Umm Hassan said she’d named him Naji and his mother didn’t have the right to change his name. Sara agreed, took the boy, offered him her breast, and went away.
“Naji’s my only surviving child,” said Umm Hassan. “He writes to me from America, God bless him. He’s become a professor at the best university, he sends me letters and money, and I send him olive oil.”
I see her walking and picking up babies and putting them in the basin on her head. It’s as though she had picked me up, as though I were Naji, as though the taste of the sesame mixed with water still lingered in my mouth, as though — I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. Umm Hassan died this morning, and we have to bury her before the noon prayer, and you are sleeping as if oblivious to what Umm Hassan’s death means for me, and for you, and for everyone in the camp.
Umm Hassan told me everything about Palestine. I asked her before she set off to visit her brother in al-Kweikat, or what’s left of it, to pass by al-Ghabsiyyeh and tie a strip of cloth to a branch of the lotus tree near the mosque for me. I told her that my father had made an oath to do this and that he’d died before he could carry it out, but he’d passed it on to my mother, and my mother had passed it on to me before going to her people in Amman. I haven’t been, and I didn’t dare to ask you to do it. I was afraid you’d make fun of me and of my father’s superstitions. I asked Umm Hassan to say a short prayer in the mosque and hang the piece of black cloth on the tree and light a candle for me.
When she returned, she gave me a branch heavy with oranges and told me she’d gone to the mosque to pray.
“Is a mosque defiled if they put animals in it?”
Umm Hassan didn’t ask herself that question. She went into the mosque at al-Ghabsiyyeh, which had been taken over by cows, drove them out, performed her ablutions, and prayed. Then she went out to the lotus tree, hung a black ribbon on it, and lit two candles.
She said the tree was covered with pieces of cloth.
“I don’t understand, Son. Your village is deserted. The roads have disappeared, and the houses aren’t demolished but are collapsing and almost in ruins. I don’t know why houses go like that when their people abandon them. An abandoned house is like an abandoned woman; it hunches over itself as though it were falling down. There’s no sign of life in your village, except for the strips of cloth tied around the branches of the lotus tree and the melted candles spread around all the way to the mosque.”
Umm Hassan said she’d been afraid of the tree when they told her about my uncle, Sheikh Aziz Yunes, and how he was found dead beneath it. But when she got close to it, she felt awe, and she knelt and wept and lit the candles.
She said she heard the rustling of the branches, full of the souls of the dead. “The souls of the dead live in trees,” she said. “We have to return and shake the trees so that the souls fall and find peace in their graves.”
I was about to cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It’s not for eating, it’s Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the living room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the moldy branch, you yelled, “What’s that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.
“You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me.
“But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.”
“Umm Hassan’s senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to consume, not let consume us. We have to devour the oranges of Palestine and we have to devour Palestine and Galilee.”
It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with the decayed offering.
“What are you going to do with it?” you asked.
“Bury it.”
“Why bury it?”
“I’m not going to throw it away, because it’s from the homeland.”
You took the branch out of my hand and threw it in the trash.
“Outrageous!” you said. “What are these old women’s superstitions? Before hanging a scrap of the homeland up on the wall, it’d be better to knock the wall down and leave. We have to eat every last orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn’t oranges. The home-land is us.”
UMM HASSAN is waiting. Won’t you come with me? I’m in a hurry now, so I won’t tell you what she did in al-Kweikat.
Get up, my friend. God, you’re impossible. The woman’s dead, and everyone’s at her house. I can hear them weeping through the hospital walls, and you hear nothing.
You’re not coming? Okay, I’ll go on my own. But tell me, why do you look like that — like a little baby swathed in white? For the last three months I’ve been watching you shrink. My God, if you could see yourself before you die. It’s a shame you don’t know what’s going on, a shame you can’t see how a man doesn’t die but goes back to where he came from. I used to think the poets were lying when they said that a man returns to his mother’s womb. But now I swear they weren’t: A man becomes an infant again before he dies. Only infants die; all death is the death of infants — infants searching for their mothers’ wombs, curling up like fetuses. And here you are, turning back into an infant, curling up on yourself, blind. If only you could see yourself.
I can’t hear you properly. Why are you mumbling? Why are you moving your left hand? You want me to tell you about Nahilah? You already know the story, and no, I won’t tell it again. Do you think of yourself as the hero in a love story? Why have you forgotten your other heroic roles? Or maybe they weren’t so heroic. You told me, “Everyone thinks that the fighters are heroes, but that’s not true. People fight the way they breathe or eat or go to the john. War is nothing special. All you need to be a fighter is to fight. Being a hero is something else; heroism doesn’t exist, and even courage isn’t anything special. A brave man can turn into a coward, and a coward can turn into a brave man. The important thing is — ” You left it there.
I didn’t ask what the important thing was. I knew what your reply would be, and I didn’t want to hear it again. And now you want me to tell you some stories? No, I won’t tell stories, not today. Today I’m busy. Have pity on me; get up and release me, please release me. I’m tired.
I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of your sickness and of how sad you look, I’m tired of the baby’s round face suspended above your neck, I’m tired of praying for you.
Did you know that I pray?
My grandmother used to say that praying means laying down words like a carpet on the ground. I lay down my words so that you can walk on them.
Why don’t you get up?
ONCE UPON a time there was a baby.
No, you don’t like the story about Naji. You told me Naji was a dog because after everything Umm Hassan had done for him, he went off to America and left her poor and abandoned.
I see a frown on your face and black spots in your closed eyes. Okay, we won’t start the story with Umm Hassan or Naji or America. I’ll tell you another one.
Back to the beginning.
Do you remember when you used to say, “Back to the beginning!” and would stamp your foot? Do you remember what you did after Abdel Nasser resigned in ’67? People gathered in the alleyways of the camp and wept; it was night, and humid, and they were like ghosts weeping in the darkness. You stood in their midst, spat on the ground, and said, “Back to the beginning!”
And after 1970, when you’d returned safely to the camp from the slaughter in the forests of Jerash and Ajloun,* you said to the woman who came to ask about her son, “Back to the beginning!” and left.