The Woman From Tantoura (22 page)

Strange; I didn’t wait to climb to the apartment. I stood at the bottom of the stairs. The headlines on the first page had nothing new: the attack on Beirut on five axes; the funeral of Bashir Gemayel in Bikfaya; the national forces were preparing for the attack. I had heard the same news the night before on the radio. I moved to the interior pages: pictures of Israeli tanks and military equipment in Bir Hasan; on the Sports City Road; in Ramla al-Bayda; at the lighthouse and the Military Bath. I stopped at the ninth page, at the details of the first item. A declaration from the White House, which I didn’t read. Then: “Subsequently yesterday a spokesman for the Israeli army announced that the Israeli forces are continuing to establish control over vital areas and crossroads in Beirut. He said that the Israeli armed forces are advancing without meeting resistance except in a few areas, where there has been an exchange of gunfire from light weapons between our forces and the saboteurs. The Israeli Defense Forces are taking these steps to prevent the ‘fedayeen’ and the leftist militias from reforming in the Lebanese capital … Israeli Army Radio said that the army had invaded the Fakahani neighborhood … and the Kuwaiti Embassy Square, which was among the most important strongholds where the saboteurs sought shelter.”

Where was Abed?

I sat on a step in the stairway, continuing to read the details as if the question and possible answer were ordinary or reasonable. A marine landing at the Military Bath, and debarkation on land at the airport. The advance of the forces along five axes: the airport road, leading to the Shatila traffic circle; the Kuwaiti Embassy traffic circle, Sports City, the Cola traffic circle, the Fakahani; the road from the sea to Ouzai; the museum; Barbir.

Where was Abed? They wouldn’t give him bonbons or chocolate.

Maybe he was in the house of one of his friends, sleeping, not knowing that the Israeli tank was below the house in which he was sleeping.

I took the newspaper and climbed the stairs. I put the key in the lock, and realized that I had forgotten Naji’s cartoon; I hadn’t seen the last page.

I saw it. I no longer remember what I did.

Did I strike my face in despair? Perhaps. Did I open the door and remain standing? I went into the house, turned around in it twice, like a hyena, and then left. Did I lock it and go down the stairs only to discover that I had to go up again? I don’t remember. I only remember that after that I was in Umm Ali’s apartment. Good morning, good morning to you. The Israeli tanks are in the Fakahani. I couldn’t find any bread. The Israelis are giving kids bonbons and chocolate at the barricades. I said it, and didn’t hear what she said. Then the apartment of the next neighbor, then the third neighbor. I repeated the same words like a tape recorder. Then the shelling began to intensify and become continuous, so I carried Maryam and my aunt to the shelter. Where was Umm Ali? I left Maryam with her grandmother and went up to Umm Ali; she was baking bread. I yelled at her, is this any time to bake bread?! She said, I found some flour and said, I’ll make bread. Anyway I’ve almost finished. She insisted on continuing: “Our lives are in God’s hand, Ruqayya.” My voice rose as I tried to convince her; perhaps I scolded her, perhaps I spoke insolently to her. Did I say something harsh, did I quarrel with her? I don’t remember, but she did not come down. After mid-afternoon, as the shelling was becoming insane, Umm Ali came down, carrying the fruits of her labor. She distributed the loaves and gave each of the nine children present in the shelter a pastry the size of a fist, sprinkled with sugar.

A little before sunset the shelling stopped, so we left the shelter. After that the firing of illuminating flares began; they lit the sky in the area suddenly, lighting it brightly, as if we were in broad daylight. What was happening? None of us needed to draw near to the
balcony or the window to see the sky; the room we were sitting in, which had been almost black because of the lack of electricity and the shadows cast by two small candles, suddenly lit up as if we were in the middle of the day. I went to the window; these illuminating flares were being fired from the south, toward al-Horsh and Bir Hasan, maybe over Shatila. Was it a new weapon? I didn’t see any thick smoke or fires, as was usual after the shelling. Umm Ali was muttering prayers and my aunt suddenly began to say that maybe it was Judgment Day. The day of accounting is in our favor, our Lord will punish them now for everything they did to us. Maryam seemed excited by the possibility of lights illuminating the night like this, saying, “Mama, the electricity is cut off, maybe this is a new way they’re using to light the houses.” I didn’t understand what was happening. I tried my best to push far away a feeling that a new disaster was on the way. The feeling was overwhelming, like certainty. What kind of disaster was it, what was its nature? I didn’t know, and that disturbed me even more.

