The Woman From Tantoura (23 page)

“Lord have mercy! But where are you going?”

Haniya said, “We’re going back to Horsh Tabet to reassure my family, then we’ll go to Acre Hospital, and God willing everyone will be fine. I’ll come back and pick up the kids and take them to my mother, and then go to the hospital. It’s not right for me to be away from my work; there must be a lot of wounded.”

We did not succeed in getting close to the camp nor to Acre Hospital; the place was tightly encircled. Haniya suggested that we go to the Israeli barricade, talk to the soldiers and ask them to allow us to pass. I tried to talk her out of it, unsuccessfully. She insisted. She said, “That’s all we can do. I’ll go. Come with me, Sitt Ruqayya.” I was not afraid of them; I would go up to them, and maybe
they would smile. What would I do? I had no weapon. All I could do was spit on them. How absurd! Spitting on one side of the scale, and on the other three months of shelling and killing and destruction. No, that’s not correct; on the other side were all the years of my life. My father and my brothers. I was nailed to the ground.

“Haniya, they won’t help us. Let’s go back to the house.”

“I must find my husband and my sister and my mother and father.”

I saw her go, almost hurrying toward the Israeli barricade. What would I do now if they fired on her? Would I leave her wounded or maybe a stiffening corpse, and run away … or would I go up and carry her away and add a new victim to their tally? They did not fire. I saw her stopping at the barricade, speaking with them. They allowed her to pass. What generosity, what kindness. Haniya entered the camp at seven in the morning on September 17, and I stood waiting for her an hour or two, and then returned to the house to care for her little ones, and to wait.

28

A Letter to Hasan

Dear Hasan,

Why have you entangled me in this writing? What sense does it make for me to live through the details of the disaster twice? I stopped last week at the morning of Friday, September 17. The day was before me: I had to face it again, to retrieve it from a memory that struggles with me as I struggle with it, as if we were wrestling in a ring. The simile is not exact, Hasan, for it’s not a game and in the end there is no victor or vanquished, no audience applauding in admiration for the victory. It’s not a game. And if it is, then it’s a strange game, dangerous and lethal.

What do you want from me? To transmit my feelings then, or my feelings now, or what was recorded by people who know more than I do and are more capable, in articles and testimonies and books? Twenty years ago Sitt Bayan Nuwayhid, the wife of Shafiq al-Hout who was the director of the Lebanese chapter of the PLO, contacted me. She told me that she was gathering the testimony of those who escaped from the massacre, the people of Shatila and Sabra and the adjacent neighborhoods. She wanted me to bring her together with those I knew among
them, and I did so. Sitt Bayan listened to Haniya here in my house, she listened to Abed and to other men and women whom I arranged for her to meet. Twenty years later Sitt Bayan called me and said that she had finished the book and it had come out. She took my address in Alexandria and sent it to me. The book arrived, and I opened the envelope. It was a hardback book, with a jacket that had a colored picture of three of those killed: a young man whose mustache had barely appeared, sprawled on the ground fully dressed, his head resting on the shoulder of another victim; on his left thigh were the feet of a third victim, of whom we could see only his running shoes and his legs in their jeans. (Running shoes exactly like the shoes your brother Abed used to wear in those days. Maybe if I had seen the picture at the time, before I saw Abed, I would have screamed that my son was gone.) On the upper left there was another, smaller picture, of two blackened corpses; it was hard to make out anything of their features. I could not bear the book jacket. I tore it off and hid it in one of the bedroom drawers. The huge book remained, with its sturdy, blue cover; that was bearable. I said I would read it. Two years have passed with the book on the small table next to the bed; I have not placed it upright among the rows of books in the bookshelf, nor have I opened it. Sitt Bayan must have spoken at length about what happened in Acre Hospital. She must have mentioned Intisar, whom I found charming, and whom they raped until she died. She must have mentioned her other coworker, whose name doesn’t come to me but whose face and tone of voice I remember, I mean the other nurse they took turns raping until they killed her.

Dearest Hasan, your mother can’t bear to read a book that recalls what happened and examines the details, so how can you ask me to write about the subject?

