I was barely twelve years old when Baba fell ill. We had been in Rameh for about a year with asbestos sheets and corrugated metal replacing our stone home in Farradiyya. The Christian and Druze inhabitants of our new village were friendly to us when we arrived, offering food and clothing, but they remained in their homes higher on the mountain and we continued to live in our makeshift shelters at the bottom. It was the olive harvest, so Baba found work picking some groves for a family in Rameh, sorting the black olives from the green, separating some for pickling, others for cracking, and the rest for pressing. In exchange, the family gave him a portion of that harvest’s bounty.
I remember he came home one evening with a tin of olives and another of oil. It was the first time I saw a smile on his face since we left Farradiyya. He even brought us boys back bars of halaweh candy, the way he used to before we left. We sat down to eat – a bulgur and lentil mujadara with yogurt Mama had soured from goat milk the neighbor had given her in exchange for bread – and on the table was a small plate of the black olives. Baba ripped a piece of markook bread and scooped the mujadara into his mouth. He followed it with a shiny black olive. I saw his jaw move, then his lips expelled the pit into his fist. He quickly put in another olive, and another, continued to chew and discard pits until he stood up and spit the contents of his mouth into his plate.
“These aren’t like the olives of Farradiyya,” he said, loud enough for cousin Rabiya to hear through the one wall we shared, and our neighbor Walid to hear through the next. Ali giggled nervously and finally spit into his plate too. Our timid Mama shook her head, but kept silent. Baba always said any weakness in my bones came from her.
“When are we going back to Farradiyya?” I asked. I was anxious to get back to school. Mama flinched before Baba even raised his hand to strike me in the face. Afterwards, he turned and went into the second room. We watched him through the yellow curtain as he sat on the pallet and let his head drop into his hands.
***
I had been doing my numbers and Mama had been boiling cardamom coffee when the knock at the door came. On that fall day in 1948, a man in military uniform handed my father a paper saying the orders had to be fulfilled within 24-hours. Baba glared back at the man. “Leave my house now,” he said. “You will never belong here.” His voice was strong, but his weak leg was quivering. The man repeated the orders, then turned on his heel and walked down the street to our neighbor’s home.
“Kheir inshallah,” Mama said when Baba closed the door. Those two words were her favored refrain, as though professing Allah’s ability to do good could keep us out of harm. Thus far, it had. Baba stood upright, but his shoulders were hunched. “We have twenty-four hours to leave and go north.”
“North to where?” Mama said.
“Anywhere. Lebanon. Another village. We just have to leave our houses, doors open. Any house found locked will be demolished.”
“What about our things? The olive harvest? The boys?” her voice was trembling now, her eyes moist.
“We pack what we can, the rest we leave for when we come back. You can carry Ibrahim on your back, the walk is too long for a two-year-old. The older boys will have to walk.”
My father started coughing a year after we arrived in Rameh. We lived in two grey rooms separated by a floral yellow curtain. The rugged hills of the Galilee were carpeted with dry greenery, and the dandelion weeds were sprouting under the olive trees. His breath stuttered in his lungs before he pronounced it, his barking cough floating through our house like the leaves floating down from the trees.
“Naji, Allah yirda aleik ya ibni,” Mama said, again beseeching God to bless me. Whatever God was cruel enough to kick us until we fell down, then kick us some more. “We need food and medicine.” She was never direct. Maybe she was told to never speak openly to men, maybe she trusted God too much. Who knows. But I think she was weak, just like Baba said.
I left our neighborhood with my rucksack in the morning. It held my math book and a handkerchief wrapping my zuwadeh: a piece of taboon bread; a hunk of salty white cheese; a pickled eggplant, bitter and dark. I passed some boys on their way to school and remembered when I was in school in Farradiyya and how my father boasted to the men at the masjid. “Naji has a way with numbers,” he said. “Just watch, he’ll be running his own business one day.”
