The Woman From Tantoura (12 page)

But he did not go often to the camp. He only went there if he had to.

13

An Essay on Waiting

“He was standing in the station waiting to get on the train, returning to where he had come from, so how absurd it was to ask him to register his stop and to get an identity card for waiting.” I said that before, describing my uncle Abu Amin. I re-examine it. It’s not absurd for us to get an identity card to wait. And anyway, an identity card is always condensed, a summary of a long, complicated story, stretched out over time and not susceptible to a summary. It’s an insufficient shorthand, but it’s an indication.

Waiting.

All of us know waiting.

To wait an hour, a day or two, a month, or a year or perhaps years. You say it’s been a long time, but you wait. How long can we wait? Maryam told me about a woman who waited for her husband for twenty years. I said, “Tell me more.” She said, “It’s a well-known story in ancient literature. The man went to war, and the war lasted ten years. On his way home he got lost.” “Who got lost?” I asked. She said the man’s name, a strange name that’s hard to remember. She said, “He was lost for ten more years, and the wife was still
waiting. Men were hovering around her, desiring her and asking her to marry them, and she was weaving on her loom, saying, ‘When I finish weaving I will accept one of you.’ She would weave on her loom during the day and at night she would undo the weaving.” I was drawn to the story, but I said to myself that it fell short, that waiting is not like that, it’s inseparable from life and not a substitute for it. You wait at the train station, and at the same time trains take you east and west and north and south. You have children and you raise them, you study and move on to a job, you love and you bury your dead, you rebuild the house that collapsed on your head, you erect a new house. A thousand details take your attention, that’s the wonder, as you are waiting in the station. What are you waiting for? What is Ruqayya, in particular, waiting for?

Thinking exhausts her. Putting it all into words exhausts her, but she knows that while she was waiting, she had three children. At the station. Amin planted the sperm, and under the umbrella of waiting she bore a child she named Sadiq, then followed him with a second child she named Hasan, and after them came Abd al-Rahman.

Like a newborn puppy whose eyes are still closed, the boy looks for the nipple of the breast, knowing his way by feel or scent, and learns how to nurse. He grows a little and his small, soft hand closes over her finger, gripping it with his fist. He crawls. He coos like the birds. He walks. He forms meaningful sentences, then takes off talking. He runs. To school. To the university. To women. To a home of his own, and children. The scene shifts as if in a film that sums up whole lives in two hours. Ruqayya at less than fourteen, following her mother on the way to Sidon, without speaking. Ruqayya at less than fifteen being married to Amin. Ruqayya at twenty-four with three children, the youngest a nursing baby. With Amin in Beirut. The children in schools. The children in universities. In the demonstrations. Behind a barricade, threatened by another barricade in front of them. The children in airplanes. Ruqayya sitting on the stairs during the shelling of Beirut, bent double until her head nearly touches her knees, holding Maryam
who had fallen to her as if from the sky. We begin again. Maryam crawls. Maryam walks. She forms meaningful sentences. She runs to school. To the university.

A story that can’t be summarized.

And then, what is the place of fear in the way station?

Fear is hidden away like inner waters, present in waking and in sleep. Open fear when the city suddenly shakes. A few moments and then she notices that the building that has turned into a heap from which smoke and flames are rising, by some incomprehensible accident, is the neighbors’ building and not the one she lives in.

A story that can’t be summarized.

Waiting had an independent existence, true, more like the earth we stand on. But that other thing also had always been there, piling up intentions that announced themselves suddenly. How else could I explain my uncle Abu Amin’s behavior and what happened after 1967, and that sudden change in the camps? (Was it really sudden, or was it a natural move, the result of what had gone before?) The change was clear in the faces of the girls and the young men, in the look in the eyes, in the stance, the walk, the gesture, and the sense of the place. Would that Maryam were here so I could ask her to give me more details of the story of the woman who waited twenty years. Penelope. She said that her name was Penelope. No one undoes their weaving even if it looks that way. No one is frozen in the act of waiting.

