Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“Don’t tell me they were your comrades because we both know they had nothing to do with you.

“I waited for you to give me the feeling that my life was real. Can you believe it? I lived my life without being convinced it was really life? Maybe everybody feels that way, maybe all our lives are like mine, I don’t know. But I’m exhausted.”

The seventh Nahilah said she was afraid.

“I’m getting scared now. Noor will get married, and Salem and Mirwan will go to work every day in Mr. Haim’s garage, but what will become of us?

“I’m afraid for your children. I don’t know how they’ll live. I don’t understand them. They live these things as though they were ordinary things and this reality as though it were the only reality. Do you know what Salem said? That he was going to open a garage in Deir al-Asad. I told him Deir al-Asad wasn’t our village, and he laughed. He said he dreamed of going to America. And Noor, how lovely she is! She’s going to get married, and the younger children are in school and I’m afraid for them. You’ve never really been interested in them. You only ask about their health. You don’t care about their studies or their future. Do you think they’ll wait for you, their lives suspended in a vacuum like mine was waiting for your Saladin to put things back the way they were? Things will never go back to the way they were. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying. . I have Israeli citizenship, of course, and I vote for the Arab Communist party for the Knesset, and I attend the meetings and demonstrations, in an attempt to preserve what’s left of our land.

“I told the interrogator that they were like an isolated fortress from the days of the crusades, they were destined to fade away.

“I told him we’d paid the full price and had been destroyed. ‘You’ve taken us to the bottom, and beneath the bottom there’s nothing. You’ll go down with us – we’ll show you around down there, and you’ll taste the fire that burns us.’

“Don’t misunderstand me, Yunes, but I want to assure my children’s future. I want them to build houses, and find work, and marry, and live. I want the illusions to end, I want. .”

He didn’t let her finish the sentence.

Yunes understood that she didn’t want him anymore, understood that she was tired of him and his journeys through the unknown. He understood, and at that moment, he discovered that he’d talked about his journeys over there more than he’d actually gone on them, and that his life, too, was like a daydream.

He said she was his life.

He said, “You and the children, you are my life. I don’t have any life without you.”

He said that he didn’t know, that it was the revolution.

In the days of ’69, Yunes entered a new phase of his political life. He joined Fatah and became an official in its Western Sector as well as a member of the Southern Lebanon Sector Command Office.

He told Nahilah that hope had reappeared, that he couldn’t abandon everything and come back to live with them.

“No, no. I’m not asking you to come back!”

He said he’d thought about it, but what could he do here? How could he earn a living? He said he didn’t know a trade and only knew how to live the way he had, but he understood their situation and was there for them, completely.

“I’m here for you,” he said.

Nahilah smiled but didn’t say anything.

Silence fell.

Time passed slowly and came between them like something solid and unmoving. Yunes tried to break the silence, but the woman’s silence stretched in all directions. He’d listened to her and deep down he knew it was true, life had slid past him, without even approaching.

“I swear I didn’t. .”

He didn’t complete his sentence and felt the urge to sleep. If only sleep would come and take him from here to there. Sleep was everywhere. The village was sleeping, the trees were sleeping, and Yunes sat in silence in Nahilah’s arms.

Nahilah broke the silence. She said Salem was going to be workshop foreman in Mr. Haim’s garage and Mirwan was going to work with his brother and learn from him. She said the third boy, Ahmad, was very good in school and wrote poetry, and that Salma helped in the house and was excellent in English, and that the little ones, Saleh and Nezar, were still little.

“Listen, Yunes,” said Nahilah. “I want to open a garage for Salem here. Do you have three thousand American dollars to help us?”

“Three thousand!” he said in a hoarse voice. “Me put together three thousand?”

“Never mind. We’ll manage. I just wanted to ask you. Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage as we’ve managed before. I shouldn’t have asked, I know you’re not a profiteer, but won’t you come to Noor’s wedding? Of course you won’t come, but the groom’s insisting on the horse. His family says he’s going to arrive on a purebred Arabian horse and kidnap Noor from in front of the house. It’s their custom, and Noor loves him. I’m sure she loves him. They were together in school, and now he works in Acre and plans to move there.”

Nahilah told Yunes that the details of life are ordinary and meaningless but had to be taken care of. “Why don’t you say anything? Why are you so silent? I swear to you, I don’t want anything. I just wanted to get things off my chest and talk. Who do I have to talk to? Before your mother died, God rest her soul, I used to talk to her, but do you think that was easy? When I told her I was going to look for work, she went berserk, and when she saw me in the house studying Hebrew with the children, she trembled with irritation. Your mother lived her life in a world that wasn’t connected to the real world. I had to remind her all the time who we were and what misery we were living in.

“How can I tell you about her?

“Poor woman, she didn’t know how to calm your father, or how to make his last days easier. She told me he was at the end and that we had to help him to get to the end. Your father was stubborn. He used dust for his ablutions, had no idea where he was anymore, and talked with his sister. Why his sister, I don’t know. He’d say something to her, and I’d think he was addressing me, so I’d answer him, and he’d avert his face and say, ‘You keep quiet!’ Your mother told me about his sister who died giving birth to her first son. It was as if his mind had been wiped clean of everything, and all that was left was his sister. He’d even mistake his wife for her. She’d order him to do something, and he’d obey. Your mother would say to me, ‘See how it is at the end, daughter. The wife turns into the sister and the son into the father, and everything’s all wrong.’

“And you – when will you become my brother? Let’s become brother and sister. That way I can tell you everything, and you can tell me everything. A man can’t say everything to his wife, and a wife can’t say everything to her husband, but a brother and sister can.

“Come on, speak to me.

“I know you’re upset now. I know I shouldn’t have told you all these things, but what you don’t know is that I’m not upset with you. I swear I’m not. When they announced you’d died and become a martyr, I came back from the prison to the house and put on a funeral that had no equal. I wept every last tear from my body and smeared my face with ashes; I was an exemplary widow. The Israeli interrogator who summoned me a month later said I could be a movie actress. What the interrogator didn’t know was that I wasn’t acting. In my heart I was convinced I’d become a widow, that you were no longer my husband.

“The military investigator didn’t know I wasn’t acting. We’ve been acting for more than twenty years, to the point of taking on our roles and resembling them more and more each day. You’re acting over there and I’m acting here. God, it’s funny.

“I’m laughing. Why aren’t you?

“You’re playing your role, and I’m playing mine, and life is draining away.

“Tell me about yourself. Tell me how you live, how you manage, how?

“Me, I’ve managed to get by through acting. I played the role of a widow and it was well-received, and I played the role of a hero’s wife and that went over even better.

“And you, what role do you play over there?

“Did I tell you about the case I brought to the Israeli courts when they refused to register your children in your name? Only Salem and Noor got registered, the others didn’t. I brought a case and appointed an Israeli lawyer, Mrs. Beida, and we won. Before Mrs. Beida, I commissioned an Arab lawyer from the Shammas family in Fasouta, but he failed; he wasn’t able to prove you were alive. The Israeli lawyer turned the whole thing upside down. She asked them to prove you were dead, which they couldn’t do either. The only thing they had to show was the military communiqué in which ‘saboteurs’ announced your martyrdom, which is a valueless document as far as Israeli judicial practice is concerned, because Israel doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of ‘saboteur’ organizations, so she forced them to issue a judgment in favor of registering the children. This has been my biggest victory here. We forced them to register the children in the name of a man they are pursuing and whose existence they didn’t acknowledge. Only on that day did I feel you were my husband, but the feeling faded quickly. How happy I was that day, but you had no idea. How could you have known? You only would come by when the mood struck you, and by the time you finally came, the news was stale. Did I already tell you all this? I don’t remember if you ever told me a story as good as mine.

“The story’s over now. I’m in my forties, and my life’s changing. I’m getting ready to be a grandmother, and that’s enough. Shouldn’t that be enough to make me unhappy? I feel like weeping all the time, and my tears flow for no reason. My face is going numb, my shoulders hurt, my whole body is falling apart. I feel as though I’m separating from my body, and I’m alone.”

Yunes ate a last mouthful, which went down like a knife in his stomach. He put his hands on his legs folded under him and said that he was going to leave again.

“Where to?” she asked him.

“Lebanon,” he said.

“No.”

She took his hand, left the full plates and the pot of tea, and led him to the cave of Bab al-Shams. She took off her clothes and stood in front of him, waiting. Yunes didn’t dare look at her naked body, ignited by desire. She came over to him and started removing his clothes while he stood there, motionless. It was the first time that she initiated things; he felt as though he’d become her plaything, and his virility had disappeared. She made him lie on his back and she spread her hair and breasts and body over him, and when the water of heaven spurted from her, she began to cry.

She got up and put on her clothes; the first threads of dawn’s light had started stealing into the cave, and she told him to wait.

She returned at noon.

She returned with a banquet – kibbeh nayyeh– a meat pâté – with a topping of hoseh– soft cheese, tomatoes, and a bottle of arak.

She set the food aside, heated some water and bathed him. He was like a small child in her hands, playing around in the water, incapable of issuing his usual orders or of making remarks about how hot or cold the water was. She took him to the open space inside the cave, which became a bathroom, ordered him to take off his clothes, bathed him with water and bay laurel soap, dried him and dressed him in fresh, dry clothes. Then they sat down together at the table.

He poured two glasses of arak, drank from his glass and asked her to do the same.

She said no.

She said she didn’t like arak. In the past, she’d only drunk to keep him company. She didn’t like the smell of arak and the scent of aniseed that wafted from his mouth, especially when he slept with her.

“I used to drink so I wouldn’t smell it.”

She said she didn’t like arak and didn’t want to drink any.

He was taken aback. “What? You don’t like arak?”

“I hate it.”

“And all these years you drank it?”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“All these years you’ve been drinking something you don’t like!”

She nodded.

“I don’t understand anything.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t want to say anything?”

“What is there to say?”

Indeed, what was left to say, after she’d said everything beneath the olive tree? She’d told him she didn’t want him anymore, what more was there? His mind was clouded with only one thought: how had she known? How had she intuited that from now on his visits would be difficult, few and far between? Southern Lebanon was now full of fedayeen, the country was under constant Israeli bombardment, and the borders were almost impossible to cross. To cross the border now required fighting an entire battle. And then there was his age. The war had stolen years from his life, and now he was too old. He was in his late forties and his body was no longer a docile instrument that complied with his desires. He wasn’t able to cover those long distances any longer. She didn’t know what had happened this time. He’d arrived at the cave at night but didn’t go to her right away, as he usually did. He’d felt weak and decided to rest a little before knocking on her window. But, in fact, he fell asleep, awakened at ten the following morning, and spent the day in the cave, waiting for nightfall so he could go to her.

How had she known?

Women just know, thought Yunes as he listened to her. She’d known his visits would become intermittent before stopping, so she’d made her decision. She wouldn’t be an abandoned woman; she’d choose her new life deliberately. And now she tells him she doesn’t like arak!

Had she forgotten how he’d drunk arak from her mouth? And how after eating she’d washed her hands with arak? Or had she been putting on a show for him, as she had for the military interrogator, the village, her children, and everybody else?

She said she’d prepared this banquet to make up with him and ask him to forget the garage, the dollars, and her stupid requests. She regretted what she’d said the day before, because he was her husband and the crown of her life. She knew this was the only way he could live and was proud of him; she understood that people have to live their lives as they find them.

We walked the steps that were written for us,

And the one whose steps are written must walk them.

“You know,” she said, “even after your father had forgotten almost everything and had started living with his sister’s ghost, he never forgot his classical poetry. Whenever I wanted him to dig up something from the back of his mind, I’d start by saying the first half of the first line, and he’d sit up straight and recite the two lines without missing a beat, and I could see the words rising up from the well of memory that the years had filled in. His voice would regain its strength, and he’d recite with me:

Your errant heart from love to love walks

Never shall the first be worn away

Many a dwelling you shall make your own

But the love for your first home nothing can sever. ^*

You’ve taken your path, and I’ve taken mine. But you’re my husband, and I’m your wife. Please, I beg of you, forget what I said yesterday.”

Nahilah said she’d spoken that way because she was afraid for Noor who was about to get married – “May God protect her!”

Nahilah apologized. She said the black veil that had been fogging her vision had lifted. And Yunes, what did he say? Did he explain how difficult the situation actually was in the south? Did he apologize for all those years? Or did he say that he was trying to survive and create a country out of the rubble we call history?

He didn’t speak. He drained the last drops of arak from his glass, drinking without quenching his thirst, and let the drink take him. The image of the hero eclipsed the image of the lover, and one story led to another. He spoke of the prisons and the training camps. He spoke of operations in the Galilee panhandle and of the young men the bases were overflowing with and how they rush headlong into death.

He spoke of the Return. He said he’d return with the others. “The nation is not a prison. We shall not return as abject prisoners.” And he told her of the revolution he’d been waiting for since the day the Sha’ab garrison had been disbanded and all its members flung into prison. It was near, and he couldn’t abandon it.

^*Verse from a poem by Abu Tammam (9th century).

HE SPOKE and spoke and spoke.

And Nahilah returned to him. She returned to him with every word he spoke, and he could see it. Her face was radiant, her eyes shone, and her hands took the little pieces of bread and transformed them into bite-sized morsels of kibbeh nayyehthat she fed to him.

He asked her about Hebrew and if it was difficult.

Of all the things the woman had said, the man picked up only on the question of language. He knew that Palestinian children in Israel learned Hebrew in school, and he knew that his own children were just like the others; but he wanted to talk about his children, so he asked about the language.

Nahilah smiled and said, “ Echad, shtayim, shalosh, arba, chamesh, shesh, sheva, shmone, tesha, eser.”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“Guess.”

“It’s Hebrew.”

“Right,” she said. “Hebrew’s like Arabic. Arabic spoken like a foreign language, if you like, but you have to put in a lot of ch’s and sh’s. That’s how I learnt it. The first thing I learned was the numbers, and then I got so I could understand almost all the words. But the children are much better, God bless them. They speak Hebrew better than the Jews.”

She said the language was easy. “The easiest thing is learning their language.”

He said he was afraid the children would forget their own language.

“That’s their problem,” said Nahilah, meaning it was the Israelis’ problem, not the Palestinians’. “They don’t want us to forget our language and our religion because they don’t want us to become like them.”

Yunes didn’t understand what she meant and started talking about the relationship of the children to their history and their heritage, saying that this relationship could exist only through language. He talked a lot, blending together literature and religion and everything else.

She said he hadn’t understood her.

“Listen and try to understand. You don’t know anything. Try to listen to things the way I tell them and not the way you imagine them in your head. When I said it’s their problem, I meant it’s the Jews’ problem: We can’t abandon our language because they don’t want us to do that. They want us to remain Arabs and not to assimilate. Don’t worry; they’re a closed, sectarian society. Even if we wanted to, they’d never let us.”

When you told me, Father, about Nahilah’s theory of language, I thought of Isa who wanted to gather the keys to the houses in Andalusia. I wanted to say that we haven’t yet understood the fundamental difference. The Castilians didn’t persecute the Muslim Arabs and the Jews simply to throw them out, for no expulsion, no matter on how large a scale and how effective, can drive out everyone. The Castilians imposed their religion and their language on the Andalusians, and that’s why their victory was definitive; that’s why al-Andalus was assimilated into Spain and that was the end of the matter. Here, on the other hand, our keys aren’t the keys of the houses that were stolen; it’s the Arabic language. Israel doesn’t want to make Israelis out of us, it’s not imposing its religion or its language on us. The expulsion took place in ’48, but it wasn’t total. Our keys are with them, not with us.

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to lose the thread of Nahilah’s story through digressions, as often would happen.

When I used to ask Yunes about Nahilah, he wouldn’t object or refuse to answer. He’d start to answer, then enter the labyrinth of peripheral stories, and Nahilah’s story would get lost.

On that occasion, I didn’t mention my theory about the keys because I was afraid for the other story, but the other story got lost all the same.

He spoke to me about Hebrew and then fell silent.

“And so?” I asked him.

“And so here we are.”

“What happened there, in the cave?”

“I returned to Lebanon, and we built bases in the south.”

“What about her?”

“Noor got married and Salem opened a garage and. .”

“Did you visit her after that?”

“Of course, often. Anyway. .”

Oftenand anywaywas his only response.

“And the cave?”

He didn’t tell me about the cave even though he talked a lot that day. He discussed the children’s problems and the revolution, which had started to spread throughout Jordan and Lebanon. The two of them talked at length and laughed easily, he would drink and she would fill his glass.

“You’re like a bride,” he told her.

After he’d finished eating, he was overcome by sleepiness. She covered him with the blanket and gazed at him, her eyes brimming with desire.

“Now?” he asked, and cleared a space for her on the mattress.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“I’ll sleep for a bit,” he said.

“You sleep and I’ll clean up the cave.”

“Wake me in half an hour.”

She let him sleep and left. But before he went to sleep, she repeated her invitation with her eyes and he repeated his smile asking if he could sleep for half an hour. She went into the corner of the cave and washed the dishes, and when she came back found him sleeping deeply, so she left him and went home.

When Yunes woke up he didn’t find her, and the shadows of evening were spreading over the hills. He found himself filling his water bottle, packing his bag and squeezing into it the two loaves of bread Nahilah had left, and setting off for Lebanon.

Did he go back to see her after the night of the Roman olive tree?

He said he did, but I have my doubts. Yunes’ life changed a great deal at that time. Once the revolution grew into an institution resembling a state, Yunes became part of that State. He went abroad as part of the official delegations, phoned his family from various capitals, then became a member of the Fatah Regional Command in Lebanon. His days filled up, especially after the massacres of April 1970 in Jordan and the transformation of Lebanon into the Palestinian Resistance’s only refuge following the migration of leadership from Amman to Beirut.

Yunes became part of that huge machine and ceased to be the wandering fedayeen fighter of old, shifting between the Ain al-Hilweh camp in the south and the Shatila and Burj al-Barajneh camps in Beirut. All the same, he was different from the others. He was not seduced by wealth like the majority of the Palestinian leaders; he remained a peasant, as he had been and wanted to remain.

Yunes tried to reconcile his new life with his convictions. It may be that he didn’t often succeed, but he preserved his image as Abu Salem, the Wolf of Galilee, who knew the country as no one else did and who had a story like no other.

Was it in that period that his legend began?

I don’t know because I didn’t know him then. Well, I knew him, but I was young and I couldn’t take things in and grasp their significance. I got to know him well from the beginning of the seventies, by which time he’d become a legend. I got to know him as the man who plants his children in Galilee and fights to liberate them.

All the same, I ask myself as I stand here beneath the rain of images covering the bedroom walls, did the legend begin when the story ended? Did he start telling people about Nahilah at the very moment he stopped visiting her?

I don’t know.

He said he continued his visits over there until 1978, when in March the Israelis occupied part of southern Lebanon in which they established a dependent ministate to which they gave the name of the State of Free Lebanon. It was just a narrow strip of Lebanese territory that formed a buffer zone between the fedayeen and the settlements of Galilee, which had been exposed to bombardment by Katyusha rockets.

He said the occupation made it impossible to slip across the border, and he began contacting Nahilah and his children by telephone. He spoke to me often of his journeys, and of the three little Nahilahs that were born in Deir al-Asad: Nahilah, the daughter of Noor; Nahilah, the daughter of Salem; and Nahilah, the daughter of Saleh.

He said he would phone all his Nahilahs, that he received their photos by way of a friend in Cyprus and that he lived with them without seeing them; he lived with the photos. “The phone doesn’t let you do it, Son. What can you say on the phone? On the phone you can only speak in generalities and clichés. Phone talk isn’t talk.”

UMM HASSAN suggested I send you back over there, and then she died and left me alone with you.

Come to think of it, what do you suggest, Father? There’s me, you, and this huge number of pictures hung on the walls of your house. The pictures, I swear, have put a spell on me. They’re amazing: smiling girls, boys holding themselves stiffly in front of the camera, and a woman looking into the distance, as if she were gazing at you – waiting for you.

Your life is coming to an end with photos. And what about me? What shall I do with them after you die? I mean, God forbid, I don’t want you to die, but if God decides to reclaim what’s His – after a long life – what do you want me to do with the photos? Should I return them to your children? Should I bury them with you? Or should I leave them as they are for whoever comes to live in your house to throw out with the trash?

I don’t know.

But I won’t be sending you back over there. Even supposing I wanted to send you back, I wouldn’t know how, and I don’t know if the Israelis would allow it.

And besides, why all the fuss?