I looked for work in the village center plowing land, taking the trash out for butchers, sweeping barbershop floors. On my first day at the Dabbah butcher shop, I tossed the fat and scrap meat trimmings into grey plastic buckets outside. Stray cats feasted until I scattered them with a wooden thistle broom. When I collected my coins for the day, I returned home and put them in our mother’s palm. “Bikafee?” she asked, wanting to know if the money was enough to buy the medicine for Baba and some lentils and flour for the week. I counted the liras. A 50-mils coin, two 10-mils and one 5-mils coins. I did the math. “We have enough,” I said. “Maybe we can even buy some eggs.”
***
After the general’s orders came in November of 1948 the day went by in a flurry of visitors – neighbors, cousins, friends – my parents didn’t even bother closing the front door. I wanted to ask what was happening, but their faces, the seriousness of their tones, said this wasn’t the time for childish questions.
Finally, Baba told us we were all leaving our homes until the Arab armies drove out the invaders, and we could not take anything with us. All hands were needed to carry the essentials. The relatives joining us brought different supplies with them: uncle Bshara pallets wrapped in cloth; the neighbor Walid tins of cheese and sacks of flour; cousin Rabiya her Singer sewing machine, cradled in her arms like a newborn for the entire ten kilometer walk we ended up taking from Farradiyya to Rameh. I nodded respectfully at him, but the questions in my mind fell over themselves like the flock of fleeing refugees we were to become. I only dared mutter one in the end. “Do you know how long we’ll be gone?” Baba stared back for a long instant then bent his head and walked away.
That evening, with no one paying attention to me, I stole Baba’s pocket knife and disappeared into the bedroom. I tore a sheet into thin strips, using two of them to tie my math book tightly around my chest. This way Baba won’t know that I have taken the book with me, I thought, and I can keep up with my work until we come back. I quickly buttoned my shirt up and went to the kitchen. It was noisy and full of cigarette smoke. Everybody already knew we were being sent out.
***
Dawood’s house sat up on a hill in Rameh with a giant palm tree towering over its gate. When he answered the door that morning, I told him I could help with the housework, whatever he needed. A pale boy stood quietly behind him. His name was Rizek I later found out. He was eight years old.
Dawood pointed to the math book in my rucksack. “What is that?”
I handed it over and told him that it was just a book from when I used to go to school.
“You’re good at math?” he smiled. “I tell you what, habeebi. I’m making arak today in the room next door. Come help me with measuring things out. My eyes are not what they used to be.”
I hesitated. Our Muslim religion said never to go near alcohol and this man was asking me to help him distill his own. I didn’t have a choice. We needed the money and the other villagers were becoming more hesitant to hire these days. Their own futures were also uncertain in this war. I promised Allah I wouldn’t touch it. I was sure He would understand after what He’d put us through. I pointed in the boy’s direction, “What about him?”
“Rizek? He’ll join us. Never too early to learn.”
Dawood took a large metal key from the wall and I followed him outside to the store room. He opened a blue and white door. Rizek and I stood against the wall as Dawood set up his tools. In the cool dark room I helped to measure juice, weigh aniseed, and mix it all with the twice distilled spirto.
“I have 5 liters of this alcohol,” I said to Rizek, “I need 100 grams of aniseed per liter. How much will you give me?”
Rizek was quick, handing me a 500-gram bag of aniseed to soak in warmed alcohol, and his pale complexion brightened up every time he answered correctly.
“Why aren’t you in school anymore?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure how much to tell him, but in truth, I wasn’t sure how much I was comfortable admitting to myself. My father still said we would return, but at night, when the angry demons came to my head, I often wondered if we would ever go back.
After school, we were joined by Rizek’s two older brothers and a stern looking woman. “Lunch is ready,” she said as she peered through the door. “Who’s this?”
“Ah Salma, this is Naji from Farradiyya,” Dawood replied. “He’s helping me with some work.”
“He’ll join us for lunch then,” she said. I often think of the aubergines she fed me that day. The rich meat and pine nut stuffing was a delicacy we couldn’t afford at home. In my entire life, I had never tasted such a thing. All these years later, I can still feel the soft flesh melting in my mouth as sharply as the shame.
