Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Did my father understand the danger he’d put himself in? Why didn’t he hide? Why didn’t he flee the house? Why didn’t he get his weapon and fire before he died?

He fell like a sack, as my mother said, or he flailed around in his blood like a rooster with its throat cut, as my grandmother said, or he was a hero, as all of you said.

But shouldn’t he have worried about us?

I know you didn’t worry about your children, but why didn’t he?

Tell me, what was this life you led? You left your children with a woman on her own over there, and you were between here and there, wearing your heroism on your sleeve the way heroes do.

Tell me, is that what heroism’s about? You abandon your children to fear and despair and march off to die?

I told you I hated my father and lived alone with my grandmother. Do you know what it means for a person to live in a vacuum? Do you know why my mother left me, and where she went?

You want the beginning!

That’s the beginning. The beginning, Father, is death. In the beginning my father died, and my mother disappeared. My grandmother knows why she disappeared, and I’m certain she encouraged her to flee; she may have even given her a push. After the death of my little sister, Fatmah, my mother spent five years with us, weeping. Then she disappeared. I don’t remember the day because I didn’t notice her absence. Then it seemed as though it had always been that way. My grandmother said my mother had gone to visit relatives in Jordan, and the visit had turned into a long one. The woman disappeared as though she’d never been, and when I became aware of her absence, it was too late. I used to long for her at night. Just at night, I used to feel like something was gnawing at my chest. I’d get up from the mattress and go to hers, and not find her. I’d sleep next to her when she wasn’t there. Then my grandmother decided to rearrange the house. She bought two beds, one for her and one for me, and my mother didn’t have a place anymore, and I could no longer go to her mattress at night to sleep next to her or smell the scent of her hair. No, no, nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen, like my coming back to the house, for example, and not finding her, bawling, rousing the neighbors and everyone setting out to search for her; my grandmother bawling, surrounded by women giving me pitying looks, and one of them saying, “Poor boy, no father and no mother!” No, nothing like that. I told you, I don’t remember the day she disappeared because I didn’t notice, and then I sort of got used to it. My grandmother never told me what had happened, but I understood my mother wasn’t going to come back.

“She’s gone to her family,” the old woman said.

“Aren’t we her family?” I’d asked her in amazement.

I don’t remember if she answered, or had ever wanted to speak about the matter. My mother’s phantom would hover over me at night, and the pain would gnaw at me. Then the light would come and she’d disappear.

Yes, I lived an ordinary life. I thought that everyone was like everyone else and all houses were like all other houses. I was sure that the memories of this faraway razed village were memory itself, and that my grandmother and my aunts were all the women there were.

But why were my aunts like that? Why did they refer to me as “Najwah’s son”? Was it because I was dark-skinned like her or because they wanted to erase the image of my father from their lives?

My grandmother said that Lebanon was, in spite of everything, the beginning of a change for the better. She said her daughters married in Lebanon within two years: “We came to Lebanon, my daughters got married, each one went her own way, and I’m still waiting to find my own path.”

“And what’s your path, Grandma?”

“My path is the one that will take us back.”

“Where will we go back to, Grandma?”

“We’ll go back to al-Ghabsiyyeh.”

“When are we going to go?”

“How should I know? But my heart tells me I’m not going to die here. I’m going to go back and put my head next to that man’s and close my eyes and rest.”

“We get no rest,” she said. “Since that day, we’ve been going from place to place like gypsies.” She said she picked up her children and ran. She said she saw the man fall from the minaret like a bird. She said she heard the screams of the dead, but she didn’t look back and found herself in the midst of throngs of people on the outskirts of Amqa, and there, among the olive trees, she set up her tent made from two woolen blankets and lived for three months. Then she found herself among those going from Amqa to Yanouh, and from Yanouh to Tarshiha, and from Tarshiha to Deir al-Qasi, and from Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif, and from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah, and from al-Mansourah to al-Rashidiyyeh, and from al-Rashidiyyeh to Burj al-Barajneh, and from Burj al-Barajneh to Shatila.

My grandmother said the journey had been long and that she’d believed the exodus from one village to the next would eventually bring her back to al-Ghabsiyyeh, but she found herself in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, fate took her three daughters by storm and they married, and she was left on her own with her husband-son until she married him to Najwah.

