like to say, begin to whisper in her ear things that made her worry. Even so she concealed this from her husband, and reached sto- ically towards her food. Observing her out of the corner of his eye, he would say to her: “Do you suppose he’s not going to eat now? Eh? Or do you think he’s reaching for his food right now with his hand just like you're doing? I swear on my father’s bones that he’s gobbling up his lunch with both hands in some fiery hell and filling his gullet without giving us a moment’s thought.”
His mother wouldn't resist, but would just go on eating as if what had just been said had nothing at all to do with her. It was her habit, whenever something bothered her deeply, to turn her thoughts to something else.
To the west, about an hour away by car, was Acre. Then a little to the south from there lay Haifa, where her oldest son lived and worked in King Faisal Street. His office was in the two outer rooms of a magnificent second floor apartment, and he himself lived alone in the two inner rooms. He wasn’t married yet. Just so that people would one day call him “Doctor,” his father had sold a section of olive trees and each year set aside a certain number of containers of olive oil which were then sold in order to defray the cost of books and microscopes for Doctor Qassim.
In spite of the father’s contempt, the son did well. One day he returned from Beirut, and the first thing he did when he met his father who had gone to welcome him in Acre was to stick
THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN 55
out his tongue as far as he could right in his face. “Is this what you learned from the Americans in Beirut, you rude child?”
Qassim, who had been preparing his answer all along the way, replied: “Of Course not. I studied medicine and now lm a doctor. A doctor through and through, even though you spent all these years telling me how impossible it was and that I was such a disappointing child, and that I was going to study a thousand years and then come back and be a farmer!”
His father couldn't repress the happiness that was overflow- ing inside him. He took his son by the arm and pushed him towards an ancient Ford, which he had made a down-payment on that morning just to transport the two of them, the suitcases and the books to Majd al-Kurum, where Umm Qassim had stuffed three chickens, a neck and some tripe. She gathered the family and the food and they all went out half the way to meet the beloved returnee.
“Hey, Doctor Qassim. Ten years ago you learned in the ele- mentary reader that...”
Qassim, laughing, cut him off. “A donkey is a donkey, even when he’s been brought up with horses. That’s what you always said to me when I told you I was going to be a doctor. Well, the donkeys and the horses are going to stay in Majd al-Kurum and your obedient servant is going to open an office in Haifa.”
Just as quickly as the joy which had filled his chest, anger now mounted to the forehead of Abu Qassim: “Haifa? Are there so few doctors in Haifa?”
“Where do you want me to work then?”
“In Majd al-Kurum, you useless son.”
“In Majd al-Kurum? Do you think I’m the kind of doctor who treats his patients with leeches? No one in Majd al-Kurum will pay more than a penny. Do you want me to die of hunger?”
Abu Qassim pressed his lips tightly together. The matter was finished—finished all the moments of joy. He knew well enough that if he continued the conversation, he would only come out with something disagreeable to the son who had just arrived from another world. He didn’t want his son to see the lump of fear he felt in his throat for one moment of weakness, so he stared out the car window as the. fields of olive trees
56 THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN
passed before his eyes, their leaves glistening in the sun like so many small sheets of silver.
“How is mother?”
“Fine.”
“And the child?”
“He’s in school. This little one loves the fields.” His chest relaxed as happiness returned suddenly to him. The fields of olive trees appeared before him bathed in a holy light: “The child loves the fields. As soon as he comes home from school, he plunges straight into the canal up to his knees. He has real farmer’s hands ... He’s always sneaking out of the house at night to go and sleep under the olive trees...”
Qassim’s voice cut him off again. “You're killing this boy... You're really killing him, for God’s sake! Tomorrow I’m taking him with me to Haifa. He’ll learn to make the kind of future he wants.”
Abu Qassim wheeled around and grabbed his son by the arm: “Look at the Jews, when one of them sets out to work in the villages ... Why don’t you open your office in Majd al- Kurum?”
But the car had stopped. Just at that moment Abu Qassim saw, with a clarity he would never forget, the look of scorn which flashed in his son’s eyes. It lasted no more than a fraction of a second, but he saw it and felt it, like mountains crashing down, fall upon his chest. The next instant the women’s trilling had burst forth and the car door opened. Qassim got out and was seized amidst arms and clothes and embroidery. Inside the car, as if nailed to his seat like a stone, Abu Qassim watched his wife press her brown tear-stained face to that of her returning son, moistening it with her tears which were pouring down to her knees, sobbing on his chest while she squeezed him in her arms, which she clasped determinedly about him. All around them trilling announced the deep pride she felt in the man who had gone away a farmer and returned home a doctor: “O my support, my child, my heart. O son of Majd al-Kurum her glory. O return of the knight. Protect htm O Guardian, with a hun- dred hands from the evil eye. O Protector, O adored one!”
While the family solemnly escorted Qassim to the house,
THE CHILD BORROWS HIS UNCLE’S GUN 57
Abu Qassim walked along far behind the boisterous throng. He picked up a stick and began hitting the side of his long belted qunbaz with it, producing a tearing-like sound. From where he was, he could see the little one racing behind the crowd trying to grab hold of his big brother who had now returned. He broke the stick, bent it and, throwing it on the ground, began to quicken his steps. “There’s still the child.”
—translated by Barbara Harlow
Dr. Qassim Talks to Eva About Mansur Who Has Arrived in Safad
¥
ROM HIS POSITION IN THE ROCKING CHAIR IN THE
home of Eva’s family, Doctor Qassim looked out at the
houses of Haifa stacked at the foot of Mount Carmel and the stony field stretching off towards the port. All of it was exposed to the barrel of the gun set up on the roof of the house. He didn’t quite recall the details of the story which he had read that morning about the two Arabs who had been killed by bul- lets from some far-off gun, or whether the incident had occurred near this very region.
He drank his tea quietly trying not to talk too much just for the sake of passing time lest the conversation approach limits which were too uncertain for him. He did not meet Eva’s eyes directly nor the eye of the gun which was staring down on him from above. He began to spread a piece of fried bread with but- ter, coating it with a large spoonful of jam which he then cov- ered with another piece of bread. The whole thing occurred just as he was about to take the first bite. When he raised his head, something appeared in front of him. Through the pale blue mist were the domes and rooftops of Acre. At the same time he remembered Majd al-Kurum. It seemed distant to him, an ambiguous distance not unlike oblivion. He didn’t need to go
J \O
60 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
over the matter in all its details, knowing that it was impossible for him to flee the memories which were beginning to reverber- ate inside his brain. He felt as if there were some terrible danger encircling him, in Haifa, in Acre, in Majd al-Kurum. His father, his mother, his younger brother. As if he could feel it buzzing, he got to his feet impatiently. He knew very well that there was no way for him to avoid submitting to the unknown something which had suddenly overwhelmed him. He put the slice of bread back in the bowl and leaned back in the chair, looking straight ahead without seeing anything in particular.
Even though he could feel Eva’s eyes studying him, he was unable to take on any role whatever. When he started to think about Eva, the image became altogether muddled in his mind and the features were lost. He profoundly wanted Eva to stop looking at him as if he were something requiring such minute scrutiny and trembled at the mere thought that she might start talking to him.
The next minute she was doing just that, beginning precise- ly where he had dreaded she would begin: “Everything has become so complicated. One of these days we should try to look straight in each other’s eyes and really see what’s the matter.”
“Which matter?”
She stretched her arms forward, making a wide circle with her right hand and pointing towards the horizon where her hand passed above the pale domes of Acre, and to the east of Acre over the seemingly level Tel al-Fakhar. In a trembling voice, she answered: “The matter you’ve been thinking about just now.”
He took the slice of bread and passed it to Eva so that it almost touched her face. Little by little he was beginning to recover his nerve.
“At the moment Pm thinking about a much smaller matter ... Do you see this slice of bread? Well, when I spread the jam on top of the butter, I remembered my little brother ... He always thought that putting jam on butter was a kind of lack of taste. Either you eat butter or you eat jam, but you can’t eat them both together. If you do, then it is an expression of dis- dain either for the honor of the butter or for the honor of the
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 61
jam. Anyway my brother believed, and he still does, that butter is a kind of food which contains all the elements which make it valuable in itself and so it shouldn't be underestimated or abused. I need to recover those words because he had been able to express his opinion so simply and clearly. This is what I was thinking about, and I was reminded of it while I was spreading the slice of bread. I thought you would have known that, since it happens to everyone from time to time.”
“But you never told me that you had a little brother
“He’s not exactly little. He’s seventeen now, | think. But we ve got used to calling him the child.”
“You never told me you have a brother.”
“There are a lot of things | didn't tell you, and a lot of things that you don't tell me. We make our world smaller with our hands in order to force outside its limits everything that has nothing to do with us. We make it smaller so we can fill it with happiness.”
“What does your brother do in the village? Why didn’t you bring him here?”
“He’s a boy who loves the fields. That’s what father always says. He’s like a pure-bred horse which can only live in the meadows.”
She passed him the slice of bread which he took coldly. In order not to get involved in the matter, he began to eat, but it was without appetite. His brother Mansur was somewhere in the rocky terrain around Safad sprinkling handfuls of rotting wild thyme on half a piece of coarse dark brown bread. He put the other half back in his large pants pocket on top of the car- tridges. The butt of the old Turkish gun kept bumping against the back of his leg whenever he was obliged to jump over the rocks.
He moved the gun to his other shoulder where the fibre rope cut a dark brown line on his white shirt. Directly under- neath it he could feel something like a wound that had opened at the top of his shoulder which was supporting the full weight of the gun. The rope rubbed like a saw. His uncle must not have thought of this problem. Certainly if he had, he would have come up with a solution of one kind or another. But as a matter
1?
62 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
of fact his uncle never really needed to hang the heavy gun from his shoulder for such a long distance, and used to just carry it by the middle in his big rough hand, since he never took it far from the house. At the time of his first assignment for it, during the revolt when he had taken it to the mountains, the original leather belt was probably still in good condition.
All of a sudden he saw the road a few metres off and in a matter of seconds he knew exactly where he was. Even though he had been to Safad only two or three times, he could still remember the distinguishing features of the main road leading to it. Without stepping on the asphalt in the middle of the road, he surveyed everything around him, listening closely to every movement, and trying to take in everything all at once.
