Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“I don’t want to hear such stories,” said the teacher, leaving.

But Alia went on. She said her mother still remembered Salim Nisan, the Jewish cloth seller who came to Teitaba before it fell and said, “Muslims, don’t go anywhere! We’re all in the same boat!” The cloth seller had originally been from Aleppo. He carried his goods over his shoulder and went through the Arab villages selling without getting paid. He carried a big ledger in which he recorded debts, and people paid what they could – a jerry can of oil, a dozen eggs, and everyone loved him. He’d go into people’s houses, eat their food, and flirt with the women; his sixty years made him seem like an innocuous old man. He’d laugh and tell jokes, and the women would surround him laughing and choose their cloth.

Alia was astonished when her mother told her that a number of the women of Teitaba crossed the border to pay him what they owed.

I didn’t ask Alia how the women of Teitaba knew where to find Salim Nisan once the border between Lebanon and Palestine had become a reality.

I listened to the story as one would to a love story, and I didn’t ask Alia for the details of the meeting between the women of Teitaba and Salim Nisan.

“We helped Salim Nisan out and that teacher won’t help Khaled Shana’a out. Is that any way to do things?”

COME, LET’S get back to our story and ask what that young man, my father, who was one of the first members of the fedayeen groups to initiate the struggle against Israel, wanted by working in Mina al-Hesn. Was he drawn to his enemies? Were they his enemies?

Today the Durziyyeh family lives in Israel. I found that out from my aunt’s husband, who told me, as he was telling me about al-Ghabsiyyeh, that he’d gone to see them in Haifa and had visited Simon at his falafel and humus restaurant. Simon had been gracious to him and had asked him about the circumstances of my father’s death.

What did my aunt’s husband have to do with Simon Durziyyeh? Did he also work in the sheet-metal factory with my father, or did he visit him there to see how he was doing, or what? I don’t understand a thing anymore! My aunt’s husband said Simon took him on a tour through the whole of Palestine and that he visited Tel Aviv and Nahariyyeh and Safad and was amazed at everything he saw, to the point of almost believing he was in a European country.

Is it true, Father, that they’ve created a European country?

I’ve tired you out, and I’m tired too.

I’ve told you story after story, but my mother’s secret remains a secret. The only thing I got out of Samya’s mysterious letter was that she’d gotten remarried and had gone to live with her husband in Ramallah, where she discovered that he was already married. And that she became a nurse.

That’s all.

Catherine came half an hour ago. Do you remember her? The French actress I told you about? She said she’d got in a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Galilee Hospital. When he told her there was no such hospital, she explained that she wanted to go to Shatila. The driver was reluctant, but she paid him ten dollars so he brought her to the door of the hospital, muttering under his breath.

I ordered a cup of Turkish coffee for her, and she drank it down in one gulp, wrinkling her face because the coffee burned her tongue. She sat in silence and then asked me why people hated the Palestinians. I didn’t know what to say. Should I have told her about the fragmentation caused by the Civil War? Or say what Nahilah said to the Israeli officer: “We’re the Jews’ Jews. Now we’ll see what the Jews do to their Jews.” I don’t agree with these phrases we use so easily every day. I can understand Nahilah because she was over there, where a Palestinian finds himself face to face with a racism like that toward the Jews in Europe. But not here. We’re in an Arab country and speak the same language.

Catherine said she’d decided not to act in the play, that she’d feel ridiculous if she did. She asked my opinion.

She said she was afraid, and that they had no right. Then she burst into tears.

I wanted to invite her to dinner and talk with her, but she said she couldn’t play this role because that much horror couldn’t be put into a play.

Why did Catherine come to my office and then leave?

These questions are unimportant, Father, but our whole life is composed of unimportant questions that pile up on top of one another and stifle us.

I want to rest now.

I’m getting tired of talking and of death and of my mother and of you. I want to lay my head on the pillow and travel wherever I wish.

But please explain the secret of my father’s death.

My grandmother told me they were wearing civilian clothes, and my mother said they were soldiers. And what do you say?

Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?

IT’S UMM HASSAN.

She came to the hospital to visit you three weeks before she died and said you had to be taken back there.

She came into the room and looked at you out of the corners of her small, sharp eyes. I was sitting in this eternal chair I sit in, and she gestured to me. “What?” I asked, and she put her finger to her lips and made me follow her out.

