The Woman From Tantoura (8 page)

I wasn’t comfortable with what he said about Yahya. I hadn’t brought his image to mind or thought of him since we left the town.

Now I look back from afar: A boy and a girl crouching on the sand. Only God knows what’s waiting for them, what secrets the unknown future holds. Two youngsters on a rugged shore with the sea before them, its waves continuously rising and retreating, rising
again and breaking. A strong sun tanning their bodies as it hangs suspended above, like destiny. They sit next to each other by the Sidon sea, talking in low voices as if they were adults. I look from afar: two youngsters by the sea of Tantoura, as if they were puppies. The girl runs and the boy runs after her, she jumps and he jumps. The wave lifts them and covers them; they swim like fish. They race and jump and quarrel. Their voices rise, spreading their words and their ringing laughter. They get a little bigger and then bigger still, and they can’t swim together—he swims with the boys and she swims with the girls. They meet at home, their heads together looking at the same book, then one of them suddenly jumps up as if stung by a scorpion. They’ve disagreed. The shouting begins and rises and is only silenced because they have become enemies, each one swearing not to speak to the other as long as he lives. That’s a short time, an hour or two or half a day, if it’s really long. Afterward they make up because one of them has forgotten that they quarreled, or because one of them wants something from the other that makes him ignore the dispute.

She looks from afar. She sees him under the June sun along the sea of Sidon after the Israelis have taken it over. What he did not live through with her on the sea of Tantoura forty years before he now lives through on the sea of Sidon. It’s as if history is repeating itself, although the scene is larger. The people are more, many more. The soldiers are more. The weapons and the armored cars. The burlap bag is reincarnated, one here and another there and a third and a fourth, each looking through the two holes in the bag that covers his head and pointing. Whenever he points the same shudder passes through the ranks, since everyone knows and has known for a long time that the ones pointed out by the burlap bags will now go in a long line to execution or to the prison camp. Not in Zirchon Yaacov or in Ijlil or Sarafand but to someplace here in the heart of Sidon, or in the heights overlooking it.

Ezz will sneak into Beirut. For a moment she won’t recognize him, because of the sudden whiteness of his hair or for some other
reason. He will sit beside her so he can hear more about his brother, so she can hear from him what happened in Sidon. He will carry the girl, asleep on Ruqayya’s knees, to her bed, and they will stay up talking until dawn breaks. A widow and an old man, whose hair has turned completely white in four months and four days. A boy and a girl … she looks from afar.

9

The Children’s Indictment

The children say that I was a stern mother, they say their father was more affectionate with them. I repeat disapprovingly, “More affectionate?” They recall the events, and confirm what they say, “You got involved in every detail. You would insist that we be angels!”

They laugh in chorus, and then Sadiq takes the floor, “Yes, the rank of angel was the minimum acceptable! One of us would bring you his report card and with good grades, or even with excellent grades, and your comment would be ‘But you’re not the best in the class, why aren’t you number one? What do you lack for you to be at the top?’”

Hasan adds, “The day we stole the oranges from the big garden, when we were still in Sidon, God! It was a world-class catastrophe!”

Abed laughed, “Do you want the unvarnished truth? When we were little we hated the camp and we hated Palestine, and we hated that you were our mother. It was all a ruler you used to measure our conduct from morning till night, and if it didn’t measure up then the ruler was ready to strike!”

I cut off their talk and say, “You’re slandering me. I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee and drink it alone to punish you since
you’re like cats who eat and are ungrateful.” They follow me into the kitchen, encircling me. One of them gets the tray ready and another holds the pot and measures the water into it with a cup. Abed, the laziest in household matters and the most impertinent, imitates my way of speaking, “‘The boys from the camp apply themselves in school in the morning and work in the evening to earn their daily bread, and they excel in school even though they lack everything! What do you lack?’ It’s possible, guys, that when we were little she saw signs of mental retardation, or saw some indication that we were from Mars! Or maybe Papa examined us and got scared, and whispered in her ear ‘It’s strange, Ruqayya, the three boys have a birth defect I haven’t come across before. In place of the heart they have a small, smooth stone the size of a large egg, hard and smooth. No blood or flesh or nerves. It’s a terrifying miracle, God keep us all!’”

He guffawed, and shouted, “Mama, we haven’t come from Mars. And we didn’t come to Lebanon as tourists.”

