The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel

by Radwa Ashour

  I did not tear up what I had written. I hid it, like the jacket of Bayan Nuwayhid’s book, in one of the bedroom drawers.

  Each of my sons calls me on the telephone once a week, and sometimes twice. Sadiq and his family call on Thursday evening, and Abed on Friday evening. As for Hasan, he calls on Sunday evening, which is morning in his time zone. Then Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday pass, waiting for the three following days. When Abed called from Paris on Friday evening I found myself asking him spontaneously, with no forethought, “Abed, do you remember when Sitt Bayan interviewed you for her book, on one of your visits years ago?”

  “I remember.”

  “Didn’t you record it?”

  “I recorded the interview, and so did she.”

  “Do you still have the tape?”

  “Didn’t you bring the tape recordings we had in Beirut with you to Alexandria?”

  “Yes, they’re all here with me.”

  “Then you’ll find the tape among them. The other tapes have labels of what’s recorded on them, all except for that tape. I remember that we were afraid of putting a label on it.”

  I found the tape easily. I put it in the tape recorder, and began to listen.

  29

  Abed’s Testimony

  Abed spoke, saying:

  “When the agreement was reached for the withdrawal of the resistance from Lebanon, they left the choice up to the young men who carried Lebanese travel documents, because they were from families who had arrived as refugees in 1948. They said, ‘You can stay if you like or go with the resistance fighters.’ I was angry over the agreements that Abu Ammar had accepted, and I was not alone. We felt that they were agreements that stripped us bare and accepted a defeat for which we weren’t responsible. His leaders fled from the south. The thugs fled, it was natural, because they were thugs. Our young men, even the ‘cubs’ who were not over fourteen or fifteen, faced the attack with astonishing courage, beyond what you could imagine. By ‘our young men’ I don’t mean just the men of the Popular Front, of course not, I have to be honest. The men of Fatah and the Popular Front and the Democratic Front and all the other Lebanese and Palestinian organizations, the Communist Party and the Labor Organization and the Progressive Socialist Party and the Syrian Nationalist Party and the Murabitun and Amal. The men of all the organizations, Lebanese and Palestinians, we all confronted them and defied them in Beirut for eight weeks, and then here was the leadership deciding to evacuate the resistance. It was important that the fighters leave in good order. My ass. I’m sorry for the expression, Sitt Bayan, but was that a military parade? It was not. It was a matter of life and death—they left, and death came to us. They left with their military uniforms and the arms on their shoulders, with Abu Ammar standing smiling and raising his fingers in the victory sign.

  “I was born in 1960, Sitt Bayan; I did not witness the situation in the camps before the resistance came, but the old men in the organization told me about it. Before the resistance the Second Bureau tyrannized us. Once a microphone was stolen in Wavell Camp in Baalbek; they gathered up the young men and took them to the headquarters of the Second Branch in Beirut and beat them with whips for three hours. After that it seemed easy to them; every week they would gather up a group of young men and take them to Beirut to be beaten, and return them. It was a weekly trip: you go on an outing to the secret police, get beaten, and go back. Moving from one camp to another or having a visitor from outside the camp required a visa and a q and a session. Hammering a nail, building a roof, adding a room, all of that was forbidden, because the camp had to stay a temporary camp, to confirm that we were refugees. To preserve our right to return. Thank you very much! My direct commander in the organization told me that up to the sixties, most of the houses in Shatila were roofed with sheets of zinc covered with fabric and held down with stones, because it was absolutely forbidden to build a roof. And if the wind was strong, people would sit on the roof to keep the zinc sheet from flying away, but sometimes they did fly away, and you would see the owners running after them to catch up with them. They might not get to them before they crashed into people and injured them. When the resistance started the situation changed, and when the leadership came to Lebanon and Abu Ammar came the situation in the camps changed. It was just a flash in the pan, it seems. They came and they went. I asked myself, would the situation return to what it was? I was scared and apprehensive and expected disasters, but what happened exceeded anything I could have imagined. I don’t just mean the massacre, but also what happened in Sidon and here in Beirut and in the camps when the Phalange took over the government. There was kidnapping and killing and making examples of corpses and imprisonment and torture, during the fall of 1982 and throughout the following year. During the invasion half the residents of the camps in the south became homeless. The shelling destroyed Beirut. That happened in June; for four months, Sitt Bayan, Israel refused to send bulldozers to remove the debris or permit any building materials to come in, to raise houses in place of the ones that were destroyed or even to repair what could be repaired. Only in October did UNRWA announce that it had been allowed to import tents, to shelter 48,000 in the Sidon region and 15,000 in the area of Tyre. We were asked to live in tents. So utter devastation, and utter humiliation. Before we could catch our breath the struggle between Abu Ammar and Syria intensified, so Amal besieged the camps, and the camps paid the price. Not only during the months of the attack and the siege, but also during years of terror and continuous calamity.

