We waved to him, and here was Maryam asking a woman carrying a bucket of rice for a handful of it. Hasan lifted her off the ground and she moved her arm with all her determination, and opened her fist suddenly, so the rice she had intended for her brother scattered over her head. She laughed, and called at the top of her voice, “Come back soon, Abed!” Her voice was lost in the crowd and in the roar of the trucks as they pulled away, amid thousands of hands waving and extending a bridge of voices, shouting and singing and scattering rice and rose petals and crying. The August sun beat down, unchecked. “God be with you, God be with you.” “Take care of yourselves.” “Goodbye.” “We’ll meet again soon, God willing.”
Suddenly Maryam said, “Mama, can you buy me an ice cream?” I looked at her, and I looked at Hasan and Amin; for a moment my spirit slipped away, as if I were suddenly dying. Then I took a deep breath and looked at Maryam: “Let’s go buy you an ice cream.”
In the evening I heard the key in the lock. I wondered, which one has come back early, Hasan or Amin? But here was Abed standing at the door. He said in a strange voice, before he stepped into the house: “Before the truck entered the port I decided to stay in Beirut.” He quickly went into his room and closed the door.
In the morning he said to Maryam, “You told me to come back quickly, and I did what you told me.” She put her arms around him and laughed. He slipped away from her and left the room; I heard his muffled sobbing.
23
Flies
How did I bear it? How did we endure and live, how did a drink of water slip down our throats without choking and suffocating us? What’s the use of recalling what we endured and bringing it back in words? When someone we love dies, we place him in a shroud, wrapping him tenderly and digging deep in the earth. We weep; we know that we must bury him to go on with our lives. What sane person unearths the tombs of his loved ones? What logic is there in my running after the memory that has escaped, trying to flee from itself? Do I want to kill it so that I can live, or am I trying to revive it even if I die because … because why? I suddenly scream: Damn memory, damn its mother and father, damn the sky over it and the day it was and the day it will be. Damn the flies!
I saw the flies with my own eyes.
In a deep pit, that was yet big enough.
Ambulance crews with gloves and protective masks
Were scattering white powder,
Bringing the bodies on stretchers,
Placing one body next to the other.
They were stretching a sheet over them all, a covering
Of the plastic
From which garbage bags are made.
They would take their stretchers back to the narrow lanes, to bring other bodies.
They came and went.
From daybreak until sunset.
A smell
And clouds
Of flies.
Let it escape, let it go. May it never return.
Stretch out a sheet as you saw them doing, to cover what you saw throughout years, and the day of the smell and the flies.
Leave the page blank, Ruqayya.
24
The Girl from Nablus
Enters the Family
I’ve made a leap that cut five years from the story. I’ll go back and pick up the thread: we’re still at the end of 1977.
Sadiq called from Abu Dhabi, saying that he had met a girl he liked from the West Bank, and that he wanted to propose to her. His father said, “How will we propose to her for you when we can’t enter the West Bank?” He said, “I’ll arrange things. We can all meet in Amman.”
Sadiq sent the bride’s picture and a long letter describing her, telling the story of his meeting her and what he knew about her family.
I told my aunt, “Sadiq wants to get engaged.”
“To someone from Tantoura?”
“No, from Nablus.”
“Your uncle, Abu Amin, God rest him, visited Nablus many times. He said that there was nothing like the kunafa dessert they make in Nablus, but that they served it before lunch!” She added, “But the girls from Nablus are stubborn, and God made them all fat.”
I laughed, and showed her the picture. She looked at it and then
waved her hand dismissively: “She’s weak and wasting away, thin as a reed.”
“Didn’t you say that the women of Nablus are fat, and here she is like a willow branch!”
“Soon she’ll get fat from eating kunafa.”
“The main thing is that he likes her, and her family are good people.”
My aunt waved her hand and said, capitulating, “Okay. God willing you’ll have better luck than I did, and she won’t take him to live in Nablus so that we never see him.”
“What’s the matter with you, Aunt—Nablus is occupied, so Sadiq can’t visit it.”
“Isn’t Sadat saying that he’s going there to ask them to end the occupation?”
“And you believe him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“We’ll meet her family in Amman, and ask them for her, and hold the marriage there.”
“They won’t agree!”
“They will agree, Aunt, because we can’t enter the West Bank; we don’t have any control over it, and neither do they.”