When he reached the market, his nostrils filled with the smells of vegetables and baskets and early morning rain. People were moving about without taking much notice of the sound of bullets, which gave the atmosphere a feeling of intolerable ten- sion. Quickening his pace, he said to himself: “They’re strange, these city people, it’s as if the matter didn’t even concern them,” and he made way for an old car which had begun to careen among the people, cutting them off with its raucous horn. Both sides of the car were splashed with mud and the front window was smashed. There appeared to be bullet holes pocking the hood along a straight line. In one of the holes someone had fixed a flag whose staff was just the size of the hole so that there was no need to attach it with a rope or wire. The flag, which was stitched out of shining clean cloth, began to wave. It fluttered rapidly because of its shortness, making a sound that could be heard over the noise of the engine, the horn, and the four men in the car.
All of a sudden the car cut in front of him. Its roof was chopped off from the middle as if by a saw, giving it a comical shape. It seemed to him to resemble a man without his pants. Inside the car the men had turned the back seat around and were leaning against the front seat. From there they had begun to observe the people. A small space extended in front of their legs the whole of which had been created by the seat and the back trunk of the car whose top had been removed. The space
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 63
made by sawing off the car’s roof was filled with boxes of veg- etables and bread and jugs of water.
When the car passed in front of him, one of the three men pointed at him with the end of a long revolver which he had placed on his arm: “So this is the peasant who wants to get through to Safad. Look, he’s carrying a stick.”
The car was moving very slowly among the crowds of peo- ple. The other two men laughed. One of them was carrying a short French rifle. The cartridge clips were slung across his chest. The other man was chewing on something.
“How much did you pay for this stick?”
“Damn you, or else this stick will beat you instead.”
He said it quietly, but his voice was agitated. He had felt the sharp insult to himself and his gun and envied the man sitting in the middle with the short French rifle and cartridges of bul- lets filling his chest. The one with the revolver kept the handle pointed at him as the car slowly pulled away. Then he heard his voice: “If you were a man this would be the place to blow your brains out with just one bullet.”
He took his gun from his shoulder and carried it across his chest. There was one bullet ready in the firing chamber. For the first time this old gun seemed to him like something warm and intimate. He shouted with everything he had, so that it would be easy for the man with the revolver to hear him: “If you were a man you'd get down.”
Even so, mere words werent enough and he started to run after the car. Before he had succeeded in grabbing on to some- thing at the back of it, one of the men, the one still chewing, stopped and began to address the other men in the car: “Shame on you ... Shame on you...”
He turned towards Mansur who was still running behind the car: “Where are you from, brother?”
“Majd al-Kurum.’
“What are you doing in Safad with that gun?”
“I heard that you're surrounding the citadel and I came to join you.”
“Are you going to surround the citadel?”
He looked at the other two men who had begun to shake
64 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
with laughter, then leaned over and lifted one of the boxes on top of another to make more room.
“Come on up with us. It would be a pretty mean thing for us to leave you to run behind the car forever.”
He reached out his hand for Mansur to grab hold of. Once he had it, he jumped and landed firmly on the metal floor of the car. Before he had really even adjusted to his seat, one of the men offered him a tomato. He was hungry and tired and he felt strange, but the story of the citadel was eating away at his mind.
“You're not surrounding the citadel?”
“The citadel has been abandoned since Adam was a child.”
“What are you doing then?”
“We've been skirmishing in the Jewish quarter.”
“What about the citadel?”
“The English would shoot if even a rat moved in it, but we're in control of it.”
He was shocked, he felt so useless. He didn’t know anything and the whole crazy undertaking had been a reckless idea with no basis to it at all. The car, having left the crowd, had picked up speed and began to bounce like a rubber ball over the street, which was filled with holes. The man with the revolver said: “Get the barrel of this stick away from my face. It could go off if a fly landed on the hammer ...I1 know about this kind of weapon.”
He threw the rest of the tomato into the road and adjusted himself in his seat, but the man with the revolver kept up his game: “If we hadn’t found him about to occupy the citadel with his stick, he might have driven us out!”
Mansur thought a bit and decided that the man with the revolver was a mean creature and that what he had to do was teach him about means and ends. Quietly he put his gun down on the boxes of vegetables, and stared him in the face.
“Would you wrestle with me?”
“You're nervous. |
“Would you wrestle with me?”
The man with the revolver studied him carefully as he slumped sharply to the floor of the car. Under his shirt his shoulders looked round and stiff, and his broad forearms were
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 65
like blocks of wood. His hands were as if made of hammered brown steel. He raised his eyes and stared at his face. He was young, with black eyes slightly sunken below his thick eyebrows and sparkling like those of a hyena. A powerful determination radiated from them.
He came simply to a decision and looked at Ustaz Ma’aruf, slapping him with his left hand on the leg.
“A young man like this one doesn’t wrestle.”
“Then keep quiet.”
The man with the revolver persisted in what was supposed to resemble a joke but wasn't one. “So he eats a serpent’s head, but this isn’t meant to stop us from getting to know him. I’m a realistic man, so easy that a young man like this doesn't wrestle, I openly admit to you, Ustaz Ma’aruf, that he might be able to wrestle and beat me in less than a minute, and this is something that I don't like. If a peasant comes from Majd al-Kurum to your village and challenges you right there in the middle of the village, then he might knock you down.”
All of a sudden the car stopped and the driver, who throughout the trip had been paying no attention to his friends, looked around. He was wearing a dirty blue jacket. His beard of some time was neither long nor short and seemed untrimmed so that it gave his face a look of misery. He opened the car door noisily and, without so much as looking at them, announced: “We can’t go on. The damned gunfire is blocking the road and I can't trust this car. It’s dangerous for the motor to stop and rest. And we're in the middle of the danger zone.”
The man with the revolver jumped on top of the boxes and started to laugh: “You always give the same lecture: the gunfire, the damned motor, the road. Don’t you think we ever under- stand? Eh? You just don’t believe it.”
The driver didn’t answer, but turned towards the back of the car. He dragged out the biggest of the boxes and lifted it to his shoulders. Barely hanging on to the sides, he began to climb up the road.
Ustaz Ma’aruf said: “You're going to have to carry a box too, Mansur, and come join us.”
“Where to?”
66 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
“We're bringing food to the men. They haven't eaten any- thing since this morning.”
Mansur slung the strap of his gun over his shoulder and picked up a box of soft overripe tomatoes and hurried along behind Ustaz Mavaruf.
It was a paved lane extending between the stone walls of the low houses. Their windows were of minutely worked wood and were carefully locked. The lane led steeply up the hill, wide at times and then narrowing until finally there was not space enough for two men to walk side by side. Each curve seemed like it must be the end of the lane, but only turned out to be a deception. Behind the lane, above it, in it, no one knew, there were the sounds of bullets whistling. Anonymous shots skimmed the edges of the roofs producing sparks which fell on the stone rooms. There was an odor of silence and death and fear and courage and alarm coming from wives who didn't know if their husbands were still alive.
Mansur caught up with Ustaz Ma’aruf. The carefully paint- ed jug with its curved mouth bounced on top of his box and he could hear the panting of Ustaz Ma’aruf as he climbed upward in his heavy black shoes.
“Where are they?”
“Who?”
“The Jews.”
“On the roofs, behind the iron windows, where only divine bullets can penetrate.”
“Where are we?”
“You'll see now ... behind the alleys, in front of every hole big enough fora fly.”
Ustaz Ma’aruf put down his box and placed his hands on his hips. The driver had reached the end of the lane where a wide space appeared to extend between the two walls. He put down his box and moved towards the other two men. The man with the revolver and the man with the rifle began to look out from over his shoulder to the open area.
Ustaz Maaruf spoke: “They're waiting for an opportunity. Do you see that little courtyard? Well, there's a bloody rifle which commands it from the roof of the tallest house in the
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 67
Jewish quarter. Yesterday they killed a man. Today they almost killed a child... Early this morning they hit three cats.”
“Cats?”
“That’s right. The man with the rifle seemed to want to make us understand that no one was safe and that his aim was good enough to shoot something even half a kilometre or more away. Cats... Probably he put a telescope on his gun.”
Ustaz Ma’aruf flapped his pockets. Then he took out a small pen and squatted down on the ground. “Come here so | can explain it to you.”
Mansur squatted down next to him and tried to follow the twisted lines which Ustaz Ma’aruf was drawing slowly and care- fully on the snow-white tiles.
The Acre road goes eastward and then climbs to the north and goes from there into Safad. It makes a half circle around the green hills of stone and wild thyme. If we say that the center of Safad is the old destroyed citadel on top of the high hill, then it’s easy to imagine the countryside. To the west of the citadel is the Kurdish section. From there to the east extends the Jewish quarter on two sides. To the south is the al-Wata section. The market is a small area with a fresh damp aroma which is situat- ed between the al-Wata section, the Jewish quarter, and the area of the citadel. The heavy stone houses there are scattered about like panting attempts to climb the hill, which faces the citadel itself with its heavy arched stones.
West of the citadel stretches the Kurdish quarter with its stone houses coated with plaster. Seen from the citadel, they look like snow-white pigeons with their wings outspread over a carpet of dark green.
The vaulted houses with domes were built from stones taken from the al-Jarmagq quarry. The people of Safad call these superior stones, since they are able to preserve their mountain soul, desolate, coarse and firm, year after year, as if they were still a part of the mountain itself, and not yet dug out of it. You can always get stones from the mountains to build the walls of a house, high or low, rich or poor, but the stones from al-Jarmaq are the only stones whose soul you can’t steal, nor can you deprive them of their connections with the mountains. If you
68 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
build one of them into the neat, upright wall, you can’t pass by it without feeling that you’re in the mountain air, helpless, dis- persed, doomed. But it continues to carry with it its intense longing for the rough rocky terrain, giving off a wild aroma, as if it were still planted in a thicket of thyme.
