II

Although nobody in his family thought he would long survive, Ahmad Khalil lived. He could not 6 know as the others knew that his three brothers and a sister who were born before him and still another brother and sister after him, had not, for all of Khadijah’s children had been weak and sickly and none of them had been able to survive beyond infancy.

He still could not walk but he had grown strong enough to crawl about the crowded little room which he and his parents shared with his grandfather, his uncle, and his aunt who was expecting a baby. He had long been able to talk and liked to amuse himself for many hours at a time with incessant chatter, trying to repeat long passages of poetry he had so often heard his grandfather and his mother recite and the sheer delight in the rhythm and rich throaty sounds of the Arabic language.

Harassed by overwork, his mother had much less time for him now than before and since he was too small to help in the fields and was regarded as a nuisance underfoot, he was often abandoned alone all day in the house where would cry in hunger and thirst until he was exhausted with nobody to hear.

At first glance, the room appeared bare and devoid of interest but little Ahmad Khalil found plenty to investigate.

On hands and knees he crawled over the rough reed matting covering the hard-packed earthen floor upon which the members of his family sat during the day and slept at night. Other times he would play hide-and-seek behind the giant-sized pottery jars that lined the wall in which his mother and aunt stored water and grain.

7 Nearby stood his mother’s loom where he could watch her weave for market the most beautiful cloth he had ever seen. In the centre of the room on the fireplace was set the great copper cooking pot charred black with age and constant use which had been in the possession of his mother’s family for generations. Close beside it was the flat iron plate upon which he loved to watch his mother and aunts cook unleavened cakes of bread. His mother had taught him never to waste or throw away even a morsel of food or else Shaitan would eat it and Allah punish him. If ever Khadijah saw a piece of bread the child had carelessly dropped on the ground, she would scold him and order him to kiss it before placing it into a crevice of the wall where a cat, dog or bird could find it.

In the darkest corner of the room, the crude village-made farm tools were kept, the plough, hoe, shovel, pick, sickle and digging sticks along with the threshing equipment. He did not know of the long drought some months before his birth which had left the entire tribe impoverished and destitute. During the drought, the harvest failed and most of their animals died. Under cover of darkness, twelve famished tribesmen broke into Negba, the neighbouring Jewish settlement, killed three guardsmen and fled away with sheep, chickens and as many sacks of grain as they could carry. This resulted in savage reprisals.

When Malak Wahab could not persuade a 8 friend from a neighbouring village to lend him his camel for ploughing in exchange for a sack of grain, Khadijah had to pull the plough herself. Those who lacked the strength to pull their own ploughs resorted to planting the grain-seeds with digging sticks of the simplest manufacture, this being possible because the tracts of land left to them had shrunken so small.

Next to the tools were the weapons and whenever Ahmad Khalil saw the rifles leaning against the wall, he felt safe and secure, certain that his father, his grandfather and his uncles would protect him from all harm.

The house was built of stones tightly fitted together and strong enough to last for generations. Its thick walls provided excellent protection against the fierce heat; it was dark inside and pleasantly cool in summer but dreadfully cold during the winter rains.

This year the harvest was not so meagre as usual and there was milk to drink and sometimes even meat. Malak Wahab would carefully save all the bits of meat in the stew Khadijah had intended for him and when she was not looking, hastily feed them to Ahmad Khalil. He would hold the child on his lap at night and in the darkness tenderly coax him into drinking one more swallow of milk and to munch another orange that had been stolen 9 from Negba. As soon as his father returned home at night, little Ahmad Khalil would rush to him and feel the bulging pockets concealed under his robes, crying: “What did you bring me? What do you bring”? And there was another orange and as a special treat, three boiled eggs!

One morning just after his father had fed him another secret meal, Ahmad Khalil astonished his parents by slowly climbing to his feet, his brown face radiant, his great black eyes bright with mischief as if he knew he had attained some great accomplishment. Excitingly Malak Wahab called out to Khadijah who saw him standing alone unsupported for the first time. Malak Wahab held out both arms and urged him forward.

The child took a few faltering steps in his direction, then fell down before he again struggled to his feet and finally made his way on unsteady legs across the room. Khadijah could not believe it. Her Ahmad Khalil had never been able to walk; he had scarcely the strength to sit upright. She feared he might always be a cripple because although he was four years old, she still had to carry him about like an infant.

No longer did Malak Wahab have to feed him in secret after Khadijah discovered him in the act for to his pleasant surprise, she was not angry, but very much pleased.

