The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  Sadiq laughed, and said, “Then we have to start now to try to get you a visa to come to the Emirates.”

  “Yes. And I’ll write that the reason for the trip is mulukhiya.”

  They laughed. I joined in with a smile, but I was downhearted. I said, “I’ll put Maryam to bed.”

  “Then you’ll join us?”

  “I won’t leave her alone in the room. She might wake up and be frightened to find herself in a strange place.”

  Sadiq said, “It would have been better for you to leave her in Beirut with my uncle’s wife.”

  Ezz said, “That’s what I suggested.”

  I did not comment. I lifted Maryam and went up to the room, followed by Hasan. I put the girl to bed and sat with him. We talked a long time about Egypt and his studies and the situation in Beirut; but neither of us mentioned the visit or the bride or her family’s house. We didn’t notice that we had passed midnight until Amin came in. He planted a kiss on Maryam’s head, as she was fast asleep, and said to Hasan, “Ezz and your brothers are waiting for you in the coffee shop; I’m going to sleep. Good night.”

  25

  Wisal (II)

  I don’t usually pay that much attention to the clothes I wear, but when I was getting ready to visit Wisal, I changed my clothes three times. I put on one of my dresses, looked in the mirror and then decided to put on another one. I went back over my directions to Amin about Maryam, if she gets hungry do this, if she wets herself you’ll do that. He laughed and said, “Come on, don’t worry,” and then, “Go ahead, Hasan,” as he had decided to go with me.

  A taxi took us to al-Baqaa Camp; we looked for the house for some time, and at last arrived at the address. The door was open, and Hasan clapped his hands. A woman came, and I was embarrassed to see her as I did not know if it was Wisal or someone else. She was my age. She extended her hand and greeted us as she welcomed us repeatedly, so I realized that she was not Wisal.

  In later years I would recall the moment we met, in that small house in al-Baqaa Camp on the heights above Amman, at the beginning of 1978, because when Wisal came into the room she did not extend her hand in greeting but rather opened her arms wide and embraced me, and also because as I embraced her, I was certain that the scent filing my nose was not from my imagination. It was my friend, the girl of Qisarya who had come to me now from Jenin, bearing with her the scent of the sea. I tell myself that a wish can create an illusion and sustain it; but then I say no, the scent did not come from my mind but rather from her body and her long dress and her hair, reaching to my nose and from there penetrating my head and breast and bowels—how could that be the effect of an illusion?

  Wisal brought me a traditional Palestinian dress and told me that she had begun embroidering it after that telephone call that Abed had made from Beirut. She said that she had finished it three years earlier, waiting for us to meet. I fought back tears as I contemplated her handwork on the dress she had brought to me over the bridge from Jenin. It was not cut and sewn, as she left it for me to sew, to fit me. It was three pieces of fabric: the first was large, for the body of the thawb, from the collar to the hem, which she had embroidered over the breast and around the hem, and two smaller pieces for the sleeves, with the same motif embroidered at the border of each. She had not chosen the usual black fabric for me but rather an indeterminate light color, almost off-white, which she had embroidered with thread of every hue and shade of blue, from light sky blue to the deepest color of the sea. I looked at the dress and could find nothing to say; my tongue was tied, and I felt that my gifts were not appropriate. I left the wristwatch and the heart suspended on a golden chain and the bottle of perfume in my bag, repeating to myself, they do not suit the occasion. I heard Hasan’s voice saying, “I must go. Do you know how to find the way back, or shall I come back to pick you up in a couple of hours?” Then with a haste I did not understand, he said to Wisal, “Goodbye, Aunt,” and kissed her hand and left rapidly.

  Wisal was the one who began to talk. She pulled me in, and I entered first with timid steps; then my tongue came untied and began to listen to her and to exchange stories with her. Then she asked, “When are you going back to Beirut?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “God forgive you, Ruqayya, stay one more day. One day, and then go in peace. I want to meet Dr. Amin and Sadiq and little Abed, and I want to get to know that handsome young man who perched like a little dove for a moment and then flew off. Tomorrow we’ll have lunch together, God willing.”

