by Radwa Ashour
Like a conjurer, Fatima’s cousin Samir brought out the tabla drum and the reed flute. He gave the flute to his brother and began to beat the drum and sing:
Welcome to you, to your guide and companion,
Welcome to the road that led us to know you.
Were it not for love, we would not have come walking,
Nor ever set our foot in any of your lands.
We are the headmen, the pillars of the town,
We are its firm mountains, when all others are overturned.
Then: “Where are you, men? Where’s the dabka line?” Sadiq, Hasan, Abed, Ezz, and the father of the bride got up and made a line near the flute player, who went on playing the flute. Samir accompanied them by beating the tabla and singing:
The horses swept in dancing,
In the plaza of the groom,
God’s blessings on Muhammad,
And for Iblis, his doom!
The horses swept in dancing,
In the plaza for the two,
God’s blessings on Muhammad,
And for Satan, his due!
“Come on, Maryam—Dabkat Lubnan”!
Abed said it from his place in the dabka line, then he jumped to where we sat and pulled Maryam after him. He announced in a loud voice, as if he were introducing a professional singer, that she was going to sing Fairuz’s song, Dabkat Lubnan. I thought, Abed is rash, and he’s embarrassed his sister. She’ll be overcome with fright, she won’t be able to get her voice out and she’ll sing off key.
She did not sing off key. The voice trembled a little at the beginning, and then it became firm and free:
There’s Lebanese dancing in the gathering, dabka with lifted arms,
The knights came down to the circle, brandishing their gleaming swords,
The plaza was lit up by its guests, the arena by their swords,
While the gazelles watched to see them, dancing and linking their arms.
They danced to the sound of the flute, and to Maryam’s singing. Their arms were linked, their shoulders leaning lightly; their torsos would lean and stand erect, and lean again. The knee would bend, a little or a lot, the feet prominent in the dance, leading it. They step, jump, advance, returning and moving forward and always striking the floor with resolution. Five men, no more, as if they were a clan of jinn. Maryam kept her eyes fixed on them as she sang. Had the dance dissipated her fear so that she forgot that she was afraid, or had the words and the melody of the song captivated her, so that it flew away with her as it did with the dancers?
The girls have come down laughing, they come with hips swaying,
You might say they’re riders, leaning on long lances.
The steps to the house are high, worn down from all the cook fires,
A poet bearing gifts sang to me, and went to live near you.
My God, she’s no longer a child, but a young woman with a full voice. It’s strange, Wisal was thinking the same thing. She leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “Has she reached puberty?” I said, “Yes. She was thirteen two months ago.”
The noble steeds came running, they came to the courtyard door,
The towers trembled in their place from their coursing horses,
They came from afar, they appeared, the door shook and opened,
O years, your glory is returning your castle to the heights.
“O protect her from the evil eye!” Wisal was saying it in an audible voice, as if she was talking to herself. Samir was creating a parallel rhythm with his loud expressions of appreciation for the singers and the dancers. From time to time “God is great!” would suddenly burst out, or “My beloved!” “God bless the Prophet!” “The pick of the nobles!” “Welcome, young men, welcome!”
The protectors have returned to the house,
Let it be lifted up with the good news!
Where is the feast, where are the dangerous eyes
That lift up the feast, and spread it in the yard?
The coursing horses have appeared from afar,
Life, long life, for those who protect us,
Welcome, welcome, welcome, God give you health
Hedged with glory
Hedged.
We all repeated, as if we were a chorus or a group singing anthems, or perhaps a crowd or a large audience:
Hedged
And walled with goodness
Walled
And fortified on high
Fortified
And radiant
Welcome, welcome, welcome to your eyes, your eyes.
What did Maryam’s voice do to me? I had never danced in my life. I mean, I had not danced since they threw us out of Tantoura. I used to dance there, but then I forgot.
I announced, “I’m going to dance with Fatima.”
I danced.