I suddenly asked Maryam, “Where are we, Maryam?” My aunt shouted, raising her hand with all five fingers extended, “Do you see my fingers?” I laughed aloud, hysterically. She said, “I thought you had suddenly lost your sight. That happened before, to a woman back home, long ago. I didn’t realize that you were joking.” I didn’t tell her that I had not been joking, nor that my eyes were completely open and that I could see clearly, but that for a moment I had lost all direction. I didn’t know where we were, in our apartment or in the shelter or in a third place, so I had asked Maryam.

That night I heard a knock on the door. I thought, Amin, or Abed. I didn’t think that each of them carried a key and would not need to knock. I jumped up and opened the door.

27

The Abu Yasir Shelter

In that first moment I didn’t recognize her. Then I knew her, even though I still stood stiffly, as if I first had to understand why she looked like that and what had brought her at this late hour of the night. She spoke first:

“I’m Haniya.”

More seconds while my mind ran in all directions. Had she been hit by shrapnel? Where? Why did she look like that? Had the Israelis raped her? Had her house been destroyed on top of her? Suddenly I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and said, more loudly than usual or than was necessary, “Come in, come in, welcome, Haniya, please come in.”

She was carrying her infant son in her hands; her daughter she was carrying like a pack on her back, tied on by fabric she had likely torn from the hem of her long dress and the sleeves. I undid the knots and took the girl, who was deeply asleep; I put her on my bed. Then I said, “Wash your face, Haniya, then we’ll sit and you can tell me what happened. Can I get you some supper?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Tea?”

“A drink of water.” She gave me the infant and went to wash her face; then she returned and took him from me. I handed her a glass of water, and she drank it at one gulp.

Haniya had come to our house daily for two weeks; she was a nurse who gave my aunt a shot that she refused categorically to let Amin give her. Why not, Aunt? Amin is your son. Even if he’s my son it’s not right for me to bare myself to him. So a nurse came whom my aunt did not accept, saying that her hand was as heavy as a sledge hammer and that she would kill her. She took the first shot and refused to take the second. The next day Amin told her that he would send Haniya to her, and that no one had as light a hand as she did—the patient would think that she was about to plunge in the needle to give him the shot, and she would have inserted the needle, emptied the serum and withdrawn it without his feeling it. He said, “Anyway, Haniya’s family are from our neighbors.” My aunt’s face lit up suddenly, “From Tantoura? From what family?” Amin stuttered, and then said, “She was born twelve years after we left. Her father is from Jabaa and worked at the oil refinery in Haifa, and was living in Hawasa near Balad al-Sheikh.” My aunt said, “The people of Jabaa are our maternal uncles.” My aunt was happy with Haniya even before she saw her, and she was even happier when she came. She was friendly and good-natured and humored my aunt; she would insist that Haniya stay and have supper with us, and Haniya would say to her, “Umm Amin, I’ve been in the hospital all day and I have to go home, because my daughter is with my mother, and my husband is waiting.” Haniya had not yet given birth to the baby she brought with his sister when she knocked on our door.

