Anyway, on the morning of my circumcision, they laid me out on my little bed, which was spread on the floor of our only bedroom in the camp, and hovered around me, gossiping and mulling over Mahmoud Dahman’s life story. This was the first time I’d heard stories about him beyond my mother and aunt’s gossip. A lot of people cursed and swore at Mahmoud, astonished at his ability to live among the Jews. Others envied him for his ‘Israeliness,’ for which they had no equivalent. Some of them said, “A thousand times better to be dead than to emigrate, be dragged around from place to place, and be given a hard time.” With their traditional clannish attitudes, others said, “I’d swear (on pain of divorce!) that life under the Israelis is a thousand times better than life under the Egyptian military administration that made us see stars at noon. The Israelis are our enemy, and they occupied us, but the others just flogged at us nationalistic self-importance to no purpose at all!”
Everyone praised Mahmoud’s bravery. As my mother passed around red juice to those congratulating me on a successful procedure (and the safe delivery of my penis, of course), she said, “Ben Gurion deserved the spit on his face. Mahmoud, cousin, if only you could have taken a shoe off and hit him in the face with it!” Those present muttered appreciation of what he had done, while my father, who was busily gathering up the presents, reinforced their mutterings: “Great, cousin! Ben Gurion really did deserve hitting with a shoe.” The guests asked for more to drink.
On the evening of the circumcision day, which doesn’t happen to a penis twice, the whole camp was happy when they heard what my mother had said in the morning. The residents celebrated a happy, nationalistic day, and spent their evening basking in the small victory that Mahmoud Dahman had scored. I was still lying on my back, more concerned about the fire that had been raging in my penis ever since it had lost a redundant part. That fire didn’t subside all night.
That was how I inherited from my mother an initial impression of Mahmoud Dahman, a hero pulled from her imagination, which took the form of The Remainer, both in nickname and in the characteristics my aunt had given him. This was before his name became well known and recognized by others in his absence; many years before Jinin borrowed his nickname and gave some of his features to the hero of her novel; and even before Mahmoud himself heard about the moniker and recognized in it the self that others had created for him.
That happened several years later, when in June 1967 Israel completed the occupation of the remainder of Palestine that had been postponed since 1948. During these years, the character of The Remainer had crystallized in isolation from him, acquiring characteristics that were later to become his: he became a man who resembled a reality overwhelmed with emotions. His family fled from the city of al-Majdal Asqalan, pursued by bombs and bullets, fires following in their wake. The collapsing walls, the winds, and the October winter—harsh that year—roared after them, urging them to flee, while he desperately urged them to stay.
My mother told me that she had heard Mahmoud say that day, “Anyone who leaves, my friends, will not come back!” I believed what my mother said because she had heard it, and also because she was my mother. I was upset when I learned that Mahmoud had in the end been defeated. He had been carried along in the general exodus, which had poured out of every corner and every alley of al-Majdal Asqalan like a mighty river. Everyone was thrown into Gaza, and camps for the Palestinians were formed from its human silt. Next I was happy, because Mahmoud had come back. He hadn’t stayed in Gaza long, though, before he’d gone away again. He’d crept back into al-Majdal Asqalan on foot, fleeing from the Egyptian intelligence service, which had begun to be active in the Gaza Strip and which caught up with him with a charge of inciting refugees to return to their homes. The Zionist organizations hadn’t yet entered the city of al-Majdal, or divided it among their own refugees, whom they imported to be the new residents there. They hadn’t closed the border with the Gaza Strip at this point, because it hadn’t yet become a strip—there were no borders at all to close. Mahmoud had fled the nakba and those affected by it. He’d left his wife and young daughter in a camp that had been planted among the yellow, sandy hills behind a city that remained for a time quite ashamed of him, as if it were somehow carrying him on its back. It called Mahmoud and others like him ‘emigrants.’ So he had returned home, hoping that his small family would catch up to him later. Israel had then closed what had now become borders following the battle with Egyptian forces withdrawing from al-Majdal in October 1948, and the Israeli authorities had refused to allow him to bring his wife and daughter into the country.
The whole Dahman family described Mahmoud as mad. Even his father, Sheikh Ibrahim Dahman, said, “My son is officially mad, my son, I know him, he’s gone to live with the
