War Stories

By Elias Khoury

09/10/06 "Al-Ahram" -- -- Hundreds of men and women walk over the rubble, carrying the coffins of 19 martyrs. Black clothes, tears and ululations. I stood to the side of the road observing the scene. I'm saying, 'to the side of the road', when it wasn't a road. I'm saying 'the scene' when it wasn't a scene. How to narrate feelings that have no name? When I went into the village of Aita Ashaab I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the name but no village. Nothing but a great ruin blocking the horizon. All the houses demolished, walls leaning on emptiness, emptiness leaning on dust.

I went to the village last week as if returning among the returnees. I wasn't carrying a house key. But I carried my heart and went along, only to be shocked at the demolished village filling up with returnees embracing the void. Everything but the sun was clothed in black. The sun was grey and stinging. I was walking in the rubble when a young man stood next to me and started narrating stories of heroism and death. But I didn't need stories that I already knew. I'm saying 'already knew' when I didn't know them. But I felt that the scene was coming at me from within an aged memory. Not my memory, rather a mixture of things some of which I lived in the past. But why am I seeing the ghost of 1948? Why am I seeing Barwa and Ghabsiya and Ein Zaitoun?

There they went into the villages, evicted their inhabitants, lined the houses with dynamite and blew them up. Here they didn't go in. Well, they had barely reached the village square when death showered them; they retreated, went on retreating till they reached the Blue Line, leaving behind the remains of a Merkava tank, part of a jeep, abandoned containers. But they had destroyed the village before going in. And, as in the year of the Nakba, they ordered the residents to leave with the help of amplifiers. I saw the memory of the year of the Nakba, and I saw the peasants carrying the keys to houses without doors or walls. This time the peasants returned in black, carrying the keys. And I saw those years when we shed our young in the villages of the south, watering the olives of Lebanese Galilee with the blood of the young of Palestinian Galilee.

That was in 1968. We were in our twenties. Kafar Shouba, Kafar Hamam and Habbariya were the start of the journey that taught us the way to Bent Jbeil, Aita Ashaab and Aytaroun. I saw as if I was remembering. But memory deceives, and so does the eye.

I stood before the ruins, and the tears flowed. No, it was before that scene that I stood, when the people carried the coffins walking over the rubble with the dust of death blanketing them. I couldn't feel the tears collecting at the edges of my eyes, burning them, before they fell on my cheeks. The dust covered us under the burning sun, the sweat trickling out of our pores and spreading over our bodies. I didn't realise I was crying when I did. I had never experienced weeping that came out of the whole body, mixing tears and sweat.

No, it was neither sadness nor memory. It was rather that storming feeling of belonging to this land, of those people, the dead and the living, being family.

How to tell a martyr who does not know me that we have become family, and that it should be disallowed to have to part the day we met? How to tell demolished houses that they have become un-visited homes, that the tobacco shoots hanging in gorged rooms are the sweat of my brow, that they are the undone work that has become my name and address? How to speak without that water that has given me a thirst for love? How to carve in my heart words that emerge from the depths of pain, which speak a language only the victim knows?

I listened to the stories of heroism, walked along the demolished alleyways with a group of young men, before we reached the outskirts of the village, where the marks of the Merkava's chains stood side by side with the demolition truck that razed the houses. I listened to the details of the battle, in which a battalion of the invincible army was forced to retreat.

They came upon them from underground, from the dumps, from where they could not expect them, turning Khillat Warda, where the two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner, into a field of the resistance and a confrontation arena.

I stood and there was the procession. Coffins carried on the shoulders. A woman throwing rice at the procession, men hitting their own cheeks, women mixing weeping with ululation. And I saw the ruins as if I were in an infinity of dust without beginning or end. As if that same procession would cut through all the destroyed villages and towns. Everywhere is destroyed, without ceilings -- except for the coffins covered with black cloth and the flags of the resistance. Nowhere but the coffin, no story but death, no water but tears.

I saw as if I was, rather, remembering, and listened to the story of a succession of generations. Abu Shawqi, an octogenarian from Hawla, said he walked off, fleeing the Hawla massacre in 1948, and has not stopped walking for 58 years. 'But this time we did not flee,' the white-haired man said, sitting on the mastaba of his house in the southern village. 'This time we learned that we do not flee, we force them to flee.'

At the entrance to Bent Jbeil, which witnessed the most violent battles of endurance, I stood before a pond with geese swimming in it. Everything in the town is demolished, but the geese swim on, caring for neither dust nor the smell of corpses being dragged out from under the rubble.

A horizon of water, and stories of heroism and death.

Peasants carrying coffins on their shoulders. Coffins turned into ships, tears turned into water, stories of resisting the Israeli monster, and a south that stretches from the Blue Line to the blue of the sky.

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