***
We left Farradiya at daybreak, doors unlocked, keys in our hands with an unspoken promise to return. We marched through the rolling hills of the Galilee, until the sun was overhead. We were at the foot of a mountain, green with specks of yellow it looked like it was blanketed with sesame za’atar, and I could see houses scattered on the slope in the distance. Around us were wild weeds, olive trees and piles of corrugated metal. Squatting on rocks, we ate arayes labaneh and made sage tea to warm us from the chilly November air.
Feeling a bout of courage from having carried a heavy water tank on my back like the rest of the men, I approached Baba. “Help me gather the metal sheets,” he said, and with the other men I started pounding them together to build temporary shelters for the families.
The weeks devoured the days and all the families quickly grew accustomed to the humble shelters we inhabited and the surrounding land that I often wondered what made one village our true home and not the other. Where did our sense of rootedness come from? Was it the land that had housed and fed our family for generations? Or was it our family that had given meaning and value to the land? Nobody would have answered my questions if I asked, so when they stirred, I pushed them aside the way I did my stray hairs, long now, not groomed in the six months since we left Farradiya.
***
It was a windy December morning when I saw a carefully dressed schoolboy with straight cut bangs laughing with his friends. He wore brown wool trousers and must have been Ali’s age, no more than eight or nine at the time. The schoolboy was carefree, even the top of his leather satchel was open and flapping on his back. I will ask cousin Rabiya to sew me the same brown wool trousers with her Singer machine, I thought. When a paper flew out of the boy’s satchel and landed at my feet, I picked it up. Neat handwriting with numbers perfectly aligned on graph paper. At first, I started towards him, but he hadn’t noticed the stray paper…or me. I crumbled the paper with my hands and slid it into my pocket. I spent the day at the Dabbah butcher shop again, tossing fat and scrap meat into grey plastic pales outside and chasing stray cats with the thistle broom.
***
I quickly got bored with Baba’s illness. He was covered in more and more blankets, wrinkled and threadbare like the man they were supposed to warm, and yet he complained of cold even as April’s sun became less shy.
“The new blanket is ready,” Cousin Rabiya said when I came home after working in the fields. She handed me a brown woolen blanket and I covered my father. Mama trailed the short distance from his pallet to the clotheslines outside where she dipped cloths in a cool water bucket before putting them on his forehead. Ali and Ibrahim collected sage and za’atar from the bushes near the olive groves and Mama boiled them to make Baba tea.
I counted the days and months the way I counted the coins.
Eighteen months since we left Farradiyya.
Baba started coughing eleven months ago.
Three 50-mils coins and seven 10-mils from making arak.
One 50-mils coin from cleaning meat and scattering cats.
I was on the floor next to Baba’s pallet after dinner, counting. It was just the two of us in the second room when he put his hand over mine. “It’s under the table.” He strained to speak. “The metal box. Get it for me.”
I set it on his mattress and inched closer to him on the floor, tucking my knees beneath my chin.
“Open it,” he said.
He slid his hand inside, resting it for a few seconds, then took out his pocket knife and a photograph. He looked at the picture in his hand and smiled. “You and your brothers.” He wheezed. “Our last summer in Farradiyya.” He held it out to me. Taped to the back was the key to our home. He squeezed my hand when I took it, then closed his eyes.
Mama was illiterate, so it must have been Baba’s handwriting on the bottom of the picture, Naji, Ali, and Ibrahim, and on the back, Farradiyya, August 1948. Us boys under an olive tree. Behind, a clothesline. Ali is grinning mischievously, a bar of halaweh tightly clasped to his chest. Baba always brought back three bars of this sweet tahini concoction with his weekend pay, and Ali saved his halaweh to barter with and tease us once we devoured ours. I can still hear the sound of the camera shutter as Baba snapped that picture. We had been flying a kite through our olive groves before stopping for a rest in the shade of one of the tree’s soaring branches. We popped halaweh into our mouths, like disappearing strands of sugar, and with our father’s pocket knife carved our names into the tree’s trunk.
