* Hope.
* Military allies of Syria that had split off in 1983, after the PLO’s forces left Beirut.
* Priest.
* Koran, Surah XXIV, 35.
NOW I STAND.
I’m alone and it’s night.
I stand and speak my last words with you. Talk is no longer possible. The speaking’s done, the talk’s run out, the story’s closed.
I stand, neither weeping nor laughing.
As though your death were in the past. As though you died long ago. As though you didn’t die.
I stand, without sorrow or tears.
I stand before this grave. I stand before the mosque turned into a grave by the siege. I bear witness that you placed your head in the earth, closed your eyes to the dust, and left for a distant place.
What then?
Tell me.
Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t we agree that we had to get through this seventh month? I told you if we succeeded in getting through the seventh month, we’d have outrun death.
Didn’t we agree to buy life with these long days and long nights spent in this hospital room, as we told stories and remembered and imagined?
I told you it would cost seven months, and we’ve made a dent in the seventh month, and your child-features are beginning to take shape. I told you it was the beginning: “We’ve reached the beginning, Father, and now you’ll become a son to me.”
Why did you do this to me?
I never intended this to happen.
I decided to leave you for an hour to go get the photos so we could start the story over again. But I didn’t make it back until morning. I saw Zainab waiting for me at the door of the hospital. She ran toward me, laid her head on my shoulder, and wept.
I asked her what was wrong, and she shook her head and said, “A heart attack.”
Zainab wept, but I didn’t.
Amjad wiped his tears as he gave directions for the burial, and I stood there like a stone. As though it weren’t me.
Please don’t reproach me — you know what happened to me.
I walked in the funeral procession like a stranger, like any one of the dozens who were there. They put you in the hole, they covered you with earth, and no one came forward to say a word. They looked at me, and I lowered my gaze. I was incapable of looking, incapable of speaking, incapable of weeping. It was as though a veil had descended over my eyes, as though I saw without seeing.
I had to wait three days before I found within myself the courage to stand before your grave, in this rain, the night of the camp covering me and granting me speech.
Now I stand, not to apologize but to weep.
I swear the only reason I left was to go to your house and get the photos. I thought I’d go and get the pictures of you and Nahilah and your children and grandchildren, and we’d begin the story. I felt my memory had dried out and my soul had gone dead, and I thought that only the pictures could renew our story.
I’d go to the photos, put them in front of you in the hospital room, and we’d talk.
I thought instead of talking about love, we could talk about the children and grandchildren.
I thought we could tell their stories one by one. That way, with them, we’d make it through these two remaining weeks of our seventh month in death’s company and make it into the pains of childbirth.
Isn’t that the law of life?
Didn’t we agree we’d try to reach the depths of death so we could discover life?
No, I won’t leave you on this terrible night.
I thought I’d go for an hour and come back, and I didn’t come back.
Forgive me.
Please forgive me.
I left you with the story of Nahilah in her last moments, as she spoke with you and with Ibrahim, calling you Ibrahim and calling him Yunes, her children and grandchildren around her, weeping.
No. I didn’t mean to leave you with death, because it was your duty and Ibrahim’s to guard Nahilah and accompany her on her final journey.
I wanted a different story.
I wanted to tell you that I believed you when you said you didn’t stop going over there after the night of the Roman olive tree, when your wife sat you down and recounted her reality; when she told you that over there you’d become the Jews’ Jews, and over here you were the Arabs’ Arabs.
I believed you, I swear.
I don’t want you defeated and discredited.
I believe you.
After the night of the Roman olive tree, you absented yourself for nine months. Then you resumed your old habits, continuing your journeys over there despite all the difficulties. You didn’t stop going over until after 1982, or, in other words, until after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when movement inside Beirut became impossible and the trip from Beirut to Sidon a reckless adventure.
That was when you stopped going across Jebel al-Sheikh and they started calling you. You’d talk to them and promise you’d all meet soon in Cyprus or Cairo. That meeting, however, kept getting postponed, as if neither of you wanted it — as if both of you’d agreed, without a word, to avoid the danger of a meeting outside the place you’d created for your meetings. One time it would be you that put it off, another time it was Nahilah, and then she fell ill.
I wanted to talk about this series of visits over there and your trip with Nahilah to Acre, when you went to the Abu Daoud restaurant in the Old City and ate fish and drank arak. It was there that you said to her, as the alcohol went to your head, “It’s like they weren’t here and had never taken our country. Acre’s still Acre, the Jazzar mosque is still where it’s always been, the sea and the sea bass and the red mullet and the black bream are still the same. I really feel like going home with you and staying there. What can they do about it? Let what happens happen.” When you returned at night, you slipped into Bab al-Shams and spent the night there and forgot your talk of all the different kinds of fish and your plans to stay at home. She left you in the morning and returned at nightfall to accompany you to the outskirts of Deir al-Asad, as she always did.
I was going to tell you about Noor and her son, Yunes, who excelled in his studies in Acre and went to the University of Haifa to study engineering; and about the second Yunes, Salem’s son, who is studying business management at Tel Aviv University and is getting ready to marry a Christian girl from Nazareth from the Khleifi family. You blessed the marriage; you told Salem his grandmother used to put an icon of the Virgin under her pillow and that you saw no harm in that, but that the thing that matters is for us to get married and have children.
I was going to tell you about the second Yunes, how you told him that God had blessed us by multiplying our descendants: “Here we are, thrown out of our country in ’48, and with only a hundred thousand of us left over there. The hundred thousand have become a million, and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.”
I was going to tell you the stories of the photos, photo by photo, story by story, moment by moment, so we might fool time and not let it kill us.
It’s my fault.
Dear God! How did it happen? How did I let it happen? How did I fail to notice? How could I have gotten drunk?
I left her in the morning and told her I had to go to the hospital because my father was sick. She said, “Go. I know all about it.”
Apart from that one sentence she didn’t say a thing. And we spent the whole night eating and drinking and making love.
What came over me?
Did her ghost come to liberate me, and to let you die in peace?
If only she were here, if only Umm Hassan were here — but she died before you and me. If Umm Hassan had been here, the funeral would’ve been different. She would’ve stood and lamented and made everyone weep.