“I started holding conversations with my son without realizing what I was doing. He became part of me. Even after Nahilah delivered our second son, Salem, and in spite of all the problems associated with the birth, we never forgot the clothes game.”
Yunes said he somehow knew.
“I was in Lebanon, hiding out at Nezar al-Saffouri’s house, God bless him, when I had that dream. I dreamt I saw Nahilah mourning my death. I saw myself lodged in the pit of al-Birwa, and Nahilah was standing at the edge of the pit trying to get me out, weeping. I was telling her to go back to the house, I don’t know how I was speaking because I was dead, or how I was able to see into the pit where I was, but I saw my pajamas.
“It was five in the morning and raining heavily. I got dressed and decided to go to Deir al-Asad. The dream had frightened me a lot because I had it more than once. I awoke in a panic, put on my clothes and set off. At Nezar’s house, I remembered I was seeing the dream for the third time, each time repeated detail for detail. The two times before, I’d seen it in prison and thought it was a hallucination caused by the torture, because in prison you become incapable of distinguishing between sleeping and waking. That morning I got up in a panic and heard the slosh of the rain, and I decided to go. I thought it was my father, that the old man had died and I had to go. I don’t know; when I thought of my father’s death, I felt relief, even though I’d grown to love the blind sheikh in his last days. But a father’s death comes quietly.
“Nezar al-Saffouri also awoke in a panic, tried to stop me from leaving, and said they’d kill me this time, that I’d never be able to stand the torture. I was worn out after three months in prison. I don’t know where they held me — I was in an underground vault, in darkness, damp and cold. I only saw the interrogator’s face once. The cold got into my body, and the pain, the pain of cold bones, crushed me from the inside. When cold gets into your bones, it turns you into solidified bits of agony. It was as though my skeleton had turned into shards of ice inside my body.
“You know, I used to hope I’d be beaten because it was my only way of getting a little warmth. I’d look forward to the beating huddle and rush to it. They must have noticed how I enjoyed the warmth while they were punching and kicking me, so they decided to do something different.
“I was laid out in the middle of the beating circle, with three men above me kicking every part of my body, while I rolled among their feet, unseeing. Just the boots, the boots above my cheeks and eyes. The interrogator came in, and the boots withdrew from my face. They stood me up — I couldn’t do it on my own — and one of them propped me up against the wall with his arm around my neck while the other started hitting me on my mouth with a chain wrapped around his fist, and the floodgates of pain opened. I remember the interrogator’s voice as he told me to swallow. I spat and gagged, and the man held my mouth shut with his hand to force me to swallow my shattered teeth.
“The Lebanese interrogator spoke to me in a fake Palestinian accent as though he were making fun of me, and he threatened me. Then he said they were going to let me go, and they knew everything and God help me if I tried to cross the Lebanon — Israel border again because they’d make me swallow all my teeth.
“I listened but didn’t answer. No, not because I was afraid of him, really. I just couldn’t talk without my front teeth.
“Nezar took me to a dentist, a friend of ours, who put in a temporary bridge and advised me to rest for a month before he put in a permanent one.
“Nezar didn’t ask me why I was wearing a torn shirt; his only concern was to stop me from going out. I told him I wouldn’t be long but that I had to go, and I set off. That day I was wearing the torn blue shirt I’d been wearing in the dream of the pit of al-Birwa. I found the shirt in the bottom of my pack — I’m the only man in the world who lives out of a bag: I put all that I possess in my bag, and it goes wherever I go.
“I won’t describe how I got there, because you’d never believe me. It’s true the distance between southern Lebanon and the village of Tarshiha in Galilee is short and you can do it, walking, in four or five hours, but in those days it took about twenty hours because we had to avoid the Israeli patrols. I don’t remember how, but I flew. Now, as I’m telling you the story, I see myself as though I weren’t walking — no, I swear I was moving over the ground as though I were skating, and I arrived at noon.
“I went to my cave at Bab al-Shams thinking I’d wait until evening and then go to the house, and I found her there, waiting for me.”
“You’re too late,” she said.
Yunes didn’t hear and didn’t see. Nahilah stood with her back to the entrance of the cave. The cave was dark, and the sunlight splintered against his eyes so he couldn’t see a thing. A wavering shadow appeared and what looked like bowed shoulders.
She said she’d spent the whole night waiting for him.
She said she wanted to die.
She said she had died.
And her words blended into her moans.
“She wasn’t weeping,” said Yunes. “I didn’t hear sobbing or screaming. I heard moaning like that of a wounded animal. I went to her. She shook me off and fell to the ground. Then I understood, and I started to rip up my shirt.
“She whispered, ‘Ibrahim.’ Silence and the madness of sorrow struck me, and I heard a low moaning coming from every pore of her body.
“I tried to question her but she wouldn’t reply. I sat down on the ground and reached out to her shaking body, but she moved away. She opened her mouth to say something, and a grating, gasping sound emerged, as though she were in her death throes.
“Poor Nahilah, she stayed that way for more than a year. For a year her eyes were swollen with unspilled tears. Her milk dried up, and Salem, our second son, almost died.
“To tell the truth, I couldn’t understand her behavior. Is it possible for a mother to lose her instincts, to refuse to let her second son live, as though she wanted him to join the first?
“Her milk dried up, but she went on feeding Salem as though nothing were wrong, and my mother didn’t notice. The child wept night and day. She would give him her breast, and he would fall silent for a while. Then he would start crying again. My mother finally discovered the truth when he wouldn’t stop crying even as he was nursing.
“Do you know what my mother did?
“She stole the child. She snatched him away and took him to Umm Sab‘, Nabil al-Khatib’s wife, and asked her to suckle him and keep him with her. My mother was afraid the old story would happen all over again, and my children would die just as hers had.
“Poor Nahilah. Mothers, my friend, are really something.”
I didn’t ask you then what you did, and how you bore the death of your son that you so resembled. “You look like him,” Nahilah used to say, when she found you sad in the cave because she hadn’t cooked you mihammara and kibbeh nayyeh. She said it wasn’t just your features and clothes but also in the way you moved. This would make you laugh, and you’d accept the dish of leftover food she’d brought from home after hearing the tap of your hand on the kitchen window.
I didn’t ask you because this time you seemed like someone who was just telling the story. You told me how you’d spent two months in the wild out of fear for your wife. You tried to calm her down and told her that Salem had to stay with Umm Sab‘ so he could survive. She would speak disjointedly and say your mother was a liar, that her milk hadn’t dried up, that she was going to die. You spent two months wandering in the woods, going to see her three times a week, and taking her to Bab al-Shams.
After staying with her for two months, you went back to Lebanon because the temporary bridge the dentist had given you was starting to crumble. You wanted to forget: More than a year went by before you returned to Galilee. You told me you were delayed by your various preoccupations and that you were getting things ready for the first groups of fedayeen, but I didn’t believe you. I believe you fled because you had no solution. A wife on the edge of madness, inconsolable, what could you do? You fled as men always do. Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there’s a refusal to face up to life.