I suddenly asked Maryam, “Where are we, Maryam?” My aunt shouted, raising her hand with all five fingers extended, “Do you see my fingers?” I laughed aloud, hysterically. She said, “I thought you had suddenly lost your sight. That happened before, to a woman back home, long ago. I didn’t realize that you were joking.” I didn’t tell her that I had not been joking, nor that my eyes were completely open and that I could see clearly, but that for a moment I had lost all direction. I didn’t know where we were, in our apartment or in the shelter or in a third place, so I had asked Maryam.
That night I heard a knock on the door. I thought, Amin, or Abed. I didn’t think that each of them carried a key and would not need to knock. I jumped up and opened the door.
27
The Abu Yasir Shelter
In that first moment I didn’t recognize her. Then I knew her, even though I still stood stiffly, as if I first had to understand why she looked like that and what had brought her at this late hour of the night. She spoke first:
“I’m Haniya.”
More seconds while my mind ran in all directions. Had she been hit by shrapnel? Where? Why did she look like that? Had the Israelis raped her? Had her house been destroyed on top of her? Suddenly I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and said, more loudly than usual or than was necessary, “Come in, come in, welcome, Haniya, please come in.”
She was carrying her infant son in her hands; her daughter she was carrying like a pack on her back, tied on by fabric she had likely torn from the hem of her long dress and the sleeves. I undid the knots and took the girl, who was deeply asleep; I put her on my bed. Then I said, “Wash your face, Haniya, then we’ll sit and you can tell me what happened. Can I get you some supper?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Tea?”
“A drink of water.” She gave me the infant and went to wash her face; then she returned and took him from me. I handed her a glass of water, and she drank it at one gulp.
Haniya had come to our house daily for two weeks; she was a nurse who gave my aunt a shot that she refused categorically to let Amin give her. Why not, Aunt? Amin is your son. Even if he’s my son it’s not right for me to bare myself to him. So a nurse came whom my aunt did not accept, saying that her hand was as heavy as a sledge hammer and that she would kill her. She took the first shot and refused to take the second. The next day Amin told her that he would send Haniya to her, and that no one had as light a hand as she did—the patient would think that she was about to plunge in the needle to give him the shot, and she would have inserted the needle, emptied the serum and withdrawn it without his feeling it. He said, “Anyway, Haniya’s family are from our neighbors.” My aunt’s face lit up suddenly, “From Tantoura? From what family?” Amin stuttered, and then said, “She was born twelve years after we left. Her father is from Jabaa and worked at the oil refinery in Haifa, and was living in Hawasa near Balad al-Sheikh.” My aunt said, “The people of Jabaa are our maternal uncles.” My aunt was happy with Haniya even before she saw her, and she was even happier when she came. She was friendly and good-natured and humored my aunt; she would insist that Haniya stay and have supper with us, and Haniya would say to her, “Umm Amin, I’ve been in the hospital all day and I have to go home, because my daughter is with my mother, and my husband is waiting.” Haniya had not yet given birth to the baby she brought with his sister when she knocked on our door.
Was it that night that Haniya told me the details of what had happened Thursday evening in the Abu Yasir shelter, or did she tell me some of it and did I hear the details from her and others later on? I don’t know, I don’t remember. All I remember is that she said: “When the shelling got intense we went to the Abu Yasir shelter, a hundred yards away from our house. My mother and father refused to go with us to the shelter and stayed in the house. I went with my husband and the little ones and my sister and her husband and her kids. An hour later some armed Lebanese came in and began to shout at us, ‘Where are the saboteurs?’ A Lebanese neighbor shouted, ‘For God’s sake don’t kill us, we’re Lebanese!’ But they began to fire in the shelter; some fell, and there were loud screams. Then they ordered us to leave the shelter. They stood the men in a line against the wall opposite the shelter; as for the women and children, they stood them in another line and said they would take us to Acre Hospital. They were shouting at us, using obscene words. We began to move, and then we heard shots, a lot of them close together, so we knew they were killing the men they had lined up against the wall. How did I pick up my daughter and lift her off the ground? How did I carry the two kids together and get out of the line and run away? I don’t know. It’s as if my legs were the ones that decided to save me and the little ones. I found myself running away, an odd kind of running because I was jumping high and zigzagging to avoid the shots they were firing at me. They were shouting insults and telling me to stop and firing at me. Even when I escaped and couldn’t hear their voices any more, my legs kept running from lane to lane, passing the corpses thrown down in front of the houses. My legs didn’t stop to investigate that strange, penetrating smell that surrounded the place. They didn’t stop for a puddle my feet waded into; the water flew onto my face and my dress and my hands and I only noticed later on that it wasn’t a puddle of water. Then I stopped, a moment or maybe two, because the baby had started to cry. I was afraid the noise would alert them. I tore off a piece from the hem of my dress and I tied it over his mouth.”