“Summer is almost over,” Baba said. “Stand still for a minute. You will soon be taller than this tree.”
Rizek no longer asked me questions about my past, or my future, as if I were destined to always exist in a vacuum, with a past too painful to bring up and a future too uncertain to discuss.
I helped Rizek and his brothers with their math homework and they helped me, even for a few afternoons a week, to escape back to a normal childhood again.
“I stole our father’s cigarettes,” Rizek laughed one day.
“Give them here,” one of the older boys threatened.
“I’m bartering them for apples,” Rizek said, his eyes challenging a boy double his size.
“I swear we’ll tie you to the palm tree like we did last summer if you don’t share,” the other one threatened.
He ran off and I chased him until we had negotiated for our apples. Seven. We each hid one in a pocket and went back with four. We split them evenly with the older brothers. We chased his mother’s goats in the fields, fed them the seeds and skin leftover from making arak and watched them bang their heads against the wire pen. We laughed until our sides hurt. When the sun got hot, we sat under their grapevine picking husrum, which hadn’t ripened to sweet black grapes yet, and dipped the sour fruit in salt.
I thought of my own brothers then. “Did you bring us any halaweh?” Ali often asked. I always lied and told him that I didn’t make enough money. I wanted to hit him, to scream. Did he not feel the same sadness and emptiness I did, the kind that nestled its ache into the bones? How could he think of candy now? But men can’t ask such questions, or have such feelings, so I chased them away just like Rizek and I chased the goats hours before.
***
Over the following months, as spring’s sun gave way to an angrier summer one, Baba’s condition worsened. Most days I preferred to go to work alone. But on some mornings, I walked with uncle Bshara and Walid to the village center.
“Shu, sayer zalameh, Naji!” they always said, proclaiming I was a man. But I got tired walking the whole way with lifted shoulders, especially if the rucksack was heavy with tools.
“The girls in this town are pretty,” my uncle Bshara commented on these walks. “See, they even look you in the eye and smile.”
Walid the neighbor with a wife and two young children, scolded him. “That’s not what you want in a wife. You need a good Farradiyya girl. She’ll make your dinner and wash your feet after work, and then she still won’t look you in the eye!”
Bshara laughed. “Have the boring life you want.” I laughed along with them.
My mother was a good Farradiyya girl, I thought to myself. A proud one too. I remember coming back from Dawood’s house one day and handing her a bundle wrapped in a brown and blue checkered handkerchief. “Shu had?” she asked.
“Fatayer za’atar,” I said. “Rizek’s mother was baking today so I wrapped five for us at home.
“Naji,” she shook her head disapprovingly, never speaking directly.
“What? She told me to eat as much as I wanted. I couldn’t eat it all then, but it’s as much as I wanted.”
***
I had been working for Dawood’s family for almost ten months when Dawood came up behind me. His smiling eyes were bent down at the corners.
I sensed something strange, almost fatherly, from this man. Baba was kind, proud, but life had made him rough on the edges, a little bitter and closed in on himself. I am certain he loved us, but emotions were reserved for the weak in his eyes. I remember coming home from school one day, crying because a classmate had pushed me to the ground in front of my friends, when I felt a vibrating pain as his hand whipped across my face. So swift he’d been, I hadn’t even noticed it coming, only heard the crack of his skin against mine.
“Men don’t cry! Next time he pushes you, teach him a lesson,” he had glared at me. “Don’t run home like a girl.”
I hated myself for crying in front of my father, and I hated him. I couldn’t imagine Dawood, ruddy cheeked and jolly, like he was in on a joke nobody else understood, slapping his Rizek like that.
“I’ve found you some work,” he said.
“Not making arak?”
“Not in Rameh,” he clarified. “The war is making it hard on everyone. You need more than what this village can offer to support your family.”
I felt tired. Weren’t we going back soon, I wondered. Wasn’t Baba going to get better with the medicine I kept working and shelling out coins on? It was fleeting, but the thought came anyway. Wouldn’t it be easier if he died?
