The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  Karima was laughing as she told the story. It’s strange, I remember everything she said that night, even though at the time it seemed like fleeting words, just like the rest of the talk. Then the story surfaced and became insistent. I thought, I’ll tell it to Maryam; then I wondered suddenly, am I preparing her? Perhaps, I thought to myself.

  Maryam can snatch a thought from the air. When I told her the story, she commented, “You intend to do the same? You think that if a man over a hundred was able to do it, then I must be able to! Remember, Mama, that Karima was a child of five, and her grandfather who she thought was over a hundred might have been a man of sixty or even fifty-five; kids think like that, that old people are really, really old. Anyway wait until I graduate and I’ll go with you. We’ll buy two donkeys and just take off.” She said it and burst out laughing; I couldn’t take her laughter, I was furious.

  At sixty or over a hundred or at Noah’s age, Noah who reached nine hundred, the man took his age in his hand, or on the back of a donkey, and did what he wanted. Neither the Israeli state nor its soldiers not the barbed wire on the border broke his will.

  I’ll go back, like him. Not on the back of a donkey but by the logic of birds.

  Fatima said, “The residents of al-Furaydis know the locations of the cemeteries.”

  Yes, locations; the plural, not the singular. The old cemetery and the mass grave, and perhaps a third cemetery. If one of them went there with you he would point to part of the asphalt and say, “This is the mass grave, under the lot for cars, at the ‘parking.’” Ruqayya would put up a tent for herself at the parking lot. Oh my God, hold on, Ruqayya! A refugee, in a tent, in Tantoura? Where will I go then, to one of the tourist chalets on the seashore? Yes, the village has become a resort. Fatima gave me pictures and a CD that Maryam put into the computer, and I saw Tantoura, its sea and its islands and its palms and its Indian figs. Just as they were. What’s new? The chalets, the sailboats, fishing, fishing for pleasure and not for sustenance, and God only knows what else besides.

  Fatima said, “At the entry of the school there’s a sign with the names of those who were killed.”

  “The names of the martyrs?”

  The ghost of a smile; I realized that the question was foolish.

  “No, a sign with the names of their dead, killed the day of the battle. I did not take a picture of the sign or of the school, for fear that one of them would appear before me suddenly and confiscate the camera. The school has become a center for agricultural research.”

  The pictures: the tomb of al-Jereini has stayed the same. Fatima said, “I found a woman praying. When she finished she greeted me and said, ‘They have no power over the sheikh or his tomb. No one can budge it.’”

  I looked up and pointed, explaining to Maryam, “This was the glass factory.”

  Fatima said, “Yes. They say that one of the Rothschilds, I don’t know which one, one of the Rothschilds visited the town in the forties and saw the vines. He said, ‘There’s a lot of value here, it must be put to work.’ He founded a glass factory, probably to bottle alcoholic beverages.”

  “In my time it was an abandoned plant.”

  “Now it’s a museum for glass. Then there’s this building, that has Arabic writing on it establishing the date when it was built.”

  “This is the Yahya house, the most prominent family in Tantoura. Is anyone living there?”

  “It’s dilapidated, just a façade and two or three rooms. Some of the young men from al-Furaydis use it to store their fishing equipment.”

  “And the rest of the houses?”

  Fatima was silent. I repeated the question.

  “They were torn down.”

  I look at the pictures, I look at them intently. Do the pictures nourish the logic of the birds? They transport me in a flash, with no checkpoints, no barbed wire, no armored soldiers; I just go. Then what—will I put up a tent, erecting it next to my family, in the parking lot, or will I live next to the Indian figs, each of us keeping the other company? When the guests leave I will scrutinize the pictures at length; while they’re with me I just look at them once, once only, then I take them and put them away in a drawer among Amin’s shirts. I know, I’m behaving oddly, I mean in keeping three of Amin’s shirts. I wash them from time to time, and iron them and fold them and put them back in their place in the clothes chest. Maryam noticed them some time ago, and then again when we moved to Alexandria. She was on the verge of asking about them, and then her face flushed and she left the room.

  Abed said, as he welcomed Wisal by telephone, “On the news yesterday they announced an earthquake in Alexandria.”

  “There wasn’t any earthquake. Or maybe a very small one—none of us felt it.”

  “Auntie Wisal, you and my mother and Maryam and Fatima are all together in one place, and there’s no earthquake? How can that be?”

  She understood the teasing and laughed.

  We have coffee together in the morning, we go to the sea, we sit in a café overlooking it. Fatima talks about Lid, about her childhood and her parents. I ask her about Hasan and she tells me. Wisal makes us laugh, telling us about the Intifada and her children.

