Tell me, what came over you?

Fill me in.

Whenever I ask you what happened, you start mixing events up, jumping from month to month and from village to village, as though time had melted away among the stones of the demolished villages. My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart, and I understood nothing. I never was able to understand why our village fell or how.

I can understand my grandmother, I can forgive her her pillow that reeks of decay. But you, you who fought in ’36, who took part in all the wars, why don’t you know?

Do you want me to believe my grandmother, to lay my head on her pillow of dried flowers and say, “This is al-Ghabsiyyeh”? Do you want me to be like her and close my eyes? Her only son came back, and she didn’t see him at all. She was standing under the olive tree, undoing her hair and swaying in sorrow, when her son, my father, came back carrying a sack of vegetables, but she didn’t see him. The boy, who had just slipped through a shower of bullets, grasped his mother’s dress, and the two of them burst into tears together, she because she’d lost him and he from seeing her weep that way.

I won’t tell you about my father who died in a heap on the threshold of his house. They assassinated him and left him there. I didn’t see it myself. My mother and his mother were there, and when I see him now it’s with my mother’s and my grandmother’s eyes. I see him dying in a pool of his own blood like a slaughtered lamb, and I see white.

But no, it didn’t happen that way.

The sky fell to the earth, my grandmother told me, describing the terrible exodus into the fields. The sky fell to earth, the stars turned to stones, and everything went black.

Tell me about that blackness. I don’t want the usual song about the betrayal by the Arab armies in the ’48 war — I’ve had enough of armies. What did you do? Why are you here and they’re there? And why did fate finally bring us together now?

I won’t go back as far as Ain al-Zaitoun because our story begins where the story of Ain al-Zaitoun ends.

That was on the night of May 1 of ’48. You’ll never forget this date because you tattooed it with a piece of smoldering iron onto your left wrist. On that day Ain al-Zaitoun was wiped out of existence. The Israelis entered the village and demolished it house by house. It’s as though it had never been. Later, they planted a pine forest on the site of the village.

Where were you on May 1?

I know you were organizing the defense of Sha’ab. You had been summoned by Abu Is’af and you’d gone, not expecting an attack on the village. The sacred jihad battalions were reorganizing themselves after the volunteer Arab Liberation Army, led by the Lebanese Fawzi al-Qawuqji, decided to enter Galilee.

Suddenly the village was overrun and destroyed; you couldn’t find it.

As you were coming home, with your English rifle slung over your shoulder, you saw Palmach men everywhere but you didn’t do a thing; you didn’t fire a single shot. You took a bit of iron, heated it in the fire and scratched the date on your left wrist. Then you ran off to the fields, heard how the village had fallen, and swore vengeance.

Ain al-Zaitoun marked the major turning point of the war in Galilee. On the night of May 1, 1948, a Palmach unit with mules carrying ammunition advanced on Ain al-Zaitoun via the hill of al-Dweirat, which overlooks the village from the north, and from the hill the Palmach men rolled barrels of explosives down onto the village.

Umm Suleiman said, weeping, that they’d killed your father.

In the olive grove, you saw their forlorn wandering ghosts. You grabbed Umm Suleiman by the shoulder, but she didn’t stop. She kept going, and you kept trying to catch up with her.

“Umm Suleiman, it’s me, Yunes,” you yelled.

Then she turned around and saw you, but she didn’t stop. She said, “They killed your father. Go look for your mother and your wife up ahead.”

You took off running and spotted your mother and Nahilah in the crowd. Drops of salty sweat mixed with your tears as you searched for your son. You got close to them and saw that your mother was leading the blind sheikh and Nahilah was walking next to them, carrying the child.

You walked beside them and didn’t say a word. You didn’t ask about your father’s death because you could see he was alive. You’ll tell me you were lost, mistaking the living for the dead and the dead for the living. Everything got tangled up, and you spent years after this first great disaster, the Nakba,^* trying to draw a line between the dead and the living.

Your father didn’t die. Umm Suleiman was mistaken, and you didn’t ask about it. But when you reached Sha’ab and the Khatib family house, you tried to discover what had actually happened. Upon seeing Umm Suleiman sitting in the doorway of the mosque with her hands clasped like a young schoolgirl, you told her that the sheikh hadn’t died, and she looked at you as though she didn’t know you. People began gathering in the courtyard of the mosque and Hamed Ali Hassan arrived.

Hamed Ali Hassan’s clothes were dripping with blood when he reached the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab. Hamed was in his early twenties with green eyes like those of his dark-skinned Bedouin mother. He left the village when he’d found himself alone with bombs exploding around him.

Hamed Ali stopped in the courtyard of the mosque and said that Rashid Khalil Hassan had been killed.

“We went back,” said Hamed. “We were six young men from the Hassan family. We wanted to get the money buried in the courtyard of our house. Rashid was the first to enter the village: He was hit by a bullet in the neck and fell. Bullets rained down on us from all sides, and we were driven off. We have to go back to bury Rashid.”

He sat down. Your mother ran over and gave him some water. No one else moved. No one got up and said, “Come on. Let’s go get the body.”

They were in the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab, wrapped in their astonishment like ghosts in long black mantles.

It was there that you found out what had happened.

On the morning of May 2, the armed men withdrew from the village and people were penned up inside their houses, trapped by the gunfire. When the Palmach soldiers arrived, they ordered the people to gather in the courtyard of Mahmoud Hamed’s house.

Umm Suleiman had hid in the stable near her house, then finally decided to join the others in the courtyard, carrying a makeshift white flag.

“What can I say, Son? We were standing there, and they were firing over our heads. We started to crouch down, some of us kneeling, some squatting, some lying flat on the ground. Then Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar stood up. His wife was beside him, and she tried to pull him down, but he stood. He raised his hands as though surrendering, but the firing didn’t stop. Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar went toward the soldiers, bearing the seventy-five years of his life on the shoulders of his huge body.

“‘I want to say something. Listen to me.

“‘We surrender. Our village has fallen, and our men are defeated, and we surrender and expect to be treated humanely. Pay attention now. We are captives, and you must treat us the way captured civilians are treated in wartime. We’re not begging for your sympathy. We are requesting it and will repay it. If you treat us well, we’ll repay your good deed with many more. Tomorrow, as you know, Arab armies will enter Palestine and we’ll defeat you and then we’ll treat you as you treat us today. It would be better for you that we come to an understanding. I have said what I must, as God is my witness.’

“A young officer approached Yusef and slapped him across the face. Then he pulled out his revolver and fired at Yusef’s head, and the man’s brains scattered over the ground. None of us moved. Even his wife remained kneeling. Then the soldiers chose about forty young men and drove them ahead of them, and after they disappeared from sight, we heard firing. They killed the young men and then drove us like sheep toward the valley of al-Karrar, where we gathered before setting off toward Sha’ab.”