The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  “There are ruins in our village too!”

  I took her to the tower to see for herself.

  She didn’t wonder at it. She said, “We have more and better ruins. Marble pillars as white as milk and known for their strange color, like smoke. And if you dig in the sand you’ll find tiled floors and pictures, as if the inside of the earth were built and paved and decorated with pictures.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Once a young man from our town dug and found a colored drawing of a swan, made of small stones stuck together. After that he said to the young men, ‘Dig more,’ and they found pavings with pictures of pelicans and ducks and flowers and tree leaves, in colors. One of the old men of the town said that these are ruins from the time of Byzantium and maybe before, and no one knew the meaning of ‘the time of Byzantium.’ The old man told them that there must be important finds among them, and if the Jews knew about them they would take the village. So no one saw anything and no one knew—they kept it quiet.”

  “In our village too, there’s a good swimmer who said he dove into the sea and found a big ship, not one of the new ships that broke on the coast but an old ship, with strange colored things in it. He didn’t tell anyone but my brother and my brother told me, and I haven’t told anyone but you. Maybe that’s the reason they didn’t come to our village.”

  “By God we didn’t tell anyone and we didn’t inform them, but they came into the town and occupied it.”

  She looked as if she was about to cry. I said, “When you return safely I’ll come and visit you there.” Then I amended, “If Yahya allows me to.”

  “Who is Yahya?”

  I smiled. “The groom, from Ain Ghazal. His father and uncles came and asked for me four months ago, and they recited the Fatiha with my father.”

  “When is the wedding?”

  “My father said, ‘Let her reach fourteen before we write the contract.’ Yahya is studying in Egypt, in Cairo, have you heard of Cairo?”

  I said it proudly, emphasizing the word “Cairo” by repeating it and pronouncing it on a higher tone that the rest of the words, anticipating that my friend would be impressed.

  She didn’t look impressed. She said, “I won’t get married until after we go back home. How could the proposal happen … and where would we receive all the important family members, when we are like this, without a home?”

  The proverb of my mother’s was right: February is fickle and stubborn, it huffs and puffs and has the smell of summer.

  And what a summer!

  4

  How?

  My father, like the rest of the men of the village, listened to the radio in the madafa. I never saw this apparatus as I was not allowed into the madafa except as a little girl, and the radio had not yet arrived then. But I would hear my father saying to my mother, “I heard such-and-such on the Jerusalem broadcast, Cairo radio announced such-and-such.” Or he would comment on what my brothers told him, saying, “It’s strange that they didn’t announce that on the radio.”

  On their next visit after the episode of the slap, at my father’s request, my brothers brought with them two big cardboard boxes. He opened the first and took out a large wooden apparatus and placed it in the front part of the house, near the entrance. Then he opened the second and took out a black box, which he said was the battery; the radio doesn’t work without it. He connected it to the apparatus and then turned a button on it and a sound came out of it. He sighed in satisfaction and said, “Now I can listen to the news every morning in peace.”

  The apparatus seemed exciting because of its large size and because of the noises that emerged from it: a strange crackling and then the clear voice of someone speaking, as if he were with us in the house. At first my mother was confused, and then she adjusted her scarf on her head, as if it were likely that the voice of the strange man which had suddenly entered the house meant that he was present in it, and could see her. After that came a woman’s voice, singing. My father cut her off with a movement of his fingers, turning a button on the apparatus, and she was followed by another man, speaking.

  I said to my father, “Can we hear songs on the radio?”

  “Yes, but we didn’t buy it to listen to songs, we bought it to know what’s happening in the country!”

  It didn’t occur to me for a moment that what my father said was a choice of what he would hear. I didn’t connect it with his will or preference but rather with the function of the apparatus. Songs, like dabka circles and the call and response of ataba and ooof songs, were for weddings and special occasions; the radio was like the madafa in those days, reserved for learning of events and news as they happened. With the large wooden apparatus and the men’s voices (it was not a single voice that was emitted from it, but multiple voices that could be distinguished easily), new expressions entered the house. Some were clear and familiar: the Arab kings and presidents, the Zionist gangs, Jaffa/Tel Aviv; some were obscure, as when the speaker referred to the Supreme Arab Authority or the Liberation Army or said “Hagana” or “Irgun,” expressions which would require an explanation from my father. My mother and I would attend to his words, and then when the explanation went on my mother would get up and turn to her work, since she was not following the thread or had become lost in the details, or because she was bored by the talk. New names were to enter the house which would be repeated afterward by the townspeople, who fastened on some and feared them or who were anxious about others, but who in either case were preoccupied by what these names said and did. It was certain that there was a relationship between them and what was happening to us, even though it was obscure for me at the time.

