The Woman From Tantoura (11 page)

My aunt asked in amazement, “Why Egypt?”

He looked at her, disliking the question: “Because it’s Egypt!”

My aunt said, raising difficulties, “If my sister Zeinab were with us, she would say, ‘Take me with you so we can look for the boys.’” She sighed. “God have mercy on her and compensate her for her patience. For sure she’s living with them in Paradise now.”

The words escaped me: “Wouldn’t it have been better for him to have mercy on her during her life, and leave her at least one of the three!”

“Better, Ruqayya? He has his wisdom that his servants cannot fathom. Say rather, ‘Thank God, the only one we thank in adversity.’”

I said nothing.

My uncle went by sea to Port Said, and returned after three weeks, receiving the people who flocked to him as if he were returning from the Hajj. He presided over the room and told his story: “I visited Port Said and Port Fouad and Port Tawfiq and Ismailiya and Suez, and of course, Cairo.” He said, “I saw the Canal and swam in its waters.” He said, “I took the train to Cairo and attended a concert by Umm Kulthum. I went to the movies and before the show I saw a film called
The Talking Newspaper
, where I saw Abd al-Nasser as if he were standing before me in person, when he was speaking from the pulpit of al-Azhar Mosque and people were shouting for him, and then when they were carrying him in his car. And I saw the planes when they were bombing Port Said.” He would say, “I asked about the neighborhood where Abd al-Nasser lived, and I walked in it.” One of the young men asked him, “Why didn’t you ask to meet him?” My uncle said, his face a little red, “Cairo is big, I didn’t know who to contact to take me to him. And anyway he’s busy, and those who love him are many—imagine if everyone who loves him asked to visit him, would he attend to the visitors or concentrate his efforts on running the country?”

Two months after my uncle’s return, Ezz confided in me that his father had sold half the boat to cover the cost of his trip to Egypt. “He didn’t tell me. If I had known I would have managed it for him. I can borrow the money and then return it, since I’m employed and have an income. But he didn’t tell me.” Ezz laughed, long and loud, and said, “Well done, Abu Amin! Always acting like a king!” I laughed too.

12

Enter the Girl from Saffurya

My uncle looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He raised his hand to the cords of his headdress as if he were going to adjust it a little on his head, and then lowered his hand without touching it. Ezz laughed and commented on his father’s concern for his appearance, “They’ll think you are the groom, Abu Amin!”

His father answered, smiling, “They should. I’ve never seen a groom like you going to propose like that, with no kufiyeh or cords, not even a jacket—a shirt and pants, as if you were one of the railway workers in Haifa.”

“It’s hot out.”

“But you’re the groom. Wear a suit and they’ll respect you.”

“Let’s leave the respect to the army and the Second Bureau.”

Sadiq clung to his father and insisted on going out with him. I refused and he cried. His grandfather said, “Let’s go, Sadiq.” He took his hand and headed for the door, followed by Amin and Ezz. I stayed at home with my aunt and Hasan. My aunt began to ask
me about the bride for the tenth or twentieth time, her hair, her height and weight, where she was from, all the details.

“Are her eyelashes long?”

“She’s pretty, Aunt, her eyelashes are long and her eyes are deep black. She’s light-hearted and charming.”

“Is her voice loud enough and does she speak distinctly, or is she like the neighbors’ daughter, who speaks fast in a low voice? I can’t understand her.”

“She speaks clearly, Aunt.”

“How many sisters did you say she has?”

“Six sisters.”

“All their children are girls, God save us. What will Ezz do with a wife with six sisters? God help him!”

She was silent for a few minutes, withdrawn, as if she were thinking over the description of the daughter-in-law she had yet to see. Then she returned to her questions, “How far is Saffurya from our town?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it in the Haifa region?”

“No, near Nazareth.”

“When they took over the town, did they take them out?”

“They besieged the town and then they struck from the air.”

“They fled?”

“They left on foot for Lebanon. They got to Rumaysh and lived with people they knew. Some months later they went back.”

“They went back to their town? What forced them out to Lebanon a second time?”

“They caught them before they got to Saffurya and considered them infiltrators. They put them in prison in Nazareth and then loaded them into trucks and threw them over the border.”

