Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Nuha said her father had always lived with sorrow in his heart: He said his greatest wish was not to kill the Jews but to kill Chicken Mahdi.

It would be lawful to kill Mahdi, isn’t that right, Father? It would be lawful to kill him not because he didn’t fight with you, but because after you took the village back he gave the order for you to withdraw and join your women and children because the ALA would protect the village. And you believed him.

Why did you believe Mahdi?

Yunes said he didn’t believe Mahdi, “but what could we do?”

“Listen, my daughter. They occupied the village, so the fedayeen withdrew and joined their families in the fields nearby. They slept and lived under the olive trees, waiting for an end to their sufferings. When they got hungry, they decided to take back their village. The Jews occupied the village on June 10, 1948, and we waited in the fields for two weeks. Then we came together — people from al-Birwa, Sha’ab, al-Ba’neh, and Deir al-Asad — and decided to liberate the village. The wheat and maize were waiting to be harvested, and people couldn’t find even a dry crust for sustenance.

“The fighters gathered at Tal al-Layyat, and there the Iraqi officer Jasem stood up and made a speech. He said the ALA didn’t have orders to help, but they were wholeheartedly with the villagers and would be praying for their success.

“Our attack began. We attacked the village from three directions — Jebel al-Tawil in the north, Sha’ab in the southeast, and Tal al-Layyat in the east — and we won.

“We won because they were taken by surprise and didn’t fight. They did just as we’d done: Instead of resisting, they ran away to Abu Laban. So we entered the village. Of course, they fired at us for a while, but it seems their numbers were very small so they withdrew.

“In al-Birwa we found everything in its place and Father Jebran there to greet us.

“He said, ‘You should have agreed with me and given me time to finish negotiating with them, but this is better. God has granted us victory.’

“The priest suggested we harvest the wheat before they came back, and we agreed. We were inspecting the village and the houses when we heard youyous coming from the house of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad. When we got there, we found everyone’s clothes stuffed into bags and placed in the center of the patio. People were attempting to pick out their own clothes from the jumble. I swear no one knows what he took and what he left behind. The clothes were all mixed up, and we couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. The priest kept telling us to leave the clothes and go out to the fields. Saniyyeh, the wife of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad, let out a celebratory trill and we all laughed; it was a rag wedding — we discovered our clothes were only rags. Why would the Jews take rags? And us, too — why were our clothes rags? We celebrated. I can hardly describe it, my dear — clothes were flying through the air, and everyone was trying things on and pulling them off. Everyone wore everyone else’s things, and we came together and were joyous. That was our victory celebration, but we couldn’t enjoy it because we heard gunfire from the direction of the threshing ground, so we thought the counterattack must have begun. Leaving our rags, we ran to get our rifles, and we found Darwish’s son, Mahmoud (not the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was only six years old then and hardly knew how to talk — it was his cousin, I think) standing in the middle of the field, firing his gun in the air and pointing to the threshing floor. There we discovered the sacks: A large part of the wheat harvest had been placed in sacks in the middle of the threshing floor. We started gathering the sacks while Salim As’ad stood by in a British police officer’s uniform, which he’d never parted with, next to seven harvesters the Jews had left when they fled.

“We climbed over the harvesters, but then the shooting started, and the dying, too.

“We left the harvesters, picked up the sacks of wheat, and rushed toward the village; the women began to leave ahead of us.

“Bullets, women leaving with sacks of wheat on their heads, men spreading out to their positions — the men decided to stay in the village after they’d been joined by eleven fighters from the village of Aqraba who announced they were deserting the ALA.”

“We were like drunkards,” said Nuha’s father.

He said he was drunk on the scent of the wheat, on the sun-dust.

“Can you get drunk on dust?” she asked Yunes.

Yunes said that Mahdi committed suicide in Tarshiha. “It wasn’t his fault, my son. Mahdi was just carrying out orders. In Lebanon we found out that Mahdi had died. When he heard the final order to withdraw, he said, ‘Shame on the Arabs,’ pulled out his revolver, shot himself in the head, and died.

“At some point, Mahdi came and said, ‘Okay. Go away and rest up with your families.’ And Mahdi was right — the big push was over. We rushed to al-Birwa and liberated it, and then we returned to our villages. Thirty-five men, too exhausted to move.

“When we talk about these battles, you think of us as disciplined soldiers, but that wasn’t at all the case.

“Listen.

“After we liberated al-Birwa, three United Nations officers arrived carrying white flags and asked to negotiate with our commanding officer.

“‘But we don’t have a commanding officer,’ said Salim As’ad.

“‘We’re just peasants,’ said Nabil Hourani. ‘We don’t have a leader, we’re just peasants who want to harvest our crop and go back to our houses. Would you rather we died of hunger?’

“‘But you broke the truce,’ said the Swedish officer.

“‘What truce, Sir? We’ve got nothing to do with the war. We wanted to go back to our village, so we went.’

“The Swedish officer asked our permission to search the village and go to Tal al-Layyat to meet with the commanding officer of the ALA, but we refused. We were afraid of spies working for the Jews, so we insisted that the officers leave the village.

“We weren’t an army. We were just ordinary people. More than half the fighters knew nothing about fighting, I swear. For them, war was shooting at the enemy. We’d stand in a row and fire; we knew nothing about the art of war. That’s why, when Mahdi came and asked the fighters to withdraw and leave the village in the hands of the ALA, we agreed without thinking. The peasants did what they set out to do, took part of their crop and handed the village over to the regular army.

“Forty aging men and women who refused to leave their houses was all that was left in al-Birwa, plus a young man named Tanios al-Khouri, who wanted to stay with his uncle, the village priest. Later he was killed when the Jews came back to occupy the village.

“The shelling started and no one knew what was happening because they found the Israelis in the village square, but there was no sign of the ALA. The Jews started blowing up houses and then asked everyone to assemble in the square. They discovered that there were only old people, the priest, and his nephew left in the village. Tanios had been helping his uncle in the church and was preparing to join the order himself, and when the village fell, the priest dressed him in a black cassock identical to his own, and they joined the others in the square.

“An Israeli officer came forward and took the youth by his hand, dragged him out of the crowd and ordered him to take off his cassock. The youth hesitated a little, then took it off under the officer’s steely gaze and stood trembling in his underwear. The July sun struck their faces, the dust spread over the village while Tanios trembled with cold. The priest tried to say something, but the shots tore over their heads.