  “They arrested all five of them. Even the girl, they picked her up too. This one they arrested for two days, that one two weeks or a month, the other one six months, then they arrest him again. A knock on the door at dawn has become familiar. They knock on the door and I open it and shout at them: ‘What’s your hurry? Are we going to run away—how? There’s only one door, and you’re standing under the windows. And where’s your shame? My daughter and I are in our nightgowns, can I open the door for you when we’re in our nightgowns? You should be ashamed!’”

  “You talk to them like that?”

  “Yes. The first time I thought I went too far, but then I learned that they’re usually young, and they blush. They already feel guilty, and when I scold them they feel it more. Of course, those are the kids; the officers and the special forces are another matter. They come to arrest a leader or one of the fedayeen, and they’re really violent. They hit you with the rifle butt right away, and that’s if they don’t fire first.”

  “And the day they came to arrest you?”

  “They came to arrest me. I said ‘Okay, but I won’t ride in an Israeli car.’ They yelled at me and I yelled at them. They were young conscripts, I wouldn’t have dared if they had been officers. I said, ‘Maybe in a taxi.’ They laughed, and said ‘Madwoman!’ I said, ‘Mad or not, I won’t ride in an Israeli car through the streets of Jenin, it would ruin my reputation! If my father were alive he would kill you and kill me, and say you’re eloping with my daughter.’ They didn’t understand ‘eloping.’ I was laughing at them, and I enjoyed it more because they didn’t know I was making fun of them. I said it again, ‘I will not ride in an Israeli car unless you tie me up and put me in it by force.’ Thank God I’m tall and heavy, no three of them would be able to lift me. I let myself go. They said, ‘Then walk.’ I went the whole way from the camp to the police station, walking calmly and with my head up, just like a queen. They were guarding me on both sides and the military car was coming behind me, slowly. I was laughing inside. I didn’t let it show because I didn’t want to get into real trouble, but it nearly got away from me when I saw some people I knew standing in the street. I saw the laughter in their eyes, and we understood each other perfectly. But I didn’t laugh.”

  “Once on the night before Eid some young men from the camp climbed up and hung flags on the electricity wires. On the morning of Eid Palestinian flags were flying over the camp, as if it was a holiday for independence, and not for the end of Ramadan. It was like they were possessed, they came into the camp and swore and cursed. ‘Take down the flags!’ But the young guys had disappeared like salt in water, and the women said, ‘We can’t climb, you climb up.’ We stood watching while they climbed up and took down the flags, with every one of us praying secretly that they would fall and break their necks. God didn’t ans
wer our prayers, except in one case. A soldier got clumsy on the pole and fell and landed on his snout, may God not help him. Who told him to oppress people and serve in an army of occupation?”

  55

  The Return to Lebanon

  Maryam is talking about the trip, she’s burning to join Abed in France. She’s arranged all the details with him: she’ll be an intern during the first year and then start her specialty training. I do not comment. She thinks I’m worried because I want her to get married; she’s twenty-two, when will she marry? Abed is thirty-five; will she be like him? I put my concern into words, but I do not speak about the other topic, not about where to go from here. Abu Dhabi? I don’t want that. Maryam says, ‘Come with me.’ Abed also says to come, that he wants me to live with him, but I won’t go. There’s a lump in my throat, just a lump that doesn’t go away, maybe because I don’t talk about it with anyone. Sadiq is no longer satisfied with calling once a week, instead he calls twice and sometimes three times. He gathers what’s bothering me, and assures me that they’re waiting impatiently for me. I say, “God willing”; the expression worries him, or maybe my way of saying it, and he insists more: “You won’t stay in Alexandria one day after Maryam leaves. What’s tying you to Alexandria?” I don’t say, a house, even though it’s temporary. I hang up and explode at Maryam, as if she were Sadiq or represented him: “Children are strange, they think their mother is a suitcase they can take with them wherever they go. They pick it up here and put it down there. My God!” I was angry. Maryam kissed me and said, “The boys, not the girls. I for example would like to be a suitcase. You would carry me and take me with you wherever you went. Imagine what would happen if you left me! A poor, abandoned suitcase, belonging to no one, crying bitterly. Then a kind passerby would notice and say, ‘What’s wrong, Suitcase?’ She would say, ‘My mother left me,’ and the kind man would take me around the streets looking for my mother.” She wants to make me laugh, but I don’t laugh. I exclaimed, in a voice that seemed to me louder than it should be, “Damn exile, and damn Palestine!” The air was tense; Maryam disappeared. She came back carrying a tray with two cups of coffee; she put it on the balcony and said, “Come on, let’s have coffee. You’ll look at the sea and drink coffee with the apple of your eye, by which I mean Dr. Maryam, in person.” I laughed, not because of her words but because as she was dragging me to the balcony by one hand, she was using the other to tickle me on the side, on my shoulder, and under the arm.

