But Yunes got a surprise. His wife wasn’t a woman, she was a twelve-year-old girl. The girl wasn’t fair skinned; her complexion was the color of wheat, her hair wasn’t long but like tufts of black wool stuck to her head, and her hips weren’t. .
More than ten years later, when he was about to make love with her at Bab al-Shams, he discovered that he was mistaken. The girl was a woman, and fair-skinned, and her eyes were large, her hair long and black, and she was overflowing with secrets and treasures.
He said, on that occasion, that she’d changed.
And she laughed at him because he hadn’t seen what was in front of him. “Now, after I’ve had children and have become fat and flabby, you come to me and say I’m beautiful? Now, after all the hard times, you see that. . You men! Men are blind, even when they can see.”
But Yunes insisted, and embraced the roundness of her hips and saw the bright sky in her broad, high brow and ate Turkish delight from her long, slim, smooth fingers.
He told her he could smell Turkish delight on her neck. He would open his pack after making love to her and would pull out a tin of Turkish delight while she made tea. Then he’d sit hunched up inside the curve of her body as she lay on the rug, and she’d feed him, the fine white sugar falling onto his chest. He told her he loved eating Turkish delight from her fingers because they were as white as the sweet, which was the best thing the Turks had left behind when they left our country, and because her smell was musky, like the white cubes that melted in his mouth.
IN THOSE DAYS, as the story goes, the world was at war, and when there’s war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the smells were different, and the people were different. War became a ghost that seeped into people’s clothes and walked among them.
Ain al-Zaitoun, in those days, was a small village sleeping on the pillow of war. Everything in it rippled. The people hurled themselves into the electrified air and tasted war. Nobody called anything by its real name, war itself didn’t resemble its own name. Everyone thought it would be like the war tales of their ancestors, where mighty armies were defeated, locusts ate up the fields, and famine and pestilence spread through the land. They didn’t know that this time the war without a name was them.
The blind sheikh told his wife that words had lost their meaning, so he had decided to be silent. From day to day, he withdrew deeper into his silence, which was broken only by his morning mutterings while he’d recite Koranic verses.
The blind sheikh told his wife that he could see, even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t explain why he had come to fear the water.
Weeping, the woman told her son that the old man had gone senile. She said she was ashamed in front of the other people and begged her son to come back from the mountains with the fighters of the sacred jihad to look after his father.
The blind sheikh told his wife he couldn’t bear to live any longer now that they’d appointed a new sheikh to be imam of the village mosque. He said an imam couldn’t be deposed and that he’d never abandon his Sufi companions in the village of Sha’ab. And he said that Ain al-Zaitoun would be destroyed because it had rejected the blessings of its Lord.
He explained everything to his wife, but he couldn’t explain to her why he’d come to fear the water. He said that water was dirty and that when he touched it he felt something sticky, as though his hand were plunging into dead putrefying bodies, and that ablutions could be performed with dust, and that dust. .
He took to using dust to wash with.
The woman would look at him, her heart torn to pieces. The sheikh would go out into his garden carrying a container, squat as though he were preparing to pray, fill the container with dust and go into the bedroom. He would remove his clothes and bathe with the dust, which stuck to his body as he moved and sighed.
The sheikh said he was afraid of the color of water.
“Water doesn’t have a color,” said his wife.
“You don’t know, and nobody knows, but the water has its own color, like gluey blood that slides over the body and sticks to it.”
At the time, Ain al-Zaitoun was preoccupied with the story of its blind sheikh who bathed with dust. It had no idea that after a little while the dust bath would move to the neighboring village, Deir al-Asad, and that the sheikh would die in his new village.
Ain al-Zaitoun was built on the shoulder of a hill. It didn’t look much like a real village. Its rectangular square was long and sloping, and didn’t look much like a real square. Its houses were built of mud and rose up above one another in piles above neighboring terraces. To the left lay the Honey Spring, Nab’ al-Asal, which the village drank from and which the villagers said was sweeter than honey.
Ain al-Zaitoun was suspended between the land and the sky, and Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, had been the imam of its mosque since he was nineteen years old.
Everyone looked like everyone else in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they all belonged to the Asadi clan, the Asadis being poor peasants who had come from the marshes of the Euphrates in southern Iraq during the seventeenth century. No one knows how or why they came. The blind sheikh said they weren’t Asadis and didn’t come from Iraq, but the Asadi name got attached to them because they worked as hired laborers on the lands of a feudal landlord of the Asadi clan who had come from there. It was said that the landlord’s descendants had sold the land to the Lebanese family of Sursuq toward the end of the nineteenth century. The question of land sales in Palestine has “no end and no beginning,” as they say. As to how the Asadi came to possess the lands of Ain al-Zaitoun, no one has any idea. Did he purchase these wide and extensive holdings, or was he a brave fighter in the army of Ahmad al-Jazzar — the governor of Acre who defeated Bonaparte — to whom the governor granted lands in Marj Ibn Amir, along with a group of villages including Ain al-Zaitoun, Deir al-Asad, and Sha’ab? Or did he flee Acre with a band of horsemen following the governor’s death, and were they the ones who occupied the land? The blind sheikh didn’t know, but he preferred the story with the band of horsemen, so he could say that the native inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun were originally cavalrymen with the Asadi sheikh in Acre and had come with him to the village to establish it, and that it came to be known by this name, which had nothing to do with them because they were originally from the districts surrounding Acre — “though we’re all sons of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.”
As for the Sursuq family, it’s even more complicated.
Did the Sursuqs buy the land, or was it given to them as a fiefdom because they were friends of the Turkish governor of Beirut?
The inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun never saw anyone from the Sursuq family. It was Kazem al-Beiruti, a man dressed in Western clothes and wearing a fez, who used to come after each harvest, count the sacks of wheat, and take half. The peasants parted with half their crop of wheat and maize without protest. The olives, however, were a different story; Kazem al-Beiruti didn’t dare demand the owner’s share of olives or oil. “The oil belongs to him who sows it,” the blind sheikh told Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud to his face when he came demanding his share.
When the disturbances in Palestine spread during 1936, the inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun refused to give Kazem al-Beiruti anything. Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud chased him away after humiliating him in public by knocking his fez off his head with his stick, trampling it underfoot and announcing the return of the land to its rightful owners. And Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud al-Asadi declared himself, as head of the clan, sole legal heir of the original al-Asadi, taking the fertile lands belonging to the village and giving the peasants of his family the liberty to cultivate the land without paying the owner’s share. However, he tried to take some of the olives and oil, and this was what caused problems between him and Sheikh Ibrahim.