The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  Abed rejoiced in the girl, playing with her when he passed through the house to reassure us or to eat or sleep. Amin would delight in her face in the morning, and contemplate her sleeping when he returned from the hospital late at night. Only my aunt did not understand why this infant had appeared without preamble and took all this attention. One day she said, “Ruqayya, I haven’t wanted to cause you any distress, but I must make you understand: I think that Amin has taken another wife and that this girl is his daughter with the other woman.”

  “But Aunt, why would he bring me the other woman’s child, why wouldn’t he leave her with her mother?”

  “God only knows!” Maybe he didn’t get married and she’s his bastard.”

  I laughed. I was used to my aunt’s quirks and her constant doubts of others.

  “She’s an orphan, Aunt, and the ambulance brought her to him from beneath the ruins. They didn’t know of any family of hers, not even any distant relatives.”

  “You’re free to do as you like, I’ve alerted you and done what I should. There are a lot of orphans in a country at war, and they have a refuge to shelter them. Why did he bring this girl and not the rest of the orphans?”

  “Oh, Aunt, everything is written and ordained.”

  22

  1982

  War teaches you many things. The first is to strain your ears and be alert, so you can judge where the firing is coming from, as if your body had become one large ear with a compass to show the specific source of the threat among the four directions, or rather the five, since death can also rain down from the sky. The second is to resign yourself a little and to have only a certain amount of fear, the necessary amount only. If your fear exceeds the amount by a tiny bit, you will leave your house needlessly, when the shelling is on the other side of the city. Your fear will turn into a malignant disease that will eat away your body every day until it destroys you; the rocket will spare you and your fear will kill you. And if your fear is a tiny bit less, you won’t hurry down the stairs to the shelter or to sit on the stairs far from the windows and the balconies, and the rocket will kill you just like that in the blink of an eye, because the shelling is aimed at the street where you live and perhaps at the building in which you live. The third thing that war teaches you is to be careful when you must leave the house to take the most important things first. For example, a bottle of water or the old lady, who might get lost as you are checking on your little girl or the limbs of your body. It’s certain that there are fourth and fifth and sixth things that war teaches you, but it always teaches you to endure, whether at the beginning or the end. To wait and endure, because the alternative is to become unbalanced, in short to go mad.

  The war handed us over to war, and war to war … What? Here the sentences stumble and the words are confused, because I don’t know how it’s possible to summarize what we lived through in those years. I don’t know how to communicate the meaning, and I wonder about how useful it is to go into the details—the details that are not details. Every discrete detail is a story affecting hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. Take for example Black Saturday at the end of 1975. The Phalange kidnapped three hundred Muslims and killed seventy others, and the National Movement answered by taking over the hotel area; afterward chaos and organized plunder broke out in the heart of Beirut. A big story or a detail among hundreds? Before that, sixty-three Syrian workers were killed and thousands of them were forced to flee. Oh my God, it’s only one thread in the fabric, or one spark in the flames of the fire. After that was the siege of Tall al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha and Dbayeh and the shantytowns in al-Maslakh and al-Karantina and al-Nabaa—details? And then Israeli invasion in 1978 and the hundreds of thousands from the south who thronged to West Beirut. Then the larger invasion in 1982.

  We were in the siege, at the height of the summer, and of the siege. There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and I nearly screamed, not because I recognized Hasan but because the boy standing in front of me at the door was a shadow of Hasan. I thought, my mind has wandered and imagination has taken over. I thought, shadows are taller. I thought, but this is his shadow, the exact image of him, but smaller, as if it were Hasan in the first year of high school, and sick. He said, “Mama.” I put my arms around him and held on. He began to slip away; I didn’t realize he was suppressing tears. I let him slip away and began to stare at him, touching his face and his neck and his shoulders.

  “You’ve been sick?”

  He laughed. “Illness is easier.”

  “Tell me what happened to you.”

  “Who’s going to go first?”

  “Your father and Abed are fine. Your uncle Ezz … we don’t know … .”

  “I found out from my father.”

  “When did you see him? Did you go to the hospital first?”

  Did he sense a note of blame in the words? He smiled; it wasn’t his shadow, it was Hasan, with his lively smile and his sweet eyes.

  “I was afraid to come straight home.” He faltered. “I said I would go first to the hospital. In the hospital I would find my father and ask him about you, and if I didn’t find him I would find someone to give me the news. Where’s Grandma?”

  He went in to greet his grandma.

  “How did you get here, Grandson?”

  “From Cairo. I took a plane to Damascus and from there by land to Beirut.”

  “Thank God you got here safely, Grandson. Were there fedayeen or Israelis on the way?”

  “There were fedayeen in some places and Israelis in others.”

  “And Ain al-Helwa?”

  “What about it?”

  “Didn’t you go by it to set your mind at rest about your uncle Ezz and his wife?”

  “No, Grandma, the road from Damascus is in one direction and Sidon is in the other.”

  “Thank God you got here safely, Grandson, we’ve missed you.”

  Hasan would remain with us throughout the period of the siege. He worked in civil defense, distributing water and bread and newspapers to the civilians. He was often at the Safir newspaper, helping with some of the volunteer work there.