Was it that night that Haniya told me the details of what had happened Thursday evening in the Abu Yasir shelter, or did she tell me some of it and did I hear the details from her and others later on? I don’t know, I don’t remember. All I remember is that she said: “When the shelling got intense we went to the Abu Yasir shelter, a hundred yards away from our house. My mother and father refused
to go with us to the shelter and stayed in the house. I went with my husband and the little ones and my sister and her husband and her kids. An hour later some armed Lebanese came in and began to shout at us, ‘Where are the saboteurs?’ A Lebanese neighbor shouted, ‘For God’s sake don’t kill us, we’re Lebanese!’ But they began to fire in the shelter; some fell, and there were loud screams. Then they ordered us to leave the shelter. They stood the men in a line against the wall opposite the shelter; as for the women and children, they stood them in another line and said they would take us to Acre Hospital. They were shouting at us, using obscene words. We began to move, and then we heard shots, a lot of them close together, so we knew they were killing the men they had lined up against the wall. How did I pick up my daughter and lift her off the ground? How did I carry the two kids together and get out of the line and run away? I don’t know. It’s as if my legs were the ones that decided to save me and the little ones. I found myself running away, an odd kind of running because I was jumping high and zigzagging to avoid the shots they were firing at me. They were shouting insults and telling me to stop and firing at me. Even when I escaped and couldn’t hear their voices any more, my legs kept running from lane to lane, passing the corpses thrown down in front of the houses. My legs didn’t stop to investigate that strange, penetrating smell that surrounded the place. They didn’t stop for a puddle my feet waded into; the water flew onto my face and my dress and my hands and I only noticed later on that it wasn’t a puddle of water. Then I stopped, a moment or maybe two, because the baby had started to cry. I was afraid the noise would alert them. I tore off a piece from the hem of my dress and I tied it over his mouth.”

“How did I get to the Gaza hospital? I don’t know. As soon as I went in I began to yell at the top of my voice, ‘They’re killing people. I saw them with my own eyes.’ They didn’t believe me, so I began to repeat that they were firing on us in the shelter. That they lined the men up against the wall and killed them. A nurse gave me a sedative pill and then began to give me first aid—I hadn’t noticed
that there was anything on my body that needed it. The director of nursing at the hospital came and wrapped her arms around me and said, ‘I know that these are hard days, dear. The entry of the Israelis into Beirut isn’t easy for any of us.’ I pushed her away and said, ‘The men who were killing were speaking Arabic. They are from the Phalange. The killed all the men who were in the Abu Yasir shelter in al-Horsh. I saw other corpses in front of the houses, piles of corpses.’ She spoke to me firmly and said, ‘Don’t scare people, we don’t need any rumors!’ I left her and went out to the courtyard where there were hundreds of people who had come to the hospital, and I said: ‘Run away, they’ll come here and kill you.’ Then I asked a lady my mother’s age to help me load my daughter onto my back; I told her, tie her on my back, and she tied her and I carried the boy and came running to you. What should I do now, Sitt Ruqayya?”

Haniya arrived at one in the morning; it was three before she responded to my insistence that she lie down on the bed for a while, until morning came and we could go together to the camp to find out what happened. I was stretched out on the couch in the living room, between sleep and waking, beset by nightmares; I would doze off a little and then become alert again, horrified by the question: what if they invaded the hospitals? What would they do to Amin? And Abed, where could Abed be? The office of the Popular Front was very close to Acre Hospital; it was still open and Abed went there sometimes. Was he there now? Maybe he was with his friends, dispelling their boredom by playing cards or arguing about what Abu Ammar did: this one curses Abu Ammar and holds him responsible, and that one thinks that the man did as much as he could to protect the Palestinian people. A daily battle that ended in shouting or that came to blows between the supporter of Abu Ammar and his decision and the one who was angry with the leadership and its policies. Abed was like a bull in a pen. He had spent three days after the resistance left without leaving his bed, then he began to stay away from home, saying, “I’ll stay with my friends.” Or he would come back late with the smell of whiskey on him, and
I would reproach him for being drunk. Once I scolded him and he answered me, “Leave me alone. If I had hashish I would smoke it and if I had opium I would sniff it.” I wonder where Abed was now? Why did the director of the Gaza hospital say what she did to Haniya? Had Haniya lost her mind with the long shelling and the terror? What if what she said was true? What would we do?

I found her standing in front of me, “Sitt Ruqayya, if I may, I’ll leave the two little ones with you so I can go see what happened to my husband and my mother and father and my sister and her children.”

I looked at my watch. It was five in the morning.

“I’ll go with you.”

I gave her one of my dresses and asked her to change into it. I knocked on Umm Ali’s door; I knew that she woke up early for the dawn prayer. I decided not to tell her anything, only to ask her to take care of Haniya’s children until we came back, and to tell my aunt and Maryam when they woke up that I had gone out and would not be late. No sooner did Umm Ali open the door, before good morning and good morning to you, she asked, “Have the Israelis gone into the camps?”

I said, “It seems that they have gone in with the Lebanese Forces.”