The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  After they encircled the area, the Israelis had entered the hospital a number of times. They asked about the “saboteurs,” and were told that there were only patients and workers in the hospital. They walked around in the hospital and ate in the cafeteria and left.

  The Israelis were not the ones who burst into the hospital on Friday; there were also Lebanese Forces, the Phalange, and Saad Haddad’s men. That’s what some of them said, without mincing words.

  One of the nurses told me that she said to my father, before they burst in, “We must flee, they will kill us.” He reassured her and said to her, “Your family is in Tyre. The Israelis occupied it but they did not just kill civilians arbitrarily. They shell us with airplanes and artillery, but when they occupy the place they don’t interfere with the women and children. We’re in a hospital. At worst they will imprison us, the men.” She said to him, “But they are the Phalange and they won’t have any mercy if we fall into their hands.” He laughed and said to her, “I thought you were braver than that.” The nurse told me, “Minutes after that they invaded the hospital. They came in the emergency entrance and I went out another door, three nurses and I and a little boy we took with us. We spent the night far from the area.”

  When they entered the hospital they were speaking roughly, in Arabic and English, shouting and hurling insults and speaking obscenely. Then they took out the doctors and the hospital workers. They stood the foreigners in a line and the Arabs in another line. They examined the foreigners and then spread out a blanket for them and allowed them to sit on it. They gave them cigarettes and gum. They were relatively nice to them, but when they allowed them to go and saw them returning to the hospital to go on with their work they began to insult them and treat them differently.

  My father was seen standing in the other line along the wall, with about ten or fifteen men. Then he was seen an hour or two later, as he was walking among the hundreds they were leading to the Sports City. It was obvious that he had been beaten and tortured.

  Two doctors and two employees managed to flee from the hospital by way of the Yacoubian Building, adjacent to the hospital. They went in the gate and came out from the gate on the other side of the building.

  As the foreigners and the doctors were standing outside the hospital, some of the Phalange men remained inside. They were laughing and joking sometimes, and asking the girls for tea and coffee. One Lebanese girl who had accompanied her father and brother, injured during the carnage the previous night, told me that they treated them like servants. Then they began to talk obscenely, so she was afraid, and fled. The girl’s instinct was right because at about the same time they took two nurses, one of them Palestinian and the other Lebanese. They pulled Intisar the Lebanese by her hair and took her down to the shelter of the hospital and took turns raping her, then they shot her. Then they returned for her coworker and raped her until she died.

  I don’t know if my father tried to flee and they killed him, or if they tortured him and then killed him, or if they drove him to the Sports City and he was carried away by those trucks that took people to unknown places from which they didn’t return. There are two other doctors besides my father of whom no trace has been found, Dr. Sami al-Khatib and Dr. Muhammad Uthman. Someone saw four bodies floating in the pool of the Sports City, wearing white coats; but we don’t know if my father and the two other doctors were among them, because there were three ambulance workers from the Red Crescent who were shelled and killed when they were in an International Red Cross car. They were also wearing white uniforms. I didn’t see the corpses floating in the pool, but others told me the story. If I had seen them I would have been able to recognize my father whatever his state.

  When the International Red Cross arrived—they came twice, at two in the afternoon (when the Forces were still in the hospital), and again at four-thirty in the afternoon (when they had left)—they transferred some of the patients to the Najjar hospital, and some of the children, with a foreign nurse, to the Amal Center. They also took four bodies: two women and a doctor and an Egyptian worker (the hospital cook or the worker in the gas station across the street? I don’t know). Was my father the doctor? The witnesses assert that my father was not among them.

  A nurse from Shatila told me that she went to the hospital on Saturday after the Forces had left the area. The hospital was in a miserable state: the glass was broken and the curtains were burned and the cafeteria was demolished, including the refrigerator; all the supplies were strewn on the floor and the picture of Abu Ammar was torn, its frame broken and the glass smashed. They had trodden it underfoot. The children’s section was empty, and the nurseries also. The next day this nurse found a child killed and thrown into the hospital garden. She added that when she went back to Sabra she found there children who had been in the hospital and whom she knew, aged a year or two years or three, killed, including a paralyzed child who had been killed with an axe. She thinks that they threw them there so it would not be said that they killed children in the hospital. A number of people testified that in a closed shelter southwest of the camp, in the Irsal neighborhood, they found bodies piled on top of each other, and among them were the bodies of nursing infants and children not fully formed (I think that they were the newborns that they took from the nursery).

  Going back to Father, there are three possibilities: that Father was killed or taken or escaped. Each of the three poses questions we have no answers for:

  If Father was killed, then how, and when? Did they torture him, and what did he say or do? Where is his body? Did it stay under the rubble? Was he buried in one of the mass graves that they dug during the massacre, and that the government has refused to dig up? Was he taken by one of the three bulldozers that were seen leaving Sabra on Saturday, piled with victims? Or did they throw him in the sea, as they did with others, near al-Naima and al-Damour, after putting him in a sack and weighting it down with stones? Or did Father have the good fortune to be buried with religious rites, performed by Sheikh Salman al-Khalil or his brother Sheikh Jaafar al-Khalil on the following Monday, when they buried the martyrs in groups of ten or twelve, until they had buried eight hundred in one day in a single mass grave?