  The big wooden apparatus occupied a prominent position in the house, attracting the attention of visitors. The voices that emanated from it as long as my father was in the house were just as prominent, but my mother didn’t pay much attention to them. Perhaps those voices weighed on her, with their words that she always said she didn’t understand. Did she really not understand them, or was she averting additional fears that she had no power to bear? She would sit with her sister, exchanging complaints and cares. She would say to my aunt, “I said to him, ‘Why should the boys stay in Haifa?’ He disapproved and said, ‘Do you want them to sit at home with you?’ I said, ‘They can work the land, or supervise the fishing boats, we have not one but five boats, they can keep track of them with the captains of the boats.’ He scolded me, ‘Did I send them to school to till the earth or sell fish?’ And what’s wrong with tilling the earth? What’s wrong with selling fish?” My aunt would soothe her, and the soothing would give her an opening to set out her own complaints: “Thank God for Abu Sadiq, God protect him and bless him, he fills up the house for us. Abu Amin is like a bird, you don’t know when he’ll alight and when he’ll up and fly away. In ‘36 we said it’s a revolt and it has its demands, and we’re afraid of the English. But afterward? He said jihad, is it endless jihad? By God I’m tired, Zeinab, Sister, I’m tired. A day at home and a thousand away. And he says that Amin has to study. Does he have to study at the ends of the earth, and the little boy and I have to stay alone? He’s a strange one, Abu Amin! The village is here, our Lord is kind and blesses us, why should he drag himself all over the place?” They exchange roles, Zeinab complains and Halima calms her, then Halima complains and leaves it to her sister to provide relief. The talk continues: “Zeinab, Sister … , Halima, Sister… .”

  Did my mother and my aunt ever imagine, as they spent their evenings together every day, that what had happened to the people of Qisarya could happen to them? Judging by myself and by what they said every day, I think that Qisarya probably seemed far away, another town that we had never seen where a disaster had befallen the inhabitants, so we had to sympathize with them and help them. The reality was that the distance between us and that other town was no more than half the distance between us and Haifa. Twelve kilometers, ten minutes by car. The men and maybe some of the women must have been aware of this fact. I can’t r
emember, for example, when I learned that the men were organizing themselves to confront the danger, or that they were buying weapons or that they had formed a committee to organize guards for the village. But I remember that we girls began to watch the men as they were training with target practice on the roofs. They would put an orange on a box or a pile and aim at it. I heard my father say something, I don’t know in what context or why, I don’t remember. He said, “Weapons come to them from everywhere, and we go barefoot to get rifles, sometimes from Sidon and sometimes from Damascus and sometimes from al-Mansura. Old rifles, rifles that don’t even work unless luck is with us!”

  But ‘fickle February,’ for all it brought with it, was gentle and kind compared to the months that followed. When the almond trees flowered the whole village knew that war was breaking out here and there, and that weapons were now as needed as a drink of water, necessary to stay alive. Talk about buying arms had begun to be common even among the women of the village. The names of Zionist gangs and their leaders, names that were strange and hard to pronounce, started to circulate among them: they knew who Hagana was, and Stern, and Etzel, and Ben-Gurion. Then the news about Muhammad al-Huneiti, commander of the Haifa militia, reached the town: he and his companions had fallen into an ambush as they were returning from Lebanon with two truckloads of weapons, and two weeks later Haifa fell. None of us, girls or boys, noticed that the almonds had turned green on the trees.

  It was at night when we heard a knock on the door. My mother sprang up in alarm, for who would come at such a late hour except to deliver bad news? She rushed to the door and I followed her, and there were my two brothers, covered in dust, their hair matted. They had come from Haifa on foot, through the woods and by winding mountain paths. My father did not say, “Let’s be off to the madafa to give the men the news of Haifa.” The news had reached them two days before, two days in which the house had nearly caught fire from the burning feelings of everyone in it. My mother ceaselessly lamented her boys, who had not appeared since the fall of the city, saying that her heart told her that she would not see them again. Her fears would spread to me and I would leave my own fears aside and chide her, repeating to her that it was a bad omen and she was tempting providence; but unlike the previous time she did not listen to my words and was incapable of making any agreements with the Lord of the universe who ordered all things. She continued to weep, in anticipation. My father seemed like a minefield, with one mine after another exploding in my mother’s face or in mine, because scheduling the guard shifts and the training for the young men who had not yet received it was not enough of an outlet for his anxiety over the fate of his boys and the fate of the country.

  How had Haifa fallen? The question would be repeated over the length and breadth of the country. Had the British handed it over to the Jews? How? What had happened to the garrison? What had happened to bring the people out to the port collectively, to leave the city? Now I can’t pluck apart the threads to know what I heard from my father or from my brothers after their return, or what came to me from the talk the girls had heard from their fathers and shared among themselves, or what my uncle told me later in Sidon, or what I gathered in later years of my life. But I know that the fall of the district capital was like a bolt of lightning in the village, a bolt that strikes the earth and the sky and causes a convulsion that encompasses everyone, as if they are waiting to see if the sky would fall on the earth and cleave it in two, or if the disaster would pass and the universe would remain as it was.

