Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Now tell me about Sha’ab.

Was it Abu Is’af who made the arrangements with the headman for you to have a house, the leader of the Sha’ab garrison thus guaranteeing that you’d stay with him?

You found yourself in the Sha’ab garrison after you’d failed – yes, failed – to form the mobile military unit you’d dreamed of. The war was speeding up, and the Arab armies that entered Palestine in 1948 were being defeated by the larger, better-armed Israeli army in record time. God, who’d have believed it? Six hundred thousand Israelis put together an army larger than all seven Arab armies combined!

You started military patrols, you begged weapons, you took part in the battles of al-Birwa and al-Zib, but the rapid fall of the villages and hamlets of Galilee made it impossible for you to move and turned you into a garrison of not more than two hundred fighters centered on the little village called Sha’ab. Later, the garrison would end up in prison in Syria and its heroic deeds would disappear among the flood of displaced people who invaded the fields and groves.

All the stories of the exodus have collected now in your eyes – shut over the teardrops I put in them – and in place of heroism I see sorrow and hear the voice of my grandmother telling about the woman who sewed up the pita bread. I’m listening to the story of the woman in the fields of Beit Jann, and I see my grandmother miming the story, screwing up her eyes so she can put the imaginary thread into the eye of the imaginary needle, then taking the imaginary pita bread in her hand, cutting it in two and starting to sew it up.

“The woman sewed the pita bread, and the boy was crying. She gave him the whole pita and asked him to be quiet, but he tore it in two and began crying again. So the mother killed her son!”

I see the exodus in your eyes and I hear my grandmother’s voice, which has dwindled into a low mutter full of ghosts.

“We reached Beit Jann, but we didn’t go into the Druze village because we were afraid.”

She tells me about fear and the Druze, and I swallow the pita bread stuffed with fried potatoes and feel the potatoes sticking to the roof of my mouth, as though I’m going to suffocate.

No, I’m not complaining about the potatoes – they were my favorite. I loved fried potatoes and still do. They were incomparably better than the boiled plants my grandmother cooked. She’d leave the camp for who-knows-where and come back loaded down with all kinds of greens, wash them, cook them, and we’d eat. The taste was – how can I describe it? – a green taste, and the stew would form a lump in my mouth. My grandmother would say that it was healthy food: “We’re peasants, and this is peasant food.” I’d beg her to fry me some potatoes; the smell of potatoes gives you an appetite, but those cooked weeds had neither odor nor taste; it felt like you were chewing something that had already been chewed.

You don’t like fried potatoes, I know. You prefer them grilled and seasoned with olive oil. Now I’ve come to like olive oil, but when my grandmother, who cooked everything in it, was around it tasted waxy to me and I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t say so in front of her. How can you say that sort of thing to a woman if she doesn’t see it? She used to live here as though she were over there. She refused to use electricity because they didn’t have it in her village – can you believe it? She didn’t want to get used to things that didn’t exist there because she was going to go back! If only she’d known what Galilee had become! But she died before she knew anything.

You won’t believe the story of the pita bread, just as you didn’t believe the story of Umm Hassan and Naji, whom she picked up and put in the basin. You believe, as I’d like to, that we don’t kill our own children and throw them under trees. You like things clear and simple. The murderer is a known quantity, and the victim, too, and it’s up to us to see that justice is done. Unfortunately, my brother, it wasn’t as simple as us and them. It was something else that’s hard to define.

I’m not here to define things. I have a mission. As usual I’ll fail and as usual I won’t believe I’ve failed; I’ll claim I succeeded or put the blame on others. Ah, habit! If only we could walk away from it! If only I could shed this past that hovers like a blue ghost in your room! Come to think of it, why do I see things as blue? Why do I see Shams looking at me with a blue face as though she were about to kill me?

If I could, I’d go to Shams’ family and tell them the truth and let them do what they want. I’m innocent of her murder, of her love, of everything, because I’m an imbecile. If I hadn’t been made a fool of. . everything might have been different.

Tell me, who in the story of Shams wasn’t made a fool of?

She killed him, the bitch! She told him, “I give myself to you in marriage,” and then she killed him.

She loved him, and he loved her, but, like me, he felt she would slip out of his hands. Is it possible for a man to marry a woman who leaves someone else’s bed to go to him?