In Safad, even though there were four thousand Jews who had never, for one day, been farmers, no one minded. They’d lived in their small shops for a long time, selling their wares to the people, exchanging greetings with them and long conversa- tions. They'd be invited to lunch and dinner. Because they'd been there for a long time, they knew how to speak Arabic. They were called by Arabic names and they read Arabic books and newspapers. It seemed logical for the inhabitants of Safad to call them Arab Jews. There would have been no problem if the large shops hadn't started to spring up in the country, sur- reptitiously, like plants, in the night. They said: The Ashkenazi came and took a closed-off, isolated corner on the side of the Jewish quarter. This happened in such a way that in the begin- ning no one noticed. The old men then didn’t worry much about the matter. Now these store owners are sitting behind their wooden desks in the biggest stores in the country. Take Iskandar. Is there a Safadi who doesn’t know the shops of Iskandar which sell lots of small housewares and notions? Or Roshar Braunfeld who sells foodstuffs? Then there’s also Yusuf Banderley who specializes in dairy products and cheeses. No one knows where he buys the things that fill his shop which is never closed except on Saturday. Behind a wide glass counter people are always doing business with the foreigner Mr. Bar in his pharmacy with wooden doors. Most people don’t know Edel Mayberg personally, but all Safad knows that he is the owner of the Central Hotel which is run anonymously like a number of the small hotels and restaurants.
Edel Mayberg, Edel ... Edel... Who suspects that he’s a member of the Haganah? And that his hotels and restaurants and houses are filled with arms? Or the foreigner Mr. Bar, the one who looks out at people from behind the glass counter and whose face looks like a chicken’s face, who would bet that he’s a military officer who procures weapons and draws up plans?
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 69
Banderley ... Braunfeld ... They dispatch especially for the future. Everything is perfectly inventoried. Probably this was a surprise not only for the Arabs of Safad but for the old Jews as well. They said so and said so and said so, then they were silent.
Year after year, through its tiled lanes, Safad saw dozens of rabbis approach the synagogues, of which there were three in the town. These old men with their long white beards and round black head coverings, did they know? Did they? You can't say anything now. The English knew. This is true and that much you can say with confidence. They came with weapons. Lots and lots of weapons, light, medium, and heavy. How is it that the English found hunting cartridges with us, and didn't find all these weapons with them? Look at them now. They let them shoot. But if we so much as shoot one bullet, Mr. Birham, the police chief, comes with his men in cars and on horseback to harry our rearguard with bullets and whips. When they could, they let them climb up to the citadel from time to time. What are they doing there? Only Mr. Birham knows. Are they mount- ing a cannon? Or digging a trench? Or burying machine guns? Can't anyone say? Mr. Birham is the only one who knows. But if we try to go there to see what they're doing, we just find armed English behind every stone. Armed English, one in front of another, who tell you: Go away!
It was an ignoble fight. Two days ago, Edel Mayberg and his son opened fire on Safad for an hour. From where? From that very citadel. The English were in their beds sound asleep in the Mount Canaan Centre and in the home of Hajj Fu’ad al-Kholy which they had made into another center for themselves between the Kurdish and the Jewish quarters, and in the central police station in the al-Wata quarter. For a whole hour of shooting not one of them woke up. But then when our young men began to climb the road to the citadel, they all got up and went racing off without even putting their pants on. An ignoble fight, like trying to stop an armored car with your bare hands.
Ustaz Mavaruf’s hands were also bare. His short pen moved in a circle over the tiles leaving twisting lines. Over and over until the tiles were transformed into thick lead lines with no beginning and no end, while the pen went on drawing. In the
70 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
still remaining clear space between the intertwining lines was placed one round dot.
“We are here now. Between us and the Jewish quarter there’s a row of British who are following us like police dogs. Thats why we're not stopping In any fixed places. It wouldn't be too smart. That empty courtyard there in front of you belongs to the Central Hotel, the hotel of Edel Mayberg and his son. The British are blind to everything as far as we're concerned ... do you understand anything of all this? Here we are like one man sitting on the roof of a minaret fighting an entire city. The bul- lets come at him from every side. But actually this example isn't quite right. Let’s change it to an upside-down minaret, or the devil’s own well surrounded by a thousand springs ... do you understand this? What brought you here from Majd al-Kurum anyway? Are there so few men in Safad?”
The question came as a surprise. As if he had been talking to some other man right by the pavement, Ustaz Ma’aruf hadn't even raised his head. The pen continued to give off a sharp screeching sound as it moved about above the dark black dot shiny as pitch. Mansur decided not to answer, since in fact he didn’t know the answer. Once more he took refuge in the world he had quietly regulated in his own mind. He decided again that a question of this sort didn’t require an answer. After all, you can hardly ask a fighter why he’s fighting, can you? It would be like asking a man why he is a man.
The lingering silence saved him when Ustaz Ma’aruf sud- denly raised his head and hastily shoved the small pen into his shirt pocket. There was a chill breeze coming from the moun- tain snow and bringing the frost with it. It swept through the land and it was as if it had extinguished the sounds of the bul- lets. Ustaz Ma’aruf got abruptly to his feet and Mansur did the same. They both looked towards the end of the lane. The three men took their boxes and disappeared from sight, but the air remained redolent with the smell of danger.
Picking up his box and positioning it on his shoulder, Ustaz Ma’aruf said: “Hey, the road looks safe.”
Mansur bent down to pick up his box, but just as his hands grasped the edge, everything seemed to happen at once. A
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 71
burning determination possessed him and began to ring in his forehead. This kind of thing had only happened to him two or three times before in his entire life: once when he was behind the plough in his father’s field and heard the sound of metal breaking and saw the plough blade split into two pieces. Another time was when his white foal had died in his arms. He just couldn’t shake off the significance of these events, as if some unknown power were kicking him, suddenly, in the nape of the neck. It was only an instant until he knew with absolute unshakable certainty that something dangerous was happening to him and that not all the power of earth and sky could help him lift the box.
Ustaz Ma’aruf hoisted his box up again and left Mansur standing in his place. Mansur, however, didn’t move, but stayed where he was, watching Ustaz Ma/aruf as he approached the end of the lane. He stopped for awhile with all his senses alert to the utmost, just in case, as if he were about to leap into the air. He moved the box to his other shoulder, scraping the tiles with the sole of his shoe, ready for the decisive moment. Then he dashed all at once across the wide covered space behind the alley.
In the next instant there was a flood of bullets. Mansur could see the blazing pellets scraping the tiles of the courtyard alongside Ustaz Ma’aruf’s feet. His heart began to beat wildly. Death trills were clamoring in his head while Ustaz Ma’aruf ran, leaping left and right in a crazily twisting line. He slid open the bolt on a door while the noisy whistling sound of bullets burst all around, above, in front and behind him. Thick and empty, the wind coming from the mountains began to howl in a miserable wounded voice.
There was a barrel filled with something standing in the middle of the courtyard. Between Mansur and Ustaz Maaruf were only a few steps, but they seemed a long endless expanse. Ustaz Ma’aruf was still holding his box on his shoulder where it protected his head from the bullets. The death trills still clam- oured in Mansur’s head like a chorus of sad captivating eyes. In front of a hole in the dirt another martyr fell. At the next instant Ustaz Ma’aruf had reached the barrel and was clinging
72 DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR
to the ground directly behind it, like a nail suddenly pounded into it with a hammer. The bullets reached the spot with him, bursting noisily when they hit the barrel and leaving three holes in its middle from which water began to gush as if from the mouths of clay pitchers.
A cold silence settled once again, but the trills of death con- tinued to fill Mansur’s forehead. Ustaz Ma’aruf was crouched behind the barrel, trying with difficulty to turn around so that no part of him would be visible to the distant eyes observing him from atop the buildings in the Jewish quarter. He raised his head signalling thereby to Mansur that he had been able to grasp the situation. The barrel, whose water had begun to flow out of the three holes in it, would not serve as a shield for much more than a few minutes now. Once all the water was gone, Ustaz Ma’aruf would have to choose between two ways of dying: either he could run out from behind the barrel and be mowed down by the rifle shots just as the cats had been that morning, or he could wait another few minutes, behind the barrel until, when all the water had emptied out of it, the bul- lets could easily pass through its sides, and one of them hit him.
It was clear that the game pleased the marksmen, for a little while later there came still another bullet which punctured a fourth hole from which the water began to flow as well. Ustaz Ma’aruf spun around in confusion and the next minute a new bullet had hit the top of the barrel with a long warning whistle. On the other side of the courtyard three indistinct heads watched what was going on.
Mansur stepped to the edge of the lane and cautiously poked his head out. The tall building appeared between the low built houses like a citadel with its broad foundations. On the roof was an enclosure of sandbags that had been raised above the wall. He could see from where he was that there was a small empty square in the middle of the bags and it seemed to him that there was something black moving behind them. But then he thought he saw the cannon itself with its steel glittering in the light of the setting sun.
He made sure of the bullet in the firing chamber, then slow- ly and cautiously lifted the mouth of the gun to the corner of
DOCTOR QASSIM TALKS TO EVA ABOUT MANSUR 73
the wall, taking careful aim. His uncle had told him: ‘Don't worry about the sights on the guns, just worry about your own nerves. The empty square in the wall of sandbags appeared framed in the mouth of his gun when still more shots were fired. The holes in the barrel became one fiendishly large hole from which water flooded out. This, however, did not rattle Mansur’s nerves and the next instant the hammer hit and an unbelievably wild thunder exploded. Then silence fell.
He loaded another bullet into the chamber and lay down on the wet pavement. In the middle of the courtyard, Ustaz Ma’aruf was once again getting ready to run. In the cold silence that had fallen there was not a sound except the water running from the holes in the barrel onto the pavement of the court- yard. Ustaz Ma’aruf, lifting his box to his shoulder and scraping the soles of his heavy black shoes, turned and made a dash for it. There was still one bullet that had not been fired. For those tense minutes there was nothing to be heard except the pound- ing of his feet on the pavement. On the other side of the court- yard where another lane began, three men cleared a way for him and he threw himself into it. Mansur stole another look at the wall of sand. It seemed quiet and ineffectual. In the next min- utes even the sound of running water trickled away. The holes were halfway up the barrel and the water had reached its limit. A high voice came from the edge of the courtyard: “You're a lion, you with the stick...”
This time, however, Mansur didn't get angry but began to laugh loud and heartily. The death trills inside his head faded away like bits of refuse.
—translated by Barbara Harlow
Abu al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car
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HEN THE CAR DROPPED HIM OFF AT THE
Nahaf crossroads, the man with the revolver switched
off the motor and looked at him attentively. The emptiness was redolent with the sighing of the olive trees. Under them stood two men of the same family. One of them shook his head and pointed to the gun in Mansur’s hands.
