Wisal talked to us at length about the Intifada. When Sadiq asked her, she said, “What do you want me to say? You can follow the news better than I can. In Jenin we only get the Amman station on television, and the Israeli stations. Your television has God knows how many stations from the whole world, and you read what’s written in the newspapers and in books.” When we asked her, she didn’t talk. But she would open up when we were talking about this or that and the subject of the Intifada came up unexpectedly, and the talk turned to what happened. The strange thing was that Wisal always laughed when she told her stories, always choosing comical incidents. Was it because she gained strength from laughter? Or was it that despite the sacrifices, the Intifada was like the resistance when it entered the Lebanese camps after 1967, when it filled the residents with pride and confidence?
She said, “Kids, by God, just little kids. A boy the size of a hand span, with no idea where God had put him, with a cooking pot on his head and in his hand a weapon half again as big as he was. They tell him, ‘Go and kill,’ and he’s scared, scared of killing and scared of being killed. Armed and armored, screened by the door of his armored car. A house mouse, sticking his head a quarter of the way out and aiming his weapon, and the next second hiding behind his door. God bless our kids, they attacked them like lions.”
I remembered her words as I followed the events of the Intifada on television in Abu Dhabi. I would follow the little ones as they carried their slingshots and aimed their stones at the soldiers. I would follow the soldiers as they swooped down on the young men and put them in the police vans, or took one aside to smash his head or his arm. I would think a lot about Wisal and her children, and look closely at the pictures whenever a woman appeared in an embroidered peasant dress, raising her hand with determination to throw a stone at one of the army cars, or to quarrel with the soldiers in order to release one of the children they had arrested. She seems to be Wisal. She looks like her, but it’s not Wisal. I wonder what she’s doing now? I would not meet her again until five years later in Alexandria, although I saw her twice in my dreams. Once we were in Tantoura, walking on the seashore, just two girls walking barefoot on the wet, sandy shore, walking along the edge of the sea. Were they talking? I didn’t hear any talk in my dream. I saw them coming, and I saw their backs as they moved away. The other dream was a nightmare. I remembered it when I opened my eyes; maybe it woke me up, as a man will be wakened by a fit of choking or a bad pain in his belly. I calmed down a little and went back to sleep, and I couldn’t recapture the dream when I tried to later on.
41
Surprising Maryam
Naji al-Ali said in a newspaper interview that he created the character of Hanzala to protect his spirit after he moved from the Ain al-Helwa camp to Kuwait to work in the press there. I read the interview when it was published in the paper on the anniversary of his martyrdom, reading it with interest because I loved Naji al-Ali’s drawings and had followed them in the Safir newspaper when I was in Beirut, especially during the days of the Israeli invasion. I was also interested because Naji was from Ain al-Helwa and was a friend of Ezz, and my uncle Abu Amin knew him and talked about him with admiration. When he was martyred I became more interested in him; I thought his drawings must have had great importance since they feared them to the point of killing him. Is it true that Abu Ammar had a hand in it? Rumors about that circulated, but I say it was Israel.
In Beirut I began to follow Naji’s drawings out of curiosity, since he was near to me, a countryman, someone we knew. Then gradually I began to notice that he expressed things that I wanted to say, even if I was not aware that I wanted to say them until the moment I saw the drawing. It was as if he spoke first, defining what was said before I put it into words or even conceived it in my mind. Or as if he knew me better than I knew myself. I didn’t notice that Hanzala resembled me; it never even occurred to me. After all, Hazala was a boy of ten, his feet bare, his clothes patched and his hair disheveled. Naji said in his interview that his hair was like the quills of a porcupine, dressed and ready to defend him (before I read the interview, the little lines surrounding Hanzala’s head had seemed to me more like the rays of the sun). Naji said in his interview that he created Hanzala to protect his spirit, as if he were an amulet protecting him from error. I wondered at what he said, and then I thought about it and remembered that I had brought five clippings from Beirut, each one a drawing of his that I had cut out when it appeared, and kept. When we were getting ready to move to Abu Dhabi I was afraid I would lose them, so I put them with my identity card in my wallet. I put four of them in the wallet, and then stopped a long time at the fifth, the only one below which I had written something: al-Safir, 9/16/1982. I remember the moment I saw the drawing, standing by the door of the house: Hanzala was looking at a mass cemetery, crosses stretching as far as the eye could see, as far as the horizon, where the earth met a black sky. Each of the crosses was like a crucified man, the horizontal wooden bar as if it were two arms stretched out and ending on the left in a hand, pointing, all of them pointing to a small Israeli soldier at the far left of the picture. Strange; Naji saw the massacre a day before it happened, and spoke out.
For the next three days the newspaper did not carry Naji’s daily drawing. Because what happened surpassed all words? Or because he mourned for three days? Only on Wednesday, September 22, did the newspaper publish a drawing of Naji’s in its usual place, on the last page: the Lebanese flag, with the cedar in the foreground, cut lengthwise by a band on which he had written ‘The End’ in English, and beneath it in Arabic. Under the flag there was a pile of bloody bodies, with Hanzala looking at them.
Strange; I remember the dates as if years had not passed since then, or as if I had learned them by heart.
I read the interview with Naji in the morning, and at night I took the newspaper to bed and read it again. I thought, when Naji moved to the Gulf he was afraid, like me. He was a young man, and he was afraid for himself. I’m no longer young — I’ve become a grandmother, and my children are the age he was when he left Ain al-Helwa to work in Kuwait. I slept, and then got up; and before I lifted my head from the pillow, I found myself thinking, I’m not afraid for myself but for Maryam. What amulet does she have?
As she was getting ready to go to school, I talked to her about Naji and Hanzala. She said, “I used to follow his drawings, I really loved them.” I found it strange.
In the evening when I was alone with her in our room, I returned to the subject of Naji’s drawings. I said, “What do you like about the drawings?”
She said, “The clarity.”
I didn’t understand, so I asked her to explain what she meant. She said, “Hanzala is clear, from his name that means a bitter fruit, to his shape, and to his stance. He’s a little boy who looks on. His enemies are also clear: men who are short and fat and look ugly, who want the world completely at their disposal. They’re also clear in the destruction they cause.”