The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  Was I aware of all these things as I was coming out from under the ruins?

  When I came out from under the ruins there was a numbness in my mind, like the numbness that comes over the body. A small frightened animal, only. Later, a little while later, like all the creatures of this earth I began to do what would keep me alive. I’m sure that I was aware of these two choices if only dimly, and even if I couldn’t have formulated them in words as I do now that I’m approaching seventy, now that I can see the hill of life from above. Then two steps to the right or left or to the rear and I can study the surface on the other side, the lands stretched out near and far. I know that I chose. I chose in spite of being frightened, frightened even of a hand that wanted to caress me tenderly and take me safely to land.

  My uncle deliberately asked for my hand for his son Amin in my presence. He said to my mother, “We’ll take Ruqayya for Amin, what do you think?”

  “And the man from Ain Ghazal?”

  “The world has changed; we don’t know where he is or where his father is. If he had wanted Ruqayya he would have looked for her. More than a year has passed since the town fell. We’ve waited for him and there hasn’t been any sight or sound of him.”

  “It’s up to you, Abu Amin. Ruqayya is your daughter, anyone who wants her should ask you for her.”

  My uncle turned to me and said, “What do you say, Ruqayya?”

  I didn’t utter a word. During the night I cried. It wasn’t because I wanted Yahya. He seemed distant; the days had folded him away with other things, and even his image as he emerged from the sea no longer came to me. I cried without knowing the reason for my crying. Then Amin came from Beirut and the contract was written, with my uncle as my witness. He announced in front of everyone: “Amin, I am giving you my daughter Ruqayya. She will be your wife and the mother of your children, but before that and after it she is my brother’s daughter, and not one but three martyrs watch over her. So let her be the delight of your eye as she is the delight of my eye and of theirs.” Amin wiped his eyes and signed the contract.

  Ezz broke in and said to the sheikh, “How can we draw up the marriage contract when Amin hasn’t asked me for Ruqayya. Ask me for her now, Amin, or else …” He laughed, and so did the others who were there.

  Did Amin want me or did his father compel him to marry me because I was the daughter of both his uncle and his aunt, and an orphan with no father or brothers? As a young doctor, what did he want with a girl who hadn’t completed her high school education? What did he want with a refugee who was a guest in her uncle’s house, when he in turn was living as a guest with the family of a friend of his from Sidon?

  I would ride the train without fuss, and remain outside of it also. I would give Amin what was expected of a good wife, affection and little ones, a bite to eat and a clean house, and I would give him myself in an intimate moment and become more confused, because after every intimacy I would wonder what happened. It seemed to me that this was the nature of things. A man would turn to his wife and then take her and she would give herself to him. Perhaps she would be surprised by some unexpected pleasure, not knowing where it came from, and it would add to her confusion.

  After he graduated from the university Amin worked as a doctor in UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency. He didn’t try to travel to the Gulf as others did when they didn’t find work in Lebanon. He would always say that he was lucky, because he had found the work he wanted in the city he wanted. I had my three children in Sidon, then we moved to Beirut because Amin started to work with the Palestinian Red Crescent. We lived near the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood, no more than ten minutes’ walking distance from the Sabra market. When Acre Hospital was established on the south edge of the Shatila Camp, Amin went to work in it. He was absorbed in his work, and he would be gone a lot from the house. It was like a holiday when he was with the children. His work freed him from orders, prohibitions, and controlling the conduct of three boys who could slip from the devilment of kids to become devils. Amin was calm by nature, patient, and spoke little. I never saw him scold one of the boys, even when he made a mistake. He would say, “His own good breeding will correct him, don’t worry.” Was Amin like me, both outside of the train and inside it, or did his work as a doctor provide him with a private train that belonged to him and tamed the wildness of his spirit? I don’t know. In fact I sometimes wonder if I really knew Amin. I search my memory for him when we were in the village; his name was present more than his person. He was seven years older than I was, and he was only there during the summer vacation. No sooner had he finished studying in the village school than my uncle sent him to the high school in Acre, and after that he moved to Beirut to study medicine. Even during the vacation I would see him only when the family gathered for dinner or supper. Where’s Amin? His mother would answer, complaining, “He doesn’t lift his eyes from the books. I tell him, ‘You’ll ruin your eyes from so much reading.’” Sometimes he would go swimming with the young men of the village. I had no relationship with him. He was near and far, unlike his brother Ezzedin, who was a year younger than I was. My mother would say, “It’s as if those two were brothers born one right after the other.” We would fight regularly, every day, Ezz and I, hitting each other, but neither of us could do without the other. We would play together, compete in swimming and diving and picking almonds and peeling Indian figs. Mostly he would win and I would go crazy because I was older. In school he could solve arithmetic problems that were hard for me. He would fill the house with, “Ruqayya’s an ass, she’s a year older than me and can’t solve the arithmetic problem!” I would interrupt, “Liar, it’s only nine months, not a year!” I would hate him and decide not to ask for his help in anything. Two days later I would return to him and ask. I know Ezzedin; I wonder, do I really know Amin? I live with him, I take care of his needs. In the faces of our three children some of his features mix with some of mine. Maybe we look alike because we are paternal cousins and my mother is also his mother’s sister; maybe, as it usually happens to married couples after living together a long time, the face of each one and the movements of his body have come to mirror the other’s. Amin is a doctor; he has never once been unkind to me, he simply speaks calmly, and if he does rebuke it’s with an allusion. There is no violence in his treatment of me, and no quarreling. Was it my uncle’s admonition to him on the day we were married that dictated this conduct to him, or was he compassionate toward the cousin who had become the mother of his children, an orphan with no brother to turn to if her husband tyrannized her or humiliated her in word or deed? When he would say, “I love you,” in an intimate moment, or when he would say proudly “Ruqayya is a great lady and a wonderful mother,” and kiss my hand suddenly, I would be suddenly troubled, because even though I knew everything about Amin I did not know Amin, and maybe I didn’t know myself. I don’t know what Ruqayya wants from this life.

  I’ve completely lost my bearings.

  10

  The Leap … Does It Make a Tale?

  Am I really telling the story of my life or am I leaping away? Can a person tell the story of his life, can he summon up all its details? It might be more like descending into a mine in the belly of the earth, a mine that must be dug first before anyone can go down into it. Is any individual, however strong or energetic, capable of digging a mine with their own two hands? It’s an arduous task requiring many hands and minds, many hoists, bulldozers, and pickaxes, lumber, and iron and elevators descending to the depths beneath and bringing those they took down back to the surface of the earth. A wonderfully strange mine into which you have to descend alone, because it does not belong to anyone else, even if you find things belonging to someone else in it. Then it might suddenly collapse on your head, cracking it open and burying you completely under the debris.

  Perhaps it’s more like a bundle than a mine; but can a person tie up his story in a kerchief and then hold it out to others in his hand, saying, “This is my story, my lot in life”? And then, how
can you transport a bundle the size of a hand, or a large bundle like those women carry on their heads as they flee east over the bridge, the story of a whole life, a life that’s naturally intertwined with the lives of others?

  I haven’t spoken about my uncle Abu Amin. I haven’t told the story of my mother in Sidon, nor the story of Ezzedin. I haven’t talked about my own state. When Hasan spoke to me about his new book project I said to him, “If your grandfather Abu Amin were still among the living he would have told you enough to fill volumes. He was with the rebels from ’36 on and moved around throughout the towns and villages. He was with the resistance in ’47 and ’48, and after they took us out of the town he sneaked back. I don’t remember all the details but I remember a lot of what he said, and I can repeat it to you.” He said, “I’m interested in hearing what my grandfather told you, but now I want your testimony about leaving the village.”

  Hasan was collecting the statements of the residents of the villages along the Palestinian coast about their forced emigration in 1948.

  Hasan didn’t record my testimony on that visit, maybe because he noticed the next day and the following one that my face was pale. I didn’t tell him that I was suffering from severe pain in my stomach; I took a sedative and forced myself to bear up until he left. I said goodbye and wished him Godspeed and then I went to bed for a week. Had the mine collapsed on my head during that night, as I was recalling some of the details in preparation for giving my testimony?

