Abed rejoiced in the girl, playing with her when he passed through the house to reassure us or to eat or sleep. Amin would delight in her face in the morning, and contemplate her sleeping when he returned from the hospital late at night. Only my aunt did not understand why this infant had appeared without preamble and took all this attention. One day she said, “Ruqayya, I haven’t wanted to cause you any distress, but I must make you understand: I think that Amin has taken another wife and that this girl is his daughter with the other woman.”
“But Aunt, why would he bring me the other woman’s child, why wouldn’t he leave her with her mother?”
“God only knows!” Maybe he didn’t get married and she’s his bastard.”
I laughed. I was used to my aunt’s quirks and her constant doubts of others.
“She’s an orphan, Aunt, and the ambulance brought her to him from beneath the ruins. They didn’t know of any family of hers, not even any distant relatives.”
“You’re free to do as you like, I’ve alerted you and done what I should. There are a lot of orphans in a country at war, and they have a refuge to shelter them. Why did he bring this girl and not the rest of the orphans?”
“Oh, Aunt, everything is written and ordained.”
22
1982
War teaches you many things. The first is to strain your ears and be alert, so you can judge where the firing is coming from, as if your body had become one large ear with a compass to show the specific source of the threat among the four directions, or rather the five, since death can also rain down from the sky. The second is to resign yourself a little and to have only a certain amount of fear, the necessary amount only. If your fear exceeds the amount by a tiny bit, you will leave your house needlessly, when the shelling is on the other side of the city. Your fear will turn into a malignant disease that will eat away your body every day until it destroys you; the rocket will spare you and your fear will kill you. And if your fear is a tiny bit less, you won’t hurry down the stairs to the shelter or to sit on the stairs far from the windows and the balconies, and the rocket will kill you just like that in the blink of an eye, because the shelling is aimed at the street where you live and perhaps at the building in which you live. The third thing that war teaches you is to be careful when you must leave the house to take the most important things first. For example, a bottle of water or the old lady, who might get lost as you are checking on your little girl or the limbs of your body. It’s certain that there are fourth and fifth and sixth things that war teaches you, but it always teaches you to endure, whether at the beginning or the end. To wait and endure, because the alternative is to become unbalanced, in short to go mad.
The war handed us over to war, and war to war … What? Here the sentences stumble and the words are confused, because I don’t know how it’s possible to summarize what we lived through in those years. I don’t know how to communicate the meaning, and I wonder about how useful it is to go into the details — the details that are not details. Every discrete detail is a story affecting hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. Take for example Black Saturday at the end of 1975. The Phalange kidnapped three hundred Muslims and killed seventy others, and the National Movement answered by taking over the hotel area; afterward chaos and organized plunder broke out in the heart of Beirut. A big story or a detail among hundreds? Before that, sixty-three Syrian workers were killed and thousands of them were forced to flee. Oh my God, it’s only one thread in the fabric, or one spark in the flames of the fire. After that was the siege of Tall al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha and Dbayeh and the shantytowns in al-Maslakh and al-Karantina and al-Nabaa — details? And then Israeli invasion in 1978 and the hundreds of thousands from the south who thronged to West Beirut. Then the larger invasion in 1982.
We were in the siege, at the height of the summer, and of the siege. There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and I nearly screamed, not because I recognized Hasan but because the boy standing in front of me at the door was a shadow of Hasan. I thought, my mind has wandered and imagination has taken over. I thought, shadows are taller. I thought, but this is his shadow, the exact image of him, but smaller, as if it were Hasan in the first year of high school, and sick. He said, “Mama.” I put my arms around him and held on. He began to slip away; I didn’t realize he was suppressing tears. I let him slip away and began to stare at him, touching his face and his neck and his shoulders.
“You’ve been sick?”
He laughed. “Illness is easier.”
“Tell me what happened to you.”
“Who’s going to go first?”
“Your father and Abed are fine. Your uncle Ezz … we don’t know ….”
“I found out from my father.”
“When did you see him? Did you go to the hospital first?”
Did he sense a note of blame in the words? He smiled; it wasn’t his shadow, it was Hasan, with his lively smile and his sweet eyes.
“I was afraid to come straight home.” He faltered. “I said I would go first to the hospital. In the hospital I would find my father and ask him about you, and if I didn’t find him I would find someone to give me the news. Where’s Grandma?”
He went in to greet his grandma.
“How did you get here, Grandson?”
“From Cairo. I took a plane to Damascus and from there by land to Beirut.”
“Thank God you got here safely, Grandson. Were there fedayeen or Israelis on the way?”
“There were fedayeen in some places and Israelis in others.”
“And Ain al-Helwa?”
“What about it?”
“Didn’t you go by it to set your mind at rest about your uncle Ezz and his wife?”
“No, Grandma, the road from Damascus is in one direction and Sidon is in the other.”
“Thank God you got here safely, Grandson, we’ve missed you.”
Hasan would remain with us throughout the period of the siege. He worked in civil defense, distributing water and bread and newspapers to the civilians. He was often at the Safir newspaper, helping with some of the volunteer work there.
On the day of the departure Beirut came out by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, scattering rice and rose petals over the young men piled into the trucks that would take them by land to Syria or to the wharf where the ships were preparing for their departure from Lebanon. Maryam was walking ahead of Amin and me, holding Abed’s hand on one side and Hasan’s on the other. She was wearing a summer dress, open at the neck and baring her arms. Her hair was as I had combed it for her, gathered into a ponytail. She would speak to her brothers and then turn around to me and her father and laugh.
Abed embraced her, then he climbed into the truck.
We waved to him, and here was Maryam asking a woman carrying a bucket of rice for a handful of it. Hasan lifted her off the ground and she moved her arm with all her determination, and opened her fist suddenly, so the rice she had intended for her brother scattered over her head. She laughed, and called at the top of her voice, “Come back soon, Abed!” Her voice was lost in the crowd and in the roar of the trucks as they pulled away, amid thousands of hands waving and extending a bridge of voices, shouting and singing and scattering rice and rose petals and crying. The August sun beat down, unchecked. “God be with you, God be with you.” “Take care of yourselves.” “Goodbye.” “We’ll meet again soon, God willing.”