Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Fawziyyeh said the camel was hit in the hump and belly, and the militia men ate it to celebrate their victory. “No one paid any attention to my tragedy. I was seventeen years old and hadn’t been married more than a month. My husband died, and they slaughtered the camel and ate it. They invited me to eat with them. I won’t deny that I joined them, but I could taste death, and from that day I haven’t eaten meat, not even on feast days or holidays. When I see meat, I see the body of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and feel faint. I didn’t touch meat again until I married Ali Kamel twenty years later. Poor thing, he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that I was a virgin. He was a widower, like me. When he took me, and he saw the blood, he went crazy – he kissed me and laughed and danced. I was frightened, I swear I was frightened. I mean, how could it be? It was as if I’d never been married and blood had never spotted the sheets in al-Kabri. He wanted to say a few things about Mohammed Ahmad Hassan, but no, I assure you, Mohammed was a real man, it was just that I had turned back into a virgin. My virginity came back when I saw them eating the camel and wiping the grease from their hands.

“Ali Kamel, poor Ali, couldn’t make sense of it. He went to the doctor and came back reassured. The doctor told him it meant I hadn’t had sex since the death of my first husband. But how could I have? I was living in a hovel with my father in Shatila, and he watched me like a hawk. He even stopped me from working in the embroidery workshop – he said he’d rather die of hunger than see his daughter go out to work. Then this widower with no teeth comes along and tells everyone he’s taken my maidenhood! But it’s not true; Mohammed was the one. Ali was like glue – he’d stick to my body and lick me like a piece of chocolate. Umm Hassan laughed at him when he told her he wanted a child. She explained that I wasn’t a virgin and that his seed was weak, but he didn’t get it. A man over sixty and a woman in her forties, and he wants children!”

Fawziyyeh was sitting apart from the others at the wake, and al-Kabri rose up before everyone’s eyes. Abu Husam spoke of his exploits while the village faded like an old photo.

“But we left the dead behind, and that was shameful,” said an elderly man as he got up to leave.

Umm Sa’ad Radi wasn’t at the wake to tell her story.

Amina Mohammed Mousa – Umm Sa’ad Radi – died a month before Husam was martyred. If she’d been there, she’d have told you; she would have stopped the flood of nostalgia and memories.

If Umm Sa’ad Radi had been there she’d have said: “My husband and I left al-Kabri the day before it fell. We were on the Kabri-Tarshiha road and they slaughtered us. I wasn’t able to dig a grave for my husband. I see him in my dreams, stretched out in the ground. He sits up and tries to speak, but he has no voice.

“We were on the road when darkness fell. My husband decided we should spend the night in the fields, and we slept under an olive tree. At dawn, as my husband was getting ready to say his prayers, our friend, Raja, passed and urged us to flee. He said the Jews were getting very close. My husband finished his prayers, and we kept going toward Tarshiha, where we ran into them. They were approaching al-Kabri from the north and the south. We were stopped, searched, and taken in an armored car to our village.

“They left us in the square; I could see the troops dancing and singing and eating. A Jewish officer came over to us, chewing on bread wrapped in brown paper and started asking us questions. He pointed his rifle at my husband’s neck and asked in good Arabic, ‘You’re from al-Kabri?’

“‘No,’ I answered. ‘We’re from al-Sheikh Dawoud.’

“‘I’m not asking you, I’m asking him,’ he said.

“‘We’re from al-Sheikh Dawoud,’ my husband repeated, his voice shaking.

“At that instant, a man with a sackcloth bag over his head came over. I recognized him – it was Ali Abd al-Aziz. The bag had two holes for his eyes, and one for his lips. Ali nodded; he was breathing through his mouth, the bag was stuck to his nose, and he was puffing as though he were about to choke. I knew him from his nose, from the way the bag clung to his face.

“The bastard nodded his head, and I recognized him.

“‘You’re from al-Kabri,’ said the officer after the man with the bag over his head had confirmed it for him.

“They took my husband, along with Ibrahim Dabaja, Hussein al-Khubeizeh, Osman As’ad Abdallah, and Khalil al-Timlawi, and left the women in the square. We stood motionless while they danced and sang and ate around us. Then the officer came over and said he would have liked to bring my husband back to me except that he’d been killed. He also told me not to cry. Then he showed me a picture of Fares Sarhan and asked if I knew him.

