The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  I remember the day clearly. It was a day in July. Beirut was like fire, and the humidity was suffocating. The boys went to Shatila to participate in a summer program. I said goodbye to them in the morning, repeating to them, “It’s very hot today. Walk in the shade, and drink water whenever you can. Otherwise you’ll get sunstroke.”

  After an hour or less young Abed rang the doorbell like a crazy person. He rang it continuously, as if he couldn’t wait. When I opened it he burst inside the house, saying, “They’ve assassinated Kanafani. He left his house and got into his car, he turned the key and the car blew up with him and his niece inside.”

  He circled through the house like a hyena, twice, then I heard the door slam, shaking the house, and I ran after him, calling. He must have heard me since I could hear his steps rapidly going down the stairs, but he didn’t answer. I shut the door and sat motionless on a chair.

  Eleven days later I heard the news of the attempted assassination of Anis Sayegh. I had seen him only in my imagination, for the older Abed would describe him to me when he talked about his work at the Center. I knew he was a great scholar, stern in his work, precise, demanding excellence from all the researchers who worked with him. He was a man of small build, short and rounded, bald, with penetrating eyes in which kindness mixed with intelligence. That’s how Abed described him to me.

  When I heard the news of the explosion in the Research Center I found myself running in the street. I stopped a taxi and said, “Sadat Street.” The movement of the car seemed slow to me, because of the traffic, and I asked the driver to stop. I got out and started running. I was afflicted with temporary insanity, because as I was running I was talking to my brothers, saying “Leave him. Why do you want him with you? Go away, now, I beg you.” At first I said it calmly, then like someone bereaved, and then I was shouting at them in a loud voice. When I got to the Center I was told that the young men had taken Dr. Anis to the emergency room in the American University Hospital. I asked, “And the others?” They assured me that no one else had been hit. I repeated the question, and they confirmed the answer. I ran down to the street. Another taxi. In the hospital I found Abed, his face blue and the look in his eyes distraught. He said, “He’s still alive. The doctors are operating on him. He was hit in the face, in his eyes and ears and left hand. Go home, I’ll call later to reassure you.” I remained sitting.

  In the evening one of the three doctors announced that he had been forced to amputate three of the fingers on the left hand. The two others said that they had done everything they could for the eyes and the ears. “We might be able to preserve some of his sight and hearing.” They asked the young men to leave. His father the priest remained, an old man who never stopped praying in whispers, along with two of his siblings, his sister and brother.

  “Let’s go, Ruqayya,” said Abed. We left the hospital. He took me to the door of the house and went on.

  I didn’t run into the streets the day of the Israeli operation in Verdun Street, nor did my brothers appear for me to argue with, chasing them away like flies, because when the news was announced the next day, the town was boiling over. It was as if hundreds of thousands of people had been transformed overnight into a single body, the body of a fantastic animal, great and awe-inspiring, proceeding deliberately with steps that shook the earth. I saw that with my own eyes in the funeral of Ghassan Kanafani in July. Then later, nine months afterward, in the funeral of Kamal Nasser and Abu Yusuf al-Najjar and Kamal Udwan, the Fatah leaders killed in their homes by Israeli commandos, I saw it again and understood what I had not completely understood the first time.

  I look from afar. A woman went out with her husband, her three children, her uncle, her cousin and his wife, the brother who wasn’t born of her mother, the spirits of her mother and father and her brothers who stayed there in the unmarked mass grave, all the friends and neighbors she knows here and countless people she doesn’t know, the march stretching out over several miles. They bid farewell to a young man who fell to an assassin before his time. They walk to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. They notice, or not, his wife and two children: a boy and a girl, the oldest a boy of ten lifted on someone’s shoulders. He shouts and his voice is drowned in the voices of hundreds of thousands. The woman looks behind her, seeing the wave surge and heave. She looks ahead, and she sees it. She looks to her right and left, staring into the faces of her children. She sees them clearly, perfectly, as if memory had not enfolded them and the moment had not passed long before. She looks closely: Sadiq narrows his eyes as if he wanted to protect them from the sun; his voice roars in a shout that he emphasizes with a movement of his arm and fist. Hasan is silent like her, his features working as if his face had become a mirror, reflecting the wave on its surface. As for Abed, she barely recognizes his face—why has it lengthened like that, the eyes rounding and the mouth open in the picture of a scream, without any sound? She wonders if it’s possible to read the future in the faces of boys walking in a funeral.

