The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  I’m letting my mind drift, Amin, and confusing things. I haven’t told you why I left Beirut. I had decided that I would not leave, though Sadiq insisted and pressured me, saying that I was imposing a burden on him that he could not bear. He quarreled with me and said, “I have nightmares because I’m so worried about you and Maryam. I don’t understand what’s tying you to Beirut.” I said I would not leave; then I did leave, because of Maryam. She was afraid whenever she heard any loud noise, thinking it was an explosion, and her face would be pale for days afterward. I told myself that she would bear up, like the others; not every child in the country has a brother working in the Gulf, where he can flee from the explosions. I decided to leave one day when Maryam came to me with her face wan and obviously upset. She asked me, “Mama, have you heard of Abu Arz, the Father of the Cedars?”

  “Abu Arz, no. Who is he?”

  “My friend in school told me about him. She said he’s like the Phalange, but worse. He and his men kidnap Palestinians and slaughter them, then they tie them to their cars and drive them fast, dragging the dead body in the street and tearing it apart. She told me that he and his men cut off the ears of the people they kill and hang them on key chains.”

  I scolded her, “Don’t associate with that girl. These are fantasies, sick fantasies. No one does that.”

  Maryam looked at me and said, “They’re not fantasies, Mama, because she’s a nice girl, and smart, and she’s been my friend for three years and never lied to me once. I didn’t believe what she said either, and I told her that whoever told her that was a liar. She said, ‘No one told me. I heard my father telling my mother. My uncle disappeared two months ago and we were looking for him, then my father found out what happened to him. He told my mother, and cried. He didn’t know I heard him, he thought I was asleep.’ When she told me that, I believed her. Mama, what will we do?”

  I decided to leave.

  In Beirut they talk about the foreigners, Amin, and about the devastation we caused in Lebanon. It’s the same old song from 1983, when the Phalange ruled. But the strange thing is that when I visited Beirut I heard it from others, who aren’t in the Phalange party or among its supporters.

  In Beirut I also met Abed, Wisal’s brother. He had returned from Amman and was working in another think tank. He had five children. He talked to me a long time about general conditions in Lebanon, and about the situation of the Palestinians in it. He knows all the details because he lives with the situation, and also because his work obliges him to keep up and to research it. I asked him about Ain al-Helwa, and he spent a whole day telling me what neither Ezz nor Karima had told me. I understood then why Ezz decided to move to Tunis and stay in the PLO, despite his anger with the leaders and their performance during the invasion. You wouldn’t know Ezz, Amin. Forget the white hair, white as a tuft of cotton, without a single black strand; he’s been like that for more than ten years now. When I saw him in Beirut after the invasion and then two years later, he was roaring, hurling insults and curses as if he were Abed the younger, not our laughing Ezz. I understood many things because Wisal’s brother Abed knows, and I would ask him and he would always answer. I’ve seen Ezz only twice since then, the day of Hasan’s marriage in Greece, and one other time here in Abu Dhabi; he came for some purpose, and we met. I did not gasp or shout when I saw him the last time; God helped me remain calm. I embraced him and spoke with him normally, as if how he looked had not shaken the very ground under my feet. That night I cried, by God, I cried. Not because he had gotten old; he had already aged when you left us, when the events of Ain al-Helwa occurred, during the invasion and afterward. Before that Ezz had always looked younger than his years, because he’s thin or maybe because he’s merry, because of his liveliness or because our Lord gave him a sweet disposition, like what you find in children. When he sneaked out of Sidon after the Shatila massacre to check on us, it seemed as if he had aged ten years in a few months; he already seemed like an old man then. But when he visited us in Abu Dhabi, Amin, he looked like an eighty-year-old, older than Uncle Abu Amin at the end of his days. It was as if old age had settled on his spirit and spread throughout his body, like a malignant tumor. He was silent, distant, and frail, and he even walked like an old man, slowly and with caution.

