My Name is Adam Read online

  Copyright © Elias Khoury, 2012

  English translation of the Work © 2019 Humphrey Davies

  Originally published in the Arabic language as Awlad al-ghittu, Ismi Adam

  by Dar al-Adab, Beirut, 2012

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Khåuråi, Ilyåas, author. | Davies, Humphrey T. (Humphrey Taman), translator.

  Children of the ghetto, my name is Adam / Elias Khoury; [translated by Humphrey Davies].

  Other titles: Awlad al-ghittu, Ismi Adam. English

  First Archipelago Books edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2019.

  LCCN 2018033607 | ISBN 9781939810137 (hardcover)

  LCC PJ7842.H823 A9413 2019 | DDC 892.7/36–dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810144

  Cover art: Andrzej Wróblewski

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support from

  Lannan Foundation, the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation, the Nimick Forbsway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  v5.4

  a

  For Jad Tabet and Anton Shammas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Will

  The Coffer of Love

  Waddah al-Yaman

  The Life and Sufferings of the Poet Waddah al-Yaman

  The Madness of the Lover

  Confusions over the Name

  The Coffer of Death

  The Night of the Queen

  The Coffer of Silence

  Adam Dannoun

  Prayers of Refuge

  Intersections

  Thirst

  The Blind Man and the Goalkeeper

  The Will: Manal

  The Will: God’s She-Camel

  Betrayal by the Father

  A Dream of Words

  The Days of the Ghetto

  Where Did the Ghetto Come From?

  — 2 —

  — 3 —

  — 4 —

  — 5 —

  Memory Gaps

  My Grandfather the Prophet

  The Map of Pain

  The Abyss

  The Maze

  —2—

  —3—

  —4—

  —5—

  —6—

  —7—

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Scene Four

  Scene Five

  Scene Six

  Scene Seven

  Sonderkommando

  The Threshold

  Say: “Are they equal – those who know and those who know not?”

  Koran, “Companies,” Verse 9

  THESE NOTEBOOKS CAME into my possession by coincidence, and I hesitated at length before deciding to send them to Dar al-Adab in Beirut for publication. To be honest, my hesitation lay in that ambiguous feeling that combines admiration and envy, love, and hate. I had met the writer and hero of these texts, Adam Dannoun – or Danoun – in New York, where I teach at the university. I remember I told my Korean student how good looking I thought he was. It was toward the end of February 2005, if my memory serves me correctly. We had gone out to eat falafel after the graduate seminar and observed the man carefully and cheerfully preparing his sandwiches. He was tall and a little on the thin side, his shoulders broad and slightly stooped. White hairs had grown among the chestnut on his head, making it look as though wreathed with a shining corona, the brightness coming, I think, from his gray eyes, which shaded into green. I told my student I understood now why she was so taken with this Israeli restaurant, and that it had nothing to do with the food but was because of its owner. I was wrong, though: that might have been the best falafel sandwich I have ever tasted. We Beirutis claim to be the best falafel-sandwich makers in the world, and the Palestinians say the Israelis stole falafel from them, which is correct, but I think both sides are wrong because falafel is the oldest cooked food known to man, being pharaonic when you really get down to it, and so on and so forth.

  The name of the restaurant was the Palm Tree, and when the handsome man with the pale oval face and the dimple sketched on his chin came over to us and began talking to my student in Hebrew, Sarang Lee, answering in English, turned to me and introduced us. The man then started speaking to me in Arabic and Sarang said, in English, how much she liked his Palestinian dialect and he replied with something in Hebrew that I didn’t understand.

  When we stepped out again into the cold, Sarang Lee suggested a drink. I was taken aback, because I don’t go out with my students; I still recall the warning given to me by my Armenian friend Baron Hagop – the one to whom Edward Said awarded the title “King of Sex” – about what they call “harassment” here. He said if a female student were to claim I had harassed her, it would be enough to ruin me and destroy my academic career.

  I agreed to have a drink with Sarang Lee because I could tell from the look in her eyes that she had something to say. We had a glass of white wine at the Lanterna Café, my Armenian friend’s favorite and the one frequented by Hanna el-Akkari, a former Popular Front fighter; we often used to go there for a drink and to reminisce about the old days, when we dreamed of revolution.

  I said to Sarang Lee with a laugh, raising my glass to her, “We don’t usually drink wine after falafel,” and waited for her to speak. She said nothing, however, and after a seemingly interminable silence, I asked her if she was in love. Immediately, the girl’s eyes shone with tears. I can’t say for sure that she cried, but that is what I thought happened, at least. Then she said she didn’t know, but that she loved me, too.