“And they came to Sidon?”

“The Lebanese put them with others in an army barracks for a year or more, in an area named Qaroun, then they moved them to Ain al-Helwa.”

“It’s the first time anyone from the village has taken a woman from Saffurya.”

She went back to her questions, “Is her hair soft or rough, like the neighbors’ daughter’s?”

I laughed. “I haven’t touched it, Aunt, I don’t know. It looks soft. She braids it. Will you have coffee with me?”

She sighed. “Yes, I’ll have some.”

I gave her Hasan and got up to go to the kitchen and boil the coffee. I was suppressing my laughter. It seemed more like a judicial inquiry—why didn’t she wait two days and see her son’s bride for herself? She couldn’t wait. My poor aunt dreaded having a strange girl move in with her, sharing her house and her kitchen and her son. She kept saying, “If we were in the village Ezz would have married one of the girls there, or he would have taken one of the girls from Ain Ghazal or Ijzim or Jabaa, our maternal relatives. We’ve married among them before and their customs are like ours. Saffurya? I’ve never heard of that town and I don’t know a thing about it. God protect us!” She was openly worried. As for my uncle, I did not understand the reason for his distress on the way to Ain al-Helwa to ask for the girl. What was upsetting him? Asking for a bride for his son from strangers he had never met, or missing his brother and relatives from the village, the customary large group that accompanies the groom when he goes to ask for the bride? Or did he dread going to the camp?

Perhaps he was not distressed, but rather something else had settled in him, like coffee after it’s boiled, when the dregs are dark and concentrated and bitter, separate from the drink and the flavor we enjoy. My uncle was merry and cheerful over the marriage of his younger son, and the thought of the bride who would live with him in his house. But when he went to ask for her on the evening of that spring day of 1957 he had to go into the camp, which he had not entered before.

After they recited the Fatiha, my uncle wanted to expedite writing the contract and celebrating the marriage, but his in-laws told him that they needed some time to send the news to their relatives in the
other camps. The girl’s father leaned over to my uncle, “We have to do what we must, Abu Amin. The invitation must reach everyone from the town. If they can attend then that’s good, and a blessing; if they can’t get the permits, then that’s God in his wisdom.”

“What permits?”

“Slowly, slowly, Abu Amin. We have to get a permit from the Second Bureau to allow our guests to enter the camp, a hand-written permit. We’ll submit the request tomorrow morning. Our guests also have to submit requests to get permits to leave their camps, and praise God, the people of Saffurya are many, scattered from Ain al-Helwa to Mieh Mieh to al-Burj al-Shamali near Tyre, to Wavel in the Beqaa and Nahr al-Bared in the Tripoli region. We have to contact them to find out what their situation is and when they can get the permits.”

I was not present for this part of the talk since I was in an inner room, changing Hasan’s diaper. But Ezz accompanied Amin and me on our way home in the evening, telling his mother and father that he wanted to stretch his legs a bit. When we arrived he said, “I want a cup of coffee from Ruqayya’s hands,” and he went up with us. He was burning to talk. He repeated the bride’s father’s words to me, and looked at Amin, “You noticed how discouraged everyone became.”

“I noticed, and I didn’t entirely understand what happened. I tried to distract them by talking about the agency’s projects for better health care for families, and how I hope to organize training sessions to prepare young people to administer first aid, something that could possibly turn into a nursing school later on. They were interested, in fact, but Mother was still upset.”

“Father was discouraged when Abu Karima talked about the permits, not because he hadn’t heard about them before but because every time he heard about them, he decided to drop the matter and forget about it, as if he had never heard of it. Suddenly he finds that his son’s wedding and the preparations for it depend on permits from the Lebanese military intelligence. He’ll be forced to live with the details, so how can he let it drop?”

“And what’s bothering Mother?”

I joined in, “Aunt is worried that the bride’s family will be larger than the groom’s, as if we had no extended family around us. I heard her saying to my uncle, “Why don’t you send for the people from Tantoura in Syria? Maybe some of them would be able to make the trip.”