  “Yes, you’re right, Sitt Bayan. The siege of the camps by Amal is another subject. You want me to talk to you about our response to the evacuation decision. Some of my comrades among the young men from the 1948 families decided to leave with the resistance, and some of them decided to stay. There were some who decided to go and said goodbye to their families and settled their business, and then turned around and came back before reaching the port. And there were other cases when the opposite happened; someone would say ‘I’m not leaving,’ and then as he was saying goodbye to his comrades who were leaving he became frightened and overwhelmed by the separation, so he jumped into the truck and it took him with them to the ship. I was wretched—each of my brothers was in another country far away, should I leave my father and mother and Maryam and my grandmother? Why should I choose a new refuge? We were refugees, yes, but I was born in Lebanon and had lived there all my life, so why would I leave it and become a refugee all over again? Why would I go farther away from Palestine? I sneaked into Sidon—it was a dangerous adventure, in the presence of such a number of occupying troops—but I managed to get to Ain al-Helwa. The bastards had destroyed it beyond all imagination. I got lost in the streets, because the destroyed houses had changed the look of the place. I went to say goodbye to my uncle Ezz; I wasn’t about to leave without telling him goodbye. Then I came back to Beirut and decided to go; then I changed my mind at the last instant. They left and I stayed. My morale was at its lowest, I don’t know how my mother put up with me. I was overcome by a feeling of absurdity, as if I had never been one of the fedayeen and carried a weapon. My mother doesn’t know that I was thinking of suicide. The truth is that I had decided; the only thing that held me back was a discussion with one of my comrades. I told him it was natural for us to commit suicide, and here was my comrade, who was two years younger than I was, scolding me as if he were a teacher and I were a small boy. He said, ‘You want to kill yourself? Kill yourself, no one needs you. Because when you think about suicide you’re fleeing from the battle and abandoning your family, who had confidence in you. It’s disgusting, how easily you say, “Confront it alone, as for me I’m going to die and to rest.” Damn your god, brother, you’re stupid, an animal.’ He insulted me and left the place, and I cried like a kid. Usually I grab the throat of anyone who insults me and make him pay the price twice over; but he insulted me and I cried. On the next day I went to him and kissed his head.

  “On the morning of Wednesday, the fifteenth of Septemb
er, the Israeli tanks entered West Beirut. I had spent the night with comrades of mine who live in the Fakahani. Wednesday morning we had seen the tanks advancing. There was no one in charge to turn to; we decided to act on our own authority. They were centered on the College of Engineering, and there were clashes between us and them. We were different groups, some of them very young, cubs. The battle continued all day. Then the Israelis pulled back behind the College of Engineering.

