Thus the PLO was exiled to Tunisia carrying the written promise of the United States. The fate of those I loved lay in the folds of that Ronald Reagan promise.
THIRTY-TWO
A Story of Forever, Forever Untold
1982
ON SEPTEMBER 10, I awoke in a terrible fright, trying to discriminate night from nightmare. The clock read 3:02 A.M. as the telephone rang in the corner of my mind.
It was Yousef.
He had arrived at his place of exile with the PLO. Tunis was their destination at the end of an agonizing departure from Lebanon, whereby Yousef and his comrades had been forced to leave their wives, children, and parents behind. These sacrifices were the small parts of Yasser Arafat’s ragtag deals on behalf of his people.
Now Yousef suffered the surreal and oppressive responsibility of delivering news he wished he did not have to utter to his only sister.
Majid had kept his promise to me, living in the shelter of his hospital, which was clearly marked on every side and on its roof with the universal symbol of medicine, a red cross. But at the urging of his co-workers, he had returned to our apartment for a respite from the constant blare of sirens. He had slept deeply and soundly in our bed, the place where we once had found deliverance in love and where we had conceived our child; and when he had returned to his duties, he had found an inferno where the hospital had been. My brother was there, searching for Majid, and together they had helped rescue as many people as they could.
“Only by the Grace of Allah were you spared, brother,” Yousef had said, relieved to see Majid alive.
Yousef did not know what surged through my husband then, only that it filled him with determination enough to spend the next twenty-six hours tilling the destruction in that garden of dismembered corpses and perished souls. Carnal ash materialized in thin air and thickened, clotting their windpipes as they trudged through puddles of blood toward screams for help. They pulled out Majid’s patients, dead under the rubble. His colleagues who had urged him to go home and get some rest were found in crimson pieces.
Exhaustion dulled their senses and weighted down their bodies until Yousef and Majid finally left, spent.
They were dragging themselves on borrowed strength when they came upon a dead woman whose stiff body clutched the body of her child, a small girl with a ribbon in her hair—whose body in turn was gripping her mother. They had seen worse, but the sight of that mother and her child summoned a small reserve of energy in them both, enough for them to throw their arms around one another. And sob.
Majid turned to Yousef and asked, “Have you been able to reach Amal?” Yousef had not. “Amal is having a little girl. I’m going to be a father, brother,” Majid said calmly, as if everything around his words was paralyzed. “I’m going back to London in the morning, and from there I will join Amal or she will come to England. Look at what these pigs do. I can’t risk making a widow of Amal and an orphan of my Sara.”
“Allah be with you, brother.” Yousef embraced his comrade again and they parted in silence, Majid heading to our apartment on the fifth floor of al-Tamaria apartment building, and Yousef returning to the refugee camp of Shatila.
Five hours later, an Israeli bomb leveled the al-Tamaria, and another leveled the adjacent building.
“I looked everywhere, Amal. But I’m sure he was inside. No one survived it,” my brother sobbed through the telephone, his speech torn and mangled by love and by the general impotence of perpetual victims.
“I’m sorry, Amal.” My brother was somber, his voice so terribly heavy in my ears. So full of sadness. “I should have insisted he come with me. I’ve been trying to reach you since then but I couldn’t get through until we reached Tunis . . .”
I listened . . . the heavy syllables pounding my sense of what was real. Rocking on the floor in my own two arms, I pressed the telephone receiver to my ear. I was not filled with grief, anger, or even love. Nothing came over me. But everything rushed out. Yousef ’s words now traveled through me like a stream, pulling life from the cells of my body and gathering it beneath me. Memories of rain beating on the windshield of Majid’s Fiat; the calluses on his feet when they rubbed against my bare legs; the hair on his chest when I lay my head there; the lines around his mouth when he laughed; the arch in his brow that was a smile of its own; the small wrinkles beneath his ears; the smooth skin on his back when he sat up in bed; his touch, his kiss, his integrity, his love . . .
