The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  “After several days they loaded us up again and took us to Umm Khalid. Do you know where Umm Khalid is? It’s a village in the district of Tulkarm, in the middle of the road between Tantoura and Jaffa, on the Natanya line, near the sea. They had occupied it and thrown the people out. They held us behind barbed wire and would take us to forced labor in the quarries, from sunup until sunset. We cut stones and carried them on our backs, taking them to the places they designated. It’s strange that we withstood it. I mean, I don’t know how our bodies bore it, because they gave us a single potato in the morning and half a dried fish in the evening, and they beat us and abused us.

  “Then they moved us again, to a big prison camp in Ijlil, on the road between Umm Khalid and Jaffa. Instead of the work in the quarries they began to drive us to the villages they had occupied and where they had destroyed the houses, to take the stones. We were carrying the stones of the houses of our people, so they could use them in building their settlements. And they used us to build fortifications, military fortifications, and to bury the Arab martyrs. They took us to Qaqun, where there had been a battle between them and the Iraqi army in which they were victorious. We had to bury dozens of the bodies. We counted them: ninety bodies. Human nature is amazing, by God it’s amazing. I had not cried since I left our town, but I cried that day when I was burying the young Iraqis. I was sad for the young men and repelled by the odor of their bodies, and the repulsion made me more disturbed. I thought, ‘Why? They’re martyrs.’ I would bury them and cry, sobbing aloud. I remember the ones I buried. I remember all their faces, but one face in particular comes to me sometimes in sleep. He speaks to me, but when I wake up I don’t remember anything he said, even though I’m sure it was a long speech.

  “In Ijlil a truck arrived carrying hundreds of men. It was obvious that they had not had a drink of water for days. They set them down at a single water faucet. The men rushed for it, and they shot at them, and some died. We later learned that those men were prisoners from Lid and Ramla.

  “There were Egyptian prisoners in Ijlil, including a pilot whose plane fell over Tel Aviv on the morning of May 15, so he was the first Egyptian prisoner, bearing the number one. That’s why I don’t remember his name—we called him ‘Prisoner Number One.’ There was another pilot named Abd al-Rahman Inan, who was the leader of the flight of five planes that attacked the area near Haifa the following week. The weather was so bad when they took off from al-Arish that they had to turn back. Then an order came to take off again. Inan said that the British were the ones who brought down the five planes, and that he was the only one destined to survive. They treated the Egyptian prisoners harshly, like us. Inan told one of our mates that the Israeli soldier grabbed a small copy of the Quran that he was carrying, threw it on the ground and began trampling it underfoot.

  “Twenty-five of the young men from Tantoura were able to flee from Ijlil. They discovered it in the morning and they became very agitated. Beatings and insults and abuse. Afterward they brought us back to Umm Khalid and from there they took us to Sarafand, near Ramla. It was a big camp with nearly 1,500 prisoners. In Sarafand there were other prisoners from the Egyptian army, officers and soldiers. They separated us from them but we found ways to communicate with them. We comforted them and they encouraged us. In captivity prisoners console each other.

  “Also in Sarafand representatives of the International Red Cross arrived. They recorded our names and told us that we were prisoners of war, and that the Geneva Conventions applied to us. They informed us of our rights, and permitted us to write messages to our families, messages no longer than twenty-five words. After that we were treated a little better. They put us to work as agricultural workers, picking the fruit from the Arab lands they had occupied. In return for the work they gave each of us a card that allowed us to get some food from the canteen, because the camp food was very meager, not enough to satisfy our hunger.

  “I got out of the camp after a year and a half. I was lucky; two months after I got out of the camp I found my family. They were in Damascus; they were in a very rough situation, but they were all alive—my mother and father and four sisters and the two little boys. They were all among those who had been loaded up and taken to al-Furaydis. By chance, by a lucky chance, none of them died, either in the massacre or from hunger and the difficult journey that followed it. We spent a year and a half in Syria, and then we moved to Jenin. My sister moved with her husband, and then her husband sent word to us that he had rented a house in Jenin and that by the grace of God he had enough money, and he asked us to join him there. In Jenin God comforted us. I worked with my sister’s husband to support the family. I saw to my sisters’ marriages and my brothers’ education.”

  Abu Muhammad smiled, perhaps for the first time since he had begun to speak, and said in an apologetic tone, “That’s why I married late. I married only after my sisters were secure and the two boys had graduated from high school. After that I got married, and our Lord blessed me with Muhammad and the rest of the children.”

  39

  Wedding

  My imagination could never have reached Piraeus, however much it circled or took wing, or stumbled and lost its way. How could it ever get there without any prior knowledge of it, or its location, or even its name?