  50

  Egypt, Where …

  We left Abu Dhabi for Cairo the first week of September, 1993. No sooner had we stowed the bags and the plane taken off than I closed my eyes. I was on my way to Egypt for the first time in my life; Egypt, where my mother said that Sadiq and Hasan had gone. She lived and died repeating that and believing it. As soon as Cairo appeared at a distance of a three-hour flight, my mother came to me, she possessed me, her deranged mind stuck to mine. Sadiq and Hasan are over there, in the earth of Tantoura, I know; so why am I associating myself with my mother’s fantasies, so that it seems as if no sooner than the plane lands on Egyptian soil and I stamp my passport, I must go out into the streets to search for them? As if what my mother’s imagination had created had become a plant that grew with the passing years, clinging to the earth with a heavy growth of roots. I tell myself, my mother died forty-three years ago; we buried her in Sidon and her tomb is known. I tell myself, Sadiq and Hasan and my father died forty-five years ago; the young men buried them under the threat of arms, in the earth of Tantoura, with no marker for the grave, or sign. Perhaps their bodies have worked free, becoming part of the sand and Indian figs in the village. But my mother, strange, she has come with me. I shoo her away, I push her, or I speak reasonably and say to her, “You’re dead, there in Sidon, what’s brought you here? Why did you bring them? They are back there, leave them to the almond trees in the village, leave them to the olives, they’re enduring, they live a thousand years.”

  “Are you sleeping, Mother?”

  I open my eyes and shake my head.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I’m not asleep, Maryam.”

  I close my eyes and see my mother, all of her. I hear her repeating, “Sadiq and Hasan fled to Egypt,” repeating, “I will go to Egypt and not come back until they are with me.” Why are you coming to Egypt with me, Mother?

  I had never seen a city the size of Cairo. I had seen it time and again in films, and before the films I was familiar with the name and some of its features. My father would say, “I heard that on Radio Cairo,” or Umm Jamil would sing:

  O Egypt, with all my beloved,

  You are so far from me!

  If my horses cannot reach you,

  I’ll go to you on my own two feet.

  It was a song I use to sing to myself secretly, when I became engaged to the boy from Ain Ghazal. I told myself that I would not find anything there strange, that I knew it; but I did find it strange. The crowds alarmed me and the chaos confused me. Life there struck me, in its strength and its vitality. Maryam wanted to see a thousand things. I said, “We’re moving to Alexandria in five days, you can come back a second time and a third and a fourth, just look at the most important things now.” But Maryam wanted intensive tourism, she wanted to see the pyramids and the Citadel and al-Azhar, she wanted to visit the Egyptian Museum and the Islamic Museum and the Coptic Museum. She wanted to go to the tomb of Gamal Abd al-Nasser, she wanted to see Cairo University where Hasan studied, she wanted to ride a boat on the Nile at sunset. “I can’t, Maryam, I’m dying!” She drags me with her and goes on with her touring. I follow her despite the exhaustion, pleased by her joy in what she sees. Maryam doesn’t walk, she flies. I’ve never entered a museum before in my life, nor taken a tour. I repeat, Cairo is big. If my mother had visited it, she would never have imagined that she could find her two boys in it. Did she think it was a little bigger than Tantoura, or than Sidon? My mother never visited Haifa or Beirut, and saw no more of Damascus than a mosque she stayed in and a neighboring medical clinic. Maybe she had seen an old film with Abd al-Wahab or Asmahan and saw two or three streets, with no more people in them than you could count on your fingers.
I was fatigued by Cairo, by Maryam’s reckless program, by the clamor and the crowding. But I loved the Nile. I loved it and was amazed: as large as a sea, and calm, with no noise, no waves, no air filled with its smells to announce its presence before you see it. It doesn’t seem to need it, for it inspires awe in abundance, in and of itself.

  When we took the train to Alexandria I watched the land spread out like the palm of a hand, in neatly drawn rectangles and squares of cultivated land. No olives or almonds, fewer trees and a lot of planting. I thought, the land of Egypt goes with the river, a carpet beside a carpet; even its wildness has order and logic. She said, “They went to Egypt.” Like every mother, she wanted every step her boys took to be safe. Her imagination rushed to her aid, with land like a carpet.