“‘Tell Fares we’ll occupy all of Palestine and catch up with him in Lebanon.’

“I burst into tears, but they weren’t real tears. Real tears found me on the second day when I saw my husband’s body and tried to carry it to the cemetery and couldn’t. That’s when I cried, the tears gushing even from my mouth.

“The officer raised his rifle and ordered us to leave the square. We slept in the fields, and in the morning Umm Hassan and I returned to al-Kabri and saw the chickens in the streets. I don’t know who’d let them out. Their feathers were ruffled and they were making strange noises. Umm Hassan tried to round them up. I don’t know what we were thinking of, but we started rounding up the chickens. Then I got scared. Scared of the chickens. They seemed wild and were making such strange noises. I fled to the spring. I was thirsty, so I left Umm Hassan rounding up the chickens and fled. On the way I found Umm Mustafa. She hugged me and started sobbing: ‘Go gather up your husband, he’s dead.’ She took me by the hand and we ran to the square.

“I found him there, lying on his stomach. He had been shot in the back of his head. The sun! The sun burned into everything. What, dear God, was I to do? I carried him into the shade. No, I dragged him into the shade. I didn’t dare turn him over. I left him like that, took hold of his feet and pulled him into the shade. I looked around. Umm Mustafa had disappeared, and Umm Hassan was still over there with the chickens. I went looking for her and I found her in the street, bleeding, with the chickens hopping around her. I pushed her ahead of me to where my husband was. Upon seeing him, she calmed down, went off, and came back with a plank. We turned him over onto his back and carried him to the cemetery, but we weren’t able to dig a grave for him. We pushed some earth to the side and buried him above his mother’s bones. To this day I pray, haunted that I wasn’t able to bury him properly. We didn’t wash him because he’s a martyr, and martyrs are purified by their own blood. And besides, dear God, how were we to wash him in such conditions?

“But the chickens!

“I don’t know what got into the chickens.

“I went back to my house on my own and stayed in al-Kabri five days not daring to go out – you could still hear scattered shots. On the sixth day, I went out. I found blood everywhere and couldn’t see the chickens. I’m sure they’d shot them all and eaten them. I didn’t see a single chicken. I went to Umm Hussein’s house. Where was her husband? Her husband was with mine and had to be buried, too. The door of her house was off its hinges, and no one was inside. I looked around for her and stumbled upon old Abu Salim, a seventy-five-year-old man, who said he was looking for his son. He kept saying he’d lost his son and needed my help, and it was only then that I came to my senses again.

“Suddenly, I could see straight. I was someone else during those five days I’d spent hidden in my house after burying my husband. I remember nothing, or I remember that I fried some dough and ate it. I was completely lost, as though the soul of some other woman had entered my body. Five days that ran together like one single day, or one hour!

“When I found Abu Salim and walked through the deserted streets with him in search of his lost son, I came back to myself.

“I took the old man’s hand and brought him with me to Tarshiha. I told him he was the one who was lost, not his son. He went with me and didn’t say a thing. He bowed his head and went like a little child. At the entrance to Tarshiha, I saw my sister and rushed over to her. Then I couldn’t find the old man again. His son said he looked for him everywhere but in vain. I swear I don’t know. Maybe he went back to al-Kabri and died there.”

Umm Sa’ad Radi died before the families of the district of Acre assembled at Abu Husam’s house to congratulate him on the glorious death of his son.

If she’d been there she’d have told everyone her story, and told Abu Husam to stop boasting of his fictive heroic deeds.

I visited her a few days before her death. She wasn’t sick; it was more as if her life force were draining away. I prescribed some vitamins even though I knew they wouldn’t do any good. But I did my duty; a doctor has to do his duty to the end – he is the guardian of the spark of life. I’m the guardian of your life force, dear Abu Salem; I won’t abandon you. It’s my duty to defend the life in you against all odds.

With Umm Sa’ad Radi I did my duty. Radi was there, a man of about sixty, his children and grandchildren with him, hovering around his mother’s bed, afraid of death.

Umm Sa’ad Radi spoke in a low voice, almost inaudibly. “His grave,” she said, almost as if she could see him shaking the earth off his bones, raising his head a little, then sitting up with his pale, cracked face and looking at her as though in reproach. The woman kept repeating, “His grave. Go to his grave.”