  My uncle was different. He did not become ill when he recalled what happened; he would talk a lot, and in great detail. He would talk about Haifa’s garrison, its national committee, the good and the bad in their leadership, the quarrels that arose among them throughout five months, and then what happened in two days and two nights when the city fell and its residents left it. He would not omit any of the actors: the residents, the jihad volunteers, the British army, the Zionist gangs, Hajj Amin, the Arab Liberation Army and its field commander al-Qawuqji, and the Arab kings and presidents. He would talk about the day and the hour and the neighborhood and the street and the blind alley and the corner, as if he were spreading out all of Haifa in front of his listeners so they could see with their own eyes its sea, its Carmel, its oil refinery, and its rail lines: the narrow gauge and the standard, the Hijaz line that connected Haifa to Damascus via Daraa, the Jaffa and Lid line that took travelers to al-Qantara and from there to Cairo, and the Beirut and Tripoli line that went to Ras al-Naqura through a long tunnel. The Acre line also, which Amin would take every morning to go from Haifa to his school in Acre. He would identify the stations and stop at the Hijaz line station, Haifa East, the largest and oldest. He would describe the station building, its iron gate, and the color of the trains. He would say that they had been brown in the thirties, then they were painted light red in the forties, bearing the English letters PR for Palestine Railway. He would specify the names of the neighborhoods and streets, drawing their borders with his words; even the names of the bus companies would find a place in his narrative.

  Sidon came into the story not because he was living there now and used to come to it often, but because it was the essential station in the arms smuggling in which he was engaged. The arms would come from Libya; Hajj Amin would buy them from what the British and German armies had left behind and send them by boat to Sidon. The boat would anchor at the Maqasid Islamiya School, and Maarouf Saad would receive them. My uncle would say, “God keep Maarouf and protect him. He worked in the school as the resident head for the boarding students. He would receive the arms at night and bring someone to clean them and grease them and then deliver them to us, and we would take them in boats back to Palestine. Sometimes the arms and ammunition would come from Egypt, from Hilmiyat al-Zaytoun, the headquarters of Hajj Ibrahim, or from Egyptian army storehouses or from Marsa Matruh or Salloum. They would be carried to Port Said and then boats would take them to the shore at Sidon, and they would be unloaded at al-Maqasid.”

  The Arab armies, kings, presidents, and leaders also had a share in the story. He would recount, categorize, accuse, and corroborate with facts, insulting and cursing and always ending with the same expression: “God have mercy on the martyrs, soldiers, officers, and volunteers.” He would amaze us every time with some new detail. He would talk about the Yugoslav volunteers who were martyred in Jaffa three days after the fall of Haifa. “They were twenty, led by a man named Ibrahim Bek, who was from Turkestan. The Jews besieged them in the train station in al-Manshiya. They exterminated them.” He would talk about the son of the mufti of Anatolia, who volunteered “with us in Haifa” and was martyred six weeks before the city fell. “We buried him when the almonds were just starting, the blossoms just opening on the branches.” He would talk about the volunteer for jihad who had come from India, “Yes, by God, from India. His name was Muhammad Abd al-Rasul. He came from India and was martyred with us in Palestine.”

  My uncle Abu Amin was not there when they occupied the village, but he was the first of the family to go back to it. He would say, “I went back to Tantoura.” Here the story would start and here it would also end. My uncle didn’t tell us anything about what he saw in our village when he sneaked back two months later. Did he go back to it once without having the strength to go back again, or was that the beginning of later visits, more like a regular pilgrimage, even if it was an odd pilgrimage that was made by stealth and remained sealed in secrecy?