I saw my grandmother’s sisters only rarely. My grandmother used to visit them three times a week at the Ain al-Hilweh camp, but she didn’t take me with her, and they didn’t come to us. Though, in those last days, when I was summoned from the south as she succumbed to her final illness, I went to see her and they were seated around her. She gestured to them to leave the room. They went out, indignation written all over their faces, and I was left alone with her. That was the day she gave me her bequest. She tried to say something but couldn’t, the words emerging in fragments from her lips like unconnected letters. The words broke up into letters and the letters rang in my ears as I bent over her trying to understand, but all I could understand was that these things were for me: the watch that didn’t work, the pillow of flowers, and the Koran. I nodded to show I accepted them, she put her hand on my head to bless me, and I heard her say, “Yasin.” I pulled away. At the moment of truth, the woman revealed the secret of her relationship with me: she didn’t know that I wasn’t Yasin, that I didn’t love Yasin and that I didn’t want to be him. I’m a different man, and I don’t resemble that photograph. I’m not a picture hung on the wall. At that moment I hated everything, and I decided to leave the base in the south and go abroad. I don’t want to die the way my father died, and I don’t want to become the captive of this mysterious village I’ve never seen or of al-Ghabsiyyeh’s moon when it’s full or of the man who hanged himself from the lotus tree.

I left her room after putting the watch in my pocket and let my aunt Munirah take the Koran from my hand. I sat in the living room listening to my aunt’s husband.

“What’s this?”

He questioned me about my grandmother Umm Yasin’s bequest. Taking me by the hand and sitting me down next to him, he started telling his story. A man of about forty-five with a bald patch that shone as though he rubbed it with olive oil, and a face full of pimples and pock marks, and a hand that trembled, holding a lit cigarette.

“Come and listen,” he said. “This is a story you must hear.”

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi began his story. I forgot about my grandmother dying in the next room, my hatred for Yasin, and my decision to go abroad, and I traveled with his words. Like a small child, that bald man told me with his eyes and his tears what his words could not. He spoke of his uncle Mohammed, who now lives in Kafar Yasif, and how he’d visited him the previous month and they’d gone together to al-Ghabsiyyeh.

I tell you, my dear friend, when I listened to Umm Hassan telling the same story before she died, I saw things flickering in front of me as though I knew the place. At the time I didn’t understand my feeling of having already lived that moment, of already knowing the story.

Umm Hassan told me about the lotus tree, and about the candles and the cattle that fill the village mosque, and I shook my head as though I already knew what she was telling me and what she was about to tell me. The fact is, it was this man who turned into a child before me with his eyes and his tears; he’s the one who took me there, fed me prickly pears and gave me water to drink from “the Bubbler.”

My grandmother’s dying in her room, I’m fidgeting inside my hatred of the place, the people, the prayers and the incense, and this bald man takes me by the hand, sits me down at his side and forces me to listen to his story. Then my grandmother dies, and I forget the story. And after about twenty years, along comes Umm Hassan and tells me the same story, which makes me see the man’s words as though I’d actually been there. I see the village square and its narrow streets, and I follow the words of Umm Hassan in my memory, interrupting her to say, “No. The Bubbler isn’t near the mosque, Umm Hassan. The Bubbler’s near the orchards.” She’d respond: “How foolish I am! I’m getting al-Ghabsiyyeh mixed up with al-Kweikat,” bringing her hand to my brow, caressing my face, and then leaving me.

The man said he went to visit his uncle in the village of Kafar Yasif and that it was very easy to do. The uncle got him a permit, he went to Jordan by car, crossed the bridge, and found himself standing in front of his uncle and his nephews, who took him to Kafar Yasif.