She died in fear. She lived her whole life in fear, waiting at the entrance of the fedayeen camp for the fighters coming back or going to southern Lebanon and imploring one after another: “I beg you, go to the cemetery at al-Kabri.”

And the young men would shake their heads and run off as though to escape her words.

“The grave is the fourth on the right, near the oak tree. You’ll recognize it, my son. Just dig a little and you’ll find him. I wasn’t able to dig deep enough. Make sure his head’s aimed toward the Qibla, ^*and if it isn’t, I beg you, move him into the correct position. God will reward you.”

Everyone promised her but no one went. Who would be so stupid as to venture to the cemetery at al-Kabri? And who would go scratching around in a grave?

Even you, Father, made promises to her and lied, telling her you weren’t able to travel that far. Even you didn’t dare speak the truth – that al-Kabri no longer existed, the cemetery had been erased, the oak tree cut down, the olive groves uprooted, and palms and pines had been planted in their place.

Abu Salem never told her he hadn’t looked for the grave, and he never told her the story of the madwoman of al-Kabri and the bag of bones thrown down in the square at Deir al-Asad. He listened to her like all the others, and like all the others he nodded hurriedly and went on.

Umm Sa’ad Radi said she wanted nothing. “They took Palestine? Let them have it. I just want to visit the grave to make sure I buried him correctly. I don’t care about al-Kabri or anywhere else, they’re all going to disappear. They took them? They can have them. But they should give us the grave at least.”

Abu Salem agrees but says nothing.

And we say nothing.

All of us were afraid; we didn’t dare visit her and give her a proper answer. Why? A good question.

Why didn’t we lie to the woman and let her die with her mind at peace?

Why didn’t anyone dare release her from the ghost of the man sitting in his grave gazing at her from the sockets of his eyes, moving his head as though he wanted to say something?

Why didn’t we lie to her?

We’re not even capable of lying. Incapable of war, incapable of lying, incapable of truth.

Umm Sa’ad Radi wasn’t there, and she didn’t tell her story.

As for you, Abu Salem, you were sitting in the midst of them, calm and silent. Everybody knew you’d taken to criticizing everything, and no one took you seriously anymore. You were bitter, they said. Even I thought so. You’d become dismissive; we thought you felt beaten down because the route over there had been blocked. After the fedayeen were thrown out of Jordan in 1970, we only had the Lebanese front, and it was swarming with fighters. They told us we had to climb Mount Hermon to protect Palestine from vanishing, so we climbed it and set the ice on fire with our fighting and our blood. This made your route to Bab al-Shams difficult, if not impossible. However, I know you managed to make your way through and slipped into your village many times, but that’s another story. I’ll save it for tomorrow.

But today.

Now, on that day, you got up and explained things to us. The house of Abu Husam al-Jashi was sailing along on memories; the stories were flying from people’s mouths. Everyone told some story or other and believed what he wanted to remember.

And the curses rained down on Kallas and Alloush: How could the Arab Liberation Army have withdrawn? How could they have betrayed us? How?

Then your quiet voice came from the corner of the room, cutting through all the others. You were holding a thin stick resembling a long pen in your hand, and you drew imaginary lines and circles on the dark red carpet. You said that Galilee had collapsed.

“The whole of Galilee collapsed between operations Dekel and Hiram, and we had no idea.”

The Dekel plan began with the occupation of Kaswan on July 9, 1948. Then al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Abu Sinan, Kafar Yasif, and al-Kweikat were occupied. On July 13, they occupied Nazareth, and then Ma’loul, linking Kafar ha-Horesh with the rest of the settlements south of Nazareth. On July 15, an Israeli unit moved from Shafa Amr to occupy Saffouri, and a broad mopping-up operation followed that led to the occupation of al-Birwa.

“What did we do after the fall of al-Birwa? We were besieged in Sha’ab. Every village and city in Galilee fell during the war, except Sha’ab. We stayed there until the end of Operation Hiram on October 28, where, in the space of sixty hours, the whole of Galilee had fallen.”

“We never. .” said Yunes.

He stood up like a man I didn’t recognize, uttered half a sentence and sat down again without finishing it. He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

He resembled a man, somebody I didn’t know. When we call someone we know “a man,” it means we don’t recognize him anymore, or he’s taken us by surprise. That’s why a wife addresses her husband as “Man” – because she doesn’t know him.

And Nahilah, what did she call you?

