I walked into the family enclosure where a donkey, several goats and some chickens watched my arrival. I saw my mother under the shade roof attached to the cooking hut; she was with my sister Aysha and with several other women of the village; they were all in mourning. Mother looked very old now. Her hair was matted with the earth of grieving. She wore dark clothing, a dark shawl over her old head. She saw me and wept into her hands, as if it were even sadder for her to think that my homecoming had to be at such a time.
“Fatah,” she managed to say, which is what you say when you greet someone in a time of grieving.
We had lost perhaps 20 cousins in the previous days, and each was like a son or daughter to her. In this tiny village three children and their mother were killed when the white Antonov bomber came. Six of the 50 houses were burned. This news, which I already knew, was told to me again by the women as I stood with my head bowed a little to my mother.
I heard running and then saw my brother Ahmed come into the enclosure. He was, against the mourning custom and his own intentions, smiling somewhat as he grasped my arm in a great handshake.
“Daoud,” he said. “Fatah. So it’s all true—you have come back.”
“Fatah,” I replied, trying not to smile.
“It’s very, very good to see you, Daoud,” he said several times. I told him that the sheik had sent his regards and had warned of an attack soon. “Yes, an attack I think will come in a few days,” Ahmed said. “Not tomorrow, but maybe soon after that.” Ahmed told me that some of the old people were refusing to leave. They were intent on dying where they had always lived. Some would point and say, “We have our great-grandfathers buried over here, and our children buried over there, and so why would this not be a good place for us to die also?” You could not argue with that.
A few days later I was walking through the village to see how everyone was doing. The birds were singing, which I took to mean we were safe at least another hour. But then there was a strange sound and I stopped walking in order to listen. It was a thumping like a great drum, then more and very rapid thumps of this drum. Then I saw two large, green helicopters through the trees, turning sharply into our narrow wadi. The thumping was their engines as they turned—then the thumping of their guns shook the air. I did not know which way to run so I stood there crazy for a moment and watched the dirt of the village spraying up from the bullets.
I ran to my mother’s hut. She and my sister and her children were already leaving, quickly moving between the huts to the safety of the rocky wadi west of the village. Let’s go let’s go, she called to her grandbabies as they ran. I quickly found myself carrying a child here, boosting some children onto donkeys, urging donkeys along let’s go let’s go, finding children and sometimes their mothers standing and crying hysterically and pleading with them to move along. The helicopters were mostly shooting at the defenders at the east end of the village and not at the people escaping to the west. They would all surely come after us when the defenders were dead, so we knew we had to keep moving.
The surviving village defenders caught up with us toward dark. My brother Juma was among them, but I did not see Ahmed. Juma looked at me sadly when he came closer. This was enough.
“Fatah,” he said. “Our brother Ahmed is killed. Maybe we will see him soon.”
On the third day we came to a water point where some of our people were waiting for us. Fifteen of us, the younger men, decided to ride camels back to the village. We needed to bury the dead before the wild dogs and jackals destroyed them.
The village was mostly gone—60 or so scorched black spots where a whole world once celebrated life. The huts were still smoking, which we smelled long before we entered the wadi. I found Ahmed. The effects of large-caliber weapons and perhaps an RPG round were such that I barely recognized his body, but it was Ahmed. I dug a grave as we do, so that he would rest on his right side with his face to the east. “Goodbye, Ahmed,” I said to him. And I knelt down there for a long time.
