Their lives merged, and she cherished the smallest details of marriage to him. They brushed their teeth at the same sink; they ate and prayed together. They wrote their names in the sand like young lovers, holding hands all the while. He shaved her legs while she nibbled on his neck. She trimmed his hair and he washed hers. They took nothing for granted. Theirs was a raw intimacy, unabashed, the kind of love of which Fatima had spoken, that dove naked into itself, toward infinity’s reach, where the things of God live.
* * *
“What are you reading, habibti?” my husband asked.
I showed him the cover. “It’s a collection of American poems about roses.”
“The English are in love with the rose, too.”
“My grandmother Basima used to cross them. Here’s one by Robert Frost, the rhyming poet: ‘The rose is a rose, and was always a rose, but the theory now goes, that the apple’s a rose.’ ”
Majid replied, “What’s so special about a rose? Have you ever really inspected one? They have thorns. They aren’t particularly fragrant. They’re difficult to grow and are frail when you do get them to bloom. I’ll take a dandelion any day over a rose. Now that’s a flower. It’s humble, hearty, keeps coming back no matter what you do to it. And it always blooms a brilliant yellow smile.”
“Spoken like a true communist,” I teased him. “So what am I? A rose or a dandelion?”
“Agh! I should have seen that trap coming. You, my dear . . . are not a flower, something that blooms one day and wilts the next. You are the beat in my heart.”
“Great answer! Go on . . . ,” I teased.
“Do I get a prize for great answers?”
“Maybe.” I smiled.
“. . . the light in my eyes,” he said.
“You’re good. A prize is in order, sir.”
“Oh, madame, you are too kind.” Majid arched his brow mischievously. “I’ll collect my prize now.”
We found a small house near Shatila so that I could continue my teaching job in the camp and be closer to Fatima and the baby. But we kept our apartment in Beirut for nights when Majid worked late.
We were as happy as anyone can hope to be. Even as rumblings of war sounded from radio reports and coffeehouse conversations, Majid and I spoke of making children and growing old to the pitter-patter refrain of grandchildren.
When my menstrual period did not arrive on time, my elation was as vast and diaphanous as the morning sky and it was multiplied twofold that afternoon, when the UN clinic confirmed both my and Fatima’s pregnancies. We calculated that our babies had been conceived during the same week.
“The doctor thinks I’m due sometime in the middle of September,” Fatima said.
“Me too.”
“You think Yousef and Majid planned it?” She was almost serious.
“I wouldn’t put anything past those two.”
* * *
Majid’s thrill pulled him to his knees, face-to-face with my maimed belly, suddenly charmed with new life. The fine components of that perfect evening have long been pilfered from my memory by age. But I can invoke its purity, that sense of unmitigated contentment that leaves you without a right to ask for more.
He kissed my belly. “Hello in there!” he said, then looked disbelievingly at me. “We’re going to be parents, Amal!” He was excited as a schoolboy.
We talked for a long while, but I no longer recall the words, only the joy.
A month later, naked in our bed, Majid and I were making plans as expectant parents do. Our limbs laced and wrapped in each other, we spoke of our future and the future of our baby.
“If the situation becomes more heated, habibti, Yousef and I agree that you, Fatima, and the children should leave until things settle down,” Majid said solemnly, tightening his body around mine.
Israel had been striking Lebanon to provoke the PLO into retaliation. In July 1981, Israeli jets killed two hundred civilians in a single raid on Beirut, and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s defense minister at the time, issued a public vow to wipe out the resistance once and for all. The rhetoric was weighing heavily on Yousef and he was concerned for us should Israeli attacks intensify. Protecting the refugee camps was the priority. Toward that end, the PLO leadership ultimately struck a devil’s deal to keep the women and children safe.
But by April 1982, the United Nations had recorded 2,125 Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace and 652 violations of Lebanese territorial waters. Israel amassed twenty-five thousand soldiers on the border and continued to illegally deploy provocative maneuvers to the south of Lebanon. The PLO resisted retaliation and so did the Lebanese government. But Yousef correctly surmised that Israel would find a reason to invade, regardless of whether the PLO took action.
Yousef and Majid, even Fatima, convinced me it was for the best. I was to return to the United States, renew my green card, and begin immigration proceedings for my husband, Fatima, and Falasteen, who was by then nearly one year old. Yousef ’s fate was bound with the PLO, but he needed the peace of knowing his family would be safe.
“Amal, do not think you are abandoning us,” Yousef said, soberly reading my mind. “You very well could save their lives.”
* * *
My pupils conspired to prepare a farewell party on my last day at school. Ranging in age from ten to fifteen, in identical navy blue uniforms, they brought sweets and hot tea to class and moved their desks together to make a table. Two girls, Wafa and Dana, synchronized their tablas and the others linked arms to perform a dabke, pulling me in to dance with them. Before I left, each handed me a letter, a drawing, or a handmade going-away gift. One little girl, Mirvat, had stitched for me a small pillowcase with the words “I Love You” in English.
I promised that I would return, sure that I would, that my departure was a temporary and ultimately unnecessary precaution. That is what I said to my students before leaving them in Shatila.
