Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud was one of the local leaders of the Revolution of ’36. It’s said that he met Izz al-Din al-Qassam,* and that he was injured in the revolution. He declared that anyone who sold land to the Jews was a traitor who must be killed.
Yunes doesn’t know why Ahmad was killed, because he’s convinced he didn’t sell land to the Jews, and that, in fact, he didn’t have any land to sell since he’d taken the land he controlled by force, and the deeds were in the Sursuq family’s possession.
When Ahmad was killed by the revolutionaries’ bullets, Yunes, who was then seventeen, didn’t understand why. Despite the rumors, he wasn’t the one who’d killed his cousin, and he was sure that Ahmad, who’d become the leader of the village, hadn’t sold land to the Jews. True, he was domineering, arrogant and rude; and true, he hated Yunes and would say that the youth had abandoned his father, mother, and wife to beggary while he worked as a bandit in the name of the revolution; and true, he beat his two wives terribly and treated everyone with contempt, but why had he been killed?
Yunes was convinced that Ahmad hadn’t been a traitor. Everyone hated him, even his children. The strange thing was that at his funeral his wives yelled as though they were being beaten. Surrounded by their children, the two women wept, moaned, pleaded with him to get up, swearing they would never leave the house again. Everyone was dumbfounded. No one mourned the loss of this shit (this is what his relatives called him privately), but everyone was amazed at his wives’ behavior and how unconvinced they seemed that the man had died. They appeared to be afraid he might rise up, see they weren’t weeping enough, and shower them with blows.
Ahmad died without anyone knowing who killed him, but the way he was killed seemed to indicate that he was a collaborator or had sold land. The killer came to his house at night, knocked on the door, shot him, and left. Then, when the killer got to Nab’ al-Asal, he fired two shots into the air. The two shots gave the impression that Ahmad had been executed rather than murdered for some personal or family reason. Suspicion hung over Yunes because of the quarrel between Ahmad and Sheikh Ibrahim, which had ended with the sheikh’s being expelled from his position at the mosque.
It was Ahmad who engineered the replacement for Sheikh Ibrahim, convincing everybody by saying that the sheikh was blind and unable to teach his pupils reading and writing, that he’d begun forgetting the names and verses of the Koran, and could no longer conduct prayers decently. Once shamefully dismissed from his responsibilities, Sheikh Ibrahim became a beggar, at a loss as to how to provide for his family.
Into the house of Sheikh Ibrahim came Nahilah, the twelve-year-old daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah. They had asked for her for Yunes because her family was the poorest in the village. Her father, who had died when she was six, had had only girls, and her mother had inherited nothing from her husband. She took up work in the fields, and Ahmad didn’t let her keep the land her husband had worked because women, in his view, “should never be entrusted with land.” So she ended up working on Ahmad’s land and as a servant in his house and was beaten along with his wives. When Yunes’ mother decided to arrange a marriage for her son, she consulted one of Ahmad’s wives, who advised her to go to Nahilah’s mother: “Go and take your pick — five poor, fatherless girls who need someone to give them a respectable home.” She went to choose, but Nahilah’s mother wouldn’t let her.
“If you want a bride for your son, take this one,” she said, pointing to Nahilah, and there was no further discussion.
“This one” was Nahilah.
Yunes will never forget the wedding, and the wedding night.
How could he forget when he could smell the blood for days and days and would hate himself until the day he died?
How could he forget the girl’s face as she shook with fear?
How could he forget his mother closing the door behind them and waiting?
How could he forget that he fell asleep with the girl next to him in the bed, and didn’t take off his clothes?
How could he forget the high-pitched youyous of joy outside and the mother waving a white handkerchief with a spot of blood on it to announce the girl’s virginity and purity?
How could he forget that room, with its bittersweet smell?
The mother took the girl without argument. She wanted a wife for her son. Marriage would steady the boy and force him to come back home.
The sheikh took the girl without argument, because he’d grieved over his son and wanted a grandson. He had wanted his son to be a sheikh, a scholar and a Sufi, but all the boy could cite from the Koran was the first chapter. He sent him to the elementary school in Sha’ab, but instead of studying he made off with the others into the mountains. He’d picked up a rifle and started moving from village to village, taking part in attacks on British army patrols.
Yunes could see that his father and mother were sunk in poverty, but he had no concept of what that meant. He must have wanted to escape from the company of that old man who cursed fate and sat all day in front of his house, and who’d go every Friday morning to the mosque of Salah al-Din in the village square, where, without fail, an incident would arise that would result in his being thrown out. During that time, Kamel al-Asadi led the worshippers. This Kamel was neither a sheikh nor a scholar. He hadn’t learned the Koran by heart, he hadn’t studied in a religious school, and he didn’t take part in the devotions of the Sufis who’d built themselves a modest mosque in Sha’ab dedicated to the Yashrati master of whom Sheikh Ibrahim was one of the first disciples.
They said, “Let’s get him married,” so they got him married.
And Yunes accepted. He heard the name Nahilah and accepted. He gave his mother ten Palestinian lira — God knows where he got them — for the wedding, the dowry, and the rest.
And the wedding took place.
The boy sat down among the men. The ceremony almost got ugly: Sheikh Ibrahim threw Sheikh Kamel out and performed the rites himself, after which there were youyous of joy. Nahilah entered the house. The youyous mounted, and the young man was receiving congratulations when the door opened and the girl entered, holding her fingers out in front of her with a lit candle on each one. She was covered from head to toe by a robe behind whose colors her face was lost.
Yunes didn’t see her.
He saw a girl on the verge of collapse, swaying as though dancing, approaching the chair on which her husband was seated, and then kneeling. The candles shone in Yunes’ face, the flames dazzled his eyes, and he didn’t see.
Yunes doesn’t remember how long she knelt, for time seemed eternal that day; his eyes burned with something like tears, his shadow swayed on the walls, and the youyous pounded in his ears.
He would never say he was afraid. He would say instead that when his shadow leapt up in front of him that night he didn’t recognize it, as though it were the shadow of some other young man, lengthening and breaking off and barging around against the ceiling and among the guests and against the walls. And he would say too that when he bent over to extinguish the candles, his mother stopped him and made him sit still again and asked him to smile. Then his mother knelt next to the girl, took hold of her right arm and pulled her up, and the two of them walked among the guests as the showers of rice started to fall on them. Sheikh Sa’id Ma’lawi stood up, struck his tambourine and shouted, “God lives!” and the cry was taken up by five bearded men who had come from Sha’ab at the behest of the great Yashrati, sheikh of the Yashrati Shadhili order, to bless Sheikh Ibrahim’s son’s marriage and recite the prayers that would help him follow the path of righteousness like his father before him.