You never told me your wife’s names for you, but I don’t think she addressed you as “Man” despite the fact that she was completely in the dark about her husband.

This man, his head crowned with white, stood up and tried to respond to this woman. All the woman said was what we’d been saying every day, what we’ll always say because it’s easiest.

“So, they sold out,” said the woman.

But instead of letting the words slide past, as words usually do on such occasions, you stood up and said, “We never. .” and fell silent. And everyone else fell silent.

Yunes used Classical Arabic on that occasion, as though he felt himself to be an orator or wanted to say the final and unanswerable word. So he said, “We never. .” in Classical Arabic and sat down.

I would like to know, what stopped you? You waited for the teardrop to be caught in Nuha’s eye before speaking. You stood up twice and started to tell the story of what happened to you in Sha’ab, your last war. You said that all the villages fell except for Sha’ab: “We evacuated Sha’ab because defending it was impossible after the rest of Galilee had fallen. Sha’ab isn’t a country, it’s just a village.”

You said you understood the meaning of the word countryafter the fall of Sha’ab. A country isn’t oranges or olives, or the mosque of al-Jazzar in Acre. A country is falling into the abyss, feeling that you are part of the whole, and dying because it has died. In those villages running down to the sea from northern Galilee to the west, no one thought of what it would mean for everything to fall. The villages fell, and we ran from one to another as though we were on the sea jumping from one boat to another, the boats sinking, and us with them. No one was able to conceive of what the fall would mean, and the people fell because everything fell.

You talked and talked; you were at boiling point, almost exploding, and we couldn’t grasp what you were trying to get at, and why you said that Palestine no longer existed.

“Palestine was the cities – Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre. In them we could feel something called Palestine. The villages were like all villages. It was the cities that fell quickly, and we discovered that we didn’t know where we were. The truth is that those who occupied Palestine made us discover the country as we were losing it. No, it wasn’t only the fault of the Arab armies and the ALA; we were all at fault because we didn’t know. And by the time we knew, everything was over. We found out at the end.

“Listen. All of them sold out, and we want to buy it back. We tried to buy it back, but we were defeated, defeated utterly.

“Listen. They were less traitors than miserable wretches because they were ignorant; they didn’t know what was really happening. Would you believe me if I said that none of us – not I, not Abu Is’af – knew their plans or understood the logic of their war? We didn’t know the difference between the Palmach and the Stern Gang. ^*

“Why call it a war when you aren’t really fighting?

“We thought we were fighting to defend our homes. But not them; they didn’t have any villages to defend. They were an army that advanced and retreated freely, as armies do.

“We didn’t put up a defense. At Sha’ab we discovered we were incapable of defending our homes. My house in Ain al-Zaitoun disappeared into thin air; all the houses in the village were blown up the moment they entered. I fought at Sha’ab, even though it wasn’t my village.

“We fought and fought. Don’t believe all that lying history. We have to go back there to fight, but I’m here. That’s enough for now.”

Do you remember how Abu Husam got up, all macho, and said that it made him angry to hear that kind of talk. “The Arab Liberation Army never fought. The Arab armies just entered Palestine to protect the borders that had been drawn and left us on our own.”

You tried to explain that we fought but we didn’t know. When you fight and don’t know, it’s as though you aren’t fighting. But no one wanted to listen. Only Nuha. Do you remember Nuha? She was there. She came and sat close to you and stared at the imaginary map you’d drawn on the dark red carpet. Then she took the stick from your hand, redrew the map of Galilee and asked you about al-Birwa.

That was the day I fell in love with Nuha and a one-sided love story began that only turned to real love six years later, when she came to the hospital to ask for my help in looking after her dying grandmother.

After Nuha finished drawing her map, she turned to you and asked, “Why?”

I think I saw a tear suspended in the corner of her eye, and that tear was the start of a love story, a love that began with a teardrop that didn’t fall and ended in the municipal stadium under a downpour of tears that soaked eyes and faces.

But Nuha, when she fell in love with me years later, denied the story of the tear. She said she hadn’t cried, but she’d felt pity for all of you because you were living on memories, and the past was your only pillar of support.

Looking at the map, she asked you – her voice halting and punctuated by white spaces, as though emotion were staining her words with silence:

“Why did you believe Mahdi?”

The room exploded in silence.

Is it true, Father, that al-Birwa fell because you believed Mahdi, Jasem, and the ALA division stationed at Tal al-Layyat?