“If they agree, they want to marry their daughter and be done. How many sisters does she have?”
“Three.”
“Thank God, some trials are easier than others. The Saffurya has done us in, with her six sisters. God forbid.”
Abed observed, talking about his brother’s plan, “We’ve gotten over Barrier Number One, may the same be true for Barrier Number Two. After that the road will be open for me.”
I laughed, “Do you have a plan?”
“Plans: a fair one and a dark one and a tall one and a short one, and the fifth is indescribable—she carries a rifle and talks politics and is our ally because she’s from Kamal Jumblatt’s group, and she’s beautiful as a moon and light-hearted to boot.”
“Then the fifth is precisely what you want.”
“There’s no call to anger all the others!”
I didn’t know where the line was between joking and seriousness, or if he had many girlfriends or was alone, his heart still filled only with fantasies of girls.
Hasan returned to Egypt to study, and I didn’t know if he was happy or miserable. He said that Cairo was large and the Nile was fascinating but he missed the sea and Sidon and the scent of orange blossoms. I would send him pictures of Maryam and talk to him at length about her in my letters. He would say, “I’m happy to have Maryam’s news but I’ve read the letter twice, thinking I had skipped a paragraph, and when I read it again I became certain that in a five-page letter you didn’t say a single word about yourself. How are you doing, Mother?”
I asked Hasan to call Wisal in Jenin and tell her that we were going to Amman for Sadiq’s engagement, and to ask if it was possible for me to meet her there.
Amin insisted that Ezz come with us to Amman. I said, “Who will take care of my aunt?”
“We’ll leave her with Ezz’s wife, she can come with him from Sidon and stay with her until we get back.”
“But my aunt can’t stand her.”
“God help Karima, she can put up with my mother for three days.”
Ezz and his wife came from Sidon. He suggested that we leave Maryam with his wife, because “She’s little, and the trip to Jordan by land will exhaust her, and she’ll exhaust you.” I did not agree.
On the morning of the following day a taxi carried us to Damascus by way of the al-Masna crossing, and from there we crossed the border at al-Ramtha on our way to Amman. I carried Maryam on my lap and sat in the back seat with Ezz and Abed; Amin sat in the front seat next to the driver. We had barely set out when Amin turned around, looked at Maryam and smiled broadly, and said, “God bless our trip. It was exactly the right thing to do, Ruqayya, to bring Maryam.”
We met at the hotel, where we found Sadiq and Hasan waiting for us near the desk. Neither of them had seen Maryam before. Sadiq planted a quick kiss on her head and then turned his attention to his
father and uncle, and I was busy examining Hasan. He was thinner and seemed smaller in size, as if he were a middle-school pupil. He lifted Maryam in his hands, saying again and again, “Now I understand why you write three quarters of your letters about her! She’s amazing, where did she get all this beauty?”
Sadiq sat with his father and uncle to discuss the details of the engagement, and Abed joined them. I went up to the room carrying Maryam, with Hasan trailing after me. In the evening we went to the bride’s uncle’s house.
The bride seemed kind and affectionate, younger than I had imagined even though Sadiq assured me before and afterward that she was only two years younger than he was. The formal living room was very large, with big chairs whose wooden frames were painted in gold. In the middle was a large rectangular table, covered with a piece of glass; on it were large crystal ashtrays and a number of rosaries that seemed to be valuable, because they were displayed as if they were fine pieces. I was intrigued by three large pictures hung on the wall, each in a gold frame: the middle was of a porter or a water-carrier who was carrying a picture of the Aqsa Mosque on his back; the pictures on each side were of a sluggish sea, and of a table holding a platter with fruits in dull colors.
The room was crowded with men and women, and I learned only shortly before we left which of the women was the bride’s mother and which was her aunt and which her uncle’s wife, and who was more closely and more distantly related. The men turned aside to talk over the arrangements for the marriage. Afterward we moved to the dining room, where the table and the rest of the furniture also was huge, crowding the space with chairs and china cabinets.
When we came back to the hotel Amin asked me, in front of Ezz and Sadiq and the other boys, “What do you think of the bride, Ruqayya?”
“She’s very nice, congratulations.”
Sadiq said, “Mother, I don’t understand what made you suddenly say, for no reason at all, ‘We are refugees, our family lives in the Ain
al-Helwa camp and we have relatives in the Jenin camp.’”
