Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“But he’s still tied up!” I said.

“Of course, of course,” answered the doctor. “I was away, as I told you, and I had no choice but to tie him up so he wouldn’t endanger himself and the nurses.”

“You ordered this?”

“Yes, Sir, absolutely. As you can see, the physician can be forced to take harsh measures. What could I do? As soon as I undid his restraints, he started beating one of the nurses and fractured his hand. So I ordered him to be taken back to shock therapy and tied down.”

“But he’s half-dead now!”

“Precisely. That’s why I called you in,” replied Dr. Karim. “I don’t think he’ll get up again after the last shock treatment. I’d like you to get in touch with his family and explain the situation to them so they can come visit him before he dies. Maybe if he sees one of his children he’ll improve a little. Can you get in touch with them?”

That’s where Dr. Amjad wants to send you – to the place where they chained Adnan up, tortured and killed him; to the place where Adnan hovered on the verge of death for six months between the shock-therapy room and his cell before taking his last breath.

“Impossible!” I said to Amjad.

I told him I’d give the matter some thought, gave him the impression that I would accept, and then implored him to leave you here. I said it was a scandal. I begged. I insisted that it was out of the question.

I talked and talked and talked, I forget now what I said. I begged him not to transfer you to the home, and he promised to reconsider, so I felt better. I left his office in good spirits, but now I am sad.

I’m here before you confused, scared, despairing.

But in Amjad’s office I was pleased that he would reconsider the situation, which meant that I’d remain here, and if I stay you stay, or vice versa.

When he does reconsider, he’ll realize that he can’t expel you from the hospital because that would be shameful. True, the hospital resembles a prison, and true, we’re both prisoners here, but it’s better than dying.

But no.

I shouldn’t have given in to his conditions. I should have threatened him, don’t you think?

In your room I saw the scene with new eyes, and I imagined what I should have said and said it, or basically did.

It was 9 a.m. and I’d finished giving you your morning bath and was standing in front of the window drinking tea and smoking an American cigarette when I found Zainab in the room.

She said Dr. Amjad was expecting me.

I threw my cigarette out the window, put the teacup on the table and followed her. The doctor was reading the newspaper. He moved it a little to one side, said, “Please sit down,” and went on with his reading. I accepted his kind invitation, sat down, and waited. But he didn’t interrupt his reading, muttering in disapproval as he read. Finally he threw the paper onto the desk, greeted me, and fell silent again.

“Nice to see you,” I said.

“Can I do anything for you?” he said.

“Thanks. Zainab told me you wanted to see me.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “How’s the old fellow doing?”

“Better,” I said.

I told him about the drops, of your reaction when I pricked your hand with a needle, of the clear signs of improvement.

He took off his dark glasses – I forgot to tell you, he wears dark glasses when he reads. Strange. I’m sure this doctor doesn’t have a clue about either medicine or politics, but what can we do? “God’s the Boss,” as they say. He took off his dark glasses, blew pipe smoke in my face, and announced my new duties as a full-time head nurse.

I objected.

I explained the importance of my work with you and was getting up to go when he informed me of the decision to transfer you to the home.

I tried to say something but couldn’t. My tongue was as heavy in my mouth as a log. Then the words burst out. I said that transferring you meant throwing you onto the garbage dump and leaving you to die, and that I knew the place was neither a homenor a hospital but a purgatory for the living and the tortured.

Amjad, however, insisted on having his way.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” I asked.

“Of course, I’m doing my duty. The hospital isn’t set up for a case like Yunes’. People like him die in their own homes.”

“There’s nobody there,” I said.

“I know. That’s why we’ll be transferring him to Dar al-Ajazah,” he said.

“Impossible!” I yelled. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“On the contrary, I know better than you do.”

“You know nothing.”

“I’m doing my duty. There’s no room for pity in our profession.”

“Pity! You’re an imbecile. You don’t know what Yunes represents.”

“Yunes! What does Yunes represent?”

“He’s a symbol.”

“And how can we treat symbols?” he asked. “There’s no place for symbols in a hospital. The place for symbols is in books.”

“But he’s a hero! A hero doesn’t end up in a cemetery for the living dead.”

“But he’s finished.”

When I heard the word finished, everything tipped over the edge. I don’t remember exactly what spilled out of me – that you were the first, that you were Adam, that nobody was going to touch you, that I’d kill anyone who got near you.

