Letters from Palestine (21 page)

He said in a quiet voice, “We were scared.
We were afraid after we heard what had happened in the Deir Yassin
massacre, after we heard about all the violence in the other
villages, after we found bodies of people killed as we walked on
the footpaths around the area. The women were raped. The children
were killed. Old people were massacred. We were scared. I felt my
duty was to protect my family, to protect the younger children. I
wish we’d had weapons to defend the land, but we were not allowed
to have any kind of weapons to defend ourselves.”

My friend caught my arm to get me to stop
speaking. When I looked back at him, I saw tears even in my
friend’s eyes. I looked back at my uncle. He had become emotional,
even his voice had changed. There was a silent moment.

After a while, he said, “No one likes to
die. We love life.”

The Jewish friend did not understand every
word, but even her eyes were full of tears. I felt no tears, only
anger. When my friend caught my arm, I had wanted to ask more, but
I stopped.

After the silence, my uncle quietly shook
his head and said, “No matter what would have happened, I shouldn’t
have left the village. I should have died here. I would rather die
here than to go survive in a refugee camp.” He said, “Actually, I
am already dead. Like most Palestinian refugees. All my generation,
we have been dead inside since the moment we left this village.
It’s true, we move, we eat. But we lost the main part of our
spirit, of who we were. Life does not make sense and for fifty
years has had no meaning.” As he touched the earth he said, “After
all this time, we are still waiting to get back here.”

I was watching my uncle carefully. In the
beginning, I didn’t care, I just wanted answers. We were here on
the ground, and I felt it was my only chance to get clear answers.
But as I watched the tears fall from his eyes, I felt my questions
shut down. I did not want to ask any more questions. I did not want
to lose him. The language between us had become too strong, too
painful. I stopped the conversation, stopped both of us.

There was a moment of silence, and then my
uncle stood up slowly and said, “Let us go to the house.”

We stood up and started walking, passing
trees and fields. My uncle started explaining, “This is the field
of the Attiyeh family.” As we continued walking, he started giving
names to the trees, to the rocks, and he started telling me
stories.

As we walked, and I listened, I saw history
jumping out at me from under the rocks, from the trees, from the
heavy stones that showed that there had been people living here.
The history was hiding, but it had not disappeared. I was watching
the awakening of history through the connection between the
generation of the catastrophe and the earth. I couldn’t experience
this kind of communication in the refugee camp. It wasn’t until I
began walking with my uncle inside the village.

Sometimes my uncle would turn to the left to
say, “Here is where we used to play when we were children.”
Sometimes he would turn to the right and say, “Here is where we
used to sit down and eat when we were farming and working in our
field.” And sometimes he connected specific places to events in my
mom’s life.

My uncle grabbed blades of grass and chewed
on them as we walked a couple hundred meters, climbing a small
hill. He knew what each plant was and which were okay to eat. After
a while, we approached an area with many stones.

It was in this particular location that my
uncle completely changed. His sadness became deeper, and I realized
that something was different about this place. He paused for a
while before telling me that this was the place he and my mother
used to live.

I looked around. I could see nothing and was
not sure what he meant. In my naiveté, I answered, “There is
nothing here. No one used to live here.”

He looked at me and slowly spoke, “Your
mother’s father’s house and your great-grandfather’s house were
here.”

He began to show me. There were stones lying
everywhere, but there was no sign of a house. He started describing
the house to me as we walked around. When we approached a pile of
stones, my uncle said excitedly, “This was the entrance of our
house here.” He told me to help him, and we started clearing the
brush away from the stones. He described the three steps in front
of his parents’ home, and we started digging for those steps. As we
cleared the area, we discovered two stairs. They were clearly
stairs leading somewhere, and we also discovered part of the
foundation of the home. He showed me where each of my family
members’ rooms used to be, where the doors, the windows, the
kitchen had been.

Each word my uncle spoke painted a picture
in my mind, and piece by piece, he began drawing the house. After a
few minutes, I started to see the house appear in front of me. I
was able to walk around the house, and I could see the doors and
the windows in my imagination. I was picturing what I would see
from looking through the window, and it looked so much different
than in the camp. In the camp, we can only see one meter out the
window before there is another house. Here, you could see such a
beautiful landscape.

Over time, he started building the other
houses around me. I started to see the village in front of me. I
realized that my uncle was an artist, and was sure that not only my
uncle, but also his entire generation is artistic. They could draw
pictures of the villages from so long ago so vividly that the
images came alive.

I saw that, here, my uncle was different
than he was in the camp. Here, he was not always sad. His emotions
were more varied; he himself came alive in ways I had not seen
before. Sometimes he was happy to remember the old days, and at
other times he was deeply sad about what had happened to him, his
family, and his community. His mood changed by the minute. Not only
was this trip helping me discover my mother’s history, it helped me
learn more about my uncle.

My uncle pointed to two trees that were
close to the house and described how his family used to have
breakfast under them. He said “In summer, every morning, we used to
eat here under the trees. Sometimes guests would come, and we’d all
sit down and eat together.”

As he spoke, my friend walked over toward
the trees and reached up to pick something from a branch. He turned
to us and said, “Almonds!” in an excited voice. “Come, let’s sit
down and eat.”

Without thinking, my uncle replied, “Yes,
but that one is very dry and hard. It is the soured kind of almond
tree. That tree never produced good nuts. Try the other one.”

My friend looked at the almond in his hand
and realized that he was right. He looked at me and said, “Fifty
years later and he still remembers which tree is sour and which is
not.” He turned to the other tree and began to pick some nuts.

