The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  A few months ago I met Dr. Anis in Amman and asked him about the library. He said that the books which had not been stolen were transported to Cyprus in 1983, and then to European capitals; he did not know how or why, or what happened to them. As for the plundered books, the Red Cross had succeeded in moving them to Algeria and it is said that they were lost there, just as it is said that a part of them arrived at the port of Ashdod by sea, and that Israeli harbor authorities notified the PLO without receiving any answer. Then they warned the PLO that they would destroy them if they did not take delivery. Dr. Anis looks at me suddenly and says, “This is all I know, Hasan.”

  Why have I digressed to speak about the massacre in Shatila and the neighboring areas? Certainly I do not intend to make a crude comparison between plundered books and martyrs, or to equate plundering the Center with the massacre; but I wanted to give some indication, even tacit, of the context in which this Center grew and collected its documents, maps, manuscripts, and rare books. To set up a research center of this value in the context of the slaughter and in spite of it (and here I am not limiting myself to the slaughter of Shatila and the neighboring areas on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the 16th, 17th, and 18th of September 1982, but rather I mean Palestinian history over half a century, the continuous slaughter from 1947 up to the massacre in Hebron days ago)—to create this edifice in the context of slaughter is something of singular value, rare in human history. Thus participating in violating or scattering it is a compound crime, which includes among other offenses scorning the Palestinian name and the blood which has given it its identity and its meaning.

  48

  The Girls’ Lathe

  Yes, “She’s been turned on the girls’ lathe.” Where did I get that expression? I heard it from my Uncle Abu Jamil’s wife; it floated away, as forgotten things will, only for us to discover suddenly that they have been preserved, unaffected by being hidden away in some nook or cranny. Did Umm Jamil repeat the expression from time to time, or did she say it once, on noticing that I had become a young woman? I see Maryam growing day after day; the spring is doing its work, I know. And yet I notice suddenly, as if I did not know, and I say, “She’s been turned on the girls’ lathe.” I think about Amin and look closely, as if I wanted to look for him too. Would his eyes have glistened to see his daughter such a beautiful young woman? I smile suddenly, and think, “Like a willow branch,” her stature the more beautiful for its curves. Amin had said, “Look, Ruqayya, how beautiful her face is!” She was a nursing baby with a round face, her hair intensely black and her eyes dark blue, her skin soft, tender, and fragile, as if it were made of rose petals, the color between white and transparent pink. She’s become a young woman, Amin, beautiful as she always was. And now her beauty is enhanced by a sharp tongue. She chatters, Amin, and talks a lot of nonsense like her brother Abed, loving bickering even more than he does, with a ready answer always at the tip of her tongue. And she sings. You liked her voice when she would sing, a child’s voice; it’s different, now. Yesterday she sang me a song she said she had learned from a classmate of hers in school, a song about Alexandria:

  O Alexandria, how wondrous your sea,

    Ah, if only I had some of your love!

  I’m tossed about from wave to wave,

    As the fishing’s good and the tide is high.

  I wash my clothes and hang out my cares

    For the climbing sun, where I dissolve,

  Like a peasant in Urabi’s army,

    Cut down on the castle and gone to the sea,

  Like a breeze that floats above the hills,

    Come from the sea to subside in your charm.

  O Alexandria, O lady born of Egypt,

    Flashing a smile and starting to laugh,

  The sea is a window and a lattice,

    And you are the princess overlooking the world.

  I’ve missed you, Amin. I’ve missed you because you’ve been with us yet absent, because the pain of your absence seems like a thin thread braided with another, of pride perhaps, and of gratitude to you. She’s no longer a child, Amin. It’s a woman’s voice, released by the melody and the words. Maryam has surprised me. It’s surprised me that at fifteen, she’s no longer a child; she’s become a woman, a strong woman.

  When we were alone in our suite at night I asked her to sing me the song again. She said, “No, it’s better for you to wish for it,” and she laughed. Then when I was in bed I found her standing next to me and singing me some of the lines of the song in a soft voice, as if she were rocking me to sleep. She changed some of the words, and the delivery and the voice; even the rhythm was altered:

  O Tantouriya,

  How wondrous your sea,

  Ah, if only I had

  Some of your love!