The man said he visited the whole of Palestine – Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, everywhere. But he wanted to tell me about al-Ghabsiyyeh. He said the moment he arrived in the square at al-Ghabsiyyeh, he fell to the ground spontaneously. “I started kissing the ground, and my tears were falling. I stayed like that for about five minutes, then I told my uncle, ‘I want to see our house.’ ‘You won’t recognize your house,’ he said to me. We stood in the square, and I walked toward the west. There was grass all around me and they’d planted pines to hide the features of the place. My uncle said, ‘Don’t go. There are vipers and scorpions.’ I walked through the plants, and the houses looked as though they’d been planted in the middle of the green grass. I stopped in front of our house but didn’t go in. The stone walls were still intact, but the roof was gone and there was grass growing inside the house and out of the walls themselves, as though the grass were eating the walls. I rested my head on the wall, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped. My uncle said, ‘Let’s go.’ I told him, ‘This is our house.’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But we have come back to live here.’ ‘It’s forbidden,’ he said. ‘Even visits are forbidden. Come on, let’s go, Son.’ And we left. There were nettles on my clothes. I don’t know why nettles grow so well inside houses. I told my uncle, ‘We have an orchard. I want to see it.’ I turned northward, and he walked at my side. I told him, ‘Please, don’t show me the way, Uncle,’ and he said, ‘Very well.’ I arrived at a rusty iron gate, looked around, and sensed it was there. There’s a way of recognizing our orchard. It has a muzawiwinter fig tree whose fruit is shaped like pears. I saw the fig tree and told him, ‘This is our orchard.’ My uncle picked a fig – fig season was past – saying to me, ‘A bit of what’s yours.’ I ate the fig, and afterward we picked a few prickly pears and ate them. Then he said, ‘Come on, let’s go back.’ I said, ‘No.’ There’s a gap in the wall between our orchard and the Hammad family’s orchard. I used to slip through and steal pomegranates from them. I searched and found the opening, and I slipped through and found myself, as if by magic, in front of the pomegranate tree. I started picking. The tree was full of fruit. I told him, ‘Come and pick with me.’ As I was picking, I could hear my uncle’s voice calling for me and asking, ‘Where did you go through?’ And I answered, ‘Through the gap in the wall.’ ‘I don’t see a gap,’ he said. I took off my coat, filled it with pomegranates, and told him, ‘Here I come.’ And guess what happened – I couldn’t find the gap either, as though the wall had closed up before my eyes. He was shouting from one side and I was shouting from the other, carrying the coat full of pomegranates and telling him to be patient. He was searching for me and I was searching for him. I don’t know how much time passed, but I stopped hearing his footsteps, and his voice disappeared. I was afraid. I thought, I’m on my own, and if the Jews come now, what would I say? I threw the pomegranates aside, keeping one with me, which I put in the pocket of my coat, and I shouted to him, ‘Let’s meet at the mosque!’”

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi told me how he’d gone around the whole village before reaching the mosque, and how he’d been afraid the weeds would devour him, and how he heard something panting and it scared him, and how he decided never to go back to al-Ghabsiyyeh again.

“Then I found the gap in the wall,” he said.

He said he walked a lot but kept looking back, for the pomegranate tree was his only landmark in the middle of that obliterated landscape. He returned to the tree, walked three steps backward and found himself in front of the opening. He jumped through it and was in their orchard. From there he returned to the mosque to find his uncle waiting for him.

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi said al-Ghabsiyyeh was the way it had always been.

He said it had been waiting for him.

He said most of the olive and carob trees had been cut down, but we’d plant new ones.

He said it wouldn’t take much work. We’d pick ourselves up and go. What could they do to us? We’d pitch our tents there the same as we’d pitched them here and wait until we’d rebuilt the houses that had been knocked down.

He said they hadn’t really been knocked down, it was just the earthen roofs that had collapsed, and we could rebuild them in days.

He said and he said and he said, his bald patch shining like oil, and I listened to him with half an ear. I thought, People like that never tire of repeating the same thing, they live in the past. Why don’t we pay attention to our present? Why must we remain prisoners of a past that overshadows us?

Then he asked me about the base in South Lebanon and said that, if I wanted, he could come down there so we could go to al-Ghabsiyyeh together. “It won’t be a military operation,” he said. “Fighting isn’t the point. I’ll take you there so you can see your village. Wouldn’t you like to see your village?”

When he said the words your village, we heard a wail from my grandmother’s room and realized the woman was dead. None of the men moved, but their tears flowed copiously, as though they’d been waiting for a signal, and the signal had come from my grandmother’s room. No one said a word, and no one went into the room. They were sure the end they’d been waiting for had come, and the crying began.

My aunt’s husband wiped the tears away with his hand and whispered into my ear his suspect question: “What are you going to do with the house?”

“What house?” I asked, thinking he was continuing the conversation about our houses in the village.

“This house,” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You don’t want to sell it?” he asked.

