The Woman From Tantoura (9 page)

I’ve completely lost my bearings.

10

The Leap … Does It Make a Tale?

Am I really telling the story of my life or am I leaping away? Can a person tell the story of his life, can he summon up all its details? It might be more like descending into a mine in the belly of the earth, a mine that must be dug first before anyone can go down into it. Is any individual, however strong or energetic, capable of digging a mine with their own two hands? It’s an arduous task requiring many hands and minds, many hoists, bulldozers, and pickaxes, lumber, and iron and elevators descending to the depths beneath and bringing those they took down back to the surface of the earth. A wonderfully strange mine into which you have to descend alone, because it does not belong to anyone else, even if you find things belonging to someone else in it. Then it might suddenly collapse on your head, cracking it open and burying you completely under the debris.

Perhaps it’s more like a bundle than a mine; but can a person tie up his story in a kerchief and then hold it out to others in his hand, saying, “This is my story, my lot in life”? And then, how
can you transport a bundle the size of a hand, or a large bundle like those women carry on their heads as they flee east over the bridge, the story of a whole life, a life that’s naturally intertwined with the lives of others?

I haven’t spoken about my uncle Abu Amin. I haven’t told the story of my mother in Sidon, nor the story of Ezzedin. I haven’t talked about my own state. When Hasan spoke to me about his new book project I said to him, “If your grandfather Abu Amin were still among the living he would have told you enough to fill volumes. He was with the rebels from ’36 on and moved around throughout the towns and villages. He was with the resistance in ’47 and ’48, and after they took us out of the town he sneaked back. I don’t remember all the details but I remember a lot of what he said, and I can repeat it to you.” He said, “I’m interested in hearing what my grandfather told you, but now I want your testimony about leaving the village.”

Hasan was collecting the statements of the residents of the villages along the Palestinian coast about their forced emigration in 1948.

Hasan didn’t record my testimony on that visit, maybe because he noticed the next day and the following one that my face was pale. I didn’t tell him that I was suffering from severe pain in my stomach; I took a sedative and forced myself to bear up until he left. I said goodbye and wished him Godspeed and then I went to bed for a week. Had the mine collapsed on my head during that night, as I was recalling some of the details in preparation for giving my testimony?

My uncle was different. He did not become ill when he recalled what happened; he would talk a lot, and in great detail. He would talk about Haifa’s garrison, its national committee, the good and the bad in their leadership, the quarrels that arose among them throughout five months, and then what happened in two days and two nights when the city fell and its residents left it. He would not omit any of the actors: the residents, the jihad volunteers, the British army, the Zionist gangs, Hajj Amin, the Arab Liberation Army and its
field commander al-Qawuqji, and the Arab kings and presidents. He would talk about the day and the hour and the neighborhood and the street and the blind alley and the corner, as if he were spreading out all of Haifa in front of his listeners so they could see with their own eyes its sea, its Carmel, its oil refinery, and its rail lines: the narrow gauge and the standard, the Hijaz line that connected Haifa to Damascus via Daraa, the Jaffa and Lid line that took travelers to al-Qantara and from there to Cairo, and the Beirut and Tripoli line that went to Ras al-Naqura through a long tunnel. The Acre line also, which Amin would take every morning to go from Haifa to his school in Acre. He would identify the stations and stop at the Hijaz line station, Haifa East, the largest and oldest. He would describe the station building, its iron gate, and the color of the trains. He would say that they had been brown in the thirties, then they were painted light red in the forties, bearing the English letters
PR
for Palestine Railway. He would specify the names of the neighborhoods and streets, drawing their borders with his words; even the names of the bus companies would find a place in his narrative.

