My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

Author:Elias Khoury [Khoury, Elias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2019-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

—3—

“WHERE ARE WE to go?” asked Khuloud, who was carrying her daughter Huda in her arms.

“Put your faith in God, sister,” Hajj Iliyya said. “Go back to where you slept last night, and then we’ll sort things out, God willing.”

It was six in the evening. After a long and grueling day of waiting, the people started to leave the square in front of the Great Mosque. They looked more like shadows, enveloped in silence. “I swear, Naji,” Ma’moun told me, “that day, for the first time in my life, I heard the sound of silence.” Describing to me how the people had begun to set off for nowhere, Ma’moun said, “The Israeli captain was clear: ‘You can live in any house you want, so long as it’s inside the wire.’”

“And what about us?” I asked him.

Ma’moun said he was the one who’d found the house and told Manal, “You two live in the house, and I’ll stay in the room in the garden. That way, I’ll be with you.”

(The blind man, who had discovered the sound of silence and its various rhythms, would transform the subject of this discovery into the basis for the lecture on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish that he gave here, at New York University, where he read the rhythms of meaning into the interstices of silence, announcing that the hallmark of the literature of the Palestinian Nakba was that it had “fashioned from the silence of the victim interstices that reconstructed the poetic image.” Even though, like most of the audience who listened to the lecture in the library of the Kevorkian Center, I couldn’t get my mind around what he meant, Ma’moun’s words had an impact on my heart, not simply because his analysis was astonishing, but because it took me back to the square in front of the mosque, where the silence of the victims rose up, drowning out the voices of the Israeli soldiers.

The eloquence of the silence of the victims in the square in front of the Great Mosque made me think of the eloquence of the dance in the village square at Fasouta, in Galilee. I saw the dust of silence spreading, covering everyone – dust like that which rose from beneath the feet of the people of Fasouta as they surrendered to the Israeli army with their northern dabke, the dust hiding both them and the soldiers, veiling them so that conqueror and conquered were equally absent and concealed – a terrifying moment, described by Anton Shammas in his wonderful novel Arabesques.)

The silence was broken suddenly when Iliyya Batshoun was heard asking the people to wait, so that the committee that was to take charge of the quarter’s affairs could be formed and distribute the people among the houses located within the ghetto’s ring of fencing. No one paid him any attention, however. The people wanted to get into the houses, not to take up residence in them but to look for food.

Khalid Hassouna went over to Hajj Iliyya and they spoke in low voices.

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