  I look from afar. A woman goes out with her husband, her three children, her uncle, her cousin and his wife, the brother who wasn’t born of her mother, the spirits of her mother and father and her brothers who stayed there in the unmarked mass grave, all the friends and neighbors she knows here and countless people she doesn’t know, the march stretching out over several miles. They bid farewell to four martyrs, three men and a woman who were killed in their bedrooms in Verdun Street. They walk to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The woman looks behind her, seeing the wave surge and heave. She looks ahead, and she sees it. She looks to her right and left. The funeral is not a funeral and the mourning is not mourning.

  I look from afar, contemplating the woman. She’s thirty-seven. She was slow to learn the lesson, slow. It’s astonishing, and strange; it brings a smile to her lips, a little sad but holding a great deal of gratitude. The site of the lesson, the funeral; the topic of the lesson, life. She accepts the funeral, and she gives herself to life.

  17

  The Trees of Shatila

  The bee is a good image. Yes, I became a bee. I would do the cooking and prepare breakfast. Amin and the boys would wake up, and I would feed them. They would go about their business. I would wash the dishes, straighten the house, and leave for Shatila, not returning until late afternoon. Every day had its schedule. There were literacy lessons for the adults, tutoring sessions for the elementary children. Statements to copy on the typewriter, when the young men brought them to me. And visits, no weekly schedule and sometimes no daily one was without them. Women whose homes I entered for the first time or whom I had met previously, whom it was necessary to visit for condolences or congratulations or perhaps to solve a family problem about which they had approached me. I came to know the lanes and neighborhoods of the camp by the houses piled one on top of the other; mostly they belonged to families from villages in Upper Galilee, who had come as a group to south Lebanon and then later had moved to Shatila. They came from Majd al-Kurum and Safsaf and al-Birwa and Deir al-Qasi and Saasaa and al-Khalisa and elsewhere. I didn’t meet anyone from Tantoura in Shatila. I asked once or twice and then no more, held back by shyness. The women of the camp became pregnant seven times, or ten, or sometimes more; whoever perished, perished, and one or two boys would remain, and if they were lucky, three. Why had my mother had only two boys? They perished, and she had no one left. This kind of question hadn’t crossed my mind before I started going to Shatila. In Sidon I had been busy with childbearing and tending the little ones. I hadn’t gone to Ain al-Helwa, except for limited visits to Karima’s family, when congratulations or condolences were called for. By the time Ezz moved to live in Ain al-Helwa we were already living in Beirut.

  I did not take the baccalaureate exam as Amin and the boys wanted, nor did I enroll in the university. I learned in the camp.

  There I acquired a new extended family—children, girls, women of my own age, elderly women, each of them with the key of her house hung on a cord around her neck, like my mother. In Shatil
a I learned that the world of women is more compassionate than the world of men. The men were formed into factions, each with its office and territory and armed young men. They differed and quarreled like cocks. Oh my God, cocks with weapons! And cocks at home, too; they came back to their women and issued orders and prohibitions. The woman is plunged into her daily chores: She picks through the lentils and the rice. She makes mujaddara lentils for seven or ten or fifteen people. She rolls grape leaves and stuffs squash. She bakes the bread on the baking sheet. She makes labneh from milk. She puts up olives. She puts her shawl back on and goes to congratulate or share condolences. She puts the shawl back on and takes one of the grandchildren to the medical center or the hospital, because his mother is in bed, only three days have passed since she gave birth. She hurries back to serve the lunch she’s cooked. She washes piles of clothes, clothes without end. She complains about her stubborn youngest daughter, who insists on continuing her studies and on working with the fedayeen.