  I am tossed

  From wave to wave,

  As the fishing’s good

  And the tide is high.

  I wash my clothes

  And hang out my cares

  For the climbing sun,

  Where I dissolve.

  Then:

  O Tantouriya,

  O lady born of Haifa,

  Flashing a smile

  And starting to laugh,

  The sea is a window

  And a lattice,

  And you are the princess

  Overlooking the world.

  She was smiling as she sang, scanning the words in a playful rhythm, caressing me with the singing. I resisted the sudden tears that sprang to my eyes; I didn’t want the joy to turn into something sad. I said, “Good night, Maryuma.”

  She laughed. “‘Maryuma’ is only for Abed, the patent is recorded in his name.”

  I smiled. “It’s legal to use it without infringing his patent.”

  “It’s not legal!” She kissed me and went to bed.

  It’s strange. I slept and I saw you in a dream, Amin. You were receiving a large family who had come to ask for your daughter’s hand. You were wearing your navy suit and light blue shirt and the dark, wine-colored tie. You seemed pleased; you were smiling. Suddenly I asked, “Where is the young man who wants Maryam?” and I woke up.

  Then I dreamed another dream, a longer one. I saw the young man who had been cast ashore. I saw him exactly as I had seen him in the sea of Tantoura, under the brilliant sun, his legs taut and his chest bare, approaching with deliberate steps on the wet sand. Even the drops of moisture on his shoulders were clear in the dream. He seemed very handsome, perhaps more handsome than when I had seen him previously, over forty years earlier. But the one sitting on the shore was not Ruqayya, but rather Maryam. I told her that his name was Yahya and that he was from Ain Ghazal. She was looking at him and nodded her head as she repeated, “I know … I know.”

  It’s strange; it’s as if the dream were a vision, Amin. One of the neighbors spoke to me, saying that she wanted to ask for Maryam for her son. She was speaking of the son who was studying in Cairo; she showed me his picture. I said, “Maryam is young, and she will go to the university after she finishes high school.” The neighbor, who is a very nice woman, said, “Let’s not talk about marriage now. When he comes during the vacation you will meet him, and he will meet Maryam and she him. If she likes him we would be honored by the relationship, Sitt Ruqayya.” I told Sadiq and he laughed as if I had told a joke. When I steered the conversation back to seriousness, he refused decisively. He said, “No one now commits himself at fifteen nor even at seventeen. Maryam is young, why would you tie her down with marriage and children and responsibilities! She has responsibilities of another kind, her studies and her professional future.” I spoke to Maryam and she reacted just like Sadiq, and since she has a sharper tongue, she began to comment on the young man who was asking for her hand without having seen her, relying on his mother’s eyes. “Am I going to marry his mother?” Then she and Sadiq began to make jokes about it, twisting and turning it until it became a laughingstock.

  Maryam has decided to study med
icine, Amin. She doesn’t miss an opportunity to announce her decision. Sadiq seems worried; he’s not certain she wants it, he thinks she wants to be like you. He told me that privately, and he also told Abed on his second visit to us, in Abu Dhabi. Abed has not changed; just like the first time, he came for a week with the same small leather bag hung from his shoulder, in pants and a shirt and rubber-soled shoes. He announced on his arrival that he had only used the suit once, and that the suit, the shirt and the tie were all new, just as they had been. “This is a forewarning, Mr. Sadiq, so you don’t do anything stupid again!” Just as he had before, he only remembered the gifts on the day he left. We laughed, and Sadiq said, “I think Abed is deceiving us, claiming that he forgot in order to make us laugh when we are seeing him off.” Abed laughed and jokingly quoted an old film, “You wrong me, Sir!” So we laughed more. During his visit he sat down with Maryam to discuss her studies with her. He said, “Maryam, when you choose a field, don’t pay a lot of attention to which academic subjects you like and which you don’t; take a longer view. Think about what you want to do with your life. Are you with me? For example, if you decided to dig a ditch, it would be important for you to know how, I mean for you to acquire the skills needed to know the nature of the soil and the styles of digging and of shoring up the sides, etc. Isn’t that so?”

  She said, “Yes, it is.”

