No‘man listened without uttering a word, as though he’d forgotten how to speak.
The Palestinian tried to explain their circumstances and the difficulties of their life and to reassure No‘man that he didn’t want the house but had been forced to rent it because his own house had been demolished.
No‘man stood up and excused himself.
“Stay for lunch — the house is yours,” said the man.
“No. Thank you,” said No‘man, and left.
No‘man didn’t look back, and he never returned. He wrote that he regretted not having gone back. Before, he’d needed to preserve the image of the house in his head, but now that image had evaporated, and nothing was left but the words of his mother that had engraved it in his memory.
No’man said he walked and walked, and then he heard the Palestinian man shouting, so he turned and saw the man running after him, waving something in his hand.
“The key. I forgot to give you the key to the house. Take it, it’s yours.”
“There’s no need,” said No‘man. “We still have the old key in Damascus.”
Dr. No‘man returned to Denmark, the key is still in Damascus, Umm Isa died muttering about the saucepan of zucchini, and her son, Isa, is in Meknes looking for the keys.
Umm Isa used to talk about her son as though he belonged to a different world, as though he were dead, which is what Umm Hassan thought when she heard Umm Isa talking about her son almost as if she were in mourning. Then she found out that Dr. Isa Safiyyeh wasn’t dead — he was living in Meknes, a faraway city in Morocco, where he taught Arabic literature at the university.
He’d been seduced by a woman from Meknes, said Umm Isa. “He met her in New York, where he was teaching, and fell in love. I saw her once when they visited me in Beirut. Damn her, how beautiful she was! Huge eyes and long, smooth black hair, and with something strange about her. She put a spell on him for sure. I know women, and I know that that one had shown him the fish that talks.”
Umm Hassan agreed, even though she didn’t believe in the existence of a magic fish in a woman’s private parts. Also, she didn’t give a damn about “Dr.” Isa, who did his doctoring in literature instead of becoming a real doctor and helping people. But then again, who knows, “maybe our Christian brothers from Jerusalem have a fish we don’t know about.”
“The woman from Meknes took Isa to her country, and they left me by myself in Beirut. Why don’t they come and live with me here? Isa writes to me, but the letters don’t arrive during wartime, and in the last one he said he was collecting keys. God help us, now we’re collecting the keys of the Andalusians! He said the descendants of the people of Andalusia who were chased out of their country and who migrated to Meknes still keep the keys to their houses in Andalusia, and he’s rounding up keys to put on an exhibition and wants to write a book about them. Here, read it, Umm Hassan.”
Umm Hassan’s sight was failing, and she could no longer read, the words looking to her like little jumbled-up insects. Umm Isa asked if she’d read it, and Umm Hassan nodded her head as though she had.
“What do you make of that? He said he wants to collect their keys and write a book! He says we have to collect the keys of our houses in Jerusalem. What do you make of it? Collect our keys, when the doors are already broken!”
Umm Hassan told me the story of Dr. Isa Safiyyeh’s keys when I asked her where I could find Dr. No‘man, since she knows everybody. I told her I didn’t want to collect keys, I wanted to ask him about emigrating to Denmark, but she didn’t believe me. She thought that I too had been struck by key fever and told me that our house in al-Ghabsiyyeh didn’t have a door and wasn’t even a house anymore because the weeds had devoured it.
I’m not interested in keys. That sort of sentimentality doesn’t concern me. I was only thinking about emigrating, and I said Denmark because lots of the young men from the camp have gone there. And I thought of Dr. No‘man because he was a doctor like me. I thought he might be able to get me a job in one of the hospitals over there. But I forgot about it and stayed here.
Umm Hassan said, “Stay in your own house here and forget about keys.”
Can we call these wretched shacks in the camp houses?
Everything here is collapsing, wouldn’t you agree, dear Abu Salem?
DO YOU know, master, where you are now?
You think you’re in the hospital, but you’re mistaken. This isn’t a hospital, it just resembles a hospital. Everything here isn’t itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say house but we don’t live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirut but we aren’t really in Beirut, we’re in a semblance of Beirut. I say doctor but I’m not a doctor, I’m just pretending to be one. Even the camp itself — we say we’re in the Shatila camp, but after the War of the Camps and the destruction of eighty percent of Shatila’s houses, it’s no longer a camp, it’s just a semblance of a camp — you get the idea, the boring semblances go on and on.
You don’t like what I’m saying?
Look around you. It shouldn’t take long to convince you that it’s true.
Let me walk you around the place.
This is a hospital. You are in the Galilee Hospital. But it’s — what can I say? It’s better I don’t say. Come on, let’s start with this room.
A tiny room, four meters by three, with an iron bed next to which is a bedside table on which are a box of Kleenex and a mucus extractor (a round glass instrument connected to a tube). To the left, opposite the bed, is a white metal cupboard. You think everything is white in this room, but in fact nothing is white. Things were white, but now they’ve taken on other colors — yellowish white, flaking walls, a cupboard discolored with rust, a ceiling covered in stains where the paint has blistered and burst because of damp, neglect, and shelling.
A white stained with yellow and gray, a yellow stained with gray, a gray stained with white or. .
You don’t care, but I’m disgusted by the sight. You’ll say I worked here for years and never let on at all that it bothered me, so what has changed?
Nothing has changed except that I’ve become like a patient myself, and a patient can’t put up with such things. As you can see, when a doctor starts to feel like a patient, it’s the end for medicine. And medicine has come to an end, dear Mr. Yunes, Izz al-Din, Abu Salem, or I-don’t-know-what. In the past you were content with all the names people had for you, you’d shrug it off. And when I asked you your real name, you gestured broadly and said, “Forget all that, call me whatever you like.” And when I insisted, you told me your name was Adam: “We’re all children of Adam, so why should we be called by any other name?”
I found out the truth without your telling me. I found it out by chance. You were telling the story when I came to visit and your relatives from Ain al-Hilweh were there. When I saw them I tried to leave, but you told me to sit down, saying that Dr. Khalil was family, and went on with your story.
You said your father had first wanted to call you Asad. Lion. So you would have been Asad al-Asadi, Lion of the Lions, and everybody would have been terrified of you. He did name you Asad but changed his mind after a couple of days because he was scared of his cousin Asad al-Asadi, a village notable who’d indicated displeasure at his name being given to the poorest of the poor in the family. So he named you Yunes. Jonah. He chose Yunes to protect you from death in the belly of the whale, but your mother didn’t like the name, so she chose Izz al-Din and your father agreed. Or so the woman thought, and she started calling you Izz al-Din while your father was still calling you Yunes. Then he decided to put an end to the litany and said that the name Abd al-Wahid was better. He started calling you Abd al-Wahid, and you and everybody else got confused. In the end, the teacher at the primary school didn’t know what to do, so he went to the blind sheikh to clarify matters, on which occasion the sheikh pronounced his theory on names: “All names are pseudonyms — the only true name is Adam. God gave this name to man because the name and the thing named were one. He was called Adam because he was taken from the adeem — the skin — of the earth, and the earth is one just as man is one. Even after his fall from Paradise, Adam, peace be upon him, gave no thought to the matter of names. He called his first son Adam and his second Adam and so on until the fatal day, until the day of the first murder. When Cain killed his brother, Abel, Adam had to resort to pseudonyms to distinguish between the murderer and the murdered. So Gabriel inspired him with the names he gave to every Adam in his line so things wouldn’t get mixed up and the names get lost.”