I don’t want the beginning now. I want to tell you that fugitives never sleep. You told me how you used to sleep with one eye closed and the other one open for danger.
Where’s your open eye so that you can see me?
I went over to you, opened your eyes and saw the whites. God, how white they were! I know you saw me searching for you because in those whites I could see all your shadows. Didn’t you tell me about a man walking with his shadows on those distant roads? In your eyes I see the image of a man who neither lives nor dies.
Why don’t you die?
No, please don’t die! What will I do after you die? Remain hiding in the hospital? Leave the country?
Please, no! Death scares me.
Have you forgotten the olive grove, and that woman, and the three men?
You told me that the woman scared you. “All those wars, and I was never scared. But that woman, my God! She made my knees go weak and my face twitch. A woman sleeping beneath an olive tree. I went up to her. Her long hair covered her. I bent over, moved the hair aside and found that the woman was rigid with death, and her hair concealed a small child that slept curled up on top of her. That was the first time I saw death. I pulled back and lit a cigarette and sat in the sun, and there, behind a rock, I saw three other bodies.”
You were with them and had no way of escaping, because that day the Israeli machine guns were cutting down anyone who slipped over, which is what they must have done and what you were returning from doing. You told me that you lived on olives for a week. You’d break them with sticks, steep them in water and eat their bitterness. “Olives aren’t really bitter — their bitterness coats your mouth and tongue and you have to drink water after each one.”
You couldn’t dig a grave. You dug with your hands because you’d left your rifle buried in a cave three hours away from Deir al-Asad. You dug, but you couldn’t make a grave that would hold the four of them. You dug a little grave for the child but then had second thoughts: Was it right to separate it from its mother? In the end you didn’t bury any of them; you broke off olive branches, covered the bodies and decided to come back later with a pickaxe to dig them a grave. You covered them with olive branches and continued on your way to Lebanon. And all the many times you went back to Deir al-Asad, you never found a trace of them.
I’M WITH YOU now, and it’s night. The electricity’s off, the candle trembles with your shadows, and you don’t open your eyes.
Open your eyes and tell me, have you forgotten my name? I’m Dr. Khalil. You told me I was just like your first son, Ibrahim, who died. Think of me as your son who didn’t die. Why don’t you open one eye and look at me? You’re sick, Father. I’m going to call you father. I’m not going to call you by your name anymore.
What is your name?
In the camp they call you Abu Salem, in Ain al-Zaitoun: Abu Ibrahim, on long-distance missions: Abu Saleh, in Bab al-Shams: Yunes, in Deir al-Asad: the man, and in the Western Sector: Izz al-Din. Your names are many, and I don’t know what to call you.
The first time we met, you were called Abu Salem, though I’m not sure of this, because I don’t remember the first time, and you don’t either. “Remember,” you said to me, “you were alone in the boys’ camp.” My mother had gone to Jordan and left me with my grandmother. I was nine years old. I remember that she’d left me a piece of white paper on which she’d scrawled things I couldn’t read; my mother didn’t know how to read or write. I remember her dimly now. I remember a frightened woman hugging me, looking suspiciously at everyone, saying that they were going to kill us like they killed my father. I was afraid of her eyes; they had something deep in them that I couldn’t look at. Fear, Father, sleeps in the eyes, and in the eyes of the woman who was my mother I saw a cold fear that I couldn’t shed until I looked into the eyes of Shams.
I know you’ll laugh and say I didn’t love Shams and ask me to call you Abu Salem, because Salem — He who was saved — was saved from death, and we’re not allowed to die.
You used to call Nahilah Umm Salem — Mother of Salem — telling her, in the cave or beneath the olive tree, that she should use the name of her second son, who had become her first.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know the truth anymore. You never actually told me your story — it came out like this, in snatches. I wanted you to tell me the whole thing, but I didn’t dare ask you to. No, didn’t dare isn’t accurate. It would be better to say that I didn’t feel capable of asking you, or couldn’t find an opportunity, or didn’t realize the importance of the story.
The moon is full, Father.
I call you my father, but you’re not my father. You said your hope was that Salem would become a doctor, but the circumstances — military rule, the curfew, poverty — didn’t allow him to complete his studies and he became a mechanic. Now he’s got a garage in Deir al-Asad and he speaks Hebrew and English.
You said to me, “Doctor, you’re like a son to me. I picked you out when you were nine and I loved you, and I asked them at the boys’ camp if I could take care of you, and you became my son. You’ve lost your parents, and I’ve lost my children. Come and be a son to me.”
You took to referring to me as “my son, Dr. Khalil,” though I’m not a doctor, as you know. Three months of training in China doesn’t make you a doctor. You appointed me doctor to the camp and asked me to change my name the way the fedayeen do. But I didn’t change my name, and the fedayeen left on Greek ships, and the only ones left here were you and me. The war ended, and I was no longer a doctor. In fact Dr. Amjad, the director of the hospital, asked me to work as a nurse. How could anybody accept that, going from doctor to nurse? I said no, but you came to my house, rebuked me, and asked me to report to the hospital immediately.
When you spoke, you’d open your eyes as wide as eyes can go. The words would come out of your eyes, and your voice would rise and I’d say nothing. I’d steal glances at your eyes, opened to the furthest limits of the earth.
In the office at the boys’ camp, you’d stand spinning and spinning the globe and then would order it to stop. When the little ball stopped turning, you’d extend a finger and say, “That’s Acre. Here’s Tyre. The plain runs to here, and these are the villages of the Acre District. Here’s Ain al-Zaitoun, and Deir al-Asad, and al-Birwa, and there’s al-Ghabsiyyeh, and al-Kabri, and here’s Tarshiha, and there’s Bab al-Shams. We, kids, are from Ain al-Zaitoun. Ain al-Zaitoun is a little place, and the mountain surrounds it and protects it. Ain al-Zaitoun is the most beautiful village, but they destroyed it in ’48. They bulldozed it after blowing up the houses, so we left it for Deir al-Asad. But me, I founded a village in a place no one knows, a village in the rocks where the sun enters and sleeps.”