Gate of the Sun (47 page)

I see the opening as a long dress. I don't know if it belonged to my mother or my grandmother. Two slender women covered from head to toe by long, ample, black dresses. Two women waiting, sitting on the doorstep of the house with me between them not knowing which is my mother and which my grandmother.

When I was little, I had two names and two mothers. My first mother called me Khalil and my second mother called me Yasin. The first told me stories about the death of her man, the second about the loss of her child after the village fell. Both stories belong to me, and I juggle them, becoming both child and man. You'll understand what I'm saying because you yourself are living the moment that everyone yearns for: You're in your second childhood – helpless as a child, speechless as a child, resigned as a child. Ah, how good you smell! Didn't I tell you we'd go back to the beginning? Your childhood smell has come back to you, your childhood has come back to you. Even your shape has started to change. I'm convinced you've started to get shorter, that you've lost a lot of weight, and that you've returned to that mysterious moment that confuses our memory when we try to recapture our childhood.

Put out your hand so I can prove it to you.

I open your hand and place my finger in its palm; your hand closes over my finger. Do you know what that means?

It's the first test we give a child at the moment of its birth. It's an involuntary reflex. So now you're at that stage: You've become a child again, and instead of being my father you've become my son. I open your hand again, and you have the same reaction, and I'm as proud of you as any father of his child. I play with you and hug you, and you surrender to the game and play and squirm. I hug you and breathe you in; your smell fills my nose. It isn't the smell of soap and ointment and powder; there's something that comes from deep inside you, a new smell that transports you to the first sproutings of childhood, to an ageless age, where we find the beginnings of speech.

I can return there, too, and see those mysterious days that I lived between
two mothers. Najwah went away to her family and left me with Shahineh, daughter of Rabbah al-Awad – the leader of Ghabsiyyeh's militia – and wife of Khalil Ayyoub, who was killed in '36 when he was a bodyguard for his wife's father in the revolution. I see the two as one woman. They looked as alike as sisters, the same dark complexion, small eyes, high forehead and long hair rippling black. When Shahineh died, I felt that Najwah had died, too. I won't talk to you about Najwah now because I know nothing about her. I do know that I looked for her once. I went to Jordan and looked for the wife of Ayyoub and daughter of Fayyad in the Wahdat camp but could find no trace of her. Then I got that mysterious letter from Sameh's wife in Ramallah. Then nothing.

I asked you why my father died, and you didn't answer me.

I asked my grandmother, and she said he had been killed because he was destined to die like his father.

“Dear God! How could the dream come twice?” she asked. “And both times, the man dies.” The first time was in '36, when I saw, as a dreamer sees, this light go out, and the second time was in '59, when the light went out again. How can I describe what I saw to you, my son? A light like no other light, a light white and brilliant. It was over me as I sat on the ground. The light came in through the window and drew closer and closer to me. I got up and moved toward it, and when I got there, I saw the face of your grandfather, Khalil. ‘What's the matter, man?' I asked, and his face started to crumble into bits like glass. He came to me and hugged me, and suddenly he went out. People, like lights, go out. The light that came from the faces of your father and grandfather went out before my eyes, and I said to myself, ‘He is dead.'”

Both times, my grandmother saw a light that went out. She never tired of retelling her dream, which took the place of the actual story.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh was like a light, and it went out,” said my grandmother as she listened to her son-in-law telling of his visit to the village.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh went out,” said Shahineh. “I was alone that day. My late father and my husband were commanding the militia, and I had Yasin and
his brothers with me. Suddenly they attacked. The Jews broke into the village from the north and southeast. They occupied the house of Osman As'ad Abdallah in the southern part of the village and seized him with his son. Then the shelling started, and we fled.”

My grandmother told how a man fell from the minaret of the mosque. She said she saw him falling like a bird. His name was Dawoud Ibrahim. In the midst of the bombardment and the chaos, he climbed to the highest point of the mosque to hang a white rag on the minaret to announce the village's surrender. She said she saw him there at the top waving it in his hand. Then he hung the rag, but it fell. He picked it up, looking into the distance, toward the source of the shelling, as though he wished they'd stop firing for a while. As he tried to hang up the rag again, he was struck by a bullet in his chest and fell like a bird. He hugged his arms to his chest and plummeted. My grandmother said that when she saw him she understood how birds die, that Dawoud was like a bird. She gathered together her children and ran with the others, scared of the tall trees – she kept glancing upward as she ran, scared that people would fall from the trees.

She kept running until she reached the fields of Amqa, where she lived for a while with her children beneath the olive trees.

My grandmother said she lost all her relatives and her father disappeared.

I'm sure that you must know my grandfather because he joined up with you after the fall of al-Ghabsiyyeh on May 21, 1948. He went to Sha'ab and stayed there with your garrison until it was dismantled and you were all arrested. He died in prison in Syria. You got out and went to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, where you put on an unforgettable show of madness that allowed you to move in on the police post and seize their rifles before disappearing.

The story I want to tell you is that of my father in Amqa.

I swear it's as though I were the one who lived the story. My grandmother told it to me hundreds of times, and every time she'd say to me, “You did such and such,” and then would catch herself and say, “May God forgive
me, I was starting to get you and your father mixed up.” I'd enter the story and correct the details because she'd forget names or mix them up. Even the name of Aziz Ayyoub, my father's uncle, that nobody from al-Ghabsiyyeh could possibly forget, slipped her mind when she was telling me the story of my father and the donkey.

They were in Amqa.

My grandmother was living under the olive trees, like everyone else, with her four children: three daughters and Yasin.

Let's suppose now that I'm her son, by whose name she used to call me. I'm her son, and I'll tell you the story.