  The word “love” set off a tremor in my heart that was immediately checked by “too,” since the latter meant she loved the Israeli but didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Love was far from my mind, especially for a girl so much younger than me. All the same, I had found in my young student’s academic excellence, her shyness, and her exquisite Asian beauty, something that led me to pay special attention to her. That day, I found I had been strung along. Though “strung along” isn’t the right term here: this girl of twenty-eight had never sent me anything but signals of ordinary admiration, such as any student might her teacher. I asked her what she’d said to the “old man” and she smiled and said he wasn’t old, “he’s the same age as you, my dear professor,” adding, with gentle malice, “unless, that is, you consider yourself old.” I ignored her remark and asked what the man had said. She replied, “He said that he’d made an effort to speak with a Galilean accent for your sake because it was close to a Lebanese accent.” She also said there was some mystery there, because, having spent her childhood in Tel Aviv, she knew Israel well but couldn’t work out the man’s precise identity – was he a Palestinian pretending to be an Israeli, or the reverse? – but that, in any case, he
was a very special person.

  As Sarang Lee pronounced the words “very special,” her eyes gleamed with love. I couldn’t think of anything to say because I had a feeling something strange was going on, and indeed, at another meeting, she let me in on the secret, that the man wasn’t Israeli: “It’s true he has an Israeli passport but he’s Palestinian, from around Lydda I think, but he likes ambiguities and doesn’t mind people thinking he’s Israeli.”

  I saw no more of this man who “liked ambiguities” until we met again at the cinema, but my student would tell me curious tales about him, saying he was a womanizer, a true charmer. I could not have cared less for these anecdotes about the Israeli who spoke perfect Arabic, or the ambiguous Palestinian who spoke Hebrew as though it was his own tongue, or his charm. I was jealous of him, though it was an unspoken jealousy. I don’t know why it occurred to me that he might be an agent of Israel’s Mossad and that that could be the root of all his ambiguities and disguises. That was the sole reason I wanted my student to keep away from him, but when, through a slip of the tongue, I put my foot in it and told her of my suspicions, she got angry and left the Cornelia Street Cafe. We’d taken to meeting there once every two weeks on average, it being a little out of the way of prying eyes on Washington Square, which is the center, practically speaking, of New York University, where I work.

  * * *

  —

  One day, Sarang Lee told me that Adam didn’t like me, that he was wary of me. He went further, in fact. She said she didn’t want to tell me (though she did) that he had doubts about my intentions toward her and that when she’d defended me, saying I’d never made even the slightest allusion to the possibility of starting an affair, he got angry and said he wasn’t talking about that sort of thing, he meant something more important, and asked her if she’d read my novel Gate of the Sun, which proved writers couldn’t be trusted and that one day she might come across herself as a heroine in one of my novels.

  Her reaction amazed me: she asked coyly if she’d make a good heroine for a novel!

  I don’t want to talk about myself, and if Sarang Lee hadn’t been the cause of these notebooks reaching me, I would never have mentioned my relationship with her, which at no time went any further than flirtatious glances. All the same, I was surprised that the idea of being the heroine of a novel attracted my young friend; and, unfortunately, she actually did end up being a heroine, though not at my hands but at those of my rival. I asked her what he’d said about Gate of the Sun but all she said was that he hadn’t liked it, and it was left to me to discover his attitude on my own, when the Israeli movie Intersecting Glances was shown at Cinema Village on 12th Street.

  I’m not going to go into what happened at the cinema or the anger that seized me, because I have no right to insinuate myself in the stories of the author of these notebooks. Certainly the reader will read the story as Adam Dannoun tells it and can make his own judgments, just as Sarang Lee will read her story, or fragments of it, in this book, if it gets translated into English. She will then discover that the Israeli who wasn’t an Israeli didn’t love her, because he thought she loved me, and that this misunderstanding, which left its mark on the falafel seller’s life, had saved the Korean girl from a relationship that would have ruined hers.

  When Sarang Lee brought me the notebooks, she said that Adam had died in a fire. It seems he’d dozed off while smoking in bed; the cassettes that filled his bookshelves caught fire, and by the time the fire department arrived, he was dead. I expressed my doubts and said the story mimicked exactly the manner of death, in New York, of Rashid Hussein, the great Palestinian poet and translator into Arabic of Bialik. She too said she thought Adam had committed suicide, staging his death to make it an exact replica of Hussein’s, because he was an admirer of the poet and had learned his verses by heart. She added that a week before his death he’d given her a short letter containing his will and asked her to read it only if something happened to him. I asked her to let me read the letter but she refused. She wept bitterly as she related how she, along with Nahum, his Israeli partner in the falafel restaurant, had carried out his wishes, cremating his body and throwing his ashes into the Hudson. She’d been surprised, however, to find that the file containing these notebooks had survived the fire. The file’s blue edges were burned and it was completely buried under the ashes, but the notebooks were untouched, the texts, written in black ink, seemingly illumined by the flames. Refusing to carry out Adam’s will, she hadn’t burned the file containing the notebooks; she’d taken it home with her, tried but failed to decipher the Arabic runes, and decided therefore to give it to me, extracting a promise that I would do nothing with it without her knowledge.

