‘I’m Tamim.’

‘Tamim son of who?’

‘Son of Mourid.’

‘Mourid son of who?’

‘Son of ‘Abd al-Razeq.’

“Abd al-Razeq son of who?’

‘Son of Muhammad al-Turrad.’

‘Ah. I know him. He was my friend. Your grandfather’s grandfather was my friend, son. And he was a poet. The whole village knew him. All the villages around knew him. He wasn’t your grandfather’s grandfather, he was your grandfather’s father. God rest his soul and those of all our dead.’

‘Amen.’

…

‘Do you know any of his poems by heart?’

“He gave a long sigh, closed his eyes, and recited:

‘This stick of mine’s from a tree.

It helps me see.

It’ll still be there,

When I’m no longer here.’

“He recited from memory, with mistakes in the meter of course, but he was proud he still remembered his old friend’s poetry.”

Husam has moved a little distance from us but now rejoins us and he tells us the never-to-be-forgotten tale of Abu Hasan and Abu Yusuf.

Abu Yusuf’s house was huge and had two stories and he was very proud of how much taller his house was than all the other houses of Deir Ghassanah. Abu Hasan was a young man. Like everyone else in the village, he had to sit and listen to the pride and boasting but could think of nothing to say back, until poverty drove him to make the journey to Beirut, where he worked as porter at the harbor and from which he returned with some money and some ‘knowledge of the world.’ He declared, “Abu Yusuf boasts he can look down on the whole village from his second story. I swear to God, people, in Beirut I saw a dog looking down from the tenth story!”

We go to the village school. Schools stay in their places; we’re the ones who leave. I left the childhood that I spent here half a century ago and turned my face toward Tamim’s. The years passed for both of us and at this instant our two childhoods meet at the door of the first school under this first sky.

In the long lane, lined on either side with cypress trees of amazing height, and then at the threshold to the school and among its arches, I think of Tamim’s childhood, spent in Cairo and Budapest, and of mine, spent here in Deir Ghassanah. The distance between them is the distance between two planets.

From the moment he was born, he found in front of him everything he needed, everything appropriate to his age, everything that would keep him happy. When he grew older, he found a computer in front of him. He took thirty lessons in piano with Prof. Kati Forrai in Budapest. He couldn’t take the discipline at five but later moved on to study in Cairo the oriental oud, which he learned to play expertly. This helped him to pick up quickly the music of ancient Arabic poetry with its sixteen meters and he learned to write the classical Arabic verse forms and to appreciate the Arabic classics, such as the Suspended Odes and the verses of al-Mutanabbi and Abu Tammam. In Budapest, he fell in love with Lego and all the different things you can make with it, and one day he kept asking for a Lego castle with flags flapping on its battlements. We couldn’t find one in Budapest, so we brought it for him from Vienna. It was the castle he had in mind but there weren’t any flags in the box, so we bought him a small game that included flags and used these for his historic castle. The blessing of exile (and exile has its blessings, which cannot be denied) gave him visits to museums, films and plays to watch, experience of live music. He acquired whatever musical instruments he wanted and at one time had a harmonica, a guitar, a violin, and an oud. It was lucky he didn’t fall in love with the piano or we would have had to go without supper.

Our teacher, ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti, took my earlobe between his fingers and pressed. It hurt a little. He pressed more and it hurt more. The children in the classroom laughed at what was happening to me so I cried. I cried because I was young (not yet six), because he was punishing me in front of the whole class, and because, like anyone subjected to punishment, I felt I’d done nothing to deserve it. It was all because my mother had decided one day to take me to ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti’s house, where I heard her telling him, “So you want to deprive him of schooling just because of three or four months, Abu Marwan? Shame on you! You did harm enough to me when you stopped me from finishing my own education.”

“Me, Umm Mounif? I took your side and your mother knows I did my best. God forgive them, they were stronger than all of us.”

“May God not forgive them, in this world or the next! Let’s stick to the boy.”

“Umm Mounif, your son isn’t of school age yet. The laws.… ”

She interrupts him in exasperation.

“What laws? And who made the laws?”

“He has to be fully six years old to be admitted to the school.”

