The Woman From Tantoura (7 page)

After we arrived in al-Furaydis some of the boys began to work in Zikhron Yaakov for a few piasters, bringing them back to their mothers at the end of the day so they could buy bread. Sometimes the Jewish boys from the settlement would harass them, beating them and taking the money, and they would come back without it the same way they left. They took other boys and some of the young men of al-Furaydis to our town to harvest the crops. A woman in al-Furaydis shouted, “Good God, we’re hungry and the stalks on our land are two feet high!” She said to her sister, “Come with me,” and she went to the town to harvest some of the wheat. In the evening her sister returned with her dress ripped and clear marks from blows on her face. She asked some of the young men of al-Furaydis to help her bring back her sister’s body; she had been caught unawares by a military vehicle. She said, “They ran her over on purpose, and when I tried to get close to see what had happened to her the car came back toward me and I jumped away. The car ran over her a second time.”

We stayed four weeks in al-Furaydis, hosted by the people of the town. They put down beds and divided their provisions, but it was meager; some of the old died. As for the nursing infants, they fell incomprehensibly—every day an infant would die, and sometimes two. We buried twenty-five children in al-Furaydis or maybe thirty, as well as the woman who was run over by the military car and the old people who died. Then the Red Cross took charge of us, and they took us east to a leveled wasteland in the Triangle area, where Jordanian officers took charge, counting us and signing for the delivery. Then they took us to Tulkarm in buses. They deposited us in a school near the Hijaz railway line. In Tulkarm we were shelled by Israeli planes, and the son and daughter of Yahya al-Ashmawi were martyred. Two weeks later other buses came and took us to Deir al-Maskubiya in Hebron. Every Friday the people of Hebron would butcher lambs, grill them, and bring them to us with rice,
bringing enough for everybody. Many children died, perhaps not so much from hunger as from cold, or perhaps because of their mothers’ grief. Wisal and I went back to wearing our three dresses, one on top of the other. Wisal talked a lot and I would listen to what she said, but I did not talk. Now I don’t know if I had lost the ability to speak or if I didn’t want to talk. My mother says that from the time we left the town until we arrived in Sidon, I did not utter a single word. Abed stayed with me like my shadow, and he would not sleep anywhere but beside me. I would warm his hands and feet and keep patting his head until he slept. But I didn’t sing to him the way I used to when we were back home, for I didn’t have a voice.

In al-Maskubiya, news of the prisoners reached us. They announced over a loudspeaker that letters had arrived from the Red Cross. My mother stood waiting in the line; they did not call her name. The women and children dispersed after everyone had received the letter that had come for him. My mother spoke to the official, and he told her that he had passed out all the letters he had.

We spent six months in Hebron, and then the people of our town started to sort themselves out: there were some who wanted to join relatives they had in Tulkarm or Nablus or Jenin, and some who slipped back into Galilee, and some who went to Syria. My mother said we would go to Sidon, to my uncle. “How will you go to Sidon?” asked Wisal’s mother. My mother brought out seven gold guineas and said she had succeeded in hiding them during the search. Wisal’s mother said that she had relatives in Jenin, and my mother gave her three of the seven guineas. We bade farewell to the townspeople and to Wisal, her mother, and Abed. We crossed the Jordan River in the company of two families from the town who were going to Irbid; we were a little caravan of sixteen people, most of them children, as well as an old man who knew the road. The weather was very cold, and it was desert road with bare, rocky mountains; I couldn’t see the sea, or smell it. In Irbid we stayed as guests with a family related by blood to the two families we had accompanied; we stayed with them for a week, and then my mother
decided to continue our trip to Sidon. The head of the family who hosted us said, “The shared taxi will take you to Daraa, in Syria. You will get off there and look for the bus that goes to Damascus. In Damascus you will ask for taxis heading for Sidon; either you’ll go straight to Sidon or else you’ll take any taxi heading for Rashaya or Marjayoun or Nabatiyeh. When you get to any of them you will be a half hour’s distance from Sidon.” He repeated the names to her again and emphasized that she should not forget them. Then he said, “God be with you.” He wanted to give her money but she said, “God blesses and provides, brother. I have money, thank God.”