The doctor tried to calm me down, but I got more and more excited.

He said he was the one who made the decisions here.

I said, “No. No one decides.”

I snatched the newspaper out of his hands and started ripping it into little shreds and putting them in my mouth. I chewed them up and spat them out and shouted. I kept on ripping and spitting away, and the doctor shrank back behind his desk until only his head remained visible. Then it disappeared and his body grew smaller and smaller in the chair until it vanished entirely as though the desk had swallowed it.

I left him under the desk and stormed out of his office. A stormy exit: a hurricane.

And I came back to you.

I’m sure now that you’ll stay put even though I didn’t say what I meant to in Amjad’s office.

Tell me, how is it possible? How could Amjad dare speak of you that way? Is he completely out of it? Everyone knows your story. Doesn’t it mean anything to him or what? Has he lost his memory? Are we a people without a memory? Maybe he’s just out of it, but I bet he’s not. What’s come over him? What’s come over all of us? In the end, there’s nothing left but the end. You and me, in a world that’s hurling us into oblivion.

You’re fortunate, Yunes.

Can you imagine where you’d be without me?

If you were in my shoes, and only if you were in my shoes, you’d understand that the worst is yet to come. I know, you want me to tell you about the political situation at the moment. I hate politics because I can no longer understand what’s going on. I just want to live. I run from my death into yours and from my self to your corpse. What can a corpse do?

You can’t save me and I can’t heal you, so what are we doing here? I’m in the hospital and you’re in prison – no, I’m in prison and you’re in the hospital – and memories flow. Do you expect me to make myself a life out of memories?

I know, you don’t like memories. You don’t remember because you’re alive. You’ve spent your whole life playing cat and mouse with death, and you’re not convinced the end has come, you’re not ready to sit on the sidelines and remember. “We only remember the dead,” you said to me once, but no, I completely disagree with you about that. I remember through you so I can stay alive. I want to know. At least know.

Like all the other children who grew up in the camps, I heard all the stories, but I never understood. Do you imagine it’s enough to tell us we weren’t defeated in 1948 – because we never fought – to make us accept the dog’s life we’ve led since we were born? Do you imagine I believed my grandmother? Why did my mother run away? Why did my grandmother tell me my mother had gone to see her family and would come back? She didn’t come back. I went to Jordan to look for her and couldn’t find a trace of her, as though she’d evaporated into thin air. That’s how it works for us: Things disappear rather than appear, as in a dream.

Now, within this long dream in the hospital, I want you to tell me the story. I’ll tell it to you, and you can make comments. I’ll tell it, and you’ll speak to me. But before that I want to tell you a secret, but please don’t get angry. I watched the video Umm Hassan brought, and I saw al-Ghabsiyyeh. I saw the mosque and the lotus tree and the roads smothered in weeds, and I felt nothing. I felt no more than I felt when I went to the center of Beirut devastated by the civil war and saw the vegetation wrapped around the soaring buildings and the ruined walls. No, that’s not true. In the middle of Beirut, I almost wept – I did weep. But while watching Umm Hassan’s film, I felt a breath of hot air slap me. Why do you want me to weep for the ruins of history? Tell me, how did you abandon them there? How did you manage that? How did you live in two places at once, inside two histories and two loves? I won’t take your sincerity at face value nor your enigmatic talk about women. All I want is to understand why Nahilah didn’t come with you to Lebanon. How could you have abandoned her? How could you have lived out your story and let it grow and grow to the point of killing you?

My question, dear master, is: Why?

Why are we here? Why this prison? Why do I have no one left but you, and you no one but me? Why am I so alone?

I know you’re not able to answer, not because you’re sick or because you’re suspended between life and death, but because you don’t know the answer.

Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me, why didn’t you insist that your wife come with you to Lebanon? Why did Nahilah refuse to come?

She said that she wanted to stay behind with the blind sheikh but you didn’t believe her. Yet you abandoned her and left. You left her and you left your oldest son, who died. It’s because your father told you, “Go, my son, and leave her here. We’re drained after so many moves; we don’t have the energy to pick up and move again.”

The old blind man, who’d moved from village to village and from olive grove to olive grove until fortune brought him to Deir al-Asad to die, told you he didn’t have the energy to move, and you believed him?