Answer me. I don’t want anecdotes but a clear-cut answer.

I know you don’t know the answers. I can see you with the eyes of those days. You were an impulsive young man – that’s how everyone who knew you describes you. Despite that, or because of it, you succeeded – you and the division from Sha’ab – in breaking through to al-Birwa and taking it back.

But, to be accurate, before the breakthrough and the recovery, al-Birwa had fallen without a fight.

Sun-dust enveloped the fields, the wheat glittering in that golden light that precedes the harvest. And the village was afraid. After the fall of Acre, the villages of al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Julis, Kafar Yasif, and Abu Sinan surrendered, leaving al-Birwa floating in the wind.

And they attacked.

No one was ready. Our ambushes were laughable. Now we’ve figured out how to do things, and we have an impressive numbers of fedayeen. But then we were forty men and Father Jebran. The priest of al-Birwa didn’t negotiate with the Jews for a surrender, that’s a lie. He negotiated for our return – this issue has sparked great debate.

Nuha’s grandmother, who came to be known as Umm al-Hajar, ^*would tell the story and say, “If only!”

“If only we’d believed Father Jebran! We were nothing, my daughter – just forty men and up above, at Tal al-Layyat, more than a hundred soldiers of the ALA under their leader, Mahdi, who used to come down like a monkey asking for chickens. We named him Lieutenant Chicken Mahdi and would hand them over. What are a few chickens? Let them eat and good health to them! The important thing was for the village to survive – better a village without chickens than chickens without a village. But the chickens did no good, my dear, because when the Jews attacked, Chicken Mahdi didn’t fight.”

They were forty. They’d sent their wives and children into the surrounding fields and sat in their ambushes waiting. The Jews chose to attack from the west at sunset, so the sun would be in the peasants’ eyes. Three armored vehicles advanced under a heavy cannon bombardment but were brought to a halt. Then the Jews retreated and dug themselves in, renewing the attack at dawn.

“We ran,” said Nuha’s father. “Yes, we ran. We had no means of defense and the army up above us didn’t fire a single shot. I said to Mahdi, ‘Aren’t you even going to defend your chickens?’ He replied, ‘No orders.’ The village fell and we left everything behind. The ALA didn’t even try to save the chickens.”

Nuha said her father had always lived with sorrow in his heart: He said his greatest wish was not to kill the Jews but to kill Chicken Mahdi.

It would be lawful to kill Mahdi, isn’t that right, Father? It would be lawful to kill him not because he didn’t fight with you, but because after you took the village back he gave the order for you to withdraw and join your women and children because the ALA would protect the village. And you believed him.

Why did you believe Mahdi?

Yunes said he didn’t believe Mahdi, “but what could we do?”

“Listen, my daughter. They occupied the village, so the fedayeen withdrew and joined their families in the fields nearby. They slept and lived under the olive trees, waiting for an end to their sufferings. When they got hungry, they decided to take back their village. The Jews occupied the village on June 10, 1948, and we waited in the fields for two weeks. Then we came together – people from al-Birwa, Sha’ab, al-Ba’neh, and Deir al-Asad – and decided to liberate the village. The wheat and maize were waiting to be harvested, and people couldn’t find even a dry crust for sustenance.

“The fighters gathered at Tal al-Layyat, and there the Iraqi officer Jasem stood up and made a speech. He said the ALA didn’t have orders to help, but they were wholeheartedly with the villagers and would be praying for their success.

“Our attack began. We attacked the village from three directions – Jebel al-Tawil in the north, Sha’ab in the southeast, and Tal al-Layyat in the east – and we won.

“We won because they were taken by surprise and didn’t fight. They did just as we’d done: Instead of resisting, they ran away to Abu Laban. So we entered the village. Of course, they fired at us for a while, but it seems their numbers were very small so they withdrew.

“In al-Birwa we found everything in its place and Father Jebran there to greet us.

“He said, ‘You should have agreed with me and given me time to finish negotiating with them, but this is better. God has granted us victory.’