“Has that stick you’ve got there been much good?”
Unable to say anything, Mansur looked at him with the feeling that he was holding a dead piece of oiled wood in his hands. But the voice came once more: “Hope to see you again in Safad when there’s no more fighting.”
Still Mansur found nothing to say. As the engine started up again with a roar, the man released the brake and the car began to roll softly down the incline. It looked just the way Mansur had always imagined it: like a man without his pants on. When it had disappeared among the olive trees, Mansur took a deep breath and started up the road to Nahat.
His uncle was out in the fields and so he put the gun in the kitchen where Umm al-Hassan was bending down over a mass of dough, kneading it with her brown hands plunged in up to the elbows. She looked up, biting her lips, when she saw Mansur
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watching her. Mansur placed his finger over his mouth asking her to be silent.
Quietly he left Nahaf crossing the stone walls which divided the olive fields and set out down the road to Majd al-Kurum where he arrived before lunch. When he was still some way off he could see his brother’s car stopped in front of the door, lord- ing over the middle of the road, but none of that disturbed him much.
At the door which was, as always, open, he untied his shoelaces, took off his shoes, and slipped inside. Walking past the door of the living room, he could see his father praying. Although his father had seen him too, Mansur hurried on to where his mother was standing in the courtyard of the clay house. He leaned over her hand and kissed it twice while his mother drew a deep breath and in turn kissed him on the fore- head. For a moment she hugged him to her, but then released him, falling back a step and cautioning him in a hoarse whisper: “Your father’s going to kill you... Where have you been?”
He answered in a steady voice which combined both hope and resolve: “Have mercy on me.”
The next minute he heard a loud angry shout behind him: “Where have you been, you dog?”
Without turning around, Mansur responded with the sim- ple truth: “In Safad.”
“In Safad? What were you doing in Safad?”
“I took my uncle’s gun and went to join the young men there. They're fighting.”
“Who asked you to go and do that?”
“No one. I decided to do it myself.”
His father shouted: “Turn around and talk to me face to face, you ingrate of a son.”
Mansur turned around and looked at his father, directly into his angry eyes. His father came a step forward, and it was clear that he was going to have to use his hands. The next minute the blow which he had been expecting landed, but Mansur didn’t move. When his mother moved to block the way between him and his father, he gently pushed her away from in front of him. Abu Qassim shouted again: “Say something.”
Mansur licked his lips and felt a sweet warm taste.
ABU AL-HASSAN AMBUSHES AN ENGLISH CAR 77
Nonethełess he didn’t raise his hand to his mouth to see whether or not it had begun to bleed, but went on looking his father straight in the eyes.
“If youre here and Qassim is in Haifa, one of us three had to go to Safad.”
“Are you trying to sell me some kind of patriotism, you son of sin?”
Mansur licked his lips again and looked at his mother standing opposite them ready to throw herself between if Abu Qassim kept up the attack.
“Pm not trying to sell you patriotism. I just went to Safad.”
Abu Qassim hesitated a moment. This was a new kind of battle, not the kind he was used to in years past. His son was looking at him angrily, when he presumably hit upon another point: “Did you return your uncle’s gun?”
“Safe and sound.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were in a hurry.”
They waited another minute, like two cocks, but the anger was the kind that disappears, and now only the semblance of it remained.
“Your brother’s in Haifa, running around with Jewish women. I’ve just dragged him out of there. He’s an even more disobedient dog than you are, you wretch...and now you...”
At a loss, he stopped talking momentarily, measuring his son up and down with his eyes.
“Get out of my sight. Go to hell.”
Smiling Mansur turned around and looked at his mother. After Abu Qassim had angrily slammed the living room door, his mother said in a subdued voice: “In any case, you have mis- behaved.”
“Where's the doctor?”
“At the coffeehouse. Ever since your father brought him back from Haifa, he’s been going there every morning. He'll be back in an hour or so.”
Even though the problem with his father had ended amica- bly enough, deep down inside him Mansur felt completely unplacated. He knew that he couldn't be satisfied with depend- ing on his brother, the Doctor Qassim. Hanging around with
78 ABU AL-HASSAN AMBUSHES AN ENGLISH CAR
Jewish women! It was impossible for a woman ever to resist Qassim. Doctor Qassim, who wanted to escape his peasantness and become citified. Break the mold, as they say. Hanging around with Jewish women. Jewish women. Wearing short skirts and exposing their shoulders. He had seen them in al- Carmel wearing short blue pants and walking shamelessly about like that with a wrap no bigger than a folded handker- chief. The very land itself couldn’t bear to look at them. Now you don’t have to... You're still ashamed of your brother Qassim and you don’t want to meet him. Instead of his being ashamed of himself, you’re being ashamed for him! Your big brother. He crossed his hands in front of himself. Don’t answer and be careful not to raise your voice louder than his, even though he’s going about with Jewish women.
He thought for a minute about leaving the house again so that he wouldn’t have to meet Qassim face to face. He couldn’t for a minute imagine how his eyes would ever be able to look upon that face of his.
In any case, however, he didn’t meet Qassim that day, nor that evening, nor even the next day. When his father finally sent him to inquire about Qassim around noon, the owner of the coffeehouse stretched his arm off towards the west, and said: “He told me to tell you that he went back to Haifa.”
When Abu al-Hassan returned to his home in Nahaf, the first thing he saw was the old gun standing in the living room cor- ner. He went over to it and picked it up as if it were something very desirable, but in fact he didn’t really desire it all that much. He examined it carefully, turning it over in his hands at first, then pulling out the broken firing pin and releasing the ham- mer, satisfied at the sound which it gave off. After that he exam- ined the gun barrel and arm, tightening the fiber rope as if to reassure himself that it still held firm. Only when he had fin- ished all this did he smile contentedly to himself. He returned the gun to its place and went off to the back courtyard where Umm al-Hassan was doing the washing and stood watching her.
Even though she had aged before her time, her determina-
ABU AL-HASSAN AMBUSHES AN ENGLISH CAR 79
tion and strength of will had not changed, nor was her head- strongness any the less. She was one of those women who, because they can do whatever you might think of, one hardly ever finds sleeping or just sitting alone, catching their breath. Most of the time they make something for themselves to do even if you find a way to excuse them from work. Umm al- Hassan usually woke up before her husband, prepared breakfast, boiled the tea and then went outside to work on the little piece of land attached to the house. Then she would come back to straighten up and sweep the house and begin cooking lunch. She would do the washing and visit her neighbors, listening to what she didn’t know and telling what she did. She would chase away the dogs, squeeze the tomato Juice, feed the chickens, bring the eggs down to the store and buy what she needed for the day. If you saw her standing for a moment in the courtyard of the house, drying her hands on her colorful apron, you would know that she had just been thinking about something she had to do afterwards, and going back in those moments to devilish thoughts: like emptying the food into new dishes to give herself a chance to wash up the old dishes, or getting a dress out of the old trunk either to take in the seams or let them out or perhaps to mend some tears in it. Or else, if she couldnt find anything else to do, she would take refuge in the kitchen and start up again on her efforts to make harisa. For years now she hadn't been successful at this, and every time she made it Abu al-Hassan would take his first bite of the harisa and choke on it. He would scowl and not say anything, just look at her angrily with the piece of harisa still between his teeth. Then when he got up, she would greedily take a taste of it herself. Even so, she never admitted her failure until the following morning when she would get up and throw the rest of the harisa to the chickens. In spite of all these frustrated efforts of hers, she kept trying and always had such difficulty avoiding the job.
While she was busy hanging the laundry on the line, Abu al-Hassan said to her: “That boy should be hung by his ears and whipped ... Did he tell you why he was late?”
“No, he didn’t say.”
“Anyway, the gun is still okay.”
Umm al-Hassan wiped her hands on her apron and put
80 ABU AL-HASSAN AMBUSHES AN ENGLISH CAR
them on her hips: “How could you give the gun to a boy like Mansur? If he had died, it would have been your fault.”
“When a man dies, there’s no time to talk about the blame. Furthermore, he’s not all that small.”
She gave him a measured look from where she was stand- ing. Sometimes when she looked at him reproachfully, he would think that she was about to leap at him and give him a good pounding. He always thanked God that so far in twenty years he hadn’t given her an occasion for that.
“Listen, woman, I’m going now. If anyone asks about me, tell them that l ve gone to Majd al-Kurum, or Acre, or to hell. Just make sure that you tell them I’m not here.”
She bit her lower lip just as he expected her to do, and just as she always did when she wanted to avoid a question she did- nt know how to answer. He didn’t waste a minute before turn- ing around and going back into the living room. Picking up his gun he went out the door without closing it after him. They were waiting for him behind the house and as soon as he arrived, they all walked off together in silence. With steps recog- nizable by their softness and without a moment's hesitation, they wandered off through the olive fields to the east. They knew practically every stone and every tree. And not only this, but they knew the history of every tree as well, who had been its previous owner and who owned it now, how much fruit it bore and how much it didn’t, what its progress would be this season and what it had been last season. They went up behind the trees, far away from anything, avoiding any encounters with another person, until they came out behind Rameh where they turned off in an arc. Here they descended behind the rocks stretching to the crossroads.
As night began to fall, morosely and gloomily, a wall of fire rose up behind the hills and dampness spread, filled with the aroma of wet dirt. From their position it was easy for them to see where the road coming from Acre branched off into two roads. One of them went to the north to Sunhamata and the other climbed eastward to Faradiya and Safad. They chose a pile of rocks that had been heaped up and concealed themselves behind it, listening to the sounds. The four of them were almost the same age; they didn't know exactly, but it couldn’t have been
ABU AL-HASSAN AMBUSHES AN ENGLISH CAR 81
much more than forty. Only one of them looked like a really old man, and that was Abu al-Abd. For this reason Abu al-Hassan told him everything as it came to their attention: “Keep up your strength, Abu al-Abd,” he would say, and Abu al-Abd would smile and shake his head without answering, as if the matter after all really didn’t require an answer.
The old gun stood upright among them. Abu al-Hassan held it in his hands as if it were the fifth member of the party. The fibre cord hung limply from under the tip of its barrel. But it was warm and friendly and inspired a hidden confidence.
Abu al-Abd said: “Let's hope that we succeed before dark falls.”