He went on, “The camp, whether you live inside or outside, it’s your story and there’s no getting away from it. Your classmate suddenly turns against you and you don’t know what’s angered him, only to discover a day or two later that he’s found out you’re Palestinian and that your existence, the very fact that you exist and that you are you and no other, is a provocation that arouses anger or indignation or, at the very least, disgust. It’s as if you were an insect that unfortunately fell in a bowl of soup. And you’ve known, for a long time before that, the meaning of the ‘Phalange’ and the meaning of ‘the Forces’ and what’s waiting for you at their hands, and that you are a son of the camp even if you are lucky and don’t live in it!”

Sadiq intervenes, “Mama provided for us faithfully. Her sternness was necessary to bring us up properly, and the results are obvious.”

Then another mocking phrase: “Umm Sadiq is strong enough to put a dent in iron!”

I’m astonished by my image in their eyes when they were children, for I was just trying to do my job as a wife and mother, whose
tasks were not limited to a clean house and wholesome food for three boys with good appetites—good eaters, as they say, thank God. Their bodies were growing miraculously, their legs carrying them higher almost daily—the pants that needed shortening when they were bought now need the hem undone so they can be lengthened, then they’re passed to the younger one and then they’re unfit for any of them, and are passed on to someone else. Life moves as quickly as an express train, from infants demanding breast feeding and diaper changing and having their wet bottoms wiped, to children forming meaningful sentences, saying yes and saying no more than yes, because they are discovering their will, discovering themselves. Then here they are, in the blink of an eye, boys devoted to the mirror, hurrying the fuzz on their faces and wanting mustaches, preoccupied with their appearance because a girl is nearby. I concentrate on them, I concentrate on every great or small thing and everything in between, because I want … what did I want?

I was with the boys on the train and yet I wasn’t, because ever since that day when they loaded us into the truck and I saw my father and brothers on the pile, I have remained there, unmoving, even if it didn’t seem like it. Maybe my concern for them was exaggerated because I knew, in some obscure fashion that wasn’t fully conscious, that I was outside the train. Or maybe this explanation is deceptive, and the reason is different. They say, “You were stern with us,” they say, “My father was more affectionate with us,” and I find it strange. I wonder, what does a woman do who feels that she has remained alive by chance, by the purest chance? How does she act in the world if her existence, all the years and months and days and moments, bitter and sweet, that she has lived, is a byproduct of some random movement of a strange fate? How does she act in the world? She’s aware, at least tacitly, that she’s naked, stripped of all logic, because of the impossibility of finding any relationship between cause and effect—or more precisely, the impossibility of understanding the causes when effects fall on her head, effects for which she can’t identify the causes. She doesn’t do anything
and she’s not yet aware of anything, not just because she’s young but because the collapse of the roof on her head was the starting point, why did the roof collapse at the beginning and not the end? What should she do? How can she deal with the world? I say, there are only two choices: either she is swept away by an overwhelming sense of the absurd, that nothing makes any difference; she lives the moment just as it is, come what may, since meaning is absent, logic is non-existent, and necessity is a figment contrived by the imagination. Or else, since the earthquake has spared her, she becomes—and this is the other choice—like the last man on this earth, as if they had all left and left her their story, so she can populate the earth in their name and in the name of their story. Or perhaps it’s as if she’s striving in the world with them before her eyes, so they will be pleased with her and pleased with the small garden they may have dreamed of planting. She comes down with a strange kind of fever, planting fever, a strange planting outside of the earth, since the earth was stolen from her and it’s impossible for her to plant anywhere but within the confines of the household.

Was I aware of all these things as I was coming out from under the ruins?

When I came out from under the ruins there was a numbness in my mind, like the numbness that comes over the body. A small frightened animal, only. Later, a little while later, like all the creatures of this earth I began to do what would keep me alive. I’m sure that I was aware of these two choices if only dimly, and even if I couldn’t have formulated them in words as I do now that I’m approaching seventy, now that I can see the hill of life from above. Then two steps to the right or left or to the rear and I can study the surface on the other side, the lands stretched out near and far. I know that I chose. I chose in spite of being frightened, frightened even of a hand that wanted to caress me tenderly and take me safely to land.

My uncle deliberately asked for my hand for his son Amin in my presence. He said to my mother, “We’ll take Ruqayya for Amin, what do you think?”

“And the man from Ain Ghazal?”

“The world has changed; we don’t know where he is or where his father is. If he had wanted Ruqayya he would have looked for her. More than a year has passed since the town fell. We’ve waited for him and there hasn’t been any sight or sound of him.”

“It’s up to you, Abu Amin. Ruqayya is your daughter, anyone who wants her should ask you for her.”

My uncle turned to me and said, “What do you say, Ruqayya?”