All of it pooled on the floor around me like a tenebrous underbelly. Until at last, I sat captive in a vacuum of thought, numb and rocking on the floor, still holding the receiver as my brother’s voice, with its unbearable sadness, faded in that emptiness.
Majid. My love.
The dreams he and I had dreamed circled around this new reality. The children we would have, the places we would go, the home we would build, the laughter we’d share and the songs we’d sing, the life we’d live, the love . . . oh the love we would love, danced like ring-around-the-rosy, around the reality that Majid was dead. Killed. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
I confronted the weather outside my apartment, walking in a daze along the leaf-strewn sidewalk. A fiery display of fall’s orange, green, yellow, and red lined both sides of my Philadelphia street. An old woman walking her dog nodded hello. I passed young lovers on a park bench as I continued through the cool wind, entranced and numbed to fate, until I reached Elizabeth’s door, ten miles later. Startled from his sleep, Mohammad cracked the door suspiciously, then opened it wide for my enormous body.
“They killed Majid,” I said, matter-of-fact.
I love you eternally. What we have is made of forever.
Majid. My forever story of love, forever untold.
Love. Eternally. Forever.
My husband’s words at the airport the day I had left Beirut.
They remain in my mind, like ashes in an urn. The glory of love, like life, quite simply reduced to dust.
“Oh dear God!” Mohammad helped me inside. Just then, I felt the intimate kick of the baby inside me, and I noticed that the sun had also risen.
THIRTY-THREE
Pity the Nation
1982
THAT WEEK IN SEPTEMBER, starting with Yousef ’s telephone call, is the mantelpiece of my life. It is my center of gravity. It is the point on which all of my life’s turning points hinge at once. It is the deafening crescendo of a two-thousand-year-old lineage. It is the seat of a demonic God.
On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli
defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.”
What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been massacres before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident—how easily we used the word “incident” in Lebanon—that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.
Jenkins and I were so overwhelmed by what we found in Shatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. But there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies—blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition—tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whisky.
Did I know those women, or those babies? How many of the children had been my students? For forty-eight hours, Israeli soldiers, sodas and chips handy, watched that malignant rush. How does an Israeli soldier, a Jewish man, watch a refugee camp being transformed into an abattoir? Fatima. Falasteen.
Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.
In the next passage, I found the fate of Fatima and her friends— those friends who had been at her side the day she gave birth to Falasteen. The women who had kissed me because Fatima had told them so much about me. The women who had gossiped about me when I fell in love with Majid, and who had sung, danced, and cried at my wedding.
On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
An Associated Press photographer pressed his finger and sent the scarlet darkness of that scene around the world. I saw the photo in the Arab press and first recognized the woman’s pale blue dress. Fatima’s favorite dishdashe, worn thin in nearly two decades of use. The curly-haired little girl behind her was my niece. Falasteen.
Yousef called me, screaming. Screaming.
Even through the telephone wires, there was enough agony in his voice to break the sky. I can still hear it shatter the wind when I walk.
“How much must we endure and how much must we give?” he wailed like a child. “Fatima! My darling, Fatima! Did you see what they did?” he asked, screamed, and he answered himself, “They ripped her belly, Amal!”
I had no words.
“They ripped my Fatima’s belly with a knife! . . . They killed my babies!” He screamed more. “They killed my babies, Amal. Oh God! Oh God . . .”
His sobs shook the ground beneath my feet and I thought the force of his grief would tear the sun to pieces. He hurled objects within his reach and I stood in Pennsylvania, mesmerized by the sound of breaking glass at the other end of the world. He cried with no measure of control, gripped in a seizure of pain. Tetanus. Thunder.
He cursed Israel, the Americans, Ronald Reagan, Arafat, and the world, sparing no leader and no god or devil. “Damn them to hell. Damn them to this hell they made for us.”
At the base of his voice I heard the silent howl of wrath burgeoning in him, the raw substance of despair and rage concentrating into resolve. He vowed vengeance, swore to cut their throats like pigs. He beat his head against the wall with no mercy for himself, still holding the telephone to his ear, still cursing. Still crying—the cries of a soul dying.