After that, she vied with Malak Wahab to forage, scavenge or steal 10 from Negba as much as she could find and take turns with him stuffing the extra food into the child’s mouth with her greasy fingers, the parents laughing and playfully teasing each other all the while.

As the stalks of grain grew tall and ripened in the green fields under the bright hot sun, the child improved steadily in health and strength.

As soon as the sun began to sink and the men returned home from the fields, Khadijah would stand just behind the doorway calling out to little Ahmad Khalil who raced the entire length down the street into her outstretched arms. For a long moment she would hold her child close against her, overwhelmed with happiness as she fondled and caressed him—a son at last of her very own! Of all the six children she had borne only to lose, this one, the sole survivor Allah had left to her.

To express her joy, Khadijah persuaded her elder brother, Yusuf Malik to make a feast.

For the occasion he slaughtered ten sheep in the name of Allah and for two days afterwards, Khadijah stirred great pots of rice and meat over the out-door fires. Word spread quickly that a feast was to be held. All the small ones whose parents had been left landless and destitute by the encroaching settlers, were invited. Starving children, most of them nearly naked in the freezing cold of the winter, came in scores from the surrounding villages and nearby beduin encampments.

More 11 than a hundred children sat in rows on the ground, impatiently waiting for the food to be distributed to them. Then a fight broke out between three older boys belonging to rival hostile tribes over the meat and only then did Yusuf Malik intervene to separate them and give each a more ample portion. Drawn to the scene by irresistible curiosity, a seven-year-old boy from Negba looked on timidly with wide blue eyes. Yusuf Malik gently took him by the hand and by signs indicated for him a place to sit on the dusty ground between Ahmad Khalil and a tiny bedu girl who were both too busy stuffing rice and marrow into their mouths by the handful to notice the alien. Yusuf Malik gave him an enormous bone. The blonde boy tried to lift it to his mouth but since it was too big for him alone, all three children gnawed eagerly at the succulent meat at once, the grease from the fat dripping over them. Famished dogs, cats and birds waited expectantly for more bones and extra morsels. They were not disappointed.

There was plenty for all. A wild jackal howled in the distance before venturing closer.

Khadijah cried out and cringed in terror, begging her brother to drive it away but Yusuf Malik only replied, calmly: “This one too is our guest. We cannot leave him hungry” and reaching for the last bone, dripping with fat and shreds of meat, threw it in its direction as far as he could reach and the animal fled away with it in its mouth into the barren hills beyond.

22 Ahmad Khalil awoke with a start. With the comfort of a full stomach, he had fallen asleep on the ground, covered by his uncle’s warm woollen robe.

The sun had set. He was alone. It was nearly dark. All was quiet.

The children had gone home.

“Why are you still here?” scolded his uncle. “Your mother will worry”.

And without saying more, Yusuf Malik wiped the dust and dirt off the child’s body with his hands as best he could, picked him up in his arms and carried him to the hut.

His mother and father were lying together on their straw mat ready for sleep and when his uncle brought him to them, Khadijah’s sleepy arm reached for him and drew him close against her. The desert night air was bitterly cold but little Ahmad Khalil, squeezed safely between his mother and father under his grandmother’s heavy black goat’s hair blanket, was snug and warm.

Now that Ahmad Khalil was strong enough to run about, he spent most of the time playing with his two small cousins, Abdul Aziz and his younger sister, Asma. No sooner did they open their eyes at dawn when they would rush up the narrow stairs to the roof and since the one-roomed huts on their street adjoined each other, they would gleefully jump from one rooftop to the next, shouting with joy until neighbours complained to their parents because of the noise. Like all other Iraq al-Manshiya children, Ahmad Khalil, Abdul 13 Aziz and Asma were docile, obedient and respectful to the elders of the tribe. They dared not misbehave, for they could do nothing without others watching them and they knew if they did mischief, not only could they receive a severe scolding and beating from father, but Grandfather, uncles, elder brothers and even cousins had equal right to discipline an unruly child.

At night Malak Wahab would take his little son in his arms and chant the Quran over him until he fell asleep.

Above all else, Ahmad Khalil loved to hear the Quran being recited and nothing gave his parents greater happiness than to listen to him trying to imitate them. In Iraq al-Manshiya, even children as young as he could clearly understand the meaning of the original Text for the speech of his tribe was the same as the beduin of Arabia—not the corrupt dialects of the citified Levantines—and had changed little since the days of the Prophet.

