Beware of the harm from those you have been good to

Author: حافظ البرغوثي

The man was sitting on the ground in the evening, placing a small pile of sugar, and suddenly the ants arrived in a crawling line towards the sugar. This continued for a long time until the sugar ran out, and the ants stopped coming to it. I mention this as a summary of a short story that was included in a section of various paragraphs we used to publish for a writer on the last page of Al-Qabas newspaper in Kuwait during the 1980s. I reread the paragraph about the ants, which was written on small green paper that leaned towards blue or vice versa, several times before publication, as I was responsible for the editorial secretary at Al-Qabas. The writer is Dr. Souad Al-Sabah, the wife of the late Sheikh Abdullah Al-Mubarak, the founder of modern institutions and Deputy Ruler of Kuwait. The English hated him after he had been a strong man in the 1950s and refused to be in a conflict with his cousins over power, opting instead for distance, and he remained loyal to his country. His national unifying sentiment was one of the reasons the English disliked him. I thought that the writer meant those who used to gather around him and received sugar, and when it ran out, they refused to stay around him. I hesitated a lot before publishing the paragraph about the ants and then sent it to the printer, expecting it to cause a stir that might cost me my job, but it went through peacefully. The story of the ants came to my mind a few days ago as I was checking my trees, where I noticed withered leaves on a fig bush and the branches had been gnawed by some rodent, and some of the unripe fruits also had their skins disappeared. I was surprised by the scene, then I searched among the branches to find a cockroach I had previously seen at night in my external yard. It was large and unlike the burrowing cockroach, which is black with white spots and smaller in size, while the new cockroach was gray with long antennae, resembling a small drone. I wanted to kill it as I have sympathy for insects and animals, so I nudged it away with my foot, but after a few minutes, it returned crawling, and one of my cats, which cleans around the house and field from reptiles, scorpions, and snakes, prepared to attack it. It made a sound similar to the buzzing of a reconnaissance drone used by the occupation, which confused the cat. It caught it and threw it away. After a while, it returned flying and landed in front of me, so I caught it and released it far away to protect it from the cats. I said to myself, this cockroach, which I felt sorry for, is ruining my cherished rare tree, which I rescued from the world of oblivion forty years ago, reproduced trees from it, and distributed them. What I heard in my childhood from Youssef Al-Abd and Irssan Al-Ishwa was true; they were two men from the village, and we used to play on the threshing floor. At that time, I was in the third or fourth grade, and the two men were passing by. I heard Youssef, who was in exile in Germany, say to his companion Irssan, just as I told you: "Beware of the harm from those you have been good to." This phrase or proverb remained in my mind for many years until it appeared as a proverb in an Arabic language book, but I did not understand it, and I used to wonder how you can be good to someone and then beware of their harm! We grew up, and life consumed us, and we discovered that those you are good to and feel compassion for are the ones who stab you in the back. When you often remember these experiences, you feel helplessness and regret because sometimes you sacrifice your job for helping others. Despite the unfortunate experiences, you are like a donkey that continues to seek those who ask for your help and strives to assist them, sacrificing effort and money, only to find that after a while, they have turned into an enemy to you and conspire against you or mock you because you helped them. Even this insect that I had mercy on turned out to be like them, or like the little turtles I used to pick up on my way back from Ramallah to the village every day in spring, fearing that cars would run over them as they crossed the street. They turned against me because I used to gather them and throw them in my field, and when I started planting my field with vegetables, I found cucumbers and melons and tomatoes that had been gnawed by some animal. Years passed as I searched for the reason and blamed the small wild boars that could sneak from the field's fence and sometimes the rock rabbit called a porcupine that lives among the rocks below my house. Then the surprise came that it was the turtles I collected from the roads to protect them, returning the favor with harm and destroying my crops. So I started searching for them and removing them from my field. Even the wild fox that comes to me every evening to eat the leftovers I leave from my cats and drink water, when I approach it to take its picture, it runs away. I recounted this to a friend who said that the fox comes to him and sleeps under a tree and does not run away. I asked him, do you feed it? He said no. I said, do not be good to it, as it might desert you because it comes to you hoping you will feed it, just like the ants. He asked, and what about the ants? I said, it's a story you won’t understand. I caught the cockroach, and it released its buzzing to scare me, but I refused to have pity on it this time. I dealt with it and said to myself that I will not feel pity for anyone anymore; it is time to feel pity for myself only, for all the tribulations that have befallen me, no one has shown me mercy except those whom God has mercy upon, and He is indeed gracious.