I didn’t utter a word. During the night I cried. It wasn’t because I wanted Yahya. He seemed distant; the days had folded him away with other things, and even his image as he emerged from the sea no longer came to me. I cried without knowing the reason for my crying. Then Amin came from Beirut and the contract was written, with my uncle as my witness. He announced in front of everyone: “Amin, I am giving you my daughter Ruqayya. She will be your wife and the mother of your children, but before that and after it she is my brother’s daughter, and not one but three martyrs watch over her. So let her be the delight of your eye as she is the delight of my eye and of theirs.” Amin wiped his eyes and signed the contract.

Ezz broke in and said to the sheikh, “How can we draw up the marriage contract when Amin hasn’t asked me for Ruqayya. Ask me for her now, Amin, or else …” He laughed, and so did the others who were there.

Did Amin want me or did his father compel him to marry me because I was the daughter of both his uncle and his aunt, and an orphan with no father or brothers? As a young doctor, what did he want with a girl who hadn’t completed her high school education? What did he want with a refugee who was a guest in her uncle’s house, when he in turn was living as a guest with the family of a friend of his from Sidon?

I would ride the train without fuss, and remain outside of it also. I would give Amin what was expected of a good wife, affection and little ones, a bite to eat and a clean house, and I would give him myself in an intimate moment and become more confused, because
after every intimacy I would wonder what happened. It seemed to me that this was the nature of things. A man would turn to his wife and then take her and she would give herself to him. Perhaps she would be surprised by some unexpected pleasure, not knowing where it came from, and it would add to her confusion.

After he graduated from the university Amin worked as a doctor in UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency. He didn’t try to travel to the Gulf as others did when they didn’t find work in Lebanon. He would always say that he was lucky, because he had found the work he wanted in the city he wanted. I had my three children in Sidon, then we moved to Beirut because Amin started to work with the Palestinian Red Crescent. We lived near the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood, no more than ten minutes’ walking distance from the Sabra market. When Acre Hospital was established on the south edge of the Shatila Camp, Amin went to work in it. He was absorbed in his work, and he would be gone a lot from the house. It was like a holiday when he was with the children. His work freed him from orders, prohibitions, and controlling the conduct of three boys who could slip from the devilment of kids to become devils. Amin was calm by nature, patient, and spoke little. I never saw him scold one of the boys, even when he made a mistake. He would say, “His own good breeding will correct him, don’t worry.” Was Amin like me, both outside of the train and inside it, or did his work as a doctor provide him with a private train that belonged to him and tamed the wildness of his spirit? I don’t know. In fact I sometimes wonder if I really knew Amin. I search my memory for him when we were in the village; his name was present more than his person. He was seven years older than I was, and he was only there during the summer vacation. No sooner had he finished studying in the village school than my uncle sent him to the high school in Acre, and after that he moved to Beirut to study medicine. Even during the vacation I would see him only when the family gathered for dinner or supper. Where’s Amin? His mother would answer, complaining, “He doesn’t lift his eyes from the books. I tell him, ‘You’ll ruin your eyes
from so much reading.’” Sometimes he would go swimming with the young men of the village. I had no relationship with him. He was near and far, unlike his brother Ezzedin, who was a year younger than I was. My mother would say, “It’s as if those two were brothers born one right after the other.” We would fight regularly, every day, Ezz and I, hitting each other, but neither of us could do without the other. We would play together, compete in swimming and diving and picking almonds and peeling Indian figs. Mostly he would win and I would go crazy because I was older. In school he could solve arithmetic problems that were hard for me. He would fill the house with, “Ruqayya’s an ass, she’s a year older than me and can’t solve the arithmetic problem!” I would interrupt, “Liar, it’s only nine months, not a year!” I would hate him and decide not to ask for his help in anything. Two days later I would return to him and ask. I know Ezzedin; I wonder, do I really know Amin? I live with him, I take care of his needs. In the faces of our three children some of his features mix with some of mine. Maybe we look alike because we are paternal cousins and my mother is also his mother’s sister; maybe, as it usually happens to married couples after living together a long time, the face of each one and the movements of his body have come to mirror the other’s. Amin is a doctor; he has never once been unkind to me, he simply speaks calmly, and if he does rebuke it’s with an allusion. There is no violence in his treatment of me, and no quarreling. Was it my uncle’s admonition to him on the day we were married that dictated this conduct to him, or was he compassionate toward the cousin who had become the mother of his children, an orphan with no brother to turn to if her husband tyrannized her or humiliated her in word or deed? When he would say, “I love you,” in an intimate moment, or when he would say proudly “Ruqayya is a great lady and a wonderful mother,” and kiss my hand suddenly, I would be suddenly troubled, because even though I knew everything about Amin I did not know Amin, and maybe I didn’t know myself. I don’t know what Ruqayya wants from this life.