A Map of Absence Read online

  About fifteen young men, including Hamed, assembled quickly and fired their rifles toward the advancing column, without much effect. The main force of about a dozen men was stationed at the school, forming the second line of defence. The men at the school were armed with rifles, but Mousa [my brother] had a Browning machine-gun and Ibrahim [my brother] a Boys, which could penetrate an armoured car. These were the most powerful armaments we had.

  The defence party was on high ground facing the Nuran ridge. Their hail of bullets, especially the threat of the Boys, stopped the advancing Jewish armoured vehicles in their tracks for a while as they assessed the situation. Then the Zionists split into two groups: twelve armoured vehicles veered toward Nuran ridge and the remaining twelve advanced directly toward the defence party on my father’s land, where the school, the house, and the farm stood.

  At the school building, Salman Abu Suleiman, my father’s cousin, recklessly stood on the roof and started shooting his old rifle. Mousa, with hardly any experience, kept his finger on the trigger of the machine-gun until it overheated and jammed. Ibrahim, on the Boys, must have hit at least one tank, or so the confusion of the headlights indicated.

  The tanks had overrun Hamed and his small group, but they, our first line of defence, kept shooting at them from behind, moving from one side to another.

  Women and children ran in a northerly direction. Mothers tried to locate their children in the darkness. They tried hurriedly to pick up things their children needed: milk, blankets, and the like. In the background, the threatening lights, the hail of bullets tracing arcs in the sky, the hurried confusion, the agonising cries, and the shouts for a missing child heightened our fear of impending death.

  My mother led my sister and me in the darkness. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I am here,’ I cried back.

  ‘Where? Where?’ she pleaded.

  All the women and children knew where to go. They all headed towards Wadi Farha, a deep ravine and a dry riverbed in the summer. In the winter, its bed carried rainwater that filled the wells. I knew this wadi well; it had steep sides that were several times my height. It was a place where I often hid and went on wild adventures, with galloping horses, monsters, and demons. But that night – or dawn – was different. It was not a flight of childish fantasy. The thud of Zionist bombs, the crying children, and the frightened mothers were the elements of a real nightmare. Women splashed dirt on their faces to discourage rape.

  Our schoolteacher, Muhammad Abu Liyya, was an affable young man, liked by everyone. A man of learning, he did not carry a gun. He fled to the wadi. Finding himself among women and children, he felt ashamed and ran for safety toward the village of Beni Suheila, leaving his wife behind.

  On the way, he ran into the grand old man, Hajj Mahmoud, Hamed’s father, on his horse, returning from Beni Suheila.

  ‘Ya Hajj, al-yahud! The Jews!’

  Hajj Mahmoud was hard of hearing. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Yahud! Yahud!’

  ‘Huh?’

  Abu Liyya sped on his way, repeating the same warning. Hamed’s father continued on his way toward the battle site, unaware of the danger ahead. When he came closer, he realised what was happening. Hamed had not yet emerged from the battle and was assumed dead. Later the next day, he saw Hamed in terrible shape, but alive. The grand old man wept. ‘I had never seen him cry before,’ Hamed remarked later.

  During the night in the wadi, we were worried about what had become of the men, our fathers and brothers. With the first light, we could recognise objects. Someone peered out of the ravine:

  ‘Look at the smoke!’

  ‘Oh, that’s the school. It’s gone!’ A column of smoke was billowing from the direction of the school that my father had built in 1920. I felt a bomb explode in my guts. There was another explosion and a column of smoke rose up. ‘That’s the bayyara (orchard)’, someone shouted.

  Our house, all the homes, had gone up in smoke. Columns of smoke, announcing the destruction of our landscape, were rising into the sky. Their peculiar shape and distant smell filled us with grief. Still, the concern was for the people. Women started wailing and beating their cheeks in anticipation of bad news.