  Haifa fell, and two weeks later Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was martyred. The whole village, not just the madafa, seemed to be a house open for mourning. It was an extended mourning, as Abd al-Qadir’s funeral—which I would not imagine or see in pictures until years later—would be held in Jerusalem after the mourners had heard the details of the massacre at Deir Yassin. Qastal fell and Abd al-Qadir was martyred defending it, and at dawn of the following day the attackers moved on neighboring Deir Yasin and slaughtered any of the residents they could. Three days later Safad fell, and after three more days, Jaffa. And three days after the fall of Jaffa, Acre fell. What happened in Safad? Its residents were twice our number and the people in our village said that it was inaccessible, located on four hills, and that the people were resolute—what happened that Safad fell in one night? Why did the garrison withdraw from it? And the Jordanian task force and the Syrian detachment, why did they withdraw? Where did the Liberation Army go? What dislodged the people from their houses? And could Acre possibly fall? How could Acre fall when it was Acre? These were not my questions, because I was only a girl of thirteen hearing what was repeated in a village that seemed like a time bomb, where the people were aware of the ticking that brought them closer to the explosion. But would it explode among us or among them? The young men were sure that it would explode among them. They said, “We have prepared ourselves and the rest is up to God.” They said that the Arab armies would enter the battle, that the Arabs would not let Palestine be lost. My father repeated what they said although he seemed less impulsive, or more precisely he seemed both impulsive and restrained by apprehensions which appeared only in his explosions. Since my brothers’ arrival from Haifa my father had included them in the guard duty shifts. Neither of them was trained in carrying arms; they trained for three days and then took shifts like the rest of the young men, one of them stationed at the school behind the railway east of the village, and the other toward the jail on the south side near the beach.

  It’s hard for me now to convey the feelings of the townspeople, perhaps because then I was living in a state that my years did not permit me to comprehend. Perhaps I wondered like everyone else, when would our turn come? Perhaps like them I was clutching at straws, like the young men repeating that Ain Ghazal and Ijzim and Jabaa that were smaller than Safad and Jaffa and Acre, and that were guarded only by their inhabitants, had endured and turned away aggression time after time, and that like them we would turn away any attempt to capture our village. Will we be able to? I cut off the question and go to the sea. I crouch on the beach, watching the scene with my eyes.

  The rocky islands were firmly anchored in place, and I was accustomed to the clamor of the waves and the movement of the sea foam and the spray. The sky would be clouds upon clouds, piled like thick blankets of dark blue or grays slipping into black, lightened suddenly by a spot of silver. The sea beneath would resemble the sky, divided between a deep, blackish blue and clearings of white. The waves would rise to the sky as if they were calling to it, speaking to it, or protesting that they were there; they would scud before it in a broad blessing of pure silver, dissolving gradually and mixing with a light gray blue that caressed the shore.

  Or the sun would be setting, hanging in the rounded shape of an orange, as if when it descended a little it would not set in the west but rather would settle full and safe on one of the islands. The sky behind it had a strange color, descending gradually, easily, from a clear red to dark orange to an ambiguous color, neither brown nor the color of lead, which stealthily met the sea behind the islands. It left it for the sun to color the water in front of it, making it whatever color it pleased, making it a wondrous mirror, pink here and silver there, and making lines and clear spaces of leaden gray, the water rolling peacefully between the one and the other.

  I did not think about what had been. I did not think about what was to come. Even the son of Ain Ghazal seemed far away, farther than the disc of the sun that was suspended before me.

  5

  My Uncle and My Father

  My uncle announced that he was leaving. The house blazed.

  They were close, more devoted than was usual even in a village where brothers were close to each other, close in where they lived and worked and in how they managed their lives. When they married they contracted for their brides on the same day and held the wedding on the same night, my father taking Zeinab and my uncle, two years younger, taking her sister Halima. My mother would say, “They’re like two peas in
a pod.” Neither would do anything unless the other did it too. Even when they joined the rebels in 1936 they came and went together, and patrolled the village together. The day the British searched the house looking for weapons, and poured the oil in the gas and the gas on the olives and the flour and the lentils, they were looking for both of them. They asked for them by name and said they had information that they were hiding weapons. They had hidden the arms in the boat and the boat had been put to sea. My mother laughs, though it was not funny then, when the British soldiers invaded the house looking for the arms, and everyone knew the consequences: the price of a single rifle was a death sentence. My God! But she recalls the event and laughs, “We had hidden the rifles in the boat and the boat was put to sea.” Then she sighs, “After that God guided your father and he looked after the farming and stayed in town. But your uncle was one day in town and ten days traveling, a day in Haifa and a day in Sidon and a day in Beirut. Poor Halima, he had no useful work, not even a whiff.”

  Did I love my uncle because he spoiled me? He would announce that I was dearer to his heart than the four boys, his two and his brother’s two. He would repeat, “Our Lord has been gracious to us and given us this girl, praise to the one who fashioned her.” He insisted that I go to school, and he surprised my father by wanting me to go to the teacher’s college in Jerusalem after I completed the sixth grade, the last one in the town school. At the time there was a quarrel between him and my father, but the earthquake was deferred; it did not occur until that night when my uncle announced that he was leaving.

  “Shame on you, you’re leaving when the village is threatened and the young men are guarding it and preparing their weapons.”