“The whole family has begun to consider the name an insult, hajja! What have you done, cousin? Come on, isn’t the person who stays in the country a thousand times better than the one who emigrates and deserts it?”
My aunt was shocked. She loosened her belt and used her hands to lift her breasts, which had begun to sag toward her belly and press down on it. Then she tightened her belt again in a double knot, in which she always put her money. She left her breasts hanging down comfortably instead of slinging them over her shoulders, as I used to say to her jokingly. But my aunt didn’t say anything. What she had done with her belt must have released her from the burden of excessive emotion, or at least reassured her about the money she was hiding in the knot.
My mother took advantage of my aunt’s temporary silence and said something about Mahmoud to put an end to her heartache—which made me think that my mother had been in love with Mahmoud in her teenage years, though she hadn’t really had her fair share of adolescence, unlike other girls.
My mother had married my father ‘before her eyes were open’ in the view of her father (who would become my grandfather) and her younger brothers, all of whom I called khali (“my uncle”). They were all afraid of little Amina opening her eyes to the world. If she had been given an opportunity to do that, even for a fleeting period of adolescence, she would perhaps have picked up Mahmoud, the neighbors’ son, and put him in her heart straightaway. She and Mahmoud were relatives and neighbors, like my own father Ahmad, whose family home was next door to hers. Like other girls of her time, she had no chance to love, or to imagine a young boy sneaking into her heart from another quarter in al-Majdal Asqalan. If my mother hadn’t married my father—after a love journey that extended from the moment his father, Nimr Dahman, asked for her hand for him from her father, Khalil Dahman, until the moment she was told that the parents had agreed (a period no longer than a week)—I would have trusted my suspicions.
Finally, my mother said to my aunt: “There isn’t a Palestinian in the world who’d accept becoming an Israeli, cousin, and if he did, it wouldn’t be through his own actions, desire, or inclination. Mahmoud became an Israeli despite himself, hajja, he became one despite himself. I’ll say to you quite frankly, in full view of witnesses, it’s a good thing that Mahmoud stayed there. It’s a good thing he didn’t emigrate like us, to be treated with contempt. Being treated with contempt back home, hajja, even with the Jews, is a hundred times more noble than being treated with contempt and abused here in the camps.”
My aunt was silent, because my mother had turned the nickname, which was supposed to represent a sort of defect, into something for which its owner could be envied.
Like many people, my mother had heard things said about Mahmoud Dahman, some of which could be believed and some not. She collected facts and rumors. She drew pictures of him, and of scenes that she loved, and which made her love him. She once told me that a short time after the occupation of al-Majdal Asqalan, Mahmoud had formed a union of weavers to protect their rights. He had persuaded many of the city’s residents to stay and had prevented many from emigrating. When I asked her, “What’s a workers’ union?”—I was still a child in the camp, and didn’t know anything about employment or workers, apart from cleaners and people who made concrete—she replied to me airily, “How should I know, Walid? They say that the people that worked in weaving clubbed together. They used to grimace as if they were giving up the ghost, write petitions, and defend each other. More than that, my dear, I don’t know. I never asked.”
She spoke with pride, though, about a violent confrontation that had taken place between Mahmoud and Ben Gurion at Israeli Government Headquarters after the nakba. And she praised Mahmoud’s challenge to the head of the first Israeli government, which had proclaimed the establishment of Israel on 14 May 1948. “My cousin Mahmoud,” she said, “was worth ten men, by God. He stood up to Ben Gurion and spat in his face.” My mother believed everything she was told, and embraced all the stories that praised Mahmoud Dahman and talked about his character, which had raised the status of the Dahman family back home and in the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip.
I laughed as my thoughts turned to a tale in which Mahmoud Dahman appeared at an untimely moment. I remembered the morning that the circumciser chased away a pigeon my eyes were fixed on, as the razor appeared like lightning in his hand and in the twinkle of an eye descended on my fresh foreskin. The head of my little penis appeared, gazing at those present and proclaiming its eternal purity, while the foreskin became just a piece of skin of no value suspended between the fingers of the circumciser. The man, who combined the shaving of heads with cutting the redundant foreskins of young children, threw it onto a small square cloth handkerchief, which he had spread out beside him. I remember that a pretty woman leaned over to my mother and whispered to her, and they laughed quietly together. Amid my confusion, my mother wrapped the handkerchief around the foreskin, which was streaked with lines of blood, while the circumciser himself was occupied with wrapping
