The Woman From Tantoura (29 page)

37

Abu Muhammad

It was chance, pure chance, that brought us together.

Sadiq took me to a large shopping mall to buy some things for Maryam. He said that he would come to take us home two hours later, and told us about a coffee shop on the second floor where we could sit to rest, or to wait for him if we finished shopping before he came back.

I finished buying what Maryam needed in less than half an hour; we went down to the second floor and headed for the coffee shop. As soon as we went in I noticed him. He was sitting alone, with a kufiyeh on his head. He was wearing a qumbaz with a leather belt around his waist and a jacket over it, like my father and my uncle Abu Amin. We sat at a nearby table; I ordered the ice cream Maryam wanted and a cup of coffee for myself. I thought, he might not be Palestinian, maybe he’s Syrian, from the country; but I thought it was likely that he was Palestinian. His face seemed familiar, similar to many of the elderly men in Ain al-Helwa and Sabra and Shatila. He was between sixty and seventy, maybe older but not showing his age. He was tall and thin, his face dark and
gaunt, his forehead broad. He had a penetrating look in his lively eyes, despite the prominence of his forehead and his bushy white eyebrows. I turned away my eyes; what would the man say, with me staring at him like that?

“Yes, Maryam.”

She protested, “I’m talking to you and you’re not listening!”

“Yes I am, I’m listening.”

She returned to her chatter, but I only followed a little of what she said. I interrupted her, “Do you see that man sitting at the table to our right?”

She pointed with her hand, “That man?”

I suppressed a laugh. “Maryam, when will you grow up? It’s not polite to point to him like that. I wanted to tell you that he reminds me of your grandfather Abu Amin.”

Maryam looked at him directly.

“Don’t look at him like that, he will realize that we’re talking about him!”

He realized. Perhaps he felt awkward and wanted to change the situation, so he greeted us: “Hello.”

I said, “Hello, how do you do?”

He said, “I arrived in Abu Dhabi yesterday. One of my acquaintances asked me to take a letter to his son, and I called him on the telephone as soon as I arrived. He said, ‘I’ll meet you in the shopping mall, in the coffee shop on the second floor.’ It’s half an hour after the time he gave me, and he has not appeared. Is there another coffee shop on this floor?”

Maryam ran to one of the employees in the shop, and asked. She returned to her seat, and said, “There are many coffee shops in the complex but this is the only one on the second floor.”

“No problem, I’ll wait.”

Maryam asked him, “Do you live in Lebanon?”

“I’m Palestinian, I’ve never visited Lebanon in my life. I’ve come from the West Bank to visit my son. I live in Jenin. Originally I’m from Tantoura, do you know where Tantoura is, girl? It’s …”

Did I scream or shout? Did I laugh? Was I preoccupied by the thought that I would not have looked at him like that if I hadn’t known him even though I didn’t know him, because blood calls to blood? I invited him to sit at our table, and it was easy to talk.

When the man looking for the letter came and took Abu Muhammad to another table, he seemed to me like an uninvited guest who had no right to spoil our meeting like this. I kept waiting, looking at my watch every few minutes, only to discover that just a few minutes had passed. Why doesn’t he take his letter and leave? Why doesn’t he leave Abu Muhammad to me, so I can ask him if he knew my father? He’s younger than my father, maybe ten years younger; or maybe he was of the same generation, and just doesn’t show his years. How had he escaped the massacre? Maybe he was not in the village on the night of Saturday to Sunday; where was he? Had he lost anyone in his family? Why was the recipient of the letter sitting so long with Abu Muhammad? He came an hour and ten minutes ago, and he doesn’t seem ready to leave. He got the letter, what does he want now—and what if he took Abu Muhammad with him? Maybe it would be wisest if I got up now and took his telephone number, or a way to reach him. Will he live in Abu Dhabi, or is it just a passing visit? I was becoming more and more tense, and Maryam was complaining that I was not following what she was saying. I said, “I’m listening to you, Maryam, I’m listening.” But her words came to my ears as a handful of sounds, which did not translate into any meaning in my head.

At last Sadiq appeared, and I introduced him to Abu Muhammad. They spoke a few minutes, and before we left the coffee shop Sadiq invited him to visit us with his son, exchanging telephone numbers with him.