My uncle continued his trips infiltrating the country. I can’t report the details because I don’t know them, and because Abu Amin, so enamored of talking and telling stories, kept silent about his trips. He would absent himself from the house, a week or two or sometimes a month; it would seem as if he had gone to sea with the fishermen. Then my aunt’s fears and later the fears of us all as we waited for his return would confirm that we knew what he had not told us, and that he had gone there. To do what? Did he go alone or with others? Did he plan and set a goal that called for the risk, or did he go only because he wanted to? He did not say, and we could only imagine.

When Abd al-Nasser’s voice rang out from the pulpit of al-Azhar one Friday in the fall of 1956, Sidon and Tyre and Nabatiyeh and Bint Jbeil and other villages and towns listened exactly as they listened in the camps. The little ones, with that wondrous spring in their knees, suddenly leapt from childhood to youth. And it seems that the spring wasn’t limited to the knees, that spring that stretched them not by one hand span but by two. Did the camp also have knees and a spring, to take it from one state to another insensibly and with no notice? Did it demand of the camp also, like them, that it sit once again before the photographer so he could take a picture that reflected its new shape?

Then came 1967.

What did it do to us? The girl from Saffurya said that her father and uncles on both sides and everyone she knew from Saffurya, and maybe the people she knew and those she didn’t from other villages in the camp, brought out the keys to their houses and prepared their identity papers and the deeds that established their ownership of their lands and houses. She said that her mother wanted to know, “Will we go back the way we came, on foot, or will a car take us there?” When her father said, “Only God knows,” she became tense and said, “I want to know what to keep and what to get rid of.” She had spread out around her all the clothes and household items they had. This she folded with care because she would take it with her and that she put in a pile to one side because she didn’t need it and would leave it by the door for whoever found it. Then she stopped, suddenly at a loss as she held the sweater she had knit by hand for the youngest girl; it was too small for her now, and she didn’t know whether to get rid of it because no one else would use it, or to keep it because she remembered her joy when she finished it and her daughter’s joy when she wore it for the first time, on Eid al-Fitr after Ramadan. Suddenly she said to one of the girls, or to herself, “We have a stove there in the house that’s larger and better, there’s no need to take the stove. And our bed there is new. No, not new, time has passed; we’ll take the bed. The kerosene heater will
be useful in the winter, we’ll take it with us—can we rent a truck to carry the things?” Then she looked suddenly at her husband and asked, “Should we keep the identification from the aid agency? I think we should tear it up, what do you think?” He answered, “We’ll tear it up as soon as we enter Palestine.”

My aunt did not act like her son’s mother-in-law. She did not sort the clothes or household items. In the afternoon of June 5 my aunt announced, “We will not act as if we had no upbringing and are ungrateful for favors, and leave without a word.” She began a crowded schedule of visits, that included the neighbors and the neighbors’ neighbors, in al-Sabil and Abu Nakhla and the surrounding neighborhoods. Every day she made two or three visits, saying goodbye, expressing her thanks and gratitude, inviting them to visit the village and asserting: “Our house is large, and everyone is welcome. I beg you not to put it off, we’ll be waiting for you.”

When things happened as they did, and Abd al-Nasser announced that he was stepping down from his post and that his decision was final, it seemed to me that we were going to undo the weaving like the lady in the old story.

I was stupid. Just a mother of small children, who had as yet learned only a little. I didn’t notice that the outpouring of millions of people to demand that Abd al-Nasser continue on his path was significant.

I didn’t notice until I was surprised one day to find that the camp had left its place. It up and moved from the edge of town to the center, and settled there. Every time the army besieged it or fired on it, it became more prominent in the story and consolidated its position.

My uncle Abu Amin began to drink his coffee hurriedly in the morning. Then he would put on his qumbaz and jacket and affix his kufiyeh and its cords; he would grasp his walking stick and say loudly to my aunt, “Don’t wait for me for lunch, Halima, I’ll spend the day in the camp. I have a lot of work to do.” He would raise his staff and then strike the floor with it, and go out. Sometimes he would be there until late in the evening, so he would ask one of the young men from the organizations who had a telephone to call the
Abu Nakhla Bakery or the coffee shop near the house; a boy would come and knock on the door, Ezz would open it for him and the boy would deliver his message: “Uncle Abu Amin called to say not to wait for him because he will spend the night in the camp, the young men there need him.” Ezzedin would laugh, and his mother and wife would come to hear the news. Ezz would say, laughing still, “Father’s spending the night in the camp. Watch out, Umm Amin, it looks as if the old man thinks he’s twenty, maybe he has his eye on a girl there!”