Abu al-Hassan thought that Abu al-Abd must really be an old man to imagine that the darkness could be any kind of frightening adversary. Oh, for those days when Abu al-Abd would be gone for a week at a time in the mountains, eating wood and thyme and not returning home until he had at least five English hats. What had happened to those days when a sin- gle person could go out walking from morning to night without so much as breathing hard? ... That was twelve years ago, a long time, and the poor man was tired now and his will was gone. Oh, unfortunate Abu al-Abd, do you think that you can enter the battle now as you did in time gone by? Do you think that those who are fighting you now are the same English you fought twelve years ago? Do you think they’ve become old the way you have? Poor Abu al-Abd, if you only knew that they keep sending new generations and the old men go back to their homes. We're the only ones who grow old... As for them... A hidden rumbling came from the distance, like the growling of a cat. Abu al-Hassan dropped a bullet into the firing chamber and positioned the barrel of the gun on the edge of a rock, while the other three men got ready, silently tying up the lower ends of their long garments under their belts. The rumbling grew grad- ually louder while the glow behind the hills became cloudy. A funereal silence, about to explode, settled on the horizon.
“Be patient.”
It was Abu al-Abd who said this, and in the silence his voice seemed hard and powerful, like in the old days. Meanwhile the rumbling grew still louder and after a few tautly strung moments
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a car appeared, approaching round the curve. It was moving slowly and there were two men sitting in the front seat. As Abu al-Hassan aimed at the driver he heard a hoarse whisper from his neighbor: “Have confidence, Abu al-Hassan. Get the driver.”
The next instant he had squeezed the trigger and there was a thundering explosion. The car veered suddenly towards the edge of the road and rammed into the high stones. Even before Abu al-Hassan had loaded another bullet, the three men had leapt over the rocks and gone straight to the side of the car. They had done this so incredibly quickly that Abu al-Hassan himself had no time to decide what to do except to leap down and catch up with them. The driver had fallen back on the steering wheel and the other man in the car was quaking in fear. They dragged the driver by the collar out of the car and took away his revolver. All the while Abu al-Hassan kept the barrel of his gun pointing in his face. Knowing only one term of abuse in English, which was “fuckin,” he kept repeating it monotonously over and over, in different tones, trying to find the right one, the way the English would say it themselves. But it was too hard.
Carefully and quickly they examined the car. Next to the driver there was a new English rifle as well as some cartridges. In front of the back seat was a long metal box. It was tightly closed and since there was no time to look into it, they took it with them. Abu al-Abd took over the attempt to persuade the soldier not to follow them. To do this, he used his hands and his eyebrows and broken Arabic. Finally when the soldier began to nod his head in agreement the others picked up the heavy box and started to run with it over the rough ground planted with olive trees. Meanwhile Abu al-Abd loaded his new gun and aimed it at the soldier, warning him to start back.
Ten minutes later or so, Abu al-Abd stopped and put his hand on Abu al-Hassan’s shoulder. “Do you know what? We have to go back to that soldier and give him a good beating. We forgot to do that.”
“What?”
“All my life, P ve wanted to slap an English soldier in the face. And now I forgot to do it.”
—translated by Barbara Harlow
The Child, His Father, and the Gun Go to the Citadel at Jaddin
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again. Instead he had heard that Abu al-Abd was hid-
ing a brand new English rifle in his house. When he went there, however, his son Abdallah told him that his father had left the house and wouldn't be back for two days. Wasting no time then, Mansur climbed the hills to Tarshiha and arrived there before the sun had set. Hajj Abbas was sitting out on his small chair in front of the door rolling a cigarette out of rough dark tobacco. He had it all spread out on his lap, so he couldn't get up when he saw Mansur. He cut him off, laughing:
“So, you see I can’t get up... How are you?”
Sitting down in front of him, Mansur replied: “Fine, and how are you, Uncle Hajj Abbas?”
Hajj Abbas looked at him with his sharp eagle-like eyes. His wrinkled face, burned by the sun, was severe. He was well- known in all the surrounding villages, but for all that, no one had formed any clear idea about him. There weren't two people who could agree on one opinion concerning Hajj Abbas: he was mean and profligate and ready to sell his pants for a few pias- tres, if his calculations showed that he stood to make a one piastre profit. At least that’s what some people who knew him
M ANSUR DIDN’T DARE GO BACK TO HIS UNCLE
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84 THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL
thought. But there were others who saw him as a clean, upright man who would give you the meat from his own neck if you were hungry.
Basically, however, Hajj Abbas dealt in tobacco and this may well have been the point which brought people to differ in their view of him. He was absolutely fair when it came to market prices and so his offers to the farmers were high or low accord- ing to whether the prices in Haifa were high or low. In the past Haj) Abbas had learned a lesson. This happened one day when the Qaraman Company had informed him that buying prices had dropped a great deal. Hajj Abbas had already made an arrangement with the farmers and had given his word. As a result his losses that year practically brought him to bankrupt- cy. From that day on, Hajj Abbas made his arrangements with the farmers on a different basis. They promised to give him the crop, but he himself made no promise on the price. The matter was left hanging ambiguously and he shipped the harvest to Haifa before paying for it. When the time came, there were, of course, problems about paying, but he was always able to end the differences to his own benefit.
Soon, however, matters became increasingly complicated and he found that if he wanted to continue successfully, he was going to have to get himself some kind of insurance. His first idea was to expand his operations. He fell back on giving credit and free loans. He was also able to reach an agreement with the Qaraman, Dik and Sulti Company whereby he would be given a monopoly on selling the crop from a given piece of land in Galilee which extended a distance of about five square kilome- ters around Tarshiha. Once all this was finished he breathed a deep sigh.
Hajj Abbas was generous in granting loans to anyone who needed it and no one knew him to have sent anyone in need away without responding to his request. He was not, however, particularly forbearing when it came to collecting on them, the precondition for the loan being in his view a friendly agree- ment. In order that the precondition be clear, however, it was written and recorded and he appended at the bottom the signa- tures of the witnesses.
THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL 85
Half the problems were solved by the court and the other half he solved himself. But however much quarrels might arise, Hajj Abbas was nonetheless eager to protect his personal con- nections with everyone. He visited them and kept in touch. No one was better than he at giving wedding presents. He gave his blessing on all the new births and his condolences when anyone died. He read the newspapers aloud to those who couldn't read, and would go to Acre to get the doctor if there were anyone sick who required it.
He had a taste for first-rate tobacco which he enjoyed down to the cigarette butt which he had made himself. When he wanted to really honor someone, he presented his guests with handfuls of the finest tobacco for them to take home with them.
He rolled his cigarette with precision, biting the edge of the paper and licking it with his tongue. Then he sealed it together and contemplated a moment the cigarette paper which was rolled carefully in the palm of his large hand. When he lit it he closed his eyes halfway in a special kind of pleasure, swallowing the smoke and then exhaling it in a thick cloud through his nose and mouth. Mansur watched him, thinking this might be a way to reach the heart of this man so capable of both desire and caution. It was as if he were all tied up in thorny threads. Hajj Abbas, however, as he usually did whenever he felt the situation required it, made the matter easy for him:
“It seems something’s happening in Majd al-Kurum. Your father came by this morning and now here you are this evening. In any case I’m at your service. Your father told me that you were going to marry soon. You know that I’m ready to be of any service... If we don’t celebrate with you young people, we old folks, what use are our lives?”
Hajj Abbas laughed as he usually did when talking with young people and old men. Deep down inside himself, he didn’t believe that he was an old man. He had a kind of scorn for the young people of today, believing that if he got into a fight with any of them he had to be careful that he didn’t break him into pieces like a dried tobacco plant. As for Mansur, however, no sooner had he collided with him than everything that had been
86 THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL
in his head got changed around, until all he wanted now was to know the reason why his father had come to Hajj Abbas. He began to put his question, abruptly, as if it were an answer: “Did he want to borrow money?”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“No. I myself thought at first that he wanted to borrow money. You know, Pm ready. Abu Qassim is very dear to me, but he didn’t want money. He wanted to borrow the rifle.”
“Your rifle?”
“That’s right. You know, it’s very precious to me. Even so, I gave it to him.”
“For how much?”
Hajj Abbas laughed again and his throat gave out a childlike gurgling which then dwindled off. It pleased him that Mansur was being realistic and understood the way things really were and so he started enthusiastically to explain to him:
“We agreed on everything. He was the one who put down the conditions and I accepted them just as they were: he’s pay- ing a pound per day. Do you think that’s such a lot? Well, it’s not really. The rifle cost a hundred pounds. Anyway, he was sat- isfied and so was I.”
“And if it gets lost or ruined?”
“Don't tell me your father has a hundred pounds to pay for it. But he could always pay the price in olives.”
“Did you make him sign a paper.”
“He’s the one who wanted that. Distinguished men want the rights of the people. They don’t accept oppression. I told him there was no place for papers between Hajj Abbas and Abu Qassim, but he insisted and I had no wish to make him angry.”
He looked Mansur directly in the face while Mansur inhaled his cigarette with rare pleasure, trying to look natural and feeling that he couldn't. In the next minute, as he exhaled the smoke, he knew that Hajj Abbas had discovered the truth of his feelings. Hajj Abbas rested his elbows on his knees, saying in an excited voice:
“If I thought this was a mistake, you know, I would tear up the papers in front of you right now. But I didn’t want to make
THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL = 87
the old man angry, so I let him do what he wanted to do. All | want is that he come back and bring my gun back.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him, and he didn’t say.”
He inhaled again and went back to leaning his back against the wall. He returned to the original subject: “Do you want to get married?”
“Of course.”
“So, bridegroom, what is it that you want from me?”
Mansur glanced at him again in embarrassment, looking like a heap of flesh and misery on his small chair. Behind him the sun was setting, coloring the edges of the dark clouds in a blood-red hue. He looked upwards awhile. Throngs of black clouds were racing at each other. The next minute a heavy clap of thunder broke in the distance and Hajj Abbas said: “It’s going to rain... what is it that you want?”
He stood up and looked at him from above.
“Nothing. I just came to ask about my father. I thought I might find him here with you and we'd go back to Majd al- Kurum together.”
Hajj Abbas stood up and picked up his chair which looked smaller than it really was.
“It’s going to rain. Why don’t you sleep here tonight?”
“Thanks. I have something to do.”
