From Osama al-Eissa’s ‘The Madmen of Bethlehem’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

Osama al-Eissa was shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for his The Seventh Heaven of Jerusalem, awarded to fellow Palestinian writer Basim Khandaqji​​ for his fourth novel, A Mask, the Color of the Sky.

Al-Eissa’s Madmen of Bethlehem was shortlisted for the 2015 Sheikh Zayed Book Award and has not yet appeared in English translation. This translation was first published on the SZBA website and appears here with permission.

From ‘The Madmen of Bethlehem’

By Osama al-Eissa

Translated by Paul Starkey

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi

THERE WAS a group of patients in the psychiatric hospital, let’s call them the fourth group, who were allowed to leave the hospital and go home. The members of this group could often be seen walking aimlessly in the streets. People belonging to this group could also usually be identified by their constant begging for cigarettes – so much so that I started to believe in a contingent link between madness and smoking. There wasn’t a single madman whose mouth didn’t hold a forgotten cigarette. With so much smoking, the cigarettes would burn his lips until his teeth became yellow and decayed, and his face
sunken and emaciated – though this was most likely not through smoking, or at least smoking was not the only reason.

Among this group of patients was al-‘Abd ‘Alawi, a young man with the appearance of a smart intellectual of the sixties generation, tall and thin, usually wearing a white shirt and black trousers, with glasses. He looked a bit like the existentialist philosopher Sartre, and indeed he was greatly influenced by him.

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi was a member of my family in the camp. His father was my mother’s uncle. As usual in a society that attached importance to family and tribe, the young people called those older than themselves ‘uncle’, and our mothers insisted that this was required by good manners. So it was my luck, or perhaps his, that I should call him ‘uncle’, although he was an uncle different from any other. Like everyone else, I knew that he was mad, although at the same time he wasn’t just any old madman as far as we were concerned.

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi’s father worked in the UNRWA mill, where he ground wheat for people. For children like us, Uncle ‘Alawi’s mill was the place we made for on the way back from school to have fun weighing ourselves on the big scales.

Uncle ‘Alawi quite often got annoyed with us, especially when one of us brought a dozen or so other children with him, to show them the uncle who was in charge of a set of scales that could tell people their weight when they stood on them. That was a power that we had for a long time regarded as enormous.

Generally, though, Uncle ‘Alawi was quiet and subdued. The glint in his eyes had gone out some time ago, as it had with all the refugees who had, like him, lost their land and found themselves in refugee camps, after being used to working their land and living off its produce. Despite the apathy that had overtaken him, the women of the family continued to discern in him his former manliness and fatherly spirit, and
they were afraid of him, even though he did not try to impose anything on them. It seems they were in need of a particular sort of manhood so that they could feel downtrodden and have more and more wretchedness piled upon them until they became completely ground down.

The women of the family, as well as the men, had for a long time looked to Uncle ‘Alawi as the ‘chief’, and this feeling had made its way to us children as well. This was not without some justification, for this uncle could be guaranteed to beat up another ‘uncle’ called Bashir – one of the many ‘uncles’ the nature of whose relationship to us I did not know. When we were young, we used to describe this Bashir as a ‘roaring drunk’. He worked in the Bethlehem bars, and would often come back home drunk and angry, eager to pick a quarrel with the walls. He would start hitting, smashing and shouting like a madman until his wife, Aunt Zainab, would send one of us boys to quickly fetch Uncle ‘Alawi. Uncle ‘Alawi would immediately stir himself and arrive in record time, whatever he had been busy with. He knew his task well: it was to deal Uncle Bashir the repeated blows we all believed could be guaranteed to make him come round and stop the foul talk he directed at his wife and neighbours when drunk.

Several people who had arrived at Bashir’s house before Uncle ‘Alawi had tried to restore Bashir to his senses but, despite using considerable force, they had all failed. Instead, Bashir became more ferocious, like a hunted animal in relation to the force confronting him, until Uncle ‘Alawi arrived. Muttering prayers and verses from the Qur’an, he would calmly ask for the path in front of him to be cleared, as he grabbed the dreadful Bashir like an empty bag and slapped him hard, until Bashir came round and gave in to him. Then Uncle ‘Alawi would ask Zainab, with great pride and dignity, to take her husband and shut the door behind the two of them and their children. “That’s enough scandal!” he would say angrily. But the scandals never stopped, for Bashir carried on drinking wine and getting drunk, even though, as he got older, he had started going to the mosque to pray. That was something completely different, though. He often used to say: “God will punish me for one thing and reward me for the other. Who knows? Perhaps I will be better in his eyes than the sheikhs, with their lies and discord?”

