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  • from Just Like a River
  • Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib (bio)
    Translated by Michelle Hartman and Maher Barakat

The Village

The camp was almost empty. It was a Thursday, so there was no one in it except for the few soldiers on guard and a number of others who were on duty for the weekend. Among this second group was Chief Sergeant Yunis.

The chief sergeant woke up from his afternoon siesta and washed his face with water from the cistern. He prepared his glass of maté,1 picked up the maté tray and the kettle of hot water, and walked toward the shade of an olive tree. He made a small stone fireplace, just like the ones they made in the village every evening when it was time to drink maté, and lit the fire. When the water was hot enough, he drank his first round of maté, thinking about his childhood friends in the village. He felt sad and lonely.

“They are in the village now drinking maté under the sindiyana tree, talking and laughing—Ahmad and Yusuf Mu’alla and Husayn Mahmud and my brother Muhammad—they are making fun of Husayn. I wonder if they are thinking about me. Do they know that just like them, right now I too am drinking maté, even though I am so far away from them? Do they know that I am in a camp in an olive grove, just as though I were in the village?

“I must return to the village soon. Inshallah,2 the house will be finished. Inshallah, Muhsin will return from Russia after he graduates. Inshallah, Dallal will also graduate from college and find a respectable boy from our area to marry. Ustaz Yusuf is a fine young man; he will leave Yabrud and go to Tartus, and we will all live between Tartus and the village. I will do administrative work at Muhsin’s clinic; I will do any type of work for my son. I will work the land, plant olive trees, help Muhsin. Ali will have grown up—he is my favorite. And Muhammad . . . Muhammad is the only one who doesn’t like to study. What do we people from the countryside have but education? We are not . . .”

He drank his fourth glass of maté and was overcome by powerful pangs of loneliness. It occurred to him that maté had no taste unless it was drunk with other human beings; it had no taste at all when a person was alone. He spied a soldier going from one tent to another.

“Shamdin, Shamdin, come here.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier answered cautiously, thinking that the chief sergeant was going to ask him for a favor. [End Page 1091]

“Come here, young man, come and drink a glass of maté.” The soldier was surprised and tried to excuse himself, but the chief sergeant insisted.

“Yes, sir. What is it, sir?”

“Come here. Taste it, taste it—this is maté. They don’t have it where you’re from in Afrin.” The soldier sat down and drank the maté as if he were obeying a military order. The chief sergeant felt relaxed with the soldier and asked him, “What do you do in civilian life?”

“I don’t do anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I farm and work the land. My family owns a small plot of land,” the soldier replied humbly. He thought the chief sergeant was going to ask him if he could bring him something from his village. All of his friends who had done their military service had warned him in advance about chief sergeants, and here this chief sergeant was asking him what he did for a living.

“Ah, a farmer. In Afrin you have olives, just as we do in Tartus.”

The soldier thought that the chief sergeant was definitely going to ask him to bring him a tenekeh of olive oil. He cursed the moment he had sat down and drunk this bitter drink. “Actually my family does not have many olive trees, and the harvest in Afrin was awful this year,” he said.

The chief sergeant felt that the soldier had started to engage in a conversation with him...

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