The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  I got up and began to pack a suitcase for travel. Maryam knocked on the door, saying “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Are you still studying?”

  “I’m about to finish and go to bed. What are you doing, is this the time to pack?

  “I’m getting ready to go.”

  56

  The Gate

  “God bless you, as long as you were going to accept my move to Sidon anyway, why did we spend all these months arguing?” I was talking about Sadiq’s determination to rent an apartment in Sidon. He asks and inquires and inspects and compares: an apartment on the fourth floor with a balcony overlooking the sea and big windows open to the sky and the sunlight? “It’s great! What do you think, Sadiq?” “How will it hold us all when we come in the summer?” Another, bigger apartment, five rooms. “It’s far from the sea, and the building is old.” A third one, new, and overlooking the sea. “The building has no guard.” Finally we find an apartment that meets all of Sadiq’s conditions: it’s new, large, sunny, near the sea, and has a guard with a strong build and a kind face. Sadiq checked everything about him, and announced with delight, “The guard’s grandfather knew my grandfather Abu Amin, and his grandfather’s brother worked in Acre in the days of Palestine; I visited his village two years ago. Now I can rest assured, as if I were the one guarding the building. Fine, I’ll sign the contract tomorrow.” Then Sadiq meets the neighbors: “I’m not comfortable with them. Neighbors are family, closer than family—you’ll be alone for months at a time, and I won’t be able to rest easy having you among them.” Sadiq wasn’t the only one looking, either: he brought in his friends old and new, and the young men of Ain al-Helwa, some whose relatives he had employed or whose education he had paid for, and their friends and their friends’ friends, until it seemed as if all of Sidon was preoccupied with Sadiq’s search for an apartment for his mother.

  At last we rented an apartment, we furnished it, and he left.

  God bless you, Sadiq, what have you done? It’s as if I were a pupil in a strange town: before he left he appointed not just one guardian but a whole host of guardians for me, young and old. As I told Maryam on the phone, I had imagined that I would be alone for a few months at least, gradually meeting a neighbor here or there or finding some of my old acquaintances in Sidon, and reconnecting with Karima’s family. I figured wrong, as if I didn’t know Sadiq: one week in Sidon and he rented an apartment, furnished it, and turned it into a madafa. He introduced his friends to the house and to me, “And I don’t have to tell you, guys … .” The young men living in Sidon would ask after me daily, and those who lived in Ain al-Helwa would come all the way into Sidon to ask. Sometimes they would be too embarrassed to come in and have a cup of coffee; sometimes they would come with their mothers or wives and children, and invite me to their homes. My God, how much Sidon has changed, and how much the camp has changed!

  Hasan asks me on the phone, and I say, “It’s the same, the sea, the castle, the Khan al-Afranj, the old quarter, and the vegetable market.” A moment of silence, and then I add, “There are new buildings, with many floors.”

  “And the camp?”

  I keep silent; he repeats the question.

  “The situation there is difficult.”

  He asks about the site of our new house; I tell him the name of the street and the number of the building.

  “How far is it from the old city? Tell me the way, Mother.”

  I laugh, and say, “Are you going to surprise me with a visit? You won’t get lost in Sidon, Hasan. As soon as you arrive ask for the street and not one but a thousand people will tell you the way.”

  “Tell me where it is from the Jad Building.”

  I can’t find an answer that satisfies him. The buildings that were destroyed, were destroyed, and new buildings were put up in their place. Why does he remember the Jad Building specifically? I no long remember where it was. What does Hasan want, to imagine the site of our new house or to redraw the city on paper, in a map like the many maps he excelled at drawing when he was little? How will he combine the city that was destroyed and the new city that was built on the ruins in one map?