“Why would I want to sell it?”

“Because you live on the base, and my son is coming next year to study at the university in Beirut. I’ll buy it.”

“No, I’m not going to sell my house.”

He said he was ready to give me whatever sum I named on the spot.

I told him that I didn’t need money, and I wasn’t going to sell my house.

The man stood up, joined the men’s circle, and resumed his weeping. Then my aunt came out of the room, silenced everyone with a flourish of her hand and announced that the woman wasn’t dead. The sobbing came to a sudden halt, the men returned to their conversation, and my uncle his story. Me, I decided to go back to the base. It seemed the woman was never going to die, and I had to get back.

My grandmother died in my absence, as my father had.

Why does the memory of my father come back when I want to root it out?

The fact is, I did root it out long ago and had forgotten about it, and the only reason it’s come back is you, because you want the story to go “back to the beginning.” I don’t know the beginning of the story. It’s not mine; I didn’t move from village to village, or go back to the field in Amqa carrying a bundle of vegetables on my back, or hide among the stalks, and I don’t know Aslan Durziyyeh and his son, Simon, or the story of the crime in Wadi Abu Jmil.

All the same, he comes back and haunts me.

It’s as though that woman who raised me on the smell of decaying flowers had slipped me into the skin of another man and handed me another name. It’s as though I’d become the Other that I’d never been.

My grandmother said the days passed. “I was like everyone else. I worked the land my husband had left me. Actually, I worked the land before and after he died – he, God bless him, was a fighter, meaning that he’d leave me and go off. If I hadn’t cultivated the land and looked after the olive trees, well, we’d have died of hunger. God rest his soul, he was full of talk, a peasant who didn’t know how to work the land and whose head was stuffed with gunpowder and weapons. We peasants don’t fight. I told them we don’t know how to fight, that the Arab armies were going to come lead the battles. But he didn’t want to listen to me. He would take off and occasionally return from further and further away, and then he died, and that was the end of him. It was my father’s fault. He was their commander, and he married me to Khalil without consulting me. One day, he came to say that they’d read the first surah of the Koran, the Fatihah, and that the wedding would be the next day. The wedding took place and I had a god-awful time. I lived with him for five years, bore three girls and a boy, and then my husband went off. The girls worked with me in the fields, and the boy we sent to the school in Acre.”

When Yasin finished his Koran lessons in the village, his mother sent him to Acre, where he joined the fourth grade class of its elementary school. In Acre, he stayed at the house of Yusef Effendi Tobil. This Yusef Tobil owned the oil press in the village and a small shop in Acre, and only came to the village in October and November, when he would press his olives and those of the peasants and then return to Acre.

“Your father, God rest his soul, would help with the oil pressing and then go back to Acre. He only studied in Acre for two years. He’d come to the village every Friday. He’d pass by the mosque and say his prayers before coming to the house, where he’d open his books and read. I barely saw him. I’d ask him about his life in Acre, and he’d read in a loud voice to make me stop talking. I tried to read his books, but I couldn’t. We knew how to read the Koran: We could open the Koran and read easily, but the books your father brought were impossible. My daughters and I tried to read them, but we couldn’t, even though they were written in Arabic. In those days, God help me, I used to think there was an Arabic language for men and another for women. Our language was the verses and chapters of the Koran, and God knows where theirs came from. Yusef Effendi, God bless him, persuaded me to send my son to school. He said, ‘Your son’s a beacon of intelligence, Shahineh, and he must go with me to Acre.’ I told him, ‘The boy’ll be scared there because he’s never seen the sea in his life.’ Yusef Effendi laughed and said the sea was the most beautiful thing in the world, and he’d teach him to swim. ‘The sea of life is harder than the sea of Acre,’ he said and took the boy. Yasin lived with them as though he were a member of the family, eating with them and sleeping in their house. He would go to school in the morning and help Mr. Yusef in his shop in the afternoon. I thought the boy would do as well in life as he did in school, but, poor boy, he only studied in Acre for two years. Then the catastrophes began: The war came to Galilee, and we started running from village to village until we reached Lebanon.”

My father, dear Yunes, didn’t understand what was going on. He was young and short and plump. He carried the vegetables on his back and stood watching his mother cry, and then resumed the exodus with her until they reached Tarshiha, and in Tarshiha he died. No, he didn’t die, but he saw death with his own eyes when the house collapsed on his head as the Israeli planes bombarded the town.