Since Amin and Ezz were working in the camp they told us how popular their father was among the residents and the young fedayeen. His activity branched out in several directions: he would tell them what he had learned from experience about the roads and pathways on the other side of the border, he would help with training in identifying weapons and using them, and perhaps most importantly he would tell his story, giving them details of his memories of Sheikh al-Qassam, of the Arab Revolt of 1936, of the battles of 1947 and 1948, of what happened on a given day in a given village, and the lessons learned. His audience was no longer restricted to his household and a few friends he would meet in the coffee shop in the old town, rather it was the youth of the camp and others among the people of Sidon and the young men who came from far and near.

My uncle would take Sadiq with him and enroll him in the ‘Lion Cubs’ team, carrying thick white paper for Hasan. He would spread it out in front of him and say, “Draw the map, boy, make it large and use colors.” Hasan would spread out the white paper on the ground and bend down as if he were praying on it, drawing the outline with pencil and using the eraser to adjust the line and make the curves precise. Then he would open the box of crayons and begin with the sea, coloring it blue, moving on to the Negev Desert which he would color yellow, and absorb himself in identifying the cities and the villages. After half a day of concentration he would call his grandfather and say, “What do you think, Grandpa?” Abu Amin would bend down over the map, trying to bend his knees and kneel
to study the details; but his knees would not cooperate so he would sit cross-legged in front of the map, staring at it. He would laugh and show his gold tooth that a young doctor had made for him. (He still remembered him gratefully, and would say, “God help him and protect him wherever he is. He studied at the University of Cairo and opened a dental clinic in Haifa.”) Hasan would have distinguished Tantoura by writing its name in larger letters than he used for the names of Haifa or Jaffa or Jerusalem, marking its place with a large circle that he colored in red, as if Tantoura were the district capital and not Haifa. Abu Amin would scrutinize the details more closely, then scoot over and sit on the map, reaching out and taking the pencil from Hasan and adding towns and villages neither I nor Amin had ever heard of. He would say, “Here, you forgot these villages of Jabal Amil; they are Lebanese villages that the Jews captured after the truce in ’48: Metulla, Ibil al-Qamh, al-Zuq al-Fawqa and al-Zuq al-Tahta, and al-Mansura.” He would specify the site of each village with a little red circle, and then his hand would slide a little lower, “Here are Hunin, al-Khalisa, al-‘Abasiya, al-Naima, al-Salihiya, and Zawiya, near each other, no farther from each other than half an hour’s walk on foot.” Then his hand would slip farther, “Below them and a little to the east are Qadas and al-Malkiya. Your uncle Maarouf Saad defended them when he was fighting in Pales-tine. The young men would come from Tripoli, Baalbek, Bint Jbeil, and elsewhere and train here in Sidon, in Bab al-Sarail Square; afterward they would head for northern Palestine. Al-Malkiya is important, boy.” He would put a big red circle around it. Then his hand would move to the left part of the page and stop before it reached the blue sea: “And here are Kafr Bir‘im, al-Nabi Rubin, and Tarbikha.” He stares at the map again and says, “Where’s al-Shajara? I don’t see it.” He marks the site with red. “Here, a little east of Saffurya, do you see Hittin? Go down a little and a little to the west. You know your uncle Naji, boy? Naji al-Ali, the cartoonist from Ain al-Helwa? He’s from al-Shajara, and the poet Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud was martyred there. Do you remember what
he said, boy?” Hasan falters; it’s hard for him to understand poetry or memorize it. Sadiq intervenes, reciting:

  I will carry my soul in the palm of my hand, and cast it into the chasm of death,

  To live, and gladden the heart of a friend, or to die, and bring to the enemy wrath.

“Perfect, perfect! Memorize it, Hasan. And don’t forget al-Shajara again, Uncle Naji might get mad at you if you forget it.”