In the corridor she spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. When I asked her why she was talking that way, she said, “So he won’t hear.”

“They can hear. I know them,” she said.

She talked about your planet, which no longer resembled ours. She said you were in torment and mustn’t be disturbed. “Talking’s no good anymore, my son,” she said. “He has to be taken back over there.”

Umm Hassan took me into the corridor and whispered that it was necessary to take you back to your country.

“How terrible!” she said. “He’s become like Aziz Ayyoub. You can’t let him die alone here.”

She said you were in this state because you refused to die alone. “Shame on you, my son, shame. The man spends his life over there and you want him to die here, in this bed? No, no, impossible. Get in touch with his children.”

I told her I didn’t know how to get in touch with his children in Deir al-Asad. She said I should contact Amna, that she would know what to do. I told her Amna had disappeared. She said she knew where she lived in Ain al-Hilweh and would go to her and come back with your children’s telephone number so we could contact them and organize your Return.

“He has to die there. It’s a sin. I know him. He’ll never die here.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and said you were like Aziz Ayyoub, who died hanging from the branches of the lotus tree.

I told her Aziz Ayyoub had committed suicide and there was no basis for comparison.

She said no. “Saints don’t commit suicide. They killed him to get rid of him.”

“But he wasn’t causing any problems, so why should they have killed him?” I asked.

“You don’t know anything,” she said. “They killed him by hanging him from the tree, and if it hadn’t been for God’s wisdom and the tree’s kindness, people would’ve thought he’d committed suicide. I didn’t see him, Son, but people told me: His eyes were open, the rope was around his neck, and he was lying on his back like a piece of wood, like this Yunes. No, Son. A man can’t die among men. A man needs a woman to die. Women are different, they’re stronger and can die on their own if they want to. But a man needs women so he can die. Aziz Ayyoub died that way because he was alone. His wife left him and took her children to Lebanon. I don’t understand why he lived that way. He said he was the guardian of the tree and of the mosque and of the graves, and he couldn’t abandon them. Who’s guarding the tree now? God is its guardian. I went there and I saw how the tree guards the whole of Galilee. The tree is the guardian, so why do we guard it? And this Yunes, Abu Salem, look at him. He’s shrinking and becoming a child again. Look at his face and eyes. His face is the size of a child’s palm, which means he wants his mother. Why are you keeping him here? Don’t you see how he’s shrinking? Take him to his mother, my son, and let him die in her house. Tomorrow I’ll go to Amna and get their telephone number and we’ll send him back. I know him better than you. He was a stubborn man; we called him ‘the billy goat.’ When he came back from over there, he stank like a billy goat, and we’d know Yunes had come back. How that poor woman could stand it I don’t know. A woman is a deep secret.”

Umm Hassan placed her hand over her mouth to hide her smile, then she drowned in laughter. When I say drowned, I mean it: She fell into her choked-off, silent roar of laughter, and her white headscarf slid onto her shoulders. Suddenly, she put her scarf back on, lowered her hand, and wiped away her smile.

I told her Nahilah would bathe you the moment you arrived at the cave of Bab al-Shams.

“Alas!” she sighed, turning her face away as though to close the subject.

I told her about the cave and about the village you built inside the caverns of Deir al-Asad. She said she knew those caves, which opened their mouths like ravening animals, and knew that no one ever went into them. “Those caves are haunted, my son.”

She told me about the goat that got lost in one of the caves of Deir al-Asad and reappeared in Ramallah.

“It’s the truth, Son. In Ramallah. And it was white. Its hair had turned white as though it had seen something terrible.” She said people had seen strange things in its eyes, so they shot it dead and no one dared eat its meat. “And now you come along after all this time and tell me that Yunes lived in those caves and used to bathe there. No, my son. I know better. He’d take her into the fields. Who told you about the caves? Yunes would go to his house, tap on the windowpane and wait for her. She’d come out and follow him, and he’d take her to the fields, and that was where those things happened. Not in the cave. Impossible.”

I told her that it was you who’d told me about it, and I tried to explain how Nahilah had fixed up the cave, how she’d brought mats and the mattress and the wooden chest and the primus stove and so on, but it seems it’s impossible to convince Umm Hassan of anything she thinks she already knows.