Leaving Majid was infinitely harder.
“Please, Majid. Please, habibi, come with me,” I begged him.
“Habibti, you know I can’t just leave. Soon people are going to need doctors more than anything. I can’t turn my back on them.”
I wished then that my husband was a coward.
“If anything happens, I promise to live at the hospital. Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,” he reassured me, and pulled me close. “Before you know it we’ll be together, raising our baby and maybe expecting another. I love you eternally. What we have is made of forever.”
Love. Eternally. Forever.
Those were my husband’s words at the airport the day I left Beirut. I hung on to each one. Each syllable.
I promised my brother, as he asked me to promise, that my first order of business upon arrival in the United States would be to apply for asylum for Fatima, who stood behind him holding a well of tears in her eyes and little Falasteen in her arms. She and I comically maneuvered a side-winding embrace around our swollen bellies, already in the second trimester, and we kissed good-bye in that ribbon of humor. On cue, Falasteen pressed her open mouth against my cheek. “Ammah,” is how she uttered my name.
I kissed my husband once more and spent the next hours of travel trying to shoo away dark premonitions, circling like buzzards in my head.
THIRTY-ONE
Philadelphia, Again
1982
The earth is closing on us,
pushing us through the last passage,
and we tear off our limbs to pass through . . .
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
—Mahmoud Darweesh, “The Earth Is
Closing on Us,” written in the aftermath of
the PLO’s exit from Lebanon
NINE O’CLOCK, ON the morning of May 16, 1982, twenty-six hours after I left Beirut, I was in Philadelphia, with the cheerless void of not wanting to be there. It seemed a lifetime had passed since I had first come to that city, unsure of my step, fright
ened that an escalator would drag me under, jealous of Lisa Haddad’s hair.
Immediate tasks in hand, I called Dr. Mohammad Maher, Majid’s former mentor in England, settled now in a Philadelphia professorship.
“Amal, I have been expecting your call,” he said in a voice husky with age and cheer. “Please. Wait for me in the baggage claim. I’ll be there in less than thirty minutes.”
Unknown to me, Majid had been corresponding with Dr. Maher for months, making arrangements. Already I had employment. I was to prepare clinical trial reports for federal audits.
“The pay is good. I’ll just need to show them proof of your degree. If you decide for something else, I’ll help you.”
Majid was like a son to him. “So please, I would love it if you called me ammo, or just Mohammad if you’d rather. But none of this doktor business.”
Touched and without adequate words—“thank you” conveying a dearth of gratitude—in Arabic I said, “Allah keep you in Grace and a bounty of goodness upon you. This kindness of yours, doctor . . . Ammo Mohammad . . . is humbling.”
Life was quickened here. I had forgotten that. Within two weeks I had been trained on the job, visited an obstetrician, and gone five times to the immigration office. My husband was cleared to come to the United States, but a response for Fatima’s visa would require at least another month.
With rows of taut African braids and a kind smile, the INS lady said, “I know it’s a mess over there. I’ll do all I can to push it through.”
“Thank you.” May Allah smile on you with plenitude and love. The city seemed to have changed while I was away. West Philadelphia had become a miasma of drug-infused poverty. I saw despair now where authority had been in the faces of the heavy matriarchs, still passing the days in the shade of habit on their porches.
Old friends—Angela Haddad, Bo Bo, and Jimmy. “It’s nice to see you again, Amal.” An apartment in the northeastern part of the city, wanting to avoid becoming a burden on the Mahers.
While I waited to receive my family, biding time with hope and sporadic telephone conversations with my husband or Fatima, Ammo Mohammad and his wife, Elizabeth, fashioned themselves into a surrogate family. Ammo and Elizabeth had been married nearly fifty years. They had served as healers, he a physician and she a nurse, living on the small salaries of aid organizations in the plains of Africa after leaving Oxford. Now in the United States, with the grand compensation of North Americans, their lives had an air of restlessness, of want for children. Though their bodies carried their seventy-odd years well, age had eroded bones and carried off vigor, forcing them to slow their pace where they could recruit young medical skill to carry on the legacy of their work. Medicine Without Borders. A labor of love, but not enough. My arrival, with life swelling my abdomen, stirred the sediments of their advanced years. Latent and undeniable, the instinctive affinity of the old for babies and children delighted them now and they protected my swollen state.
Elizabeth saw to it that I ate well, consumed vitamins, and went to regular checkups. She sat nearby each day as I dialed and redialed numbers to Lebanon and the INS, there to share the disappointment of no answers or busy circuits.
Her fading blond hair, short above her neck, curved behind her ears in a way that dismissed vanity. She moved through days tall and erect, and her long, slightly arthritic fingers took little rest from her determination to save the world while simultaneously keeping her husband’s life in order. Her mornings started with coffee, which she had been giving up for the past forty years. She would fix Ammo’s red bow tie, as much a part of him as his hazel eyes. They’d part with a brown-bag lunch and a kiss, a rite that had not wavered in all their years of marriage.