  By midday, the shooting had stopped. Twelve tanks continued westward toward Deir al-Balah. We remained hiding in the wadi. Half of the Jewish tanks were still there. A light airplane was hovering overhead most of the day. It seemed that the destruction of the Zionist convoy at Deir al-Balah had been reported. The remaining convoy that had stayed in al-Ma‘in retreated to its base, leaving only the smouldering remains of their work.

  Slowly we emerged from our hiding place and began inspecting the charred ruins. My brothers Ibrahim and Mousa emerged, to our joy, alive and well. They told us about how they had been surrounded. They had retreated to the karm, my father’s orchard, with its cactus fence. The enemy thought they had them cornered inside the fence, but the defenders escaped from the other side of the karm through hidden gaps in the cactus fence. Still, we had lost a number of fighters, and found many in a ditch, dead. My father was not in al-Ma‘in; he had gone to Khan Yunis. Abdullah [the resistance leader] had gone two days earlier to the Egyptian border to meet General Mawawi, the commanding officer of the Egyptian forces, coming to save us.

  We found corpses here and there. The two shops owned by al-Shawwal and Abu I‘teim stood wide open, their shelves empty. Near the bayyara we found Muhammad Abu Juma lying dead, spattered with blood. Poor man, he was a simple, peaceful young person, who never carried a gun or even knew how to use one.

  We spent the following night and day taking in the shock and contemplating what to do. My father and Abdullah, whose direction and counsel we were waiting for, returned. Abdullah said the Egyptian forces had now entered Palestine and ‘our rescue was imminent’. He told us that when he offered to join the army with his group, General Mawawi replied, ‘Leave the business of war to the professionals.’

  ‘We can show you the way. We can be the front line. We can keep an eye on and surround the colonies,’ Abdullah insisted. He received no response from the Egyptian general.

  My father told my brother Mousa to return to his university and urged Hamed to do the same, leaving the fighting to ‘the professionals’. I stood there looking helpless. My Beersheba school was out of bounds, my old school destroyed. My father came up with the solution: ‘Take your brother with you,’ he instructed Mousa.

  We bade a tearful farewell to mother and father and the few family members who were still there. It was a subdued good-bye, without the anticipation of expected adventure that would normally accompany a journey like this, or the assurance that those whom we left behind would be there when we returned.

  Hamed, Mousa and I rode to the Khan Yunis railway station. I rode behind Mousa. We carried nothing with us, no clothes, no papers, just the few pounds my father had slipped into Mousa’s hand. I looked back at the smouldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat.

  I was engulfed by a feeling of both anxiety and serenity: serenity because we were still alive and an anxiety that was never to leave me. I wanted to know who this faceless enemy was. What did they look like, why did they hate us, why did they destroy us, why had they had literally burned our lives to the ground? What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway? I thought to myself that I must find out who they were: their names, their faces, where they came from. I must know their army formations, their officers, what exactly they had done that day, and where they lived later.

  I scanned the horizon behind me, recalling the places where I was born, played, went to school, as they slowly disappeared from view. My unexpected departure did not feel that it would be such a long separation – it was simply a sojourn in another place for a while. If the future was vague for me at that moment, the past that I had just left behind became frozen in my mind and became my present forever.

  I never imagined that I would not see these places again, that I would never be ab
le to return to my birthplace. The events of those two days catapulted us into the unknown. I spent the rest of my life on a long, winding journey of return, a journey that has taken me to dozens of countries over decades of travel and turned my black hair to silver. But like a boomerang, I knew the end destination, and that the only way to it was the road of return I had decided to take …

  GHADA KARMI

  Excerpt from In Search of Fatima

  My father got back into the car and my mother said, ‘’Why can’t they make up their minds? One minute they tell us all the women and children are to leave and now they’re saying we shouldn’t. And anyway, what’s the point now with everyone already gone?’ My father told her to keep her voice down. As we started to move off, I twisted round on Fatima’s knee and looked out of the back window. And there to my horror was Rex standing in the middle of the road. We can’t have closed the gate properly and he must somehow have managed to get out. He stood still, his head up, his tail stiff, staring after our receding car.