“He’ll be six in two or three months.”

“It’s just not possible, and it’s in his interest, so he can take in the lessons and not fail the first year and get a complex.”

“The boy’s clever, Abu Marwan. Cleverer than all the boys from the village that you’ve accepted. I know every one of them. Mourid is the cleverest of them all, as you’ll find out. Also, he has his brother Mounif’s books and he’s always got a pen in his hand at home. He can write the alphabet now, his handwriting’s good, and he’s memorized lots of songs. If you gave him the exam today he might pass.”

“Umm Mounif, they check and send inspectors and it would be embarrassing for me. If one of the inspectors discovered that he was too young.… ”

“And why should the inspector find out he’s too young?”

“He’ll find out, and the school administration will be blamed because of me and.… ”

She interrupts him again.

“Accept him, Abu Marwan, and when the inspector comes, send him out of the classroom. He stays out for one period and no harm done. Or make him get under his desk and hide, he’s small enough anyway.… ”

“He wasn’t small a minute ago, Umm Mounif!”

He laughed and added, “All right, Umm Mounif. He’ll start school, for your sake, but when the inspector comes he has to hide or get out. I’ll persuade the headmaster.”

My mother thanked him and next morning told Mounif, “Take your brother with you today, dear, and leave him in Class One. I’ve spoken to Abu Marwan and he says yes.”

We went back to the house. We found that my father had got back from work and she told him she’d succeeded in getting me into school. My father was embarrassed and hated the idea of having asked his cousin Abu Marwan for a personal favor, but my mother wouldn’t be put off and refused to let me lose a whole year because of a law she thought was stupid.

That evening, she took the scissors and a piece of thick linen cloth, made me a bag, which she would always refer to as a ‘case,’ and put in it a pencil and a new exercise book on which she had handwritten ‘Mourid ‘Abd al-Razeq al-Barghouti, Class One, Deir Ghassanah Boys School.’

(A long parenthesis. Later, I will discover that my name in my birth certificate isn’t Mourid at all. How I found this out is a story that bided its time until I reached Third Year Preparatory, or Class Nine, at Ramallah Boys Secondary. The Ministry of Education had decided to introduce a Preparatory Certificate. The headmaster asked us to provide the entry requirements for the certificate exam, which were ten Jordanian dinars and an original birth certificate. I went home, asked my parents for my birth certificate, and was confronted with one in the name of Nawaf ‘Abd al-Razeq al-Barghouti. In amazement I yelled, “This isn’t my birth certificate!” Things became clear when they told me that when I was born, my parents had decided to call me Mourid. After two or three days, they sent the midwife to the headman of Deir Ghassanah to ask him to issue an official birth certificate. The midwife, Amna al-Warda, went in to see Abu Rasim the headman and told him that ‘Abd al-Razeq (otherwise known as Abu Mounif) had been blessed with a male child and she’d been sent to get a stamped birth certificate. He got his papers ready and asked her the child’s name. The midwife had forgotten the name, which wasn’t common in Deir Ghassanah, or anywhere in the country for that matter. She tried to remember but it was useless, and was the headman going to hold up his business because of the midwife’s stupidity? He told her, “You don’t have to remember the name. His brother’s Mounif, so he’ll be Nawaf”: at his own whim, the headman chose me a name close to my elder brother’s and entered it in my birth certificate. He made his thumb print and stamped it and it was done. When Amna al-Warda returned with the stamped certificate, they stuffed it in with the other papers without checking and no one asked for it until the headmaster, because of the newly introduced exam. All through the nine preceding years, I’d been registered as Mourid al-Barghouti. In any case, once I’d explained things to him the headmaster agreed to let me take the exam under my freshly discovered name of Nawaf, as in the original certificate, and that is what happened. From then on, all my official papers have been in the name of Nawaf and no one outside the family and a small number of close friends knows this name, none of whom ever calls me by it. I refused to acknowledge, as did my family, my made-up name. We behaved as though it didn’t exist. I went on being known everywhere as Mourid and I publish my books, articles, and poems under the name Mourid al-Barghouti, a name that I love as much as I hate my official name.)