The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  We arrived in Sidon at the beginning of February of the following year. When we met my aunt and uncle I was wearing the three dresses, one on top of the other, and on top of them the wool sweater that my mother had bought for me in Irbid. The first words I spoke since we had left home were what I said in a whisper to my uncle: “My father and my two brothers were killed. I saw them with my own eyes on the pile. They were with a hundred or maybe two hundred people who were killed, but they were on the edge of the pile, I saw them. My mother will tell you that Sadiq and Hasan went to Egypt and that my father is a prisoner. I saw them covered with blood, on the pile.”

  8

  A Boy and a Girl

  When Ezz said to me, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you,” I thought the way he said it was strange. I nearly made fun of him, I nearly said, “Do you want permission to talk to me, or an appointment?” But I didn’t. I waited for him to speak, and he said, “I’ll take you to the sea.”

  I walked beside him. When he left the village with his father and mother eight months earlier I was taller than he was, but he had become taller than I was. I remarked on it, and he laughed and said, “I have springs in my knees. Every couple of days I hear them creak, and then I find myself a few inches taller.” The smell of the sea was clear in the city. Even though it was mixed with other smells, in the old city it became more dominant as we got closer to the shore, until the only smell was the sea. We took off our sandals and plunged into the sand. Then we sat down next to each other, cross-legged, and Ezz said, “The sea in Sidon is like the sea at home.” I looked up and said, “The sea in the village is better. Here there aren’t any islands or sugar springs or grottoes. The smell there is different, and the sounds too.” He remained silent and I did also, feeling the sea air spread over my hair and face and clothes, staring at the movement of the waves rising and breaking and rising again. I followed the flight of the sea foam. Strange how two images can come together and be superimposed, one over the other! You’re in Sidon, girl, and the other sea is there, bound by the dark, rocky islands, the scent of the lilies and the houses that seem like shells or moss, which sprang from the sea originally and then stayed close to it when the waves washed them ashore. I see them as two seas, as if one eye saw one and the other looked at a different sea.

  Ezz said, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you.”

  “What’s the matter, Ezz? Just say it, what’s holding you back?”

  “I want to ask you … are you sure that you saw my uncle Abu Sadiq and Sadiq and Hasan with the corpses on the pile?”

  “I saw them.”

  “Why does my aunt say … .”

  I interrupted him, “I pointed with my hands. I pulled on her hand and pointed. They were in front of her eyes. She didn’t see them, as if she lost her sight for a moment and then got it back. I don’t know how or why.”

  “Did you see them alone or did you see others too?”

  “I saw them with the others. The young men they took from al-Furaydis to bury those who were killed told us that they buried them with the others. They said that they buried 120, two or three days afterward. They said that the others had been buried before that, the day they took over the village.”

  “Do you remember the day we left in the boat?”

  “I remember.”

  “While we were on the way I saw corpses. I saw someone floating in the water. I yelled and ran to my father, pointing with my arm. But my father put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘He died days ago.’ I shuddered violently, and my father noticed. He said, ‘You’re a man now, Ezz, aren’t you a man?’ I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry even when I saw the bodies of others floating on the surface of the water. I asked the captain of the ship and he told me that many boats sank on the way because they were small and were carrying more than their capacity, or because the captain of the boat was not skilled enough. I used to like to ride in boats and go sailing in them but I don’t like them any more, not boats and not the sea and not traveling.”

  “Do you like your new school?”

  “Something else happened in the boat.”

  “What happened?”

  “A woman began to scream. Then her screaming got louder, and I heard someone say that she was having a baby. Then my mother came and said, ‘Give me your knife.’ The red knife that Amin gave me, do you remember it?”

  “The penknife?”

  “Yes. I didn’t understand why my mother was asking for it. I asked her and she said, ‘We need it for the birth.’ I thought they were going to use it to cut open the woman’s belly, so I started shivering. I crouched down and fought back tears so my father wouldn’t scold me.”

  “And then?”

  “I didn’t see anything because the women were surrounding the woman who was screaming and screening her with their bodies. After a while we heard the sound of the baby crying. The women said, ‘Thank God she came through safely.’ I saw the baby wrapped in my mother’s shawl. When she returned the knife to me I hesitated to take it. She was surprised, and then laughed and said, ‘We cut the umbilical cord with it.’ I put it in my pocket but since we got to Sidon I’ve kept it hidden, and I don’t use it any more. I don’t want to.”

  I said, “Let’s walk along the sea.”

  I put my arm around his shoulders and we walked. The silence lengthened, and then I asked him again about the school.

  “I like it because it has a soccer field.”

  “You used to like school because you were the best.”

  “I’m not the best any more, because the teacher calls on me suddenly and I don’t know what he’s been talking about or what the question is. If he repeats it I answer, and if not I stand tongue-tied in front of him, and he scolds me and the boys laugh at me. At first they laughed, but now they’ve become my friends. They whisper to remind me of what he was saying or to help me answer and I try to catch what they’re whispering but I can’t make it out if I’m upset. But when we play soccer the game takes over and I don’t think about anything but the ball as it moves from one side to the other. I watch it between the feet of the players or I take off toward it when it flies and I fly too, to catch up with it. Soccer has introduced me to all the boys in the school and we’ve become friends.”

  “I don’t have girlfriends any more. My uncle says that most of the people of the village went to Syria, and we don’t yet know where they live. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again.”

  “No problem.”

  “Why?”

  He said, “You’ll make new friends, and your old friends will still be your friends when we go back home. My friends here didn’t know anything about the village so I told them. When we go back they’ll come to visit me. I’ve gotten to know Sidon and they’ve gotten to know Tantoura, and when they visit it they’ll get to know it better.”

  “But when I make friends here I’ll leave them when we go back.”

  “When things go back to the way they were, you’ll take the train or a taxi and go to them, and they will also visit you there. And who knows, Yahya might work in Jerusalem or in Lid so you’ll live there, and you’ll have friends in Jerusalem and in Tantoura and in Sidon and maybe in Haifa and Beirut when we go to visit Amin, or in Cairo if Yahya takes you there. The world will open up, and you’ll have family and friends and acquaintances everywhere.”

  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 eart
h 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.