Sidon came into the story not because he was living there now and used to come to it often, but because it was the essential station in the arms smuggling in which he was engaged. The arms would come from Libya; Hajj Amin would buy them from what the British and German armies had left behind and send them by boat to Sidon. The boat would anchor at the Maqasid Islamiya School, and Maarouf Saad would receive them. My uncle would say, “God keep Maarouf and protect him. He worked in the school as the resident head for the boarding students. He would receive the arms at night and bring someone to clean them and grease them and then deliver them to us, and we would take them in boats back to Palestine. Sometimes the arms and ammunition would come from Egypt, from Hilmiyat al-Zaytoun, the headquarters of Hajj Ibrahim, or from Egyptian army storehouses or from Marsa Matruh or Salloum. They would be carried to Port Said and then boats would take them to the shore at Sidon, and they would be unloaded at al-Maqasid.”

The Arab armies, kings, presidents, and leaders also had a share in the story. He would recount, categorize, accuse, and corroborate with facts, insulting and cursing and always ending with the same expression: “God have mercy on the martyrs, soldiers, officers, and volunteers.” He would amaze us every time with some new detail. He would talk about the Yugoslav volunteers who were martyred in Jaffa three days after the fall of Haifa. “They were twenty, led by a man named Ibrahim Bek, who was from Turkestan. The Jews besieged them in the train station in al-Manshiya. They exterminated them.” He would talk about the son of the mufti of Anatolia, who volunteered “with us in Haifa” and was martyred six weeks before the city fell. “We buried him when the almonds were just starting, the blossoms just opening on the branches.” He would talk about the volunteer for jihad who had come from India, “Yes, by God, from India. His name was Muhammad Abd al-Rasul. He came from India and was martyred with us in Palestine.”

My uncle Abu Amin was not there when they occupied the village, but he was the first of the family to go back to it. He would say, “I went back to Tantoura.” Here the story would start and here it would also end. My uncle didn’t tell us anything about what he saw in our village when he sneaked back two months later. Did he go back to it once without having the strength to go back again, or was that the beginning of later visits, more like a regular pilgrimage, even if it was an odd pilgrimage that was made by stealth and remained sealed in secrecy?

Only once did my uncle Abu Amin talk about his visit. He said, “There is a three-sided monument of white marble that was erected near Rachel’s Tomb, at the fork of the road to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Hebron. On the monument were carved the names of the martyrs who participated in the battles that occurred south of Jerusalem. Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Libyans, Sudanese, and Yemenis, who are buried there. I visited them, and recited the Fatiha for their souls.” Ezz was surprised, and said, “But the two cemeteries are in the West Bank, how did you go
to Jordan from occupied Palestine?” My uncle Abu Amin smiled broadly, and answered, “God forgive you, Ezz, they divided the country into three pieces. They divided it but I did not, nor did I accept the division!”

For many years my uncle Abu Amin did not comprehend the fact that he was a refugee, perhaps because he did not come to Sidon as a stranger but instead had been familiar with it for long years before his permanent residence there. He would live in it for weeks and sometimes for months; he had friends and acquaintances not only in Sidon but also in Tyre and Nabatiyeh and Bint Jbeil. They were colleagues and friends, and his relationship with them had not started when the village was lost; rather they were his peers who would come to visit him in Haifa or Tantoura, just as he would visit them in their towns. A visit to them might be extended with no awkwardness, because he had not come to them as a refugee, asking for their generosity, and because he was certain that in the future he would go back and then host those who had hosted him, returning the favor and more.

When we came to Sidon we were the guests of one of these friends. The friend did not consider us guests nor did my uncle consider himself a guest, for they were lifelong friends sharing in two types of work. They had shared in jihad since 1936 along with other friends, acquiring experience in buying and smuggling weapons far from the eyes of the British and French authorities and the Zionist gangs who followed them. They were also partners in the ownership of a number of fishing boats, whose proceeds allowed them to pay for the necessities of life, and to use any surplus in their work for the armed struggle.

After waiting a year, my uncle decided to rent an apartment in old Sidon, so we moved to it. We did not live in the camp. For years it was possible for my uncle to avert his gaze from the meaning of the move, seeing the apartment only as a way station—a passing trial, hard to bear to be sure, but however long it lasted, it would not go on much longer. When Umm Amin brought up the necessity
of registering with the refugee relief agency he exploded at her angrily: “Do you need aid, woman, are you in need of a bag of flour? Shame on you!” My aunt remained silent, and perhaps she thought the idea over and decided that her husband was right. But Ezzedin brought up the subject again, saying that it wasn’t a matter of a bag of flour and a can of sardines, but rather it was about maintaining our rights, about the right to go to school and to university and to be employed. He said we must register. My uncle insulted Ezzedin and announced, his face flaming with rage, “I am not a refugee and I will not ask for aid from anyone!”

