Gate of the Sun (34 page)

“And the child?” I asked.

“What child?”

“The child with the pita bread.”

“I don't know.”

She said she didn't know, though she knew the boy had died.

Its mother killed it – do you hear, Father? – its mother killed it because she was afraid of the old man, who was afraid of the Jews. The mother didn't carry her child on her breast, and she didn't support his head on her shoulder the way my grandmother had told me. She wrapped him in the blanket and sat on him until he died.

That's the way our relative, Umm Fawzi, told it. Umm Fawzi said they walked for five days without a sound so the Jews wouldn't hear them, and when the boy cried his mother killed him because the old man threatened to kill them both.

“Umm Fawzi's raving,” said my grandmother.

You'll say I'm raving, too, because you don't like hearing the story about the boy, or the story about the people of Saleheh, who were executed wrapped in their bed sheets. The Jews wrapped more than seventy men in the white sheets they'd been carrying as a sign of surrender and fired on them, and the sheets spurted blood.

You don't want to hear about anything except heroism, and you think you're the
heroes' hero
. Listen then to the story of another hero, a mixture of you and your father, a hero who didn't fight. A man from a village called Mi'ar. It's close to your new village. His name was Rakan Abboud.

When Mi'ar fell, after the rest of his family had gone, the man refused to leave his village and stayed on with his wife. This is what Nadia told me. Do you know Nadia? Didn't you meet her? She was in charge of the People's Committee in the camp. Nadia said the Jews drove her grandfather out along with two other men from the village three months after they'd occupied it. The two men died on the road, near Jenin, but Nadia's grandfather, who was in his eighties, went to Aleppo and stayed with someone he knew there. Then he joined Nadia's father in the camp in Baalbek.
“My grandfather had become unbearable,” said Nadia. “He hated Baalbek. He hated its snow and its cold. He used to scream that he didn't want to die there, so my father decided to move to the camp in Burj al-Shamali near Tyre. We lived in a shack there, like everyone else. His condition got frighteningly worse. He'd go out at night and only come back at dawn. Then he informed my father he'd decided to go back to Mi'ar to look for his wife. That was in 1950, and we were waiting. All my father did was listen to the radio and set dates for the Return. Each month he'd say our time would come next month. My father tried to stop him and begged him to wait one more month, but the man had made up his mind. One day, he managed to hire a guide and a donkey and left.

“He made it to his house – imagine! – knocked on the door, and a woman opened it. The poor man thought she must be a spirit and ran off, tripping over himself. He left Mi'ar, never to return. He spent what remained of his life in the fields. My grandmother, who lived in Majd al-Kuroum, found out and began her long search for him. She looked for him for more than a year. When she found him, the poor man had completely lost his sight, so she took him to Majd al-Kuroum, where he died.”

Nadia went on at great length about how her grandfather died. She told how he lived his last days like a thief, a blind, feeble thief. Despite this, his wife had to hide him from the police so he wouldn't be expelled like others who'd got back in. He'd gone to see his village and his wife, but he saw nothing. He lived in secret, and his presence was made public only when he died.

Blind and feeble, living in secret – but when he died, people wept openly. All those people who'd now become the people of Majd al-Kuroum wept. You know the villages aren't the old villages anymore: They've become full of abandoned houses inhabited by refugees from other villages. The people were all mixed together. The people in Majd al-Kuroum didn't know the blind old man. They knew that Fathiyyeh Abboud was hiding “Lebanon” in her house. They called him Lebanon because he'd come from there. When the secret got out, the whole village wept for the blind man. He didn't die in his own house surrounded by children and grandchildren; he didn't die, as most die, in the platitude of memories. He went back and
died in the secrecy of that town living under the secrecy of military rule, curfew, and the footprints of those who slipped back in.

“That was a blind old man, nothing like me,” you'll say. “I didn't go back to end my life wrapped in memories. I went back to start again, to remember the way, so I could love my wife.”