Ezz laughed, and said, “Mother whispered in my ear, ‘Who will cook for all these people? What if a hundred people came—we’re not at home and I only have Ruqayya and our neighbor, who’s ill, and her daughter, and I can’t understand her.’ So I whispered, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll arrange things later. We shouldn’t whisper something that might reach the ears of our guests.’ She whispered back, ‘They have relatives that are coming from the Beqaa and from Baalbek. What if they turned out to be a thousand, what would I do?’ So I got up and sat in another place!”

Ezz burst out laughing, and got up.

“I’ll go home and reassure them before they go to sleep. I really needed to talk about that sudden anxiety; I couldn’t sleep without talking about it. I’ve gotten it off my chest and now I’m relaxed. Good night.”

Some of the people got their permits and some didn’t. Most of those who were invited from Tripoli and the Beqaa weren’t able to participate in the wedding, so my aunt wasn’t obliged to cook for a thousand people. Despite her constant worry she was singing and humming and welcoming the guests. They bridged the distance from the bride’s house and the surrounding houses, where her family and relatives lived in the camp, to my uncle’s house in old Sidon. The young men set up the dabka circles in the camp and in Sidon, where the people of the neighborhood shared in the dabka and the call and response of the ataba, miijaanaa, and ooof songs. Even the wedding procession was held according to custom. My uncle brought a horse from one of his friends; they decorated it and Ezz rode it, after his friends had taken him to the public bath and sung the customary songs to him: “The handsome young man comes from the bath, God and his names protect him,” and “O you with
the kufiyeh and cords, where did you hunt this gazelle?” I sang with my aunt and the bride’s mother and sisters:

Say to his mother, rejoice and be glad,

Perfume the pillows and bring henna for our hands.

The wedding is here and the couple is smiling,

The home is my home and the houses are mine—

We are engaged, let my enemy die!

Little Sadiq was clapping his hands and joining in the singing.

My aunt outdid herself when she sang
Ya Zareef al-Tuul
—O Tall One. She added some lines to the familiar song which I had not heard before:

O tall one, O handsome, stop and let me say,

You’re going abroad, when your country would be best.

I’m afraid, O tall one, that you’ll settle there,

You’ll live with another, and let my memory go.

O tall one, O handsome, you with the laughing smile,

Tenderly raised by your mother and father,

O tall one, the day they took you far away

My hair went white and my back bent low.

O tall one, O handsome, you’re far from your own.

Don’t travel far away and leave us the blame!

If God wills you’ll return, we’ll return to the vines,

We’ll harvest the wheat, and gather what we grow.

O tall one, O handsome, you who’ve been spoiled,

If you go to the well, think how to climb out.

We’re scattered, it’s for God to bring us back;

Our Lord scatters and he gathers, that we know.

The girl from Saffurya came into the house, lived in it, and spread out. My poor aunt found herself cramped in a space that was ever smaller, as “the stranger” (as she called her in her absence) shared in ordering the house, and what will we cook today and how will we cook it, and “this couch is better here,” and “having this window closed makes the house stuffy, it’s better if we keep it open,” and “never mind, Aunt, I’ll cook.” My aunt complains to me in whispers, looking around her. “She has your uncle and your cousin completely fooled. Even the kids are fooled. She’s strong, the girl from Saffurya!” Or again, “Thank God they live in the camp. If Ezz had married her when we were in the village he would have lived in their village, and we would only have seen him on holidays.”

Since most of the residents of Saffurya were refugees in Lebanon, the whole village and not just the bride came into Abu Amin’s house. It was a dense presence that made my aunt feel as if she didn’t have any extended family around her, and that my uncle welcomed joyfully. His daughter-in-law brought him her family who became a family for him; in fact she brought Saffurya itself with her, to become part of his story. He would recount what happened in it, and it came to seem as if he had been there when the people were forced to leave it for Rumaysh. In fact, one morning he decided, “We have a duty that we cannot neglect,” so he went to Rumaysh to meet the family that had hosted his in-laws the day they left their village, taking with him a “worthy” gift of fish. He thanked them and invited them to visit him in Sidon, and held a banquet for them as if they were his in-laws and not a family who had hosted the family of a girl who would become his daughter-in-law, nine years later.