“In Tarshiha we lived in the house of Ali Hammoud, who’d fought with my father,” said my grandmother. “Yasin stopped going to school, and I worked in the olive groves with Ali Hammoud’s wives, and we waited for the ALA, of which there was news everywhere, and we said to ourselves, ‘Things are fine.’ How were they fine? We lived like dogs. True, Ali Hammoud offered us a house, and true, we worked in the olive groves, but God, we were so hungry. I never slept a night in Tarshiha with a full stomach. You know, Son, from the day we left the village, I’ve not once gone to sleep with a full stomach. I eat and I don’t feel full, like there’s a leak at the bottom of my stomach. I have no appetite, and my stomach hurts I’m so hungry.”
My grandmother’s appetite was never satisfied. She’d say she wasn’t hungry, put the plate in front of me and sit watching me. Then, all of a sudden, she’d swoop down on my plate, devour everything without coming up for air and say she’d eaten nothing. The woman was a strange case. She’d only eat from my plate, devouring every last crumb, would put her hand on her stomach and moan, and then start eating again. I used to think she’d taken to eating that way as a sort of compensation after my father’s murder. Then I found out that her hunger came from further back, and that she had treated his food the same way she did mine. I remember the story of the string stew only vaguely, but my paternal aunts, on their rare visits, used to talk about little else, starting with laughter and ending up in a sort of quarrel.
“You loved Yasin more than us,” one of the aunts would say.
“God forgive you,” Shahineh would reply. “It wasn’t like that at all. I used to make string stew because the boy was short and we were poor, not like now.”
You hear her? As though we weren’t poor now. We say we used to be poor so that we don’t have to face our present reality. But the main thing is that she had this strange way of cooking. She’d make a stew the way everyone else did, she’d fry bits of meat with onions before adding the vegetables, but she’d take the bits of raw meat, thread them on a string and tie the ends together before frying them. When the family sat down at the table, she’d pull the meat string out of the pot and say, “This is for Yasin.” I don’t know what happened next. Did my father eat the meat while his sisters looked on, their eyes glazed with desire? Or did he distribute the bits of meat among them? Or did he leave the string untouched, to be devoured by his mother?
My grandmother only stopped cooking string stew when my mother left. I vaguely remember those days. I remember how I hated the string on my plate. I remember that I wouldn’t touch it, and my grandmother would try to force me to eat it and I’d refuse. Maybe I ate it once or twice, or a dozen times, I don’t know, but the taste of string stuck between my teeth has never left me.
My grandmother stopped threading the meat after my mother left, and I didn’t think of it again until one of the fighters with us at Kafar Shouba told us about his mother’s string stew, which was just like my grandmother’s. In the fedayeen camps we ate lots of meat, and Abu Ahmad used to take my share, saying that I didn’t understand anything about food because I hadn’t tried string stew, and I’d say that I hated the taste of meat precisely because of string stew. Abu Ahmad would eat in an extraordinary way — but was his real name Abu Ahmad? In those days, our names were all made up anyway. I wasn’t called Khalil, I was Abu Khaled, even though I’d wanted to call myself Guevara. The fact is, I love Guevara, and whenever I see his picture, I see the light in his eyes as something holy. I think that he, like Mohammed or that Talal you told me about, had his death lurking in his eyes, which is why they were beautiful and radiant. I wanted to call myself Guevara but discovered someone else had beaten me to it. Amir al-Faisal said, “We’ll call you Abu Khaled.” Then the Abu Khaleds multiplied. Gamal Abd al-Nasir was the first Abu Khaled because he called his oldest son Khaled, and when he died in ’70, the young men all wanted to name themselves after him, so we were everywhere. I was the first Abu Khaled in South Lebanon, but following the September massacres in Jordan, a wave of fighters fleeing from there swept in and we couldn’t distinguish among all the Abu Khaleds anymore. My name thus became Abu Khaled Khalil, and gradually the Abu Khaled part dropped off. To this day, however, I still turn when I hear the name Abu Khaled, even though I know people have forgotten that’s what I used to be called.
Meat was Abu Ahmad’s only joy. He’d leap onto the supply truck, pick up the meat platter, put it under a tree, pull out the knives, and start cutting it up, singing. He sang to the meat because meat was the food, as he would say. I despised him. Or not exactly despised him but felt disgust when he would eat raw meat and invite me to join him.
“That’s disgusting,” I’d tell him.
“What’s disgusting is your not eating it. Don’t you know what Imru’ al-Qais said were the three most beautiful things in the world — ‘Eating flesh, riding flesh, and putting flesh into flesh’?” — he’d say, his tongue, extended to lick his lips, mixing with the red meat that he was chewing.
“All our lives, brother, the only meat we ate was string. We used to fight over the string and the little scraps of meat that clung to it. Now we are really eating. Long live the Revolution — the best thing about this revolution is the meat. It’s the Revolution of Meat!”
He’d chew on the raw meat and start preparing maqloubeh. We ate maqloubeh once a month, when the supplies arrived, and Abu Ahmad would put huge quantities of meat on top of the rice cooked with eggplant or cauliflower; everyone at the base dove into the meat of the revolution. Our revolution was rich while our people are poor, that was the tragedy. The problem’s over today — the revolution’s moved on, leaving nothing here in the camp but a consuming poverty. I don’t know if people have gone back to their old habit of cooking meat on a string because I live on my own, and so do you. And I don’t like meat, I prefer lentils and cracked wheat and broad beans, and you like olives.
I know the story. You don’t have to tell me what your mother did with black olives, how she would slice them over bread cooked in the peasants’ clay oven and say they were chicken breasts and that olives were tastier than chicken. I know the story, and I don’t feel like spelling out the virtues of olives again, or talking about the Roman olive tree that served as a shelter during the winter, inside whose huge hollow trunk you’d spend the day before continuing your journey to Bab al-Shams.
As a doctor, I acknowledge the beneficial properties of olive oil, but I can’t agree with your mother’s theory about dentistry. I’m still not convinced by her belief that ground olive pits make a good painkiller for a tooth-ache. A handful of cloves will act as a painkiller, and arak will do the job, but olive pits — impossible! It seems your mother found a solution to her poverty by transforming olives into something similar to Salim As’ad’s little Ekza bottle. No, my friend, olive pits are useless as a medicine, and olive leaves are useless for fumigating houses. Were we — were you — that poor in Palestine? Were we too poor to buy a handful of incense? Was it poverty that made your blind father take dry olive leaves and use them as incense when he led the Sufi devotions every Thursday night? They’d use dry olive leaves for incense: The men would gather around the blind sheikh, who stood in the middle of the circle clapping his hands and saying, “There is no god but God,” and the circle would start to rotate. Then you’d come, carrying a vessel full of dry olive leaves with three lit coals placed on top of them. You’d give the vessel to your father and step back while he’d try to make you join the others — you’d run away and stand at the far end of the room, near the door, where the women were gathered, and you’d watch for a while before leaving quietly. The sheikh would blow on the coals, the coals would ignite the olive leaves, and the incense would rise. The circle would begin revolving faster, and the men would fall down until the tambourine player himself fell to the ground, shouting “Succor! Succor! Madad!”