Then I understood.

This is your secret, Father. Your secret is your obscurity. Your secret is your multiple names and your mysterious lives. You are the Wolf of Galilee, and why should the wolf reveal his secrets? You yourself chose the name Wolf: You told me you wanted to be a wolf so the wolves wouldn’t eat you. You were a wolf enveloped in its secret. No one knew your secret or penetrated Bab al-Shams, which you made into a house, a village, a country.

I told Umm Hassan that the Ramallah goat resembled my mother. Najwah seemed to have disappeared down a tunnel from here to there. She disappeared from Beirut only to appear in a hospital in Ramallah wearing her white nurse’s outfit.

“No, my son, no,” said Umm Hassan.

“What could your mother do in the face of your grandmother’s madness? It was Shahineh who destroyed her, and all the people of the camp were witnesses. After the death of your little sister, the life of your mother became hell. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, was an excellent woman, but she was the reason. Was Najwah responsible for the death of your father? She didn’t know anyone here, she was from Tira, near Haifa, and had come on a visit to Lebanon. Your grandmother sunk her claws into her and managed to persuade her father to give his daughter to her son, who worked in that workshop that stank of scandal and filth. She wouldn’t let her touch anything in the house. She’d do the dishes, and the old woman would come along, sniff the dishes and the pots, and wash them again. She’d mop the floor, and your grandmother would mop it again behind her, cursing the filth. Your mother, my son, is no Ramallah goat; your mother is an unhappy creature, God help her. Her family must have truly tormented her to make her agree to marry the Bedouin and live with him in Ramallah.”

“The Bedouin! What Bedouin?” I asked.

“Yes, the Bedouin. Abu al-Qasem had come to Amman and saw her at Ashrafiyyeh Hospital, where she worked, so he went to her family and asked for her hand, and they agreed right away without asking her because her stepmother wanted to get rid of her.”

Umm Hassan said that in Ramallah, Najwah found out that the Bedouin was married to another woman, and she lived in misery and humiliation. The Bedouin married her and then regretted it because his first wife, who was also his first cousin, turned the whole clan against him, so that Najwah became a sort of secret wife, which was why she was forced to work in the hospital.

I asked Umm Hassan how she knew all this.

She said that everybody knew.

“But I didn’t know.”

“The husband’s the last to know.”

But I’m not her husband, and I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone tell me about my mother? When I’d ask my grandmother, she’d shut down, locking her face with the key of silence. I had to wait for that mysterious letter from Ramallah to know, and still I didn’t know. I tore up the letter, I lost Samya’s telephone number, and I lost the name of the Bedouin in Ramallah. Even Umm Hassan didn’t know the Bedouin’s name even though she knew everything. She told me about my uncle Aziz and about his days and nights in the ruins of al-Ghabsiyyeh. “He lived alone for more than twenty years, dividing his time between the tree, the mosque, and the graves. He’d stand in front of the lotus tree, talking to it and listening to it. He knew everything because the tree used to tell him. When people came from the surrounding villages to visit the tree, he’d disappear. He wouldn’t talk to them or go near them. They’d see him like a distant ghost wrapped in the shadows of his white mantle. They’d greet him and he’d respond with a nod. They’d bend over the roots of the tree and light their candles before tying their strips of cloth and ribbons to the branches and departing.”

I told her that he’d committed suicide, that he was mad: “Who could live alone for twenty years and not go mad?”

Her face lit up, seemingly in agreement, but then she said, “No, no, Son. He’s a saintly man; people make offerings to him and call his name when praying for their children.”

But I’m tired of saints and heroes and wolves. My father’s a hero and you’re a wolf, and I’m lost in the middle. I see my father’s death in yours and in your newfound childhood I see his. It’s very strange! I see you both, but I don’t see myself, it’s as though I’m no longer here and everything around me is unreal, as though I’ve become a shadow of the lives of two men I don’t know. It’s true, I don’t know you. You I know only through this childlike death of yours, and him only through a picture on a wall. Even Shams, Shams who I loved to the point of wanting to be her assassin, Shams whose vengeful ghost I fear, seems to be no more than the ghost of that woman who disappeared and became a white goat in a hospital in Ramallah.