Why did she kill him?

Was the fact that he’d lied to her enough to make her kill him?

We all lie, so it really seems unreasonable. Just imagine – if the penalty for lying were death, there’d be no one left alive on the surface of the earth.

Now I’ve started to doubt everything. I’m not sure it was a matter of honor. Shams is the first woman in the history of the Arab world to kill a man because he was unfaithful and tricked her.

But let’s slow down. .

Did she kill him?

They said she killed him in public. Everyone saw her, but does that mean anything? What if everyone’s lying? What if everyone just believed what they’d heard from everyone else, who had heard what they’d heard from others?

No, that’s impossible. If that were true, my whole life might have been an unbearable lie, which it is anyway. Shams lied to me, and everyone is lying to me now. Death threats are being passed on to me, and I’m afraid of a lie. When you’re afraid of a lie, it means your life is a lie, don’t you think?

I’m scared and I hide in the hospital, and the memories pour down on me and I have no idea what to do with them. What would you say to a novel-writing project? I know you’ll tell me I don’t know how to write novels. I agree, and I’d add that no one knows how to write because anything you say comes apart when you write it down and turns into symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life. Writing is confusion; tell me, who can write the confusions of life? It’s a state between life and death that no one dares enter. I won’t dare enter that state, I say this only because like all doctors and failures, I’ve become a writer. Do you know why Chekhov wrote? Because he was a failed doctor. I imagine that by becoming a writer he was able to find the solution to his crisis. But I’m not like him; I’m a successful doctor, and everyone will see how I was able to rescue you from the Valley of Death.

I’m certain she killed him, because I know her and I know how death shone in her eyes. I used to think it was love that changed her eyes from gray to green, then back to gray, but it was death. Gray-green is the color of death. Shams used to talk about death because she knew it. My grandmother didn’t.

Shahineh didn’t dare say the child had died. She said they went by Beit Jann and were afraid. The airplanes were roaring above their heads, and when night fell their journey to Lebanon began.

My grandmother said she found herself in the middle of a group of about thirty women, old men, and children from the village of al-Safsaf wandering the hills looking for the Lebanese border. “With my daughters and my son, we walked with them. I don’t know how we ended up in that terrified group. We were afraid, too, but not like them. When they spoke they whispered. When we got to Beit Jann, they refused to go into the place. Their leader said they’d rob us and ordered us to continue marching. I told him not to be afraid, but he told me to shut up, and we left. When we got to Lebanon, we’d lost our voices because the old man had made us whisper so much.”

It seems that on that journey my grandmother’s voice became husky. I forgot to tell you that my grandmother had this husky voice, like it was coming out of a well deep inside her, which made it seem broad and full of holes.

“The child began crying from hunger. A child of three or four sobbing and whining that he was hungry, while everybody looked askance at his mother and asked her to make him shut up. The woman didn’t know what to do. She picked him up and started shushing him, but he wouldn’t let up. And there was an old man. . I’ll never forget that old man.”

My grandmother always used to threaten me with the old man of al-Safsaf. When I refused to eat her greens, she’d tell me she’d ask the old man of al-Safsaf to come and strangle me at night, and I’d be scared and chew my prechewed roughage.

She said she realized why they were so terrified when they reached Tarshiha. There their fear disappeared and they ate and wept, and the old man told the story of the white sheets.

“We received them with white sheets. We went out waving the sheets as a sign of surrender, but they started firing over our heads. Then they ordered us to gather in the square. They chose sixty men of various ages, tied their hands behind their backs with rope and stood them in a row. Sixty men of various ages standing like a wall threaded together by the rope linking their hands. Then they opened fire. The sound of the machine guns deafened us, and the men dropped. The people gathered in the square fled into the fields. Death enveloped us.”

“After we reached Tarshiha, he became a different man,” said my grandmother. “But on the road, during those silent nights, he was a monster. A tall, thin man with a hunchback. His moustache looked like it had been drawn with a pen. His hair was gray, his moustache black, and he ordered us about furiously. We could see the sinews of his small, veiny hands as he motioned to us to be silent.”