  He can’t come to Lebanon to visit me, Sadiq was right about that; he had caused a huge commotion. Sadiq had called me in Alexandria, and said, “Call Hasan and try to talk him out of this stupidity. We don’t need to add complications to our lives, by our own free will. He doesn’t want to listen to me, but maybe he’ll listen to you.” Hasan had decided to travel with his wife, saying he would visit Palestine. Sadiq went crazy, and said, “You’re visiting Israel. Yes it’s Palestine, but officially it’s Israel, and once they put the state stamp on your Canadian passport in their airport you won’t be able to visit most of the Arab countries. You’re not Canadian, even if you have a Canadian passport. Your name is Hasan and you were born in Sidon. Go convince the passport officer in Syria or in Lebanon that you just wanted to visit your country! Use your head, Brother, that’s just the way it is, there’s nothing you can do! Your visiting Palestine is a luxury we can’t afford. How will you visit me, how will you visit your mother? And if Maryam got married in Syria or Lebanon, how would you visit her?” Sadiq was repeating to me the conversation he had with his brother on the phone. “He told me, ‘Mama lives in Alexandria, and I can visit Egypt with no problem.’ I didn’t tell him that you’re living there temporarily, and that as soon as Maryam graduates you’ll come back to live with me in Abu Dhabi. I didn’t tell him because my blood pressure was sky high, so I ended the call.’”

  Now Hasan asks me to describe our house; he can’t come to Lebanon, and my heart aches for him. I think, Sadiq was right; then I take it back. Hasan had wanted to visit Palestine; how did it look to him? He did not call me in Alexandria during his visit, he did not telephone me to say, “I’m in Tantoura, Mother, I’m standing on the seashore there.” He did not write a letter about his trip, and he didn’t even talk about the trip when he visited me later in Alexandria. He didn’t tell me about Tantoura, or al-Furaydis or Haifa or Lid, even though Fatima told me that he spent a month going everywhere. She said, “He visited the coast from Acre to Gaza, the West Bank from Nablus to Hebron. He spent three weeks in Jerusalem, and visited Wisal in Jenin. He went to Randa’s family in Nablus, and met relatives in al-Furaydis, and met friends he had met in Canada, going to meet them in Nazareth. He visited the Negev.”

  But Hasan did not tell me. Strange! As if he were stricken with the same silence that once struck me.

  57

  Light and Shadow

  The doorbell woke me. I looked at my watch, it was one a.m. Who can be knocking on the door at this hour? I open, and I scream—Abed and Maryam are standing before me! Abed laughs and Maryam says, “The jack-in-the-box only pops up in the middle of the night!” After hugs and laughter and flying half sentences and a quick tour of the house, “because we want to get to know our new home,” we move to the kitchen.

  “I’ll make supper for you.”

  “We ate on the plane.”

  “We want coffee.”

  Maryam insists that she make the coffee: “Where’s the coffee, where’s the sugar, where do you keep the cups?”

  The talk takes us far and wide, and the coffee boils over. We make another pot and take it to the living room.

  Abed says, “Now we have a problem, and we want a solution.”

  Is he joking? He’s speaking seriously; what’s wrong? I’m apprehensive.

  “Maryam resents me!”

  So they’re joking. Maryam says, “There are well-founded reasons for resentment, and also for fear. My vacation is five days, I’ll take off and leave Abed with you for a whole month. First, that’s not fair, second … .”

  I began to laugh.

  “Second, there are real reasons to fear that he will take advantage of my absence to occupy my place, even though it’s known, proven, and confirmed by your very own words, that the three boys are one thing and Maryam is something entirely different. I
’m alerting you to his evil intentions.”

  Abed jumps up and sits on the back of my chair, putting his arms around me.

  “I will begin immediately to execute my evil intentions. I believe that Sitt Maryam has occupied the throne long enough, and the time has come to depose her. I’m a democrat! What do you say, shall we smuggle her out like kittens? We’ll get rid of her and live without a nagging censor.”

  We didn’t go to sleep until the break of dawn.

  When they went to bed I made myself another cup of coffee and waited for daylight, then I left for the market. A boy helped me carry everything I bought to the house. Maryam was sleeping; as for Abed, he had bathed and changed his clothes. We had breakfast together, and then, “By your leave, Mother.”

  “Where to?”

  “I have work, I’ll see you at lunch.”