  “What’s wrong with her being with the fedayeen, Auntie?”

  “Am I against the fedayeen? I support them with all my heart, as God is my witness. The day the Second Bureau left and the fedayeen entered the camp, I danced and clapped with the others and sang and trilled. The whole camp was celebrating, the sound of the bullets in the air made it seem like a hundred weddings, not just one. God comfort them and protect them and bless them, the fedayeen, God guide them and calm their spirits, so they don’t draw their weapons on each other every time a jug knocks against a jar! I’d do anything for the fedayeen. But that girl leaves in the morning and doesn’t come back until evening, saying she’s getting weapons training. For God’s sake, use your head, girl!”

  She leaned toward me and began to talk in whispers.

  “Just between you and me, Sitt Ruqayya, don’t tell anyone else. Our neighbor saw her twice standing with the same boy. I asked her, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said, ‘He’s my comrade in the organization.’ I said, ‘Comrade or not, don’t keep standing with him, it’s not right. If he’s hanging around you, let him propose, and we’ll ask about him. What’s his family?’ She laughed and said that she wasn’t thinking about getting married, and he wasn’t thinking about it either. I said, ‘Then don’t spend a lot of time with him, so people start talking about how you’re behaving.’”

  She looked at me and raised her voice a little, “Anything but honor, Sitt Ruqayya!”

  Then she went back to whispering: “She stands with the boy and people put two and two together, someone says something and the next day there’s talk. The girl’s nineteen and says she’s not thinking about getting married! At her age I already had a boy and a girl and I was pregnant with the third.”

  “Times change, Auntie.”

  It was a different time. Was that good? At the time it seemed so, to me. I would look and see a certain confidence or hope or perhaps strength in the faces, in the posture of the young men and the girls, in their walk and way of sitting, in the way their hands moved in spontaneous gestures, in the tilt of the head when they nodded. It was in their laughter, in the tone of their voices when they discussed events, in their looks. I would speak with them, but I would make an effort to meet the elderly women of the camp. I love to listen to their stories, even if they’re sad at first, because the stories always began with “there,” with what happened when “they took over the village and threw us out and we fled to Lebanon.” The story moves on, but sometimes not completely, because as it advances in time it goes back, and remembers. The stories resemble each other but also differ, like the faces that tell them.

  The face of Umm Nabil lights up as she talks about the pomegranate tree “that you’ll find on your right when you’re heading for the door of the house.” She describes its height, the shape of its branches and the green of its leaves at first, and then later, when it’s covered by them and when it flowers. When Umm Nabil comes to the fruit she doesn’t talk about it, she simply stretches out her hand and picks it and opens it, spreading the seeds before your eyes so that you see their crimson red, which somehow moves from her hands to your tongue, so you taste its tangy sweetness.

  It’s strange, every woman is a tree. I mean, every woman has a tree, there. The lemon tree of Umm Samir; the orange tree of Umm Ilyas; the carob of Umm Haniya; the almond of Umm Abed; the palm of Umm al-Nahid; the blackberry of Umm Muhammad; the fig of Umm Sabah, “the figs were the green kind, their sweetness would entice the birds, and they would perch on it and peck the fruit before dawn.” Her face lights up and then darkens, because the story is coming to the part that’s hard to tell, or the harder part that can’t be told. Then her face lights up again, because, “Our Lord consoled me and the kids’ father found work,” or “We bought a cow and began to sell the milk and nourish the little ones,” or “The girl graduated and began working,” or “The boy went to the Gulf and began to send home part of his salary on the first of the month,” or because “At the worst of the trials and the tribulations, with barely a bite to eat, we turned the corner, yes, by God, we turned the corner.”