I can’t believe Umm Hassan and her saintly Aziz Ayyoub, or my grandmother and the evil spell that was the cause of my father’s murder. Instead of telling me about the first fedayeen in whose ranks my father died, Shahineh told me about the cave and its curse.

Shahineh would contemplate the photo of the dead man; she’d wipe it with water to keep it fresh and would talk about the cave of al-Ghabsiyyeh.

She said she’d known that Yasin would die and that a woman was going to kill him.

“May God curse me,” she’d say, “I married him off and thought nothing of it. I was terrified by the business of the rabbi, so I married him to that girl from Tira. I paid no attention to her eyes. Her eyes had something of that fear I saw after the business with the cave.”

My grandmother said it was called Aisha’s Cave. Aisha’s Cave is to the north of the village, on the high ground that separates al-Ghabsiyyeh from al-Kabri.

My grandmother said that my paternal uncle, Mohammed Abdallah Ayyoub, was a religious scholar and a Sufi, and he had power over the djinn. “One day he sent his son Mahmoud and a boy called Sa’id with my son, Yasin, to the cave, telling them, ‘When you arrive, read this paper. A black dog will appear. Do not fear it, for it is possessed by the djinni that rules the cave, and watch out if you’re afraid!’”

My grandmother said Mohammed Abdallah Ayyoub wanted to test the three young men in preparation for their initiation into his Sufi circle.

“At the cave, it happened as he had said, for as soon as Mahmoud had finished reading the paper, the black dog appeared. Mahmoud was afraid and started to run. The dog struck him with its tail, knocked him down and then pounced on him. In the meantime, Sa’id and Yasin managed to get away. Then we don’t know what happened. Mahmoud had a fever for three days, and when his temperature went down, he left his father’s house carrying a stick. He knocked on the first door he came to, and when they opened it, he rushed at the people and beat them with the stick. He was like a madman. No, he had truly gone mad. He kept going from house to house beating and smashing until the men of the village managed to tie him up. He was sent to the insane asylum in Acre. I don’t know what the Jews did with him after the fall of Acre. During those days, people forgot themselves and their children, so how could they remember the insane? We were living in apocalyptic times. We rushed about in the fields to save our skins, but not one of us was saved, not one.

“I saw death in the eyes of my son. Yasin came back from the cave utterly transformed. I saw death hovering over him and knew he was going to die. And when he married Najwah, I saw death in her eyes, but somehow I took no notice, God curse us human beings. I saw death, but I wanted to release him from those rumors that clung to him after the incident of the Greek boy and the rabbi. So I decided to get him married and paid no attention, and he died.”

This is how things become linked in the mind of a senile old woman. The whole business of the cave is meaningless. Fantasies, Father. Fantasies, Son. We invent stories of our misery and then believe them. We’ll believe anything so as not to see. We cover our eyes and set off, and then we bump into each other.

Umm Hassan believed the story of the cave never took place and that my grandmother was crazy, persecuting my mother for no reason and forcing her to run away into God’s vast world.

But Umm Hassan knows that God’s world is narrow and that “eventually, all men meet.”

My mother fled from Beirut to Amman and then from Amman to Ramallah. She disappeared as completely as if she’d gone into your cave, dear friend. Which reminds me: Tell me about the cave. Umm Hassan said the Deir al-Asad cave was uninhabitable, so where’s the Bab al-Shams you spoke about? Where is that village that stretches through interlinked caves, “a village that’s bigger, I swear, than Ain al-Zaitoun,” as you used to say? “I proposed, ‘Come on, let’s look for caves in Galilee and bring back the refugees. A cave is better than a tent, or a house of corrugated iron, or banana leaf walls.’ But they didn’t agree. Members of the Organization said it was a pipe dream. An entire people can’t live in caves. They told me to go look for caves for the fedayeen and I saw the sarcasm in their expressions, so I didn’t look. I arranged my cave for myself and by myself and lived in it.”

Do you want me to take you back there, as Umm Hassan suggested?

“Go to his house, Son, and look. You may find their telephone number. Call them. Call his children, and they’ll work things out through the Red Cross.”

I don’t think Umm Hassan’s suggestion is practical. I’m not selfish, and it’s not that I’m afraid. To hell with this life. Whenever I think of you, I feel eyes boring into my back, eyes saying I’m scared. No, I’m not scared. Does Umm Hassan think I haven’t tried to contact your children? Do you remember that first day, Father, when Amna came to tell me of your fall? That same day I asked her to contact your children, and she did. She said she did.

