A Map of Absence Page 11

  Later they said they tried to bury him but they couldn’t free his arm from my fingers without breaking the fingers.

  So Alaeddin was in two parts, each in a different place.

  With Zeinab between the two, with his horse.

  In the evening she went back to the hill where the men were still posted, and behind her in the distance his mother followed her.

  The men said, ‘We’ll go and fetch his hand.’

  ‘If anyone has to die for his hand, then it’s going to be me,’ said Zeinab.

  Zeinab ended up scrambling again across the rough terrain, with bloody fingers, cuts on her feet and a broken heart, until she reached the place. She groped around on the ground and cried.

  ‘What if they took it with them to prove they’d killed him? It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that,’ she thought to herself.

  His hand should be here, she said to herself, and she rushed around searching for it frantically.

  ‘And finally, my fingers found it, my blind fingers. I trembled and cried and wanted to scream. I wanted to die right there. I wanted his warm hand back, a hand quite different from this cold hand. I wanted his hand as it was when it knew me, the hand that knew my hand, that knew my shoulders, my hair, the hand that waved at me, his playful, lithe hand. I wanted to scream, ‘Where is it?’ but I was worried they might bury him without this hand that didn’t remember me, this hand that used to remember me, this hesitant hand that took comfort in me and liked to bury itself in my breast. I had to find it. Otherwise I would have spent the rest of my life looking for it.’

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, auntie!’

  I cried and my hand reached into my breast to take it out.

  And we went back.

  Two women and a horse,

  And three broken hearts.

  ‘Leave us with him,’ his mother said, cradling his head between her knees.

  His horse was restive in the courtyard.

  Zeinab shouted, ‘Let that one in.’

  They looked out of the door. ‘Who?’

  ‘His horse.’

  ‘His horse!’

  ‘You’ve heard, haven’t you?’ his mother shouted.

  The horse came in – the horse that lay down beside him, its neck and face pressed against the ground, calm and crying.

  * * *

  With trembling hands and tearful eyes that rolled, Zeinab began to sew his hand back on.

  ‘Give me the needle, my girl,’ said Alaeddin’s mother.

  His mother turned his head and put it on Zeinab’s knee and her hands began to work – hands she felt she was seeing for the first time, frail hands, like hands that had never planted a tree.

  Her face was covered in tears. She stopped, wiped her face with the edge of her sleeve and continued.

  They stayed the whole night

  Till dawn broke.

  The men knocked on the door, and came in timidly.

  ‘Now you can bury him,’ Zeinab said.

  ‘Come on, lift him up,’ said his mother.

  They walked off, and his horse walked in the funeral procession too.

  Translated by Jonathan Wright

  Settlement

  Here a tree blossomed

  Here a sparrow wandered

  Here a violin was lost to nostalgia

  Here a star loved a little girl

  Here a nightingale stole fruit!

  Here a boy wrote a book of songs

  for someone else in his neighbourhood who loved

  Here there was a field of pears

  Here a student memorised the lesson to the point of exhaustion

  Here there was merry laughter

  and the talk of sunset with swallows

  before a tank rolled over

  bullying its way towards the hilltop

  To build for the army of invaders,

  over my mother’s bosom, a settlement.

  Translated by Atef Alshaer

  ELIAS KHOURY

  Excerpt from Gate of the Sun

  How am I supposed to talk to you or with you or about you?

  HEY, YOU!

  How am I supposed to talk to you or with you or about you?

  Should I tell you stories you already know, or be silent and let you go wherever it is you go? I come close to you, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake you, and then I laugh at myself because all I want is to wake you. I need one thing – one thing, dear God: that this man drowning in his own eyes should get up, open his eyes and say something.

  But I’m lying.

  Did you know you’ve turned me into a liar?

  I say I want one thing, but I want thousands of things. I lie, God take pity on you, on me and on your poor mother. Yes, we forgot your mother. You told me all your stories, and you never told me how your mother died. You told about the death of your blind father and how you slipped into Galilee and attended his funeral. You stood on the hill above the village of Deir al-Asad, seeing but unseen, weeping but not weeping.

  At the time I believed you. I believed that intuition had led you there to your house, hours before he died. But now I don’t.

  At the time I was bewitched by your story. Now the spell is broken, and I no longer believe you.

  But your mother?

  Why didn’t you say anything about her death?

  Is your mother dead?

  Do you remember the story of the icon of the Virgin Mary?