Contrary to his expectations, Uncle ‘Alawi became famous for his ability to sort things out with a blow. People started to visit him – for example, a man struck in the face by a fierce gust of wind of the sort that can cause hemiplegia, whom he hit, not realising that he should be treated by massage, as is done today for people suffering after that sort of exposure. His blows were not limited to people with medical conditions, of which there were many, he also treated people possessed by jinn or sprites, some known and others unknown. Despite his increasing renown, and the increasing number of his visitors, he refused to take any fee for what he regarded as a divine gift by which he could benefit people, being content with his reputation, people’s prayers, and securing his status among them.

Like Uncle ‘Alawi, his son, al-‘Abd, was extremely calm. He had inherited his height, but unlike his father, the cigarettes never left his hand, and ash burns from the smoke were visible on his yellowed fingers as well as on his lips while his teeth had lost their whiteness, if they had ever been white at all.

What distinguished al-‘Abd ‘Alawi from the other patients was his pride in a small transistor radio, with a strap he attached to his wrist. When he walked, one could see the radio swinging from his hand, and when he sat on a chair or on the ground and stretched himself out, he would put the radio to his ear.

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi suffered from a tremor in his feet, which became noticeable when he sat down and put one foot on top of the other. The foot on top wouldn’t stop shaking, though it didn’t cure him of holding cigarettes. I came across this sort of involuntary movement of the foot later in a prisoner who had proved uncooperative during an investigation in the occupation prisons and been subjected to severe punishment. His interrogators violated him by putting an empty bottle up his anus in revenge, and when he came out he could never control the movement of his feet.

It is true that al-‘Abd was quiet, but that didn’t mean he didn’t often want to speak, or rather argue, with the girls and boys of the family. His cultural horizons were astonishingly wide. He made no secret of his embrace of existentialism and his admiration for Sartre and other names of people that those he was speaking with had never heard of before and that they never remembered. When he was faced with questions about existentialism that he didn’t hesitate to describe as being stupid, he would rush to answer them with explanations of subjects like ‘atheistic’ and ‘believing’ existentialism, and details of the existentialist philosophers. Among those he mentioned, for example, was the pre-Islamic poet Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, whom he greatly admired. I have no doubt now that Tarafa’s premature death, the story of which al-‘Abd often related, had affected him deeply.

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi’s own story, which went before him to the houses of the family and which contained within it a good deal of distress, was that he had been gifted and industrious at school, and that it was this supposed outstanding intelligence that had led him to madness instead of to the universities.

Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi’s colleagues had drifted away both before and after June 1967, and unlike him, most of them had been influenced by Marxism and nationalism. I was not destined to meet any of them until many years later in the Jordanian capital Amman. When I asked my informant about al-‘Abd ‘Alawi, he was surprised by the question but confirmed to me the story about school and how he had begun to go mad. He had told my friend – my informant – that when he heard the sound of birds tweeting, he became sexually aroused . . . “And he immediately came, and felt relief when he had ejaculated.”

Al-‘Abd’s old friend told me that laughing. He didn’t need anything apart from this confession from al-‘Abd, either before or after, to realise that he really was mad.

I said to my informant: “If al-‘Abd is as you say, then he is a poet and not a madman.”

“Every poet is a madman in the end,” he replied laughing.

I laughed and recalled the poet Bahija, who used to say proudly that she was the fastest woman to come, and often interrupted our telephone conversations to say “Ummm”, before calming down a bit so that we could resume our conversation. This was after telling me that she had wet herself.

It was always impossible to count the number of times Bahija had wet herself during a single phone conversation.

I knew nothing about al-‘Abd’s sexual or emotional desires, but I recall that he gave especial attention to the girls of the family. This did not reach the stage of explicit flirting or harassment – so far as I know, at least – but anyway, he succeeded in forming friendships with them, because as an intellectual he believed in friendship between a man and a woman. There was also another reason, namely, his readiness to listen to them without their being anxious in case he might spill their secrets. If he did so, it might well be annoying, but it would not be a major upset, for in the end he was a madman, and he could say many things that were not necessarily true.