  As usual, Sadiq began by objecting. He said, “How can you, Brother? Are you going to spend your whole life in Canada? If you marry her she won’t be able to live with you in Lebanon or in the Gulf or in any Arab country, except maybe Egypt. And in Egypt they won’t give you residency or a work permit, and every time relations are strained between Abu Ammar and the Egyptian government they won’t allow us to enter. God, it’s a big problem, Brother.”

  Sadiq advanced his arguments, piling them up in front of his brother, and he said “Impossible!” It was a long call, followed by a second and a third—give and take, like a tug of war. After two days Sadiq agreed.

  Hasan had told me before telling his brother. He didn’t mention the subject of marriage; he told me about the girl, and said, “I’ll send you a long letter.”

  I understood and said, “Should I congratulate you?”

  He was silent, so I knew. I said, “May God bless it for you.”

  I heard him stumble over his words: “There’s a problem.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  It never occurred to me. The possibility that she was older than he flashed through my mind, that she was divorced and had children—or that she was married and had not yet gotten her divorce. She couldn’t be foreign, her name was Fatima.

  “She’s from Lid.”

  “And so?”

  “I mean that her family still live there. We won’t be able to go to them to make the proposal, and she won’t be able to come with me to meet you.”

  I didn’t grasp it; I said, “Randa’s family live in Nablus, and we met them in Amman. Didn’t we write your brother’s wedding contract in Amman? It’s manageable, dear, and God willing, good will come of it. I’m waiting for your long letter. Send me her picture. Whose family is she from, in Lid? How old is she? Is she still in school or has she finished? What’s her subject? I’ve kept you a long time. Don’t worry. Congratulations, a thousand congratulations!”

  I had plunged into a flood of questions. I didn’t understand that there was any problem, even after I replaced the receiver, and I didn’t stop to wonder what was worrying Hasan. The news excited me and flooded me with joy, leaving no room to think about the details.

  Sadiq is the master of details; he becomes absorbed in them. He begins with no, with an absolute no, then in the end he gives in to what his brothers want. He becomes absorbed in carrying out what they want, enthusiastically, as if the idea had been his and he had never opposed it.

  I looked up at Sadiq. He was sitting in the chair opposite, wearing reading glasses and holding a pen and notebook in his hand. He was absorbed in the details. He raised his eyes and said, “Cyprus or Greece—I don’t see any other solution.”
He picked up the telephone and called Hasan. “What do you think about meeting in Greece? In Piraeus. Yes, we’ll have the wedding there. A week. No, of course not—I’m the head of the family, and I’ll underwrite it. Airline tickets, the stay, the night of the wedding. It’s my responsibility. Slow down, Hasan, there’s no reason for this talk—I’m the head of the family. It’s done, no more discussion of this subject. What matters now is the arrangements—you’ll have to call your uncle Ezz in Tunis first, to get his permission and set the date with him. Then call the girl’s family and see if the date suits them, and find out which of them will come. Don’t limit the number, it’s not right—say that everyone is welcome, and stress the invitation to her uncles on both sides. Of course the bride’s brothers and sisters and her mother and father. Within a week I want the specific number and a fax with their names, so I can send them the tickets. If you have friends you want to invite, invite them. Wisal and Abed? Of course. Call them, invite them. God keep you.”

  He replaced the receiver and returned to his notebook. Suddenly he lifted his head, looked up at me and said, “How can I go to the travel agency I work with and buy airline tickets from Tel Aviv to Athens to Tel Aviv?”

  I said, in an attempt to ease his mind, “Don’t complicate matters, Sadiq. It’s obvious from the names that they’re Arabs.”

  Sadiq did not look like his grandfather Abu Amin, but when he looked up I remembered my uncle the day he went to the camp to make the proposal for Ezz, and Abu Karima talked to him about the permits necessary to leave the camp or to receive visitors in it. Suddenly Sadiq called Sumana in an angry voice, as if he was about to scold her for some mistake she had made. “I want a cup of tea with sage.” He forgot the “please” with which he always ended his requests. He looked up at me with a frown on his face and began to curse Hasan and himself and Tantoura and Lid and Palestine, that had imposed this separation on us.

  Piraeus. How had the name acquired this halo between one day and the next? How had it suddenly been transformed from the name of a place to the name of a time we wish we could jump to, passing above all the intervening days to get to it? It was as if I had become a girl again, counting on her fingers every morning the days left between her and the Eid holiday at the end of Ramadan. I had not seen Hasan for five years; I had not seen Abed since he left Beirut in 1985; I had not seen Ezz since he went to Tunis with his wife; and I had not seen Wisal since I visited her in her sister-in-law’s house in al-Baqaa Camp, more than ten years earlier. I’ll see them in Piraeus. How strange; we’ll hold Hasan’s wedding and meet his bride and her family, we’ll ask for the girl and marry the two and become family, all in one week. There in Piraeus.

  Abed leaned over and said, smiling slyly, “I’ve had my doubts for years, but today I know for sure.”