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.”

I didn’t ask what nothingmeant. Nothing means nothing.

She said nothing, and I didn’t comment. At the time it never occurred to me that you might live. Being sure you’d die, I didn’t think of sending you over there. What for? I don’t believe they want you anymore. This is what things have come to.

In describing your other planet, Umm Hassan told me you could see God.

“Pay attention, my son,” she said. “Pay attention to his movements. We may learn something from them. People like him see God.”

“How’s that, Umm Hassan?”

“I don’t know, my son, but I’m sure of it.”

She told me about an old woman in Acre that she’d known before everything happened. Whenever the woman awakened from her stupor, she’d tell people of strange things, and then they’d happen. “It was like she saw God, my son. I was there, training as a nurse, and this woman, who was halfway between life and death, would fall unconscious for a few days and say these strange things when she awoke. For instance, she’d say that so-and-so’s husband was going to die. The man’s wife would be nearby and would laugh it off, but when she went home, the prophecy would turn out to be true. They all started to fear her; her children and grandchildren sat around her deathbed trembling with fear, and they only relaxed when she died – as if a stone had been lifted from their chests. To tell you the truth, Khalil, I think they killed her. They were scared of her cottony words, her quavering voice, and her white hair. I think one of them smothered her with a pillow because she turned blue in death. But I didn’t say anything. I returned to the village, dying with fear. And I’m telling you now, this man, Yunes Abu Salem, is in the same place. Take him back home and let’s be done with it.”

CAN YOU hear me?

What’s happening to you?

You know, you’re really starting to look like Na’im, Noor’s son. I know you’d rather look like Ibrahim, your first son and your twin, but unfortunately you don’t look like him; you look like one of your grandsons. When I went to your house I saw a picture of Na’im. I was shocked, it was as if I were seeing you in front of me! I didn’t go to your house because of Umm Hassan. I did search for the telephone number out of curiosity though, but didn’t find it. No, I went for the pictures. And there I saw you the way you really are. What a setup, my dear friend! Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. The first room for guests, with a traditional carpet spread on the floor, three sofas, a small table, a radio, a television and a video player, and one photo on the wall. I went up to the photo and saw a group of children circled around an old woman. It’s her, I thought. I moved closer because I couldn’t distinguish the features. Their features were almost obliterated, as though time had wiped them away – or not time, the photographer. The photographer had taken the picture from a distance in order to get that throng of twenty-five children around the woman into the frame. The result was a crowd of indistinguishable children. I smiled at them. You don’t know them; to you they’re just numbers and names, these grandchildren of yours whose names you won’t tell me. Wait, you did tell me about Nahilah No. 2, Noor’s daughter; you told me you loved her particularly. Which one is she?

I WENT INTO the bedroom, and there I saw them all. It’s like a studio. Seven photos frame to frame on the wall and, above the bed, a large photo of Nahilah. An amazing number of small photos of children of various ages hung on the other wall. A world of photographs. A strange world. I don’t know how you managed to sleep amid all that life.

Tell me, did you sleep?

During the long nights of the Lebanese civil war, when there was no electricity, did you light a candle in your room and see them transformed into shadow puppets flickering on the walls?

Weren’t you afraid?

They frightened me, those photographs. I entered your bedroom in the early evening. The clock said five and it wasn’t dark yet, but there wasn’t enough light. I tried the switch – no electricity. I seemed to be floating with the photos in the dark. I went up to them, one by one, and discovered your secret world, a world of photographs hung from the cords of memory. The photographs seemed to move. I heard low voices emanating from the walls and was afraid.

Where did all those photos come from?

When you went, did you go for Nahilah or for the pictures?

Tell me how you could live with their pictures. How could you restrain yourself from going to their houses and breathing in their smells, one after another?

I hear laughter in your eyes, you’re telling me you did see them. You had gone into the house and kissed them one after another. It was the day that your father, the blind sheikh, died.