  “The next day we decided to investigate the situation and go to our office opposite Acre Hospital, to see if we could get more weapons. I repeat, Sitt Bayan, there was no local leadership; the leaders who had gone had not left us any instructions, nor was there any committee responsible for the security of the camps. They left us cut off, as if we were foundlings or orphans. With the situation like that it was natural for the residents to feel that the presence of any armed man or any weapons in the camp was a threat to the camp and to everyone in it. Many people got rid of their individual weapons; sometimes they got rid of them by wrapping them in newspaper and throwing them in a garbage can, or in any heap or pile.

  “I headed for the office of the Popular Front with a number of my comrades, and a group of young men and two girls joined us there. I remember that one of the girls was from Fatah. We decided to skirmish with the Israeli soldiers, using hit and run tactics. One of us would fire a magazine or half of one and rush off to another place. Notice, Sitt Bayan, that up to that moment we did not know about the presence of the Lebanese Forces; we thought that we were confronting Israeli soldiers only. We were able to hit an Israeli officer and two soldiers, or maybe three. They were standing near the Kuwaiti Embassy, on a hill, looking toward the camp with binoculars. We fired a B7 rocket-propelled grenade and bullets at them.

  “There was another group from the Arab Front. Their office was in the Farahat neighborhood, southeast of the camp. When the Israeli shelling concentrated on them they decided to blow up the arms depot they had, to make the Israelis think they were facing stiff opposition. The depot contained Grad and Katyusha rockets and artillery missiles; imagine, a weapons depot that we were blowing up with our own hands, since what good were the weapons after the evacuation of the trained cadres and leaders who could tell us when and where to use them?

  “There was a cub named Hani who was known in the camp. A cub from Fatah. Somebody shouted to him, ‘The Israelis are underneath you, Hani.’ Hani threw a grenade on an Israeli truck carrying soldiers (at the time we thought they were Israeli soldiers, they might have been Israelis, or maybe they were from the Lebanese Forces). He hit them, then he came back and hit a half tank. He was one individual, acting alone. There was also a girl named Fatima from Fatah, who caught up to us and joined in with us. That evening we lost Comrade Butrus, that was his name in the movement, he was from the Popular Front fighters.

  “When it got dark, we decided to withdraw and meet again the next day. Some of us decided to spend the day in the house of friends in the camp; a comrade of mine and I decided to leave the camp. We hadn’t heard about what was happening. We didn’t know that the Lebanese Forces were killing the residents with bullets and axes and knives. We were naturally walking cautiously, scouting the place and then moving on our way, noiselessly. On our way back we met a Fatah fighter who told us that he had seen the Lebanese Forces invade the Abu Yasir shelter in the Horsh Tabet neighborhood. It was the first time that we heard that the Lebanese Forces had entered the camp. He said, ‘We have to get the people out of the shelters and lead them calmly out of the camp.’ He assigned each of us a shelter and told us how to behave, and the way out. We carried out his instructions, and we were able to get hundreds of residents safely out of the shelters and to lead them out of the camp. But despite what this fighter told us, none of us realized what was happening. I mean, when we put our heads on our pillows on the night of Thursday to Friday we knew that the camp was under siege, and that Israel was lighting up the sky of the area with illuminating flares to make it easier for the Lebanese Forces to go in, and that the Forces were carrying out the task of inflicting harm on the residents for Israel, killing some of them and capturing others. But none of us imagined at all that we were facing a massacre of that magnitude, or that the Phalange and the men of Saad Haddad were going into the houses and killing the people with axes and knives and raping the girls, and destroying the houses with bulldozers, bringing them down on top of the people who lived in them. We had never known anything of that magnitude before, we hadn’t heard of anything like it, so we didn’t conceive of it. It wasn’t possible for us to conceive of it.

  “On the morning of the next day the area was completely surrounded. We failed to get in, despite repeated attempts. I did not witness what happened in Acre Hospital nor in Gaza Hospital. You said that you want my statement as an eyewitness; what I saw ends with the night of Thursday to Friday.