Did complete calm suddenly come over the place, or were my five senses occupied with celebrating the bride, so that I went to her sincerely unaware of the presence of anyone else? Even the sound of the flute, which continued, seemed as if it was coming over a long distance, reaching us from afar, or trying to. I put out my hand to the bride, my fingertips touching the ends of the fingers on the hand she stretches out to me. I turn her around, and I turn, slowly. I bend lightly with her, and she bends. It was as if my body had become a light breeze. She inclines, and I incline. I lead her shyly, and surrender gladly.
Why did I dance, and how? Was I dancing, or doing something else? I don’t know. All I remember is that when I returned to my seat at the table Hasan got up and faced me without looking into my eyes, then bent over my hand and kissed it. I noticed a light moisture on the back of my hand.
The next day, Wisal said to me, “Give me a cigarette.”
As I handed her the cigarette I said that I didn’t know that she smoked.
She said, “A cigarette every few months. Ruqayya, everyone says that Wisal knows how to talk, that she can express herself with ease.”
I smiled, and said, “It’s true. If only I were like you. I’m the opposite, and you know it.”
“I know. But yesterday … I wanted to put what I saw into words, but I couldn’t. What happened?”
“You mean the party?”
“I mean your dance with Fatima.”
“I didn’t know that I was able to dance, or that I knew how.”
Wisal looked at me and said, “It’s strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“That dance. In your dance you said what words can’t express.”
40
The Battle of the Dress, or What Do You Want Me to Say?
We were walking on the beach, and a man of medium height was following us, looking toward us and smiling. The man went up to Samir and spoke to him, then said goodbye and left. Wisal stopped and asked, “What does he want? He keeps staring at us, and at me in particular.”
Samir said, “He spoke to me in English and asked, ‘Are you from Israel?’ I wondered at the question, and he pointed to your dress, and smiled, and said, ‘I knew from the dress.’”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything, I let him go.”
“How could you let him go?”
Wisal hurried toward the man and we hurried after her as she was calling, “Sir! Sir! Hey, Mister!”
The man looked around and stopped, waiting for the lady whose thawb had caught his eye. He was smiling broadly.
Wisal grasped the collar of her thawb and said, “This no Izrael. This is a Palestinian thawb that I embroidered with my own hand. Translate, Maryam.”
Maryam translated.
“Izrael is a thief, it stole our land and turned us out and slaughtered us, and it even wants the clothes off my back! Translate, Maryam.” She pointed to her chest with her finger. “This stitch … .”
Maryam interrupted and said in despair, “Aunt Wisal, I don’t know how to stay ‘stitch’ in English.”
“It doesn’t matter, say ‘embroidery,’ say ‘handwork.’ I worked late
many nights to embroider this. It’s called ‘peasant embroidery,’ and this is a Palestinian peasant thawb. What does Izrael have to do with it?”
She pointed to the man with her finger and asked, “You Izraeli?”
The man shook his head and said, “No.”
“Then why do you smile when you say Izrael? Any respectable man is grieved when he hears the name Izrael. I’ll tell you what Izrael means. Translate, Maryam.”
Wisal began to enumerate what Israel does in the West Bank and Gaza, and what it did before the West Bank and Gaza. The words flowed from her in a torrent, as Maryam tried to catch up, saying, “Slowly, Auntie, slowly, translating is hard.”
Wisal said, pointing with her finger to herself and then to each of us, “This, and this and this, everyone is Palestinian. Do you know Tel Aviv?”
The man nodded his head. His smile had disappeared and his face had darkened; he was in a hurry to bring this situation to an end.
“Tel Aviv itself is stolen. They stole Jaffa and named it Tel Aviv. Translate, Maryam.”
We drew Wisal away so she would let the man go. When he moved on Wisal noticed Samir’s presence, and asked him, “Don’t you speak English?”
“I speak it.”
“For God’s sake! Then why didn’t you tell him what Israel’s worth? Son, don’t you know better than anyone else what Israel means?”
The young man blushed, and we decided to go back to the hotel.