  Only once did my uncle Abu Amin talk about his visit. He said, “There is a three-sided monument of white marble that was erected near Rachel’s Tomb, at the fork of the road to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Hebron. On the monument were carved the names of the martyrs who participated in the battles that occurred south of Jerusalem. Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Libyans, Sudanese, and Yemenis, who are buried there. I visited them, and recited the Fatiha for their souls.” Ezz was surprised, and said, “But the two cemeteries are in the West Bank, how did you go to Jordan from occupied Palestine?” My uncle Abu Amin smiled broadly, and answered, “God forgive you, Ezz, they divided the country into three pieces. They divided it but I did not, nor did I accept the division!”

  For many years my uncle Abu Amin did not comprehend the fact that he was a refugee, perhaps because he did not come to Sidon as a stranger but instead had been familiar with it for long years before his permanent residence there. He would live in it for weeks and sometimes for months; he had friends and acquaintances not only in Sidon but also in Tyre and Nabatiyeh and Bint Jbeil. They were colleagues and friends, and his relationship with them had not started when the village was lost; rather they were his peers who would come to visit him in Haifa or Tantoura, just as he would visit them in their towns. A visit to them might be extended with no awkwardness, because he had not come to them as a refugee, asking for their generosity, and because he was certain that in the future he would go back and then host those who had hosted him, returning the favor and more.

  When we came to Sidon we were the guests of one of these friends. The friend did not consider us guests nor did my uncle consider himself a guest, for they were lifelong friends sharing in two types of work. They had shared in jihad since 1936 along with other friends, acquiring experience in buying and smuggling weapons far from the eyes of the British and French authorities and the Zionist gangs who followed them. They were also partners in the ownership of a number of fishing boats, whose proceeds allowed them to pay for the necessities of life, and to use any surplus in their work for the armed struggle.

  After waiting a year, my uncle decided to rent an apartment in old Sidon, so we moved to it. We did not live in the camp. For years it was possible for my uncle to avert his gaze from the meaning of the move, seeing the apartment only as a way station—a passing trial, hard to bear to be sure, but however long it lasted, it would not go on much longer. When Umm Amin brought up the necessity of registering with the refugee relief agency he exploded at her angrily: “Do you need aid, woman, are you in need of a bag of flour? Sh
ame on you!” My aunt remained silent, and perhaps she thought the idea over and decided that her husband was right. But Ezzedin brought up the subject again, saying that it wasn’t a matter of a bag of flour and a can of sardines, but rather it was about maintaining our rights, about the right to go to school and to university and to be employed. He said we must register. My uncle insulted Ezzedin and announced, his face flaming with rage, “I am not a refugee and I will not ask for aid from anyone!”

  He was standing in the station waiting to get on the train, returning to where he had come from, so how absurd it was to ask him to register his stop and to get an identity card for waiting. Ezz took his father’s papers and those of the family and registered the household on his own at the agency. Until his death, after twenty-seven years of residence in Sidon, my uncle did not know that he was registered as a refugee, and that Ezzedin would accept aid regularly, sometimes taking it to his mother and aunt or, usually, distributing it to the needy.

  Perhaps the image of waiting at the station isn’t accurate: even though my uncle resisted the idea of accepting his position, absorbed as he was in limited operations across the newly established borders, nonetheless day after day he stood before an alternate reality, which he neither acknowledged nor recognized even as he crept into it by stealth. The camps were taking their current form, making their presence hard to ignore or deny. Some of his acquaintances would tell him about the restraints and pressures to which the camp residents were subjected by the Second Bureau and the Lebanese authorities. He would suddenly shout in a loud voice, “Good God, they need permission from the authorities to leave the camp? Is it a prison?” I was pregnant with my second son when the authorities carried out the forced evacuation of the refugees from the border villages, relocating them to the camps, as a decree had been issued forbidding Palestinians from living in the southern villages adjacent to their lands. My uncle had friends who lived in Bint Jbeil, like him living as guests with their business partners. In accordance with the decree they were forced to move to the Ain al-Helwa camp. I remember my uncle as he struck one hand with the other in despair. He was angry, but he was more troubled than angry, repeating that he did not understand. The Arab kings and presidents had no mercy and left no way open for God’s mercy! Why were they moving people far from their land, when, sooner or later, they would move back to it?