Why did you believe him?

Why didn’t you tell them?

Why did you turn your back on them and go?

I know you were one man straying from village to village along with the other lost souls, that you were wanderers in despair. But what did you do after the fall of Tarshiha? Why didn’t you go to Lebanon with the fighters? You made your way into the hills of al-Kabri and fought with the Yemenis, and then returned to Sha’ab and found the village empty. You looked for them everywhere. A month later you found them in Deir al-Asad, living in half a house, and instead of looking after them you left again, abandoned them.

Tell me, what came over you?

Fill me in.

Whenever I ask you what happened, you start mixing events up, jumping from month to month and from village to village, as though time had melted away among the stones of the demolished villages. My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart, and I understood nothing. I never was able to understand why our village fell or how.

I can understand my grandmother, I can forgive her her pillow that reeks of decay. But you, you who fought in ’36, who took part in all the wars, why don’t you know?

Do you want me to believe my grandmother, to lay my head on her pillow of dried flowers and say, “This is al-Ghabsiyyeh”? Do you want me to be like her and close my eyes? Her only son came back, and she didn’t see him at all. She was standing under the olive tree, undoing her hair and swaying in sorrow, when her son, my father, came back carrying a sack of vegetables, but she didn’t see him. The boy, who had just slipped through a shower of bullets, grasped his mother’s dress, and the two of them burst into tears together, she because she’d lost him and he from seeing her weep that way.

I won’t tell you about my father who died in a heap on the threshold of his house. They assassinated him and left him there. I didn’t see it myself. My mother and his mother were there, and when I see him now it’s with my mother’s and my grandmother’s eyes. I see him dying in a pool of his own blood like a slaughtered lamb, and I see white.

But no, it didn’t happen that way.

The sky fell to the earth, my grandmother told me, describing the terrible exodus into the fields. The sky fell to earth, the stars turned to stones, and everything went black.

Tell me about that blackness. I don’t want the usual song about the betrayal by the Arab armies in the ’48 war – I’ve had enough of armies. What did you do? Why are you here and they’re there? And why did fate finally bring us together now?

I won’t go back as far as Ain al-Zaitoun because our story begins where the story of Ain al-Zaitoun ends.

That was on the night of May 1 of ’48. You’ll never forget this date because you tattooed it with a piece of smoldering iron onto your left wrist. On that day Ain al-Zaitoun was wiped out of existence. The Israelis entered the village and demolished it house by house. It’s as though it had never been. Later, they planted a pine forest on the site of the village.

Where were you on May 1?

I know you were organizing the defense of Sha’ab. You had been summoned by Abu Is’af and you’d gone, not expecting an attack on the village. The sacred jihad battalions were reorganizing themselves after the volunteer Arab Liberation Army, led by the Lebanese Fawzi al-Qawuqji, decided to enter Galilee.

Suddenly the village was overrun and destroyed; you couldn’t find it.

As you were coming home, with your English rifle slung over your shoulder, you saw Palmach men everywhere but you didn’t do a thing; you didn’t fire a single shot. You took a bit of iron, heated it in the fire and scratched the date on your left wrist. Then you ran off to the fields, heard how the village had fallen, and swore vengeance.

Ain al-Zaitoun marked the major turning point of the war in Galilee. On the night of May 1, 1948, a Palmach unit with mules carrying ammunition advanced on Ain al-Zaitoun via the hill of al-Dweirat, which overlooks the village from the north, and from the hill the Palmach men rolled barrels of explosives down onto the village.

Umm Suleiman said, weeping, that they’d killed your father.

In the olive grove, you saw their forlorn wandering ghosts. You grabbed Umm Suleiman by the shoulder, but she didn’t stop. She kept going, and you kept trying to catch up with her.

“Umm Suleiman, it’s me, Yunes,” you yelled.

Then she turned around and saw you, but she didn’t stop. She said, “They killed your father. Go look for your mother and your wife up ahead.”

You took off running and spotted your mother and Nahilah in the crowd. Drops of salty sweat mixed with your tears as you searched for your son. You got close to them and saw that your mother was leading the blind sheikh and Nahilah was walking next to them, carrying the child.

You walked beside them and didn’t say a word. You didn’t ask about your father’s death because you could see he was alive. You’ll tell me you were lost, mistaking the living for the dead and the dead for the living. Everything got tangled up, and you spent years after this first great disaster, the Nakba, ^*trying to draw a line between the dead and the living.