  He laughed, and said, “No it’s not. The most important thing is to know where to put the ditch, from where to where and why, I mean why you are digging this ditch here precisely and not in another place, what its function is, and what your goal for it is.”

  I intervened: “I don’t understand anything you’re saying, Abed, and Maryam doesn’t understand either.”

  Maryam looked at me and said, “Mama, wait a little. Go on, Abed.”

  Abed said, “In short, think about what you want to do with your life. It takes thought for all of us to choose who we want to be, what we will be, where we will stand, and why.”

  She interrupted him, “I want to be a doctor.”

  “You want to be like Father?”

  “Maybe!”

  “I was studying architecture. Perhaps I wanted to be like Sadiq because he was the eldest, and because Mother and Father were always praising his outstanding achievement. Perhaps because I was infatuated with building, infatuated with architecture books. After 1982 I looked up one day, as I was looking around me at the ruins and the destruction in the city and the camps, and I thought: what use is it to build beautiful houses and to plan cities if they are going to bring them down on our heads, what’s the use? I said to myself, you have two choices, boy, and only two: that you specialize in military science and become a well-qualified resistance fighter—I mean, able to plan on the basis of real knowledge—or that you specialize in law. Protect the place first and secure it, and then let your imagination run wild, if you want to plan cities as beautiful as dreams. The first choice was not possible, so I went for the second. Do you understand, Maryuma?”

  “I understand, Abud.”

  “And you understand, Mother?”

  I did not answer his question. I was thinking about the day when he told me that he was going to leave the College of Engineering, and we had an argument. I was angry at his decision to leave a subject on which he had spent three years, in order to start all over again. I told myself that the boy had answered my question, nine years later. Is it a convincing answer, Amin?

  He said, “Where do you want to study, Beirut?”

  “I don’t want Beirut.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Egypt.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Egypt. Because the expense will be less for Sadiq, I mean less than Europe, for example, and less than Beirut too.”

  “In Cairo?”

  “In Alexandria, if my scores allow it—they require very high scores. If not Alexandria then one of the provincial universities.”

  “Why Alexandria? Because you love Fairuz’s song?”

  She sang the beginning to him: “Alexandrian shore, O you shore of love, We went to Alexandria, and it cast its spell on us.” She laughed. “No, because of Sheikh Imam’s song.” She sang,

  O Alexandria, how wondrous your sea,

    Ah, if only I had some of your love!

  I’m tossed about from wave to wave,

    As the fishing’s good and the tide is high.

  She said, “Frankly, it’s Alexandria for Mama’s sake.”

  “Will you take Mama with you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “How will you learn when you’re snuggled in your mother’s arms?”

  “I’ll snuggle, then I’ll get up and go to the university and learn a little, then come back and snuggle. Every day a little learning, and a little plus a little will make a lot, even if I do snuggle!”

  He laughed at the image. She became serious, “Mama wants to go with me; she’s not happy here. When she came back from Beirut she was sick for a whole month. Mama loves the sea, and so I chose Alexandria and not Cairo.”

  Abed looked at me, “Do you agree to Alexandria, Mama?”

  I didn’t answer; I didn’t know.

  49

  Beirut (III)

  “Birds of a feather flock together.” The proverb came to me between waking and sleep, as I was preoccupied with the thought of going to a city we didn’t know, where we didn’t know anyone. Why not go back to Lebanon and live in Beirut, or return to Sidon and live like the rest of our people there, come what may? Sadiq said that the situation of the Palestinians in Lebanon was getting more difficult by the day. He said that a friend of his visited Beirut recently and met a young man who suddenly lifted his eyes and whispered, “I’m a Palestinian!” as if he were telling him something secret or embarrassing, calling for an explanation or an apology. He said that society there has come to reject the Palestinians, telling them in a thousand ways, we don’t want you. Young men don’t find work and the government doesn’t permit them to hold dozens of jobs, not to mention the daily insults in casual words here and there about the foreigners who demolished the city and brought on its devastation.