He was standing in the station waiting to get on the train, returning to where he had come from, so how absurd it was to ask him to register his stop and to get an identity card for waiting. Ezz took his father’s papers and those of the family and registered the household on his own at the agency. Until his death, after twenty-seven years of residence in Sidon, my uncle did not know that he was registered as a refugee, and that Ezzedin would accept aid regularly, sometimes taking it to his mother and aunt or, usually, distributing it to the needy.

Perhaps the image of waiting at the station isn’t accurate: even though my uncle resisted the idea of accepting his position, absorbed as he was in limited operations across the newly established borders, nonetheless day after day he stood before an alternate reality, which he neither acknowledged nor recognized even as he crept into it by stealth. The camps were taking their current form, making their presence hard to ignore or deny. Some of his acquaintances would tell him about the restraints and pressures to which the camp residents were subjected by the Second Bureau and the Lebanese authorities. He would suddenly shout in a loud voice, “Good God, they need permission from the authorities to leave the camp? Is it a prison?” I was pregnant with my second son when the authorities carried out the forced evacuation of the refugees from the border villages, relocating them to the camps, as a decree had been issued forbidding Palestinians from living in the
southern villages adjacent to their lands. My uncle had friends who lived in Bint Jbeil, like him living as guests with their business partners. In accordance with the decree they were forced to move to the Ain al-Helwa camp. I remember my uncle as he struck one hand with the other in despair. He was angry, but he was more troubled than angry, repeating that he did not understand. The Arab kings and presidents had no mercy and left no way open for God’s mercy! Why were they moving people far from their land, when, sooner or later, they would move back to it?

My uncle lived in anticipation, like my mother, but her anticipation was different. The concern about returning home hid behind her anticipation of the return of her sons and her husband. She kept saying, “The boys haven’t sent any news from Egypt, nor has Abu Sadiq sent a letter from prison.” Whenever she heard that a man from our village or from another had arrived in Sidon and had been among the prisoners, she would seek him out and go to visit him. She would congratulate him first, and then ask, “Did you meet Abu Sadiq?” She would return to the house to tell us what the freed prisoner had said, and every time she would repeat the same words: “It’s been a long time for Abu Sadiq. One of the spies must have told them that he was in the revolt in ’36 so that instead of one charge it was two, and they decided to imprison him longer than the others. How long it’s been!” One day my aunt tried gently to prepare the way for her sister to accept what happened. She said, “Zeinab, Sister, they say that some of the men died in prison, maybe Abu Sadiq was one of them.” My mother started as if she had been stung by a scorpion and exclaimed, “God forbid! I take refuge with God from you and your thoughts!” For the next three weeks in a row my mother’s face was pale, and it became paler if she was forced to speak with her sister or be present with her in the same room.

The wait was not long for my mother. She waited until I married Amin. She sang, she trilled for joy, she joined the women’s rhythmic clapping the day the contract was written and the day of the wedding, and on the morning of the following day she and my aunt
visited me in my new house in Sidon. They came carrying the usual provisions for a newly married couple. One week later my aunt found her dead in her bed. My aunt said, “Last night she said to me ‘Halima, Sister, thank God I’ve married Ruqayya and she has moved safely and soundly to live in her husband’s house. Now it’s possible for me to travel to Egypt to look for Sadiq and Hasan.’ When I said to her that Egypt is large and that we don’t know where they are in it, she said, ‘Tell Abu Amin, and if he agrees we’ll go together, and if he doesn’t agree I’ll go alone. I won’t come back without them.’ Then she went to sleep.” My aunt wiped away her tears and got up. She went into my mother’s room and returned, extending her hand to me with a large iron key. She said, “The key to your house, Ruqayya.”