  I looked at him questioningly. He said, suppressing his laughter,

  “It’s clear to see that you love Hasan more than us. What do you think, Sadiq?”

  “There’s no think about it, it’s a fact, as clear as day.”

  Maryam caught onto the game and joined in immediately: “I can’t compare, because I was little when Sadiq got married. But for sure I haven’t seen my mother this happy since I was born! And I haven’t seen her this beautiful. What ‘Aboud’ says is right—admit it, you love Hasan more than us, we have proof!”

  Abed joined in, “The matter of beauty is a whole other subject, open to discussion. People get old, and you get younger and prettier, as if you were a girl of twenty. The girls have all gotten complexes, and poor me! Every time I like one, I make comparisons. Then you come and say, ‘Why aren’t you getting married, Abed?’ as if I were responsible! What do you think, Aunt Wisal?”

  Wisal laughed, and spread her five fingers in his face. “Five and five again! I’ll put a spell on her to protect her from your jealous eyes.” She looked at me, “Ruqayya, as soon as we get back to the hotel I’ll put a spell on you. Sadiq, where can we get incense? Are there perfumers in this country?”

  We laughed. I heard the children, even though I was distracted by Fatima, stealing glances at her. It was as if I wanted to make sure. In fact, she looked like him, calm like him, and petite. There was a sweetness in her green eyes, and like him she had a childlike face that made her seem younger than her years. I looked at her as they were coming toward us in the transit lounge, and it was as if they were a girl and boy of no more than twenty. That wasn’t what amazed me; what amazed me was that when Hasan was walking beside her he seemed even more mild-tempered than he always was, and more self-confident. It was as if he was finally able to show his sweetness without embarrassment, or as if he had found a secure place to hitch his reins and he could relax. Where did these ideas come from? My imagination? Later, during the seven days we spent together in Piraeus and during the coming years, I would discover that my intuition had been correct, and that sweet little Fatima was a woman of amazing strength. She was able to love Hasan without any fuss, to keep his feet on the ground and to protect him—as if she were a wolf, or a guard dog, or an angel.

  Then came the night of the wedding.

  It was a small restaurant on the seashore, and Sadiq wanted to rent it completely so that we would be the only guests. But the owner of the restaurant suggested that he accept other guests, as a full restaurant would add to the liveliness and cheer of the evening; everyone would join in the singing and dancing. Sadiq objected and spent half a day in discussion with the owner of the restaurant, and then he agreed to his suggestion.

  He was right. As soon as the musicians began playing their instruments the Greeks began to sing. They inclined their heads and torsos right and left with the singing, and then the chairs couldn’t hold them and they began to leave them, individually and in couples, for the dance floor. They danced, and then the circle widened; they formed a big ring, linking their arms, and became absorbed in a collective dance to the rhythm of the music. One of them motioned to Maryam to join the ring; she looked at Sadiq, but before he gave her permission Abed drew her by the hand, and then drew Hasan and Fatima, and they joined the dancers. Abed came back and tried to convince the elderly ladies to join in; Wisal said to him, “Wait a little. We’ll dance and sing when the time comes. It’s coming, our turn is coming.” When it came, Wisal got up from her seat and advanced a few steps, and burst out singing a mhaha song:

  Iiwiihaa … he adorns youth itself, he adorns our home.

  Iiwiihaa … you cannot contain him when you seek to describe!

  Iiwiihaa … he’s a young prince and worthy to reign.

  Then she loosed a long trill that surprised the Greek guests in the restaurant. They had not yet understood why she was standing, or the meaning of what she was doing. Then:

  Iiwiihaa … I’ve brought henna from Mecca for your hands, O bride,

  Iiwiihaa … O bright, full moon, all the jewels are for you,

  Iiwiihaa … the henna is worthy of your hands alone,

  Iiwiihaa … O Fatima, most beautiful of brides, to Hasan I bring you!

  She trilled again, more loudly than and stronger than the first time, and Maryam, Karima, and Randa joined her. Then:

  Iiwiihaa … I’ve been running after the noble ones, to marry among them.

  Iiwiihaa … The winds of love rose, and threw me at their door.

  Iiwiihaa … I pray to the Lord in heaven to bring them victory,

  Iiwiihaa … a dear victory that will make them proud.

  The third trill was not limited to the bridal table, rather it rose from all over the restaurant. The other guests, who had been watching the old woman in a long embroidered dress with a cloth belt tied below her stomach, leaving space for her large chest, had understood the game and wanted to share in it. They trilled after their own fashion, and the expert trills mingled with cheerful gargles and laughing shouts that imitated the original. As she returned to her seat, Wisal said, “Where are you, Samir? What are you waiting for?”

  Like a conjurer, Fatima’s cousin Sami
r brought out the tabla drum and the reed flute. He gave the flute to his brother and began to beat the drum and sing: