“The last time they arrested him, the Israeli officer who notified him of the expulsion order told him he was absent when the census was made after the establishment of the State, so he was considered an absentee.
“‘Well, here I am, Sir. I was absent and now I’m present.’
“‘No,’ said the officer. ‘The absentee is not entitled to be present.’
“‘But my wife and children are here.’
“‘Take them with you if you like.’
“‘But it’s my village.’
“They tied him up and threw him out at the Lebanese border. He returned to the camp. He stayed about a year, then disappeared again, and we discovered they’d thrown him across the border into Gaza, and we tied ourselves into knots getting a plane ticket from Cairo to Beirut. Five times he went in and stayed, and five times he was thrown out. The sixth time was the clincher.
“It was in 1957, the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice. My wife was busy cooking, and the smell of kibbeh nayyeh filled the house. He looked at my children and his face ran the gamut of emotions. ‘Let’s go to Tyre,’ he said. I left my wife and my children that day and went with him because I knew him, and I knew nothing could stop him. We went to Tyre, from there to the al-Rashidiyyeh camp, and from there to the house of Ali Shahada from al-Ba’neh. Ali Shahada, who worked as a smuggler, asked for a thousand Lebanese lira to get him to Tarshiha. And a thousand lira in those days was no joke; it was five times the monthly income of a fish-shop owner like me. My brother agreed and said he’d pay over there. Ali, however, asked to see the money before he did anything, and my brother pulled a huge amount of money out of his back pocket, showed it to him, and gave him a hundred lira, saying, ‘Here’s a feast present for your kids.’
“‘Let’s go,’ said my brother. ‘We’ll eat lunch first and rest a little.’
“‘Then we’ll leave right at sundown,’ said Ali.
“He slaughtered a rooster for us, and we ate it with rice, drank coffee and chatted. As soon as the sun began to set, my brother, Hamad, set off with the smuggler, Ali, and I went back to Beirut.
“My brother reached his house and stayed there. Thirty years after all this, he got me a permit to visit Tarshiha, and there I found Hamad, living among his children and his children’s children. I told him, ‘This isn’t Tarshiha: Our land doesn’t belong to us anymore, and our house isn’t ours any longer’ — Hamad was living in the house of Mahmoud Qabalawi, whose family live in Burj al-Barjneh today. He told me our house had been demolished along with all the houses in the lower square and that Salmeh had had no choice but to live there. ‘I moved in here, but you can tell Jaber, Mahmoud Qabalawi’s son, that I haven’t changed a thing in their house. When they come back, they can take it, and God bless them.’
“‘But it’s not Tarshiha, Hamad,’ I said to him. ‘The Jews are everywhere.’
“Hamad reached his house and stayed a week with his wife before he was seized and deported to the Lebanese border. Before he reached the border checkpoint, he took off his Swiss watch and offered it to the Israeli soldier. The soldier hesitated, then took the bribe, and left Hamad on his own.
“My brother returned and was arrested again. He was convicted as a saboteur, getting eighteen years. He spent nine of those in prison, then they let him out after a series of remissions for good behavior. They didn’t know what to do with him because he refused to go to Lebanon — he said he’d rather stay in prison. So they sent him back to his house in Tarshiha.”
Tell me, Yunes, why didn’t you go back for good?
Why didn’t you ever try?
Were you afraid of dying? If you say you were afraid they’d liquidate you, I’ll understand, but then don’t talk to me about the struggle or the revolution or any of that.
And now, tell me, what will you do when we’ve got everything fixed and you’re born again? Will you lead a new life, or will you return to your old migratory life?
I hear your voice emerging from low-pitched moans. Why the moaning? Your body temperature’s normal, everything’s tip-top, your heartbeats are more regular than those of a young man; knock on wood. But tell me, if we could run life backwards, who would you prefer to have been — Yunes or Hamad? Or would you prefer a third option, going to Canada, for instance? What do you think — emigrate and leave the whole thing behind?
I know you can’t answer. That’s why I can ask you so freely, I’m not obliged to defer to you in anything. I know what you’d like to say, but you don’t, and that’s much better.
Tell me, what should I tell Zainab?
Should I advise her to stay here or encourage her to travel to her son in Germany? Should I promise her that things will get better for the hospital or promise her that her village, Saffouri, will be reborn from its ashes?
I’ll tell her to do what she wants.
I see Zainab now for the first time, it’s as though for all those long months I’d looked right through her. And now, after she’s told me how she was wounded at Tal al-Za’atar, her name is no longer “the crippled nurse,” as I would call her to myself; her name is Zainab, Zainab the nurse. Good grief, how long do we need to wear our names for them to become ours! Zainab became Zainab because she told her story. True, she’s leaving soon, and true, she informed me when her work here came to an end, and true, if I’d known earlier things would have been different. But that’s the way it is. A human being only reveals his name at the moment of departure or, in other words, when the name becomes his shroud. We wrap him in his name and bury him. Now I understand the wisdom of the photos that fill our lives: The victims of the massacres have no names and no shrouds. Their bodies are covered with lime and insecticides before being thrown into a common grave. People disappear because they have no names, they are reduced to numbers. That’s the terrifying thing, my son, numbers are the terror. That’s why people carry pictures of their dead and their missing, and use them as a substitute for names.
Zainab is not convinced.
She says everything I’ve done for you was for nothing. If she only knew! But she doesn’t want to listen to the story from the beginning, plus I no longer have the energy to tell it. If Zainab had come and listened to your story, she’d have understood I wasn’t wasting your time and mine but was buying time and history, for you and for me.
Yes, my son and master, yes.
I’m here because I was under the influence of Shams. I thought I’d flee her ghost and her revenge. I wasn’t afraid of real revenge — that one of her family would come and shoot me. No, I was afraid of her.
Your death came and rescued me. You made me a doctor again, you brought me to live with you here in the hospital, and you allowed me to recover my desire for life. Yes, I was incapable of living. The air that entered my lungs felt like knives. I’d feel ants burying themselves in my face and would get dizzy. In clinical jargon, it’s called the onset of nervous collapse.
When Shams died, everything inside me died. I became a corpse, and things lost their meaning and taste. Life became unbearably heavy. It was as though I were carrying my own corpse on my back. Who can carry the sack of life when it’s filled with forty years of desolation? Who would have the courage?
Amna came, and she told me about you. By the way, where is she now? She vanished, like all your women. This means we’ve entered the dangerous period, for when the women vanish, it means the end is near. Women only run away when life is extinguished.
Amna left, followed by all your other women. No one remains but me in this collapsing place. There are cracks everywhere — cracks in the walls and cracks in the ceiling; it seems everything is on the verge of collapse.
But I’m not afraid. Everything’s collapsing, but I’m here and I’m not afraid.