  “As you say, Wisal.”

  In the hotel, after Maryam and Amin had gone to sleep, I looked into the mirror for a long time. I saw myself with Wisal right next to me, in her embroidered country dress and her full, fertile figure. Why had she seemed older than I, years older? She had become tall and plump, her country dress and its belt emphasizing her plumpness; I had remained as I always was, thin, my thinness emphasized by the dress that was tight on my body, falling narrowly from the waist to end just below the knee. Perhaps my hair, drawn back and held in a narrow black ribbon, made me look like a schoolgirl when I had passed forty? She covered her hair with a white shawl, showing a lock of hair in which white was mixed with the black.

  I moved my eyes between the two images, wondering. It wasn’t only the thinness here or the plumpness there, but rather the clothes, maybe, or the posture or the difference in the hands, the face and the forehead. Was it by chance or for some other reason? Was it the difference between Beirut and Jenin, or because she was the wife of a peasant, a son of the camp, while my husband had studied at the American University of Beirut, becoming a doctor, and we moved easily from place to place? Was my way of speaking different? How did I used to speak? How did I speak now?

  I stared at the two images, finding it all strange, confused by questions that weren’t completely clear and to which I could not easily find an answer. One thing that was clear and about which I harbored no doubt was that Wisal, whom I had known as a girl back in Tantoura, and who now lived far away in Jenin, whom I had met once after thirty years of separation, had opened her arms wide and embraced me, and it had seemed as if nothing had happened. I felt that I wanted to cling to her coattails and follow her wherever she went, and wherever she was.

  I changed my clothes and lay down in bed, with the caution I had grown used to so as not to awaken Maryam or Amin. Then sleep came over me, and I dreamed I was in Tantoura, repeating that the gift must be a bouquet of the lilies from the village. I smelled their scent and followed it, hoping it would lead me to them, but I did not find them. I went back to my mother, crying, “Who picked the lilies? They were here and here and here and there, does it make any sense that someone picked them all? And can the scent stay even after they’ve gone?” My mother made light of it, saying, “There are a lot of flowers. You have red anemones and lilies of the valley and daisies and knotweed and lavender, so make your gift a bouquet of them.” But I wanted lilies. I looked for them far and wide in the town, from the tower north of it to the police station south of it, from the beach to the school east of the railroad, but there was no trace of the lilies, even though their scent was penetrating and filled the space around me.

  On the next day we all went to see Wisal, except for Sadiq who preferred to spend the day with his bride and her family. When we said goodbye at the door, she brought a can of olive oil and two bottles of olives, two large, plastic soda bottles into which she had pressed all the olives she could. She said, “The oil is from our olive trees in Jenin, and the olives too. I put them up myself and sealed the bottles well, so you won’t have any trouble taking them to Beirut.”

  From the beginning of the year until the end, we ate from Wisal’s olives and olive oil. As it was the custom, we always had a supply of olives and olive oil in the house, but Wisal’s oil and olives were only for special occasions, holidays, Hasan’s return from Cairo for the summer vacation, when Ezz and his wife came from Ain al-Helwa, or when the elder Abed came for one of his visits, which now were ra
re. I would spoon out some of it and place it on the table with the rest of the food, and Amin would laugh and say, “This is something Ruqayya does not grant us except on very special occasions.” On the holidays I would also visit the tomb of my mother and my uncle in Sidon; and whenever Wisal visited Amman she would call me on the telephone, and that day would be like a holiday. She would tell me her news and her family’s news, and I would sum up our news for her. I would say, “Maryam is growing up day by day,” and she would say, laughing, “My youngest son is only nine years older, he’ll wait for her.” I would laugh, and she would laugh. “Take care of yourself, Ruqayya,” “Take care of yourself, Wisal.” I would replace the receiver not knowing if I felt sadness or satisfaction, or something suspended between the two.

  26

  Where Are We,

  Maryam?

  Hasan was the one who suggested that I write my story. I said, “I’m not a writer!”