  Maryam doesn’t know Sidon, she never lived there like her brothers. Maybe she only visited it once or twice, when she was less than five. She says she doesn’t remember it.

  I take her to old Sidon, to the Bab al-Serail Square, I say, “It was here … .”

  I point to the Bab al-Sarail Mosque, to the Khan, to an old sign on the closed door of an apartment on the ground floor, which says: al-Irfan Printers, Ahmad Arif al-Zain, Proprietor, Founded 1910. “Your grandfather knew Sheikh Ahmad Arif al-Zain personally. He told me about him, and he said … .”

  We go down a few steps and walk through a dark archway. This is the Abu Nakhla neighborhood. I point to the Abu Nakhla Mosque on my left and the oven on my right; I say, “When your grandmother made a vow she would inform the Abu Nakhla oven, and they would make as much bread as she asked for and distribute it in the mosque.”

  A few steps under the arches that connect the two sides of the lane. “Here is the Sabil neighborhood, and this house on your right is where your grandmother and grandfather lived.”

  We keep walking. “This is what’s left of the public bath where your uncle Ezz bathed the day of his wedding. It was destroyed by the Israeli shelling in ’82.”

  I take her to the Great Omari Mosque, and say that the men gathered here on the day of … here was the funeral of … .

  Then the Maqasid Islamic School next to the great mosque. Maryam tries to convince the guard to let us in, but he says he’s sorry, it’s not allowed; school is in session and the students are studying. Maryam looks through the gate at the school buildings to the right and left of the courtyard. I point to the sea behind the courtyard: “This is where the boats carrying the weapons would anchor at night, and … .”

  I take her to the carpenters’ market, to the shoemakers’ market, to the perfumers’ market. I take her to the castle on the sea and to the Khan al-Afranj.

  We sit in a café overlooking the sea, divided from it by the highway. I say, “We used to call it ‘the holiday sea’; now it has become ‘the waterfront.’” She doesn’t catch what I mean to say, and I don’t explain.

  Maryam said that Hasan was right. “He told me, ‘Old Sidon is a sequence of light and shadow. The lane will be dark because it’s narrow and there are houses and shops on both sides, with arches above and bridges that also might have houses suspended on them, but before you get used to the shadow you’re surprised by a long, sunny open space. Because we were kids we didn’t walk but rather flew, so we would move in the blink of an eye from the light to the dark and from the dark to the light, as if we were playing with the sun and it was playing with us. And not only the lanes but the houses too: you step into a dark place where you nearly trip, because you can’t see where you step, or because the ghoul is lurking there, waiting for you. Then suddenly you’re on stairs flaming with daylight. You jump up the steps and stop a moment to lean over a tin basin planted with mint or jasmine, or you find yourself in front of the sea, lit up as if there were a fire under it.’”

  “Hasan wrote me that in his letter. But he didn’t tell me anything about the poverty, the run-down houses, and the tired faces.”

  It’s strange; Maryam didn’t buy sweets as visitors usually do, nor the bars of soap for which the city is famous. From the carpenters’ market she bought a small chest and a sieve and a pair of clogs. I said, “As long as you want the clogs for decoration, let’s look for some Syrian ones, inlaid with shell.” Then laughing, “You’ve become like the foreigners, Maryam—you hang the sieve on the wall and put the clogs on the living room table. Souvenirs from life in the old days. I hope you don’t ask me for an embroidered peasant dress so you can hang it on the wall of your apartment in France!”

  She said, laughing hard, “‘You wrong me, Sir!’ As for the chest, I’ll put your picture in it, and my father’s picture, and the love letters that will definitely come to me some day! I’ll close the chest and keep it in my dresser.”

  “And the sieve?”

  “I’ll put it next to my bed so I don’t forget to sift my thoughts and feelings every night before I go to sleep.”

  I laughed. “And the clogs?”

  “Here we have the main thing. I’ll be sure to use them every day, if only for an hour. I’ll stomp on the ground with them and hear the sound, and it will reassure me that I’m here, here and then some!”

  “What an imagination you have, Maryam!”

