The Hour of Sunlight

"These grapes are from today?" I asked with appreciation.

"I cut them from the vine just half an hour ago," Wassef replied as I began to drive away. He reached over and touched my shoulder. "You know, Sami, you deserve better! Stop the car!"

"Why?"

"Just stop the car!"

I did, confused. Wassef slid open the door and jumped out. He leapt over a low stone wall and returned with a bunch of grapes still perspiring with dew. He held them up. "You will eat grapes from the moment, not from the morning!"

"Did you just take someone's grapes?"

He laughed. "Don't worry. These belong to my brother, Karim. He'll be thrilled to have given you grapes." Karim means generous. His brother had been aptly named.

The drive from Halhoul to the city of Asqalan began. I had spent more than four years of my life in Asqalan but had not seen anything outside of the prison walls. My passengers saw very little of the city as well, aside from the stones they lifted and the concrete they mixed. Abu Hussein tore a chunk of the round taboun¹ bread for everyone, still warm from his wife's clay oven. "It's from your sister, Um Hussein," he said as he handed me a piece. I knew Um Hussein must have risen before dawn to mix the flour and knead the dough in order to bake it before the morning prayers. Issa passed around a bottle of cold water. I popped in a cassette of the Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam. They called him "Sheikh" out of respect because he was old and blind and had been a scholar of Qur'an in his youth. His music wasn't religious, however, but political. Sheikh Imam sang about revolution and love for ordinary people and the simple life. We sang along, all of us eating grapes from the moment.

The Israeli checkpoint was half a mile ahead of us. I shut off the music as tension seeped into the van. I veered my Transit off the road, joining a line of old, dilapidated cars and vans heading west, creeping around rocks and trees on a path in the Hebron hills that scarcely existed, all of them filled with Palestinians going to work inside the Green Line,² none of whom had permits from the Israeli army to be there. We bounced and jolted our way over rocks and bushes past Nuba and Beit Ulla villages in order to bypass the checkpoint. It was illegal, according to Israeli law, and it was dangerous, but what choice did we have? We had the right to work to feed our families. Military jeeps regularly patrolled the area. If we were stopped, my Transit would be taken to the checkpoint. The workers would be forced to squat in the punishing sun all day with their hands on top of their heads, released in the evening to return home dehydrated, humiliated, and without the day's wages. As a Jerusalem resident, I would not be detained; however, I would be fined hundreds of shekels. But it was difficult for the patrolling jeeps to catch us. In 1995, there were multiple routes through the mountains and we knew them all.

My Transit crawled forward. The mountain way met the road just past Kharas village. We drew a collective sigh of relief as I guided the van back onto the asphalt. We had safely crossed the Green Line and were back on the main road to Asqalan. We joked and sang once more, consuming the remainder of the warm bread and fresh grapes.

The rocky landscape covered with olive trees became fields of grass, groves of fruit trees, and one bizarre orchard of enormous satellite dishes, fenced off with chain link and topped with barbed wire. The Ford Transit sailed along, heading west toward the Mediterranean. I scarcely had to steer. My van knew the way.

Through the grape orchard, I could make out the minaret of the old Zakariyya mosque rising above the houses. The hills on the other side of the road, also part of Zakariyya's rich, fertile land, were covered with pine trees. This was my mother's village.

A large rope lay ahead in the road. Suddenly it began twisting and turning. It was a snake, crossing from the forest to the grapevines. Wassef stood up and shouted excitedly, "Get the snake, Sami! Run him over! Aim at his head; we can smash him! Yallah,³ Sami, quickly!" Everyone pressed toward the front of the van, their heads and hands filling the reflection in the rearview mirror.

My eyes flicked to the tree-covered hill where the snake had come from. In 1948, my mother was a little girl huddled under those trees with her brothers and her granny, peering through the grapevines to the homes they had just fled, afraid for their lives. I slammed on the brakes of the Transit, jolting the excited workers. The snake slithered past the front tires, which had been but an inch away from crushing its head.

My passengers slumped back into their seats in disappointment. "It's just a snake, Sami. Why won't you run over it?"

I watched the snake languidly continue toward the grapevines.

"There are three reasons why I didn't kill this snake. Maybe he is exactly like us, leaving his home early in the morning in order to feed his family."

"And the second reason, Sami?"

"This is my mother's village. The nature in this area—the trees, the rocks, this snake—is almost all that remains. This snake may have been a witness to what happened in 1948. He is a connection to the people of Zakariyya, one of the only souls still protecting this village. If someone kills this snake, it won't be me."

I then told my passengers everything that I myself had only recently learned.

A few years after I was released from prison, I began transporting workers from Halhoul to Asqalan. I drove past Zakariyya daily, but I never entered. My instinct told me I would not be welcome. But one day, after I dropped the workers off in Asqalan, my curiosity won over my trepidation. I had to know what it felt like to step on the land of my native village.

I steered the Transit off the main road. How could I explain what I was doing there should I be asked? It would not be wise to tell the current residents that I had roots in this village. But I did not want to be treated as a visitor merely passing through.

I located the mosque easily, though it was deep inside the moshav. A house from the original village was next to it that I guessed had once belonged to my extended family, the Adawis. It appeared that an Israeli family was now living in the house. I parked the Transit next to the chain-link fence surrounding the abandoned mosque and shut off the engine. The mosque was in a state of decay; stones were missing from the base of the minaret as if someone had taken a large, jagged bite out of it. According to the legend I had often heard from the old people in Dheisheh, the Israelis had tried unsuccessfully to topple the minaret, using bulldozers. A Palestinian was brought to drive the bulldozer for the final attempt. In the middle of the operation, his arm became paralyzed. He jumped out of the bulldozer and ran away. So the minaret remained, damaged, but standing tall and proud. I placed my hand on its warm stones. This mosque, one of the only remaining original buildings, was Zakariyya. The old Zakariyya. The real Zakariyya.

I brooded for the rest of the drive. Many Palestinians had remained in their villages inside the Green Line after 1948. Why had the people of Zakariyya fled from the tranquility of the old mosque?

My mother knew immediately that something was wrong when I arrived home that night. She took her fingers off the large Braille book she had been reading and placed them on my face, deciphering my mood.

"You are angry, Sami. What is wrong?"

"I went to Zakariyya today."

"Ahhh, did you, my son?" She removed her fingers from my cheeks and pressed them together. "How was it there?"

My anger boiled over. "How could you have left that beautiful village? Tell me!"

"Ya Sami, I wasn't more than thirteen years old, just a small girl!"

"Damn your father then, and all his generation!"

My mother was shocked. "No, no, my son! You mustn't say that! Your grandfather was a hero. And he is a shaheed.⁷ The British killed him in 1939, long before the Nakba."

A shaheed? From the British? I had not known that. My temper eased. I sank down on the couch next to my mother. "How was he killed? What happened to Zakariyya?" I suddenly realized that I knew almost nothing of the personal history of the woman who had raised my eight brothers and sisters and me. "What is your story, Yamma?"⁸

My mother closed her book. She turned to face me on the couch. Running her fingertips over my face one more time to satisfy herself that I was no longer angry, she took my hands in hers and began talking.

"My mother and father went from Zakariyya to Yaffa before I was born so that my father, Ahmad Adawi, could find work. He got a job in the harbor. I was born in Yaffa in 1934. When I was nine months old, my mother was pregnant with my little brother, your uncle Mustafa. One day, she had a craving for taboun bread. Our neighbor had a clay taboun oven outside her home and baked the flatbread daily. My mother lifted me in her arms to go ask them for a piece of taboun