By the Fountain of the Virgin


	The Matar family home in Nazareth (Nabil Matar.)

“JANB NAB‘ al-adhra‘”—the words that my mother muttered about our house in Nazareth. “May God be with you.”

Fifty years after the Nakba, in November 1998, I was intent on visiting the house I had never seen, and the house that my mother had not seen since that fateful day of nuzah—the term my parents had used, migration. They had believed they would return to Nazareth.

With my sister in tow, I stepped out of the taxi into the saha of the village about which I had heard since childhood. I had grown up in Beirut, but until I became a teenager, I knew more about the alleys and neighbors of Nazareth than about anywhere else.

Two men were playing tawleh. I went up to them.

“My name is Nabil Matar. My father was Ibrahim Matar. He was the school principal here before ’48. Do you know where our house is?”

“No. Where did he tell you it was?”

“By the fountain of the Virgin.”

“Then you need to walk uphill.”

I strode in the direction he had pointed, my sister barely keeping up.

Memories flashed. Where is the house in which dar Saidah lived—dar Bishara, ra’es al-baladiyah—I could still hear the veneration in my mother’s voice—dar Bawardi, my maternal grandmother. History was colliding with the streets of Nazareth and my mother’s voice was explaining where each family lived, how they were related to each other, who had married whom and begat whom.

Minutes later we came across an old man in a thôb, sunning himself.

I repeated my question.

“Aah, yes, Ibrahim Matar, yes, his house is there. At the end of that street, turn left. Near the dentist’s.”

The only image I had of the house is of the gate that four men had to carry, as my mother proudly explained. My parents had never kept a photograph of the house. I remember a friend of my father’s, an American missionary, once bringing a picture he had taken during his visit to the “Holy Land.” My father looked at it, then handed it back.

He did not want it.

We reached the dentist’s clinic. Was the house to the right of it or the left? I zoomed in on the gate, but I wanted to be sure as tears began to break through.

My sister took charge. A doctor, she could handle crises better than I. She waved down a car.

The driver was the dentist. He did not know. But then his father, he was sure, would. He pulled out his cell phone and called him.

“I have here a doctor and her brother—min dar Matar. They want to know which is their family house.”

The father must have asked to talk to my sister because the dentist handed her the phone and switched on the speaker.

“Inti me’n?”

“Ana Inaam Matar.”

“Daughter of Ibrahim and Wadad Matar?”

“Yes.”

“I knew you when you were a baby. Now you must be older. Why is your voice so throaty? You must smoke. Just like your grandmother. God rest her soul. She smoked a lot.”

“I stopped smoking.”

“Good. Now tell me, ballahi, what happened to your [maternal] uncle, Jiryis? Did he ever get children?”

My uncle, whose story had been Palestine-known, had gotten married but had not had children.

“Yes, he lived to have four healthy children. A girl and three boys. All in America now.”

“May God protect them. Did he divorce his wife and marry another?”

I screamed.

“The house,” from inside the telephone and beyond 1948, “is to the right.”


A caravan of camels passes over Mount Olivet, 1918 (Library of Congress/American Colony (Jerusalem) Photographer.)

The one I had zoomed in on. Another story had been added. But there was the gate. And a jasmine tree. And a big sign: the house was the headquarters of David Levy’s political party. There were elections.

My sister was now completely in charge as she introduced herself to the shabab who came out to see the woman with the uncontrollably weeping man. They were local Nazarites, and like party members in all headquarters in the Middle East, spent their time sipping coffee, reading newspapers, and infinitely bored. Immediately, my sister started chatting with them, the dentist joining in. Coffee appeared, and cigarettes were lit. The Palestine of exile with Palestine of that day of awdah, Nov. 14, 1998.

I moved around the house with my camera and silence. “If I forget you Nazareth, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you,” my mother repeatedly sang as she bathed me as a child. It was long after that I realized she had changed the biblical verse.

“How can you still believe in God after the destruction of Palestine?” I had always asked my mother—even at the home in which she spent her last months. She never answered, but would look at me with her sightless eyes, and break into the hymn she had been taught in the CMS Anglican orphanage in Nazareth where she had grown up. She had had a beautiful voice, and as a little girl had very shiny blonde hair. She was always made to stand in the front line of the choir so that English visitors would donate generously to the orphanage.

When she used to sing it, she remembered with a glowing smile, she had lisped. At 91, she would sing to me.

With a lisp.
It was the only answer she had.

We are little Nazarene children
And our Father placed our home
’Mid the olive trees and vineyards
Where the Savior used to roam.

For the Lord who loved the children
And was glad to hear their praise
Cares that Nazareth children know Him
Do His will and choose His ways.

He cares that they should keep in memory
All that sacred life spent here
Try in heart to walk beside Him
Safe and happy in His fear.

And we know that He is coming
Every knee to Him shall bow
And the joyous shouts to greet Him
Shall begin in Nazareth Now.

My mother and father lie buried in Florida. On their graves they wanted inscribed the phrase, “At home in Christ”—the Christ in whose village they had grown and from whose fountain they and His mother had drunk.

“If I forget thee Nazareth, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you,” I sang to my children as I helped them take their baths.

By Nabil Matar, professor of English at the University of Minnesota.