The Woman From Tantoura (18 page)

I would wait for them all, but I would wait for Abed more than the others. I wouldn’t sleep at night until I heard the key turn in the lock; I would stir at his steps and say “Abed?” I would hear his voice and then give myself over to sleep. His grandmother barely saw him; it did not seem as if she missed him. When he happened to be home during the day he would bend over her playfully, seeking a kiss, or say, laughing, “Will you marry me, Grandma?” She would cling to the old relationship, muttering as she waved her hand dismissively, “Good-for-nothing!” He would laugh and say “By your leave,” and go out.

21

Amin’s Gift

I said that I was beset by panic, and that my imagination was running wild. No, it wasn’t my imagination but the earth that had gone wild, making everything wild and savage familiar. Was Ruqayya completely sane in those days? Before the boys wake, before “good morning” or boiling the coffee, she goes down to the street to buy the newspapers. She takes them home and reads the large headlines and the small ones and the details, the commentaries and the articles, the first page and the last and everything in between. Before “good morning,” she buys the newspapers and takes them home; she leaves them folded just as they were, not glancing even at the headlines. She does not buy the newspapers; Amin or the boys bring them. In the evening one of the boys asks, “Where are today’s papers, Mother?” “I don’t know.” She helps him look and then remembers, “I used them to clean the window glass.” “I put them at the bottom of the wastebasket.” “I gave them to the garbage collector.” “Didn’t you notice they were today’s papers?” She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t say, of course I noticed. Then she goes back to going out early to buy the papers… .

She says to Hasan, “Show me a sketch of Beirut’s neighborhoods and the suburbs.” She knows where East and West Beirut are; she knows the museum and Martyrs’ Square and the hotel area and the site of the markets. She knows where Khalda is and al-Naima and al-Damour. She does not know exactly where Ain al-Rummana is, or the Ghwarna neighborhood, or Sabnay. Where is al-Nabaa, where are al-Maslakh and al-Karantina, where is Ashrafiyeh, and where is Furn al-Shubbak? She comes back and asks Hasan to draw her another map. “I drew you a map, Mother, where’s the map I drew you?” She looks at him questioningly, as if she were the one waiting for the answer from him. Then she notices, and says, “I tore it up.”

Amin spends his day at the hospital and comes back exhausted, not given to talking. If he does say something he does not allude to the war or the number of killed or wounded who were brought to him. Hasan is preparing for the baccalaureate examination; she doesn’t know how he can keep the noise of the rockets away from what he’s studying in the book. Sadiq is going to the university, to get his certificates and graduation papers. She knows that he and other students chafe against the administration and the Phalange youth, holding sit-ins and demonstrations, but the area of the American University is relatively safe; no rockets fall on it and the war in it is curbed and kept within limits.

Ruqayya returned to her old silence. She had not lost the power of speech; she would speak to her aunt to reassure her, or exchange brief words with Hasan or Sadiq or Abed or Amin, but if that wasn’t necessary, speech would retreat into silence. She lived barricaded in it.

She can’t wait for Sadiq’s trip to the Gulf, to work there; she can’t wait for Hasan’s trip to Egypt to enroll in the university. “Can’t we send Abed to Egypt with Hasan, to study in a high school there?” Unlike every other mother, she wants them to leave her and go away, to travel to any place far away. Any place.

The two boys departed, and all that was left was waiting. Waiting for Amin to come back from the hospital at a late hour of the night.
Waiting for Abed, who would come back one night and stay away for two or three. She took care of her aunt. I look from afar: I know that the old woman’s needs and requests and her talk, however disordered at times, were all a mercy that relieved the pressure of waiting.

Then Amin brought Maryam.

He came carrying her one night and put her before me, saying, “She will be our daughter. Tomorrow I’ll begin the official adoption process.”

Sometimes a man commits a stupidity, or his eyes dim and he loses all power of sight. I said, “The time for raising children is over, so why are you bringing me a nursing baby and telling me to start over? Besides, my aunt has become like a child, needing care morning and night—should I occupy myself with her and take care of her, or watch over this little one who needs everything, from nursing to cleaning her bottom to teaching her to walk and talk?”

