The Woman From Tantoura (38 page)

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, arranging 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.

The plants preoccupy me. When I go to bed I think about them and about my relationship to them, and say to myself, “A garden in prison, why not? No harm done.”

Less than a week after we arrived in Alexandria I saw Abu Ammar at the White House shaking hands with Rabin and Perez, with Mahmoud Abbas on his left and the American president in the center. They had signed the Oslo Accords. Moments after the end of the live television broadcast of the White House event Sadiq telephoned. He said, “What has the old one done? The sole legal representative eliminated the coast from the agreement. Who represents Tantoura, then? Who represents Safad and Tiberias and Galilee and Haifa and Jaffa and Ramla and the Negev? Who represents Acre and Nazareth? Who represents us?” He was angry. He commented bitterly about Abu Ammar’s insistence on shaking hands with Rabin and Perez, and their avoidance, as if they were condescending to shake hands. “What a farce, what an insult!” No sooner had I hung up than the telephone rang again. This time it was Abed on the other end. He swore and cursed, and as usual he spared no obscene expression, he used them all. Hasan did not call, and I knew that he was nursing his grief in his own way, shrinking like a wet dove chick. I called him. “What do you think, Hasan?” I asked. “It will take a long time, Mother. It will take a long time.”

Hasan was right. In Alexandria, over the same telephone, from the very same seat and over the same television set I would follow the news of the Hebron massacre, the killing of Rabin and his funeral, and Abu Ammar’s insistence on offering his condolences. He bent over the widow’s hand and kissed it; I saw him. Then the events of the new Israeli incursion into South Lebanon, the Cana massacre, the funeral of the martyrs. I followed in silence, repeating Hasan’s expression. “It will take a long time,” I mutter.

I called Wisal in Jenin. Her voice comes over the phone and dispels some loneliness, or some lump in the throat that was about to choke me.

I continue to write because Hasan asks how far I’ve gotten, how much I’ve accomplished. He asks every time we speak. Sometimes the telling seems simple, it flows easily and the words are written as if of their own accord. Or it’s a pleasure, as I relive some intimate or lovely moment with the children or Uncle Abu Amin. It’s as if I summon them and they come, and fill the house for me. Then I stop; the writing is hard, and weighs me down. It seems like a weight of iron that I’ve placed on my chest of my own free will. Why, Hasan? I don’t have to obey you, I can stop; why do I obey? I sit in front of the notebook and look at an empty page, open like an abyss. The writing will kill me, I told you that, Hasan. He said, “Writing does not kill.” Why does he seem so confident?

I flee to the plants, to the sea. I suddenly decide that the window glass is dirty and makes the house dark, separating me from the sky. I bring the ladder and a rubber squeegee and both the short-handled scrub brush and the other one with a long handle, and a bucket of water and soap. I wipe the glass with the cleaning liquid and rub it well, polishing it. I dry it with the squeegee. I don’t look up until Maryam comes home. She says, “Oh no, just a week ago you cleaned all the windows in the house and washed the glass.” I say, “Just a moment, by the time you heat supper I’ll have finished.”

52

New Jersey

Hasan called me and told me that he was sending me two copies of his new book, “one for you and the other for Maryam.”

A moment of silence, and then: “It’s not a study or a research work, Mother. It’s a novel.”

“A story?”

“Yes, a story.”

I was amazed, and even more amazed when the book arrived. Unlike his previous books, it was small in format and size, ninety pages at most. He said that it was about the attack on Lebanon. How? Is it possible to tell what happened in these few pages? How could a small book, or a large one, bear thousands of corpses, the extent of the blood, the quantity of rubble, the panic. Our running for our lives, wishing for death. Anyway,
New Jersey
, what was this strange title? What relationship did it have to what happened in Lebanon? Does he speak about his father in his novel? Does he set aside a larger place for Acre Hospital, or does the whole novel center on what happened in Acre Hospital? Does he talk about Beirut, or write about Sidon and Ain al-Helwa, did he listen to the details
from his uncle Ezz? I don’t know much about stories and novels; before that I had only read the two stories by Ghassan Kanafi that Ezz lent me in Sidon. I no longer remember more than the title of the short story: “The Land of Sad Oranges.” The longer story was about three Palestinians who wanted to be smuggled into Kuwait, so they hid in the empty tank of a water truck. The border employees delayed the driver so the three died of suffocation, without daring to knock on the sides of the tank.

I was preoccupied with Hasan’s book all day long, but I did not try to page through it or read any of its paragraphs. At night I sat in the seat next to the bed and opened the book, and read. I did not sleep until I had finished it.

The novel centers on a battleship named
New Jersey
. It was an amazing seagoing vessel, the size of three soccer fields put together, 887 feet long, forty-five tons, and as high as a seven-story building. Its main battery had nine canons, all sixteen inch, and its secondary battery had twenty smaller canons. Each of the large ones shoots missiles weighing 1,200 kilograms, with a range of thirty-seven kilometers. As for the smaller canons, they can reach fourteen kilometers.

The battleship is the heroine of the story. We follow the history of its birth, even its prehistory: it was one of six vessels that surpassed everything that went before. The United States decided to build them at the beginning of the Second World War, to support its forces in the probable theater of operations in the Pacific Ocean. On December 7, 1942, it was commissioned and christened, and its name was recorded on the rolls of the American Navy. Its official birthday was not celebrated until it was delivered for duty and assigned its first task in the war, on May 23 of the following year. The battleship took part in all US wars from the middle of the twentieth century on: the Second World War in Japan and the Philippines, in the forties; the Korean War in the fifties; Vietnam during the years 1968 and 1969, after an overhaul. Then at the beginning of the eighties there was another overhaul with the addition of launchers for long-range Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles,
and afterward it went to the Mediterranean, bound for Lebanon. In 1991 it headed for the Gulf.

The account of the life of the battleship is gripping. We follow its movements, a floating structure wandering the high seas with more than two thousand men on board. It carries them to the Pacific Ocean, to the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, to the Mediterranean, and to the Gulf, clear under the sun, foggy and cloud-covered in the rain, shining with lights in the dark of night. We observe it closely as it carries out its task with zeal, precision, and competence: it points its guns and fires. It hits. Its crew—officers and soldiers, sailors and doctors, mechanics and janitors, those in charge of the food service and cooks—is a lively crew. All of them work. In the kitchen, for example, they produce 1,800 loaves of bread daily and 250 gallons of ice cream.