  ‘Look!’ I cried out frantically, ‘Rex has got out. Stop, please, he’ll get killed.’

  ‘Shh,’ said Fatima, pushing me down into her lap. ‘He’s a rascal. I’ll put him back when I return and he won’t come to any harm. Now stop worrying.’

  But I stared and stared at him until we had rounded the corner of the road and he and the house disappeared from view. I turned and looked at the others. They sat silently, their eyes fixed on the road ahead. No one seemed aware of my terrible anguish or how in that moment I suddenly knew with overwhelming certainty that something had irrevocably ended for us there and, like Rex’s unfeigned, innocent affection, it would never return.

  The short journey to the taxi depot in the Old City opposite the Damascus Gate passed without much incident. We were stopped again at the checkpoint outside the zone, and my father explained once more why we were leaving. When we reached the depot, we got out and transferred our luggage to a taxi which would take us to Damascus by way of Amman. To reach Damascus from Jerusalem, one would normally have taken the northern route through Ras al-Naqura. But all that part of Palestine was a raging battleground and no car could travel that way. Hence we had to take the longer and more roundabout route through Amman. The taxi depot was bustling with people leaving Palestine like us. There was a different atmosphere here to the one we had got used to in Qatamon. As it was a wholly Arab area, there was no sound of gun-fire and, though it was full of crowds of people crying and saying goodbye, it felt safe and familiar.

  Fatima stood by the car which would take us away. For all her efforts at self-control, tears were coursing down her cheeks. She embraced and kissed the three of us in turn. My father said, ‘Mind you look after the house until I come back,’ and she nodded wordlessly. I clung desperately to the material of her kaftan but she gently disengaged my fingers. As we got into the taxi and the doors were shut, she drew up close and pressed her sad face against the window. We drove off, leaving her and Muhammad looking after us until they were no more than specks on the horizon, indistinguishable from the other village men and women who were there that day.

  No doubt my parents thought they were sparing us pain by keeping our departure secret from us until the very last moment. They also believed we would be away for a short while only and so making a fuss of leaving Jerusalem was unnecessary. But in the event, they turned out to be woefully wrong. We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned, without coffin or ceremony, our hasty, untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.

  I did not know until much later that, although my parents had accepted for some time that we would have to leave Jerusalem, if only for a while, there were two major events which had finally persuaded them to go. The first was the death of Abdul-Qadir al-Husseini and the second, close on its heels, was the massacre at Deir Yassin. In the first week of April, the battle to control the road to Jerusalem had raged between Jewish and Arab forces. Fighting was particularly fierce at the strategically important village of al-Qastal, ten kilometres to the west of Jerusalem. This was built on top of a hill and derived its name (castle) from an ancient fortress whose remains still stood there. It was there, as the Arab side was winning the battle (in which Husseini was joined by our Qatamon commander Abu Dayyeh and his unit), that he was killed by a Jewish soldier from the Palmach. This was a special unit of the Haganah whose men were highly trained for difficult or dangerous assignments. While Abdul-Qadir’s death meant little to the Jews it had a profound impact on the Arab side. Even my father, who was sceptical about the Arab forces’ chances of success, shared in the general hope embodied in Abdul-Qadir’s courage and commitment. His death was therefore seen as an omen of impending disaster.

  In the wake of his killing, it was said that the Arab fighters were so overwhelmed with grief that most of them escorted his body back to Jerusalem. This emotional send-off left al-Qastal unguarded and enabled the Jewish forces to regain it later that day. They were exultant and claimed that the Arab fighters were deserting in droves and returning to their villages. Traces of that triumphalism are still evident today. When I saw al-Qastal on a sad, windswept day in 1998, Israeli flags were fluttering from its old castle walls and placards declaring it to be the site of a major Israeli victory. So great was people’s shock and grief that Abdul-Qadir’s funeral at the Dome of the Rock in the Old City on 7 April drew a crowd of 30,000 mourners.