  He said, “Tell the story, write what you have seen and lived and heard, and what you think about. If it’s hard to write, then tell it orally and record what you say, and afterward we’ll put it on paper. This is important, Mother, more important than you imagine.”

  I repeated, “I’m not a writer. Every craft has its craftsmen. I have never excelled in composition, even when I was a pupil in school. I was amazed by the ability of some of my classmates to write well, whatever topic the teacher assigned us.”

  He said, “Mother, what I’m asking for isn’t a composition but testimony. Do you remember that day when I asked you to record your testimony about what happened in our village, and I told you to gather the details and get ready? You became ill and it wasn’t possible for us, because I left after that. What I want from you is testimony like that, even if it’s long and detailed, concerning the large events and the small ones, too. Write whatever comes to mind, and tell it however you like.”

  I said, “I wish I knew how. Besides, it’s hard to tell, it’s not something to tell. It branches out, and it’s heavy. How many wars can a single story bear? How many massacres? Anyway, how can I tie the small things, important as they are, to the terrors that we’ve all lived through? Tell it yourself if you like, you have a lot of the details, and whatever you lack I can make up, I mean, if I have anything to add. You are gathering people’s testimony, you read countless books, you research and you record and you compose. You write it, and if I have anything to add, I will.”

  He said, “If I weren’t confident in your ability I wouldn’t burden you by asking.”

  I said decisively, “I don’t know how.”

  I refused, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. It stayed with me like a disagreeable guest who doesn’t want to leave. I said to myself, I can’t and I don’t want to. I threw it out and locked the door. Years later Hasan once again began to insist. Then one evening he surprised me with a large notebook, on the cover of which he had written “al-Tantouriya.” The woman from Tantoura.

  He said, “Write anything. Write about the village, about the sea, about the weddings … . Repeat some of what you used to tell us when we were little. As for the catastrophes, write what you can stand to, an allusion, even an allusion might be enough for the purpose.” He smiled suddenly and reminded me of the homework he used to demand of me when I was preparing for the baccalaureate examination. “Consider it part of that homework, as if it were a school requirement. The difference is that I’m not demanding it for next week. Begin to write, and then we’ll see what happens.”

  I changed the subject. “You taught me Arabic and English and history and geography and social science, and Sadiq took charge of math and sciences for me. You were a better teacher than he was.”

  He said, “Maybe you were more inclined to the subjects I helped you with, and so you imagined that I was better than Sadiq in explaining the lessons?” He laughed. “And Abed would look at us resentfully because he was out of the game and didn’t know how to share in it.”

  I laughed.

  Hasan snared me. The notebook was waiting. The title was seductive, and the blank pages whispered suggestively, aren’t you the Tantouriya? Temptation. I would avert my face and tell them, go away, I don’t want you. At night when I lay down in bed to sleep I would find them waiting for me.

  One morning I picked up the pen and here I was writing about the young man the sea cast ashore for me. A passing adventure under the heading of love, awakening the senses, preparing them.

  It was pleasurable and interesting to summon on paper my mother and my father, the village sea, and a wedding from long ago.

  It was pleasurable and problematic to describe the almond tree in the spring. (I wrote it once, twice, three times. I said to myself, it’s no use. It was a queen in its land, I can’t transfer it to paper.)

  It was delightful to set down a song, the colorings of the voice and its rhythms ringing in my ears—and then I would stop, wondering how a song can be imprisoned on paper, bare of its melody, except for someone who knows it and has heard it or sung it before.

  Then I advanced farther along the rough trails of memory and of words. I said, Hasan has snared me. Here I am after writing two notebooks and dozens of pages, incapable of continuing. How can I tell the next four months? How have I told the first four months? I’ve told the little part I lived, a part entwined with thousands of others, lived by other people during the same months; how can the story be completed without all of these parts?

