Umm Hassan didn’t think she’d done anything extraordinary. She’d gone and got the child, and that was all there was to it. No one considered her a heroine. In those days, surprise had disappeared from people’s faces; sorrow alone wrapped itself around them, like an overcoat full of holes.
Al-Kweikat fell to the Jews without our knowing it. On the night of June 9, 1948, everyone came out of their houses in their nightclothes. The shelling was heavy, and the artillery thundered into the night of the unsleeping village. People took their children and fled through the fields to the neighboring villages of Yarka and Deir al-Qasi, and from Deir al-Qasi to Abu Sinan and Ya’thur, and on from there. Abu Hassan drove four head of sheep and three of goats along the road, but the flock died at Ya’thur, and Umm Hassan wept for the animals as a mother weeps for her children.
“God, I wept, Son! How I mourned those animals! How could they be gone as though they’d never been? Wiped off the face of the earth, dead. How were we supposed to live?”
But Umm Hassan lived long enough to bury her sons one after the other.
Sana’ said Umm Hassan never stopped weeping. She’d put on the cassette and would weep and tell everyone the story of the two visits she’d made over there. “Dear God, people. What we’ve lived through and seen. Would that we’d neither seen nor lived through such things!”
Sana’ said that she died of grief over her house.
“She knew?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea,” she answered. “Maybe it was because she saw it for herself. Hearing’s not like seeing.”
And you, Father — did you know these things? Why didn’t you tell Umm Hassan what had happened to al-Kweikat? Didn’t you spend your days and nights in those demolished villages? Why didn’t you tell the woman that the Jews had occupied her house?
“Why the fuss?” you’ll say. “Umm Hassan didn’t die because she saw the house. She died because her hour had come.”
THAT’S WHAT YOU would have said if I’d told you about Umm Hassan’s house.
Umm Hassan said she’d gone there. It was her second visit to her brother Fawzi’s house in Abu Sinan.
“My family fled from al-Kweikat to Abu Sinan and stayed there. What a shame that my husband didn’t want to listen to my father. He preferred to stay with his own family; his brothers had decided to go to Lebanon, so he went with them. My father disagreed. He hid with his wife and children and grandchildren in the olive groves for more than a year. Then he appeared in Abu Sinan and stayed there. I don’t know how they managed. My father used to grow watermelons. After the Israelis moved in, the watermelons belonged to them. They were signed on as construction workers and got by. Then my father bought a plot of land and built a house. It was to my father’s house in Abu Sinan that I went, and there I found my brother, sick. He had pneumonia, and we feared for his life. That’s why we didn’t go to al-Kweikat. Was I supposed to go on my own? I went to Deir al-Asad and Sha’ab and visited our relatives there, but al-Kweikat had been demolished, and my brother was sick. All the same, once when we were coming back from Sha’ab and my nephew was driving me in his little car, I begged him to go by al-Kweikat. “No, Auntie,” he said. “There are only Jews,” and kept going. I begged him, but he wouldn’t agree. We went on the road parallel to the village, but I couldn’t see a thing.”
“The second time was different,” said Umm Hassan.
“My brother was in excellent health, and he took me to al-Kweikat. I asked him to do it, and at first he said the same thing as his son, but later he agreed. We went and he took his son, Rami, who had a video camera. He’s the one who filmed the tape, God love him. We went into al-Kweikat, and I didn’t recognize it until we got to the house.”
What should I say about Umm Hassan?
Should I mention the tears, or the memories, or say nothing?
Seated in the backseat of the little blue Volkswagen, she was looking out the window and seeing nothing.
“We’re here,” said Fawzi.
Her brother got out of the car and held out his hand to help her out. Umm Hassan moved her stout body forward but couldn’t raise her head. She seemed unable to do so, as though her breasts were pulling her down toward the ground. She was bent over and rooted to the spot.
“Come on, Sister.”
Fawzi helped her out of the car. She remained doubled over, then put her hand to her waist and stood upright.
He pointed to the house, but she couldn’t see a thing.
Her tears flowed silently. She wiped them away with her sleeve and listened to her brother’s explanations while his son played around with the camera.
“They demolished every single house, and built the Beyt ha-Emek settlement — except for the new houses, the ones that were built on the hill.”
Umm Hassan’s house had been one of the new ones up on the hill.
“All the houses were demolished,” said the brother.
“And mine?” murmured Umm Hassan.
“There it is,” he said.
They were about twenty meters from the house. The branches of the eucalyptus tree were swaying. But Umm Hassan could see nothing. He took her by the arm and they walked. Then suddenly she saw it all.
“It’s as if no time has passed.”
Of what time was she talking about, Father? Can we find it in the videocassette tapes that have become our only entertainment? The Shatila camp has turned into Camp Video. The videocassettes circulate among the houses, and people sit around their television sets, they remember and tell stories. They tell stories about what they see, and out of the glimpses of the villages they build villages. Don’t they ever get sick of repeating the same stories? Umm Hassan never slept, and, until her death, she would tell stories, until all the tears had drained from her eyes.
She said that suddenly everything came back to her. She went up to the front door but didn’t press the buzzer. She stood back a little and walked around the house. She sat on the ground with her back against the eucalyptus tree as she used to do. She’d been afraid of the tree, so she’d turn her back on it. Her husband would make fun of her for turning her back on the horizon and looking only at the stones and the walls. Her brother took her by the hand and helped her up. Again, it was difficult for her to stand, as though she were rooted to the ground. Her brother dragged her to the door and pressed the buzzer. No one opened, so he pressed it a second time. The ringing reverberated louder and louder in Umm Hassan’s ears; everything seemed to be pounding, her body was trembling, her pulse racing. The brother stood waiting.