Sand-Catcher

Daily Fiction, When will my father open up his locked vault? For so long now I’ve been begging him to let me document his youth in Palestine. I’ve told him repeatedly that it would gratify my children to learn the truth of what happened from their own grandfather’s lips.

“Gratify them? Palestine was lost.”

That continued to be his default response. Palestine was lost. Every time we asked him a question about the past, his reply was, “Palestine was lost.” I know. I swear to God, I know. We all know. But we know few of the details as to how it was lost. We don’t know the details of your own personal loss, Papa. We don’t know the stories of our village at the time when everyone left it: who the casualties were, who among those who were driven out made it to safety, and who didn’t. This is our right, Papa. You were nearly grown at the time, and there must be a great deal you could tell us. Age fifteen—that’s old enough for a person to have a veritable archive of amassed stories not dimmed by the passage of time. My mother herself didn’t know the story of her husband’s background. My father got to know her family, who were living in the camp at Jenin, in the 1950s. He married the daughter, and moved with her to the Balata camp, near Nablus. They were there until the Naksa in 1967, when they emigrated to Amman. The Naksa, now—about that I’ve heard plenty. My mother told me all about it, and her doing so upset my father, but he didn’t want to impose his views on her. Only my father’s Nakba has remained obscure, concealed from my siblings and me. When my father heard my mother telling us stories about the Naksa, the occupation, Nasser, and his defeat, he laughed bitterly.

“This is ‘occupation,’” he said. “Naksa, occupation. Occupations come and go. Occupation isn’t the Nakba. There was a Nakba, in ’48. The Nakba isn’t occupation. Nablus was still Nablus. ’67 wasn’t a Nakba. You can’t know what ‘Nakba’ means unless you know what happened in ’48.” Exactly—exactly! I stopped him the instant he spoke these words. It was one of the few times I ever raised my voice to my father. I shouted at him, “I do want to know! Papa, I want to know! For pity’s sake, please tell me—I’m begging you!” He made to stand up and go to his room, but I seized him by his shoulders. “You’re not going anywhere, Papa.” He glared at me, gave me a shove, and went.

My father opened a small grocery store in Jabal Amman, an enterprise he maintained from 1968 until a few years after my mother died. After her death, I insisted that he move in with me. He closed the shop when he got too tired to keep it going, taking nothing with him but a map of Palestine, which had hung on the wall there and now assumed a new place on the wall of his room in my house. After the Oslo Accords and the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, some Palestinians began obtaining visas to visit Palestine from the Israeli Embassy in Amman. I held no clear political position on the matter; I had always been pragmatic, not delving too much into politics—plus I think my father’s stance on his past had dampened my curiosity. I did love reading, and I’d read some of the works of Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as memoirs by the leaders of Fatah and other such material, but I had never settled on a clearly defined set of opinions. I wasn’t for PFLP or Fatah or Hamas. I believed in Palestine, same as other Palestinians in the diaspora, but, in that connection, my personal and professional life never involved any activism. Now it occurred to me to suggest to my father that he apply for a visa to visit Palestine, and I thought about going with him if he agreed.

“Visa from where?”

“From the Israeli Embassy in Amman.”

“There’s only one reason I’d ever go to the Embassy.”

“And what’s that?”

“To take a shit on its doorstep.”

Great. Thanks, Papa. Keep all those feelings pent up inside you, and don’t talk to us about Palestine. All through the second intifada we sat in front of the television, which was showing footage of the “’48 Palestinians”—those living inside the 1948 mandate—who fell while demonstrating in solidarity with those in occupied West Bank and Gaza.

I looked at my father and felt that he was following the details with more than his usual interest. I wanted to provoke him, so I grabbed the remote and turned off the television. He rounded angrily on me and told me to turn it back on. I refused, saying that if there was no need for us to know the details then he could do without them as well. Palestine was lost, and that was that. It embarrasses me now to admit that saying these things to him filled me with a vindictive satisfaction. I wanted him to have the same experience he’d forced on me by keeping silent about his past. Going red in the face, his voice rising, he demanded again that I turn on the television.

“Why? This is news about the ’48 Palestinians. 1948 . . . remember that year? Does it mean something to you? Personally, I don’t know much about it. What about you? Are you actually from Palestine? Can you prove it?”

“I made a mistake, agreeing to live with you. To hell with you, and to hell with 1948.”

“Fine. Palestine was lost. Don’t forget that. Palestine was lost, and so were you, and so were we. What else do you want?”

“I want to leave your house.”

“Oh, no, you’re not going anywhere. You’re not leaving, Papa. You left Palestine—wasn’t that enough? One experience of exile you refuse to tell anyone about is sufficient. Keep it hidden, Papa, keep it hidden.” He came over to me and slapped my face. I don’t recall that he’d ever, since my childhood, struck me, and now here I was—a tall, broad-shouldered young man, married, a professional engineer—and here was my father, hitting me, and Palestine was lost, and your stories, Papa, stayed buried.

When Abir told us about the newspaper profile that some of her friends wanted to put together, the desire to learn about my father reawakened in me. He had reached the age of eighty-five, and I hardly knew him. I had no interest in getting his opinion on the idea of the proposed report, as I was certain he would refuse. I placed certain conditions on the meeting, to which the reporters agreed. I didn’t sleep the night before the interview. Naturally, I was hoping my father would talk, but at the same time I could imagine the pain it would cause me if it was to others—to these strangers—rather than his own family, that he told the stories I had been hoping for decades to hear. I imagined various ways the meeting might play out, but my imagination was not equal to the reality that was my father. I told myself that I was putting him face-to-face with a different generation of Palestinians who wanted to hear what he had to say, and that maybe this would rouse something in him. Perhaps, sensing how little time was left to him before he departed this world forever, he would decide to reveal the stories of that other, earlier departure. Perhaps he would realize that his words, passing beyond the narrow confines of our family and appearing in a respected newspaper, would reach thousands of readers, who, thanks to his narrative, would become acquainted with a Palestinian history obscure to so many. Perhaps. Perhaps.