“The priest suggested we harvest the wheat before they came back, and we agreed. We were inspecting the village and the houses when we heard youyouscoming from the house of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad. When we got there, we found everyone’s clothes stuffed into bags and placed in the center of the patio. People were attempting to pick out their own clothes from the jumble. I swear no one knows what he took and what he left behind. The clothes were all mixed up, and we couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. The priest kept telling us to leave the clothes and go out to the fields. Saniyyeh, the wife of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad, let out a celebratory trill and we all laughed; it was a rag wedding – we discovered our clothes were only rags. Why would the Jews take rags? And us, too – why were our clothes rags? We celebrated. I can hardly describe it, my dear – clothes were flying through the air, and everyone was trying things on and pulling them off. Everyone wore everyone else’s things, and we came together and were joyous. That was our victory celebration, but we couldn’t enjoy it because we heard gunfire from the direction of the threshing ground, so we thought the counterattack must have begun. Leaving our rags, we ran to get our rifles, and we found Darwish’s son, Mahmoud (not the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was only six years old then and hardly knew how to talk – it was his cousin, I think) standing in the middle of the field, firing his gun in the air and pointing to the threshing floor. There we discovered the sacks: A large part of the wheat harvest had been placed in sacks in the middle of the threshing floor. We started gathering the sacks while Salim As’ad stood by in a British police officer’s uniform, which he’d never parted with, next to seven harvesters the Jews had left when they fled.

“We climbed over the harvesters, but then the shooting started, and the dying, too.

“We left the harvesters, picked up the sacks of wheat, and rushed toward the village; the women began to leave ahead of us.

“Bullets, women leaving with sacks of wheat on their heads, men spreading out to their positions – the men decided to stay in the village after they’d been joined by eleven fighters from the village of Aqraba who announced they were deserting the ALA.”

“We were like drunkards,” said Nuha’s father.

He said he was drunk on the scent of the wheat, on the sun-dust.

“Can you get drunk on dust?” she asked Yunes.

Yunes said that Mahdi committed suicide in Tarshiha. “It wasn’t his fault, my son. Mahdi was just carrying out orders. In Lebanon we found out that Mahdi had died. When he heard the final order to withdraw, he said, ‘Shame on the Arabs,’ pulled out his revolver, shot himself in the head, and died.

“At some point, Mahdi came and said, ‘Okay. Go away and rest up with your families.’ And Mahdi was right – the big push was over. We rushed to al-Birwa and liberated it, and then we returned to our villages. Thirty-five men, too exhausted to move.

“When we talk about these battles, you think of us as disciplined soldiers, but that wasn’t at all the case.

“Listen.

“After we liberated al-Birwa, three United Nations officers arrived carrying white flags and asked to negotiate with our commanding officer.

“‘But we don’t have a commanding officer,’ said Salim As’ad.

“‘We’re just peasants,’ said Nabil Hourani. ‘We don’t have a leader, we’re just peasants who want to harvest our crop and go back to our houses. Would you rather we died of hunger?’

“‘But you broke the truce,’ said the Swedish officer.

“‘What truce, Sir? We’ve got nothing to do with the war. We wanted to go back to our village, so we went.’

“The Swedish officer asked our permission to search the village and go to Tal al-Layyat to meet with the commanding officer of the ALA, but we refused. We were afraid of spies working for the Jews, so we insisted that the officers leave the village.

“We weren’t an army. We were just ordinary people. More than half the fighters knew nothing about fighting, I swear. For them, war was shooting at the enemy. We’d stand in a row and fire; we knew nothing about the art of war. That’s why, when Mahdi came and asked the fighters to withdraw and leave the village in the hands of the ALA, we agreed without thinking. The peasants did what they set out to do, took part of their crop and handed the village over to the regular army.

“Forty aging men and women who refused to leave their houses was all that was left in al-Birwa, plus a young man named Tanios al-Khouri, who wanted to stay with his uncle, the village priest. Later he was killed when the Jews came back to occupy the village.

“The shelling started and no one knew what was happening because they found the Israelis in the village square, but there was no sign of the ALA. The Jews started blowing up houses and then asked everyone to assemble in the square. They discovered that there were only old people, the priest, and his nephew left in the village. Tanios had been helping his uncle in the church and was preparing to join the order himself, and when the village fell, the priest dressed him in a black cassock identical to his own, and they joined the others in the square.

“An Israeli officer came forward and took the youth by his hand, dragged him out of the crowd and ordered him to take off his cassock. The youth hesitated a little, then took it off under the officer’s steely gaze and stood trembling in his underwear. The July sun struck their faces, the dust spread over the village while Tanios trembled with cold. The priest tried to say something, but the shots tore over their heads.