  If Father was driven with hundreds of others to the Sports City, there is the possibility that they shot him just like that, for no reason, which is what they did to many. There is the possibility that they sent him down into one of the death pits where they buried people alive. Perhaps he was able to flee, because when they were driving the people a man shot an RPG missile at them and there was chaos and confusion among the guards, so dozens fled, as eyewitnesses asserted. Did Father flee then? And if he escaped then why has he not contacted us up until now, when three months have passed since the massacre? Is he imprisoned? I have tried to learn if the Phalange have any prisoners, but I have not obtained any information.

  Legally, Father is among the missing. The Lebanese government has not issued an official report up to now, even though it’s known that there is a report prepared by the military prosecutor, Asaad Ger-manos. He completed it less than two weeks after the massacre. This report was not published, even though the Safir newspaper recently ran a summary of it. Perhaps it was not published because the number of victims it advances is ridiculous, since it estimates the number at 470 killed. The International Red Cross estimated the number of victims at 2,750, and the sources of the Lebanese Red Cross estimated it at 3,000, not including those who remained under the rubble, nor those who were bulldozed, nor those who were kidnapped or lost. Agence France Presse estimated the number taken away in trucks and never seen again at 3,000 persons. Other estimates say that they were 1,300. These numbers alone translate into insanity, when the difference between one estimate and another is 1,000 or 1,500 people.

  My dear Sadiq and Hasan,

  I have tried my utmost to investigate what happened at Acre Hospital on Friday morning, September 17; that’s what I promised you. I’ve only written four pages, but it took me months to get the d
etails. I have many papers and clippings from the newspapers and reports and statements, as well as observations and testimony and a roster of the names of the witnesses whom I listened to and to whom we can return if we need to. I have tried as much as I was able to concentrate the information I had, and to present it clearly. As for the writing, it’s hard, really hard. We owe it to our father to find out what happened to him, and this report is only a small step at the beginning of the path. If he was martyred then we must be certain of that and learn the circumstances of his martyrdom, and the grave where he lies. If he was captured we must search for him and turn the world upside down to get to him. If we don’t, we do not deserve his name or his efforts to raise us and teach us or a single hour of the love he gave us. And I know we agree that he gave us an incalculable number of those hours.

  Your brother, Abed

  Beirut, December 17, 1982

  31

  To Cut a Path

  Abed did not show me this letter when he wrote it, nor when he gave a copy of it to Sitt Bayan. I read it, and was brought up short by the date. Nearly twenty years later I understood Abed’s strange behavior on the day his grandmother died.

  She died on December 16, 1982 and we buried her the next day, the same date as the one Abed had placed on his letter to Sadiq and Hasan.

  I found her motionless in her bed. I ran to Abed. For two days he had not left his room, sitting at his desk with his beard growing and his hair as disheveled as the papers and newspaper clippings that he surrounded himself with.

  I said, “Abed … your grandmother … .”

  He got up from his seat and followed me to her room. He confirmed that she had died. He said, “I’ll go look for a doctor and do what’s necessary.” But when he was putting on his clothes he was swearing and cursing as if his grandmother had played a trick on him with the timing of her death and had died purposely to make him miserable. The next day he suddenly asked me, “We buried her and it’s over, and people came to pay their condolences today. Will they come tomorrow?”

  I said, “Usually condolences last three days.”

  “I don’t want any visitors here tomorrow, I’ll throw them out if they come. She lived her full life and died in her bed, and we buried her fittingly. It’s over.”

  He shouted again, “It’s over!”

  Abed was twenty-eight years old, could I slap him? I nearly did. I don’t remember what I said, or how I reacted to his insolence. All I remember is that he was shouting at the top of his lungs like a deranged person, and that Ezz put his arm around his shoulders and led him gently into his room and closed the door; it stayed closed for an hour or more. Maryam was sitting beside me, then she put her head in my lap and went to sleep; I stayed still as a stone, without moving or thinking, until I heard the door open and saw Ezz coming out of the room. It seemed to me that I had not seen him for years. The dark blue circles under his eyes had become fuller; when had he gotten so old? Why hadn’t I noticed it before? He noticed Maryam and said in a whisper, “She’ll get cold.” He took her and placed her in her bed, and came and sat next to me. He extended his hand with a pack of cigarettes, giving me one and taking another. We sat smoking in silence.

  Two or three days later, Abed surprised me: “I’m going to leave the College of Engineering.”

  “You’ll graduate next year.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You chose to specialize in architecture, no one imposed it on you.”

  “I’ll transfer to studying law.”

  “You’ll start over?”

  “I’ll start over.”

  “Can you explain the reason to me?”

  “I have reasons, but it takes a long time to explain them.”

  “I’m listening. Explain, even if it takes days.”

  He left me and went out of the house.

