his identity: At that time too, while he was in the Islamic Hospital in Tripoli, scraps gathered from here and there shed light on his past, of which no trace at all remained to him... He was born in 1941; his father, Shawqi Abu Zayd, was an officer in the Jordanian army who had been pensioned off... He left Jordan and came to Tripoli with his wife and children.
This is the summary of the information that Ahmad gave, and it shows that his age is above thirteen years — the age he himself recently stated at Radio Lebanon.
The search for his family: Inquiries were made in Tripoli and efforts exerted to search for his kin, by Miss Arman, by the Islamic Hospital, and by the police as well, but all of them went for nothing. Not one person came forward from the district the flood had swept away, or from the neighboring district, to say a single word confirming that Ahmad's family had one day lived in that quarter! In vain did the people there stare into Ahmad's face; no one recognized him...
Ahmad at Deir al-Salib: We have said that the campaign of the ladies of the Lebanese Red Cross came back from Tripoli telling the story of Ahmad and what his heart-rending sight had left in their hearts. The feeling spread to the members of the bureau, and a Red Cross car set out especially to carry the boy to Beirut and then to the Deir al-Salib hospital, where he was placed in the charge of the specialist, Dr. Edouard Azouri. That was on January 25, 1956 — five weeks after the catastrophe...
With the psychological treatment he recovers his hearing and his speech, but loses his memory: Dr. Azouri devoted himself to Ahmad, using with him the most modern psychological treatment. The days and weeks passed, and one day Ahmad awoke with the doctor at his bedside — and behold, he could hear and speak... Then he
asked where he was, and who had brought him to the hospital, and where he had come from... and who he might be?! In vain did Dr. Azouri try to remind him of his past life and of the flood disaster... for the events he had lived through before recovering his hearing and his speech had all been wiped from his head, and in their place had come emptiness, bewilderment, and the most intense astonishment... Who am I?? Who are my parents? Did I come thus, out of nothingness?! I want my family!!..
These questions remain without answers, and the days pass with Ahmad at Deir al-Salib, where the doctor, the nuns, and all the patients surround him with their tenderness and love, until he grows used to this life and applies himself to study with the help of Sister Jeannette, in the hospital's warm, merciful atmosphere, everyone regarding him with affection...
Ahmad visits Tripoli: During this period Dr. Azouri exerted his utmost efforts to help Ahmad within the scope of his psychological treatment, taking him two and three times to Tripoli, in stormy winter weather like the weather in which the flood had come, in the hope that his locked memory might open and the problem come to an end. On these journeys he was accompanied by Miss Renée Arman, who had become Ahmad's favorite friend and the foremost of those to whom he gave his trust — thanks to the extraordinary care she lavished upon him, care which, truth be told, no one fell short in granting him...
O father, O mother! On first reaching Tripoli, Ahmad denied ever having seen that city before. As the car advanced toward the bridge where the deluge had occurred, leaving behind it the many terrible ruins, his bewilderment grew, and little by little he began to believe what he had heard from them, as though
surrendering to them in a matter that was closed to him — the story must be true; these are truthful people; they love me. And before this moving sight he suddenly began calling his father and his mother and his brothers at the top of his voice, weeping and bursting into sobs and striking his head from the force of emotion, until he fainted, and nothing but an injection brought him back to consciousness!
His bewilderment at the Islamic Hospital: They led him gently to the Islamic Hospital, where he had stayed five weeks, and he denied knowing a single one of them — except those who had visited him in Beirut and whom he had come to know after the psychological treatment was carried out. They showed him his writing and his handwriting, and he acknowledged that the hand was his own, but he was greatly astonished that he could actually have stated and written things of which he was utterly ignorant... For how could he have written his name, his father's name, his date of birth, and the story of the flood — things that had so long perplexed him, about which he himself had asked, and which everyone had been powerless to answer!!..
Back to the beginning: It also appeared on investigation, confirming what Ahmad had written in his own hand, that he had in fact been rescued on the morrow of the flood, clinging at his last gasp to a lemon tree, and was carried straight to the Najjadeh house in Beirut; there those in charge returned him, that very day, to the College of Education and Instruction in Tripoli and from there to the Islamic Hospital, where the doctors determined that he was suffering from a violent psychological shock that had robbed him of his hearing and speech, and that he had to be treated