  Four months there at home, and another four in Lebanon, our second home, where we are now classed as aliens. Four and four—pure coincidence, or the workings of destiny? An arbitrary destiny, a butcher, not satisfied with a few slaughtered carcasses to hang in its shop window and to cut according to the buyer’s wishes, but slaughtering out of greed. The perfect setting for the most horrendous nightmares. But in sleep nightmares are usually restricted to a few silent images, the fear when you’re chased or a feeling of strangulation—nightmares are meek and gentle, and they have their limits. Here, insanity overflows: shelling from airplanes, battleships, heavy artillery, bombs, charges that explode cars which just minutes before had seemed tame as sleeping cats, fires. The water is cut off, and the electricity. There’s no bread. You go to look for it and the earth explodes beneath your feet. God’s heaven is your enemy all day long, a siege from all six directions. Senseless bombs bring down buildings, which collapse on their residents and leave a deep ditch, before which all we can imagine of hell and its deepest pit seems small. Cluster bombs continue exploding, as if forever. Maryam is crying from the pressure of the noise in her ears; I block her ears for her with earplugs, and surround her completely with my arms. Can they hear the noise in Jenin? If only it were Jenin. Maryam says, “Tell me a story.” I remove the plug from one of her ears, bring my lips close and begin to speak; she listens for a bit and then cries again, from the intensity of the noise.

  In this hell on earth my relationship with Beirut became solid. Strange; how did it happen? Its tame, everyday sea was no longer its sea, its land was no longer its land, its sky was no longer sky. Your house, and the one next to it and the one next to that and the rest of the buildings in the street where you live and in the next street, and at a distance of ten minutes’ walk in the direction of the Sabra market, or a little father in the lanes of Shatila or in the other direction toward the Cola Bridge and the Fakahani, all of them surprise you with something you’re not used to. Shells have hit them here and here and here and there. Glass has turned in an instant from stable panes in the windows, reflecting the sunlight playfully, to scattered fragments on the ground; cars and the feet of pedestrians pass over them, grinding them, and they emit a sound like a moan. Balconies, wooden shutters, ceilings have flown without wings, and fallen as debris on the street. Even the walls have lost their expected civility, under the shelling, and revealed what had been concealed inside the homes. I lift my head and look, and I see a bed, clothes, a chair, half a table, food dishes, suspended in the open. Or a lucky f
amily, not killed by the shelling, may be reunited in a room from which the fourth wall has fallen, leaving someone passing to lift his head and say “Good evening,” or to avert his gaze and pass as if he saw nothing. I walk toward the Fakahani neighborhood, the Arab University of Beirut, Afif al-Taybi Street—what has happened to the street? The Abu Iyad Building, the PLO Planning Center and Unified Information, the Writers’ and Journalists’ Union, all were destroyed. Just one street in Beirut—where did the street go?

  Amin would return to the house whenever he could, when the firing stopped. He no longer kept regular hours in Acre Hospital because he was occupied with preparing medical centers and emergency units in this or that neighborhood in West Beirut. Abed the younger was with the resistance and I hadn’t seen him for weeks; I didn’t know in what position he was or behind what barricade, in the heart of Beirut or on its heights? Near the airport confronting the Israeli soldiers, or near the museum confronting the Phalange, or on the beach confronting the battleships? Where was Abed now? Hasan was with the civil defense, distributing bread or water or newspapers, on duty whenever he could be in the Safir newspaper. Where was Hasan, at this moment? Where was Amin, where were Ezz and his wife? My imagination wandered after them, hovering over the streets, looking for them. I let it wander as I hurried to accompany Maryam and my aunt to the shelter in the building. At the end of the raid I would go out to the street to inspect it, to inspect Beirut, or Ruqayya; I would return and take Maryam in my arms and try to sleep.

  At the entrance to the apartment I kept a small overnight case and two shopping bags which could be picked up quickly when the shelling intensified. Maryam would run for the stairs to the shelter carrying the smaller bag, as I had taught her, the bag with the candles and the Lux battery and lighter. In her other hand was a small transistor radio. I would follow her with slower steps, in my hand the overnight case with a towel, some clothes, a first-aid kit, and another bag with a bottle of water, some loaves of bread and a plastic container of cheese or labneh or olives. With my other hand I held my aunt’s hand, guiding her slowly down the stairs toward the shelter.