Why don’t your children ask about you? Did Amna tell them you’re dead, and did they already have a funeral for you over there, and was that the end of the matter? Or have they forgotten about you, has the image of the man who knelt and kissed them one by one been wiped from their memories? Or was everything cut off after Nahilah died?

You didn’t tell me about the eighth Nahilah.

The eighth Nahilah is thewoman, Father, and I’m prepared to make changes to the numbering because I know you love magic numbers. So, let’s throw out Nahilah number six according to our previous classification and call the Nahilah of the Roman olive tree Nahilah number six, and that makes the Nahilah of the flower basket the seventh Nahilah, the last.

You didn’t tell me about that Nahilah. You only said that Salem told you all she was interested in was flowers.

“Her senility’s expressing itself through flowers,” said the son to the father he didn’t know.

“What’s all this about flowers?” the man asked his wife from his hotel in Prague, where he was visiting the city with an official Palestinian delegation.

“There’s nothing to it. I like flowers and your son makes fun of me and says I’m senile.”

After having left his job in Haifa, your son opened his own garage in the village. Business was good, and soon his two brothers, Mirwan and Saleh, went to work with him. Ahmad graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a master’s degree in Arabic literature and is now preparing his doctoral thesis on the work of Ghassan Kanafani. Nezar is working with Noor’s husband as a contractor. Noor is well, except her husband suffers from kidney stones, but the doctor says that his life is not in danger. Salma, the pretty one, is working as a teacher in al-Ramah and none of her flock of suitors has yet found grace in her lovely green eyes.

Why didn’t you tell me about the Nahilah that you haven’t seen again?

About the woman with the blazing head of white hair who had taken to carrying around a small basket into which she put flowers and little folded scraps of paper on which she wrote the names of those she loved. She’d mix up the flowers with the scraps of paper, warning her grandchildren that she’d put a black mark next to the name of anyone who annoyed her.

That was the game she played with her grandchildren. They’d visit her and she’d spill the contents of her basket onto the ground and ask them to play the basket game with her, and they’d open the scraps of paper and read out their own names and the names of their mothers and fathers, as well as your name, all of your names.

Nahilah believed the basket was her family, and when they brought her back from the hospital to the house, and she was in the throes of the disease, she gave the basket to Nahilah, Noor’s daughter, and asked her to leave only three Nahilahs in the basket, because Old Nahilah was going to die. She asked Noor to change the flowers once a week, and each time, she was to change the little scraps of paper with the names written on them.

“Keep the names safe, Daughter, and don’t you dare stop writing them and putting them in the basket. This basket keeps the names safe from death.”

She took the scrap of paper with her name on it out of the basket and tore it up, and the next day she died.

Don’t tell me now about Nahilah’s death; I’m not here to listen to sad tales. I’m here to tell you I won’t send you back over there. I’ll bury you in the camp, in the mosque that’s been turned into a cemetery where the young men are buried. Your story will come to an end there, Father. I won’t tell little Nahilah that she has to tear up your names and take them out of the basket. I don’t believe that little Nahilah has kept up the tradition, for we forget our promises to our dead; we keep them for a few days, and then we forget. I’m sure little Nahilah has forgotten the basket she inherited from her grandmother among her toys, that the basket of flowers ended up like my grandmother’s pillow, and that mold will find the scraps of paper on which the woman wrote the names of the ones she loved.

Your Nahilah was careful to rewrite the names when she changed the flowers in the basket. She’d toss the old flowers under the Roman olive tree, burn the names, and replace them with fresh flowers and rewrite the names on new little scraps of paper.

Where are the women?

Where are the two women who used to come?

Where are the friends and comrades?

Where is everyone?

No one.

You are dying now, and there is this no one around you. You are dying in calm and in silence. I make you up as I please and I make myself up in you, I see what you have seen and what I haven’t seen myself, I speak of a country I’ve never visited – a country I entered a few times at night with the fedayeen but never really could see. You told me it was like the Lebanese south, flat and overlooked by low hills, and that it was the epitome of a warm and tender land, which is why it had been ideal for Christ. You can’t imagine Jesus Christ without Galilee. This land resembles him and is fitting only for strangers, which is why they call it Galilee of the Nations. The Jews fled to Galilee after the ruin of their kingdom, and we remained in it after the ruin of our history.