Your father didn’t die. Umm Suleiman was mistaken, and you didn’t ask about it. But when you reached Sha’ab and the Khatib family house, you tried to discover what had actually happened. Upon seeing Umm Suleiman sitting in the doorway of the mosque with her hands clasped like a young schoolgirl, you told her that the sheikh hadn’t died, and she looked at you as though she didn’t know you. People began gathering in the courtyard of the mosque and Hamed Ali Hassan arrived.

Hamed Ali Hassan’s clothes were dripping with blood when he reached the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab. Hamed was in his early twenties with green eyes like those of his dark-skinned Bedouin mother. He left the village when he’d found himself alone with bombs exploding around him.

Hamed Ali stopped in the courtyard of the mosque and said that Rashid Khalil Hassan had been killed.

“We went back,” said Hamed. “We were six young men from the Hassan family. We wanted to get the money buried in the courtyard of our house. Rashid was the first to enter the village: He was hit by a bullet in the neck and fell. Bullets rained down on us from all sides, and we were driven off. We have to go back to bury Rashid.”

He sat down. Your mother ran over and gave him some water. No one else moved. No one got up and said, “Come on. Let’s go get the body.”

They were in the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab, wrapped in their astonishment like ghosts in long black mantles.

It was there that you found out what had happened.

On the morning of May 2, the armed men withdrew from the village and people were penned up inside their houses, trapped by the gunfire. When the Palmach soldiers arrived, they ordered the people to gather in the courtyard of Mahmoud Hamed’s house.

Umm Suleiman had hid in the stable near her house, then finally decided to join the others in the courtyard, carrying a makeshift white flag.

“What can I say, Son? We were standing there, and they were firing over our heads. We started to crouch down, some of us kneeling, some squatting, some lying flat on the ground. Then Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar stood up. His wife was beside him, and she tried to pull him down, but he stood. He raised his hands as though surrendering, but the firing didn’t stop. Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar went toward the soldiers, bearing the seventy-five years of his life on the shoulders of his huge body.

“‘I want to say something. Listen to me.

“‘We surrender. Our village has fallen, and our men are defeated, and we surrender and expect to be treated humanely. Pay attention now. We are captives, and you must treat us the way captured civilians are treated in wartime. We’re not begging for your sympathy. We are requesting it and will repay it. If you treat us well, we’ll repay your good deed with many more. Tomorrow, as you know, Arab armies will enter Palestine and we’ll defeat you and then we’ll treat you as you treat us today. It would be better for you that we come to an understanding. I have said what I must, as God is my witness.’

“A young officer approached Yusef and slapped him across the face. Then he pulled out his revolver and fired at Yusef’s head, and the man’s brains scattered over the ground. None of us moved. Even his wife remained kneeling. Then the soldiers chose about forty young men and drove them ahead of them, and after they disappeared from sight, we heard firing. They killed the young men and then drove us like sheep toward the valley of al-Karrar, where we gathered before setting off toward Sha’ab.”

As they talked you looked for Hanna Kamil Mousa. Hanna was the leader of the village militia and closer to you than a brother. You’d met Abd al-Qadir Husseini with him in Saffouri, and you were inseparable.

“Where’s Hanna?” you yelled.

Ahmad Hamed told you he’d seen him.

“I was hiding in the house,” he said, “before I decided that it would be better to give myself up. So I went out and walked along the street where the Hamed clan lived, making my way to the square. Before I got to Abu Sultan Hamed’s house, they grabbed me and started dragging me along: I’d put up my hands in surrender, but they dragged me along as though they’d captured me. It was behind the square that I saw him. He was in the oak tree. I don’t know if he was alive because they wouldn’t let me get near him. One of them had a tight grip on my neck and was pulling me along as if he’d tied a rope around it. I couldn’t resist. I had no intention of resisting, I just wanted to stop in front of the oak, but they wouldn’t let me. Then they led me to the square where they had just killed Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar. They’d done the same with the sheikh, your father – didn’t your mother tell you? Where is the blind man? Have they taken him away?