Without stopping he started to run across the stony hills while the clouds quietly poured forth rain like whispers. For the first time in his life he felt that his head was stuffed with clay, and that he was unable to work anything out. There were all these complications that he didn’t believe: the rented rifle, why? And his father as well! What had brought him into the clutches of Hajj Abbas? This person was more like a worm. He didn't know his head from his tail. Didn’t he know? Of course not! His father didn’t meddle in this kind of thing. He was an old man and the only thing that mattered to him was the season just past and the season to come. But how?
He didn't slow down at all and his head was buzzing like a nest of hornets as he hurried down the narrow track which had
been worn away by feet since the beginning of time. Nor could he contain his agitation as he entered the house. His mother, who was sleeping, woke up at the sound of his excited steps going about the house like a small gale. When she peeped out the door, she saw him standing directly in front of her, bigger than he had ever seemed before, angry, panting and drenched with rain.
“Where's my father?”
“He said there was a wedding in Acre.”
Before saying anything he calmed down, even in spite of his surprise. His mother seemed to him such a poor woman, know- ing nothing and needing nothing but a great love to last all her life. Does she really believe it’s true that her husband has gone to Acre? And he had lied to her! What if he grabbed her now and shook her the way you shake a jar of milk, would she be able to see anything else? What was the hope?
He put on his long white shirt and got into bed, but his eyes didn’t close all night. From the low window of the bedroom he watched the brilliant blood-red dawn. Soon the sun would dis- appear behind thick black clouds. Quietly he slipped from his bed and got dressed. He went out of the house, leaving the door wide open.
Shakib was in front of the coffeehouse smoking a cigarette. He was wearing long leather shoes and a khaki robe with large pockets and his short machine gun stood between his legs. When he saw Mansur coming he got up. Putting out his ciga- rette he picked up his machine gun by its middle, like someone long used to carrying such a gun, and asked: “Where's your weapon?”
“I didn’t find anything. All the doors were locked.”
“So why did you come then?”
“I don't know. lIl take my orders there.”
He measured him up and down with his steady black eyes, then stepped in front of him without a word. Shakib was an enigmatic man, rigid as a basalt wall. He knew every family in Majd al-Kurum and the neighboring villages, but they in turn did not know him. Shakib was always able to procure weapons, and yet no one knew where he got them, so that most days
THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL 89
when the English arbitrarily searched for arms Shakib managed to guard a revolver, or a rifle, or a machine gun. One day, five years ago, Majd al-Kurum saw him carrying a huge machine gun. It was a Vickers model. Because it was difficult to conceal, he had dismantled it, and buried the small pieces outside in the village. Five years later when he went back to get it, it was all corroded and impossible for him to reassemble, so he sold it as scrap metal.
The English arrested him immediately whenever one of their soldiers was reported killed anywhere around Galilee. As a result, he had come to know every Palestinian jail and most of the officers in the British army. Madly passionate for weapons, he was nonetheless ready to strangle an English officer with his bare hands if ever given half a chance. For a long time he was called a scoundrel, even though he wasn’t really like that, but rather polite and diffident and acknowledging the service to others as an obligation. When he married, the families of Majd al-Kurum saw him as an ideal husband eager to protect and provide a worthy life for his wife and child. For days on end he would disappear without anyone knowing where he was hiding. Then, when he returned, Majd al-Kurum would hear the myste- rious news of dangerous things happening in one place or another around Galilee. Everyone was, however, sworn to silence.
Shakib didn’t talk much to anyone about his own life, but every man in Majd al-Kurum knew that he received all his clothes, right down to the underwear, from the English army camps and that somewhere in his house he had uniforms of English officers of different ranks. Once while he was ploughing in his field outside Majd al-Kurum he had even had the oppor- tunity to wear the uniform of an English major.
His marksmanship was unbelievably good and he was able to use a wide variety of weapons with skill and confidence. He was well-known as well for his beautiful voice and he used to sing on occasion at the weddings in Majd al-Kurum of deep affliction and the sadness of love and land and sky.
His steps were broad and heavy as he took the shortcut across the rugged terrain. Mansur followed with difficulty with-
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out understanding whether he was welcome. Before the morn- ing was over the two of them had crossed the hills of Jaddin. From the heights surrounding it they saw the mighty citadel standing atop the plain and encircled by wood huts inside a girth of thick barbed wire.
Shakib sat down, spreading his legs as if they were two big pieces of firewood and pointing with the muzzle of the rifle toward the citadel. He appeared calm, relaxed and unbothered by anything exactly as he had appeared that morning sitting in the square of Majd al-Kurum. He spoke to Mansur in his sad, quiet voice which seemed as free as did the man himself: “I don't understand much about history, but this citadel is really old. Anyway were not here to study it, we're here to occupy it.”
Once more he looked at Mansur, as if he hadn’t seen him before. He smiled: “Even though you're not carrying a weapon! ... But don’t worry too much, now when the men are gathered, we ll see. Probably some of them will discover at the last minute that they're sick and can’t use their weapons.”
For a while Mansur gazed at the citadel. To him it seemed forbidding and closed, like a mountain with no caves, and the idea of occupying it struck him as a joke.
“We're the only ones in this area. All the men are approach- ing from Tarshiha, Yaraka, and al-Kabri. Maybe al-Shishakli will bring some of his men as well ... But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that this citadel is filled with arms. If it were easy for you to enter it, then you would worry about all you had to carry with you... this way your coming isn’t in vain. You can devote yourself to praying during the fight. If the heavens answer your prayers, you'll get a weapon.”
He smiled briefly to himself, then got up and started down the slope on his hard steady feet. The men were waiting halfway between Jaddin and Umqa. There were two mortar guns in front. The rifles looked old, but they were sound. When the two of them arrived, the first thing Mansur saw was his father’s face.
He was sitting on the ground at the far end of the circle with his hands resting on the gun, Hajj Abbas’s gun no doubt, and listening to the remarks of a man with a beard wearing a
THE CHILD, HIS FATHER, AND THE GUN GO TO THE CITADEL 91
belt filled with bullets. He was in the middle of explaining the details. He used his hands and gave a brief outline.
He had expected that, he was deeply convinced of it. But even so, he continued in a way to repress the lie to himself because he hadn't wanted it, and yet had been certain that he would find his father sitting there, waiting for the battle. For agonizing hours he had clung to the tiny hope of not finding him there. What happened next was simple: his father raised his eyes from the ground and saw him standing at the other side of the circle next to Shakib. His face, however, remained frozen as if he were looking at some man he didn’t know. Once the man with the beard had finished his explanation, Abu Qassim stood up and went over to his son. He stood next to him without looking at him. Only when the march began did he speak to him in a whisper: “You shouldn’t have come. It’s not right to leave your mother alone.”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. Why don’t you give me your gun and go back to Majd al-Kurum?”
Abu Qassim shoved the gun in front of his son’s face. It seemed to sparkle in the morning light as if it had just come from the factory.
“Its not my gun. It belongs to Hajj Abbas. I put down the rental price for it and gave my olives as security, so I’m not going to surrender it to anyone, into any hands but these.”
Mansur waited a little and then asked in a peremptory voice: “Why did you join the attack on Jaddin?”
“The revolution has begun. That’s the whole thing.”
“No, that’s not it. You wanted to get a rifle from Jaddin, to give me on my wedding night, just like you promised me.”
Abu Qassim didn’t answer, but pressed his lips together and took a few steps, so that he suddenly saw the men who were in the front. Looking around him he saw Shakib humming a tune to himself. He grabbed him with his hands and could feel the strength of his arm and its hardness.
“Listen, Mansur. This generation is an accursed generation. You have to know that from the beginning. Their heads are like stones, so don't waste your time trying to satisfy them. You can’t
fool them. Your father and my father and all this accursed gen- eration, you can only work with them by cleverness. Now do you know what you have to do? Just try to protect him.”
“Do you really think we can occupy the citadel?”
“No, I don’t really think so, but the attack will be useful, and who knows, a miracle might happen.”
There were low wooden houses surrounding the citadel on all sides and around these he saw thick barbed wire. A group of men had gathered on the road to cut off the help that might arrive from Nahariya. Meanwhile the men on the slope settled down to wait.
Some distance away Mansur saw Shakib crawling towards the wire. He had seen where it was attached by rope and was about to shake it from afar so that the mines which had been set there would explode. Before Shakib reached the wire, however, bullets poured forth. For the next few minutes, the hill was alight with sparks. Mansur couldn't catch up with his father, but all the men were moving rapidly from one place to another. He couldn’t see anything more than their kaffiyas fluttering like small white flags among the stones and thorn trees. The bullets rained down around Shakib making it impossible for him to move except to wait completely crouched down with his arms on a bundle of rope and a roof of uninterrupted firing above him. It occurred then to Mansur that the situation might well go on like this indefinitely, that the two sides would go on firing bullets and mortars of steel and stone without knowing any- thing about each other. If he only knew the natural layout of Jaddin, couldnt he imagine some other way? Then when the mortar shells began to blow up the wooden houses one by one, the sound of the bullets died down. Shakib moved a step and began to creep forward like a short viper while the mortars exploded here and there silencing the guns behind the others. By the time Shakib reached the barbed wire, the sound of the bullets coming from the wood huts had ceased. This made it easy for him to tie carefully the ropes and slip nimbly away. In the next instant the wire began to shake violently pulling out the ropes while the mines exploded all at once producing a dreadful noise and hurling a storm of sand and stones to a
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tremendous height. Then suddenly the sound of rifles and machine guns and mortar shells fell silent, as if waiting.
When the smoke cleared, the wood huts reappeared, impo- tent, crippled and wholly exposed in front of the men lying in ambush on the hill. Mansur slipped from behind and caught up with the front line. After some long minutes of expectant silence the men began to advance, slowly, cautiously at first. Then one man, and another, stood up and both started to run, carrying their guns over their heads, towards the abandoned huts. It was as if they were declaring that a new stage of the assault had begun. The men left their hiding places and started slipping over the hill, releasing as they went a huge roar. Only when they had reached the shredded barbed wire did fire from the windows of the mighty fortress get to them, and they fell to the ground once again.
For an hour it was impossible to advance a single step. The firing was profuse and uninterrupted and it wasn't easy to tell exactly where it was coming from. Mortar shells began again to fall around the tenacious fortress, then it was silent. Mansur said to himself: “If only they'd run out of mortar material.” He was still clinging to the rock where Shakib, looking dusty and tired and shattered, had crawled. He sat down next to him, hug- ging his machine gun and shaking his head.
“Do you understand? I didn’t fire a single bullet. How are we shooting?”
He looked at his machine gun as if to blame it, then he gave Mansur a push with his elbow.
“Here we are. Everything’s finished. The British will come and surround us.”
Dismayed, Mansur asked: “What happened?”
“Nothing, of course... It was easy to demolish the wooden houses and half the barbed wire. They probably knew this and so they dug deep trenches between the houses and the citadel. When the mortar shelling began, the retreat began. They were watching us from the citadel. We didn't do anything. The citadel can hold out for two days, but does that guarantee that the British won't come?”
“But if we could destroy...”
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“Everything’s finished. Here we are. It was a Bedouin attack and couldn't tell its head from its tail. But we'll learn.”
“What about my father?”
“Let him take care of his own affairs himself. It’s not your job to tell him what he has to do.”
The sound of the bullets began to wane and only a few stubborn shots gave notice of their existence from time to time. Mansur turned around and started to climb up the hill next to Shakib. In the meantime the men were retreating one by one and firing off what remained of their ammunition. When Mansur reached the road he sat down to wait while Shakib con- tinued on his way. They didn’t exchange a single word of farewell. He felt a repeated pain in his throat and couldn't get rid of the sensation which had been troubling him since the morning that he had forgotten something. After all, it was really ridiculous to go into battle without weapons, as if you were going to a wedding. Even a wedding requires that a man go armed. Any kind of combat, and wasn't this combat? Fighting each other with stones in your hands. Struggling, banging your bare head against a wall. Wasn't it a disgrace to go on like this without arms? Men got their weapons by force, not by asking permission and not by going sometimes to Nahaf and some- times to Kisra to borrow a gun.
To own a gun for one courageous moment, maybe with a bayonet on it as well. But whoever said that the sky rained rifles the way it rained manna and quails? For the last ten years Shakib had been able to steal hundreds, at least, of weapons. He didn’t ask permission from anyone. What are you waiting around for, Mr. Mansur? Do you think you're going to find a rifle or a machine gun on the doorstep of your house some morning? This is the revolution! Thats what everyone says, and youre not going to know what that means until you sling a gun over your shoulder, a gun that shoots. How long are you going to wait?
The skies filled suddenly with the sound of thunder and men’s voices rose from the top of the hill. Between the thick clouds an airplane was visible glittering like a long silver platter. The plane made two wide circles over the hill and the citadel
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and then circled high once more. Before he saw it again bombs began to go off on the hilltop like a cordon of black trees. To the north armored cars appeared haughtily from over the al-Kabri road and opened fire on the hill. The voice of a frightened man shouted from the bottom of the valley: “Here come the English boys!”
The white kaffiyas fluttered about looking for a hiding place. The sun was veiled behind the dark black clouds and the skies began to rain lightly. For just awhile the men were con- fused, then they began to climb the hill turning toward the south. It was clear that the Nahariya-al-Kabri road to the north was being patrolled by the English armored cars that had come to assist Jaddin, and so the only open road was to the south. Whatever you decided to do, the narrow road climbed straight up. The rifles opened fire on the raised roofs of the hill across the valley.
The armored cars were practically breathing on the Jaddin citadel and from their windows they kept up a heavy fire. Meanwhile the first rows of men were passing Mansur on their way towards the south. Although Mansur was waiting, out of breath, for his father to arrive, he nonetheless couldn't rely on this weak, trembling expectation and so he began to go on down, stubbornly but cautiously. When he reached the edge of the firing the bearded man who was carrying his machine gun aimed and stopped him. He was swathed with belts of car- tridges and all muddy. His face was streaked with black. Grabbing Mansur by the hand, he shoved him roughly back- wards, shouting: “Where do you think you're going? Are you crazy?”
Mansur shook his hand greedily and before the man had recovered from the impact of the gesture Mansur had grabbed the arm of the rifle with both hands and tugged it violently to himself: “If you’re afraid, give me your gun... My father’s still there.”
The man, however, held on to his gun. Quietly, with a quick movement which Mansur could neither see nor follow, he stood up, snatching his gun with him and causing Mansur to lose his balance. His voice came from his chest and his scowling face
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streaked with black smiled savagely: “Let’s look for him togeth- er. He’s from Majd al-Kurum isn’t he?”
Mansur nodded his head in assent while the man picked up his gun and moved forward, placing his large feet hard and judiciously in the muddy puddles and skillfully concealing him- self behind the piles of stones. The bombs had begun to go off behind the two of them as they beat their retreat step by step. At the sound of a violent thunder, the man looked at Mansur. It was hard to tell much from his appearance, stained as it was with mud and smoke.
“He must be a tough old man. Our front lines were here. Does this mean he went beyond them?... Are you sure he did- n't retreat?”
“Of course.”
As he said this, Mansur’s heart began to beat violently, like a rooster being slaughtered, and he felt a violent danger all around him. He swallowed his saliva with difficulty and ended up staring at the ground. “No, no, he didn’t retreat. I was at the head of the road... if he had retreated, he would have had to pass by me.”
The man wiped his forehead with his sleeve and asked: “Do you want to go further ahead?”
“Yes.”
The man thought awhile and picked up his gun.
“Try to shield me. l'l] go on by myself and come back to you here... Don’t move a single step.”
The steel of the rifle was wet and he felt a tremor run through his hand when he seized it. He began ever more vora- ciously to look around him at everything washed in rain water. The sound of the many bullets had lost its meaning now and become a part of the thunder and lightning and dark clouds which stretched like a low roof of darkness above his head. He pressed the machine gun to his chest, tightly closing his eyes for just a second, then he went back to examining the muzzle in front of him, bending his fingers around the hammer and tak- ing sight with his narrowed eyes at the rocks and the thorn trees lavishly bathed in rain water.
Time passed cold and heavy as he dragged his steps through
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the deep pools of mud, as if shackled and tied to the mountain. He was angry but exhausted as well. His teeth were chattering and the pounding had started again in his chest. He trembled like a steel spring from mud and fright.
Mansur was filled with expectation. It throbbed inside him to a point where it seemed that whatever it was that he was expecting must inevitably happen. It couldn't escape him. When he saw the man with the beard in the distance, a stooped, coarse spectre, carrying another shadowy-like figure on his shoulders, he took in the sight calmly, as if he had seen it hours and hours before and was ready for it.
He stayed where he was, and knelt down on one knee, washing himself in the rain and staring at his father being car- ried on the man’s shoulders. When they had drawn close to him he saw that his father’s hand was closed carefully around the middle of the gun and that he had wrapped the strap around his forearm. Both men were covered with blood which had soaked through their clothes like the last protection from the rain. When they were right near him, the bearded man said:
“Here. Pll get a mule when we reach the road. From there, you take your father straight to Majd al-Kurum. Walk behind me and keep your eye on the road at the back of us. They’ve left the citadel and intend to meet up with us. At least that’s what I’m thinking.”
Mansur didn’t utter a single syllable, but walked quietly behind the man. Meanwhile the clouds had broken and sun- beams were streaming forth checkering the small stretch of land behind them. The hill looked deserted and forlorn. The cannon had stopped firing, but the sound of gunshots continued to rain down heedlessly from different directions. When they reached the road, the man lowered Abu Qassim from his shoulders, propping his back against a thick tree trunk. One of the old man’s hands clutched his stomach while the other held on stub- bornly to the rifle. Mansur handed the machine gun to the man, saying in a hoarse voice: “I don't want to see him... Tell me, is the wound serious?”
“The bullet seems to be in the intestines. If he doesn't bleed to death on the road, a doctor can save him... Do you know a
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doctor? Anyway I’m going to go now and get a donkey. You'd better get to Majd al-Kurum quickly ... I asked you, do you know a doctor?”
Mansur looked at his father crumpled at the foot of the tree trunk. Blood was gushing from between the fingers of his muddy hand which was pressed over his stomach. His eyes were closed and his other hand, clenched around the rifle, looked wooden and dead.
“Do you know a doctor?”
“A doctor? My brother Qassim is a doctor. Qassim. Of course ... But he..
“What are you waiting for then? I’m going to get a donkey for the old man.”
The moans began to lessen and then to increase again. The sun by now had completely set and all sounds had died away. In the utter silence the moans had a grievous effect, together with the blood pouring from between the convulsive fingers so that you could almost hear it. Mansur stood in the wet emptiness watching his father slowly dying, impotent and unmoving except for the deep throbbing which shook him. His veins were like taut wires bulging from his hands and extending around the torso of the rifle. Finally they all began to blur together: the tree, the man and the rifle, from behind the darkness of the angry rain, and through his tears. But to Mansur, they were not together. There was only the quiet corpse.
—translated by Barbara Harlow
The Child Goes to the Camp
¥
T WAS WAR-TIME. NOT WAR REALLY, BUT HOSTILITIES,
to be precise ... a continued struggle with the enemy. In war
the winds of peace gather the combatants to repose, truce, tranquility, the holiday of retreat. But this is not so with hostili- ties that are always never more than a gunshot away, where you are always walking miraculously between the shots. That’s what it was, Just as I was telling you, a time of hostilities.
I lived with seven brothers, all of them strong. Father didn't much care for his wife, but this may have been because she had borne him eight children during a time of hostilities. Then there was our aunt and her husband and five children who also lived with us. And our old grandfather. Whenever he found five piastres on the table or in the pocket of one of the many pairs of pants which would be hanging up, he went straight out and bought a newspaper. As you know, he couldn’t read, so in order to find out what was being done, he had to have one of us read aloud to him the latest bad news.
At that time—but first let me tell you that it wasn’t a time of hostilities in the sense that you might think. That is, there wasn't really a war. In fact there was no war at all. The whole thing is that we were eighteen people from different generations
99
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living in one house, which would have been more than enough at any time. None of us had managed to find work, and hunger—which you may have heard of—was our daily worry. That is what I call the time of hostilities. You know, there is absolutely no difference. We fought for our food and then fought each other over how it would be distributed amongst us. Then we fought again. Whenever there was a moment of silence, my grandfather would carefully get his rolled-up news- paper out from under his clothes and look at everyone with his small alert eyes. This meant that five piastres had been pilfered from some pocket—if there had been five piastres—or from somewhere. A quarrel would follow. My grandfather kept hold of the newspaper, resisting the voices with the silence of an old man who has lived long enough to have heard all sorts of clam- or and quarrels without seeing in them any reason for answer- ing or concern. Then, when the noise had quieted down, he would lean towards the nearest child (he didn’t, however, trust the girls) and give him the newspaper, always keeping hold of it by the edge, so no one would take it from him.