  * * *

  —

  Sarang Lee probably thought that I’d be able to do what she could not bring herself to, that after what had happened at the cinema, I would burn the notebooks. In a fit of that lack of control that has so often cost me dear, I’d screamed in Adam’s face that he was a nobody who criticized my book because he understood nothing, and that I’d written a story, not a history book, and couldn’t know the actual fate of characters I’d made up. I don’t know why the guy insisted that he knew the characters in my novel, but he started raving like a madman and it was only when I read these texts that I came to understand what he was talking about.

  That day, when Adam left the cinema, Sarang Lee had run after him, while I quivered with rage. I told my friend Chaim that the man was a liar, who told his girlfriends he was Israeli when in fact he was Palestinian, and that this identity of his was his main argument against my novel – as though I had no right to write about Palestine just because I wasn’t born of Palestinian parents!

  * * *

  —

  The notebooks given to me by Sarang Lee were ordinary, ruled, Five Star university notebooks, the pages held together by a spiral binding. On the first page of each, we find a calendar, for the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and they can be bought from any stationery store in New York. It seemed likely that the author was planning to write a work long enough to need all these notebooks with their colored covers.

  I read them all three times and had no idea what to do with them. Even today, seven years later, I don’t know why I eventually decided to go back to them. I then reread them, with eyes that no longer held hatred for the man, only sorrow. I grieved for him and grieved for myself, and after much hesitation made up my mind to publish the notebooks as though they were the text I wished I had written myself.

  * * *

  —

  The undeniable truth is that I faced a major ethical problem that made me hesitate at length before taking this decision.

  A diabolic idea had taken hold of me – to steal the book and publish it under my own name, thus realizing my dream of writing a sequel to Gate of the Sun, something I’d found myself incapable of doing. What was I supposed to write about after the murder of Shams and the passing of Nahila? With their deaths, my pen ran dry and I felt I’d lost the ability to write. I entered the depressed state known in Arabic literature as “the lover’s demise,” in which death takes his last breath the moment the beloved vanishes, and it took Daniel Habeel Abyad, hero of my novel Yalo, to rescue me, because he forced me to study Syriac, and in learning that new alphabet I rediscovered love, as a gateway to betrayal.

  Stealing the book didn’t mean that I would publish the text as it was. It meant rewriting it, treating it as primary material. I told myself I wouldn’t be the first to do so. Indeed, I believe – and this is what I teach my students – that all writing is a kind of rewriting, and that plagiarizing is permitted to those who are capable of it. What the Arab critics referred to as “the thefts of al-Mutanabbi” may be the model for the kind of plagiarism that is on a par with, if not superior to, creation. Sholokhov, author of the masterpiece And Quiet Flows the Don, one of the greatest works of Russian literature, has been accused of having s
tolen the manuscript during the Russian Civil War, an allegation that has had no impact on the novel’s importance or its author’s place in the history of modern Russian literature.

  After trying to rewrite the text a number of times, however, I found that I couldn’t go on. Instead of being a thief I’d become a copyist, and instead of working on the text I felt it had started to work on me; I began to feel that my life was dissolving and becoming part of the life of this man, and of his story, and it seemed to be on the verge of taking me over so completely that I feared losing my soul and entering into the maze of his memory. I decided, therefore, to abandon the idea completely.

  The reader will notice that these notebooks contain texts that are incomplete, a fusion of novel and autobiography, of reality and fiction, and a blending of literary criticism with literature. I don’t know how to categorize the text, in terms of either form or content: it mixes writing with outlining and blends narration and contemplation, truth and imagination, as if the words had become mirrors of the words in an infinite reflection.

  Finally, I wish to stress that this book contains the manuscript in its entirety, as Sarang Lee had entrusted it to me. I have not added a single word to it beyond the chapter headings, which I believe are needed to guide the reader. By the same token, I have deleted nothing from it. I have even retained, as is, the savage criticism that the author directs against my own novel, convinced as I am that the reader will not fail to detect the outrage directed toward me and the injustice to my book.

  * * *

  —

  I have put the notebooks back in order, hesitating, however, before the one with the red cover, which begins with what is apparently the outline of the novel about Waddah al-Yaman that the author seems in the end to have decided not to write. This I initially decided to publish separately, taking it as the plan for a novel about love whose hero is that Omayyad poet; then I dropped the idea, noting that this concept reappeared throughout the notebooks. I also hesitated before the numerous analytical passages, as the author, rather than deleting them, had left them in place, either because it had never occurred to him that his book would be published, or because he’d thought he’d be able to revise it first.