“It’s a Jewish contractor,” Dawood said. “I know him from my days in the Palestine Police Force under the British Mandate.”
Yitzhak was how he introduced himself when we met. A short, thin man with a pointed nose and a large mustache, he had three wrinkles creasing his forehead, like ridges hiding murky waters.
“But he’s from them, how can I work for him?”
“Habeebi, it’s decent work you will be doing, and you need to buy medicine for you father. Your family needs food too, and oil. Winter is near.”
The digging, moving, and piling work Yitzhak gave me was harsh but it kept me strong, stopped my mind from wandering back to those looming questions.
***
Less than two years after the war had moved us from the lush mountains of Farradiyya to the rocky valleys and olive groves of Rameh, I returned to hear Mama wailing. “It’s Baba,” Ali said as he greeted me at the door. He shuffled uneasily from one leg to another, tugging at his shirt, “The doctor told her to keep him comfortable, nothing else she can do now.”
I had always dreaded this moment, knowing my father was the only remaining root I had in this world. People rarely called me Naji. I was Naji, ibn Hassan, my father’s son, defined and introduced by his name. I walked over to my mother, sitting on his mattress, and not knowing what to say, lay my head on her shoulder. She sighed, her chest heaving, her eyes red from hours of crying.
“Maybe doctor Hani is wrong,” I tried, “inshallah Baba will get better again.”
She attempted a smile, but her face, leathered by sadness, wasn’t supple enough to oblige. “Habeebi, your father died the day we left Farradiyya.”
He lived for two more nights before his heart gave out. The neighbors and townspeople flooded our two-room house in Rameh for three days. The women sat on straw mats inside, the men on plastic chairs stretching out to the alleyways. The air was crisp. Uncle Bshara poured bitter cardamom coffee from a dallah into cups and passed it around. When he reached my chair, he held the tray out to me. “Tfadal,” he said, offering me a cup. For a moment I thought he must have confused me for one of the adult mourners. Children were never served coffee. I hesitated, but he caught my eyes before I could move them. "For me?” I asked. He nodded. “Go on, take one,” he said.
The following week, I went to see Yitzhak again. I told him that my father passed away and I needed to find more stable work.
“You’re in luck my boy,” he said. “The government wants to build a kibbutz nearby. We need to clear the land now. It will be hard physical labor. Harder than what you’ve been doing.”
I had expected a fight, and prepared an argument. Instead, I stared back, silent.
I assured him that I could work.
“Meet me here at 6am tomorrow,” he said as he walked me to the door.
I went back home that evening and told Mama I had found work that would sustain us throughout the summer months. “I start tomorrow.”
She blessed me and there was a hint of a smile on her lips. “Allah yirda aleik ya ibni,” she said as she stroked my hair. “I’ll pack your lunch from tonight.” The four of us sat down on a straw mat, gathering round some bread, labaneh and olives. When we finished, she found a small blanket to wrap what little food we had left for my zuwadeh the next day.
***
The mosquitos were relentless that night and I suffered from the heat, waking up, falling asleep and waking up again in fitful bouts. At dawn, I got up. In a clay pitcher was some water, still cool in spite of the summer night’s sweltering heat. I leaned my head back and streamed some into my mouth, using a few stray drops to freshen my face.
I dressed and quietly left our home, marching to my meeting point with Yitzhak. He was already there waiting next to a small truck. He greeted me in his language. “Boker tov,” he said. I nodded quietly in response. He ushered me in to the truck and I climbed into the passenger seat. In the back, I saw shovels, saws, rakes, buckets and sheets of plastic. A large ax stood among the resting tools. The drive was short, it felt like ten minutes but maybe it was thirty. Yitzhak was silent and the time was marked with my thoughts not the minutes.
When we arrived, the sun had fully risen but a gentle breeze caressed my face as I stepped out of the car. Maybe my nerves were misplaced, it wouldn’t be as strenuous as I had feared after all.
