With Umm Hassan, sleep comes to you. With her you feel the world is stable, not about to be dislodged. Oh, where are you now, Umm Hassan? And where’s the nursing certificate you kept from the days of the British Mandate? Umm Hassan told me about my grandfather’s uncle, Aziz Ayyoub. She said he’d become a saint and that people made oaths in his name and that he could cure illnesses. She said that during her visit to her brother in al-Jdeideh, she’d remembered her promise to my grandmother to visit al-Ghabsiyyeh and light a candle under the lotus tree.

Have you seen the lotus tree, Father?

Have you tasted its fruit?

Umm Hassan said its fruit was called doum and were like medlars, or even more delicious than medlars.

Umm Hassan told the people in Jdeideh that she had to go al-Ghabsiyyeh to fulfill her vow under the lotus tree, and she went on her own because her brother was afraid to go with her. He told her that since the Ayyoub incident and the building of his tomb there, the Israelis had started to clamp down and stop people from visiting the village. Al-Ghabsiyyeh was a military area, and if anyone was found there they were taken to prison and had to pay a huge fine.

Her brother took her to the village of al-Nahar and showed her the way. She said that when she reached the tree, she made a prostration. She saw melted candles and ribbons hung over the delicate small leaves, which covered the branches. She made a prostration there and then entered the mosque, where she knelt in a corner and prayed.

When she returned, she told me about Ayyoub.

She said the people in al-Jdeideh talked about him. They told her about a white man with a white beard and white clothes who guarded a tree and talked to its branches. People would come from the surrounding villages to fulfill their vows to the tree and see the man. Umm Hassan told them it was Aziz. “It’s Aziz,” she’d say. “No. His name’s Ayyoub,” they’d say.

Umm Hassan said Aziz cleaned the mosque every day. The Israeli settlement that had been built on the edge of al-Ghabsiyyeh used the mosque as a cow pen. Ayyoub would get up every day and start cleaning the mosque first thing, picking up the dung with his hands and throwing it into the fields. Then he’d sprinkle water and pray.

Umm Hassan said that at first the people thought he was Jewish, for he resembled the Iraqi Jews who were common in the area and had set up the settlement of Netiv ha-Shayyara. They thought he was the guard for the cow pen. Then they discovered the truth because whenever more than three women gathered around the lotus tree, he’d climb the minaret and give the call to prayer. Many, both men and women, had attempted to talk to him, but he wouldn’t speak. He seemed to be from another world, a spirit, with his eyes sunken in his oval face and his shoulders that drooped as though his body were no longer capable of holding them up.

“That’s Aziz Ayyoub,” said Umm Hassan, and she told them his wife and children lived in the Burj al-Shamali camp near Tyre, and that she’d seen his son, who’d grown into a fine man and worked as a broker for the lemon growers in Tyre.

The people of al-Jdeideh couldn’t believe that their Ayyoub was this Aziz Ayyoub.

Their Ayyoub was a phantom; our Aziz was a man.

Their Ayyoub was a saint; our Aziz died when the young Yasin left him and fled into the valley.

Ayyoub, or Aziz Ayyoub, lived his life a solitary phantom in a village inhabited by ghosts. He lived alone close to the tree and the mosque, sleeping in the mosque with the cows and eating plants that grew on the land and the remains of provisions that had been left behind in the abandoned houses. They’d see him walking through the fields or sitting under the lotus tree or praying in the mosque or giving the call to prayer. His clothes were a brilliant white, as though all the muck that surrounded him left no mark.

People called him White Ayyoub.

After lighting their candles under the tree, they’d approach him hoping for a blessing, but he’d walk away. No one could touch him. Umm Hassan didn’t know how they knew his name. “He didn’t speak to anyone, he didn’t respond, so how did they know? This, my son, I’m not able to tell you. They said he was as pure as an angel, that he’d clean out the mosque and become even more immaculate.”

Umm Hassan says she thinks a good number the stories circulating about Ayyoub are just fantasies. The mosque wasn’t used continuously as a cow pen, most likely the Jews kept their cattle there during the winter. She didn’t think they’d leave their cows with Ayyoub.

“Ayyoub went mad,” said Umm Hassan. “How could anybody live alone among those ruins and not lose his mind? If he hadn’t lost his mind, he’d have left al-Ghabsiyyeh and gone to live in another village, any other village, among people.”

“But that’s not the point of the story, Son,” said Umm Hassan. “The point is that Aziz Ayyoub became a saint after he died.”

One day a woman came to the lotus tree to fulfil a vow, and she saw him. She threw down her candles and ran to al-Jdeideh, and everyone came. Ayyoub was dead beneath the holy tree, his neck tied to a rope, the rope on the ground, as though the man had fallen from a branch of the tree. At one end of the rope was Ayyoub’s neck, which had turned thin and black, and at the other end was a branch of the lotus tree that had been torn from its mother and had fallen to the ground.

“No one touch him,” someone said. “The man committed suicide, and suicide is an impure act.”

The people backed away from the body of White Ayyoub, whispering in strangled voices. One woman left the throng, went over to the corpse, took off her headscarf, and covered the face of the dead man. Then she knelt bareheaded and started to weep.

“They killed him,” said the kneeling woman. “They killed the guardian of the lotus tree. It’s a sign.”

Sheikh Abd al-Ahad, imam of the Jdeideh mosque, said that Ayyoub hadn’t committed suicide. “Ayyoub is a martyr, my friends.”

The sheikh gave orders to take the body into the mosque, where it was washed and wrapped in a shroud. The burial took place beside the lotus tree, where they built Ayyoub a tomb.

“Now, Son, when you go to al-Ghabsiyyeh, you’ll see cacti everywhere. Only the cactus bears witness to our endurance. And there next to the tree, you’ll see the tomb of Ayyoub. The tree is lush and beautiful and green. Ah, how beautiful lotus trees are! Have you ever seen a lotus tree in your life? Of course you haven’t. Your generation hasn’t seen anything. There, Son, sleeps Aziz Ayyoub, Saint Ayyoub. People visit his tomb and leave him gifts and votive offerings, and he answers their prayers. I saw the tomb. A small tomb with a window. I leaned my head down and shouted, ‘Aziz! Can you hear me? Dear beloved one, you truly have earned your name!^* You rose above an entire people. You ended your life on the tree you guarded. Aziz, Dear Saint, Beloved of God!’ That’s how the people invoke him, Son. They come from all around; they put their heads near the window and call, ‘Ayyoub!’”

Umm Hassan said she thought Aziz Ayyoub had committed suicide. “A man all alone, afflicted by madness, what was he to do? But he was transformed into a sheikh, and they swear by his name and await his blessings. Poor humans!”

Even though Umm Hassan didn’t believe that Aziz Ayyoub had become a saint, in her last days, she’d swear by his name and ask me to tell her the story of how I’d stood with my father behind the donkey, and how Aziz grabbed the donkey’s tail and told my father to stand behind him. I’d describe the scene to her and she’d burst into laughter: “What was that? Did I think the donkey would act as a barrier and protect them from the bullets?”

As you see, dear master, things have become mixed up in my mind just like in yours. I had nothing to do with it: It was Yasin, my father, who stood behind the donkey. But, you see, I’ve been infected by Umm Hassan and have started talking about these people as though I knew them all personally. But Ayyoub did become a saint. What do saints do to become saints? Nothing, I suppose, because people invent them. People invent wonders and believe in them because they need them. True as that is, it changes nothing. Ayyoub’s a saint, whether we willed it or not.