The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  “Two years before the beginning of the First World War your grandfather traveled to the hajj pilgrimage by train. My mother bade him farewell at the door of the house, and my uncles, God have mercy on them all, accompanied him to Haifa. Your uncle Abu Amin was four, and he clung to my father and started to cry. My uncles took pity on him and decided to take him with them. I looked up at them. I didn’t cry, I didn’t say a thing, I just looked up. They said, ‘Come with us, boy.’

  “We took a horse-drawn carriage to Haifa. We bade my father farewell at the Haifa East station, the station for the Hijaz line. I began to look everywhere, dazzled by what I saw—the station building, the gate, the monument that was higher than anything I had ever seen before, the train. It was colored; I remember that one of the cars in it was painted green … and another part was painted red, and even its black was shiny as if it were a color too. And whenever the train whistle sounded I started as if I were frightened, and then I would find myself laughing. I laughed aloud.

  “My father bought us lukoum before he boarded the train. When he boarded I saw him through the window and we began to wave at him with our hands. Then the train started to move and I was moving my eyes between my father’s face behind the glass and the wheels that were turning slowly, then faster. That day was the most joyful day of my life. It’s etched into my memory in its smallest detail, even the pliable feel of the lukoum between my fingers and the taste of the almonds and the powdered sugar in my mouth, I remember it. On the way back your uncle slept, he was deeply asleep, sitting next to two of my uncles in the back seat of the carriage, but my uncle who was driving the carriage let me sit next to him in the front, so I saw the whole horse and I could almost touch his tail, if I leaned forward a little. But my uncle had his arm around my waist so I wouldn’t be hurt by any sudden movement of the carriage or the horse. It was the end of autumn; the sky was a little cloudy, maybe it had rained during the previous days. The trees were dense and colorful, green and red and brown, and the earth was also colored, red sometimes and sometimes black, and sometimes the color of coffee before it’s roasted. The hills extended on our left, cloudy and milky, in waves as if they weren’t hills. The clouds above them were amazing, at times looking like white lambs with thick wool and at times like a sea of shells. I even liked the sting of the cold that day. I was sitting next to my uncle, turning my eyes from the sky to the earth, from the horse to the hills, from the tree that we were passing to the tree we were approaching. The road seemed calm like a dream, disrupted only by the neighing of the horse or the sound of his hooves on the road.”

  He suddenly stopped. He said, “Good night, Ruqayya. Tomorrow is another day.”

  It seems I didn’t sleep long as I awoke before my mother and found my father sitting next to the radio. I said good morning. He looked up at me and said, “Your uncle is an ass, Ruqayya!” The expression surprised me, threw me into confusion even. I didn’t understand until two or three days later, when it seemed clear that there was good news from the battles raging in many places. I took my father’s words as a comment on my uncle’s decision to leave, which now seemed uncalled for. The Syrians had taken possession of Samakh and the Jews had pulled out after suffering heavy losses. The two neighboring colonies had fallen. It was said that the Egyptian army was moving toward Tel Aviv, and that the Iraqi forces were launching fierce attacks on a large colony named Gesher, with armored cars and airplanes. The Atarot colony on the Jerusalem–Ramallah road fell, and the guerrilla fighters succeeded in turning back the attempted invasion of the old city of Jerusalem.

  On the night of Wednesday to Thursday I dreamed that I was visiting Medina The Blessed. When I told the dream to my mother, as she was absorbed in her usual Thursday bread baking, her face lit up and she assured me that it was a vision and not a dream. “The bastards will be defeated and the whole country will become like blessed Medina!”

  7

  When They Occupied the Village

  I didn’t hear the noises; I was sleeping. When my mother woke me up, I heard them and asked her about them. She said, “Wake up Wisal and Abed. Put out fodder for the livestock that will last two or three weeks, and a lot of water. Scatter seed for the chickens, a lot. And the horse, don’t forget the horse. Lift the oil cans off the ground so the moisture doesn’t get to them, and put a cushion between the wall and each can. Dress in three layers, and Wisal also, and the boy.” I asked, “Where are my father and brothers?” She did not answer the question. She was absorbed in gathering things in a hurry. Wisal’s mother was doing the same. Then we found ourselves standing in front of the house, and I asked again. She said that they were on guard duty and would catch up with us when things became clear. I asked her what she meant by “when things became clear,” but she didn’t answer. It was strange—my mother who wailed in anxiety over her boys in Haifa seemed like another woman, giving orders, managing the affairs of her small flock with resolution and speed, even though I didn’t understand the logic of this management. She gave me a four-liter measure of white cheese to carry and took a can of oil, and Wisal’s mother took a can of olives. I did not understand, so I asked, “All this cheese and all this oil and olives, what will we do with them?” She did not answer.

