DR. AMJAD said he wasn’t sure. The doctor said, and I say too, that you hear sounds but don’t know what they are. Do the sounds enter your consciousness, or do they simply remain sounds?
The doctor said you don’t see, and I didn’t ask him what that means. Does it mean that you’re in blackness, and is the blackness a color? Or do you exist in an absence of color? What does “absence of color” mean? Do you see that frightening blend of white and black that we call gray? If you don’t see colors, that means you’re not in blackness but in a place we don’t know. Aren’t you afraid of what you don’t know?
You said you didn’t fear death and that you knew fear only once, when you were living with the dead in the olive grove. You said that men die from fear, that fear is what is down below.
Are you “down below”? What do you see?
“It’s a matter of arithmetic,” you told me. “We are afraid because we live in illusion, since life is a long dream. People fear death, but they really should be frightened of what goes on before being born. Before they were born, they were in eternal darkness. But it’s an illusion. The illusion makes us think that the living inherit the lives of all others. That’s why history was invented. I’m not an intellectual, but I know that history is a trick to make people believe that we’ve been alive since the beginning and that we’re the heirs of the dead. An illusion. People aren’t heirs, and they don’t have a history or anything of the sort. Life is a passage between two deaths. I’m not afraid of the second death because I wasn’t afraid of the first.”
“But history isn’t an illusion,” I answered. “And if it were, what would it be for?”
“What would what be for?”
“Why would we fight and die? Doesn’t Palestine deserve our deaths? You’re the one who taught me history, and now you tell me history is a ruse to evade death!”
That day, you laughed at me and told me that your father, the blind sheikh, used to talk that way, and “we ought to learn from our elders.” I don’t know if this discussion took place on a single occasion because we never had discussions; we’d just talk, and you wouldn’t finish your sentences but would jump from one word to another without paying attention to cause and effect. But you laughed. When you laughed, it was like you were exploding from within yourself. Your laughter used to surprise me because I was convinced that heroes didn’t laugh. I used to look at the photos of the martyrs hanging on the walls in the camp, and they weren’t laughing. Their faces were frowning and closed, as though they held death prisoner within themselves.
But not you.
You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes. And the little creases that extend from the corners of your eyes created a space for smiles and laughter. You were a laughing hero — but all the same I wasn’t convinced by your theories, or your father’s, about death and history.
You answered me by saying that what was worth dying for was what we wanted to live for.
“Palestine isn’t a cause. Well, all right, in some sense it is, but it isn’t really, because the land doesn’t move from its place. That land will remain, and the question isn’t who will hold it, because it’s an illusion to think that land can be held. No one can hold land when he’s going to end up buried in it. It’s the land that holds men and pulls them back toward it. I didn’t fight, my dear friend, for the land or for history. I fought for the sake of a woman I loved.”
I can’t recall your exact words now. They were simple, transparent, and fluid. You speak as though you aren’t speaking, and I speak as though I am. But I remember what you said about smells. We were sitting in front of the hospital drinking tea, it was the time of false spring. That year, spring arrived in February. The sun broke through the winter and tricked the earth, and yellow, white, and blue flowers emerged shyly from the rubble. That day you taught me how to smell nature. Putting your glass of tea aside, you stood up and filled your lungs with air and the aroma, holding it in your chest until your face started to turn red. When you sat down again and took a sip of tea and talked about the thyme and the jasmine and the columbine and the wildflowers, you said she was like the seasons. With each season she would come to your cave with a new smell. She would let down her long black hair, and the scents of flowers and herbs would fill the air. You said you were always enchanted by the new smells, as though she’d become a different woman.
“A woman, Son, is always new. Her smell reveals her. A woman is the aroma of the world, and when I was with her I learned to fill my lungs with the smell of the land.”
That was when I understood what you’d told me about her death: Nahilah hadn’t died, because her smell was still in you. But Umm Hassan has died. Don’t you want to come with me to her funeral? Everyone is gathering at her house, except for her son, Naji, who’s in America, as you know. I have to go. I want to carry Umm Hassan’s bier, and I will fear no one.
Please get up. We’ll go to Umm Hassan’s funeral, and then you can go back to your children and die with them. Go, die with them, as Umm Hassan suggested, and set me free.
Do you remember Umm Hassan?
Umm Hassan was my professor of medicine. I was in the hospital when a pregnant woman was brought in; I’d never seen a woman give birth before. In China they had taught me how to bandage wounds and do simple operations, what was called “field medicine.” But they didn’t teach me real medicine.
The woman was writhing in front of me, and I could do nothing. Then I remembered Umm Hassan, and I sent for her, and she came. She managed the delivery and taught me everything. As she helped the woman, she explained everything to me like a doctor training a student. From then on I knew what to do, and I became sure enough of myself to deliver babies. But she deserves all the credit. Umm Hassan was the only certified midwife in al-Kweikat; she had British documents to prove it.
I can see her now.
She’s putting the basin she was carrying on her head and bending over to pick up babies in the olive grove. In reality, she only picked up Naji, who became her son. I told you the story, remember? They were traveling inside Palestine because, having been driven out of al-Kweikat, they got lost in the fields and stopped on the edges of Deir al-Asad, and then they were driven from there, so they went to Tarshiha, which the Israeli planes came and burned, so they found themselves on the road to southern Lebanon, where Qana was their first stop. And on that road, a woman named Sara al-Khatib gave birth to a child with Umm Hassan at her side. Everyone was running, carrying their bundles on their heads, and Sara threw herself down under a tree writhing in pain. Umm Hassan washed the baby with hot water, wrapped him in old clothes and gave him to his mother.
Everyone walked on that “last journey,” as the people of the villages of Galilee referred to their collective exodus to Lebanon. But it wasn’t their last journey. In fact it was the start of wanderings in the wilderness whose end only God knows.
On that last journey, as Umm Hassan was walking with her basin on her head and her four children, her husband, her brothers, and their wives and children around her, she saw a bundle of old clothes discarded under an olive tree, and she realized they were the same clothes she’d used to wrap Sara’s baby in. She bent down, picked up the child, put him in the basin, and named him Naji — Rescued. She offered him her dry breasts, then fed him sesame paste mixed with water. At the village of Qana, where they stopped for the first time, the boy’s mother came, weeping and asking for her child back. Umm Hassan refused, but in the end, when she saw the milk bursting from the mother’s breasts and spotting her dress, she gave him to her.