  “Sadiq, I’m going back to Sidon.”

  “On a visit?”

  “No, I’ll rent an apartment and live there. In the summer we’ll all get together there.”

  “God bless you, Mother, can’t you find anywhere but south Lebanon, with the Israelis as your neighbors?”

  “They’ll leave.”

  “General Giap has spoken. He said they would leave, and they left!”

  “Who’s General Giap?”

  “A leader of the Vietnamese liberation forces in the fifties and sixties. Now General Ruqayya has decided.”

  I did not lose my temper over his sarcasm. I repeated coldly, “They’ll leave!”

  “Even if they left, every time there’s friction or at every little crisis they’ll shell the south and storm in. Anyway Hasan and Abed won’t be able to visit you in Lebanon.”

  “There’s no problem for Abed, he has a French passport.”

  “And Hasan?”

  I did not answer.

  “Mother …” He marshaled his arguments and the call lasted half an hour before I hung up. In the evening I asked Maryam, “How much time will you stay in Alexandria after the exam?”

  She said, “I’ll wait for the results, and then to get my certificates from the university and have them notarized, then I’ll leave. Maybe I’ll need a couple of months. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t want to start getting ready for the trip while you’re studying for the exams. As soon as you finish your exams I’ll begin to pack up the household.”

  “You’ve decided?”

  “I’ve decided.”

  “Sidon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Sadiq agree?”

  “He didn’t agree, but I’ve decided.”

  From Alexandria I followed the liberation of the south. Maryam was in her bachelor’s exams, either in the college taking an exam or in her room studying. I would almost call her to see what I saw, and then stifle the call. But I did not stifle the tears. Maybe if she had been sitting beside me I would have stifled them out of embarrassment. It’s strange; where did all these tears come from? Why are tears linked to sadness and care? Were they tears of joy, then? No, neither sadness nor joy, but something larger, with greater depth, ambiguous, like the look in your eyes when someone holds the newborn that has just slipped out of you. The newborn is wet with your water and blood, and whoever holds him, doctor or midwife or your mother, holds him upside down, by his feet. He’s warm, about to open his eyes, about to announce with a cry that he has opened the airway in his throat to live. You’re weary, maybe suspended between life and death; you look up weakly and tears flow from your eyes, not in sadness or in joy but rather … rather what? It’s beyond my ability to put into words. Maybe it’s a spring in some obscure place inside the body or the spirit or the earth, like the spring in the southern cave, east of town. My mother says that its water is sweet, like the water of Kawthar. “What’s Kawthar, Mother?” She says it’s a river in Paradise. I find that strange—how does she know the taste of a river in Paradise, had she ever visited it? Later I heard someone say that “Paradise lies at the feet of our mothers.” I was seven and I thought, “then she did visit it; why didn’t she tell me?” Television broadcasts scenes of the liberation live, and the mothers on television, who look like my mother and my aunt, trill and rejoice. They throw rice and rose petals on those who are returning to their villages. I’ll live there, I’ll live beside the tomb of my mother and my uncle Abu Amin, and when the time comes I’ll settle beside them. One day maybe they’ll take us all there. To the parking lot? Fatima said that they are under the ‘parking,’ there; that’s the expression she used. But why move us? Maybe it would be better for us to stay where we are, like guards at the gate, between our old camp and the country that has become ours once again.

  I’ll cut out everything I’ve just written; if Hasan read it he would say that there’s no call for that kind of talk, it’s emotional and exaggerated and spoils the writing. People followed the liberation of 2000 on their television screens and it was described in thousands of reports and newspapers, and written about by specialists and non-specialists alike. I want you to write about what you witnessed. Isn’t this a part of the testimony, Hasan? My fast heartbeat, the box of tissues, blowing my nose again and again as I watch the residents return to their villages twenty years later? God keep you, Sadiq, what’s left of life is less than what’s passed; let me do what I want.

  Yes, I will live in the seventh and last house. I suddenly sit up in bed, after lying there between sleep and waking. I count on my fingers: our house in Tantoura; my uncle Abu Amin’s old house in Sidon; the marital home, in Sidon also; the house on the Tariq al-Jadida in Beirut; then Abu Dhabi, then Alexandria. The seventh will be there in Sidon, at the gate. I like the number seven, maybe it’s a blessing. I feel the key hung on my neck and Abed’s gift, the silver piece made by the Kurd, carrying on the trade of his teacher, the Sabian smith.