My uncle sat down on one of the stones,
sweating from the heat. He wiped his face. He took a few moments
alone, looking around. Then he called me over to his side, saying,
“Come, come.” He pointed to an area about twenty meters away, a
flat empty space full of dry grass. He asked me, “Do you know what
this area is?”

I guessed, “A garden where you were planting
vegetables?”

He said, “No. This is the place we call
‘Sahet et Balad,’ the place where everyone came at night to sit and
socialize. Our village was a very small village, with only 220
people living here. Most of the time, the people spent the evenings
sitting down together and socializing. When someone got married, we
spent one week celebrating the wedding here. It’s the same place
where we also used to mourn when someone died. It was where we
would all gather together to support the family.

“The people in the village were living as a
community. The whole village was like a big family. We used to
support each other, working together on the land, or some of us
taking care of the sheep. If someone wanted to build a house or do
any work, all the people would come to help him. We used to cook
and eat, all of us together.”

He looked at me. “Look now where we are. We
are divided. Some of the people from this village are living in
Lebanon, some in Syria, some in Jordan. We are so far from each
other. We don’t even know anything about each other anymore. This
village used to keep the family together. The moment we left this
village, we were scattered everywhere.”

My uncle stood up and said, “Sit here and
relax a little bit. I want to go visit the cemetery.”

We looked at each other, and I said,
“Cemetery? We want to come.”

We climbed the hill for about two hundred
meters and began to see graves marked with stones. When we reached
the edge of the cemetery, my uncle opened his hands and started
reciting the Quran. It was clear that the graves were old. Some of
the tombs were destroyed, and the graves were lying empty. Some
were still closed. I asked my uncle if he knew anyone in the
cemetery.

He replied, “Of course. My grandparents are
buried here. Many other relatives are buried here, too.” He added,
“They are so lucky. At least they are buried in the village here.
Not like us who live as refugees and will be buried as
refugees.”

I remembered what my mom had told me, that
she wanted to be buried in the village, if it is at all possible.
Before she passed away, she asked me to bury her in the village if
I would one day have the chance to come back. She wanted me to take
her remains to be buried here.

My friend commented, “This land is so full
of history. No matter what they do, destroying houses, uprooting
trees, planting new forests, making the area a nature reserve, it
will not erase history.”

My uncle agreed, saying, “This history is
saved here.” He tapped the back of his head. “And saved here,” he
continued, tapping his heart. “No one can erase it.”

He looked at me and spoke, “If I die, this
history will not die with me. It will stay with you. You will keep
it and you will pass it on.”

The sun started to set, and my friend
reminded me that we should leave before it got dark. We would have
to start heading back to the camp.

When I told my uncle we should leave, he was
upset and said he wanted to stay longer.

I reassured him, “Don’t worry, we will come
back again. And again.”

We turned and started walking down the hill.
My friend was speaking with the American woman, translating for her
into English. My uncle was walking, but it was clear he was very
sad. His footsteps were slow and heavy, like those of someone who
did not want to get where he was going.

As we continued down the hill, I was
thinking that I had read lots of history, but today I had learned
the main history lesson about myself, about my roots. This man,
sixty-eight years old, had not gone to school. He didn’t learn from
books, but he was the best tour guide to the history of this area.
He has a power to make the stones speak, the trees whisper, the
land come alive. He is an artist who can build something beautiful
from the remains of destruction.

The Israeli state, after fifty years of
trying to bury history, and with all the weapons they have, and all
the support they receive from America and Europe, couldn’t defeat
my uncle. They have power, but they couldn’t erase history. They
couldn’t erase my uncle’s memories. They couldn’t erase his
connection to this land.

After visiting my parents’ villages, I felt
like I was a different person. I realized that, although I live in
a refugee camp, I am not from this camp. I was forced to be a
refugee, but I have land that calls to me that I call home. I have
a house. I have fresh air. And I have dignity. One day I will
return.

The next two selections continue to emphasize
the themes of the preceding sections in the book—those concerned
with the life of refugees in the camps and the longing to return
home. Except in this case, the writers speak of their fathers, one
dead now seven years, the other dead only a few days before his son
wrote his epitaph. Each of these men exemplify both the enduring
spirit of the Palestinian people and the terrible price they have
had to pay once they were reduced to living as refugees in
ghetto-like camps, trying to scratch out a living to support their
families and to protect them against the life-threatening dangers
that are endemic to camp life, especially in Gaza. These brief but
heartrending homages to the fathers of these writers show us still
another aspect of the Palestinian struggle to maintain one’s
dignity and to pass it on to one’s children while living, year
after year, with illness and tremendous hardship under
circumstances that most readers of this book could not be expected
even to imagine.

_PHOTO

My name is Olfat Khalil Mahmoud. I was born
in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, called Bourj Al
Barajneh, in 1960. I am the mother of four boys who are doing very
well in their education and the wife of a successful man, Mahmoud
Khazaal, who has a master of arts in cinematography.

I was a registered staff nurse and a
clinical instructor at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society from
1980 to 1986, during the height of the Lebanese Civil War. Working
in a continuous war zone was exhausting, and I was fed up with
seeing blood and countless dead bodies each and every day. So I
changed careers to become a community health educator from 1987 to
1992. In 1993, I went back to university for four years to study
sociology and psychology. It was during this time that I founded
and became director of the Women’s Humanitarian Organization, while
also looking after my own family of three children.