I often listened to his arguments about things like friendship between a man and a woman; equality; his criticism of popular Marxism as a fashion; his embrace of existentialism, and his opposition to the Soviets because – despite their loudly proclaiming ideas of liberation, which al-‘Abd had never believed – they were the first to recognise Israel. There were also endless conversations about civilisation, progress, religion and modernity.

Al-‘Abd passed his days between his house, the houses of his family, the streets of Dheisheh and Bethlehem, and the psychiatric hospital where he received treatment. The treatment might not amount to the terrifying electric shocks that were widely used, or severe beatings from nurses, perhaps because in the last resort he was a child of Dheisheh, a child of the camp, that is, and he had some support – unlike those patients who came from other areas further away, who were usually left by their families in the hospital to face their fate alone, unasked about. Such families only saw them twice, once when they signed their committal documents, and once when they received their corpses for burial. On several occasions they were so slow to collect the corpses that they were buried in any grave that could be arranged. Sometimes a nurse or some charitable soul would volunteer to accept the corpse and bury it in their family graves.

It often happened that we visited him in the hospital to find that he had for a long period disappeared somewhere. We would wander in the direction of the convent and make for the ‘sane insane’ department– as we used to call it in accordance with the classification we had invented (it was actually called the ‘convalescence unit’) – where the inmates who were not dangerous were housed.

There we would sit with al-‘Abd under a shady tree, or wander along the dirt track, shaded by pine trees on either side. I recall al-‘Abd’s pleasure at our presence, and I don’t recall his being particularly miserable when we finished our visit – unlike the other patients who, if they had enjoyed a visit from their relatives, would cling to them and beg them to take them out of the hospital, on the basis that they themselves were perfectly sane but if left among the insane, they would certainly be driven mad. A highpitched scream would sound out, which would quickly change into a plea until the matter was settled by nurses in white uniforms, who would drag the now tearful patients to their rooms.

Was al-‘Abd concealing his sorrow at leaving us, with a pride and selfrespect that he could not show, especially as on most visits we would have with us a number of the older girls of the family, with whom he liked to sit and show off his cultured views, just as they in turn were making him fond of that something inside of him that attracted us all to him?

Besides the men’s ‘sane insane’ section, I remember that there was a ‘sane insane’ section for women. I once went to visit al-‘Abd with some of the older girls of the family, who were always needing young men like me to accompany them when they went on an errand, as if we were maharim (to use the religious expression) – people who could render it acceptable for women to go out in those days. When we reached the hospital, we could not find al-‘Abd. I don’t know how it was that the opportunity arose to sit with two of these women patients, who were dressed up to the nines. The conversation revolved around a single topic: love. It was like a conversation just between girls, for they ignored my presence. Each patient spoke about her beloved and about her ambition to tie the knot when she left the hospital. The conversation turned to the meaning and nature of love, to lust, sacrifice and faithfulness, and to the difference between love and sex. All the girls of the family and the two patients agreed that love had to be love for its own sake, love for the sake of love, unsullied by certain desires. It was as if an adult – an adult of the family or any adult with a certain authority – were present among us. Every one of the girls, mad or sane, was anxious that they should not be constrained by any suspicion of a connection between sex and love.

The surprise came when one of the ‘sane madwomen’ revealed her love for a ‘sane madman’ living in the hospital and talked about how to avoid the attention of the male and female nurses in order to pass messages of love and desire between them. She was assisted in that by her fellow inmates and those of her beloved – among them al-‘Abd, whose virtues and character the patient extolled highly. She regarded him as the master and spiritual director of their love story, which had reached point at which the pair had agreed on names for their children when their luck turned, one of whom would be called al-‘Abd.