I was angry and I didn’t understand why Amin had chosen to adopt a nursing baby, put her in my hands, and just simply go off to the hospital, as if he had not left her behind him. He was calm, as usual. He looked at me and said, “Look at her, Ruqayya. When they brought her to me to examine her I looked into her face and she captured my heart. I said, ‘A daughter has come to us, a gift from heaven.’ A rocket destroyed the house and everyone died, the mother and the father and maybe the brothers and the neighbors; only this child was destined to live. The ambulance brought her to me from beneath the ruins. There wasn’t a wound or bruise showing but they thought she must have internal bleeding or a wound that didn’t show. I examined her, and she was fine. Look into her face, Ruqayya, how beautiful her face is!”

I did not look.

I look now from afar: I’m carrying Maryam, perhaps out of pity, because she’s an infant without a mother, poor thing. I do what’s needed, as if she were the daughter of a neighbor and I must look after her until her mother returns and reclaims her from me. Then one night when the shelling was intense I carried her and took my
aunt’s hand and we moved to sit on the stairs, and I hugged the girl. I looked into her face and felt that tickling in my breast, as if my breasts were about to produce milk. Maybe there was a lump in my throat, and a film of tears in my eyes. Until now I don’t know if I was protecting her, in that moment when I encircled her completely with my arms and shielded her small head from a likely rocket, or if I was seeking protection in her.

She became a daughter to me. The most beautiful and dearest of all that Amin left me.

I say that her face was like an angel. Then I reconsider: none of us has seen an angel, and here she was before my eyes, more beautiful than the angels we imagine.

Yes, it was falling in love, purely and simply. Perhaps it surpassed motherly love, which nothing can surpass—because that love comes cumulatively and following preparation, the nine months of pregnancy and the birth, and then you find the boy before you and he’s yours, flesh of your flesh, from his father’s seed. But Maryam just came to us, she just came, without any preparation. I denied my feelings as a lover does, for a day or two, a week or possibly two, then I accepted that I had fallen in love. It was love in the time of war, of killing for one’s identity, of rattling bullets and explosions and rockets and dynamite and car bombs and chasing people out of their houses and neighborhoods for no fault of theirs other than being Muslim or Christian; in the time of chaos and stealing and confusion between a noble effort and the greed of petty thieves. Maryam was here before me gurgling like a bird, assuring me with every morning that in spite of everything, this life held something worth living for.

Abed rejoiced in the girl, playing with her when he passed through the house to reassure us or to eat or sleep. Amin would delight in her face in the morning, and contemplate her sleeping when he returned from the hospital late at night. Only my aunt did not understand why this infant had appeared without preamble and took all this attention. One day she said, “Ruqayya, I haven’t
wanted to cause you any distress, but I must make you understand: I think that Amin has taken another wife and that this girl is his daughter with the other woman.”

“But Aunt, why would he bring me the other woman’s child, why wouldn’t he leave her with her mother?”

“God only knows!” Maybe he didn’t get married and she’s his bastard.”

I laughed. I was used to my aunt’s quirks and her constant doubts of others.

“She’s an orphan, Aunt, and the ambulance brought her to him from beneath the ruins. They didn’t know of any family of hers, not even any distant relatives.”

“You’re free to do as you like, I’ve alerted you and done what I should. There are a lot of orphans in a country at war, and they have a refuge to shelter them. Why did he bring this girl and not the rest of the orphans?”

“Oh, Aunt, everything is written and ordained.”