But the incident that had made Wisal so tense turned into the subject of jokes. Samir told it to anyone who hadn’t been there, and they insisted that Wisal tell them again what happened. Her skill in telling the story astonished me, for it seemed livelier and more detailed when she told it: “The man was no more than three hands high, his forehead was just a dent in his face, his eyes only a hole here and a hole there. And he was opening his big mouth, his face flushed for his dearly beloved! Maybe if his mouth was a little smaller it would have been okay, or if his face was a little bigger it would have only been half a disaster, but his big mouth swallowed up three quarters of his face! That was at first, before he discovered that we weren’t his dearly beloved, but their cousins. The more I insulted Israel the more his shoulders sank, so he looked shorter; his eyes became narrower, and his face turned colors—it went red like a fez, then yellow like a lemon, then the color drained and darkened.” She stopped suddenly and asked me, “Was he cross-eyed or did I only think so?” She laughed, then ended with a deep sigh, “Oh well, you don’t need to tell me that we can’t bring Palestine back with words!”
Wisal talked to us at length about the Intifada. When Sadiq asked her, she said, “What do you want me to say? You can follow the news better than I can. In Jenin we only get the Amman station on television, and the Israeli stations. Your television has God knows how many stations from the whole world, and you read what’s written in the newspapers and in books.” When we asked her, she didn’t talk. But she would open up when we were talking about this or that and the subject of the Intifada came up unexpectedly, and the talk turned to what happened. The strange thing was that Wisal always laughed when she told her stories, always choosing comical incidents. Was it because she gained strength from laughter? Or was it that despite the sacrifices, the Intifada was like the resistance when it entered the Lebanese camps after 1967, when it filled the residents with pride and confidence?
She said, “Kids, by God, just little kids. A boy the size of a hand span, with no idea where God had put him, with a cooking pot on his head and in his hand a weapon half again as big as he was. They tell him, ‘Go and kill,’ and he’s scared, scared of killing and scared of being killed. Armed and armored, screened by the door of his armored car. A house mouse, sticking his head a quarter of the way out and aiming his weapon, and the next second hiding behind his door. God bless our kids, they attacked them like lions.”
I remembered her words as I followed the events of the Intifada on television in Abu Dhabi. I would follow the little ones as they carried their slingshots and aimed their stones at the soldiers. I would follow the soldiers as they swooped down on the young men and put them in the police vans, or took one aside to smash his head or his arm. I would think a lot about Wisal and her children, and look closely at the pictures whenever a woman appeared in an embroidered peasant dress, raising her hand with determination to throw a stone at one of the army cars, or to quarrel with the soldiers in order to release one of the children they had arrested. She seems to be Wisal. She looks like her, but it’s not Wisal. I wonder what she’s doing now? I would not meet her again until five years later in Alexandria, although I saw her twice in my dreams. Once we were in Tantoura, walking on the seashore, just two girls walking barefoot on the wet, sandy shore, walking along the edge of the sea. Were they talking? I didn’t hear any talk in my dream. I saw them coming, and I saw their backs as they moved away. The other dream was a nightmare. I remembered it when I opened my eyes; maybe it woke me up, as a man will be wakened by a fit of choking or a bad pain in his belly. I calmed down a little and went back to sleep, and I couldn’t recapture the dream when I tried to later on.
41
Surprising Maryam
Naji al-Ali said in a newspaper interview that he created the character of Hanzala to protect his spirit after he moved from the Ain al-Helwa camp to Kuwait to work in the press there. I read the interview when it was published in the paper on the anniversary of his martyrdom, reading it with interest because I loved Naji al-Ali’s drawings and had followed them in the Safir newspaper when I was in Beirut, especially during the days of the Israeli invasion. I was also interested because Naji was from Ain al-Helwa and was a friend of Ezz, and my uncle Abu Amin knew him and talked about him with admiration. When he was martyred I became more interested in him; I thought his drawings must have had great importance since they feared them to the point of killing him. Is it true that Abu Ammar had a hand in it? Rumors about that circulated, but I say it was Israel.
