I did not take the baccalaureate exam as Amin and the boys wanted, nor did I enroll in the university. I learned in the camp.
There I acquired a new extended family — children, girls, women of my own age, elderly women, each of them with the key of her house hung on a cord around her neck, like my mother. In Shatila I learned that the world of women is more compassionate than the world of men. The men were formed into factions, each with its office and territory and armed young men. They differed and quarreled like cocks. Oh my God, cocks with weapons! And cocks at home, too; they came back to their women and issued orders and prohibitions. The woman is plunged into her daily chores: She picks through the lentils and the rice. She makes mujaddara lentils for seven or ten or fifteen people. She rolls grape leaves and stuffs squash. She bakes the bread on the baking sheet. She makes labneh from milk. She puts up olives. She puts her shawl back on and goes to congratulate or share condolences. She puts the shawl back on and takes one of the grandchildren to the medical center or the hospital, because his mother is in bed, only three days have passed since she gave birth. She hurries back to serve the lunch she’s cooked. She washes piles of clothes, clothes without end. She complains about her stubborn youngest daughter, who insists on continuing her studies and on working with the fedayeen.
“What’s wrong with her being with the fedayeen, Auntie?”
“Am I against the fedayeen? I support them with all my heart, as God is my witness. The day the Second Bureau left and the fedayeen entered the camp, I danced and clapped with the others and sang and trilled. The whole camp was celebrating, the sound of the bullets in the air made it seem like a hundred weddings, not just one. God comfort them and protect them and bless them, the fedayeen, God guide them and calm their spirits, so they don’t draw their weapons on each other every time a jug knocks against a jar! I’d do anything for the fedayeen. But that girl leaves in the morning and doesn’t come back until evening, saying she’s getting weapons training. For God’s sake, use your head, girl!”
She leaned toward me and began to talk in whispers.
“Just between you and me, Sitt Ruqayya, don’t tell anyone else. Our neighbor saw her twice standing with the same boy. I asked her, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said, ‘He’s my comrade in the organization.’ I said, ‘Comrade or not, don’t keep standing with him, it’s not right. If he’s hanging around you, let him propose, and we’ll ask about him. What’s his family?’ She laughed and said that she wasn’t thinking about getting married, and he wasn’t thinking about it either. I said, ‘Then don’t spend a lot of time with him, so people start talking about how you’re behaving.’”
She looked at me and raised her voice a little, “Anything but honor, Sitt Ruqayya!”
Then she went back to whispering: “She stands with the boy and people put two and two together, someone says something and the next day there’s talk. The girl’s nineteen and says she’s not thinking about getting married! At her age I already had a boy and a girl and I was pregnant with the third.”
“Times change, Auntie.”
It was a different time. Was that good? At the time it seemed so, to me. I would look and see a certain confidence or hope or perhaps strength in the faces, in the posture of the young men and the girls, in their walk and way of sitting, in the way their hands moved in spontaneous gestures, in the tilt of the head when they nodded. It was in their laughter, in the tone of their voices when they discussed events, in their looks. I would speak with them, but I would make an effort to meet the elderly women of the camp. I love to listen to their stories, even if they’re sad at first, because the stories always began with “there,” with what happened when “they took over the village and threw us out and we fled to Lebanon.” The story moves on, but sometimes not completely, because as it advances in time it goes back, and remembers. The stories resemble each other but also differ, like the faces that tell them.
The face of Umm Nabil lights up as she talks about the pomegranate tree “that you’ll find on your right when you’re heading for the door of the house.” She describes its height, the shape of its branches and the green of its leaves at first, and then later, when it’s covered by them and when it flowers. When Umm Nabil comes to the fruit she doesn’t talk about it, she simply stretches out her hand and picks it and opens it, spreading the seeds before your eyes so that you see their crimson red, which somehow moves from her hands to your tongue, so you taste its tangy sweetness.