  “Afterward many people told me what they saw during the three days. I was asking and listening, determined to know what happened in Acre Hospital moment by moment because my father was in the hospital. We don’t know what happened to him; he was considered to be among the kidnapped. I examined all the details in order to learn my father’s fate. It was also because I wanted to give the details to my brothers, because they were working outside of Lebanon and I was the only one still living through the situation. I felt that I was responsible for learning what happened and telling them. If you like, I’ll tell you, and if you like I’ll give you a copy of the report I sent to my brothers, to Hasan in Cairo and to Sadiq in Abu Dhabi.”

  At the time I did not look at this report. But when I wanted to put the tape of the interview back in its plastic box, I found in the box three sheets of foolscap folded several times.

  30

  The Report

  Abed wrote:

  Dear Sadiq and Hasan,

  This is the picture I have been able to put together, piece by piece, of what happened in Acre Hospital on Friday, the seventeenth of September.

  Beginning at five in the morning on Friday, calls were heard over loudspeakers, coming from the Israelis that were surrounding the camps: “Surrender and you’ll be safe. Everyone must return to their houses and put any weapons they have in front of the houses. Surrender and you’ll be safe.” The calls caused turmoil among the residents, and hundreds of them had sought refuge in the hospital for protection the previous night. Some thought that leaving the place was the only guarantee of safety, and others that staying in the hospital was safer. There were those who calmed the others and reassured them, denying the talk that was circulating about a massacre and considering it a rumor, despite the arrival of a woman shouting and crying and confirming that there was a massacre, and that the killers were on their way to the hospital to kill the people. In short the witnesses all agree that between five and seven in the morning a state of terror, turmoil, and chaos reigned. Then the residents began to leave the hospital, gradually.

  Between eight and nine in the morning a meeting was held for the employees of the hospital—doctors and nurses and administrative workers. Here, also, opinion was divided between those who said it was necessary to go and those who advocated staying, because moving the sick would not be easy, and because there was a greater possibility of their being hunted down outside the hospital. They decided to stay. At the same meeting they discussed evacuating the children but the director of the hospital said he opposed the idea.

  After the meeting the two nurses from the night shift went away to sleep; two nurses remained in the emergency ward, two European nurses stayed to take care of the children and the crippled, there were two nurses on the ground floor, and one or two on the upper floor.

  Two things happened right after the meeting: a woman who worked in the hospital went out to buy a pack of cigarettes for one of the doctors and was hit by a sniper’s bullet, and died. And Urabi, a young Egyptian who worked in radiology, went out to bring in one of the hospital cars so it wouldn’t be hit by a missile. He crossed to
the gas station in front of the hospital. (Maybe Urabi went out for another reason. Someone suggested the possibility that he was maybe trying to flee, but I think that’s unlikely, because his wife was a nurse in the hospital and she was there that day.) Then the nurses looking out the window saw someone stretched out on the ground and suspected it could be Urabi. A lady arrived at the hospital driving a Renault car, and they got her permission to use her car to cross to the other side of the street to the gas station, to save the person lying there if he was still alive. (There was sniping and gunfire.) An Egyptian woman who worked in the kitchen drove the car and two European nurses went with her, Ann the Norwegian and Erica the Frenchwoman, crouched in the back seat so that their heads would not appear in the window. The Egyptian worker drove the car fast, protecting it with the buildings, right and then left and then left, until she got to the gas station. It was Urabi stretched out on the ground, lifeless. The three woman together carried him to the car and returned to the hospital with him. He had been hit by bullets and a missile had torn off part of his face. (Hasan, you are in Cairo and maybe the authorities in Egypt have attempted to learn more about the subject. Was anything published about Urabi in the Egyptian papers? There were also two other martyrs, a worker at the fuel station and a hospital cook, who were Egyptians, was anything published about them?) No sooner had my father finished putting Urabi in a shroud than the first of the Lebanese Forces soldiers appeared, followed by the rest. It was eleven o’clock.