  We left the house. My mother closed the gate and locked it with the large key. It was strange for me, as I had never seen the door of our house locked ever, nor had I seen the key; it was of iron, large, and my mother turned it in the lock seven times. She put it in her bosom. Suddenly my mother noticed that I was carrying the little goat kid whose mother had died, and she asked, “Why are you carrying that goat?” I said, “I’ll take her with me.” She did not comment. She announced, “We’ll go to the house of my uncle, Abu Jamil.” We walked toward his house, my mother and Wisal’s ahead of us, each carrying a can in one hand and a bundle in the other, with me, Wisal, and Abed behind them. Wisal was holding her brother’s hand in one of hers and in the other carried a square iron box with the papers they had brought with them from Qisarya; I was carrying the goat in one hand and the cheese container in the other. We arrived at Abu Jamil’s house. The sound of explosions and the rattle of bullets came to us from the east in the direction of the school, from the direction of the tower in the north, and from the direction of the jail in the south. Umm Jamil insisted that we eat breakfast; she repeated that it would be a long day and that we didn’t know what would happen. She gave each of us a flat round loaf and said “Eat!” None of us said that we weren’t hungry or that it was the middle of the night and not time for breakfast or lunch; rather we ate, complying with her order, which was firm and decisive. The shelling increased. Abu Jamil said that it was coming from the west. “It seems that they are striking from the sea also.” He made his ablutions and began to pray. We heard the cocks crowing, then the dawn chirping of the birds; then we heard footsteps and three armed men burst into the house and drove us to the headman’s house. They were threatening us with their rifle butts and firing over our heads. On the way we saw the blind Hasan Abd al-Al and his wife Azza al-Hajj al-Hindi lying near their house surrounded by a pool of blood, then we saw the body of another person I didn’t know. Abed began to cry aloud. I let go of the goat and picked him up; he wrapped his legs around my waist and put his arms around my neck. I couldn’t see his face to know if he was still crying. The goat kept walking behind me.

  They drove us to the beach and divided us into two groups, the men on one side and the women and children and some old men on the other. It was the first time I saw female soldiers: women wearing a military uniform and bearing arms. They spoke to us in Arabic and began to search us, one after the other, taking any money or jewelry they found on us and putting it in a helmet. Every time the helmet was filled they emptied it onto a large blanket stretched out on the sand. The woman soldier didn’t notice the goat but she noticed the rings in my ears as she was searching me. She yanked them out, and blood flowed from my ears. I wiped them with the edge of my dress. The soldier moved on to
search my mother and Wisal and Abed and his mother. They took the cans of oil and olives and the half measure of cheese. My mother was stripped of her ring and her earrings and the chain she wore around her neck. We were standing close together. I looked at my mother’s face and saw her lips moving slightly, continuously, and I didn’t know if she was mumbling prayers or repeating verses from the Quran or trembling. I whispered in Wisal’s ear, “Was this the way they took over your town?” She said, “No, they didn’t stand us by the sea. They took us out of our houses to the bus, but they took the women’s jewelry and any money they found on them.”

  I was standing at the edge of the group nearest the men. My eyes couldn’t stop looking, hoping for the sight of my father or either of my brothers. I did not see them; I surmised that they had taken off for the mountains or had disappeared into one of the caves. I saw the “burlap bag”: a man standing next to the Jewish soldiers with his head covered by a burlap bag that had two holes in it so he could see. The officer was examining a paper in his hand and would call the men’s names, and the man would answer or not. If he didn’t answer the “burlap bag” would step forward and point him out; sometimes he would point without any call. No sooner did the “burlap bag” point to someone than they brought him out. They would take a group of men, five or six or seven, and disappear. Were they taking them to the prison in Zikhron Yaakov? We heard the rattle of bullets fired—was the guard resisting? I took Wisal’s hand and she looked at me, as if asking why I was squeezing her hand; she did not ask. The goat came close to me and began touching my feet, but I did not pick her up. Abed said he was thirsty, and his mother told him to put up with it. I said to the soldier, “The boy’s thirsty,” and she answered me with a foul word, pushing my shoulder with the butt of her rifle. The weather was hot and the sun burning, and I wondered why my mother had asked me to put on three dresses, and why I obeyed her. I was dripping with sweat; I wanted to ask her, but I did not. The soldiers shouted loudly, “Yalla, let’s go!”