  We will not go back to Lebanon, we will go to Alexandria. A new beginning, at sixty. Who begins all over again at sixty? I would rather go back to Lebanon and flock together with birds of my feather. I heard that proverb from my uncle Abu Jamil’s wife; it’s strange, how she comes to me after a long absence. Not a day goes by but that I remember a proverb she quoted or a scene she was part of. I can no longer recall her face, though I remember that her complexion was the color of wheat, that her hair had a real curl, and that she was very articulate. I remember one day when she invited us to have musakhan at her house. As we approached we were greeted by the aroma of the oven-baked bread and the mixture of onions, sumac, and olive oil, and suddenly I said, “I’m hungry!” My brothers laughed and said that it was the aroma that made me salivate. “That’s right,” I said. “When I left the house I didn’t feel hungry, and when I inhaled the odor I imagined the roasted chicken on the fresh bread and became hungry.” They laughed more. There was no better musakhan than Umm Jamil’s, nor any better maqlouba than hers. “Nor any better mulukhiya,” adds Ezz.

  Did Umm Jamil invite us often or was her food so good that that it stayed in the memory, as if we had eaten it with her dozens of times? The day we had the musakhan, or perhaps another day, Umm Jamil said that her father’s grandfather had told her that many of the people of Tantoura came from Egypt in the days of Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali, and settled there. My uncle Abu Amin laughed and said, “Maybe your grandfather loved Egypt, so he said that we come from there. Did he study in al-Azhar, Umm Jamil?”

  “He studied in al-Azhar. He used to visit Egypt every year; he would mount his horse, say ‘By your leave,’ and come back loaded down with gifts of every shape and color. I was little, no higher than five hand spans.”

  My uncle Abu Jamil intervened, waving his hand, �
�In the Turkish era in the time of the Ottomans, the world was completely open. People would go and live wherever they wanted, since it was all Arab Muslim land.”

  Uncle Abu Amin laughed again and said, “Or everyone would choose to trace his origins to the place he loved best. One would say, ‘We’re descendants of the Prophet, we came from Mecca,’ and another would say ‘We’re of Turkish origin,’ as long as the Turks ruled the country. Someone would say he came from Aleppo, the administrative center in the old days. We can’t tell the strand of truth apart from imagination.”

  Uncle Abu Jamil suddenly tensed, “Be careful, everyone, that’s enough of this talk. If the Jews heard us they would say, ‘Go to Egypt, that’s where you come from.’ That would be all we need!”

  I no longer remember what Uncle Abu Jamil looked like. I only remember that he was old, that he carried a large rosary in his hand, that he prayed a lot, and that he was with us in the truck that took us to al-Furaydis. I don’t remember him in al-Furaydis or al-Maskubiya in Hebron, but my mother said that he and his wife went to their daughter, who was married and living in Syria.

  Maryam said that she would not study in Lebanon; was that her wish, or did she imagine that I did not want to go back to live in Beirut? When I returned from my visit to Beirut, the one visit after we left Lebanon, I was sick and stayed in bed for two months. Sadiq said that the visit was the reason; perhaps Maryam was influenced by what her brother said.

  Yes, I visited Beirut. I went back after five years away, and stayed in a hotel. I lost my way in the camp; I couldn’t find the houses I used to go to or the school where I taught, and I became disoriented in the lanes. I couldn’t find anyone I knew, not Haniya nor anyone else. Where had they gone? I was so upset that I didn’t leave my hotel room for two days. Then I tried again to bring back the city, to connect the memories I carried in my body with what was new in it. I walked, and looked closely; I thought, “It was here.” I delved, as if I were looking for a city submerged in another city, sunk under a weighty pile. No, that’s foolish writing, it wasn’t like that, or at least not completely. The sea was in its place, Beirut’s familiar sea. The mountains were its eastern border, as usual, and Bliss Street was also the same, and the American University. I pick my way carefully through the streets, looking closely, and I find—what do I find? Damage that convulses me, as if I had not been aware of it or had not seen it before. In the Tariq al-Jadida, the Fakahani, Hamra Street, the market area, the Demarcation Line. Is it because I’m seeing it now for the first time as a whole, from the outside? Acre Hospital is standing, people go to it and there are doctors and workers inside. The Gaza Hospital building is also standing, with immigrants living in it. But the camp has changed; all of Beirut has changed.