  On the outskirts of Alexandria Maryam began to sing “O Alexandria, how wondrous your sea” in a whisper, so I laughed and followed her, distractedly. I was looking at my watch. I had never taken a train before in my life, and Sadiq had warned me: “The Sidi Gaber Station is not the last one on the line. The train stops there only five minutes or maybe ten, and then goes on to the last station. The trip takes two hours and ten minutes; get ready before you arrive. Pick up the things you’ve put near you, you and Maryam, and ask a worker to get down the large bags you’ve given him; he’ll set them down for you as soon as the train arrives. At the station you’ll find the friend I told you about. I told him to make sure to be there waiting for you; he’ll take you and Maryam to the apartment. Here’s his telephone number; if you want anything, call him. Assuming that for any reason you don’t find him, then ask one of the porters to take your things on his cart and go with you to the taxi stand, outside the station. You’ll give the driver the address, and you have the key to the apartment. The building has seven floors and our apartment is on the fourth. As soon as you arrive call to let me know.”

  Sadiq was laying out what we would and would not do. Maryam said that he was treating us as if we were children; he scolded her with a look and went on speaking.

  When I got up from my seat in the train, Maryam said, “Mama, everyone is still seated in their places, they’ll laugh at us.” But I got up and she followed me. She was right, because we stood near the door of the carriage for a quarter of an hour before it was announced over the loudspeaker, “Sidi Gaber Station.” Five minutes later the train stopped. Maryam was laughing.

  51

  Household Gardens

  How do the years pass, how did they pass? In a flash or slowly, like a camel crossing a desert that stretches endlessly toward the horizon, before you, behind you, and on the left and right? What brings the desert to mind when I’m in Alexandria, living on a street where the buildings crowd together, and each one has several floors, with apartments and residents? The pedestrians and the cars in the street move in three lanes, one for the cars heading east, another for the opposite direction, and between the two, tramlines. I hear the friction of their wheels against the iron and the hissing of their brakes when they approach the station and stop, or begin to move again. Clamor all day long, beginning at daybreak and not subsiding until the wee hours of the night, when it leaves the city to the sea. I inhale the aroma of the sea even in the dark, without seeing it. I don’t see it; I hear its roar and the impact of its waves on the stone breakwaters along the shore. Where did the desert come from?

  Maryam is engrossed in her study; she leaves in the morning and returns only in the afternoon, or sometimes in the evening. I wait for her return, I wait for her to complete her education so we can go back. Go back where? I don’t know; maybe to Sidon, if the children accept that. I don’t know anyone in Alexandria. No, that’s not so, I do—a nice neighbor here or there, the grocer, the butcher, the vegetable seller, and all the boys who work for them. Maryam’s friends, and sometimes their mothers; I invite the women to have coffee in my house, or I go to them. It may be the only visit, or it may be repeated from time to time. I make a pretext of any occasion or none at all, and invite Maryam’s classmates, boys and girls, to lunch or supper. Cleaning the house, shopping, and preparing the food is all done by an hour before noon, or sometimes two. What do I do with the rest of the hours of my day? I walk along the Corniche sometimes, then I become annoyed with the traffic, the clamor of the cars, their horns and their exhaust, and I go back home. Sometimes I go down to the beach; I take off my sandals and plunge into the sand with my bare feet, crossing it in a straight line toward the water. Then I stop, and give myself to the scent of the sea, to the splashing of the waves, to the salt and spray they scatter over my face and body, which somehow steal onto the tip of my tongue. I stay standing like that, watching; or else I go back a step or two and crouch down, or I don’t go back, I simply squat down as I used to do when I was only three, not yet daring to jump in the water. I squat at the door of the sea, or I walk, wandering, unaware, not thinking of anything. Just the damp sand refreshing my feet, the blueness with its embroidery of foam, the air laden with a familiar scent that steals through my dress and onto my body.

