The Woman From Tantoura (37 page)

Did Umm Jamil invite us often or was her food so good that that it stayed in the memory, as if we had eaten it with her dozens of times? The day we had the musakhan, or perhaps another day, Umm Jamil said that her father’s grandfather had told her that many of the people of Tantoura came from Egypt in the days of Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali, and settled there. My uncle Abu Amin laughed and said, “Maybe your grandfather loved Egypt, so he said that we come from there. Did he study in al-Azhar, Umm Jamil?”

“He studied in al-Azhar. He used to visit Egypt every year; he would mount his horse, say ‘By your leave,’ and come back loaded down with gifts of every shape and color. I was little, no higher than five hand spans.”

My uncle Abu Jamil intervened, waving his hand, “In the Turkish era in the time of the Ottomans, the world was completely open. People would go and live wherever they wanted, since it was all Arab Muslim land.”

Uncle Abu Amin laughed again and said, “Or everyone would choose to trace his origins to the place he loved best. One would say, ‘We’re descendants of the Prophet, we came from Mecca,’ and
another would say ‘We’re of Turkish origin,’ as long as the Turks ruled the country. Someone would say he came from Aleppo, the administrative center in the old days. We can’t tell the strand of truth apart from imagination.”

Uncle Abu Jamil suddenly tensed, “Be careful, everyone, that’s enough of this talk. If the Jews heard us they would say, ‘Go to Egypt, that’s where you come from.’ That would be all we need!”

I no longer remember what Uncle Abu Jamil looked like. I only remember that he was old, that he carried a large rosary in his hand, that he prayed a lot, and that he was with us in the truck that took us to al-Furaydis. I don’t remember him in al-Furaydis or al-Maskubiya in Hebron, but my mother said that he and his wife went to their daughter, who was married and living in Syria.

Maryam said that she would not study in Lebanon; was that her wish, or did she imagine that I did not want to go back to live in Beirut? When I returned from my visit to Beirut, the one visit after we left Lebanon, I was sick and stayed in bed for two months. Sadiq said that the visit was the reason; perhaps Maryam was influenced by what her brother said.

Yes, I visited Beirut. I went back after five years away, and stayed in a hotel. I lost my way in the camp; I couldn’t find the houses I used to go to or the school where I taught, and I became disoriented in the lanes. I couldn’t find anyone I knew, not Haniya nor anyone else. Where had they gone? I was so upset that I didn’t leave my hotel room for two days. Then I tried again to bring back the city, to connect the memories I carried in my body with what was new in it. I walked, and looked closely; I thought, “It was here.” I delved, as if I were looking for a city submerged in another city, sunk under a weighty pile. No, that’s foolish writing, it wasn’t like that, or at least not completely. The sea was in its place, Beirut’s familiar sea. The mountains were its eastern border, as usual, and Bliss Street was also the same, and the American University. I pick my way carefully through the streets, looking closely, and I find—what do I find? Damage that convulses me, as if I had not
been aware of it or had not seen it before. In the Tariq al-Jadida, the Fakahani, Hamra Street, the market area, the Demarcation Line. Is it because I’m seeing it now for the first time as a whole, from the outside? Acre Hospital is standing, people go to it and there are doctors and workers inside. The Gaza Hospital building is also standing, with immigrants living in it. But the camp has changed; all of Beirut has changed.

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.