Those were the days of waiting.
Abu Kamal went back to Haddatha because working with concrete had tired him out, and he found that the Palestinians had been deported to the suburbs of Beirut. The trucks came, they ordered the Palestinians living in Lebanese villages to gather in their squares, and they were transported to Beirut and the north.
That was how they left Lebanese Galilee after their expulsion from Palestinian Galilee.
Abu Kamal didn’t grasp the reality of what had happened. Like all of you, like my father, he was led by the feeling that everything was temporary. The temporary led him to work for the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, and then toward death.
You lived in the temporary and died in the temporary. You endured unbearable lives and hid yourselves in that never-to-be-forgotten oblivion.
What should I have asked Abu Kamal as he sat there, collapsed, his back against the wall?
Should I have asked him why he’d married three women? Or how his fortune turned after the death of his last wife, Intisar?
Would I have been able to explain to him why his first wife, Fathiyyeh, and his second, Ikram, refused to go back to him?
And how will Abu Kamal live now?
The children have emigrated. They send a little money to the two women, but he’s alone, and no one sends him anything. Should I have told him he was paying the price for his behavior? Why should he have to pay? Was the camp destroyed just because he married a third time? His third wife, Intisar, died during the long siege that destroyed our world: Our world wasn’t destroyed during the great massacre, when we were buried under corpses; our world was destroyed by what they call the War of the Camps, between 1985 and 1988, when we were besieged from every side. That was when everything was wrecked.
Later we read all that stuff they threw together in a hurry about how the intifada in Gaza and the West Bank was born to the beat of the War of the Camps. It may be true — I don’t mean to judge history — but tell me, why does history only ever come in the shape of a ravening beast? Why do we only ever see it reflected in mirrors of blood?
Don’t talk to me now about the mirrors of Jebel al-Sheikh. Wait a little, listen a little.
In front of me sits Abu Kamal, who I wish would die.
A man who has tried his hand at virtually everything, forging his path through life. He worked in concrete — he left concrete with a hip problem, then at the Jaber Biscuit Factory, before deciding to sell ice cream. Then he opened a café, then a shop, which he named the Abu Kamal Minimarket and where he sold smuggled tobacco and a bit of everything. This man who tried to master life by every means possible, now, however, only inspires pity in me. I’m incapable of imagining a solution for his predicament. How could I possibly find work for him when I am myself, as you know, virtually unemployed? And then this man comes and tells me his two wives have shunned him and are keeping the money his children send from him?
“If I could just get in touch with Subhi,” said Abu Kamal. “Subhi’s always been kind to his father, but I don’t know his address. I went to Fathiyyeh and told her. . I told her I didn’t want anything. You don’t know, Son, what it is to be treated like shit by a woman, a woman who was once. .”
“Shame on you, Abu Kamal. Don’t talk that way about the mother of your children.”
“But you don’t know anything.”
He said that Fathiyyeh was humiliated twice. The first time was when he married Ikram, and the second, when Intisar forced him to repudiate his two other wives as a condition of marrying him.
“It was my fault, Son — it was my fault, but I just couldn’t resist the Devil. He seduced me and made me accept the woman’s conditions, but she died and took everything with her. Now I have nothing. The shop was burnt down, the house is half-destroyed. Can an old man like me live alone? I said I’d go back, I’d go back to my life the way it was before and to the two women who couldn’t do enough to serve me. Do you know what Fathiyyeh did when I went to visit her? She stood at her door and began yelling and rousing the neighbors. As though I were a beggar. I didn’t go to ask for anything, I went because God had opened my eyes. I said, ‘I’ll get my wife back, and I’ll be decently taken care of. I’ll get my children back. God took Intisar and the shop to punish me.’ I went to make amends, and all I got was humiliation and abuse. Now I don’t have the price of a loaf of bread.”
I put my hand in my pocket, but all I found was ten thousand lira. I gave them to him saying it was all I had.
“No, Son, no. I don’t beg.”
He put out his second cigarette, stood up, and left.
I know Fathiyyeh. That woman — I swear every time I think of Nahilah I see Fathiyyeh’s image. A tall, dark woman who covers her head with a white scarf and stands as straight as the letter alif — no bending, no shaking, and no stumbling, as though life had passed beside her, not through her.
I don’t understand how Fathiyyeh accepted his second marriage. At first, he hid it from her. He bought a house in Burj al-Barajneh, where Ikram lived, and divided his time. He’d spend the night in his first wife’s house in the Shatila camp, and he’d spend a portion of the day with his second wife in Burj al-Barajneh. Word got out and Fathiyyeh discovered what was going on. When Abu Kamal returned to the house one day exhausted from work — as he claimed — she raised the subject. A look of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, and he thought of denying everything because he was afraid of how she’d react, but instead he found himself telling the truth.
“Yes, I got married,” he said. “And that’s my legal right.”
He waited for the storm.
But instead of getting angry and breaking dishes, as she usually did whenever she had a disagreement with her husband over the smallest of things, and instead of killing him, as he believed she might do, this woman, straight as an alif, collapsed and broke in two. She bent over, letting her face fall between her hands, and started shuddering with tears. Fathiyyeh broke apart all at once and never stood upright again until he divorced her.
That same day she made peace with Ikram, and the two women lived in one house with their ten children. As the family hemorrhaged children through the deaths of several boys and the emigration of others, and the marriage of their girls, the women found themselves alone, breathing in the scents of letters sent from far away and chewing over their memories together.
After her divorce, Fathiyyeh came back to life. The slump of her shoulders was erased and they became straight again; the long neck bore its white scarf, and the woman walked the roads of the destroyed camp as though she were flying over the rubble, as though the destruction were a sideshow whose sole purpose was to focus the viewer on the beauty of her commanding height and the splendor of her huge eyes.
Fathiyyeh neither yelled nor roused the neighbors, as Abu Kamal claimed.
She stood at the door, blocking it with her broad shoulders, so Ikram couldn’t interfere. She knew Ikram’s heart would crumble for the man who’d made her believe that his every footstep shook the earth. She kept Ikram behind her and raised her right hand, straightening her scarf with her left one.
“Out!” she said. “Out!”
He tried to speak, but she put her hand over her mouth to keep her hatred and her shouts in, saying only those two words — “Out! Out!” The man left without daring to speak. He didn’t even ask for the address of his son, Subhi, who worked in Denmark. He saw the barrier rise in front of him, and he leaned forward, before turning his back on the door Fathiyyeh had blocked with her body.