  Umm Ilyas tells us: “The bastards, four months before they threw us out they occupied the village farmland, which was to the west of us. They set up ditches and military centers, and the village was separated from its lands. We were on one side and our fields were on the other. Then the harvest season came; we said, “The crops will spoil, what should we do?’”

  “First the young men scouted them, so we knew the position of their lines, where they were and when their patrols passed. At night they passed the farms but on the paved road, going in cars. We knew that, and put our trust in God. Every night we would wait for sunset and then sneak across the valley, going in a roundabout way that took us to our fields. We would go in groups of ten, men and women and boys and girls. We would go through the valley like ghosts, without any light or noise or even a breath, until we got to our land and gathered what we could of the tobacco crop; and at daybreak or a little later we would cross the valley coming back. Sometimes the young men keeping watch on the hill for our security would sense danger, and distract their soldiers by firing on them; they would answer the fire and not notice us as we passed beneath them in the valley, hearing the bullets whistling over our heads.”

  Umm al-Nahid told a similar story, though the planting was wheat rather than tobacco: “When they took over the village we fled to the neighboring villages, in the hope that the Arab Liberation Army, which was camped a few kilometers away, would help us. When May was over and June came, we said that the crops would die on their stalks; we didn’t have much left and our children were hungry. We said, ‘We’ll face them, come what may.’ The news spread to the neighboring villages and the young men came to help us. They set out; some carried a rifle and those who didn’t have them armed themselves with sticks or knives. ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar,’ and they attacked. The Jews were frightened and fled.” Umm al-Nahid laughed. “The wheat was harvested and in sacks. They saw the young men attacking and heard the voices, so they left the bags and fled. They left three machine guns on the land, set up on stands and aimed at us. And seven reapers, big machines they used to reap our wheat. When our men entered the village, before they inspected the houses they wanted to make sure that none of them were still there, so they headed for the houses of Abed Darwish and Ahmad Ismail Saad, which they had turned into their headquarters. They didn’t find any of them; they found the tea still hot and poured into cups, and they found quantities of coffee and sugar and canned goods, and cardboard boxes, the whole courtyard was boxes. They opened them, and what did they find? The bastards had collected what they could carry from the town and packed it into boxes—our clothes and our men’s clothes and our kids’ clothes, and excuse me, Sitt Ruqayya, even the underwear! And the blankets and towels and sheets and pillows. The men began slapping one hand with the other and saying, ‘Good God, it’s not enough to steal the land and the crops, they even want the clothes we’re wearing and the blankets we
wrap up in!’ Believe me, Sitt Ruqayya, they didn’t even leave a sieve—there was one box with the sieves they had gathered from the houses. Were they going to sell them? To give them to the people of the ‘company’? To give them to the Jewish Agency? God only knows. Anyway, the men decided to leave the boxes as they were temporarily. Every one took a bag of wheat to the village where his family was. They gave us the wheat to grind so we could feed the little ones, and went back to the village because they decided to secure it before they came back to us. Two days, and on the third about a hundred soldiers from the Arab Liberation Army arrived. They said that they would take over protecting the village and asked us to evacuate it, because they expected heavy shelling. The men left the village and came back to us. Two days later the battle began, the Jews shelling from their positions on the west and the Liberation Army answering them from the village and the surrounding area. Then the Liberation Army withdrew and the village fell. The Jews attacked the neighboring villages and we fled to Lebanon. Afterward Abul Nahid and three others went back to find out what happened to our houses. Abul Nahid had hidden twenty liras under the palm tree. They arrested them and put them in prison; when they let them go they loaded them into a truck with twenty other prisoners from other villages. They blindfolded them and set them down at the border crossing to Lebanon. They said, ‘Run there, anyone who looks back will be killed.’ They took off running with the Jews firing on them. God have mercy on them all. Abul Nahid and two others who went with him were martyred. The third is the one who told me.”