I was short and round, and no one could believe that I was really twelve years old; they thought I was just a child until the day I returned with the sack of vegetables.

We were hungry. Do you know what we ate during that long month? Almost nothing: bread, thyme, and weeds. Then the bread ran out. Can you imagine a whole people living without bread? We'd gather greens and weeds, and we'd eat them and still be hungry. We slept under the trees, we'd spread woolen blankets over the branches of the olive trees for protection, and we waited. My mother wasn't afraid. The olive trees weren't so tall that she had to be afraid of dead men falling out of them. Her father let her know he'd joined the Sha'ab garrison and asked her to stay put with her children until he came and took them to Sha'ab. But he didn't come, and she couldn't take it any longer. She told her children that hunger had made her ache for her village and she'd decided to go back to gather some vegetables from her field and bring back some flour and oil. She told her children to stick together and to be careful while she was away.

So I volunteered.

“Yasin volunteered,” said my grandmother, “and insisted on coming with me. I refused and asked him to stay with his sisters. ‘You stay, and I'll go,' he said, and to cut a long story short, Yasin came with me.”

We walked with the others who were going to the village, each one with sack in hand. My mother had a donkey she'd gotten from a relative in Amqa. We kept walking until we reached al-Sheikh Dawoud. There the firing
started from the rampart that dominates the village. The Jews were hiding behind the barrier, and the firing began. People got scared and ran back toward al-Kweikat and Amqa. I lost my mother, she'd gone off with the donkey toward Amqa, while I kept going toward al-Kweikat, running and shouting. Then, suddenly, there was a man standing in the middle of the road behind his donkey that was moving straight into the line of fire. “Help, Uncle Aziz!” I say, and he says, “Get behind me,” as if the donkey were a shield. I got behind him, and, after a while, the firing stopped. I left Aziz and his donkey and went down toward the valley. He told me he was going to al-Ghabsiyyeh to stay there. “I'm the guardian of the mosque,” he said, “and I won't leave it. Come with me.” “I want my mother,” I told him, and I left him and went down the valley. I heard firing and thought, Uncle Aziz is dead and started crying, and when I saw my mother I told them Uncle Aziz had died behind his donkey, and everyone believed me.

But Uncle Aziz, as you know, Father, didn't die. He remained dead in the memory of the people of al-Ghabsiyyeh until '72, when my sister's husband returned from his visit and told the amazing stories of Uncle Aziz. Then people found out that my father had lied, that he hadn't seen Uncle Aziz dead. Yasin died before his son-in-law's visit to the village, so he won't be able to tell you about it. So I'll tell you about it, but not just now.

Where were we?

We left Yasin in the valley of al-Kweikat, crying from fear. Then the bullets became fewer. “I pulled myself together and climbed in the direction of Amqa. On the way, I found a bundle of okra and vegetables. Someone must have thrown his bundle down and fled for his life when he heard the shots. I picked the sack up with difficulty; in fact, I couldn't really lift it, so I dragged it and the vegetables started spilling out onto the ground. Then I slung the sack onto my back and set off.”

Shahineh reached the olive groves of Amqa and said she'd lost her son at al-Sheikh Dawoud and had fled along with everyone else. She'd led the donkey through the valleys looking for her son; she held on to the donkey's halter and cried out her son's name. On the outskirts of Amqa, she had to admit that she had truly lost him and, fearing that she might lose the
donkey, too, she returned it to its owners before she went back to stand in front of her blanket-tent, waiting and weeping.

She said she was weeping and didn't see him.

Yasin returned carrying the bundle of vegetables he'd found in the valley of al-Kweikat. He was small and bent over – the bundle hid him completely.

“I was tired, my back was bent, and the vegetables were on top of me – I was all sweat and okra pods. I made it to the entrance of the olive grove at Amqa with the okra spilling everywhere. I was exhausted and couldn't believe I'd made it. Instead of throwing the bundle down and running toward my mother, I stood where I was with my back nearly breaking, inching toward her with tiny steps. She was tall and thin and kept waving her hands about and crying while everyone looked on and wept with her. Everyone was rooted to where they were while I drew closer, the bundle of vegetables still on top of me, until I reached her. Then I threw the bundle down on the ground and stood up. Everyone said, ‘Yasin's here! Yasin's here!' They all saw me except for her. She kept crying and waving her arms around, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I grabbed hold of her long black dress and started tugging on it. She bent down and saw me and fell to the ground as if she'd fainted, and everyone went and got water and sprinkled it on her face.”

My grandmother said that when she saw her son, she lost her voice and couldn't remember anything after that.

She was the only one not to see him. When she recovered from her faint, Yasin and his three sisters were around her. He opened the bundle on the ground and told her he'd gathered all these things: “I went and harvested the land, and I wasn't afraid of the Jews.” The mother slowly got up, asked her daughters to start the fire beneath the stew pot, and the bustle of cooking began.

My grandmother said they attacked the village at dawn.

The village was half-empty because after the fall of al-Kabri and what happened to its inhabitants we'd understood that everything was over. “But
my father, God bless his dust in its foreign grave, didn't leave,” said my grandmother. “He stayed with the militiamen, so we stayed. Do you know, Son, I don't know where they buried my father. They said he was killed in the military camp, trying to escape from prison.”

My grandmother said she went to look for him in al-Neirab camp in Aleppo. She paid her uncle and his children a visit, who lived in strange barracks the French army had built. They were squashed on top of one another like flies, in long, oblong rooms. Her husband's brother, Azmi, said he wasn't sure, but he thought they'd buried him in the Yarmouk camp and suggested she forget the matter.

“The man's dead,” Azmi said, “so we can say he died in Palestine.”

But Shahineh wasn't convinced.

“Forget it, Shahineh, and look after your children.”