The next day as we were having lunch, Sadiq said, directing his words to me, “It’s a coincidence more amazing than the one yesterday. Muhammad, Abu Muhammad’s son, works with us as an accountant in the company, a young man in his thirties. The
predicament is that I’ve never invited any of the employees, and now it will seem like clannishness for me to invite him because he’s from our village.”

I looked at Sadiq, “Where’s the predicament? How can it be clannishness to invite a person from your village whom you want to get to know?”

Sadiq laughed. He seemed split between embarrassment and pride, “Mother, your son is the president of the company!”

“So?”

“I can invite an employee on some occasion, but can’t favor a minor employee by inviting him to my house unless he’s my brother or my cousin.”

I said, “Consider them your uncle and his son!”

“The problem is that his colleagues will feel as if it’s favoritism.” He laughed suddenly, not without embarrassment, “Should I explain that my mother wants to meet his father because he’s from Tantoura?”

I was not comfortable with his words, and I didn’t understand what he meant.

After Abu Muhammad and his son visited us, I was careful to return the visit. I took Maryam with me and I met Muhammad’s wife and two children, and asked them all to lunch at Sadiq’s house. I said that I would cook, and I prepared a feast worthy of people from Tantoura. Sadiq did not seem to welcome my conduct; maybe he considered it rash, unjustified, and incomprehensible. That’s what I sensed, though he did not add anything to what he had said previously. But I decided to leave him to his confusion and worry, and to do as I pleased, visiting them and inviting them to the house. The day Abu Muhammad left for Amman, Sadiq took me, unwillingly, to the airport to see him off. He said, “Didn’t you say goodbye to him yesterday? I sent the driver as you asked, didn’t you go?”

“I did go.”

He smiled. “You forgot to give him the wool sweater you made for Wisal?”

“I gave it to him. I asked him to look for her, and to give it to her.”

“So?” He was looking at me in surprise. I said, “Sadiq, humor me, I want to see him off at the airport.”

“As you wish.”

38

The Prisoner’s Tale

Abu Muhammad told me his story.

“I was among the forty they stood against the wall. I no longer remember if I had resigned myself to death and pronounced the shahada, or if I was still clinging to God’s power over everything, to his ability to change one state into another, in the blink of an eye. I only remember that we were standing, raising our hands as we had been ordered, our faces to the wall, barely seeing what was going on behind our backs: the rifles leveled at us, the contempt on their faces and the look of fear and bloodthirstiness. Yes, Sitt Ruqayya, they were afraid—how else can you explain all this killing after the battle had ended in their favor, after they had killed some and occupied the town? They were talking at the top of their voices, as if they were in the desert or as if they thought that everyone around them was deaf. They were shouting insults and curses and pushing this one with the butt of a rifle and beating that one on the head. We were standing near the village center, which was suddenly invaded by a strange odor, stronger than the smell of the sea. Then suddenly they said ‘Yalla, yalla, let’s go,’ and drove us under
the threat of arms into trucks, we forty who were to be executed at the wall and others from the town. They stuffed us into the trucks like sheep and took us to the Zikhron Yaakov colony in Zummarin. We were several hundred, maybe three or four hundred men.

“Why didn’t they kill us at the wall? Some say that Yaqub, the headman of Zikhron Yaakov, is the one who saved us. They say that an old man from our town knew him and was standing in another line to be executed, and that he said to Yaqub when he saw him, ‘Abu Yusuf, the town has fallen and you’ve taken the weapons. What more is there after that?’ and that Yaqub answered, ‘We want to make peace between you and the Hagana so that we can stop the killing.’ They say that the headman left the village and came back with a written order to stop the killing. They say that some of the residents of Zikhron Yaakov, who had neighborly relations with some of the townspeople, intervened. Some say that they wanted to stop the killing because they needed us to work in their settlements, and some say that they wanted us alive because Abd Allah al-Tall had captured three hundred of them in the battle of Kfar Atsiyon near Jerusalem, and they wanted to exchange us. God only knows.

“In any case the trucks unloaded us in Zikhron Yaakov, at the building that was the headquarters of the English army. They held us, thirty to a narrow, dank, dark room that was only big enough for us if we stood. We spent three days in those mass graves, without any food but beatings with rifle butts, insults, and abuse.