My grandmother said she gave the mother the one pita bread she had underneath her dress. She said she was afraid of the old man because he was determined to kill the child if he kept crying. The woman tried her best to make her son shut up – holding his hand, lifting him up, carrying him, putting him back down on the ground, letting him walk between her legs; but the child wouldn’t stop crying. The woman took the round loaf from my grandmother and divided it in two. She gave her son half and the other half she gave back to my grandmother. But the boy refused; he wanted a whole pita and started crying again. The old man came up to him and took hold of his clothes and started shaking him. My grandmother rushed over and gave her half to the mother, who gave it to her son. But the boy wanted a whole pita, not two halves. The woman put the two halves together, extracted a needle and thread from the front of her dress, threaded the needle, and started sewing up the pita bread.

My grandmother said she saw things as though they were wrapped in shadows. The meager crescent moon that would slip out from among the branches of the trees turned people into colliding shadows. I listened to the story and was scared of my grandmother’s husky voice, which swallowed up the scene and made it a story of djinn and afrits.

The woman sewed up the pita bread and gave it to the boy, and he stopped crying. He took it joyfully, until he discovered that it wasn’t a normal pita. The woman had sewn it hastily in the dark and hadn’t made the stitches tight. The boy took the bread and the stitches started to pull apart – the gap between the two halves widening. And he started to cry again. He held the pita up to give back to his mother and cried.

The old man came forward, took the pita bread, put it in his mouth, and started gobbling it down. He swallowed more than half of it along with the thread and went over to the woman.

“Kill it,” he hissed at her.

“Throw it down the well,” said a woman’s voice from the within the shadowed crowd.

“Give it to me. I’ll take care of it,” said the old man.

He went toward the child, whose screams grew louder and louder. The woman took a wool blanket, wrapped her son in it and picked him up. She put his head on her shoulder and kept pulling him down onto it as she walked, stifling the child’s cries with the blanket. The old man walked behind them; my grandmother said he walked behind the woman and kept pushing the child’s head down onto its mother’s shoulder.

In Tarshiha the mother put her son down on the ground. She pulled back the blanket and started weeping. The child was blue. But the old man changed when they reached the last Palestinian village and started looking for his daughter, eagerly asking people about a short, fat woman with five children.

My grandmother said the people of Tarshiha brought them food, but the man refused to eat. He became a different person. The veins disappeared from his face and hands, his body slumped, and he started weeping and asking to die.

“And the child?” I asked.

“What child?”

“The child with the pita bread.”

“I don’t know.”

She said she didn’t know, though she knew the boy had died.

Its mother killed it – do you hear, Father? – its mother killed it because she was afraid of the old man, who was afraid of the Jews. The mother didn’t carry her child on her breast, and she didn’t support his head on her shoulder the way my grandmother had told me. She wrapped him in the blanket and sat on him until he died.

That’s the way our relative, Umm Fawzi, told it. Umm Fawzi said they walked for five days without a sound so the Jews wouldn’t hear them, and when the boy cried his mother killed him because the old man threatened to kill them both.

“Umm Fawzi’s raving,” said my grandmother.

You’ll say I’m raving, too, because you don’t like hearing the story about the boy, or the story about the people of Saleheh, who were executed wrapped in their bed sheets. The Jews wrapped more than seventy men in the white sheets they’d been carrying as a sign of surrender and fired on them, and the sheets spurted blood.

You don’t want to hear about anything except heroism, and you think you’re the heroes’ hero. Listen then to the story of another hero, a mixture of you and your father, a hero who didn’t fight. A man from a village called Mi’ar. It’s close to your new village. His name was Rakan Abboud.

When Mi’ar fell, after the rest of his family had gone, the man refused to leave his village and stayed on with his wife. This is what Nadia told me. Do you know Nadia? Didn’t you meet her? She was in charge of the People’s Committee in the camp. Nadia said the Jews drove her grandfather out along with two other men from the village three months after they’d occupied it. The two men died on the road, near Jenin, but Nadia’s grandfather, who was in his eighties, went to Aleppo and stayed with someone he knew there. Then he joined Nadia’s father in the camp in Baalbek. “My grandfather had become unbearable,” said Nadia. “He hated Baalbek. He hated its snow and its cold. He used to scream that he didn’t want to die there, so my father decided to move to the camp in Burj al-Shamali near Tyre. We lived in a shack there, like everyone else. His condition got frighteningly worse. He’d go out at night and only come back at dawn. Then he informed my father he’d decided to go back to Mi’ar to look for his wife. That was in 1950, and we were waiting. All my father did was listen to the radio and set dates for the Return. Each month he’d say our time would come next month. My father tried to stop him and begged him to wait one more month, but the man had made up his mind. One day, he managed to hire a guide and a donkey and left.

