The women went back inside the house and sat in silence.
Umm Hassan got up and went into the bedroom. She looked at the bed that occupied the center of the room. It was the first bed she’d slept on in her life. At home with her family, and then in her husband’s house, she’d slept on bedding on the floor, folding it up each morning and tucking it away at the far end of the room. But in this house the bed couldn’t be folded up.
“A room just for sleeping in,” her husband had said.
The other woman sleeps here every night, thought Umm Hassan, with her husband, in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house, in the same — No, not in the same village: The village didn’t exist anymore. Umm Hassan could no longer see the close-packed houses of the village — the houses were gone. Nothing was left of al-Kweikat.
When she finished her tour of the house, Umm Hassan wept. She sat in the living room and wept. Her brother came in to hurry her up so they could return to Abu Sinan and found her weeping. He wept, too, and the son with the camera wept.
“Do you know what she said to me?”
Umm Hassan would relate the same conversation every day, adding a word here, deleting one there, choking back her tears.
“She asked me, ‘Where are you from?’
“From al-Kweikat, I told her. This is my house and this is my jug and this is my sofa, and the olive trees and the cactus and the land and the spring — everything.”
“‘No, no. Where are you living now?’
“‘In Shatila.’
“‘Where’s Shatila.’
“‘It’s a camp.’
“‘Where’s the camp?’
“‘In Lebanon.’
“‘Where in Lebanon?’
“‘In Beirut, near Sports City.’”
When the Jewish woman heard the word Beirut, she gave a start and her manner changed completely.
“You’re from Beirut?” she cried, the words tumbling out of her mouth and her eyes filling with tears.
“Listen, Sister,” the Jewish woman said. “I’m from Beirut too, from Wadi Abu Jmil. You know Wadi Abu Jmil, the Jewish district in the center? They brought me from there when I was twelve. I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land. Do you know the Ecole de l’Alliance Israélite? To the right of the school there’s a three-story building that used to be owned by a Polish Jew named Elie Bron. I’m from there.”
“You’re from Beirut?” Umm Hassan said in amazement.
“Yes, Beirut.”
“How did that happen?”
“What do you mean, how did that happen? I’ve no idea. You’re living in Beirut and you’ve come here to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. Get up, my friend, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back.”
Umm Hassan said she talked with the Israeli woman for a long time.
The woman’s name was Ella Dweik. Hers was Nabilah, daughter of al-Khatib from the family of al-Habit — the fallen — wife of Mahmoud al-Qasemi. Al-Habit isn’t the family’s real name, but my grandfather used to spend all day sitting down so they used to call him that. Our real ancestor was Iskandar, and before Iskandar there was al-Khatib.
Nabilah al-Habit talked of al-Kweikat.
Ella Dweik spoke of Beirut.
Ella said then that she’d married an agricultural engineer who worked there, that they’d been given the house, that she hadn’t had any children. Her husband was Iraqi, from the outskirts of Baghdad; she’d always wanted to see Baghdad. She had a brother who worked in Tel Aviv, but she never saw him.
Umm Hassan told her about Beirut. About the sea and the Manara Corniche, the shops on Hamra Street, the wealth and the beauty and the cars. She said the war hadn’t been able to destroy Beirut. It had destroyed a lot, but Beirut was still as it had always been.
Umm Hassan said that there, in al-Kweikat, she saw once again the Beirut that she didn’t know very well. “All I know is Umm Isa’s house on America Street, near the Clémenceau cinema.”
“In al-Kweikat I saw Beirut, but I don’t live in Beirut, I live in the camp. The camp? It’s a grouping of villages piled up one on top of another.”
The Jewish woman stood up.
When someone stands up, it means it’s time for the guest to leave. Umm Hassan didn’t grasp the meaning of the signal, however; when her brother said they had to go, she looked at him in amazement and didn’t respond.
“And now, what can I do for you?” said Ella.
“Nothing, nothing,” said Umm Hassan as she began ponderously to get up.
The Jewish woman took the earthenware jug and gave it to Umm Hassan without a word. Umm Hassan took it without looking and went back with her brother to his house in Abu Sinan.
“The jug is still in its place,” said Sana’.
Umm Hassan said nobody should move it and that she was sorry she’d brought it with her, it should have stayed in its own house.
“Then what?” I asked Sana’.
“‘Then what?’” she said. “She died in the camp, and the Jewish woman is still living in her house.”
Can you imagine, Father, that Umm Hassan would die weeping for the earthenware jug she brought with her from her house? That she’d die because a woman said to her, “Damn al-Kweikat! Take it!” Why didn’t she take it? Why didn’t she tell this woman she was welcome to the whole camp, the whole of Wadi Abu Jmil, the whole world?
Umm Hassan said she wept over what had happened to her. “The Jewish woman bought my silence with the jug and her stories about her mute childhood, and I came back to the misery and poverty of the camp. She has the house and I’m here. What’s the point?”
So the story was turned into a videotape that’s now mine. Rami didn’t film the conversation between the two women. He made the camera roam over the house and around the land and the olive orchard. But it’s a beautiful tape, made up of lots of snapshots joined together. I’d have preferred a panorama, but never mind, we can imagine the scene as we watch. We’ve become a video nation. Should I be watching the tape every night, weeping and eventually dying from it? Or should I be filming you and turning you into a video that can make the rounds of the houses? What should I film though? Should I ask someone to play you as a young man? I might be able to play that role myself, what do you think? Mme. Claire already asked me if I were your son. I’d be able to say that I am and that I might play the role of you as a young man. But I’m not an actor, acting is a difficult profession! I wish I did know how to act, I’d have reenacted Shams’ crime, and the interrogators wouldn’t have laughed at me and humiliated me with their pity.
“Pity is the ugliest thing,” you used to say. “We must not pity ourselves. Once a man pities himself, he’s doomed.”
But I’m very sorry to have to tell you now that I pity you. I swear you stir more pity than Umm Hassan’s earthenware jug or that mute Jewish woman.
The Jewish woman told Umm Hassan she hadn’t forgotten her Arabic and said she’d been struck dumb when she came to Israel.
“I was on my own, the only child from Lebanon; they all spoke Hebrew. I went for five months without saying a word in class. I didn’t dare talk to anyone, I didn’t answer the teachers’ questions, and I refused to read out loud. Five months. Then I opened my mouth. It was as though I’d tried, in my silence, to become part of these people I didn’t know. French was my first language because at the Ecole Alliance in Beirut we were taught Arabic, like all other school children in Lebanon, but our language in school and at home was French. I knew a little Hebrew because we also studied it at school, though we never liked it. I also learned Hebrew at the Maabarot, but in the classroom, in the midst of all the children, I was struck dumb before I could speak like them.”