  On the day of the departure Beirut came out by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, scattering rice and rose petals over the young men piled into the trucks that would take them by land to Syria or to the wharf where the ships were preparing for their departure from Lebanon. Maryam was walking ahead of Amin and me, holding Abed’s hand on one side and Hasan’s on the other. She was wearing a summer dress, open at the neck and baring her arms. Her hair was as I had combed it for her, gathered into a ponytail. She would speak to her brothers and then turn around to me and her father and laugh.

  Abed embraced her, then he climbed into the truck.

  We waved to him, and here was Maryam asking a woman carrying a bucket of rice for a handful of it. Hasan lifted her off the ground and she moved her arm with all her determination, and opened her fist suddenly, so the rice she had intended for her brother scattered over her head. She laughed, and called at the top of her voice, “Come back soon, Abed!” Her voice was lost in the crowd and in the roar of the trucks as they pulled away, amid thousands of hands waving and extending a bridge of voices, shouting and singing and scattering rice and rose petals and crying. The August sun beat down, unchecked. “God be with you, God be with you.” “Take care of yourselves.” “Goodbye.” “We’ll meet again soon, God willing.”

  Suddenly Maryam said, “Mama, can you buy me an ice cream?” I looked at her, and I looked at Hasan and Amin; for a moment my spirit slipped away, as if I were suddenly dying. Then I took a deep breath and looked at Maryam: “Let’s go buy you an ice cream.”

  In the evening I heard the key in the lock. I wondered, which one has come back early, Hasan or Amin? But here was Abed standing at the door. He said in a strange voice, before he stepped into the house: “Before the truck entered the port I decided to stay in Beirut.” He quickly went into his room and closed the door.

  In the morning he said
to Maryam, “You told me to come back quickly, and I did what you told me.” She put her arms around him and laughed. He slipped away from her and left the room; I heard his muffled sobbing.

  23

  Flies

  How did I bear it? How did we endure and live, how did a drink of water slip down our throats without choking and suffocating us? What’s the use of recalling what we endured and bringing it back in words? When someone we love dies, we place him in a shroud, wrapping him tenderly and digging deep in the earth. We weep; we know that we must bury him to go on with our lives. What sane person unearths the tombs of his loved ones? What logic is there in my running after the memory that has escaped, trying to flee from itself? Do I want to kill it so that I can live, or am I trying to revive it even if I die because … because why? I suddenly scream: Damn memory, damn its mother and father, damn the sky over it and the day it was and the day it will be. Damn the flies!

  I saw the flies with my own eyes.

  In a deep pit, that was yet big enough.

  Ambulance crews with gloves and protective masks

  Were scattering white powder,

  Bringing the bodies on stretchers,

  Placing one body next to the other.

  They were stretching a sheet over them all, a covering

  Of the plastic

  From which garbage bags are made.

  They would take their stretchers back to the narrow lanes, to bring other bodies.

  They came and went.

  From daybreak until sunset.

  A smell

  And clouds

  Of flies.

  Let it escape, let it go. May it never return.

  Stretch out a sheet as you saw them doing, to cover what you saw throughout years, and the day of the smell and the flies.

  Leave the page blank, Ruqayya.

  24

  The Girl from Nablus

  Enters the Family

  I’ve made a leap that cut five years from the story. I’ll go back and pick up the thread: we’re still at the end of 1977.

  Sadiq called from Abu Dhabi, saying that he had met a girl he liked from the West Bank, and that he wanted to propose to her. His father said, “How will we propose to her for you when we can’t enter the West Bank?” He said, “I’ll arrange things. We can all meet in Amman.”

  Sadiq sent the bride’s picture and a long letter describing her, telling the story of his meeting her and what he knew about her family.

  I told my aunt, “Sadiq wants to get engaged.”

  “To someone from Tantoura?”

  “No, from Nablus.”

  “Your uncle, Abu Amin, God rest him, visited Nablus many times. He said that there was nothing like the kunafa dessert they make in Nablus, but that they served it before lunch!” She added, “But the girls from Nablus are stubborn, and God made them all fat.”

  I laughed, and showed her the picture. She looked at it and then waved her hand dismissively: “She’s weak and wasting away, thin as a reed.”

  “Didn’t you say that the women of Nablus are fat, and here she is like a willow branch!”

  “Soon she’ll get fat from eating kunafa.”

  “The main thing is that he likes her, and her family are good people.”

  My aunt waved her hand and said, capitulating, “Okay. God willing you’ll have better luck than I did, and she won’t take him to live in Nablus so that we never see him.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Aunt—Nablus is occupied, so Sadiq can’t visit it.”

  “Isn’t Sadat saying that he’s going there to ask them to end the occupation?”

  “And you believe him?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “We’ll meet her family in Amman, and ask them for her, and hold the marriage there.”

  “They won’t agree!”

  “They will agree, Aunt, because we can’t enter the West Bank; we don’t have any control over it, and neither do they.”

  “If they agree, they want to marry their daughter and be done. How many sisters does she have?”

  “Three.”