“Hanna Kamil Mousa is still crucified on the tree. Go and get him down, Son. I wish I could come with you. I don’t know where his family is. They’ve probably come to Sha’ab. Perhaps they went to Amqa, lots of people went toward Amqa. Go to Amqa, maybe you’ll find his mother or father there. Tell them Ahmad Hamed saw him crucified, and we have to get him down from the oak.”

You left him midsentence and rushed to the Khatib house to confirm, for the umpteenth time, that your father was alive. You found the sheikh sitting in the courtyard drinking coffee and talking about the terrible events of the First World War!

You were gone for three weeks. Everyone believed you’d gone to Ain al-Zaitoun to get Hanna down from his cross, and when you came back you didn’t tell anyone about what you’d seen.

Tell me, is it true they crucified him? And what does it mean that they crucified him? Did they drive nails through his hands? Did they tie him to the tree with a rope and then kill him? Or did they tie him there and leave him to die, the way the Romans did with their slaves?

You don’t know, because when you slunk into the village and went to the oak tree, you found no one.

Was Ahmad hallucinating?

Or were you no longer able to see?

Perhaps, my friend, you weren’t capable of seeing your father walking beside your mother and wife in this exodus.

“It was as if I could see only darkness,” you told me.

Is it true that the area around the spring was strewn with the bodies of the forty young men who were killed there in cold blood?

Is it true that instead of burying the dead they used a bulldozer to push them into a communal pit, which didn’t get covered over properly so that people’s remains stuck out, mixed with earth?

Is it true that their demolition of the village was meant as revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?

Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin. I know he’s lying, and in any case, no one in the camp believes anything he says since the strange scene he made in ’72 following the Munich operation. People saw something they’d never seen before – a father jealous of his dead son!

Everyone raced to his house to offer their condolences after his son Husam was killed at the Munich airport, but instead of talking about Husam, he couldn’t stop talking about himself and his own acts of heroism, about how he’d killed seventy Israelis in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin.

Of course you remember the Black September operation and the kidnapping of Israel’s Olympic athletes in Munich. I know what you think about that kind of operation, and I know you were one of the few who dared take a stand against the hijacking of airplanes, the operations abroad, and the killing of civilians. People said your position sprang from your fears for your wife and children in Galilee, but you said no, and you were right. I’m completely convinced of your position now, even though at the time I believed you only wanted to protect your family. As you used to say, “If you want to win a war, you don’t go in for acrobatics, and if you don’t respect the lives of others, you don’t have the right to defend your own.”

Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle of Kherbet-Jeddin. We didn’t believe him, though. That old hunchbacked man with a large nose sat in his house receiving condolences and congratulations on his son’s martyrdom, and seized the occasion to recount his own glories and those of the bands that came from al-Kweikat and Sha’ab and Ain al-Zaitoun to support the fighters of al-Kabri. And when someone asked about you, he raised his finger and said, no, he didn’t remember you being with them. Puffing out his chest, he told the story of the ambush: “The people of al-Kabri won’t forget the victory they tasted at Kherbet-Jeddin! If we’d fought throughout Palestine the way we did at al-Kabri, we wouldn’t have lost the country!”

“But we’re fighting now,” a voice said. A youth, one of Husam’s comrades.

“We’ll see, my son. We’ll see what you can do.” Then Saleh al-Jashi started telling us about the Israeli convoy that fell into the ambush.

I want to ask you, was the fall of Ain al-Zaitoun, al-Kabri, and al-Birwa revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?

Umm Hassan said she went past there on her way to al-Kweikat and amid the ruins saw a burned-out bus and the remains of an armored car; the Israelis had set up a monument to their dead.

“What about us – what will we put up there?” I asked her.

“What will we put up?” she asked in surprise.

“After the liberation, I mean,” I said.

She looked at me with half-closed eyes as though she didn’t understand what I was getting at. Then she laughed.

Umm Hassan’s right. We’ll never put up anything – we can’t even manage a decent burial ground, let alone a monument. For the fifteen hundred individuals who fell at Sabra and Shatila, we built nothing. The mass grave has turned into a field where children play soccer. Some even say that the whole of Shatila will be razed soon.

Monuments aren’t important, only the living count. But why did Abu Husam claim you didn’t take part in the battle, and why, instead of weeping for his son, did he sit like a puffed-up cockerel boasting of his heroic deeds?

Tell me what really happened.