  We would peck at each other daily, like roosters. He couldn’t stand me and I couldn’t stand him. I told myself again and again that I had to be patient. You are his mother, Ruqayya, and he’s a boy, a young man laboring under a burden. I would try; then he would explode in my face like a mine, and I would explode. The house seemed like a war zone; no sooner did we put out one fire than another sprang up. Even Maryam would run all over to put out the fires. The thought makes me smile: a girl not yet seven, in second grade, wearing a helmet and jumping up the ladder to face the burning fire with a water hose many times longer than she was tall. She said to me, “Mama … don’t you love Abed like you love me?”

  I smiled.

  “And doesn’t he love you like I love you?”

  “I don’t know, Maryam.”

  “He loves you and you love him, so why do you fight every day?”

  “We aren’t fighting.”

  We were fighting, and we kept fighting, as if we were a married couple on a boat that was about to break up, after which each one would go off on one piece of wood. I complained to Sadiq, and he said, “Abed is devastated. If you don’t put up with him, who will?” It seems as if he called Abed and spoke to him about the subject, because Abed came to me like a crazy person and said, “Sadiq called me to tell me to take care of you. He said, ‘Your mother is tired, be more considerate of her.’ God damn Sadiq, he talks as if you were my stepmother, and as if he were responsible. Of course he’s responsible as long as he sends a few dollars every month. Do you know what your responsible son said? He said that he’s arranging to take you and Maryam to live with him in Abu Dhabi. He said that next July he’ll take his wife and children to Europe, for a change of scene. He said, ‘Two weeks only, then Mama will come here and we’ll register Maryam in the school here.’ Did he tell you that? Do you want to live with him? Have you decided to leave Lebanon? God damn him!”

  I hadn’t had the slightest idea of Sadiq’s intentions, even though my surprise was lost in the sharpness with which Abed threw it out. It was as if he were a prosecutor about to send me to prison after he got the confession.

  I wouldn’t leave my home, I wouldn’t leave Beirut. Stubbornness? Maybe. It seemed as if it was a decision I had made and could not reexamine. Why? Why wouldn’t I take my son and daughter and escape with them, far from this place that had come to say implicitly to us, ‘Get out of the country, you’re aliens.’ Did I say implicitly? That’s a mistake, they said it frankly every day. I saw it with my own eyes written on the walls. In the newspapers there were leaks about plans to reduce the number of Palestinians in Lebanon from half a million to fifty thousand. Did they want to throw us into the sea? They threw leaflets into the camp, menacing and threatening us. And it wasn’t just empty words: the army tyrannized the camps, and the Forces did what they pleased. Daily arrests, killing at the barricades, kidnapping, destruction of any wall built in the camp—how can people live in houses without walls? And strangulation: there was no work, there were no work permits. The men of the camp were killed or imprisoned or had left with the evacuation, and the few remaining were unemployed. Once again women took care of themselves and their dependents as if they had just emerged from the summer of 1948. No, it wasn’t only the Palestinians who were undesirables; the Lebanese who had immigrated from the south and al-Metn, who lived in Ouzai and the southern suburbs, were exposed like us. The army clashed with them and martyrs fell among them. They wanted to destroy their houses, or more precisely to remove them, as the houses had been destroyed since the invasion and the battles that had occurred in the area with the Israeli army. The government did not allow the residents to rebuild or repair their houses, to bring back water and electricity to them, to remove the debris or the waste. All that was forbidden; they were required to leave. But where to?

  In the future I would think a long time about it, asking myself why I didn’t leave. Had I inherited from my uncle Abu Amin the sense that I was not a stranger, or had I come to imagine, gradually and over time, growing up in the place, that my estrangement was that of the people there, or of some of the people, those who were like us? Perhaps I didn’t wa
nt to go farther away, as if the shore of Beirut would lead me to the shore of our village, as if Shatila were one end of a street that I could follow, walking in a straight line, to arrive in Tantoura. Just a long street, one line like the line between Tantoura and Haifa or Tantoura and Qisarya, Wisal’s town. Maybe it was simpler than that: I hated to leave my life and go, as the young men had gone. They were forced to leave; the leaders ordered them and they left. No one had ordered me, so why would I leave?

  Ezz told me at length what happened in Sidon: the kidnapping and the killing, the disfigured bodies that they found near Ain al-Helwa and al-Mieh Mieh, in the heart of Sidon. They would find leaflets signed by “the Cedar Rebels” demanding that the residents throw out the foreign terrorists who were oppressing Lebanon and causing its devastation. “We will not permit the Palestinians to live on Lebanese land.” In the leaflets they called us killers and germs and garbage. They said that the Israelis had come to save them and that Lebanon and Israel would become stronger by working together. They said that the two civilizations would be combined. The Phalange didn’t spare anyone and the Israelis were forming militias of local workers, claiming to keep the peace in the villages. They didn’t limit themselves to the militias of the Phalange and Saad Haddad and the Cedar Guards, but also created other militias. They forced the chief of every village to designate ten people from the village to work with what they called “the Civil Guard,” and they forced them to come up with the money for their expenses. Everyone complained, even the traders. Israeli fruits and vegetables came to be everywhere. They brought their products to sell in the south. So it was death and humiliation and utter devastation, and of course, fear. It was a fear I hadn’t seen in the camp before, even during the time of the Second Bureau, in the fifties.