Nice words, my dear friend, and everything you say is correct. And I'm not going to talk to you about the beginnings of the fedayeen, which coincided with your journeys to Deir al-Asad and the routine births of your children.

Tell me, how did Sha'ab fall?

Very well, tell me how Sha'ab didn't fall.

Without heroics, please. I'd like to find out who the woman of Sha'ab was.

Nahilah, or who?

Who was that woman who stood up six days after the village fell and said she was going to go back? The men tried to stop her, but she'd already left, and you had to catch up with her.

Did people get confused and mix up the woman who carried a jerry can of arak on her head with the woman who led them in liberating their village?

And why didn't you tell me about the smuggling of arak? Because it was shameful? What's shameful about smuggling arak from Lebanon to Palestine? Is it because you don't want to acknowledge that the Lebanese arak they make in Zahleh is the best in the world? Or are you embarrassed because the smugglers made use of the Revolution of '36 and became revolutionaries in their own way?

Reem belonged to the Sa'ad family, which was famous for smuggling. It was the smugglers' sheikh, Hassan Sa'ad, who came up with the brilliant idea to smuggle arak on the heads of women. He'd place jerry cans of arak on the heads of the women so it appeared they were carrying water.

The column set off, crossed the Lebanese border, and came to the outskirts of Tarshiha. The column was composed of eight women in long peasant dresses and, for protection, three armed men, Hassan Sa'ad at their head.

A column of eight women, moving rhythmically as though they were coming from the well, armed men at the rear, and Hassan Sa'ad about three hundred meters ahead to scout out the unpaved road joining Tarshiha to al-Kabri.

Hassan came back suddenly, having spotted a British patrol. He ordered the women to scatter in the fields, and the women began to run. All of them ran except Reem. It appears she was paralyzed with fear. Hassan shouted, but Reem stayed frozen to the spot. Hassan pulled out his revolver and fired at the jerry can. Reem bolted, the arak pouring down over her face and clothes. Then she fell. Apparently she'd drunk a large quantity of the triple-strength arak, or maybe it was just the fumes. The girl staggered and fell. Hassan tried to hold her up, but he couldn't, so he left her and hid in the field by the road. Having heard the shot, the patrol approached and found the girl awash in arak. They tried to question her and searched at the sides of the road but didn't find anyone. One of the soldiers went over to her, held out his hand to help her up . . . and bullets rang out. Hassan had seen the soldier going up to Reem so he fired, and the battle was launched.

This is where accounts differ.

Some people say Hassan killed three members of the patrol and took Reem and fled with her to Sha'ab, others that Hassan fired into the air so no one was hit, and that the soldiers had simply retreated, thinking they'd fallen into an ambush set by revolutionaries. That's how Reem managed to escape and reach Hassan, even though she tripped over her long, wet dress.

Hassan became a hero. When he arrived at the village, he was treated like a revolutionary.

Even Reem believed in his heroism and fell in love with him. Their love persisted for more than five years, Reem's father refusing to marry his daughter to her smuggler cousin and Reem refusing marriage to any other suitor. Things grew even more inflamed when Reem threw tradition to the winds and declared in front of everybody in the
madafé
^*
of Shaker al-Khatib,
and to the councillor of the Western Quarter, that she loved Hassan and would never belong to anyone else. The old story of blood feuding would have been repeated if Abu Is'af hadn't intervened by claiming that Hassan had become a sacred warrior and that he would vouch for his character.

And so Reem married her hero, Hassan.

Reem of the jerry can full of arak became Reem the heroine. Incredible as it may seem, most people attribute the decision to return to Sha'ab to her.

Yet, it's the truth.

Please tell me, wasn't Nahilah the woman of Sha'ab?

Nahilah rose. She gave the impression that she was at the end of her rope: a woman with an infant in her arms, faced at every turn by a blind man and his wife. Her first village had been demolished, and her second was occupied.

Nahilah rose, and Reem joined her.