It’s strange, every woman is a tree. I mean, every woman has a tree, there. The lemon tree of Umm Samir; the orange tree of Umm Ilyas; the carob of Umm Haniya; the almond of Umm Abed; the palm of Umm al-Nahid; the blackberry of Umm Muhammad; the fig of Umm Sabah, “the figs were the green kind, their sweetness would entice the birds, and they would perch on it and peck the fruit before dawn.” Her face lights up and then darkens, because the story is coming to the part that’s hard to tell, or the harder part that can’t be told. Then her face lights up again, because, “Our Lord consoled me and the kids’ father found work,” or “We bought a cow and began to sell the milk and nourish the little ones,” or “The girl graduated and began working,” or “The boy went to the Gulf and began to send home part of his salary on the first of the month,” or because “At the worst of the trials and the tribulations, with barely a bite to eat, we turned the corner, yes, by God, we turned the corner.”
Umm Ilyas tells us: “The bastards, four months before they threw us out they occupied the village farmland, which was to the west of us. They set up ditches and military centers, and the village was separated from its lands. We were on one side and our fields were on the other. Then the harvest season came; we said, “The crops will spoil, what should we do?’”
“First the young men scouted them, so we knew the position of their lines, where they were and when their patrols passed. At night they passed the farms but on the paved road, going in cars. We knew that, and put our trust in God. Every night we would wait for sunset and then sneak across the valley, going in a roundabout way that took us to our fields. We would go in groups of ten, men and women and boys and girls. We would go through the valley like ghosts, without any light or noise or even a breath, until we got to our land and gathered what we could of the tobacco crop; and at daybreak or a little later we would cross the valley coming back. Sometimes the young men keeping watch on the hill for our security would sense danger, and distract their soldiers by firing on them; they would answer the fire and not notice us as we passed beneath them in the valley, hearing the bullets whistling over our heads.”
Umm al-Nahid told a similar story, though the planting was wheat rather than tobacco: “When they took over the village we fled to the neighboring villages, in the hope that the Arab Liberation Army, which was camped a few kilometers away, would help us. When May was over and June came, we said that the crops would die on their stalks; we didn’t have much left and our children were hungry. We said, ‘We’ll face them, come what may.’ The news spread to the neighboring villages and the young men came to help us. They set out; some carried a rifle and those who didn’t have them armed themselves with sticks or knives. ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar,’ and they attacked. The Jews were frightened and fled.” Umm al-Nahid laughed. “The wheat was harvested and in sacks. They saw the young men attacking and heard the voices, so they left the bags and fled. They left three machine guns on the land, set up on stands and aimed at us. And seven reapers, big machines they used to reap our wheat. When our men entered the village, before they inspected the houses they wanted to make sure that none of them were still there, so they headed for the houses of Abed Darwish and Ahmad Ismail Saad, which they had turned into their headquarters. They didn’t find any of them; they found the tea still hot and poured into cups, and they found quantities of coffee and sugar and canned goods, and cardboard boxes, the whole courtyard was boxes. They opened them, and what did they find? The bastards had collected what they could carry from the town and packed it into boxes — our clothes and our men’s clothes and our kids’ clothes, and excuse me, Sitt Ruqayya, even the underwear! And the blankets and towels and sheets and pillows. The men began slapping one hand with the other and saying, ‘Good God, it’s not enough to steal the land and the crops, they even want the clothes we’re wearing and the blankets we wrap up in!’ Believe me, Sitt Ruqayya, they didn’t even leave a sieve — there was one box with the sieves they had gathered from the houses. Were they going to sell them? To give them to the people of the ‘company’? To give them to the Jewish Agency? God only knows. Anyway, the men decided to leave the boxes as they were temporarily. Every one took a bag of wheat to the village where his family was. They gave us the wheat to grind so we could feed the little ones, and went back to the village because they decided to secure it before they came back to us. Two days, and on the third about a hundred soldiers from the Arab Liberation Army arrived. They said that they would take over protecting the village and asked us to evacuate it, because they expected heavy shelling. The men left the village and came back to us. Two days later the battle began, the Jews shelling from their positions on the west and the Liberation Army answering them from the village and the surrounding area. Then the Liberation Army withdrew and the village fell. The Jews attacked the neighboring villages and we fled to Lebanon. Afterward Abul Nahid and three others went back to find out what happened to our houses. Abul Nahid had hidden twenty liras under the palm tree. They arrested them and put them in prison; when they let them go they loaded them into a truck with twenty other prisoners from other villages. They blindfolded them and set them down at the border crossing to Lebanon. They said, ‘Run there, anyone who looks back will be killed.’ They took off running with the Jews firing on them. God have mercy on them all. Abul Nahid and two others who went with him were martyred. The third is the one who told me.”