“He made it to his house – imagine! – knocked on the door, and a woman opened it. The poor man thought she must be a spirit and ran off, tripping over himself. He left Mi’ar, never to return. He spent what remained of his life in the fields. My grandmother, who lived in Majd al-Kuroum, found out and began her long search for him. She looked for him for more than a year. When she found him, the poor man had completely lost his sight, so she took him to Majd al-Kuroum, where he died.”

Nadia went on at great length about how her grandfather died. She told how he lived his last days like a thief, a blind, feeble thief. Despite this, his wife had to hide him from the police so he wouldn’t be expelled like others who’d got back in. He’d gone to see his village and his wife, but he saw nothing. He lived in secret, and his presence was made public only when he died.

Blind and feeble, living in secret – but when he died, people wept openly. All those people who’d now become the people of Majd al-Kuroum wept. You know the villages aren’t the old villages anymore: They’ve become full of abandoned houses inhabited by refugees from other villages. The people were all mixed together. The people in Majd al-Kuroum didn’t know the blind old man. They knew that Fathiyyeh Abboud was hiding “Lebanon” in her house. They called him Lebanon because he’d come from there. When the secret got out, the whole village wept for the blind man. He didn’t die in his own house surrounded by children and grandchildren; he didn’t die, as most die, in the platitude of memories. He went back and died in the secrecy of that town living under the secrecy of military rule, curfew, and the footprints of those who slipped back in.

“That was a blind old man, nothing like me,” you’ll say. “I didn’t go back to end my life wrapped in memories. I went back to start again, to remember the way, so I could love my wife.”

Nice words, my dear friend, and everything you say is correct. And I’m not going to talk to you about the beginnings of the fedayeen, which coincided with your journeys to Deir al-Asad and the routine births of your children.

Tell me, how did Sha’ab fall?

Very well, tell me how Sha’ab didn’t fall.

Without heroics, please. I’d like to find out who the woman of Sha’ab was.

Nahilah, or who?

Who was that woman who stood up six days after the village fell and said she was going to go back? The men tried to stop her, but she’d already left, and you had to catch up with her.

Did people get confused and mix up the woman who carried a jerry can of arak on her head with the woman who led them in liberating their village?

And why didn’t you tell me about the smuggling of arak? Because it was shameful? What’s shameful about smuggling arak from Lebanon to Palestine? Is it because you don’t want to acknowledge that the Lebanese arak they make in Zahleh is the best in the world? Or are you embarrassed because the smugglers made use of the Revolution of ’36 and became revolutionaries in their own way?

Reem belonged to the Sa’ad family, which was famous for smuggling. It was the smugglers’ sheikh, Hassan Sa’ad, who came up with the brilliant idea to smuggle arak on the heads of women. He’d place jerry cans of arak on the heads of the women so it appeared they were carrying water.

The column set off, crossed the Lebanese border, and came to the outskirts of Tarshiha. The column was composed of eight women in long peasant dresses and, for protection, three armed men, Hassan Sa’ad at their head.

A column of eight women, moving rhythmically as though they were coming from the well, armed men at the rear, and Hassan Sa’ad about three hundred meters ahead to scout out the unpaved road joining Tarshiha to al-Kabri.

Hassan came back suddenly, having spotted a British patrol. He ordered the women to scatter in the fields, and the women began to run. All of them ran except Reem. It appears she was paralyzed with fear. Hassan shouted, but Reem stayed frozen to the spot. Hassan pulled out his revolver and fired at the jerry can. Reem bolted, the arak pouring down over her face and clothes. Then she fell. Apparently she’d drunk a large quantity of the triple-strength arak, or maybe it was just the fumes. The girl staggered and fell. Hassan tried to hold her up, but he couldn’t, so he left her and hid in the field by the road. Having heard the shot, the patrol approached and found the girl awash in arak. They tried to question her and searched at the sides of the road but didn’t find anyone. One of the soldiers went over to her, held out his hand to help her up. . and bullets rang out. Hassan had seen the soldier going up to Reem so he fired, and the battle was launched.

This is where accounts differ.

Some people say Hassan killed three members of the patrol and took Reem and fled with her to Sha’ab, others that Hassan fired into the air so no one was hit, and that the soldiers had simply retreated, thinking they’d fallen into an ambush set by revolutionaries. That’s how Reem managed to escape and reach Hassan, even though she tripped over her long, wet dress.

Hassan became a hero. When he arrived at the village, he was treated like a revolutionary.

Even Reem believed in his heroism and fell in love with him. Their love persisted for more than five years, Reem’s father refusing to marry his daughter to her smuggler cousin and Reem refusing marriage to any other suitor. Things grew even more inflamed when Reem threw tradition to the winds and declared in front of everybody in the madafé ^*of Shaker al-Khatib, and to the councillor of the Western Quarter, that she loved Hassan and would never belong to anyone else. The old story of blood feuding would have been repeated if Abu Is’af hadn’t intervened by claiming that Hassan had become a sacred warrior and that he would vouch for his character.

And so Reem married her hero, Hassan.

Reem of the jerry can full of arak became Reem the heroine. Incredible as it may seem, most people attribute the decision to return to Sha’ab to her.

Yet, it’s the truth.

Please tell me, wasn’t Nahilah the woman of Sha’ab?

Nahilah rose. She gave the impression that she was at the end of her rope: a woman with an infant in her arms, faced at every turn by a blind man and his wife. Her first village had been demolished, and her second was occupied.

Nahilah rose, and Reem joined her.

But why did people say it was Reem?

Was it because that woman, who’d carried the jerry can of arak and staggered under the shot fired by the man she loved, lost everything the moment they entered the village?

Her husband, Hassan, was the first to join her and to plunge into battle. And he was the first martyr.

Reem was at the front beside Nahilah, and Hassan was behind them. On that day in July 1948, Reem came to the end. After the village was liberated and her husband died, she took her three children and went to Deir al-Asad. From there she fled to Syria, and nothing more was heard of her. She lived in the Yarmouk camp outside Damascus and ceased to be of interest to all of you.

What puzzles me is why everybody forgets all the other stories but remembers Reem and her decision to enter the village?

They forgot Hassan, the smuggler-martyr, they forgot Nahilah, who led the march, and they forgot you, too. There is no mention of you in the battle of Sha’ab. Nobody ever told me anything about you. They all said you were there, but you weren’t what people were interested in. What they were interested in was your father, the blind sheikh, who refused to leave again after the village had been liberated. He said he couldn’t because he had responsibilities at the mosque. You begged him to leave, but he refused. You begged him and you begged your mother and you begged Nahilah. Your decision was clear: No one but militiamen were to stay behind in Sha’ab. The residents were to take their belongings and leave because it was no longer possible to live in the village, which was under constant fire from the Jews posted at Mi’ar.

But your father refused, and then he refused again when you decided to withdraw to Lebanon.

Let’s get back to Sha’ab.

I’ll try to put together the fragments I’ve heard from you and others. When I make a mistake, correct me. I won’t begin at the beginning because I’m not like you. I can’t say “In the beginning. .”

I’ll start after the fall of al-Birwa, with the story of Mustafa al-Tayyar.

After you’d mobilized all the men and matériel, you liberated al-Birwa, seizing weapons, ammunition, and harvesters. Then Mahdi, the commanding officer of the ALA detachment, arrived and his men surrounded you. “Everything on the ground!” Mahdi cried. He wanted to confiscate the weapons and claim he was the hero of the liberation.

You were dumbstruck. The battle of al-Birwa was your first offensive. You’d tried to coordinate your fire and organize the assault; you’d put great effort into mobilization and were exhausted from the victory, your first; and along comes this officer whose soldiers hadn’t fired a single bullet, yelling, “Everything on the ground!”

Up jumped Mustafa al-Tayyar, a fighter from al-Birwa who’d die in the last battle between the Yemeni volunteers and the Israeli army, which took place on the hills of al-Kabri.

Al-Tayyar bolted up and yelled, “We’re the Arabs and you’re the Jews,” and threw himself down on the ground holding the machine gun Ali Hassan al-Jammal had pulled out of the Jewish redoubt during the battle.

The Iraqi sergeant Dandan intervened and said, “This won’t do. An Arab doesn’t kill another Arab.” He prevented a massacre. Things were worked out, and they took half the weapons.

Mahdi came back afterward and convinced you to leave al-Birwa and hand it over to the ALA. And you let him persuade you! You abandoned al-Birwa only for it to be surrendered to the Jews twenty-four hours later without a fight. And Dandan stands up and says, “An Arab doesn’t kill another Arab!” Poor people! Say you agreed with Mahdi because it was impossible to stay, because you were exhausted, and the village was surrounded on all sides; so you abandoned it before the ALA did the same.

After al-Birwa fell, you only had Sha’ab.

And Sha’ab didn’t survive either.

On July 21, 1948, the shelling of Sha’ab began, from the direction of al-Birwa. Then an infantry unit advanced from Mi’ar and swept through the village. The first shelling was intermittent but accurate. Ten minutes after the first shell fell on the threshing floors, the second one fell on the houses of Ali Mousa and Rashid al-Hajj Hassan, destroying them. The villagers started fleeing in all directions. In the midst of the chaos, everyone found themselves on the outside of the village except for a small group of fighters concentrated in al-Abbasiyyeh on the eastern side of the village.

On July 21, Sha’ab fell for the first time, without a fight!

The ALA, concentrated in al al-Layyat, Majd al-Kuroum, and al-Ramah, didn’t intervene. It seems the Israeli attack took everyone by surprise. War was everywhere, and it took you by surprise!

The village collapsed before its defenders fired a single shot, and the Jews came in.

You said you lived those six days in the fields and could see Sha’ab from a distance. It was as though the village had fallen into the valley. Sha’ab is hemmed in by hills on all sides, and had become a valley of death. After the fall of al-Birwa and Mi’ar, Sha’ab was under fire, and the only way to protect it was by concerted military action. Abu Is’af tried to organize the fighters. He divided them into four detachments and assigned each one the task of protecting one of the village borders, but he didn’t leave a central force capable of responding to emergencies.

Practically speaking, there was no battle.

The shelling and screaming caused terrible confusion among the peasants and the fighters, and the battle ended before it had begun.

In the fields, the Sha’ab fighters discovered they were impotent. Attempts at surveillance and infiltration were useless. “We can’t attack,” said Abu Is’af, “without preparatory shelling, and we don’t have any artillery.” He assigned the task of contacting the ALA to assure artillery support to Yunes.

Yunes went to al al-Layyat and entered into impossible negotiations with Mahdi and Jasem. Every plan he proposed was rejected on the grounds that it would cause huge losses to both peasants and fighters.

“I suggested an attack from al al-Layyat, and they said the artillery at Mi’ar would wipe us out. I suggested an attack from the fields to the east, and they said they’d discover us and wipe us out before we arrived. I suggested that the ALA unit move, to give the impression that the attack would come from their positions while we attacked from the east, and they said they had no order to move. All my plans were refused, and their suggestion was to reflect and wait. I told them, ‘You’re the army. You propose something and we’ll carry it out.’ They said, ‘Of course, but we’re waiting for orders.’ I said we couldn’t stand around waiting. They said, ‘In war, you have to obey orders.’

“I said, they said. .

“My mission ended in failure. I went back to the field where everyone was waiting for me. Everybody thought I’d returned with the order to liberate Sha’ab in my pocket. When I told them, their faces darkened but they made no comment, as though I were telling them about some other village.”

The table for breaking the fast was set at sunset. They were starving, miserable, yet nevertheless keeping the fast.

When I ask you about the meal, you’ll tell me you were tired but not hungry. You’ll tell me you never used to feel real hunger unless you were with her, after you’d made love to her in the cave of Bab al-Shams. On ordinary days you didn’t feel hungry, you ate just to fill your stomach. On that day, however, you did try to eat from that meager table. There was almost nothing – greens and weeds. There wasn’t even any bread.

Perhaps that was the reason.

Why didn’t you tell me the Jews attacked Sha’ab precisely at sunset in the month of Ramadan, as the villagers were all around their tables, breaking the fast? The shelling started, your defenses collapsed, and you were defeated. Hungry, you fled to the fields in that terrible chaos; then, as you were fleeing, you saw the flames springing up in the middle of the village. You thought they were burning the village, and this added to your panic and drove you out into the neighboring fields.