I have forgotten, and will continue to forget, many important and moving incidents that I experienced in prison, in the street, and among the Palestinian diaspora, but I will never forget that mentally disturbed girl, her appetite for life, her elegance, her way of smoking, and her passion for her mad lover. I imagined that she was sick with love. Later, she seemed to me like one of al-Manfaluti’s or Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim ‘Abd Allah’s heroines. Perhaps some of the resounding expressions that I heard from her were actually taken from books by al-Manfaluti or Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi‘i or Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus. The last-mentioned, together with Yusuf al-Siba’i, was among the favourite writers of the girls of the family, some of whom knew off by heart sentences the authors had written. I found that out when one of them read a letter that had reached her from another girl’s lover – ignoring the fact that I was there, as always happened – and the other girl stopped her at a particular sentence or expression and said “Ihsan” with a laugh, meaning that the lover had stolen it from the famous author to express his love for that girl.

After that visit, word got around – I have no idea how serious it was – about the possibility that al-‘Abd ‘Alawi might marry a fellow inmate. It may be that that talk reached al-‘Abd, but it didn’t induce him to change his position. It seems he realised that the extent of his present and future life was to move between the camp and the hospital and to listen to the radio, with endless arguments, non-stop smoking, and the birds that never stopped chirping.

My acquaintance with al-‘Abd ‘Alawi now seems like a mere flash of light that quickly extinguished itself, for one day, like a thunderbolt, there arrived a sudden piece of news that nevertheless seemed to have been expected:

“Al-‘Abd ‘Alawi has committed suicide . . . in the pools.”

I headed with several others to Solomon’s Pools, where the Lama Brothers acted and produced their film. It consists of three enormous pools situated beside our camp, and it forms part of the water system that has supplied Jerusalem with water by means of aqueducts for more than two thousand years. There is no doubt that whoever invented it wanted to bring to fruition a mad idea that had occurred to him. It may have been the Roman Emperor Hadrian who did it – the Emperor who destroyed Jerusalem and rebuilt it in AD 135 to mark the twenty-first anniversary of his succession to power. He gave it the name Aelia Capitolina, which is an amalgamation of the name of his family and the name of the Roman God Jupiter – a name that the Arabs abbreviated to Aelia without understanding it. Yaqut al-Hamawi, for example, explains the name as if it were “Beit El”, saying: “Aelia is the name of the Beit al-Miqdas. Its name is said to mean ‘God’s House’.”

The important thing is we found out that al-‘Abd’s body had been discovered in the middle pool. He had left his spectacles, radio and tin of tobacco on the edge of the pool, which is the only certain thing in the story. The conclusion was that he had decided to commit suicide and had jumped into the massive pool, which was full of vegetation and not fit to swim in.

Al-‘Abd was not the first person from our camp or the area around it to commit suicide in the pools. People talked a lot, for example, about the suicide of an outstanding talented student who did not get the expected grades in his secondary school exams, which came as a shock to him. He probably couldn’t face a domineering father who wanted to see his son make it in life, after time had treated him so badly and turned him into a refugee expelled from his land. He didn’t want his son to repeat his own wretched life. In those circumstances, the son thought that the quickest and simplest solution would be to end his own life by his own hand, so he committed suicide in Solomon’s Pools, which had often seen suicides and drownings, including of some Jews. Each year without fail we had an appointment with death in these pools of blood, the point where water is brought into Jerusalem – the so-called ‘House of God’, which writers and travellers have fallen in love with and lived beside, and which has been an inevitable focus for invaders. The revolutionaries lured the soldiers of Ibrahim Pasha to the area and slaughtered them, and the British brought a purification pump, which they had captured from the Germans in the Sahara. The system for supplying water to Jerusalem worked until the war of 1948 and the partition of Jerusalem, whose eastern part was assigned to the defeated party and the western part to those who had won the war.

From our experience with suicides and drownings, we knew that the body of a suspected suicide or drowned person settles on the bottom, and only becomes visible after several days, when it becomes bloated with water and rises to the surface. Then we know that someone has committed suicide or drowned. In al-‘Abd’s case, his glasses and radio were immediate evidence of his identity, even before the corpse became visible.

When I recall the affair now, I wonder: Why did al-‘Abd put his most obvious identification marks on the edge before taking his decision? Why didn’t he just jump into the pool with all his things? Did he want to leave a coded message as a sort of will? Did he want to say to us: Look, I’m leaving you something of myself for you to remember me by? Or did he want his identity to be established quickly, so that he wouldn’t be left alone for a long time in the darkness at the bottom of the pool?