“I need you to clear this site,” Yitzhak told me, pointing to a landscape filled with rubble and weeds. Thistles sprouted out between them, standing tall, refusing to surrender. A few olive and fig trees framed the border of the plot, branches bent as if mourning the loss of what they once guarded. Whoever he’d hired for the first clearing had done a shoddy job, leaving behind clusters of debris and some ragged stumps of carelessly torn down olive trees.
We unloaded the tools from the back of the truck. “Can you find your way back to Rameh when you’re done?” he asked. I nodded, fearing I would lose my job if I asked for a ride back. Now I wished I had paid more attention on the way up. Rameh looked like every other village in the Galilee, squat stone houses, clustered on rolling hills of dancing olive trees. Would I recognize it?
“Right, just walk down the mountain here,” he pointed. “When you get to the Orthodox church, make a right and follow the road. You’ll see the village from there.” He handed me a few coins and told me to go see him at the end of the week for the rest of my pay. He got back into his truck and drove down the mountain, becoming smaller and smaller, until he was nothing but a black dot like the millions of pebbles strewn among the trees.
The digging wasn’t too strenuous, the stone wreckage in manageable pieces, and I started piling things to one side. The thistle was more difficult to manage but I kept at it, pulling as much as I could. The hardest were the stumps with their roots, like arthritic fingers clawing in to the ground, refusing to let go in spite of the pain. Moss sprouted from the cracks on the olive tree stumps, their countless rings telling the story of a generation reduced to fragments. I started to dig, moving the dirt away from the tree roots. I lifted the shovel and struck the ground, up and down, and up, and with all my force, down again, beads of sweat trickling down my temples and my back. I must have spent some time getting to the roots because by the time I looked up, the sun was directly overhead.
I crouched on the ground and unwrapped the zuwadeh Mama had packed: bread, olives and a tomato. With my head hunched between my knees, gazing at nothing but the pebbles between my feet, I took a bite. I couldn’t chew fast enough.
My eyes surveyed the field as I took a sip of water from my pouch. The same unease I had felt on arrival washed over me again. The rise and fall of the hills, the smell on the breeze of dry dirt fragranced with za’atar bushes was so familiar.
I walked the edge of the land, brushing my hands against clusters of stones, once the foundation of someone’s home. I wondered if the dreams born in this place, the lives this house had sheltered, were as shattered as these rocks. Nothing remained. There were no standing houses, only broken stones where houses once stood; no markers other than the dip of the valley giving a glimpse to the summits of other hills; nothing to confirm my suspicions.
I dropped to my knees and clawed at the ground, a sense of urgency swelling through my fingers. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I burrowed until my nails were black and my sweat turned the dirt to mud. How the ax found its way to my hand I don’t remember, but with all my force, I swung at the stumps in the ground like a madman. I struck once, twice, and again until my body trembled with exhaustion and my knees buckled. With the bulk of my weight on a tree stump, I pushed myself up.
And that was when I saw it.
Naji, Ali, Ibrahim. Carved into one of the stumps I had spent the day digging up were our names, from two summers ago.
I sat back down and stared at what was left of the olive tree, fingering our names until the sun moved and a light breeze stirred. I took one last look around and then, head bent, started down the mountain. I touched the coins in my pocket. I counted enough to buy two bars of halaweh.
Contributor Notes
Reem Kassis is a Palestinian writer whose work uses the power of food and story telling to share the Palestinian narrative with the world. Born and raised in Jerusalem, she later moved abroad where she obtained graduate degrees from The Wharton School and The London School of Economics. Her debut cookbook The Palestinian Table was nominated for a James Beard award, short-listed for the Andre Simon Award and the Edward Stanford Award, and won The Guild of Food Writers First Book Award. It was also named one of NPR’s best books of 2017 and featured in the NYTimes, Washington Post, FT, CNN, HuffPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle, and The Guardian among many others. Reem is based in Philadelphia with her husband and two daughters and is working on her second cookbook about the evolving and cross-cultural food of the Middle East.