“How did I get to the Gaza hospital? I don’t know. As soon as I went in I began to yell at the top of my voice, ‘They’re killing people. I saw them with my own eyes.’ They didn’t believe me, so I began to repeat that they were firing on us in the shelter. That they lined the men up against the wall and killed them. A nurse gave me a sedative pill and then began to give me first aid—I hadn’t noticed that there was anything on my body that needed it. The director of nursing at the hospital came and wrapped her arms around me and said, ‘I know that these are hard days, dear. The entry of the Israelis into Beirut isn’t easy for any of us.’ I pushed her away and said, ‘The men who were killing were speaking Arabic. They are from the Phalange. The killed all the men who were in the Abu Yasir shelter in al-Horsh. I saw other corpses in front of the houses, piles of corpses.’ She spoke to me firmly and said, ‘Don’t scare people, we don’t need any rumors!’ I left her and went out to the courtyard where there were hundreds of people who had come to the hospital, and I said: ‘Run away, they’ll come here and kill you.’ Then I asked a lady my mother’s age to help me load my daughter onto my back; I told her, tie her on my back, and she tied her and I carried the boy and came running to you. What should I do now, Sitt Ruqayya?”
Haniya arrived at one in the morning; it was three before she responded to my insistence that she lie down on the bed for a while, until morning came and we could go together to the camp to find out what happened. I was stretched out on the couch in the living room, between sleep and waking, beset by nightmares; I would doze off a little and then become alert again, horrified by the question: what if they invaded the hospitals? What would they do to Amin? And Abed, where could Abed be? The office of the Popular Front was very close to Acre Hospital; it was still open and Abed went there sometimes. Was he there now? Maybe he was with his friends, dispelling their boredom by playing cards or arguing about what Abu Ammar did: this one curses Abu Ammar and holds him responsible, and that one thinks that the man did as much as he could to protect the Palestinian people. A daily battle that ended in shouting or that came to blows between the supporter of Abu Ammar and his decision and the one who was angry with the leadership and its policies. Abed was like a bull in a pen. He had spent three days after the resistance left without leaving his bed, then he began to stay away from home, saying, “I’ll stay with my friends.” Or he would come back late with the smell of whiskey on him, and I would reproach him for being drunk. Once I scolded him and he answered me, “Leave me alone. If I had hashish I would smoke it and if I had
opium I would sniff it.” I wonder where Abed was now? Why did the director of the Gaza hospital say what she did to Haniya? Had Haniya lost her mind with the long shelling and the terror? What if what she said was true? What would we do?
I found her standing in front of me, “Sitt Ruqayya, if I may, I’ll leave the two little ones with you so I can go see what happened to my husband and my mother and father and my sister and her children.”
I looked at my watch. It was five in the morning.
“I’ll go with you.”
I gave her one of my dresses and asked her to change into it. I knocked on Umm Ali’s door; I knew that she woke up early for the dawn prayer. I decided not to tell her anything, only to ask her to take care of Haniya’s children until we came back, and to tell my aunt and Maryam when they woke up that I had gone out and would not be late. No sooner did Umm Ali open the door, before good morning and good morning to you, she asked, “Have the Israelis gone into the camps?”
I said, “It seems that they have gone in with the Lebanese Forces.”
“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.