I remember the day clearly. It was a day in July. Beirut was like fire, and the humidity was suffocating. The boys went to Shatila to participate in a summer program. I said goodbye to them in the morning, repeating to them, “It’s very hot today. Walk in the shade, and drink water whenever you can. Otherwise you’ll get sunstroke.”
After an hour or less young Abed rang the doorbell like a crazy person. He rang it continuously, as if he couldn’t wait. When I opened it he burst inside the house, saying, “They’ve assassinated Kanafani. He left his house and got into his car, he turned the key and the car blew up with him and his niece inside.”
He circled through the house like a hyena, twice, then I heard the door slam, shaking the house, and I ran after him, calling. He must have heard me since I could hear his steps rapidly going down the stairs, but he didn’t answer. I shut the door and sat motionless on a chair.
Eleven days later I heard the news of the attempted assassination of Anis Sayegh. I had seen him only in my imagination, for the older Abed would describe him to me when he talked about his work at the Center. I knew he was a great scholar, stern in his work, precise, demanding excellence from all the researchers who worked with him. He was a man of small build, short and rounded, bald, with penetrating eyes in which kindness mixed with intelligence. That’s how Abed described him to me.
When I heard the news of the explosion in the Research Center I found myself running in the street. I stopped a taxi and said, “Sadat Street.” The movement of the car seemed slow to me, because of the traffic, and I asked the driver to stop. I got out and started running. I was afflicted with temporary insanity, because as I was running I was talking to my brothers, saying “Leave him. Why do you want him with you? Go away, now, I beg you.” At first I said it calmly, then like someone bereaved, and then I was shouting at them in a loud voice. When I got to the Center I was told that the young men had taken Dr. Anis to the emergency room in the American University Hospital. I asked, “And the others?” They assured me that no one else had been hit. I repeated the question, and they confirmed the answer. I ran down to the street. Another taxi. In the hospital I found Abed, his face blue and the look in his eyes distraught. He said, “He’s still alive. The doctors are operating on him. He was hit in the face, in his eyes and ears and left hand. Go home, I’ll call later to reassure you.” I remained sitting.
In the evening one of the three doctors announced that he had been forced to amputate three of the fingers on the left hand. The two others said that they had done everything they could for the eyes and the ears. “We might be able to preserve some of his sight and hearing.” They asked the young men to leave. His father the priest remained, an old man who never stopped praying in whispers, along with two of his siblings, his sister and brother.
“Let’s go, Ruqayya,” said Abed. We left the hospital. He took me to the door of the house and went on.
I didn’t run into the streets the day of the Israeli operation in Verdun Street, nor did my brothers appear for me to argue with, chasing them away like flies, because when the news was announced the next day, the town was boiling over. It was as if hundreds of thousands of people had been transformed overnight into a single body, the body of a fantastic animal, great and awe-inspiring, proceeding deliberately with steps that shook the earth. I saw that with my own eyes in the funeral of Ghassan Kanafani in July. Then later, nine months afterward, in the funeral of Kamal Nasser and Abu Yusuf al-Najjar and Kamal Udwan, the Fatah leaders killed in their homes by Israeli commandos, I saw it again and understood what I had not completely understood the first time.
I look from afar. A woman went out with her husband, her three children, her uncle, her cousin and his wife, the brother who wasn’t born of her mother, the spirits of her mother and father and her brothers who stayed there in the unmarked mass grave, all the friends and neighbors she knows here and countless people she doesn’t know, the march stretching out over several miles. They bid farewell to a young man who fell to an assassin before his time. They walk to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. They notice, or not, his wife and two children: a boy and a girl, the oldest a boy of ten lifted on someone’s shoulders. He shouts and his voice is drowned in the voices of hundreds of thousands. The woman looks behind her, seeing the wave surge and heave. She looks ahead, and she sees it. She looks to her right and left, staring into the faces of her children. She sees them clearly, perfectly, as if memory had not enfolded them and the moment had not passed long before. She looks closely: Sadiq narrows his eyes as if he wanted to protect them from the sun; his voice roars in a shout that he emphasizes with a movement of his arm and fist. Hasan is silent like her, his features working as if his face had become a mirror, reflecting the wave on its surface. As for Abed, she barely recognizes his face — why has it lengthened like that, the eyes rounding and the mouth open in the picture of a scream, without any sound? She wonders if it’s possible to read the future in the faces of boys walking in a funeral.
I look from afar. A woman goes out with her husband, her three children, her uncle, her cousin and his wife, the brother who wasn’t born of her mother, the spirits of her mother and father and her brothers who stayed there in the unmarked mass grave, all the friends and neighbors she knows here and countless people she doesn’t know, the march stretching out over several miles. They bid farewell to four martyrs, three men and a woman who were killed in their bedrooms in Verdun Street. They walk to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The woman looks behind her, seeing the wave surge and heave. She looks ahead, and she sees it. She looks to her right and left. The funeral is not a funeral and the mourning is not mourning.
I look from afar, contemplating the woman. She’s thirty-seven. She was slow to learn the lesson, slow. It’s astonishing, and strange; it brings a smile to her lips, a little sad but holding a great deal of gratitude. The site of the lesson, the funeral; the topic of the lesson, life. She accepts the funeral, and she gives herself to life.
17
The Trees of Shatila
The bee is a good image. Yes, I became a bee. I would do the cooking and prepare breakfast. Amin and the boys would wake up, and I would feed them. They would go about their business. I would wash the dishes, straighten the house, and leave for Shatila, not returning until late afternoon. Every day had its schedule. There were literacy lessons for the adults, tutoring sessions for the elementary children. Statements to copy on the typewriter, when the young men brought them to me. And visits, no weekly schedule and sometimes no daily one was without them. Women whose homes I entered for the first time or whom I had met previously, whom it was necessary to visit for condolences or congratulations or perhaps to solve a family problem about which they had approached me. I came to know the lanes and neighborhoods of the camp by the houses piled one on top of the other; mostly they belonged to families from villages in Upper Galilee, who had come as a group to south Lebanon and then later had moved to Shatila. They came from Majd al-Kurum and Safsaf and al-Birwa and Deir al-Qasi and Saasaa and al-Khalisa and elsewhere. I didn’t meet anyone from Tantoura in Shatila. I asked once or twice and then no more, held back by shyness. The women of the camp became pregnant seven times, or ten, or sometimes more; whoever perished, perished, and one or two boys would remain, and if they were lucky, three. Why had my mother had only two boys? They perished, and she had no one left. This kind of question hadn’t crossed my mind before I started going to Shatila. In Sidon I had been busy with childbearing and tending the little ones. I hadn’t gone to Ain al-Helwa, except for limited visits to Karima’s family, when congratulations or condolences were called for. By the time Ezz moved to live in Ain al-Helwa we were already living in Beirut.