“I’m sure you understand, Sitt Ruqayya, our morale was very low. The town had fallen, and we had seen piles of bodies with our own eyes. In fact, four of us had been told to move some of the bodies and bury them in a large ditch. Everyone who had seen anything spoke about it. Some said that they saw groups of people from Zikhron Yaakov walking around the town, with the bodies everywhere, singing and clapping their hands, and that others were doing the same thing on the boats in the sea near the beach. They were celebrating. One would say, ‘I saw So-and-So’s body.’ ‘So-and-So fell, killed before my eyes.’ ‘I saw Abu So-and-So and his brother and the three
children of his brother killed near the mosque.’ Those who were martyred in the battle were few. In fact, more of them died than of us; that was also why they were afraid and lusting to kill. But most of those who were martyred were killed after being stripped of their weapons, after the end of the battle. Then we saw the women and children and old men in trucks, and no one knew where they took them. One person among us saw the Israeli soldiers assaulting a girl before his eyes, and when her father tried to protect her, they killed him. No one talks about rape now because it’s a painful subject for the family, and they don’t want to go into it, but we learned of it when we were held in Zikhron Yaakov. I was twenty-two and was not married, but I had four sisters; you can imagine my state, and my fears. We were all thinking about the old women. I mean, death and destruction and the greatest possible humiliation. All of these things, Sitt Ruqayya, were lead weights. It was a terrifying despair; I never knew anything like it, before or since, except perhaps in 1967. I was imprisoned twice later on and I did not despair, even though I was older and had a family and children I was worried about. In the seventies I was imprisoned for five years, and in the Intifada I was held for six months. Both times I was part of a group that believed it was powerful. We were part of a resistance organization, and in the prison camp there was a meaning to life; we weren’t without hope, or without moments of contentment, satisfaction, even cheer. In 1948 the situation in the camp was completely different. The despair was total, and life was narrow, dark, dank and oppressive, like the room we were crowded into.

“After several days they loaded us up again and took us to Umm Khalid. Do you know where Umm Khalid is? It’s a village in the district of Tulkarm, in the middle of the road between Tantoura and Jaffa, on the Natanya line, near the sea. They had occupied it and thrown the people out. They held us behind barbed wire and would take us to forced labor in the quarries, from sunup until sunset. We cut stones and carried them on our backs, taking them to the places they designated. It’s strange that we withstood it. I
mean, I don’t know how our bodies bore it, because they gave us a single potato in the morning and half a dried fish in the evening, and they beat us and abused us.

“Then they moved us again, to a big prison camp in Ijlil, on the road between Umm Khalid and Jaffa. Instead of the work in the quarries they began to drive us to the villages they had occupied and where they had destroyed the houses, to take the stones. We were carrying the stones of the houses of our people, so they could use them in building their settlements. And they used us to build fortifications, military fortifications, and to bury the Arab martyrs. They took us to Qaqun, where there had been a battle between them and the Iraqi army in which they were victorious. We had to bury dozens of the bodies. We counted them: ninety bodies. Human nature is amazing, by God it’s amazing. I had not cried since I left our town, but I cried that day when I was burying the young Iraqis. I was sad for the young men and repelled by the odor of their bodies, and the repulsion made me more disturbed. I thought, ‘Why? They’re martyrs.’ I would bury them and cry, sobbing aloud. I remember the ones I buried. I remember all their faces, but one face in particular comes to me sometimes in sleep. He speaks to me, but when I wake up I don’t remember anything he said, even though I’m sure it was a long speech.

“In Ijlil a truck arrived carrying hundreds of men. It was obvious that they had not had a drink of water for days. They set them down at a single water faucet. The men rushed for it, and they shot at them, and some died. We later learned that those men were prisoners from Lid and Ramla.

“There were Egyptian prisoners in Ijlil, including a pilot whose plane fell over Tel Aviv on the morning of May 15, so he was the first Egyptian prisoner, bearing the number one. That’s why I don’t remember his name—we called him ‘Prisoner Number One.’ There was another pilot named Abd al-Rahman Inan, who was the leader of the flight of five planes that attacked the area near Haifa the following week. The weather was so bad when they took off from
al-Arish that they had to turn back. Then an order came to take off again. Inan said that the British were the ones who brought down the five planes, and that he was the only one destined to survive. They treated the Egyptian prisoners harshly, like us. Inan told one of our mates that the Israeli soldier grabbed a small copy of the Quran that he was carrying, threw it on the ground and began trampling it underfoot.