“Forty aging men and women who refused to leave their houses was all that was left in al-Birwa, plus a young man named Tanios al-Khouri, who wanted to stay with his uncle, the village priest. Later he was killed when the Jews came back to occupy the village.
“The shelling started and no one knew what was happening because they found the Israelis in the village square, but there was no sign of the ALA. The Jews started blowing up houses and then asked everyone to assemble in the square. They discovered that there were only old people, the priest, and his nephew left in the village. Tanios had been helping his uncle in the church and was preparing to join the order himself, and when the village fell, the priest dressed him in a black cassock identical to his own, and they joined the others in the square.
“An Israeli officer came forward and took the youth by his hand, dragged him out of the crowd and ordered him to take off his cassock. The youth hesitated a little, then took it off under the officer’s steely gaze and stood trembling in his underwear. The July sun struck their faces, the dust spread over the village while Tanios trembled with cold. The priest tried to say something, but the shots tore over their heads.
“The officer ordered Tanios to walk in front of him. He walked until they reached the sycamore tree at the edge of the square. There the officer fired a single shot from his revolver. Returning to the little clump of people, he ordered them to get into a truck. Everyone rushed toward the truck; not even Father Jebran looked back at his dead nephew. But before the priest reached the truck, he fell, striking his head on a stone. He started bleeding, and the blood seemed to rouse him from his stupor. He stood, or tried to stand, staggering as though he were about to fall, and then regained his balance. Instead of continuing his dash for the truck, he turned and walked back to the tree, where he knelt and started to pray.
“The truck took off, and no one knows what happened to Father Jebran. He wasn’t seen again. He didn’t catch up with everyone at al-Jdeideh, and no one saw him at the village of Kafar Yasif. Maybe he fell near his nephew. Maybe they killed him. We just don’t know. Some say he went to stay with the Shufani family (who were distant relatives) in Ma’aliyya, where he changed his name and stepped down from the priesthood.
“The old people were dumped at Kafar Yasif, and the priest disappeared.
“When the Israelis entered al-Birwa, they blew it up house by house. They didn’t take our clothes and rags. They were like madmen. They blew up the houses and began bulldozing them; they trampled the wheat and felled the olive trees with dynamite. I don’t know why they hate olives.”
Actually, why do they hate olives?
You told me about Ain Houd and the peasants they chased out of their village, which was renamed En Hud. The peasants wandered the hills of Jebel Karmal, where they built a new village, which they named after their old village.
You were telling me about them because you wanted to explain your theory about the secret population that stayed behind over there.
“I wasn’t the only one,” you said. “We were a whole people living in secret villages.”
You told me how the Israelis changed the original village into an artists’ colony and how the peasants live in their new, officially unrecognized village with no paved streets, no water, no electricity, nothing. You said there were dozens of these secret villages.
And you asked yourself why the Israelis hate olive trees. You mentioned how they planted cypress trees in the middle of the olives groves at Ain Houd, and how the olive trees were ruined and died under the onslaught of the cypresses, which swallowed them up.
How can they eat without olive oil? We live on olive oil, we’re a people of olive oil, but them, they cut down the olive trees and plant palm trees. Why do they love palms so much?
“Poor little Tanios,” Nuha’s father went on. “They killed him right in front of us, and God, what a sight he was. He arrived in the square all puffed up in his uncle’s cassock. The uncle was short and fat, but Tanios was tall and slender. Tanios went out with the priest, in his short cassock that ballooned out like a ghost. We could see his legs, covered with thick, curly black hair. He had to take off the cassock and was shivering as he walked; then we heard the fatal shot and everything went dark. Sweat filled our eyes, and we could hardly see — when you’re scared, you sweat an incredible amount. Sweat was dripping into our eyes, and Father Jebran wiped the blood from his forehead. He knelt in front of his nephew’s body under the tree, made the sign of the cross over the thin young man, then stretched his arms out under the tree as though he’d become a tree himself or as though he were crucifying himself against the air, while the village collapsed.”
Tell me, Yunes, how, why, did you believe Mahdi? Did you have to believe him?
We shouldn’t have believed him, you’ll say. “We believed him because we had no choice at the time. Only the priest suggested reconciliation with the Jews, but who could guarantee that it wouldn’t turn out with us as it did at al-Kabri? The priest said he’d be the guarantor, but he wasn’t even able to save his nephew’s life.”
Nuha, who told me the story of al-Birwa, wouldn’t accept this. Nuha was different from Shams and would only allow me a small peck on the corner of her mouth, whose taste I’d steal as I listened to the endless story of al-Birwa.
One time she said she’d seen the rags in a dream.
Another time she said that Father Jebran had put the cassock on Ahmad Yasin, the grain measurer, who hadn’t withdrawn with the others because he wanted to steal one of the harvesters the Jews had left behind on the threshing floor, and that the officer recognized Ahmad and ordered him to take off his cassock and killed him. And that the priest didn’t go back to the body under the tree but that an Israeli soldier pushed him and he fell and his head was cut open, so they dragged him away and killed him as well as Ahmad. And her grandmother, who witnessed the scene, swears that Father Jebran didn’t have a nephew named Tanios and that the young man disguised in the cassock was the son of the grain measurer.
“Al-Birwa, it’s gone,” said Nuha. “All I see are the shadows of the houses drawn in my grandmother’s eyes.” This grandmother was the cause of all their trouble. “She turned my father into a stone. She killed him, killed everything inside him. Like all the mothers who kill their sons, out of love. I lived with him. He lay there in our house like a stone.”
Nuha said her grandmother walked and walked until her feet were swollen. When the truck dumped them in al-Jdeideh, she refused to enter the village and started searching for her children. She got down from the truck and walked. She went to al-Damoun and from there to Sekhnen and from Sekhnen to al-Ramah and then on to Ya’thur. In Ya’thur she found her son and his family, and they crossed over into Lebanon, where she found her four other children.
Her grandmother walked alone, entered the villages and slept in the open. She entered the villages a stranger and left them a stranger, and all she ate was bread moistened with water. She ate so she could walk, and she walked so she could look, and she looked but she didn’t find.
Nuha said the pain etched on her grandmother’s face frightened her. A woman etched with pain and stories. “She didn’t love us; she loved only my father. She seemed in a perpetual state of shock that he was still alive. Every day — every day, I promise you — she’d squeeze him to make sure he was still among the living. She didn’t want him to work; when they settled in the camp near Beirut and he found work in a chocolate factory, she refused. ‘You stay in the house and we’ll work,’ she said. ‘You’re the pillar of the house; it will fall down without you.’ My mother couldn’t understand her mother-in-law — a woman stopping her son from working, not wanting him to leave the tin shack, so that no harm might come to him while we were all dying of shame and hunger? He’d sit next to his mother and they would listen to the radio and analyze the news and whisper to one another. She’d make plans, and he’d agree with her. Then they decided to go back to al-Birwa, and so we returned.”