My I.D card shows I'm now ninety-four, with a picture of me aged forty stuck on it. For years I claimed I was actually three years younger, as my father registered my birth to match the age of boys I know were not my generation, to get me out of military service. Ten or twenty years ago, if I said this, some men - my sons among them - would respond that on the contrary, I'm in fact three years older than the document indicates, in keeping with my father claiming I was too young to serve. And they would tell stories putting me in the same generation as Abu Ali Youssef and Hajj Ali Farhat. I know that couldn't be true since they were off on their first trip to Palestine when I was not old enough to be left alone with the cows. Then they'd talk about events that took place when I was already an old man, with Ali Farhat confidently confirming what they were saying. That's because our evenings together, during the years before his death, had got him thinking that we were always peers, friends of the same generation. These people were adamant about my age. They considered my anecdotes from those days to be too few and unchanging, insufficient to swerve them from their thinking. Whenever they picked up talkng they'd carry on parroting what they'd grown so used to hearing themselves say. Eventually, I realised it was pointless to argue with them, to tell them the two or three stories that were the only ones I held to be true.

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Last modified on September 5, 2011  | © Telegram 2005