In Beirut I began to follow Naji’s drawings out of curiosity, since he was near to me, a countryman, someone we knew. Then gradually I began to notice that he expressed things that I wanted to say, even if I was not aware that I wanted to say them until the moment I saw the drawing. It was as if he spoke first, defining what was said before I put it into words or even conceived it in my mind. Or as if he knew me better than I knew myself. I didn’t notice that Hanzala resembled me; it never even occurred to me. After all, Hazala was a boy of ten, his feet bare, his clothes patched and his hair disheveled. Naji said in his interview that his hair was like the quills of a porcupine, dressed and ready to defend him (before I read the interview, the little lines surrounding Hanzala’s head had seemed to me more like the rays of the sun). Naji said in his interview that he created Hanzala to protect his spirit, as if he were an amulet protecting him from error. I wondered at what he said, and then I thought about it and remembered that I had brought five clippings from Beirut, each one a drawing of his that I had cut out when it appeared, and kept. When we were getting ready to move to Abu Dhabi I was afraid I would lose them, so I put them with my identity card in my wallet. I put four of them in the wallet, and then stopped a long time at the fifth, the only one below which I had written something: al-Safir, 9/16/1982. I remember the moment I saw the drawing, standing by the door of the house: Hanzala was looking at a mass cemetery, crosses stretching as far as the eye could see, as far as the horizon, where the earth met a black sky. Each of the crosses was like a crucified man, the horizontal wooden bar as if it were two arms stretched out and ending on the left in a hand, pointing, all of them pointing to a small Israeli soldier at the far left of the picture. Strange; Naji saw the massacre a day before it happened, and spoke out.
For the next three days the newspaper did not carry Naji’s daily drawing. Because what happened surpassed all words? Or because he mourned for three days? Only on Wednesday, September 22, did the newspaper publish a drawing of Naji’s in its usual place, on the last pa
ge: the Lebanese flag, with the cedar in the foreground, cut lengthwise by a band on which he had written ‘The End’ in English, and beneath it in Arabic. Under the flag there was a pile of bloody bodies, with Hanzala looking at them.
Strange; I remember the dates as if years had not passed since then, or as if I had learned them by heart.
I read the interview with Naji in the morning, and at night I took the newspaper to bed and read it again. I thought, when Naji moved to the Gulf he was afraid, like me. He was a young man, and he was afraid for himself. I’m no longer young—I’ve become a grandmother, and my children are the age he was when he left Ain al-Helwa to work in Kuwait. I slept, and then got up; and before I lifted my head from the pillow, I found myself thinking, I’m not afraid for myself but for Maryam. What amulet does she have?
As she was getting ready to go to school, I talked to her about Naji and Hanzala. She said, “I used to follow his drawings, I really loved them.” I found it strange.
In the evening when I was alone with her in our room, I returned to the subject of Naji’s drawings. I said, “What do you like about the drawings?”
She said, “The clarity.”
I didn’t understand, so I asked her to explain what she meant. She said, “Hanzala is clear, from his name that means a bitter fruit, to his shape, and to his stance. He’s a little boy who looks on. His enemies are also clear: men who are short and fat and look ugly, who want the world completely at their disposal. They’re also clear in the destruction they cause.”
Tears nearly sprang from my eyes. I hugged her, and she asked, laughing, “Is this a sentimental Arab film? What happened?”
Maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid for Maryam. She surprises me. One day Abed called her “Surprising Maryam,” but he hadn’t seen her for two years, so even he was surprised by that same spring inside her. It’s different from the young men’s spring; they call it “the girls’ lathe.” Abed found his sister a teen, a small woman. She was no taller than he was or than her two other brothers, but she had grown suddenly from a child with two braids into a teenager with all the curves of a young woman. She had been shaped on the girls’ lathe. I smiled. But the spring was working on her mind also. It takes me by surprise.