I often think about my mother as I am writing. She could not bear the thought of the death of her sons, so she sent them to Egypt. She lived under the protection of an illusion she had created in order to live. Maybe I’m like her. Haven’t I lived for years with the illusion that your father was among those kidnapped? I wait for his knock on the door, to open it and find him in front of me. Perhaps he is thinner,
or there is more gray than black in his hair; he’s exhausted from years of absence, broken because he was forced to tear up his identity card and deny that he was Palestinian in order to live. I open the door and see him in front of me, whole. I enfold his shoulder with my arms and lead him into his house. I seat him, and sit down. I sum up for him the story of his family, what they have seen and gone through during the years of his absence. It’s strange, I sum it up without any voice or words. I am at peace with him and he is also at peace, having returned to his wife and his home. He leans over a little and rests his head on my shoulder, and sleeps.

I promised you, Hasan, that I would finish this book, but when I got to this part of the story I knew I could not do it. Forgive me, my dear. But this is all I can do.

Love,

Ruqayya

It was as if I was afraid of retreating and tearing up the letter. I put it in the envelope and hurried to the post office, and mailed it.

Five days later Hasan called me.

He asked me about how I was. He talked about Maryam and Abed and Sadiq. He talked about his wife and his two children. He talked about his work. He took his time with the preliminaries. Then: “I got your letter. You say, what sense is there and what’s the use? I say that I wanted others to hear your voice, the voice of Ruqayya the woman from Tantoura. Your four children, we know that voice because we were raised with it. We know you and we know that you have a lot to tell people. It’s not only the story I’m interested in, I’m after the voice, because I know its value and I want others to have the chance to hear it.”

I nearly said, mockingly, “I’m not Umm Kulthum or Fairuz, and what I lived through can’t be sung!” I didn’t say that or anything else. His voice came to me over the telephone, “Mama … are you there? Hello, Mama?”

“I hear you, Hasan. I hear you.”

“I know from my studies and from my experience in life that conveying our voice is hard, it’s demanding. Even peoples, even groups work long and hard to make their voices present and heard, so what about an individual person? Leave the writing for a few weeks, and then take it up again and continue. Promise me that.”

“Give my best to your wife and the little ones.”

“Don’t run away from the promise.”

“I’ll try, Hasan. But what if I die? The writing will kill me.”

“It won’t kill you, you’re stronger than you think. Memory does not kill. It inflicts unbearable pain, perhaps; but we bear it, and memory changes from a whirlpool that pulls us to the bottom, to a sea we can swim in. We cover distances, we control it, and we dictate to it.”

I was no longer listening to what he said. Then, once more, “Mama, are you with me? Hello, Mama.”

“I’ll try. I’ll try. Goodbye, Hasan.”

I hung up. The words had provoked me, and I was angry. I don’t understand educated people. I don’t understand this strange talk about the voice. What voice? I didn’t like his talk about the sea, either. Didn’t like? That’s not precise; I was upset by what he said, as if the words were choking me. Afterward I felt angry. I wanted to scream at him, why are you torturing me, Hasan? Leave me alone, God forgive you, go away! Your mother is seventy. She’s tired. She raised you all, that’s enough. Her battle with fate is unending. I did not scream at him. Hasan is the most gentle of my sons, the sweetest, the most mild-tempered, ever since he was a child. But he’s determined; he asks for something and works toward it as if the revolution of the earth on its axis depended on his effort. He’s always like that when he begins new research or a book project. He learned to become a researcher and a writer; he was trained in it and research has become his profession. Why is he driving me into an area I have nothing to do with? Besides, he’s demanding that I drill into my living body. I’m not an oilfield, and these excavations that pierce through layers of earth are being made in my spirit.
What does Hasan mean by the voice? Have I not learned enough to understand his words, or are his words complicated and incomprehensible? I won’t write. I’ll tear up the two notebooks. I’ll tear them up and throw them in the wastebasket so the garbage man will take them away. I’ll block all roads leading back, as if I were emigrating from one country to another, because the airplane is hovering over me, threatening a shelling that will bring down the roof over my head and kill me.

I did not tear up what I had written. I hid it, like the jacket of Bayan Nuwayhid’s book, in one of the bedroom drawers.

Each of my sons calls me on the telephone once a week, and sometimes twice. Sadiq and his family call on Thursday evening, and Abed on Friday evening. As for Hasan, he calls on Sunday evening, which is morning in his time zone. Then Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday pass, waiting for the three following days. When Abed called from Paris on Friday evening I found myself asking him spontaneously, with no forethought, “Abed, do you remember when Sitt Bayan interviewed you for her book, on one of your visits years ago?”

