I asked Widad, “Since you’re from Deir Yassin, and work in the museum, can you tell me what your family said about the massacre? I know everything that’s in the books and on television, but I’d like to hear more.”
We walked together along a long path, paved with red bricks, flanked by two stone walls about a meter high, on which had been placed equally spaced flowerpots with various sorts of roses growing in them. Parallel with the walls on both sides were rows of olive trees, spread out at intervals, which led up to the edge of the nearby hills to the east and west. The walls continued to rise up with the hill toward the enormous building, with twists apparently dictated by the natural environment—or perhaps whoever planned it had wanted to say that it had taken a lot of effort and required the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to get to the stage of allowing the establishment of a memorial museum for the Palestinians. I noticed that there were names and dates carved on the flowerpots. It was clear that these belonged to Palestinians who had fallen on the way to the contemporary Palestinian revolution at various times in a variety of places, either resisting the Occupation inside Palestine or during the various stages when the Resistance was dispersed.
Before I could continue formulating my own explanations and commentaries on everything I saw, Widad said she would tell me everything she had heard, and that everything she would tell me was third-hand via her mother.
“Honestly,” she said. “I don’t remember what happened. I wasn’t yet born. Anyway, this is what my mother told me, and she got it from her own mother, for she was only little herself. She said that after numerous clashes and quarrels, the people of Deir Yassin and the residents of the Giv’at Shaul settlement signed a non-aggression pact. The residents of Deir Yassin were gullible and acquiesced in the agreement, but it didn’t last long. The settlement that they had the pact with was the one from which the attack on them was launched on the morning of 9 April in the year of the nakba. A band of Irgun fighters led by Menachem Begin (may God send him to hell in his grave, wherever he’s buried) came down from the settlement and attacked the village . . . .”
I interrupted her: “But God didn’t spare Begin, Widad. Aliza, his wife, died, and he was overcome with grief, which consumed him for ten years of his life before he died in 1993. They buried him near here, opposite the village which he and his group were responsible for destroying.”
Widad went on. “My mother said that when my grandmother Zaynab left Deir Yassin, she was twenty years old, and my mother was only just four. They were all collected together in a family house. ‘Either we live together or we die together,’ they said. My mother heard from her mother that the massacre happened between 3:30 and 4 a.m. As the people fled in the direction of Ein Kerem, the attackers came down from above, from the hill, and a gang of Palmach fighters slaughtered twenty-seven people from the Zahran family—my husband’s family—immediately. They piled them up in front of the door to the house. My husband’s grandfather died with them. My husband’s father was a young boy, who was brought up in an orphanage in Jerusalem. My mother had two maternal aunts who also died, the sisters of my own grandmother, may God have mercy on them.”
I told Widad that what she had said reminded me of The Remainer, and the novel to be published shortly, entitled Filastini Tays, by my relative Jinin Dahman. I recounted how The Remainer used to go to Old Jerusalem every Friday, reaching it an hour or two before the noon prayer. He would then walk in the streets and stroll in the bazaars until the time for the Friday prayer arrived, when he would head for the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount). He would then catch a taxi to take him to the Giv’at Shaul B settlement. From there, he would walk in the direction of the ruins of Deir Yassin, passing the carob and almond trees, and stopping for a while at the cypress tree that remained there. He liked that particular tree. Whenever he reached it, he would embrace its trunk and kiss it, before going to pick up a large white piece of limestone, which he would take back beneath the tree. Then he would write on the stone in black paint the name of one of the victims of the massacre of Deir Yassin, and tell himself one of the terrible stories about it that he said had opened the way to the nakba, because everyone who heard what happened in Deir Yassin at that time left his home and fled. The Remainer did that regularly every Friday until he had written the names of more than a hundred and sixty victims, each name on a piece of stone, which still exist in the form of a small pyramid near the cypress tree.”
“That’s a fabulous man, sir. There should be more like him. But didn’t they take the tree away some time ago while The Remainer was still alive?” she asked.
“You mean, in the novel? I don’t know. I haven’t finished reading it all yet. But I have the impression that Jinin, if she leaves him alive, will plan