During that terrible winter of ’68, the likes of which Galilee hadn’t seen for a hundred years, Yunes arrived at his cave in the pouring rain, exhausted and soaked. The wolf arrived at his cave covered in mud and with every part of him knocking against the other. He lit a candle and searched for dry clothes in the caverns he’d made into his home, and all he could find were a shirt and a wool sweater. He undressed, put the dry clothes on over his wet body, and left the cave. He headed to the right, behind the hill that hid his cave from the village, and ran into the masses of mud that were sliding down with the rain, forming torrents of mud and water. He fell into the torrent, swallowing a lot of mud before getting back on his feet and continuing on his way. He reached his house, gave his three knocks on the window, and left. But she ran after him, grabbed him by the arm, and led him into the house he hadn’t entered for twenty years. The blind sheikh was laid out on the ground, dying. He saw his mother beside the sleeping man, whose mattress had been placed on the floor. When his mother saw him, a sort of scream emerged from deep inside her. She stood and opened her arms, tried to go toward him, doubled over and sunk down again onto the floor. Yunes went up to her and kissed her on the head. She took him in her arms and squeezed him, and the water started to run off him. The mother wept while the water dripped from his clothes, and Nahilah stood there.

“Now you come?” said the mother.

Nahilah took him to the bedroom, undressed him, dried him with a large white towel, wrapped his naked body, and fetched hot oil and rubbed his back, his belly, and all his limbs with it.

“You’re going to get sick,” she said. “What made you come?”

She rubbed him with the hot oil and left him to bring dry clothes, and when she returned she found the water exuding from his pores. He was naked, he was shivering. Droplets of water oozed from his limbs – water streamed onto the floor, a man enveloped in water as though it dwelt in his bones. She dried him again and told him how the blind sheikh had fallen into a coma three days before and how they’d given him nothing but a few drops of water dripped into his mouth, and that since the evening before he’d been shaking with fever.

Yunes left the room, drops of water clinging to his feet, and approached the prone man. He bent over Ibrahim, kissed him and left, saying nothing to his mother, who was reciting verses from the Koran, her eyes drifting in the emptiness.

Yunes returned to his cave, he was hungry but could find nothing to eat. He sat alone smoking. Then she came. She was wrapped in a long woolen blanket dripping with water that gave off a smell of mold. Nahilah cast the blanket aside and sat down. She said she’d brought him three boiled eggs, two sweet potatoes, two pieces of bread, and an onion. He took the food from her and devoured it. He’d tear off a corner of the bread, stuff it with onions, sweet potatoes, and eggs, and swallow the whole thing without chewing. By the time she’d made him his glass of tea, he’d polished off the lot. She told him the man had died and that she was tired and was going to go back to help his mother prepare for the funeral.

She stood up, wrapped herself in the woolen blanket, and bade him farewell. He grabbed her by the waist, threw her to the ground, and made love to her. At the time, Nahilah didn’t understand why he’d behaved that way. She’d come with the intention of bringing him food, informing him of his father’s death, and returning. He’d listened to her weep for his father without shedding a tear himself while he was busy eating. And when she got up to go, he threw her down on the soggy, musty blanket, and took her. He was like an animal mounting its mate. He was like he’d been in the beginning, an ignorant kid who didn’t know how to love. On that stormy night he mounted her. Nahilah tried to refuse, but he was on top of her. She tried to move so he could penetrate her, but he came. In an instant, the hot fluid spurted and spread across her dress. She tried to get up, but he clung to her neck and broke out into loud sobs. She stayed motionless and cradled his head, and his sobs grew even greater. “Let me go, my love,” she said. “I have to go to your mother. The poor woman’s alone with the dead man and the children.”

Instead of moving aside and letting her go, he hung on to her. His body covered her entirely, his chest on her chest, his belly on her belly, his feet on her feet. She had to shove him several times before she succeeded in freeing herself. She got up, straightened her clothes and departed, swathed in the damp blanket. Nahilah couldn’t understand how he’d lain with her without her removing any of her clothes. He hadn’t penetrated her, she thought on her way back through the black night spotted with drops of rain the size of cherries.

At eleven the next morning, the sun was wrapping itself around the hills of Deir al-Asad and spreading itself over Galilee. The procession moved off from the house of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Asadi toward the mosque. After the prayer, they carried the bier to the village cemetery. The men walking behind the bier, which was raised up to the height of outstretched arms, bent their heads, covered with their white kufiyyehs, as they tried to avoid the mud and the puddles, and kept up a loud buzz of prayers.