I don’t want to listen to that cripple boasting that a hand grenade went off in his pocket and didn’t kill him. I didn’t believe the story, but you confirmed it, laughing, “The poor man was frightened for his manhood. Blood was spurting out of him, and he put his hand between his thighs, and when he was sure the injury was elsewhere he started jumping for joy before fainting from the pain. We were a band of fighters on our way to al-Birwa. Saleh al-Jashi was hanging out of the window of the bus when the grenade went off in his pocket and he fell. We took him back to al-Kabri and continued on to al-Birwa. Then he met up with us again at the Sha’ab garrison after he’d become crippled.”

That was in May of ’48.

Al-Kabri had been in turmoil for two months. At the beginning of February, a band of Israelis attacked the village and tried to blow up the house of Fares Sarhan, a member of the Arab Higher Committee. The attack failed, and the band that made it to Sarhan’s house would’ve been wiped out if they hadn’t withdrawn under a hail of bullets.

On the same day, the commander of al-Kabri’s militia, Ibrahim Ya‘qub, saw a Jewish armored car leave Jeddin at the head of a convoy of vehicles in the direction of the main road that leads to Safad via Nahariyyeh. He rushed to Alloush, commander of the Arab Liberation Army in the area, to ask him for help, but Alloush refused because he hadn’t received any orders.

Ibrahim gathered the fighters and divided them in two, the first group in the area of al-Rayyis, two kilometers southwest of al-Kabri, and a group at the cemetery.

The first group blocked the road with rocks and stones while the second set up an ambush in the cemetery under the command of Saleh al-Jashi.

The Israeli convoy stopped where the road was blocked but didn’t retreat. The armored car pulled back and the bulldozer moved forward, followed by three armored cars, two trucks, and a bus.

Then all hell broke loose.

The battle began at noon. After the bulldozer succeeded in clearing a way, Saleh threw a hand grenade, but it didn’t explode. He threw another, and it made a terrible noise and produced a lot of dust, but the convoy continued to advance. Suddenly one of the armored cars turned and burst into flame. How did it catch fire? No one knows. Did a third grenade hit it or did it collide with the pile of rocks at the crossroads and catch fire?

Saleh didn’t know.

But he does know that the convoy halted in its tracks and the firing started. It was a bloodbath. The firing went on until dawn.

Sitting in his house among the mourners, Saleh described what happened:

“They began getting out of the armored cars and tried to spread out among the olive trees while we fired at them with our rifles. We had English rifles, some hand grenades, and one Sten gun. Not one of them got away. They couldn’t fight, and they didn’t raise a white flag. We fired and received occasional fire from the windows of the bus or from the perimeter of the ambush. The firing didn’t stop until we’d killed every last one of them.

“In the morning, the British came to remove the bodies. I stayed up the whole night in the cemetery with a few young men from al-Birwa and Sha’ab who’d come to lend their support. The rest gathered the arms of the Israelis and went home to sleep. General Ismail Safwat, chief of staff of the Arab Liberation Army, came, was photographed in front of the destroyed Israeli vehicles, before confiscating our stash of arms, from which he gave us back eleven rifles and seven boxes of ammunition.

“What kind of army was that? And what kind of liberation?”

Didn’t anyone ask him what they did after the battle?

Didn’t they expect a counterattack? Did they prepare for one?

But tell me, dear friend, what did Khalil Kallas do, commander of the group of thirty ALA men stationed near Fares Sarhan’s house in al-Kabri?

“ Withdrew,” you’ll say.

“When?” I’ll ask.

“Three days before the village fell.”

“Why?”

“Because he knew.”

“And you? You all didn’t know?”

Abu Husam said they were taken by surprise by the attack on al-Kabri.

However, Fawziyyeh, the widow of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and wife of Ali Kamel, knew, because she left the village the day that the ALA men left.

Fawziyyeh, whose husband died in the battle of Jeddin, didn’t remarry for twenty years, and Ali Kamel, her second husband, discovered that she was a virgin.

Her first husband died in the battle of Jeddin without taking part in it. He was a cameleer, transporting goods among the villages. On that day in March 1948, he was returning from Kafar Yasif to al-Kabri when he passed by the Israeli ambush pinned under the gunfire of the village militia. He was hit and died. The man fell, but the camel continued on its way to the village, ambling along in its own blood, until it reached its owner’s house, where it collapsed.