  The procession of women began to move. They led us toward the cemetery. On the way I saw three corpses and then two more, none of which I recognized.

  As they were leading us toward the cemetery I noticed that the village had a strange odor, mixed with the scent of the white lilies that grew on the islands and along their beaches at that time of year. I couldn’t distinguish the odor even though it remained in my nose after we left the village. Afterward it would sometimes appear suddenly, days or weeks later, without my knowing where it had come from or why the village had had that odor on that particular day.

  At the cemetery two trucks were waiting. Threatening us with their weapons, they told us to get in. One of the soldiers took the goat from me as I was carrying it. We were several hundred women, children and old men, maybe five or six hundred. They crammed us into the trucks, and they began to move. Suddenly I shouted and pulled my mother’s arm, pointing with my hand to a pile of corpses. She looked where I was pointing and shouted, “Jamil, my cousin Jamil!” But I pulled her arm again with my left hand and pointed with the right to where my father and brothers were: their corpses were next to Jamil’s, piled one next to the other at a distance of a few meters from us. I was pointing and my mother was still keening in mourning for Jamil with his mother. The women were wailing and the children were crying, terrified of their mothers’ weeping, while the old men stayed stiff as statues.

  The trucks left us at al-Furaydis, at a distance of four kilometers from our village, where we were handed over to the headman, our number was written on the papers, and then we were distributed among the people’s houses. I did not say to Wisal that we had become refugees like them. I didn’t say anything during the entire time we stayed in al-Furaydis. My mother was sure that I had lost the power of speech. She kept saying, “Her father and her brothers will be worried sick when they find out that she has lost the ability to speak.”

  In al-Furaydis and on the road to the Triangle, and in Tulkarm and Hebron and on the road to Sidon, and during all the years she lived in Sidon, my mother would repeat ceaselessly, never tiring, that her boys had fled to Egypt and that Abu Sadiq had been arrested with the men of the town, that we didn’t know if he had been released without knowing where we were or if he was still among the prisoners. One of the women whispered that Umm Sadiq had lost her mind. Another answered, “It’s really strange, she’s completely rational outside of the subject of her husband and her boys.” The first replied, “By the Lord of the throne, I didn’t believe my own eyes, I said that a mother’s heart knows best and maybe we were mistaken. But one of the young men they took to dig the mass grave saw that Abu Sadiq and his boys were among the corpses they buried.”

  My mother would say, “Thank God that Sadiq and Hasan fled to Egypt. When things calm down they will come back safely.” In Sidon a year after we left she implored my uncle to travel to Egypt to let them know that we were living in Sidon. “Poor things, they must be heartsick with worry about us, and here we are, living safe and sound.”

  After we arrived in al-Furaydis some of the boys began to work in Zikhron Yaakov for a few piasters, bringing them back to their mothers at the end of the day so they could buy bread. Sometimes the Jewish boys from the settlement would harass them, beating them and taking the money, and they would come back without it the same way they left. They took other boys and some of the young men of al-Furaydis to our town to harvest the crops. A woman in al-Furaydis shouted, “Good God, we’re hungry and the stalks on our land are two feet high!” She said to her sister, “Come with me,” and she went to the town to harvest some of the wheat. In the evening her sister returned with her dress ripped and clear marks from blows on her face. She asked some of the young men of al-Furaydis to help her bring back her sister’s body; she had been caught unawares by a military vehicle. She said, “They ran her over on purpose, and when I tried to get close to see what had happened to her the car came back toward me and I jumped away. The car ran over her a second time.”

  We stayed four weeks in al-Furaydis, hosted by the people of the town. They put down beds and divided their provisions, but it was meager; some of the old died. As for the nursing infants, they fell incomprehensibly—every day an infant would die, and sometimes two. We buried twenty-five children in al-Furaydis or maybe thirty, as well as the woman who was run over by the military car and the old people who died. Then the Red Cross took charge of us, and they took us east to a leveled wasteland in the Triangle area, where Jordanian officers took charge, counting us and signing for the delivery. Then they took us to Tulkarm in buses. They deposited us in a school near the Hijaz railway line. In Tulkarm we were shelled by Israeli planes, and the son and daughter of Yahya al-Ashmawi were martyred. Two weeks later other buses came and took us to Deir al-Maskubiya in Hebron. Every Friday the people of Hebron would butcher lambs, grill them, and bring them to us with rice, bringing enough for everybody. Many children died, perhaps not so much from hunger as from cold, or perhaps because of their mothers’ grief. Wisal and I went back to wearing our three dresses, one on top of the other. Wisal talked a lot and I would listen to what she said, but I did not talk. Now I don’t know if I had lost the ability to speak or if I didn’t want to talk. My mother says that from the time we left the town until we arrived in Sidon, I did not utter a single word. Abed stayed with me like my shadow, and he would not sleep anywhere but beside me. I would warm his hands and feet and keep patting his head until he slept. But I didn’t sing to him the way I used to when we were back home, for I didn’t have a voice.