I know that I shall never be able to know the final moments in the life of al-‘Abd, as he stood on the edge of the enormous Roman pool, under the tall trees. Maybe it was after night had fallen when he stood alone facing the water, and life. Perhaps he had some sense of the historical and archaeological symbolism of the place. Perhaps his life flashed in front of his eyes. Perhaps he thought of his father and his reaction, and of his mother, whom we described as being “ala niyyatha”, a local expression meaning that she was miserable, or weak-minded, or submissive, or a mixture of all three.

I don’t recall how long it took to retrieve al-‘Abd’s body, which was taken to his home accompanied by the police, as the women of the family started wailing for the young man whose life was ended. The women of the family were faithful to the traditional mourning customs, which were rooted in antiquity. These customs were not confined to wailing and tears, and rehearsing the virtues of the deceased, but also required the organising of collective circles for flagellation, and the repetition of mournful death chants. They would stand in a circle with a woman in the middle, holding her head scarf in her hand, leading them and keeping the rhythm of the sorrowful verses, so that a visitor who saw these circles from a distance would actually think that he was watching a happy occasion.

Their voices, as they mourned al-‘Abd and described him as “zarif altul” – whose life and power and everything about him had now been extinguished – still continue to haunt me, making me indescribably sad. After al-‘Abd’s suicide, no one mentioned him anymore, as if his fate had been predestined, as if his death was something expected, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because the family had lost a large number of its menfolk who had died young, either drowning in the Atlantic, or from a virus in the Arabian desert, or from disease or suicide, as was the case with Ilyas, who set fire to himself for love.

Can passion kill? Some people would say yes, and I will say: Perhaps. I sat in my mother’s lap amidst the women mourning Ilyas after his suicide, without knowing the details of what had driven this Don Juan to his death. Later, I had the idea that he might have wanted to put some particular pressure on his beloved, and set fire to himself in the hope that someone would notice it and put it out. Or perhaps he was intending to put it out but matters got out of control.

I have known cases of young men and women – perhaps as many as the fingers on both hands – who have decided to commit suicide for love but been saved at the last moment, as well as of young men who have actually committed suicide. I was with a Christian friend in the Augusta Victoria Hospital, that fortress of the German Empire on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem: he was saved after taking an overdose of pills to put pressure on his Muslim girlfriend to marry him. And I have known a handful of cases of people who have gone the whole way and lost their lives for love. I once found myself standing in a hospital courtyard with the father of a friend who had committed suicide because of his beloved. Both of us knew that the man now lying inside was already dead when we brought him to the hospital, but without saying anything, we had both entertained the hope of seeing him emerge bright and smiling. He came out the following day, after the completion of some routine but deadly formalities, carried on our shoulders to his final resting place.

But can madness kill?

In the hospital, crimes of murder occurred. Some patients killed others. I heard the story of one patient killing another patient who had been a doctor but had gone mad and become a fellow inmate of the people he had been treating. It seems that the killer harboured a secret grudge for the doctor who was previously sane but had later gone mad. So he chose a suitable time, slid out a knife, and poured out his hatred in a series of knife thrusts.

But in al-‘Abd’s case, the surprise for me was when I read a psychiatric specialist (or so the publisher described him) as saying that a madman does not commit suicide, for suicide requires a decision, and a madman is incapable of taking a decision like that. Only the sane commit suicide.

So al-‘Abd was not mad. I had always known that he was a madman of a specific type, or had been hiding behind his madness from a life in which no one understood him. And so he possessed the will to decide, before putting his glasses, cigarettes and radio on the edge of the Roman pool and jumping in. Most likely, he wasn’t mad in the same way as the rest of the hospital inmates, he was just tickled by the cheeping of the birds. No, he was a poet, and also mad like Bahija, borne aloft to the seventh heaven by the chirping of the birds.

Osama Alaysa is an author and journalist, born in Bethlehem, Palestine, in 1963. He has worked as a journalist for numerous Arab and regional newspapers, as well as publishing five novels, two collections of short stories, many essays, and seven research studies on Palestinian history and culture

Paul Starkey is a British scholar and translator of Arabic literature.

This excerpt previously appeared on the Zayed Book Award website and appears here with permission. Publishers can find more information about the award’s translation grant on their website. Interested publishers can also find a synopsis available at Frankfurt Rights.