Elizabeth had retired when Ammo took a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. Her time was spent in the service of their medical charity, her newfound indulgence of spa treatments, and water aerobics three times a week. My arrival changed her patterns and, as the delivery date approached, she invested her time in me and our mother-daughter assembly. I still spent more nights in Elizabeth’s guest room than in my apartment.
The accretion of days without word from Majid, Yousef, Fatima, or the INS amassed around me. A sum total of void and portents of the evening news. Then it all crumbled on June 6, 1982.
Israel attacked Lebanon.
I wasn’t paying attention to the small screen on the kitchen counter, but Ammo was, and I noted the change in his face before hearing the news. We had all been holding our breath for weeks and now what we had feared moved languidly, like a cloud, across Ammo’s expression, pulling the color from his face and causing it to droop.
I heard the shrill broadcast as I met his sad eyes.
“A massive invasion.” “Intense aerial bombardment.” “Ninety-thousand-strong invasion force moving up the coast of Lebanon.” The television headlined “Operation Peace in the Galilee.” Such was history’s name.
Operation; how words are violated. Majid performed operations to save lives.
For five interminable hours, I dialed and redialed, but Lebanon’s telephone lines convulsed with relatives trying to reach one another as Israel began systematic destruction of communications in the country. At last, the heavens parted. A ray of sweet mercy touched my world with the sound of my husband’s voice at the other end.
“Habibti. Oh God, your voice is all I need to get me through this hell,” he said, as if reading lines of my own heart. I had reached him at the hospital, war tearing all around it. I could hear the thunder of bombs muffled by distance, the blaring of ambulance sirens. The squeal of terror far away, where I wanted to be.
“Majid, please come now,” I begged.
“Habibti, the injured are pouring in by the hundreds and the hospital is already short of staff. They need me. So many doctors have abandoned them already. Please stay put and take care of our baby. I will come . . . I promise we will be together soon.”
Not knowing when we could speak again, we held on, filling every second with the love we vowed would never die. He promised to remain in the hospital.
“I dreamed you gave birth to a baby girl, little Sara, and we were picnicking on the shore of Sidon. Remember when we wrote our names in the sand?”
I could barely speak. “Of course I remember.” I sobbed, “I saw her, in the sonogram.”
“Her?”
“Yes. We’re having a girl. We’re going to have Sara.”
A long pause followed. “In the end, you’re all that matters. It is you that I owe, more than anyone here. Isn’t that right, darling? I love you more than you imagine. Perhaps I’ve done all I can here.”
Little Sara.
In a while it was time to hang up, a task that felt like turning a valve to expel the air from my lungs. But Majid was coming to me now and it would be a matter of only days, a week at most.
I turned to God with the immediacy of every woman’s faithful vow. Keep my family safe through this and I’ll live to deserve your mercy. I prayed and prayed. As Dalia had prayed in another time and another place. In another war.
Their telephone lines remained severed.
Each day, I cleared the cobwebs of my nights’ dark premonitions and shuffled through my days, my mind always tuned to the news. I dialed and redialed, infected with dread. Ariel Sharon marched his military into Lebanon—known as “the Oasis of the Middle East” for its splendor—and laid siege to Beirut for two grueling months, during which Israel deprived its people of water, electricity, and medical care.
My heart became metallic, leaded with the ink of newspapers and the tinny tone of broadcasters. In the office lounge, a television reporter: “Humanitarian organizations are warning of . . .” I couldn’t listen.
“Management needs to do something about the food in this place,” one of my co-workers said. Others went on about the dire parking situation: “It’s too damn far, especially when it’s raining.”
I had lost contact with Majid and felt as if I would also lose contact
with life itself.
Bombs and more bodies to receive them. I prayed and called the Red Cross. Called the INS. Please. They were doing the best they could, and no, I couldn’t go there. All flights had been suspended. How will my family get here? The BBC showed high-rise buildings crumble like dried cracked clay, whoever had been inside also broken.
“Israel is striking back against the PLO, a terrorist organization whose aim is to slaughter Jews like they did the Munich athletes.” Israel’s stated aim was self-defense. To dislodge the PLO, a six-thousand-member resistance.
By August, the results were 17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless, and 100,000 without shelter. Prostrate, Lebanon lay devastated and raped, with no infrastructure for food or water. Israel claimed it had been forced to invade for peace. “We are here for peace. This is a peacekeeping mission.”
Decades later, still searching for the fate that forgot me, I sifted through the accounts of peace. In his epic memoir, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, British correspondent Robert Fisk described phosphorous Israeli shells:
Dr. Shammaa’s story was a dreadful one and her voice broke as she told it. “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames,” she said. “When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.” Next morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.
Ronald Reagan dispatched Philip Habib, who brokered a cease-fire deal in which the PLO evacuated Lebanon. Yousef had to leave or die. He left because it was the only way to keep Fatima and the babies safe. So they said.
The PLO withdrew from Lebanon only after an explicit guarantee from U.S. envoy Philip Habib and Alexander Haig that the United States of America, with the authority and promise of its president, Ronald Reagan, would ensure the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the refugee camps. Philip Habib personally signed the document.
Mornings in Jenin Page 20