The next day in the morning the man took us to the taxi stop and we rode with others going to Daraa. He commended us to the driver and to the other passengers. We crossed the border, and after a few hours we and other passengers were settled in our seats in another taxi that was heading from Daraa to Damascus. We arrived at night, and spent the night in a mosque. “The idea was,” my mother would say to her sister, “that we would set out early in the morning and reach Sidon on the same day. We slept peacefully, and in the morning I found Ruqayya’s face red. I put my hand on her forehead and it was like fire. I said, ‘Ruqayya, pull yourself together, it’s nothing, today we’ll arrive at your uncle’s.’ But the girl didn’t hear me or see me, stretched out on the carpet of the mosque as if she were dead but breathing.” I don’t remember any of the details of my illness, but my mother says that I had the fever for two weeks, and that she was crying day and night because she was sure I would die. “And what would I say to her father and brothers when they come back safely, she died on me on the road? When she had had the fever for two days and I didn’t have any sage or mint, and I couldn’t boil a chicken for her so she could drink the broth, I asked the good people about a doctor. I went to him and he came with me to the mosque. He asked for a lira—yes by God, a Palestinian guinea in gold! I gave it to him before he would agree to go to the mosque with me. He examined her and wrote a prescription for me and I bought it. By the time Ruqayya got well, out of the four liras I
only had ten piasters left.” My aunt marveled, “Ten piasters? Didn’t you say that you had four liras in gold?” My mother counted the expenditures on her fingers: “Didn’t we cross the Jordan River, and pay for it? Didn’t we take the taxis? And food and drink while we were in the mosque, and the doctor, may God not forgive him. And I bought two wool sweaters, one for me and the other for Ruqayya, when we were in Irbid, because the cold cut to the bone.” She returned to counting on her fingers. “And I bought the medicine. The sheikh of the mosque, God protect him and bless his children, brought me bread and something to eat with it and sage from his house, and a woolen blanket for us to wrap up in.” My aunt returned to the question of the ten piasters: “So how did you get to Sidon?” My mother waved her hand and sighed, saying, “There are many good people.” She did not tell her sister, from whom she hid nothing, that she had stood at the door of the mosque and told her story to anyone she thought might help her, among those who passed.

We arrived in Sidon at the beginning of February of the following year. When we met my aunt and uncle I was wearing the three dresses, one on top of the other, and on top of them the wool sweater that my mother had bought for me in Irbid. The first words I spoke since we had left home were what I said in a whisper to my uncle: “My father and my two brothers were killed. I saw them with my own eyes on the pile. They were with a hundred or maybe two hundred people who were killed, but they were on the edge of the pile, I saw them. My mother will tell you that Sadiq and Hasan went to Egypt and that my father is a prisoner. I saw them covered with blood, on the pile.”

8

A Boy and a Girl

When Ezz said to me, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you,” I thought the way he said it was strange. I nearly made fun of him, I nearly said, “Do you want permission to talk to me, or an appointment?” But I didn’t. I waited for him to speak, and he said, “I’ll take you to the sea.”

I walked beside him. When he left the village with his father and mother eight months earlier I was taller than he was, but he had become taller than I was. I remarked on it, and he laughed and said, “I have springs in my knees. Every couple of days I hear them creak, and then I find myself a few inches taller.” The smell of the sea was clear in the city. Even though it was mixed with other smells, in the old city it became more dominant as we got closer to the shore, until the only smell was the sea. We took off our sandals and plunged into the sand. Then we sat down next to each other, cross-legged, and Ezz said, “The sea in Sidon is like the sea at home.” I looked up and said, “The sea in the village is better. Here there aren’t any islands or sugar springs or grottoes. The smell there is different, and the sounds too.” He remained silent and I did also, feeling the sea air spread over my hair and face and clothes, staring
at the movement of the waves rising and breaking and rising again. I followed the flight of the sea foam. Strange how two images can come together and be superimposed, one over the other! You’re in Sidon, girl, and the other sea is there, bound by the dark, rocky islands, the scent of the lilies and the houses that seem like shells or moss, which sprang from the sea originally and then stayed close to it when the waves washed them ashore. I see them as two seas, as if one eye saw one and the other looked at a different sea.