“In Tarshiha we lived in the house of Ali Hammoud, who’d fought with my father,” said my grandmother. “Yasin stopped going to school, and I worked in the olive groves with Ali Hammoud’s wives, and we waited for the ALA, of which there was news everywhere, and we said to ourselves, ‘Things are fine.’ How were they fine? We lived like dogs. True, Ali Hammoud offered us a house, and true, we worked in the olive groves, but God, we were so hungry. I never slept a night in Tarshiha with a full stomach. You know, Son, from the day we left the village, I’ve not once gone to sleep with a full stomach. I eat and I don’t feel full, like there’s a leak at the bottom of my stomach. I have no appetite, and my stomach hurts I’m so hungry.”

My grandmother’s appetite was never satisfied. She’d say she wasn’t hungry, put the plate in front of me and sit watching me. Then, all of a sudden, she’d swoop down on my plate, devour everything without coming up for air and say she’d eaten nothing. The woman was a strange case. She’d only eat from my plate, devouring every last crumb, would put her hand on her stomach and moan, and then start eating again. I used to think she’d taken to eating that way as a sort of compensation after my father’s murder. Then I found out that her hunger came from further back, and that she had treated his food the same way she did mine. I remember the story of the string stew only vaguely, but my paternal aunts, on their rare visits, used to talk about little else, starting with laughter and ending up in a sort of quarrel.

“You loved Yasin more than us,” one of the aunts would say.

“God forgive you,” Shahineh would reply. “It wasn’t like that at all. I used to make string stew because the boy was short and we were poor, not like now.”

You hear her? As though we weren’t poor now. We say we used to be poor so that we don’t have to face our present reality. But the main thing is that she had this strange way of cooking. She’d make a stew the way everyone else did, she’d fry bits of meat with onions before adding the vegetables, but she’d take the bits of raw meat, thread them on a string and tie the ends together before frying them. When the family sat down at the table, she’d pull the meat string out of the pot and say, “This is for Yasin.” I don’t know what happened next. Did my father eat the meat while his sisters looked on, their eyes glazed with desire? Or did he distribute the bits of meat among them? Or did he leave the string untouched, to be devoured by his mother?

My grandmother only stopped cooking string stew when my mother left. I vaguely remember those days. I remember how I hated the string on my plate. I remember that I wouldn’t touch it, and my grandmother would try to force me to eat it and I’d refuse. Maybe I ate it once or twice, or a dozen times, I don’t know, but the taste of string stuck between my teeth has never left me.

My grandmother stopped threading the meat after my mother left, and I didn’t think of it again until one of the fighters with us at Kafar Shouba told us about his mother’s string stew, which was just like my grandmother’s. In the fedayeen camps we ate lots of meat, and Abu Ahmad used to take my share, saying that I didn’t understand anything about food because I hadn’t tried string stew, and I’d say that I hated the taste of meat precisely because of string stew. Abu Ahmad would eat in an extraordinary way – but was his real name Abu Ahmad? In those days, our names were all made up anyway. I wasn’t called Khalil, I was Abu Khaled, even though I’d wanted to call myself Guevara. The fact is, I love Guevara, and whenever I see his picture, I see the light in his eyes as something holy. I think that he, like Mohammed or that Talal you told me about, had his death lurking in his eyes, which is why they were beautiful and radiant. I wanted to call myself Guevara but discovered someone else had beaten me to it. Amir al-Faisal said, “We’ll call you Abu Khaled.” Then the Abu Khaleds multiplied. Gamal Abd al-Nasir was the first Abu Khaled because he called his oldest son Khaled, and when he died in ’70, the young men all wanted to name themselves after him, so we were everywhere. I was the first Abu Khaled in South Lebanon, but following the September massacres in Jordan, a wave of fighters fleeing from there swept in and we couldn’t distinguish among all the Abu Khaleds anymore. My name thus became Abu Khaled Khalil, and gradually the Abu Khaled part dropped off. To this day, however, I still turn when I hear the name Abu Khaled, even though I know people have forgotten that’s what I used to be called.