  “Thank God, some trials are easier than others. The Saffurya has done us in, with her six sisters. God forbid.”

  Abed observed, talking about his brother’s plan, “We’ve gotten over Barrier Number One, may the same be true for Barrier Number Two. After that the road will be open for me.”

  I laughed, “Do you have a plan?”

  “Plans: a fair one and a dark one and a tall one and a short one, and the fifth is indescribable—she carries a rifle and talks politics and is our ally because she’s from Kamal Jumblatt’s group, and she’s beautiful as a moon and light-hearted to boot.”

  “Then the fifth is precisely what you want.”

  “There’s no call to anger all the others!”

  I didn’t know where the line was between joking and seriousness, or if he had many girlfriends or was alone, his heart still filled only with fantasies of girls.

  Hasan returned to Egypt to study, and I didn’t know if he was happy or miserable. He said that Cairo was large and the Nile was fascinating but he missed the sea and Sidon and the scent of orange blossoms. I would send him pictures of Maryam and talk to him at length about her in my letters. He would say, “I’m happy to have Maryam’s news but I’ve read the letter twice, thinking I had skipped a paragraph, and when I read it again I became certain that in a five-page letter you didn’t say a single word about yourself. How are you doing, Mother?”

  I asked Hasan to call Wisal in Jenin and tell her that we were going to Amman for Sadiq’s engagement, and to ask if it was possible for me to meet her there.

  Amin insisted that Ezz come with us to Amman. I said, “Who will take care of my aunt?”

  “We’ll leave her with Ezz’s wife, she can come with him from Sidon and stay with her until we get back.”

  “But my aunt can’t stand her.”

  “God help Karima, she can put up with my mother for three days.”

  Ezz and his wife came from Sidon. He suggested that we leave Maryam with his wife, because “She’s little, and the trip to Jordan by land will exhaust her, and she’ll exhaust you.” I did not agree.

  On the morning of the following day a taxi carried us to Damascus by way of the al-Masna crossing, and from there we crossed the border at al-Ramtha on our way to Amman. I carried Maryam on my lap and sat in the back seat with Ezz and Abed; Amin sat in the front seat next to the driver. We had barely set out when Amin turned around, looked at Maryam and smiled broadly, and said, “God bless our trip. It was exactly the right thing to do, Ruqayya, to bring Maryam.”

  We met at the hotel, where we found Sadiq and Hasan waiting for us near the desk. Neither of them had seen Maryam before. Sadiq planted a quick kiss on her head and then turned his attention to his father and uncle, and I was busy examining Hasan. He was thinner and seemed smaller in size, as if he were a middle-school pupil. He lifted Maryam in his hands, saying again and again, “Now I understand why you write three quarters of your letters about her! She’s amazing, where did she get all this beauty?”

  Sadiq sat with his father and uncle to discuss the details of the engagement, and Abed joined them. I went up to the room carrying Maryam, with Hasan trailing after me. In the evening we went to the bride’s uncle’s house.

  The bride seemed kind and affectionate, younger than I had imagined even though Sadiq assured me before and afterward that she was only two years younger than he was. The formal living room was very large, with big chairs whose wooden frames were painted in gold. In the middle was a large rectangular table, covered with a piece of glass; on it were large crystal ashtrays and a number of rosaries that seemed to be valuable, because they were displayed as if they were fine pieces. I was intrigued by three large pictures hung on the wall, each in a gold frame: the middle was of a porter or a water-carrier who was carrying a picture of the Aqsa Mosque on his back; the pictures on each side were of a sluggish sea, and of a tabl
e holding a platter with fruits in dull colors.

  The room was crowded with men and women, and I learned only shortly before we left which of the women was the bride’s mother and which was her aunt and which her uncle’s wife, and who was more closely and more distantly related. The men turned aside to talk over the arrangements for the marriage. Afterward we moved to the dining room, where the table and the rest of the furniture also was huge, crowding the space with chairs and china cabinets.

  When we came back to the hotel Amin asked me, in front of Ezz and Sadiq and the other boys, “What do you think of the bride, Ruqayya?”

  “She’s very nice, congratulations.”

  Sadiq said, “Mother, I don’t understand what made you suddenly say, for no reason at all, ‘We are refugees, our family lives in the Ain al-Helwa camp and we have relatives in the Jenin camp.’”

  I found his comment strange, and I said, “Isn’t it the truth?”

  He said, “I don’t object, but the words came as a surprise, for no reason. Anyway, who of our family lives in the camp in Jenin?”

  “Wisal and her mother.”

  “They are people we know, not relatives.”

  “They’re my family. I have no one left but Ezz and Karima in Ain al-Helwa, and Wisal and her mother in Jenin, and Abed too—even if he lives in Beirut he’s from the camp in Jenin.”

  Ezz broke in to end the tension that had begun to form around us without our having noticed: “I attest that the mulukhiya was respectable, one more degree and it would reach the level of the mulukhiya you make, Ruqayya. If it were two degrees better it would surpass it. Watch out, if the girl cooks like her family it will slip away from you, and I’ll go to Sadiq’s house for the mulukhiya.”