Translation sample by Sawad Hussain

I don’t remember too much about our village, Tal al-Adas. It comes to mind sometimes, like a mirage or in pieces, but I’m not sure how real it actually is. Maybe it’s just my imagination running away with itself, or maybe I just conjured up this safe haven I could run to when times get tough. I remember, or maybe it’s more like I see myself sitting on a pile of wheat at harvest time, Ummi scolding me and then I roll back down laughing. Maybe I imagined my father giving me a piggyback ride at sunset, singing a mawwal in his melodious voice, and my mother scuttling after him and insisting that he must stop spoiling me. Maybe I imagined the children playing tabat al-saba, scrambling to knock down their opponent’s stone tower, while I chewed on some cucumber or a tomato seed and looked on. Maybe this small, quiet village on the Marj Ibn Amer plain, never was.

You won’t find Tal al-Adas on any map, and there’s no evidence of its existence except our memories and that tingling like a ululation in the pit of my stomach whenever I recall it or add another detail to it in my imagination. Returning seems within reach if I just lean into the dream or part of a memory. Tal al-Adas was just the beginning, the foundation of the tale, with hardly an end in sight.

I was little girl, six years old, but I can remember with piercing clarity that night when my father came back from the mayor’s house. His face grim, he was hunched over, the hulk and bulk of Mount Tabor weighing on his shoulders. He removed his abaya and hung it on a nail on the wall, then took off his brightly colored turban and placed it on the nail right above, as he’d always done. But he didn’t greet my mother or cradle her swollen belly in his hands. Joking with Tayseer and me was also out of the question. He sat on the bed silently and held his head in his hands, staring at the colorful reed mat under his feet. Ummi tried to get him to talk, but he remained tightlipped. I sensed that something serious had happened, a catastrophe of some kind, but I didn’t fully understand. I was afraid but still didn’t understand. Ummi ordered us to go to bed and get some sleep, but how could I? My bed was only a curtain away from the living room, and curtains don’t block out sound or keep out fear. When Ummi tried again to get him to speak, I heard a tremble in her voice. “What happened? Please, tell me.”

Still nothing.

She pressed him with another question. “Tell me, what did the mayor want? You’re scaring me. Is everything all right? What did al-Mukhtar want?”

Abuwi exploded, his voice distressed. “All right? How can anything be all right? We’re ruined Halima, ruined I tell you!”

“My heart, my heart, it’s going to stop right here and now. Tell—”

My father cut her off before she could finish. “They sold us out. Sold us out for a measly eighty qirsh!”

“What are you saying? I don’t understand. Who sold what?”

Sobbing, he continued. “The landowners. The ones in Lebanon, the Sursock and Tayyan families – sellouts, the bastards. They sold the country, they sold it for eighty qirsh per dunam. Eighty qirsh, Halima!”

Ummi gasped and I heard my father blowing his nose. I’d never heard Abuwi cry before. In my eyes he was a mountain, nothing could shake him. I used to think that he wasn’t afraid of anything and that nothing could wipe away his smile. How could he be so rattled? I didn’t grasp what he said about who had sold what to whom, but his weeping was enough to make it clear that whatever had happened was awful. A monster had opened its jaws to swallow us whole. I sat up on my mattress and hugged my knees to my chest.

In a strangled voice, he added, “The Jews came to al-Mukhtar and told him ‘Tell the people of this place to pack up their things and go. This land is now ours and we don’t want Arabs on it.’”

“Meaning that …?”

He snapped at her and yelled, “Meaning khalas! It’s over. They want us to pack up and leave our land, find somewhere else to live. To get up and go.”

“It can’t be, it can’t be. One calamity after the other! Where do they want us to go? We’ve farmed this land our whole lives, and its soil runs through our veins.” Ummi slapped her cheeks in despair. “I’m cursed, cursed! How has this catastrophe fallen on our heads? As if
we don’t already have enough on our hands! What do we do now?”

With a sigh that came from the deepest part of him, my father shared, “Al-Mukhtar wrote an appeal and we signed it with our fingerprints so that he could send it to the English, to the Northern Brigade Commander in Nazareth. To tell him how unjust this is, that we can’t just up and leave our family lands, our livelihoods. We’ll see what happens, but I have a bad feeling.”

But we left – we left the house, the land, and the threshing floor. We left the sunset, the sparkling dew, the sweet spring water. My father placed what he could of our household possessions and a simple mattress on Khadra – our donkey – and sat my brother Tayseer, who was two years younger than me, on top of it all. He put me and my mother, who was seven months along, on top of our mule Ziriq. We left at the end of summer, after the harvest. We didn’t even get the chance to ground our wheat. Behind us walked a line of refugees just like us. Phantoms carrying their fate on heads that had never bowed before. Children clinging to their parents’ hands and looking at the ground, afraid to stumble. Parents staring straight ahead, broken and fearful. Phantoms walking, staring off into the unknown horizon. They left their souls behind, among the still hot stones in the taboon oven, between the layered rocks of the sansala walls where love letters lay nestled, or hovering above the threshing board flipped upside-down, its sharp teeth pointed to the sky. Women let fly heart-wrenching wails while the men were silent, their heads bowed slightly. None of us knew what would become of us. From that moment, a journey of hardship began which has never ended. All that I remember or that remains in my memory are disjointed pictures, and stories my mother told us of that time and the village during her rare moments of clearheadedness.