  We were living through the civil war in Lebanon, and you were saying that war shouldn’t be like that. You even advised me, when I came back from Beijing as a doctor, not to take part in the war and asked me to go with you to Palestine.

  ‘But Yunes, you don’t go to fight. You go because of your wife.’

  You gave me a long lecture about the meaning of war and then said something about the picture of the Virgin Mary in your house, and that was when I asked you if your mother was Christian and how the sheikh of the village of Ain al-Zaitoun could have married a Christian woman. You explained that she wasn’t a Christian but loved the Virgin and used to put her picture under her pillow. She’d made you love the Virgin, too, because she was the mistress of all the world’s women and because her picture was beautiful – a woman bending her head over her son, born swaddled in his shroud.

  ‘And what did the sheikh think?’ I asked you.

  It was then that you explained to me that your father, the sheikh, was blind, and that he never saw the picture at all.

  When did Nahilah tell you of your mother’s death?

  Why don’t you tell me? Is it because your wife said your mother had asked to be buried with the picture and this caused a problem in the village?

  Why do you sleep like that and not answer?

  You sleep like sleep itself. You sleep in sleep, and are drowning. The doctor said you had a blood clot in the brain, were clinically dead, and there was no hope. I refused to believe him.

  I see you before me and can do nothing.

  I hold conversations with you and tell you stories. I’ll tell you everything. What do you say – I’ll make tea, and we’ll sit on the low chairs in front of your house and tell tales! You used to laugh at me because I don’t smoke. You used to smoke your cigarette right to the end, chewing on the butt hanging between your lips and sucking in the smoke.

  Now here I am. I close the door of your room. I sit next to you. I light a cigarette, draw the smoke deep into my lungs, and I tell you tales. And you don’t answer.

  The tea’s gone cold, and I’m tired. You’re immersed in your breathing and don’t care.

  Please don’t believe them.

  Do you remember the day when you came to me and say that everyone was sick of you, and I couldn’t dispel the sadness from your round pale face? What was I supposed to say? Should I have said your day had passed, or hadn’t yet come? You’d have been even more upset. I couldn’t lie to you. So I’m sad too, and my sadness is a deep breach in my soul that I ca
n’t repair, but I swear I don’t want you to die.

  Why did you lie to me?

  Why did you tell me after the mourners had left that Nahilah’s death didn’t matter, because a woman only dies if her man stops loving her, and Nahilah hadn’t died because you still loved her?

  ‘She’s here,’ you said, and you pointed at your eyes, wide open to show their dark grey. I was never able to identify the colour of your eyes – when I asked you, you would say that Nahilah didn’t know what colour they were either, and that at Bab al-Shams she used to ask you about the colours of things.

  You lied to me.

  You convinced me that Nahilah hadn’t died, and didn’t finish the sentence. At the time I didn’t take in what you’d said; I thought they were the beautiful words an old lover uses to heal his love. But death was in the other half of the sentence, because a man dies when his woman stops loving him, and you’re dying because Nahilah stopped loving you when she died.

  So here you are, drowsing.

  Dear God, what drowsiness is this? And why do I feel a deathly drowsiness when I’m near you? I lie back in the chair and sleep. And when I get up in the middle of the night, I feel pain all over my body.

  I come close to you, I see the air rolling around you, and I see that place I have not visited. I’d decided to go; everyone goes, so why not me? I’d go and have a look. I’d go and anchor the landmarks in my eyes. You used to tell me that you knew the sites because they were engraved on your eyes like indelible landmarks.

  Translated by Humphrey Davies

  GHASSAN ZAQTAN

  Remembering the Grandmother

  Pretexts come with her absence

  and with the waiting of boats between

  noon and afternoon

  when the light is deeply fissured

  and the satisfied prisoners, our grandmothers

  in the plains, comb the sleep of hills

  then age in their fissured sleep

  We haven’t seen the sea

  but we can be certain, after the rosary prayers,

  it’s behind the line of hills,

  says the girl who sweeps the courtyard

  When I remembered

  … when we had come up to the lighthouse

  you lit a fire and kept me warm.