  “Mama, sometimes we keep things without being able to sum up their value in one meaning. Do you remember the marble that the boy in Shatila gave me?”

  “What marble, what boy?”

  “The one the boy bought from Mustafa Umda’s shop.”

  “Who’s Mustafa Umda?”

  She reminded me of the story, and then said, “I still have it. Not because I think it will bring luck or it’s an amulet or a charm, but just for some reason. A small glass marble for kids to play with. When I get it out of the place where I keep it, I put it in the palm of my hand and stare at it, and recall moments and places and faces. I see the boy who gave it to me; he was very handsome, astonishing. I was five; can a child of five fall in love? I wonder where he is now, if he left the camp and life took him to a new exile, or if he stayed there, and has been buried under the rubble since the fall of ’82. I look into his marble and see things, I see myself and maybe the past and the future. I close my hand around it carefully and put it away again.”

  In the house we sit together, or we stand in the kitchen, sharing in preparing a meal or a cup of coffee to have on the balcony. We talk, endlessly. We laugh. She tells me things and I tell her. We barely see Abed, who leaves the house early and rarely comes back for lunch, though we usually have supper together. He’s preparing to file suit in the Belgian courts. Why Belgium, Abed? He gives a lengthy, involved answer about binding international laws and regulations, the Treaty of Rome and the decisions that followed it, and the European countries that had adopted it. At the end of the detailed talk comes the specific answer: “Because Belgium is the one country in the world that allows individuals to file suits of this kind. They present their complaint to the investigating magistrate, and if the basis of the claim is present then he is required to look into it. This is the first reason; second, because immunity is not considered an impediment in the criminal courts in Belgium. Third, because the Belgian courts accept the principle of trying the accused in absentia, meaning that someone accused of torture or war crimes or crimes against humanity can be tried even if he is not present, or not a Belgian citizen, or not living in the country. Two weeks ago a group of my colleagues filed a suit in the name of twenty-three plaintiffs against Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron, and other Israelis and Lebanese, for the massacre in Sabra and Shatila. They presented the documents to the investigating magistrate in the Belgian criminal court; now we’re preparing other suits, about the Sidon elementary school and the Jad Building.”

  “Abed, where is the Jad Building?”

  “It was destroyed. I’ll take you to the site; why do you ask?”

  “Every time Hasan called, he asked, ‘Where is the building you live in from the Jad Building? How do you get there fro
m the Jad Building?’”

  “Don’t you know the story of the Jad Building?”

  “I know, it was shelled at the beginning of the invasion and everyone who was in the shelter was killed.”

  “And Hasan?”

  “What about Hasan?”

  “I mean Hasan’s story, didn’t he tell you?”

  “About … ?”

  Abed changed the subject; I found it strange.

  Maryam is the one who told me, when Abed went out. She said, “Hasan was in love with a girl who lived in that building. He had loved her since he was in middle school, and he kept going back to Sidon to see her when you moved to Beirut. Abed told me that when Hasan came to Beirut in ’82 he sneaked into Sidon to check on her. He went to Sidon two days before he left Lebanon.”

  “And so … ?”

  “So, nothing. He knew what had happed to the Jad Building, but he was still hoping. The girl died, with her mother and father and grandfather and sisters and brothers and neighbors and everyone who came from elsewhere to take shelter in the basement of the building.”

  I found nothing to say. That night I asked Abed, “Did you see the girl Hasan was in love with?”

  “Yes, I saw her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Mira.”

  “Describe her for me.”

  “She was small. Her hair was very black, and her eyes too. She was short and a little plump and had two braids, and dimples in her cheeks. Her face was usually bright and smiling.”

  “Was she much younger than he was?”

  “No, I’m describing her to you the way I remember her from our time in Sidon. She was the same age as Hasan, or a year younger. Maybe she was thirteen or fourteen. I didn’t see her after we moved to Beirut. By the time of the invasion she had finished school and was working.”

  “Why didn’t Hasan ask to marry her after he graduated?”

  “I think she was trying to convince her family to let her marry him.”