  Two days later, on 9 April, Irgun and Stern Gang gunmen perpetrated a massacre at Deir Yassin, a small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. This was the unmentionable thing which Ziyad and I were not allowed to know. The people of Deir Yassin were mainly engaged in stone quarrying and had been peaceable throughout the troubles besetting other parts of Palestine. They had even concluded a non-aggression pact with the nearby Jewish settlement of Givat Sha‘ul, approved by the Haganah, at the beginning of April 1948. The accounts of what the Jewish attackers had done to the villagers were truly shocking. The survivors who fled came with stories of mutilation, the rape of young girls and the murder of pregnant women and their babies. Some 250 people were massacred in cold blood (though recent estimates have put the number at between 100 and 200). Twenty of the men were driven in a lorry by the Irgun fighters and paraded in triumph around the streets of the Jewish areas of Jerusalem. They were then brought back and shot directly over the quarries in which they had been working and into which their bodies were thrown. The surviving villagers fled in terror, and the empty village was then occupied by Jewish forces.

  The worst of it was that the gangs who had carried out the killings boasted about what they had done and threatened publicly to do so again. They said it had been a major success in clearing the Arabs out of their towns and villages. In this they were right, for news of the atrocity, disseminated by both the Jewish and the Arab media in Palestine and the surrounding Arab states, spread terror throughout the country. But because of Deir Yassin’s proximity to Jerusalem, the news reached us first and led to an accelerated exodus from our city. The rest of the country was powerfully affected too. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, said with satisfaction that the massacre had helped in the conquest of places as far away as Tiberias and Haifa. He said it was worth half a dozen army battalions in the war against the Palestinian Arabs.

  On 30 April, the Palmach unit of the Haganah launched a huge attack on the St Simon monastery. They overcame the contingent of Arab fighters inside and within twenty-four hours had taken control of the monastery. Fierce fighting ensued between them and the Arab battalions defending Qatamon for a full two days before it was brought to an end by the British army. Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh fought and was wounded in this final battle. A twenty-four-hour truce was agreed between the two sides, but before it ended the Jews had occupied the whole of Qatamon up to the boundary of the British zone. The Sakakini family had been the last to stay on, but on 30 April they to
o left their home. Throughout April, the Arab League was deliberating over plans of invasion to defend Palestine. These involved various combinations of Arab forces which would cross into Palestine from the neighbouring states and rescue the Palestinians. But none of them came to anything, while the Jews continued to consolidate their hold on the parts of the country they had conquered. In Jerusalem, they had control of most of the new city, which included our neighbourhood, while the Arabs retained the Old City.

  We heard that Fatima kept going back to check on our house for as long as she could brave the journey. But in the end, it was too dangerous and she could go no longer. Her own village, al-Maliha, was conquered by the Jews (Israelis by then) in August 1948 and its people were made refugees. She escaped to the village of al-Bireh, east of Jerusalem and still in Arab hands, where we presume she stayed. After that news of her died out. In the chaos that attended the fall of Palestine and the mass exodus of its people, lives were wrenched apart, families brutally sundered, life-long friendships abruptly severed. No organisation existed to help people trace those they had lost.

  And so it was that we too lost Fatima, not knowing how to pluck her from the human whirlpool that had swallowed her after our departure. As for Rex, whom we last saw that April morning in 1948, no news of him reached us ever again.

  YAHYA YAKHLIF

  The Hyena

  The tunnel appears endless. The darkness is thick and heavy, and his feet move with difficulty. The darkness is hills and deep hollows, metaphor. The vision is clear. Heartbeats amplify, and the man imagines that he is seeing through the eye cavities of a skull. Suddenly a hyena emerged, all at once. Its fangs and claws protruded. He stopped. Stopped. His feet were nailed to the ground.