The Caged Rooster

·   The Caged Rooster

*   A few days ago I sat with my friend "Thualbah" in the veranda of my house in the city of al-Bireh, while the rain was falling heavily, promising a good agricultural season this year... and we thanked God for that. I was delighted about my winter plantings in the garden of the house. From behind the glass of that veranda we could see those plantings of peas, broad beans, chickpeas, spinach, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, green onions, parsley and potatoes growing and forming a beautiful green tableau before our eyes... We sat sipping tea with Persian thyme — or what is called Iraqi thyme, or al-qurnayyah, or zaatar daq 'adas... etc., among the names — and began to remember the old days, since it had been a long time since I had seen my friend — how people used to live their daily lives. We exchanged jokes about our villages in Palestine, how they clung to some anecdotes about those villages in bygone days and teased one another..! Most of them were retellings of people’s conversations!!... and they swore they actually happened long ago, becoming, for example, proverbial... indeed turning into proverbs. So when, for example, they ask a guest "Which village are you from, sir?" he says, "I am from ... village such-and-such," they immediately say, "You people of your village do such-and-such..." (one of the anecdotes)... and many of these stories become proverbial.

·      For example, one of these villages, as my friend "Thualbah" told me, its people in the ancient past — "that’s how they tell it" — used to force a chicken’s crop into the shape of the crop because its growth was not straight — it was crooked — they tried to correct it. In another village it is said that its people burned the mulberry tree on the parts raised on the trunk!! Others tied up the mosque and tried to move it!! In another village they said the people washed sugar with water because of the presence of qazaqiz — impurities — meaning they made a proverb of them for their stinginess: how could it occur to them to wash sugar when after they had done their work they found neither sugar nor anything!! In one village “they shot the sun” after they pushed it into the well because it annoyed them, the story goes according to my friend. The villagers in the morning used to go to their agricultural fields east of the town and the sun would strike them in the face, and in the evening they would return westward and the sun would strike their eyes; day after day, when they were annoyed they said later, "This sun is not praying blessings on the Prophet!! Wherever we go it is in our faces and saddens our hearts." Then one of them, a man of unusual quickness — "that’s how they tell it" — said at the solution... so he opened the cover of a well that had collected winter rains for them and said, “I have trapped the sun in the well,” since the sun’s rays did indeed enter into the well. He told them to bring those muskets — and they fired them — then he told them to close the well and that would be the end of it; never would the sun return...!! In another village, it happened that the mukhtar of the village always wore a qamiz and a jacket in the morning and sat with his entourage in that diwan. One man wondered how the mukhtar’s clothes — his qamiz and jacket — were always ironed; he wanted to know which dry cleaner the mukhtar used to send his clothes to! Of course this was hundreds of years ago when there was no dry cleaner or the like, maybe they were ironed on a kerosene iron — so he asked the mukhtar, “O Abu so-and-so, I want to ask you without fuss, where do you iron your damaitek — qamiz, Arab garment —?” He said, “Just don’t tell anyone... by God, my wife washes them every day and puts them in the taboon when they dry and they come out ironed.” “Of course, Abu so-and-so,” they told him, “don’t tell anyone.” He went straight home to his wife and said, “O woman... this and that happens and why shouldn’t she be better than you? The mukhtar had his garments ironed; they were the same as ours.” She told him, “God willing,” and said, “Embank the taboon and go back to your friends.” The next morning he wanted to put them on and go up to the diwan. He said, “Bring me those clothes; God willing I will have ironed them.” She said to him, “Don’t you know what happened?” He said, “No.” She told him, “I did as the mukhtar described: I put the damaitek and the hutta [shawl] inside the taboon and closed the taboon door on them. After an hour, as I do when I put a tray of potatoes in the taboon, I opened the taboon door and tried to pull them out from inside, and when I took them outside to air what remained if they were not fully dry, by God there was not a minute that they did not come out of the garments on the ground as nothing but crumb-like ashes — very small pieces. I said, ‘May God not give you her mind... these are ruined, they are much scorched.’” He said to her, “Oh my woman... maybe I will take an account of them — that is, they are overcooked.” In short, there was neither hutta nor damaitek nor qamiz left... He fetched this shingle-like baking implement and began to beat his wife... cursing her: “You don’t keep house, you don’t clean me!” “Go pack your clothes and go to your parents’ house.” The woman left and sat for months until he brought her back! I said to my friend, “Man, are you sane, this talk... are people such goats?” He said, “This happened hundreds of years ago... people were gullible...!”

·      And he said to me, "Just let me tell you one last thing about a village near your village..." I said, "Give me one and that’s it." My friend told me that there was an old man in a certain village — a poultry breeder (chickens, pigeons and rabbits) — who did not believe in currency — coins and notes — and it was known that he was stingy!! He would, for example, buy a little kerosene for his primus and give the shopkeeper an egg or two from the chickens he bred... and the grocer would accept such barter from him. As for the rest of the people, they paid coins and small change. I asked him why this old man accepted barter. He told me that this old man’s chickens had a rooster, and the eggs from that man were fertilized by that rooster, and the shopkeeper profited from them because he sold them to people for hatching and brooding chicks. This old man treated that rooster like one of his children... Once he felt that the number of eggs had decreased, so he observed the hens and the rooster and found that they were layered — that is, the hens were laying among their neighbors! That is, the hens were laying eggs at the households of the neighbors who also had hens but no rooster. They were happy when the hens from that old man came with their rooster, and they began selling them in the shops at a higher price than others because the old man’s rooster, when it went with the hens to the neighbors’ houses, fertilized their hens’ eggs. The shopkeepers discovered the reason!!! He was upset with the neighbors and told them, "I will complain about you." In the end the old man devised a way to end this drain: he tied the rooster in his house yard... and people made jokes... “You are from the village where you tie roosters and rent hens... it seems from this anecdote people began taking their hens to the old man after he tied the rooster so they could have their hens serviced for money: each hen would go to him for the rooster’s fee!! — half a qirsh — I laughed a lot and said to my friend "Thualbah," “Man, you left no one out in your stories...!!” He said to me, "What do you think, should I tell you about your village?" I said, "Don’t you dare speak of my village!! There is nothing on it worth mentioning, and I might even be babbling and hung up on your village... let it be kept modest!" We laughed and my friend took his leave after we finished a full pot of tea and enjoyed the stories and the anecdotes of the old days!! We agreed that it was better than hearing about the Deal of the Century and politics and the dollar rising and the dollar falling...!! We feel that the old days, despite scarcity, were rich in a beautiful feeling away from technology and mobile phones. Loyalty, devotion and respect were real... there was no falseness in relationships!! What amused me most was caging the rooster and tying it with a rope so that it would not fertilize the neighbors’ hens in order to monopolize them.!! By God, Adam Smith, the father of world economics... did not do this... I chose it as the title of this conversation...

·      With all my greetings to you

·      Date: 12-1-2019