Often Malak Wahab would relate to him many stories about when he was a slave in the palatial villa of the great Turkish landowner, Mustafa Effendi, whose great-grandfather had been granted a fief by the Ottoman Sultan for his loyal service to the Empire.

But most of all, his father wanted to tell him about the city. He seldom spoke of Gaza; it was too backward; hardly more than a trading post for the beduin. His Paradise was the modern streets of the new Cairo and wide-eyed with astonished 14 wonder, Ahmad Khalil listened to his father 1s vivid descriptions of the giant high-rise buildings, hundreds of feet tall, the electric lights more dazzling than the sun at mid-day, and the wide concrete paved streets filled with thousands of motor-cars, trucks and buses, the new post-office, factories, the finest of modern hospitals and schools, the railway station with all incoming and departing trains and that most breath-taking sight, of the airport with airplanes taking off and landing from every part of the earth.

“Would you like to fly high in an airplane far swifter than any bird?”

“Oh yes! Yes!” shouted the child, clapping his hands and jumping up and down in his eagerness. “I want to fly with you on one of those flying machines! When are you going to take me? Can we go now?”

Malak Wahab smiled happily; his black face shining; his teeth gleaming white. “Inshallah sooner than you think! You don’t want to spend the rest of your life here,” he spoke in a quieter, somewhat plaintive voice as if he were talking to himself rather than to his son.

“Surely Iraq al-Manshiya must be the poorest, the most wretched, the most backward and primitive village in all of Palestine! Yes, my son, I pray to Allah in every Salat, that you be educated in a modern school and perhaps even have the good fortune to graduate from Cairo University so you may escape 25 all this poor, limited, dreary life and become a teacher, a social worker, a lawyer or a doctor and never again be compelled to roughen your hands with the lowly menial toil of the fellah.”

Five-year-old Ahmad Khalil listened uncomprehending but soothed by the richness of his father’s deep voice. He was growing very sleepy. He curled up on his mat.

“It was in Cairo on the route to Mecca to perform Haj, I met Sayyid Rashid Rida and all the other disciples of the great reformer, Shaikh Muhammad Abduh. They changed my life when they convinced me that we can only rise to greatness again after we accept the knowledge and wisdom of Europe and understand that this not only is not in conflict with our faith but indispensable to it!”

Ahmad Khalil was startled awake when his father raised his voice almost loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

But his gaze was fixed not on his father but on his mother. She was squatting in the dim corner on the opposite side of the room, grinding the grain on the handstone mill. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and her long sleeves were rolled up to expose lean sinewy arms with their muscles developed from hard labour almost as much as a man’s. She stared at her husband with a sullen face and hostile suspicious eyes as if at that moment he were her enemy.

But Malak Wahab remained determined. Ahmad Khalil watched his father cross the room, open a locked trunk with a big key, take out his 16 foreign clothes and contemptuously throwing his keffiyeh and robes at his feet, put on one by one the strange garments — first the underwear, then the shirt, tie, jacket and trousers and finally the socks and shoes on his feet.

He was about to put the English hat on his head when Khadijah lunged forward, her black eyes blazing with fury, and knocked it off. The hat fell on the floor and she trampled on it with toughened dirt-stained bare feet.

Malak Wahab angrily pushed her away. He put the hat back on his head and turned to his son.

“I only want to show you what a civilized man wears.

I always wore this dress before I came here.

And this is how you will dress someday when Progress transforms the village.

How do you like it?”

The child began to cry. “I don’t know you

anymore! It is ugly!” He ran to his mother and clung to her for protection against the unknown.

“Take them off!” commanded Khadijah in a voice as hard as steel. “No! Never!”

“I tell you to take them off at once, throw them away and never stand before me like this again!”

Her black eyes blazed fire, her sharp nose and strong cheek-bones jutted out from her thin face with authority. Ahmad Khalil no longer recognized 17 her. She had always seemed so gentle, meek and submissive.

His father refused to move.

Khadijah grabbed his loaded rifle and pointed it at him.

In terror, Malak Wahab cringed. “No! No!” he shrieked. “You are mad!” “Are you one of us or one of them? Take those off or else I denounce you before the entire tribe as an infidel, a renegade and a British spy! I will tell my father and as the Chief, he will deal with you!”

His father’s powerful shoulders sagged in defeat. Khadijah stood over him in silence like a rock, his rifle still grasped firmly in her hands until he had removed all the foreign garments, put back on the robes which she picked up off the floor and handed to him, replaced the hated hat with his kaffiyeh and quietly locked everything away from sight inside the mysterious tin trunk.