Ezz said, “Ruqayya, I want to talk to you.”

“What’s the matter, Ezz? Just say it, what’s holding you back?”

“I want to ask you … are you sure that you saw my uncle Abu Sadiq and Sadiq and Hasan with the corpses on the pile?”

“I saw them.”

“Why does my aunt say … .”

I interrupted him, “I pointed with my hands. I pulled on her hand and pointed. They were in front of her eyes. She didn’t see them, as if she lost her sight for a moment and then got it back. I don’t know how or why.”

“Did you see them alone or did you see others too?”

“I saw them with the others. The young men they took from al-Furaydis to bury those who were killed told us that they buried them with the others. They said that they buried 120, two or three days afterward. They said that the others had been buried before that, the day they took over the village.”

“Do you remember the day we left in the boat?”

“I remember.”

“While we were on the way I saw corpses. I saw someone floating in the water. I yelled and ran to my father, pointing with my arm. But my father put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘He died days ago.’ I shuddered violently, and my father noticed. He said, ‘You’re a man now, Ezz, aren’t you a man?’ I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry even when I saw the bodies of others floating on the surface of the water. I asked the captain of the ship and he told me that many boats sank on the way because they were small and were carrying
more than their capacity, or because the captain of the boat was not skilled enough. I used to like to ride in boats and go sailing in them but I don’t like them any more, not boats and not the sea and not traveling.”

“Do you like your new school?”

“Something else happened in the boat.”

“What happened?”

“A woman began to scream. Then her screaming got louder, and I heard someone say that she was having a baby. Then my mother came and said, ‘Give me your knife.’ The red knife that Amin gave me, do you remember it?”

“The penknife?”

“Yes. I didn’t understand why my mother was asking for it. I asked her and she said, ‘We need it for the birth.’ I thought they were going to use it to cut open the woman’s belly, so I started shivering. I crouched down and fought back tears so my father wouldn’t scold me.”

“And then?”

“I didn’t see anything because the women were surrounding the woman who was screaming and screening her with their bodies. After a while we heard the sound of the baby crying. The women said, ‘Thank God she came through safely.’ I saw the baby wrapped in my mother’s shawl. When she returned the knife to me I hesitated to take it. She was surprised, and then laughed and said, ‘We cut the umbilical cord with it.’ I put it in my pocket but since we got to Sidon I’ve kept it hidden, and I don’t use it any more. I don’t want to.”

I said, “Let’s walk along the sea.”

I put my arm around his shoulders and we walked. The silence lengthened, and then I asked him again about the school.

“I like it because it has a soccer field.”

“You used to like school because you were the best.”

“I’m not the best any more, because the teacher calls on me suddenly and I don’t know what he’s been talking about or what the
question is. If he repeats it I answer, and if not I stand tongue-tied in front of him, and he scolds me and the boys laugh at me. At first they laughed, but now they’ve become my friends. They whisper to remind me of what he was saying or to help me answer and I try to catch what they’re whispering but I can’t make it out if I’m upset. But when we play soccer the game takes over and I don’t think about anything but the ball as it moves from one side to the other. I watch it between the feet of the players or I take off toward it when it flies and I fly too, to catch up with it. Soccer has introduced me to all the boys in the school and we’ve become friends.”

“I don’t have girlfriends any more. My uncle says that most of the people of the village went to Syria, and we don’t yet know where they live. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again.”

“No problem.”

“Why?”

He said, “You’ll make new friends, and your old friends will still be your friends when we go back home. My friends here didn’t know anything about the village so I told them. When we go back they’ll come to visit me. I’ve gotten to know Sidon and they’ve gotten to know Tantoura, and when they visit it they’ll get to know it better.”

“But when I make friends here I’ll leave them when we go back.”

“When things go back to the way they were, you’ll take the train or a taxi and go to them, and they will also visit you there. And who knows, Yahya might work in Jerusalem or in Lid so you’ll live there, and you’ll have friends in Jerusalem and in Tantoura and in Sidon and maybe in Haifa and Beirut when we go to visit Amin, or in Cairo if Yahya takes you there. The world will open up, and you’ll have family and friends and acquaintances everywhere.”