  In al-Maskubiya, news of the prisoners reached us. They announced over a loudspeaker that letters had arrived from the Red Cross. My mother stood waiting in the line; they did not call her name. The women and children dispersed after everyone had received the letter that had come for him. My mother spoke to the official, and he told her that he had passed out all the letters he had.

  We spent six months in Hebron, and then the people of our town started to sort themse
lves out: there were some who wanted to join relatives they had in Tulkarm or Nablus or Jenin, and some who slipped back into Galilee, and some who went to Syria. My mother said we would go to Sidon, to my uncle. “How will you go to Sidon?” asked Wisal’s mother. My mother brought out seven gold guineas and said she had succeeded in hiding them during the search. Wisal’s mother said that she had relatives in Jenin, and my mother gave her three of the seven guineas. We bade farewell to the townspeople and to Wisal, her mother, and Abed. We crossed the Jordan River in the company of two families from the town who were going to Irbid; we were a little caravan of sixteen people, most of them children, as well as an old man who knew the road. The weather was very cold, and it was desert road with bare, rocky mountains; I couldn’t see the sea, or smell it. In Irbid we stayed as guests with a family related by blood to the two families we had accompanied; we stayed with them for a week, and then my mother decided to continue our trip to Sidon. The head of the family who hosted us said, “The shared taxi will take you to Daraa, in Syria. You will get off there and look for the bus that goes to Damascus. In Damascus you will ask for taxis heading for Sidon; either you’ll go straight to Sidon or else you’ll take any taxi heading for Rashaya or Marjayoun or Nabatiyeh. When you get to any of them you will be a half hour’s distance from Sidon.” He repeated the names to her again and emphasized that she should not forget them. Then he said, “God be with you.” He wanted to give her money but she said, “God blesses and provides, brother. I have money, thank God.”

  The next day in the morning the man took us to the taxi stop and we rode with others going to Daraa. He commended us to the driver and to the other passengers. We crossed the border, and after a few hours we and other passengers were settled in our seats in another taxi that was heading from Daraa to Damascus. We arrived at night, and spent the night in a mosque. “The idea was,” my mother would say to her sister, “that we would set out early in the morning and reach Sidon on the same day. We slept peacefully, and in the morning I found Ruqayya’s face red. I put my hand on her forehead and it was like fire. I said, ‘Ruqayya, pull yourself together, it’s nothing, today we’ll arrive at your uncle’s.’ But the girl didn’t hear me or see me, stretched out on the carpet of the mosque as if she were dead but breathing.” I don’t remember any of the details of my illness, but my mother says that I had the fever for two weeks, and that she was crying day and night because she was sure I would die. “And what would I say to her father and brothers when they come back safely, she died on me on the road? When she had had the fever for two days and I didn’t have any sage or mint, and I couldn’t boil a chicken for her so she could drink the broth, I asked the good people about a doctor. I went to him and he came with me to the mosque. He asked for a lira—yes by God, a Palestinian guinea in gold! I gave it to him before he would agree to go to the mosque with me. He examined her and wrote a prescription for me and I bought it. By the time Ruqayya got well, out of the four liras I only had ten piasters left.” My aunt marveled, “Ten piasters? Didn’t you say that you had four liras in gold?” My mother counted the expenditures on her fingers: “Didn’t we cross the Jordan River, and pay for it? Didn’t we take the taxis? And food and drink while we were in the mosque, and the doctor, may God not forgive him. And I bought two wool sweaters, one for me and the other for Ruqayya, when we were in Irbid, because the cold cut to the bone.” She returned to counting on her fingers. “And I bought the medicine. The sheikh of the mosque, God protect him and bless his children, brought me bread and something to eat with it and sage from his house, and a woolen blanket for us to wrap up in.” My aunt returned to the question of the ten piasters: “So how did you get to Sidon?” My mother waved her hand and sighed, saying, “There are many good people.” She did not tell her sister, from whom she hid nothing, that she had stood at the door of the mosque and told her story to anyone she thought might help her, among those who passed.