I found his comment strange, and I said, “Isn’t it the truth?”
He said, “I don’t object, but the words came as a surprise, for no reason. Anyway, who of our family lives in the camp in Jenin?”
“Wisal and her mother.”
“They are people we know, not relatives.”
“They’re my family. I have no one left but Ezz and Karima in Ain al-Helwa, and Wisal and her mother in Jenin, and Abed too—even if he lives in Beirut he’s from the camp in Jenin.”
Ezz broke in to end the tension that had begun to form around us without our having noticed: “I attest that the mulukhiya was respectable, one more degree and it would reach the level of the mulukhiya you make, Ruqayya. If it were two degrees better it would surpass it. Watch out, if the girl cooks like her family it will slip away from you, and I’ll go to Sadiq’s house for the mulukhiya.”
Sadiq laughed, and said, “Then we have to start now to try to get you a visa to come to the Emirates.”
“Yes. And I’ll write that the reason for the trip is mulukhiya.”
They laughed. I joined in with a smile, but I was downhearted. I said, “I’ll put Maryam to bed.”
“Then you’ll join us?”
“I won’t leave her alone in the room. She might wake up and be frightened to find herself in a strange place.”
Sadiq said, “It would have been better for you to leave her in Beirut with my uncle’s wife.”
Ezz said, “That’s what I suggested.”
I did not comment. I lifted Maryam and went up to the room, followed by Hasan. I put the girl to bed and sat with him. We talked a long time about Egypt and his studies and the situation in Beirut; but neither of us mentioned the visit or the bride or her family’s house. We didn’t notice that we had passed midnight until Amin came in. He planted a kiss on Maryam’s head, as she was fast asleep, and said to Hasan, “Ezz and your brothers are waiting for you in the coffee shop; I’m going to sleep. Good night.”
25
Wisal (II)
I don’t usually pay that much attention to the clothes I wear, but when I was getting ready to visit Wisal, I changed my clothes three times. I put on one of my dresses, looked in the mirror and then decided to put on another one. I went back over my directions to Amin about Maryam, if she gets hungry do this, if she wets herself you’ll do that. He laughed and said, “Come on, don’t worry,” and then, “Go ahead, Hasan,” as he had decided to go with me.
A taxi took us to al-Baqaa Camp; we looked for the house for some time, and at last arrived at the address. The door was open, and Hasan clapped his hands. A woman came, and I was embarrassed to see her as I did not know if it was Wisal or someone else. She was my age. She extended her hand and greeted us as she welcomed us repeatedly, so I realized that she was not Wisal.
In later years I would recall the moment we met, in that small house in al-Baqaa Camp on the heights above Amman, at the beginning of 1978, because when Wisal came into the room she did not extend her hand in greeting but rather opened her arms wide and embraced me, and also because as I embraced her, I was
certain that the scent filing my nose was not from my imagination. It was my friend, the girl of Qisarya who had come to me now from Jenin, bearing with her the scent of the sea. I tell myself that a wish can create an illusion and sustain it; but then I say no, the scent did not come from my mind but rather from her body and her long dress and her hair, reaching to my nose and from there penetrating my head and breast and bowels—how could that be the effect of an illusion?
Wisal brought me a traditional Palestinian dress and told me that she had begun embroidering it after that telephone call that Abed had made from Beirut. She said that she had finished it three years earlier, waiting for us to meet. I fought back tears as I contemplated her handwork on the dress she had brought to me over the bridge from Jenin. It was not cut and sewn, as she left it for me to sew, to fit me. It was three pieces of fabric: the first was large, for the body of the thawb, from the collar to the hem, which she had embroidered over the breast and around the hem, and two smaller pieces for the sleeves, with the same motif embroidered at the border of each. She had not chosen the usual black fabric for me but rather an indeterminate light color, almost off-white, which she had embroidered with thread of every hue and shade of blue, from light sky blue to the deepest color of the sea. I looked at the dress and could find nothing to say; my tongue was tied, and I felt that my gifts were not appropriate. I left the wristwatch and the heart suspended on a golden chain and the bottle of perfume in my bag, repeating to myself, they do not suit the occasion. I heard Hasan’s voice saying, “I must go. Do you know how to find the way back, or shall I come back to pick you up in a couple of hours?” Then with a haste I did not understand, he said to Wisal, “Goodbye, Aunt,” and kissed her hand and left rapidly.