“I remember.”

“Didn’t you record it?”

“I recorded the interview, and so did she.”

“Do you still have the tape?”

“Didn’t you bring the tape recordings we had in Beirut with you to Alexandria?”

“Yes, they’re all here with me.”

“Then you’ll find the tape among them. The other tapes have labels of what’s recorded on them, all except for that tape. I remember that we were afraid of putting a label on it.”

I found the tape easily. I put it in the tape recorder, and began to listen.

29

Abed’s Testimony

Abed spoke, saying:

“When the agreement was reached for the withdrawal of the resistance from Lebanon, they left the choice up to the young men who carried Lebanese travel documents, because they were from families who had arrived as refugees in 1948. They said, ‘You can stay if you like or go with the resistance fighters.’ I was angry over the agreements that Abu Ammar had accepted, and I was not alone. We felt that they were agreements that stripped us bare and accepted a defeat for which we weren’t responsible. His leaders fled from the south. The thugs fled, it was natural, because they were thugs. Our young men, even the ‘cubs’ who were not over fourteen or fifteen, faced the attack with astonishing courage, beyond what you could imagine. By ‘our young men’ I don’t mean just the men of the Popular Front, of course not, I have to be honest. The men of Fatah and the Popular Front and the Democratic Front and all the other Lebanese and Palestinian organizations, the Communist Party and the Labor Organization and the Progressive Socialist Party and the Syrian Nationalist Party and the Murabitun and
Amal. The men of all the organizations, Lebanese and Palestinians, we all confronted them and defied them in Beirut for eight weeks, and then here was the leadership deciding to evacuate the resistance. It was important that the fighters leave in good order. My ass. I’m sorry for the expression, Sitt Bayan, but was that a military parade? It was not. It was a matter of life and death—they left, and death came to us. They left with their military uniforms and the arms on their shoulders, with Abu Ammar standing smiling and raising his fingers in the victory sign.

“I was born in 1960, Sitt Bayan; I did not witness the situation in the camps before the resistance came, but the old men in the organization told me about it. Before the resistance the Second Bureau tyrannized us. Once a microphone was stolen in Wavell Camp in Baalbek; they gathered up the young men and took them to the headquarters of the Second Branch in Beirut and beat them with whips for three hours. After that it seemed easy to them; every week they would gather up a group of young men and take them to Beirut to be beaten, and return them. It was a weekly trip: you go on an outing to the secret police, get beaten, and go back. Moving from one camp to another or having a visitor from outside the camp required a visa and a q and a session. Hammering a nail, building a roof, adding a room, all of that was forbidden, because the camp had to stay a temporary camp, to confirm that we were refugees. To preserve our right to return. Thank you very much! My direct commander in the organization told me that up to the sixties, most of the houses in Shatila were roofed with sheets of zinc covered with fabric and held down with stones, because it was absolutely forbidden to build a roof. And if the wind was strong, people would sit on the roof to keep the zinc sheet from flying away, but sometimes they did fly away, and you would see the owners running after them to catch up with them. They might not get to them before they crashed into people and injured them. When the resistance started the situation changed, and when the leadership came to Lebanon and Abu Ammar came the situation in the
camps changed. It was just a flash in the pan, it seems. They came and they went. I asked myself, would the situation return to what it was? I was scared and apprehensive and expected disasters, but what happened exceeded anything I could have imagined. I don’t just mean the massacre, but also what happened in Sidon and here in Beirut and in the camps when the Phalange took over the government. There was kidnapping and killing and making examples of corpses and imprisonment and torture, during the fall of 1982 and throughout the following year. During the invasion half the residents of the camps in the south became homeless. The shelling destroyed Beirut. That happened in June; for four months, Sitt Bayan, Israel refused to send bulldozers to remove the debris or permit any building materials to come in, to raise houses in place of the ones that were destroyed or even to repair what could be repaired. Only in October did UNRWA announce that it had been allowed to import tents, to shelter 48,000 in the Sidon region and 15,000 in the area of Tyre. We were asked to live in tents. So utter devastation, and utter humiliation. Before we could catch our breath the struggle between Abu Ammar and Syria intensified, so Amal besieged the camps, and the camps paid the price. Not only during the months of the attack and the siege, but also during years of terror and continuous calamity.