Authors: Elias Khoury
I've told you about Samih so I can tell you about Samya. Samya was an ordinary woman, or at least that's what she led us to believe in Beirut. She did nothing other than wait for her husband. In the space of two years, she bore two children and cooked a lot. When I visited them at home, I'd see her sitting on the edge of the sofa as though ready to get up at any moment. She sat with us but gave the impression of being elsewhere. I was told she changed a lot after Samih died. She arranged for herself and the children to return to Ramallah because she had American citizenship. She'd worked
as a librarian and became the official in charge of the Ramallah organization during the
intifada
. It was as though Samih's death had liberated her from waiting and had driven her to forge a new life.
My existence was jarred by Samya's mysterious letter.
I was in Shatila, during the first siege, when a young man called Nadim al-Jamal joined us. He was a friend of the camp commandant, Ali Abu Toq.
Nadim al-Jamal said he had a letter for me from a woman called Samya Barakeh whom he'd met by chance in Amman, where she was returning from a conference in Stockholm. When she found out he was going to see me in Beirut, she asked him to delay until the next morning and brought him a letter for me.
I believed that Samya had never listened to me because although she'd sit with us at their place, she always gave the impression of not really being present. Her husband would ask questions and I'd respond, but she would never intervene. Samih would always talk about his dream of writing a book without a beginning or an end. “An epic,” he called it, an epic of the Palestinian people, which he'd start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of '48. He said we didn't know our own history, and we needed to gather the stories of every village so they'd remain alive in our memory. Samih would talk to me about his theories and dreams, and I had nothing to tell him. Well, I did tell him about our village, and my grandmother's stories, and my father's death and my mother's disappearance. With him, or because of his questions, I became acquainted with the stories of my family, put events together and drew a picture of al-Ghabsiyyeh, which I hadn't known. I put so much into getting the story ready that I came to know the village house by house. And during all that time, Samya sat there in silence.
I opened Samya's letter and read it.
To start with, she wrote about her longing for Beirut. Then she informed me of Samih's death and about the difficulties of life in Ramallah. I don't have the letter any longer to read to you because we tore up all our papers when we were afraid the camp would fall. I wish I hadn't torn it up, because
it was my only evidence that my mother wasn't a ghost or a story made up by my grandmother. My mother is a real woman, not a phantom belonging to the mysterious world of childhood. I followed orders and tore up the letter; Abu Toq called us together during the siege and ordered us to tear up everything. “I don't want documents falling into their hands,” he said. I tore the letter up, but before doing so I wrote down the telephone number Samya had put at the end. I must have tried that number a dozen times, and every time I got a recorded message saying it was out of service. Did I copy it wrong? Or were the numbers on that little piece of paper I kept in the back pocket of my trousers erased or illegible?
Sanya wrote that she'd met my mother, Najwah, and that she had wept and wept when Samya told her she knew me and had kissed her and held her close, so she might breathe in the smell of me. Samya wrote that she'd met my mother in the hospital in Ramallah, that she wore a headscarf, and she was working as a nurse.
Samya was waiting for her son outside the operating room where he was having his appendix taken out when a dark-skinned nurse wearing a white headscarf came over to reassure her.
“Your mother's beautiful, Dr. Khalil,” she wrote. I wish I had the letter, but it's gone and I can't get in touch with Samya because the number was either erased or written down wrong.
My mother's there, a nurse like me! Samya wrote that she knew her because she was a nurse. “Nurses look alike, and she resembles you a lot.” I'm at a loss. What if I found my mother? I don't want her now, and I don't love her. But why? Why should her ghost come and inhabit this room with me? My grandmother didn't describe her to me, and all I can remember is her brown arm. I used to put my lips on her arm and kiss it. All that's left of that woman for me is the image of a face nuzzling her arm, two eyes fixed on it, a mouth caressing the vast, soft brownness.
Samya's letter brought me this new picture of a woman, a woman who covered her hair and worked as a nurse in Ramallah. My mother emerged from the letter looking like any other woman, and when your mother comes
to resemble any other woman, she's not your mother anymore. What strange kind of a relationship is this that depends on an illusion? But everything's like that. Isn't Shams an illusion? My problem with Shams is that the illusion won't die. When they killed her, they didn't kill her image. I haven't told you what I found out afterwards. When Shams was ambushed, she opened the door of her car and was about to get out. The upper half of her body hung outside the open door while the lower half remained inside the car. The number of bullets that poured into her was terrible. More than sixty machine guns firing at once. Her body was torn apart and scattered. Little bits flew through the air and pelted trees and houses. After they'd finished, the pieces were collected in two plastic bags and buried.
As far as I'm concerned Shams didn't die, for when the body is torn apart there is no death. I wish she'd died, but she didn't. And I'm incapable of loving another woman. No, I'm not saying that I won't ever be unfaithful, because everyone is unfaithful, but I can't . . . The problem is not my betrayals but my permanent feeling of being unfaithful. I wish she'd died. No, it's not possible to compare your situation with mine. You died when your wife died, but my wife wasn't my wife, she was another man's wife, and when she died her smell invaded and took hold of me. When her image comes to me, I'm overwhelmed by that feeling that my rib cage is burning. I get up from my bed and stand in the dark and drink it in. I drink in the dark and rub it into my chest, and the memories possess me.
I
WAS TELLING
you about my mother, and what has Shams to do with that?
I told you I lost my mother, then found her in Samya's letter, then lost her again. All I know is that my father married Najwah after the incident with the Jew, then took a new job in the factory belonging to the Palestinian Badi' Boulis, and then died.