  One morning I asked the building doorman if he knew the way to a nursery nearby. He said, “A nursery for decorative plants?” I found the expression odd, and said, “For plants.” He told me the way, and I went on foot. I came back by taxi, because I had bought seedlings, plastic pots, dirt, and extra fertilizer. When Maryam came home from school and saw what I’d bought she laughed and said, “Is the garden free, or is there a charge to go in?”

  Sometimes I reflect on it and I think I am trying to deceive myself, to beguile the solitude and the wait; sometimes I forget to reflect, and become absorbed in the work of my little garden. I remember that my mother used to say that my uncle Abu Jamil’s wife had a green thumb. I was four or five when I heard the expression, so I began to look closely at Umm Jamil’s hands, every time I met her, searching for her green thumb. Her hands were wheat colored, a little darker than my own, so I thought that perhaps the thumb had been green and then returned to its natural color; or maybe it was green during times of the day when I didn’t see her, or at night when she was sleeping.

  Would my mother have said I had a green thumb if she had seen my little garden? It was not a single garden, but rather three small ones; what had begun as a thought, the day I asked the doorman about a nearby nursery, had turned into a daily preoccupation. I planted geraniums in seven oblong containers that I hung on the railing of the balcony. Mallow flowers are suited to the climate in Alexandria, to its sun, and even in the winter they keep their leaves and their colors, a fiery red or a soft violet or a third color, somewhere between the other two. The mallow flowers were the first plants I bought, and the game attracted me. Later on I put two deep pots on one side of the balcony, where I planted two kinds of jasmine. Jasmine is like a girl, it grows quickly and then fills out. That was the first garden (I have loved that word for garden, jeneina, ever since I became aware that it’s the diminutive of janna, Paradise). The second garden was small: on the marble countertop in the kitchen, under the large window, were a pot of mint, one of basil, and one of sage (I thought they wouldn’t grow inside the house in a little pot, but they surprised me). There was also a sweet potato in a cup of water, which rooted and then produced leaves; I tied up the canes with string attached to small nails, and it climbed and spread with its green leaves over the wooden window frame. The third garden was at the entrance of the apartment just outside the door, to your left as you come in. It was all cactus, in seven pots of different sizes, large and small. There were different kinds, and they flowered once a year.

  I wanted to occupy myself with the plants; they enticed me, and I gave in to temptation. I would water them, turn over the dirt, feed them with fertilizer, clean their leaves, and think about them. I missed the almond tree, and in the spring I missed it more. Sometimes I would think about what I was doing and mock myself; then I would murmur, “It’s not bad, not bad at all.”

  Sometimes I would be gripped by flower fever; I would look for stores and buy, a
rranging them in vases and distributing them throughout the house. There are beautiful flowers in Egypt. There was a strange, elegantly shaped flower I had never seen before: its long stalk ended in something that looked like the head of a swallow, with a crest on the head made of upstanding petals, yellow and orange, surrounding one or two petals of violet color. I asked about its name, and when the salesman said, “bird of paradise,” I loved it more. I take the bird of paradise home with me, in season, and sometimes the damask rose, which I prefer red. Sometimes carnations catch my eye, and I buy them. I do not buy lilies; they aren’t like the lilies in Tantoura, their scent is different, and I don’t like them. I don’t like expensive vases, either, nor vases of colored or decorated pottery. I avoid vases that attract the eye; what would be the point of the flowers, then? I put them in glass containers, ordinary jars like the ones where I put olives or coffee beans or sugar.

  When I’m engaged in tending the plants I think of nothing else. I water them, I turn over the dirt, I wipe the dust from their leaves. I transfer a plant that has outgrown its pot to another, bigger one, where it can grow comfortably. I talk to the plants, I always talk to them, encouraging them in their behavior or scolding them for it. “Just look at you, what’s all this, don’t tempt the evil eye!” Or I scold the sluggish one for her laziness: “You silly thing, look at your neighbor, it’s grown leaves and flowered and become twice your height!” Maryam comments that I’m behaving like a schoolteacher with young pupils. I find the comparison odd, and ask, “How so?” She laughs.