22

1982

War teaches you many things. The first is to strain your ears and be alert, so you can judge where the firing is coming from, as if your body had become one large ear with a compass to show the specific source of the threat among the four directions, or rather the five, since death can also rain down from the sky. The second is to resign yourself a little and to have only a certain amount of fear, the necessary amount only. If your fear exceeds the amount by a tiny bit, you will leave your house needlessly, when the shelling is on the other side of the city. Your fear will turn into a malignant disease that will eat away your body every day until it destroys you; the rocket will spare you and your fear will kill you. And if your fear is a tiny bit less, you won’t hurry down the stairs to the shelter or to sit on the stairs far from the windows and the balconies, and the rocket will kill you just like that in the blink of an eye, because the shelling is aimed at the street where you live and perhaps at the building in which you live. The third thing that war teaches you is to be careful when you must leave the house to take the most important things first. For example, a bottle of water or the old lady, who might get
lost as you are checking on your little girl or the limbs of your body. It’s certain that there are fourth and fifth and sixth things that war teaches you, but it always teaches you to endure, whether at the beginning or the end. To wait and endure, because the alternative is to become unbalanced, in short to go mad.

The war handed us over to war, and war to war … What? Here the sentences stumble and the words are confused, because I don’t know how it’s possible to summarize what we lived through in those years. I don’t know how to communicate the meaning, and I wonder about how useful it is to go into the details—the details that are not details. Every discrete detail is a story affecting hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. Take for example Black Saturday at the end of 1975. The Phalange kidnapped three hundred Muslims and killed seventy others, and the National Movement answered by taking over the hotel area; afterward chaos and organized plunder broke out in the heart of Beirut. A big story or a detail among hundreds? Before that, sixty-three Syrian workers were killed and thousands of them were forced to flee. Oh my God, it’s only one thread in the fabric, or one spark in the flames of the fire. After that was the siege of Tall al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha and Dbayeh and the shantytowns in al-Maslakh and al-Karantina and al-Nabaa—details? And then Israeli invasion in 1978 and the hundreds of thousands from the south who thronged to West Beirut. Then the larger invasion in 1982.

We were in the siege, at the height of the summer, and of the siege. There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and I nearly screamed, not because I recognized Hasan but because the boy standing in front of me at the door was a shadow of Hasan. I thought, my mind has wandered and imagination has taken over. I thought, shadows are taller. I thought, but this is his shadow, the exact image of him, but smaller, as if it were Hasan in the first year of high school, and sick. He said, “Mama.” I put my arms around him and held on. He began to slip away; I didn’t realize he was suppressing tears. I let him slip away and began to stare at him, touching his face and his neck and his shoulders.

“You’ve been sick?”

He laughed. “Illness is easier.”

“Tell me what happened to you.”

“Who’s going to go first?”

“Your father and Abed are fine. Your uncle Ezz … we don’t know … .”

“I found out from my father.”

“When did you see him? Did you go to the hospital first?”

Did he sense a note of blame in the words? He smiled; it wasn’t his shadow, it was Hasan, with his lively smile and his sweet eyes.

“I was afraid to come straight home.” He faltered. “I said I would go first to the hospital. In the hospital I would find my father and ask him about you, and if I didn’t find him I would find someone to give me the news. Where’s Grandma?”

He went in to greet his grandma.

“How did you get here, Grandson?”

“From Cairo. I took a plane to Damascus and from there by land to Beirut.”

“Thank God you got here safely, Grandson. Were there fedayeen or Israelis on the way?”

“There were fedayeen in some places and Israelis in others.”

“And Ain al-Helwa?”

“What about it?”

“Didn’t you go by it to set your mind at rest about your uncle Ezz and his wife?”

“No, Grandma, the road from Damascus is in one direction and Sidon is in the other.”

“Thank God you got here safely, Grandson, we’ve missed you.”

Hasan would remain with us throughout the period of the siege. He worked in civil defense, distributing water and bread and newspapers to the civilians. He was often at the
Safir
newspaper, helping with some of the volunteer work there.

On the day of the departure Beirut came out by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, scattering rice and rose petals over
the young men piled into the trucks that would take them by land to Syria or to the wharf where the ships were preparing for their departure from Lebanon. Maryam was walking ahead of Amin and me, holding Abed’s hand on one side and Hasan’s on the other. She was wearing a summer dress, open at the neck and baring her arms. Her hair was as I had combed it for her, gathered into a ponytail. She would speak to her brothers and then turn around to me and her father and laugh.

Abed embraced her, then he climbed into the truck.