5

The painter called me. “Ms. Nidal, this painting must be taken down.”

I entered my uncle’s room—my uncle Amin, the cultured one, a member of the political parties, a buyer of books and journals. I found the ground covered with books, journals, magazines, pamphlets, old newspaper clippings of photos, drawings and headlines reading, “The British Want to Leave,” “The Investigation Committees Failed,” “The Mufti Issues a Statement from Exile, but al-Nashashibi Refutes It.”

The painter looked at me with an expression of both boredom and curiosity, holding a large scraper and a box of paste. “Ms. Nidal, how can we work with this painting and all these books and papers?”

I called a young man who was pulling out weeds in the garden and asked him to remove the books and the papers, but I carried the painting to the second floor where I was sleeping and reliving the past from the start, through the documents, letters, and unpublished articles.

I placed the painting on top of the boxes containing documents, photos, and keepsakes; then I sat on the bed, lay down, and stared at the painting—a painting of Mount Ebal and the pine forest on top of the mountain, above the quarry and Sheikh al-Emad. I was eleven years old when I drew this picture. I had become an artist, a budding painter, drawing with chalk and watercolors. I had no experience with mixing colors and I had not used oil paints yet. That drawing, the Mount Ebal drawing, was painted with watercolors, but the colors were beginning to dim. It was as if time had dealt with the tableau the way it did with us; we were beginning to die out and the revolution was beginning to dim. But had it really dimmed, or was it dying? It was moving like the hands of a clock, which start at the top, then go down and return to the top once more, though without indicating the time!

One day, my uncle Amin saw me drawing the photo of an actor I had found in a magazine; it was the photo of the actor Muhsin Sarhan.

I loved Muhsin Sarhan. I was a teenager then, dreaming of a gentle and handsome young man who would grow up to be strong, who would protect me, hold my hand, and kiss me; a man who would carry me, and fly me over the Ebal and Jarzim summits; a man who would tell me that I was beautiful and innocent, and that he had come to save me from this environment of fear and tension, and my grandmother’s tears.

My uncle looked at the drawing and made fun of me, laughing loudly, saying, “Muhsin Sarhan? You are drawing Muhsin Sarhan! Is this your taste? Muhsin Sarhan!”

I had drawn Muhsin Sarhan many times before, drawing him bigger and bigger every time, but every time I failed to reproduce his eyes correctly. One eye would be a true copy, but the other would make him look blind or cross-eyed or dead eyed, its pupil having moved out of its location. But I persevered, hoping to succeed in painting Muhsin Sarhan, the gallant, faithful man, the beloved of women.

My educated uncle was not convinced by my evasive techniques. He told me that dreams, films, and copying photos from magazines were useless and fruitless efforts. Was this art? Was this life, was this beauty, were these emotions? Art is death and revelation . . . but Muhsin Sarhan! Where is life? Where is reality? Where is history? Where is your vision?

I did not understand what he meant by history and vision, but I understood that what I was copying was not real, and above all, it was not beautiful. My uncle explained matters to me in a sarcastic manner that made me feel disgusted with my drawings and with Muhsin Sarhan. He said, in a serious and philosophical tone, “It is as if you are dreaming like we do, of a sheikh who would save us from reality and from this misery.” I started imagining Muhsin Sarhan being that sheikh, a man with a white turban, a long coat, a long, thick beard, and a menacing voice.

I stopped painting for many weeks, until the day he reprimanded me, saying, “Is it either Muhsin Sarhan or nothing? Is this art?” He gave me books about painters who drew reality, and drew ideas, and drew imaginary representations of heaven and hell; painters who drew the Mona Lisa, Aphrodite, Cupid, the god of love, and Jesus Christ. I lived in the company of Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. I had begun to understand that painting meant reality, a reality mixed with vision and the movement of history. Muhsin Sarhan was wiped from my mind and my imagination, and so was the image of the sheikh with his white turban, thanks to a historical turnaround.

I started painting live models, my grandmother, my mother, poppies and jasmine, a white cat sleeping quietly under a tree. Then came Mount Ebal and the pine forest on top of the mountain where my grandmother and I had met my uncle, a number of revolutionaries, and my first love, the boy, the young man, the son of the village. The revolution had quieted down at that time; or rather, it had disintegrated from inside and outside. It began well, strong and clean, but gradually crumbled. At that time, during the good years of the revolution, we used to meet my uncle and a group of revolutionaries in the forest on top of the mountain; that was where I met the love of my life.

I could see it all now, on top of the cases filled with the family papers and letters, and my uncle’s forgotten poems. They represented a whole time period for me, a time passed, but a time that continued to rotate like the hands of a clock, starting on the top and going down, then going back up again, to the top, to twelve. Meanwhile, I waited and meditated, while my imagination moved in circles and my memory pushed me to dig deeper and advance in that forest, before I dug deeper into my memories and the distant love, my first love.