Isam and I were ten years old. He was a little bigger than I was, and still is, and he considered himself the leader of his brothers, my cousins, just as I consider myself the leader of my brothers. After long efforts, my father and my aunt’s husband finally found a daily task for us. Together we were to carry a big basket and walk for about an hour and a quarter until we came to the vegetable market sometime in the afternoon. You don't know what the vegetable market was like: the shops were begin- ning to close their doors and the last of the trucks loaded with what was left from the day were getting ready to leave the crowded street. Our job—mine and Isam’s—was easy and diffi- cult at the same time. We had to find stuff to fill our basket. From in front of the shops or behind the cars. Even from the tops of tables if the owner happened to be taking a nap or was inside his store.
I tell you it was a time of hostilities. You don’t know how a fighter runs between shots all day long. Isam would shoot off like an arrow just in order to snatch a torn head of lettuce or a bunch of onions or maybe even some apples from between the
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wheels of a truck which was about to move. My role was to hold off the fiends—the rest of the children. If they tried to get hold of an orange, I would see it in the mud before them. We worked all afternoon, Isam and I, struggling with the other children, or the shop owners or the truck drivers, sometimes even with the police. The rest of the time I fought with Isam.
That was the time of hostilities. I tell you this because you don't know. The world at that time had turned upside down. No one expected any virtue. This would have seemed too ridiculous. This itself was virtue’s triumph. Fine. When a man dies, so too does virtue. No? Well then, let’s suppose that, in a time of hostilities, it was your job to safeguard the first and foremost virtue, which 1s to keep yourself alive. Everything else is secondary. But in a time of continuous hostilities, nothing 1s secondary. Everything comes first.
Once the basket was filled, it was up to us to carry it back home. This was to be everybody's meal on the following day... But of course Isam and I had agreed between ourselves that we would eat the best of whatever was in the basket on the way home. There was never any objection to this agreement from either of us, and we never gave it away. It just happened. We were together in a time of hostilities.
Winter was very hard that ill-fated year and we were carry- ing a very heavy basket (I haven’t forgotten this, it was like falling into a trench during a battle, a trench that held you like a bed). I ate the apples and we left through the market gate and went on out into the main street. We spent nearly ten minutes in the middle of people, cars, buses, and shop fronts without exchanging a word (the basket was really heavy and both of us were completely absorbed in eating), when suddenly...
But no, I can’t describe it. Its absolutely indescribable. It’s as if the enemy had you at swordpoint, and you had no weapon of your own, and then just at that instant you find yourself in your mother’s arms...
Let me tell you what happened. Isam and | were carrying the basket, just as I said, and there was a policeman standing in the middle of the road. The street was wet and we had no shoes. Perhaps it was because I was looking at the policeman’s thick
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heavy shoes, but anyway, suddenly I saw it there under his shoes. It was about six meters away, but I knew, maybe from the color, that it was more than one pound.
In situations like this, we don’t stop and think. People talk about instinct. That’s fine. | don’t know if the color of paper money has anything to do with instinct, but it does have a con- nection with that kind of savage force, crime, the power to strangle someone in a moment, which is there deep inside every one of us. What I do know is that a man, in a time of hostilities, doesn’t think when he sees a paper bill under a policeman’s shoes, even if he’s six meters away and carrying a basket of rot- ten vegetables. And that’s what I did. I threw away what was left of the apple and dropped the basket. Probably Isam staggered under the sudden weight of the basket which I left in his hands, although he too had seen the money only a second after I did. But of course I had already pounced, compelled by this unknown force which drives the rhinoceros to attack blindly. I wanted it more than anything. I bumped up against the police- man’s legs with my shoulder so that he fell back in alarm. I lost my balance, but I didn’t fall and at that instant—just when the foolish think that it’s all over—I saw it. Five pounds. All I had to do was pick it up as I fell. But I got up faster than I fell and I ran faster than I got up. Practically the whole world began to run after me. There was the policeman’s whistle and the sound of his shoes pounding on the stones of the street right behind me. Isam screamed. The buses rang their bells. People were shouting ... were they really right behind me? You can’t say and neither can I. But I ran until I was sure that no one in all the armored squadrons could ever catch me. With the savvy of a ten-year-old child, I took another road. Maybe it was because | thought that Isam would point the policeman in my direction. I don’t know. I didn't turn around, I just ran, and didn’t even think how tired I was. I was a soldier, fleeing the scene of the battle I had been forced to enter. There was nothing in front of me but to keep running and the world with its shoes was behind me at my heels.
I didn’t reach home until after dark and when the door was opened for me I saw Just what I had been expecting, deep inside
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me, to see. Seventeen people waiting in the house for me. They studied me quickly but carefully and I met their glare from the doorway where I stood. My hand closed around the five pounds in my pocket and my feet remained firm on the ground.
Isam was standing between his mother and father. He was furious. Most likely there had been a quarrel between the two families before my arrival. I looked in appeal to my grandfather who was sitting in the corner wrapped up in his neat brown aba and staring at me in amazement. A wise man, a real man, knows how he’s supposed to see the world. The only thing he wanted from the five pounds was a really big newspaper that day.
I waited impatiently for the argument. Isam, of course, had lied and told them that he was the one who found the five pounds and that I forced it from him. Not only that, but that I had made him carry the heavy basket by himself the whole way. Didn’t I tell you that it was a time of hostilities? None of us bothered about Isam’s protest, about whether he was telling the truth or lying. That was something that couldn’t matter less. Isam maybe wasn’t lying, but it was certain that no one worried about the truth. Furthermore, here he was, content to humble himself and even admit for the first time that I had hit htm and that I was stronger than he was. But what did all of this matter, given the really important questions?
His father was thinking of something completely different. He was ready to accept half the money and my father wanted the other half. If I succeeded in keeping the whole amount, which was my right, I would have it all, but if I gave up this right, then I lost everything and they would split the money.
They didn't really know what it meant for a child to have five pounds in his pocket in a time of hostilities ... I threatened them all, using words I had never in my life used, to leave home forever. The five pounds were for me and only me.
Of course, you must know. They were absolutely furious and lost all control. Everybody was against me. First of all, they just warned me. But I was prepared for even more than that, so they began to hit me. Of course, I couldn’t defend myself, and since I was trying as best as I could to protect my pocket with the five pounds in it, it was especially hard for me to ward off
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their well-aimed blows. In the beginning my grandfather watched the battle excitedly, but then, when it began to lose its interest, he got up and stood in front of them and whispered to me to hold on to him. He proposed a settlement. He said that the grown-ups had no right to the money, but that on the first sunny day I had to take all the children in the house to some place where we could all spend the money in any way we want- ed.
I was just about to refuse the proposal when I was struck by something I saw in my grandfather’s eyes. I didn’t exactly understand what it was, I only felt that he was lying and that he wanted me to keep quiet.
You know that a child of ten—in a time of hostilities—can’t understand things (even if there is any need to understand them) the way an old man like my grandfather can. But that’s what happened anyway. He wanted his newspaper every day for a whole week and he was trying to appease me whatever the price.
So we came to an agreement that evening, but I knew that it wouldn't end there. I would have to guard the five pounds every instant, night and day. And I had to put off the other children. I also had to resist all my mother’s attempts to bribe me which she could never refrain from. She told me that evening that five pounds would buy two rotls of meat, or a new shirt for me. Or medicine if it were needed. Or books, since they were thinking of sending me to school next summer. But what was the use of all this talk? It was as though she wanted me to stop and clean my shoes while running between gunshots.
I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. But all the next week I managed to hold the other children off with a thou- sand lies, which, or course, they knew were lies, but they never said anything about it. There was no virtue here. You know. It was a different question and revolved around only one kind of virtue: five pounds.
My grandfather, however, understood matters and he want- ed his newspaper at a fair price for his role in the whole story. When a week had gone by, he began to grumble. He knew (he had to know it since the truth doesn’t escape an old man like
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him) that I wasn’t going to buy him his newspaper. He felt that he had lost his opportunity, but he didn’t do anything to recov- er It.
By the time another ten days had gone by, everyone believed that I had spent the five pounds and that the hand | kept in my pocket was holding on to nothing, that it was all a trick. But my grandfather knew that the five pounds was still in my pocket, and that night in fact he got up and tried to take it while I was sleeping (I always slept with my clothes on). I woke up, however, and he went back to his bed and to sleep without a word.
I told you, it was a time of hostilities. My grandfather was sad because he didn’t get his newspaper, not because | broke a promise which had not been agreed to. He understood the time of hostilities, and so for the next two years he didn’t scold me for whatever I did. In the meantime Isam forgot the story too. Deep inside him—like an unruly child—he understood exactly what had happened. We continued our daily trips to the veg- etable market. We argued less than at any other time before and we spoke little. It seemed that something—a strange wall sud- denly went up within him—it was still a time of hostilities—l was the one who breathed a sigh of relief—I don’t know how— it seemed that something else was in the air.
I remember that I kept the five pounds in my pocket for five weeks. I was looking for the right moment, when the time of hostilities would be over. But whenever this was about to hap- pen, it seemed as if we were getting deeper into hostilities rather than out of them.
How can you possibly understand that? I had the five pounds, but something kept me from using it. As long as it was in my pocket it seemed to me like a key that I held in the palm of my hand and that I could use at any time to open the door and walk out. But whenever I got close to the lock I smelled still another time of hostilities behind the door, further away, like going back once more to the beginning.
What followed is not important. I went one day with Isam to the market. While I was trying to grab a bunch of chard which was in front of the wheels of a truck, the truck slowly
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started to move. At the last minute I slipped and fell underneath it. It was really lucky that the wheels didn’t go over my legs, but stopped just as they hit them. In any case, I regained conscious- ness in the hospital. The first thing I did—as you must have guessed—was to look for the five pounds. But it wasn’t there.
I think it was Isam who took it when he was with me