My father married Najwah by chance. If he hadn't worked in the factory belonging to the Jew in Mina al-Hesn, and if the rabbi hadn't been murdered, and if my father hadn't been arrested, and if Najwah's father hadn't been on a visit to Ain al-Hilweh, my father wouldn't have married at such
an early age. You know, I feel as though he were my older brother. He was eighteen years older than me. Now do you understand why I hated him, and hated my white hair and my face with its bulging cheekbones and long jaw? I don't want people to look at me as if I were him. The truth is that that sort of look stopped existing after the Shatila massacre â as if everyone had died, as if that massacre, with its more than fifteen hundred victims, had wiped out the memory of faces, as if death had wiped out our eyes and our faces, and we've become featureless.
It was chance, as I told you. Chance was his story.
Explain to me how that young man could work for a Jew after all that had happened? Please don't talk to me about tolerance; say something else.
Listen! I'll tell you this story, and it's up to you to believe it or not. Do you remember Alia Hammoud, the director of the camp kindergarten? Alia asked me to give a lecture to the teachers at the kindergarten on preventive health. So I went. When we were having tea after the lecture, one of the teachers started talking about her problems with a child named Khaled Shana'a. She said he was obnoxious and she couldn't put up with his being in her class any longer. He was full of turbulence and anxiety, and she asked Alia's permission to expel him from the class. Alia told her to be silent. The teacher continued complaining, at which point Alia said to her in a controlled voice that she couldn't expel him and suggested that the teacher try being gentle and caring with him. When the teacher indicated her dissatisfaction with the director's suggestion, Alia's voice rose.
“Do you know who Khaled is? He's the grandson of a great man.”
She was speaking of the '48 occupation of her village, which was located in the district of Safad, and of how a group of young men had been taken and then crushed by a bulldozer; Khaled Shana'a, the child's grandfather, was the only one to survive. She also mentioned how, after the villagers crossed the Lebanese border and took up residence in the village of Yaroun, Khaled was the only one to return to Teitaba. He stole into the village on his own, went to his house, opened the door, and everything exploded. The
man opened his door and found himself thrown to the ground, blood gushing from him. He pulled himself together, returned to Yaroun, and spent the rest of his life blind.
“He's a hero,” said Alia. “His grandfather is a hero, and I won't expel his grandson.”
The teacher couldn't understand where the heroism lay in the story, since she was one of the ones who'd escaped from the Tal al-Za'atar camp, where, during the siege of the camp, which had ended with the massacre of its inhabitants, she'd seen for herself how heroes die and their acts of heroism disappear.
“I don't want to hear such stories,” said the teacher, leaving.
But Alia went on. She said her mother still remembered Salim Nisan, the Jewish cloth seller who came to Teitaba before it fell and said, “Muslims, don't go anywhere! We're all in the same boat!” The cloth seller had originally been from Aleppo. He carried his goods over his shoulder and went through the Arab villages selling without getting paid. He carried a big ledger in which he recorded debts, and people paid what they could â a jerry can of oil, a dozen eggs, and everyone loved him. He'd go into people's houses, eat their food, and flirt with the women; his sixty years made him seem like an innocuous old man. He'd laugh and tell jokes, and the women would surround him laughing and choose their cloth.
Alia was astonished when her mother told her that a number of the women of Teitaba crossed the border to pay him what they owed.
I didn't ask Alia how the women of Teitaba knew where to find Salim Nisan once the border between Lebanon and Palestine had become a reality.
I listened to the story as one would to a love story, and I didn't ask Alia for the details of the meeting between the women of Teitaba and Salim Nisan.
“We helped Salim Nisan out and that teacher won't help Khaled Shana'a out. Is that any way to do things?”
C
OME, LET'S
get back to our story and ask what that young man, my father, who was one of the first members of the fedayeen groups to initiate the struggle against Israel, wanted by working in Mina al-Hesn. Was he drawn to his enemies? Were they his enemies?
Today the Durziyyeh family lives in Israel. I found that out from my aunt's husband, who told me, as he was telling me about al-Ghabsiyyeh, that he'd gone to see them in Haifa and had visited Simon at his falafel and humus restaurant. Simon had been gracious to him and had asked him about the circumstances of my father's death.
What did my aunt's husband have to do with Simon Durziyyeh? Did he also work in the sheet-metal factory with my father, or did he visit him there to see how he was doing, or what? I don't understand a thing anymore! My aunt's husband said Simon took him on a tour through the whole of Palestine and that he visited Tel Aviv and Nahariyyeh and Safad and was amazed at everything he saw, to the point of almost believing he was in a European country.
Is it true, Father, that they've created a European country?
I've tired you out, and I'm tired too.
I've told you story after story, but my mother's secret remains a secret. The only thing I got out of Samya's mysterious letter was that she'd gotten remarried and had gone to live with her husband in Ramallah, where she discovered that he was already married. And that she became a nurse.
That's all.
Catherine came half an hour ago. Do you remember her? The French actress I told you about? She said she'd got in a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Galilee Hospital. When he told her there was no such hospital, she explained that she wanted to go to Shatila. The driver was reluctant, but she paid him ten dollars so he brought her to the door of the hospital, muttering under his breath.
I ordered a cup of Turkish coffee for her, and she drank it down in one gulp, wrinkling her face because the coffee burned her tongue. She sat in
silence and then asked me why people hated the Palestinians. I didn't know what to say. Should I have told her about the fragmentation caused by the Civil War? Or say what Nahilah said to the Israeli officer: “We're the Jews' Jews. Now we'll see what the Jews do to their Jews.” I don't agree with these phrases we use so easily every day. I can understand Nahilah because she was over there, where a Palestinian finds himself face to face with a racism like that toward the Jews in Europe. But not here. We're in an Arab country and speak the same language.