But why did people say it was Reem?

Was it because that woman, who'd carried the jerry can of arak and staggered under the shot fired by the man she loved, lost everything the moment they entered the village?

Her husband, Hassan, was the first to join her and to plunge into battle. And he was the first martyr.

Reem was at the front beside Nahilah, and Hassan was behind them. On that day in July 1948, Reem came to the end. After the village was liberated and her husband died, she took her three children and went to Deir al-Asad. From there she fled to Syria, and nothing more was heard of her. She lived in the Yarmouk camp outside Damascus and ceased to be of interest to all of you.

What puzzles me is why everybody forgets all the other stories but remembers Reem and her decision to enter the village?

They forgot Hassan, the smuggler-martyr, they forgot Nahilah, who led the march, and they forgot you, too. There is no mention of you in the
battle of Sha'ab. Nobody ever told me anything about you. They all said you were there, but you weren't what people were interested in. What they were interested in was your father, the blind sheikh, who refused to leave again after the village had been liberated. He said he couldn't because he had responsibilities at the mosque. You begged him to leave, but he refused. You begged him and you begged your mother and you begged Nahilah. Your decision was clear: No one but militiamen were to stay behind in Sha'ab. The residents were to take their belongings and leave because it was no longer possible to live in the village, which was under constant fire from the Jews posted at Mi'ar.

But your father refused, and then he refused again when you decided to withdraw to Lebanon.

Let's get back to Sha'ab.

I'll try to put together the fragments I've heard from you and others. When I make a mistake, correct me. I won't begin at the beginning because I'm not like you. I can't say “In the beginning . . .”

I'll start after the fall of al-Birwa, with the story of Mustafa al-Tayyar.

After you'd mobilized all the men and matériel, you liberated al-Birwa, seizing weapons, ammunition, and harvesters. Then Mahdi, the commanding officer of the ALA detachment, arrived and his men surrounded you. “Everything on the ground!” Mahdi cried. He wanted to confiscate the weapons and claim he was the hero of the liberation.

You were dumbstruck. The battle of al-Birwa was your first offensive. You'd tried to coordinate your fire and organize the assault; you'd put great effort into mobilization and were exhausted from the victory, your first; and along comes this officer whose soldiers hadn't fired a single bullet, yelling, “Everything on the ground!”

Up jumped Mustafa al-Tayyar, a fighter from al-Birwa who'd die in the last battle between the Yemeni volunteers and the Israeli army, which took place on the hills of al-Kabri.

Al-Tayyar bolted up and yelled, “We're the Arabs and you're the Jews,”
and threw himself down on the ground holding the machine gun Ali Hassan al-Jammal had pulled out of the Jewish redoubt during the battle.

The Iraqi sergeant Dandan intervened and said, “This won't do. An Arab doesn't kill another Arab.” He prevented a massacre. Things were worked out, and they took half the weapons.

Mahdi came back afterward and convinced you to leave al-Birwa and hand it over to the ALA. And you let him persuade you! You abandoned al-Birwa only for it to be surrendered to the Jews twenty-four hours later without a fight. And Dandan stands up and says, “An Arab doesn't kill another Arab!” Poor people! Say you agreed with Mahdi because it was impossible to stay, because you were exhausted, and the village was surrounded on all sides; so you abandoned it before the ALA did the same.

After al-Birwa fell, you only had Sha'ab.

And Sha'ab didn't survive either.

On July 21, 1948, the shelling of Sha'ab began, from the direction of al-Birwa. Then an infantry unit advanced from Mi'ar and swept through the village. The first shelling was intermittent but accurate. Ten minutes after the first shell fell on the threshing floors, the second one fell on the houses of Ali Mousa and Rashid al-Hajj Hassan, destroying them. The villagers started fleeing in all directions. In the midst of the chaos, everyone found themselves on the outside of the village except for a small group of fighters concentrated in al-Abbasiyyeh on the eastern side of the village.