Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-312-42561-6
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2006-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

• 7 •

THE CORRIDORS OF MEMORY

The Naqba and the Palestinians of Lebanon

——————

We find stories tossed in the streets of our memory.

— ELIAS KHOURY

When Mahmut went to collect the few belongings, the mattresses, quilts, and cooking pots that his family had salvaged from their house, he brought them piled high on a camel that had been borrowed for the journey over the mountains. His daughter Zainab remembers the animal well. She had not been expecting anything as exotic, and she can recall it with the sharpness of a photograph, just as she remembers with perfect clarity the earlier flight from Balad al Sheik, stumbling without shoes across the rocky hillside as dawn was breaking and the first slit of sun touched the horizon, crouching down in the gullies, dragging her younger brothers and sisters by their hands, while behind them she could hear the crack of the rifles and see the flames as the soldiers set fire to their house. It was cold and very still.

That was New Year’s Eve, 1947. She was twelve. The Haganah, the Jewish underground armed organization, was beginning its assault on the mountain villages above Haifa, flushing out the Arab fighters, of whom her father was one, driving them farther back up into the mountains, toward the isolated stone shack that her grandfather had built for the hot summer months, when he lent his village house to guests.

The attack on Balad al Sheik, one of the first acts of reprisal in the war between Arabs and Zionists, had been prompted by the killing of forty-one Jewish oil refinery workers the night before, itself a gesture of revenge for the deaths of six Palestinians at the gates of the refinery. Mahmut, unlike many of the other villagers, owned a gun; he was a man of standing and land, some of which he had sold to buy the gun and the ammunition to go with it, for the Arab resistance was very short of weapons. He was a farmer, she explained to me when I visited her in the autumn of 2002, who grew carrots and cabbages, as well as corn, wheat, and barley; he grew olive trees and grapevines, pressing oil from the olives and fermenting a little vinegar from the grapes; her mother supervised the making of jam, and there was a small shop in which the produce was sold. There were cows, large black and white Dutch cows that gave milk three times a day, and some sheep. Their house had many rooms because her father was a well-known man, and many people came to call on him and drink the coffee that was always kept ready for visitors.

Zainab can also remember, and can recite, step by step, the stages of their journey into exile, the weeks in Majed al Koroum, while her father crept back to their village under cover of dark to see whether it was safe to go home; the drive on by hired truck in search of greater safety when he

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