Meat was Abu Ahmad’s only joy. He’d leap onto the supply truck, pick up the meat platter, put it under a tree, pull out the knives, and start cutting it up, singing. He sang to the meat because meat was thefood, as he would say. I despised him. Or not exactly despised him but felt disgust when he would eat raw meat and invite me to join him.

“That’s disgusting,” I’d tell him.

“What’s disgusting is your not eating it. Don’t you know what Imru’ al-Qais said were the three most beautiful things in the world – ‘Eating flesh, riding flesh, and putting flesh into flesh’?” – he’d say, his tongue, extended to lick his lips, mixing with the red meat that he was chewing.

“All our lives, brother, the only meat we ate was string. We used to fight over the string and the little scraps of meat that clung to it. Now we are really eating. Long live the Revolution – the best thing about this revolution is the meat. It’s the Revolution of Meat!”

He’d chew on the raw meat and start preparing maqloubeh. We ate maqloubehonce a month, when the supplies arrived, and Abu Ahmad would put huge quantities of meat on top of the rice cooked with eggplant or cauliflower; everyone at the base dove into the meat of the revolution. Our revolution was rich while our people are poor, that was the tragedy. The problem’s over today – the revolution’s moved on, leaving nothing here in the camp but a consuming poverty. I don’t know if people have gone back to their old habit of cooking meat on a string because I live on my own, and so do you. And I don’t like meat, I prefer lentils and cracked wheat and broad beans, and you like olives.

I know the story. You don’t have to tell me what your mother did with black olives, how she would slice them over bread cooked in the peasants’ clay oven and say they were chicken breasts and that olives were tastier than chicken. I know the story, and I don’t feel like spelling out the virtues of olives again, or talking about the Roman olive tree that served as a shelter during the winter, inside whose huge hollow trunk you’d spend the day before continuing your journey to Bab al-Shams.

As a doctor, I acknowledge the beneficial properties of olive oil, but I can’t agree with your mother’s theory about dentistry. I’m still not convinced by her belief that ground olive pits make a good painkiller for a tooth-ache. A handful of cloves will act as a painkiller, and arak will do the job, but olive pits – impossible! It seems your mother found a solution to her poverty by transforming olives into something similar to Salim As’ad’s little Ekza bottle. No, my friend, olive pits are useless as a medicine, and olive leaves are useless for fumigating houses. Were we – were you – that poor in Palestine? Were we too poor to buy a handful of incense? Was it poverty that made your blind father take dry olive leaves and use them as incense when he led the Sufi devotions every Thursday night? They’d use dry olive leaves for incense: The men would gather around the blind sheikh, who stood in the middle of the circle clapping his hands and saying, “There is no god but God,” and the circle would start to rotate. Then you’d come, carrying a vessel full of dry olive leaves with three lit coals placed on top of them. You’d give the vessel to your father and step back while he’d try to make you join the others – you’d run away and stand at the far end of the room, near the door, where the women were gathered, and you’d watch for a while before leaving quietly. The sheikh would blow on the coals, the coals would ignite the olive leaves, and the incense would rise. The circle would begin revolving faster, and the men would fall down until the tambourine player himself fell to the ground, shouting “Succor! Succor! Madad!”

The smoke blinded you, Father. Your incense wasn’t incense, it was smoke, which blinded you and made you fall down. Your poverty, however, allowed you to transform olives into an entire way of life. You transformed them into meat, chicken, incense, and medicine. Explain to me now, why all this nostalgia for those days of poverty? Why did my grandmother hug her pillow and take such care to change the flower heads she stuffed it with, saying it was the smell of al-Ghabsiyyeh? Have you forgotten how poor you were there? Or do you feel sentimental about it? Or is memory a sickness – a strange sickness that afflicts a whole people? A sickness that has made you imagine things and build your entire lives on the illusions of memory? I still remember the song we chanted at our bases in South Lebanon. Listen to these words and think with me about the meaning of illusion:

Abd al-Qadir pitched a tent

Above the tent were orange groves

Feyadeen I am, my father too

Together, we go out to battle!

Imagine with me how Abd al-Qadir saw his life: He’d become a refugee, so he set up his orange groves on top of his tent and sat underneath singing songs. That’s how we express our nostalgia. We believe an orange grove is just above the tent and that the homeland was an orange grove! We feel sentimental about our poverty and our demolished villages to the point of forgetting ourselves and, finally, dying.