That frenzy of pain dismantled him. Yousef was irreparably undone. They killed my sweet brother in absentia when they murdered Fatima. And his heart now beat with the force of his rage.
“THEY SLAUGHTERED MY WIFE AND MY CHILDREN LIKE LAMBS!”
The line went dead. And I stood, besieged by the trickery of destiny. By stolen futures and the unbearable sorrow of extinguished love.
Again, I walked outside, freshly fallen leaves crackling under the weight of my steps. I overpowered my tears with a tight clench of my jaw. I was afraid to cry, lest I feel the storm inside my brother.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside. Oh, Dalia, Mother! I understand!
I removed my shoes, took off my socks and sweater.
The better to freeze my heart.
And I imagined myself screaming at Philadelphians, who went about their daily American lives.
Ten blocks later, I collapsed at Rittenhouse Square and, I was told, did indeed grab a woman, begging her to tell me what she found so funny in the world that she could laugh at that moment, with her friend, on a bench in the park?
My water broke and an ambulance carried my wet, pregnant, and barefoot body away from the crowd of onlookers, who stared in pity at the deranged little woman about to give birth.
My obstetrician, who was called by the hospital at the behest of the medics, alerted Mohammad, who immediately summoned Elizabeth. The two of them heard the news and needed only one look at my face to know that Fatima and Falasteen had not survived. But I looked away from their eyes, afraid their sorrow might free the tears I labored to contain.
For ten hours, my body convulsed with contractions. I wanted the labor to go on until eternity. My eyes turned to glass, my heart to ice, and no breath left my body without first being stripped of its sound. I held it all in, gripped it with my fingernails. Imprisoned it all in an inexpressible clench of my jaws.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside.
I wanted the pain to last longer, to become more intense, to kill me, too. The need to hurt was far greater than the need to push and I saw the confusion, even fright—or terror—of the nurses who came in one after the other “to check on me.”
The aging elegance of Elizabeth’s face was damp with compassion and a discernible desire to lift me out of my own fate. But in her wisdom, she said nothing, merely holding my hand without once letting go, as I gazed into space clinching my jaw tight on its trembling hinges, lamenting the few tears that escaped in a silent journey from my eyes.
At last, my baby’s instinct for life conquered me and I let go. I pushed, drenching the cloth beneath me with the pulp of childbirth and tears, freed at last.
The head began to emerge, tearing my flesh, and I thought of Fatima’s belly ripping at a murderer’s blade. I yelled her name like a battle cry—“Fatima!”—pushing harder and harder to rip my body as hers had been ripped. I wanted to bleed for the penance and torment of purgatory. Why should I live while Fatima lay rotting in an unmarked mass grave? Why should my baby be born while hers was torn from
her womb? I pushed with a heart that loved and longed for Majid. I pushed again, with the determined force of self-punishment, of contrition and apology for living.
At last, my child lay wrapped in my arms, like a flower bud. I settled my being in the rhythm of her jaw suckling at my breast, while she spooned life over my hardened heart, like moss cushioning a stone. But I kept my distance, going only through the mechanics of caring for a newborn. This fragile infant had forced upon me the will to live, and I resented her for that, for all I really wanted then was to die.
THIRTY-FOUR
Helpless
1982–1983
But you do not see, nor do you hear, and it is well.
The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,
And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it.
And you shall see.
And you shall hear.
Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.
For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things,
And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.
—Khalil Gibran, “The Farewell”
I EMBARKED ON MOTHERHOOD WITHOUT Majid and with only a thread of will. Elizabeth and Mohammad were there, steady and compassionate. I moved in with them, at their insistence. In many ways, they saved us, Sara and me.
I watched my child with curiosity, nourished her body for the sake of duty. I held my emotions in a tight fist and hard jaw. But Sara’s scent was irresistible, an intoxicating, wordless promise that weakened me. So, at times, I sneaked over my heart’s fortress to inhale her baby smell into the deep parts of myself that still craved love. And I would lose myself in the rhythm of her suckling jaw, the warmth of her helplessness, the insistence of her endless needs.
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