She looks from afar. She sees him under the June sun along the sea of Sidon after the Israelis have taken it over. What he did not live through with her on the sea of Tantoura forty years before he now lives through on the sea of Sidon. It’s as if history is repeating itself, although the scene is larger. The people are more, many more. The soldiers are more. The weapons and the armored cars. The burlap bag is reincarnated, one here and another there and a third and a fourth, each looking through the two holes in the bag that covers his head and pointing. Whenever he points the same shudder passes through the ranks, since everyone knows and has known for a long time that the ones pointed out by the burlap bags will now go in a long line to execution or to the prison camp. Not in Zirchon Yaacov or in Ijlil or Sarafand but to someplace here in the heart of Sidon, or in the heights overlooking it.
Ezz will sneak into Beirut. For a moment she won’t recognize him, because of the sudden whiteness of his hair or for some other reason. He will sit beside her so he can hear more about his brother, so she can hear from him what happened in Sidon. He will carry the girl, asleep on Ruqayya’s knees, to her bed, and they will stay up talking until dawn breaks. A widow and an old man, whose hair has turned completely white in four months and four days. A boy and a girl … she looks from afar.
9
The Children’s Indictment
The children say that I was a stern mother, they say their father was more affectionate with them. I repeat disapprovingly, “More affectionate?” They recall the events, and confirm what they say, “You got involved in every detail. You would insist that we be angels!”
They laugh in chorus, and then Sadiq takes the floor, “Yes, the rank of angel was the minimum acceptable! One of us would bring you his report card and with good grades, or even with excellent grades, and your comment would be ‘But you’re not the best in the class, why aren’t you number one? What do you lack for you to be at the top?’”
Hasan adds, “The day we stole the oranges from the big garden, when we were still in Sidon, God! It was a world-class catastrophe!”
Abed laughed, “Do you want the unvarnished truth? When we were little we hated the camp and we hated Palestine, and we hated that you were our mother. It was all a ruler you used to measure our conduct from morning till night, and if it didn’t measure up then the ruler was ready to strike!”
I cut off their talk and say, “You’re slandering me. I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee and drink it alone to punish you since you’re like cats who eat and are ungrateful.” They follow me into the kitchen, encircling me. One of them gets the tray ready and another holds the pot and measures the water into it with a cup. Abed, the laziest in household matters and the most impertinent, imitates my way of speaking, “‘The boys from the camp apply themselves in school in the morning and work in the evening to earn their daily bread, and they excel in school even though they lack everything! What do you lack?’ It’s possible, guys, that when we were little she saw signs of mental retardation, or saw some indication that we were from Mars! Or maybe Papa examined us and got scared, and whispered in her ear ‘It’s strange, Ruqayya, the three boys have a birth defect I haven’t come across before. In place of the heart they have a small, smooth stone the size of a large egg, hard and smooth. No blood or flesh or nerves. It’s a terrifying miracle, God keep us all!’”
He guffawed, and shouted, “Mama, we haven’t come from Mars. And we didn’t come to Lebanon as tourists.”
He went on, “The camp, whether you live inside or outside, it’s your story and there’s no getting away from it. Your classmate suddenly turns against you and you don’t know what’s angered him, only to discover a day or two later that he’s found out you’re Palestinian and that your existence, the very fact that you exist and that you are you and no other, is a provocation that arouses anger or indignation or, at the very least, disgust. It’s as if you were an insect that unfortunately fell in a bowl of soup. And you’ve known, for a long time before that, the meaning of the ‘Phalange’ and the meaning of ‘the Forces’ and what’s waiting for you at their hands, and that you are a son of the camp even if you are lucky and don’t live in it!”
Sadiq intervenes, “Mama provided for us faithfully. Her sternness was necessary to bring us up properly, and the results are obvious.”
Then another mocking phrase: “Umm Sadiq is strong enough to put a dent in iron!”
I’m astonished by my image in their eyes when they were children, for I was just trying to do my job as a wife and mother, whose tasks were not limited to a clean house and wholesome food for three boys with good appetites — good eaters, as they say, thank God. Their bodies were growing miraculously, their legs carrying them higher almost daily — the pants that needed shortening when they were bought now need the hem undone so they can be lengthened, then they’re passed to the younger one and then they’re unfit for any of them, and are passed on to someone else. Life moves as quickly as an express train, from infants demanding breast feeding and diaper changing and having their wet bottoms wiped, to children forming meaningful sentences, saying yes and saying no more than yes, because they are discovering their will, discovering themselves. Then here they are, in the blink of an eye, boys devoted to the mirror, hurrying the fuzz on their faces and wanting mustaches, preoccupied with their appearance because a girl is nearby. I concentrate on them, I concentrate on every great or small thing and everything in between, because I want … what did I want?
I was with the boys on the train and yet I wasn’t, because ever since that day when they loaded us into the truck and I saw my father and brothers on the pile, I have remained there, unmoving, even if it didn’t seem like it. Maybe my concern for them was exaggerated because I knew, in some obscure fashion that wasn’t fully conscious, that I was outside the train. Or maybe this explanation is deceptive, and the reason is different. They say, “You were stern with us,” they say, “My father was more affectionate with us,” and I find it strange. I wonder, what does a woman do who feels that she has remained alive by chance, by the purest chance? How does she act in the world if her existence, all the years and months and days and moments, bitter and sweet, that she has lived, is a byproduct of some random movement of a strange fate? How does she act in the world? She’s aware, at least tacitly, that she’s naked, stripped of all logic, because of the impossibility of finding any relationship between cause and effect — or more precisely, the impossibility of understanding the causes when effects fall on her head, effects for which she can’t identify the causes. She doesn’t do anything and she’s not yet aware of anything, not just because she’s young but because the collapse of the roof on her head was the starting point, why did the roof collapse at the beginning and not the end? What should she do? How can she deal with the world? I say, there are only two choices: either she is swept away by an overwhelming sense of the absurd, that nothing makes any difference; she lives the moment just as it is, come what may, since meaning is absent, logic is non-existent, and necessity is a figment contrived by the imagination. Or else, since the earthquake has spared her, she becomes — and this is the other choice — like the last man on this earth, as if they had all left and left her their story, so she can populate the earth in their name and in the name of their story. Or perhaps it’s as if she’s striving in the world with them before her eyes, so they will be pleased with her and pleased with the small garden they may have dreamed of planting. She comes down with a strange kind of fever, planting fever, a strange planting outside of the earth, since the earth was stolen from her and it’s impossible for her to plant anywhere but within the confines of the household.