  Beyond That

  I have a wish to see the land

  a wish to retrieve recitation from the wisdom of lectors

  and to think like a falcon

  I have a wish to see the land whole

  return song to poetry,

  call strange mountains my brothers

  and release my heart from the corpse of longing

  and from the thick honey of prophets

  Four Sisters From Zakariya

  Four sisters climb the mountain,

  alone,

  dressed in black

  Four sisters

  sigh

  in front of the forest

  Four sisters

  are reading

  tear-stained mail

  – A train shunted through

  the picture

  of the settlement of Artov

  – A horse

  carried a girl

  from our village, Zakariya

  The horse whinnied

  as it stood on the hill

  behind the plain

  Clouds

  drifted lazily

  over the ditch

  Four sisters from Zakariya

  are stood on the hill,

  alone, dressed in black

  Beirut, August 1982

  How I wish he had not died

  in last Wednesday’s raid

  as he strolled through Nazlat al-Bir –

  my friend with blond hair,

  as blond as a native of the wetlands of Iraq.

  Like a woman held spellbound at her loom,

  all summer long the war was weaving its warp and weft.

  And that song, O Beiruuuuut!,

  sang from every single radio

  in my father’s house in Al-Karama –

  and probably in our old house in Beit Jala

  (which, whenever I try to find it in the maze of the camp,

  refuses to be found).

  That song sang of what we knew –

  it sang of our streets, narrow and neglected,

  our people cheek by jowl in the slums made by war.

  But the song did not sing about that summer in Beirut,

  it did not tell us what was coming –

  aeroplanes, bombardment, annihilation …

  The song was singing while my friend from Iraq –

  who’d thought I was Moroccan from the countryside there –

  limped bleeding to his death …

  His blond hair will never fade,

  a beam of light seared into memory.

  A Picture of the House in Beit Jala

  He has to return to shut that window,

  it isn’t entirely clear

  whether this is what he must do,

  things are no longer clear

  since he has lost them,

  and it seems a hole somewhere within him

  has opened up

  Closing up the cracks has exhausted him

  mending the fences

  wiping the glass

  cleaning the edges

  and watching the dust that seems, since he has lost the things,

  to lure his memories into hoax and ruse.

  And from here his childhood appears as if it were a trick!

  inspecting the doors has fully exhausted him

  the window latches

  the condition of the plants

  and wiping the dust

  that has not ceased flowing

  into the rooms, on the beds, sheets, pots

  and on the picture frames on the walls

  Since he has lost them he stays with friends

  who become fewer

  sleeps in their beds

  that become narrower

  while the dust gnaws at his memories ‘there’

  … he must return to shut that window

  the upper story window which he often forgets

  at the end of the stairway that leads to the roof

  Since he has lost them

  he aimlessly walks

  and the day’s small

  purposes are also no longer clear

  All translated by Fady Joudah

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  Different Ways to Pray

  There was the method of kneeling,

  a fine method, if you lived in a country

  where stones were smooth.

  The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,

  hidden corners where knee fit rock.

  Their prayers were weathered rib bones,

  small calcium words uttered in sequence,

  as if this shedding of syllables could somehow

  fuse them to the sky.

  There were the men who had been shepherds so long

  they walked like sheep.

  Under the olive trees, they raised their arms –

  Hear us! We have pain on earth!

  We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

  But the olives bobbed peacefully

  in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

  At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,

  and were happy in spite of the pain,

  because there was also happiness.

  Some prized the pilgrimage,

  wrapping themselves in new white linen

  to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.

  When they arrived at Mecca

  they would circle the holy places,

  on foot, many times,

  they would bend to kiss the earth

  and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

  While for certain cousins and grandmothers

  the pilgrimage occurred daily,

  luggin
g water from the spring

  or balancing the baskets of grapes.

  These were the ones present at births,

  humming quietly to perspiring mothers.

  The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,

  forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

  There were those who didn’t care about praying.

  The young ones. The ones who had been to America.

  They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

  Time? – The old ones prayed for the young ones.

  They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,

  for the twig, the round moon,

  to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

  And occasionally there would be one

  who did none of this,

  the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,

  who beat everyone at dominoes,

  insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,

  and was famous for his laugh.

  Blood

  ‘A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,’

  my father would say. And he’d prove it,

  cupping the buzzer instantly

  while the host with the swatter stared.

  In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.

  True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.

  I changed these to fit the occasion.

  Years before, a girl knocked,

  wanted to see the Arab.

  I said we didn’t have one.

  After that, my father told me who he was,

  ‘Shihab’ – ‘shooting star’ –

  a good name, borrowed from the sky.

  Once I said, ‘When we die, we give it back?’

  He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

  Today the headlines clot in my blood.

  A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.

  Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root

  is too big for us. What flag can we wave?

  I wave the flag of stone and seed,

  table mat stitched in blue.

  I call my father, we talk around the news.

  It is too much for him,

  neither of his two languages can reach it.

  I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

  to plead with the air: