On their next visit after the episode of the slap, at my father’s request, my brothers brought with them two big cardboard boxes. He opened the first and took out a large wooden apparatus and placed it in the front part of the house, near the entrance. Then he opened the second and took out a black box, which he said was the battery; the radio doesn’t work without it. He connected it to the apparatus and then turned a button on it and a sound came out of it. He sighed in satisfaction and said, “Now I can listen to the news every morning in peace.”
The apparatus seemed exciting because of its large size and because of the noises that emerged from it: a strange crackling and then the clear voice of someone speaking, as if he were with us in the house. At first my mother was confused, and then she adjusted her scarf on her head, as if it were likely that the voice of the strange man which had suddenly entered the house meant that he was present in it, and could see her. After that came a woman’s voice, singing. My father cut her off with a movement of his fingers, turning a button on the apparatus, and she was followed by another man, speaking.
I said to my father, “Can we hear songs on the radio?”
“Yes, but we didn’t buy it to listen to songs, we bought it to know what’s happening in the country!”
It didn’t occur to me for a moment that what my father said was a choice of what he would hear. I didn’t connect it with his will or preference but rather with the function of the apparatus. Songs, like dabka circles and the call and response of ataba and ooof songs, were for weddings and special occasions; the radio was like the madafa in those days, reserved for learning of events and news as they happened. With the large wooden apparatus and the men’s voices (it was not a single voice that was emitted from it, but multiple voices that could be distinguished easily), new expressions entered the house. Some were clear and familiar: the Arab kings and presidents, the Zionist gangs, Jaffa/Tel Aviv; some were obscure, as when the speaker referred to the Supreme Arab Authority or the Liberation Army or said “Hagana” or “Irgun,” expressions which would require an explanation from my father. My mother and I would attend to his words, and then when the explanation went on my mother would get up and turn to her work, since she was not following the thread or had become lost in the details, or because she was bored by the talk. New names were to enter the house which would be repeated afterward by the townspeople, who fastened on some and feared them or who were anxious about others, but who in either case were preoccupied by what these names said and did. It was certain that there was a relationship between them and what was happening to us, even though it was obscure for me at the time.
The big wooden apparatus occupied a prominent position in the house, attracting the attention of visitors. The voices that emanated from it as long as my father was in the house were just as prominent, but my mother didn’t pay much attention to them. Perhaps those voices weighed on her, with their words that she always said she didn’t understand. Did she really not understand them, or was she averting additional fears that she had no power to bear? She would sit with her sister, exchanging complaints and cares. She would say to my aunt, “I said to him, ‘Why should the boys stay in Haifa?’ He disapproved and said, ‘Do you want them to sit at home with you?’ I said, ‘They can work the land, or supervise the fishing boats, we have not one but five boats, they can keep track of them with the captains of the boats.’ He scolded me, ‘Did I send them to school to till the earth or sell fish?’ And what’s wrong with tilling the earth? What’s wrong with selling fish?” My aunt would soothe her, and the soothing would give her an opening to set out her own complaints: “Thank God for Abu Sadiq, God protect him and bless him, he fills up the house for us. Abu Amin is like a bird, you don’t know when he’ll alight and when he’ll up and fly away. In ‘36 we said it’s a revolt and it has its demands, and we’re afraid of the English. But afterward? He said jihad, is it endless jihad? By God I’m tired, Zeinab, Sister, I’m tired. A day at home and a thousand away. And he says that Amin has to study. Does he have to study at the ends of the earth, and the little boy and I have to stay alone? He’s a strange one, Abu Amin! The village is here, our Lord is kind and blesses us, why should he drag himself all over the place?” They exchange roles, Zeinab complains and Halima calms her, then Halima complains and leaves it to her sister to provide relief. The talk continues: “Zeinab, Sister …, Halima, Sister….”
Did my mother and my aunt ever imagine, as they spent their evenings together every day, that what had happened to the people of Qisarya could happen to them? Judging by myself and by what they said every day, I think that Qisarya probably seemed far away, another town that we had never seen where a disaster had befallen the inhabitants, so we had to sympathize with them and help them. The reality was that the distance between us and that other town was no more than half the distance between us and Haifa. Twelve kilometers, ten minutes by car. The men and maybe some of the women must have been aware of this fact. I can’t remember, for example, when I learned that the men were organizing themselves to confront the danger, or that they were buying weapons or that they had formed a committee to organize guards for the village. But I remember that we girls began to watch the men as they were training with target practice on the roofs. They would put an orange on a box or a pile and aim at it. I heard my father say something, I don’t know in what context or why, I don’t remember. He said, “Weapons come to them from everywhere, and we go barefoot to get rifles, sometimes from Sidon and sometimes from Damascus and sometimes from al-Mansura. Old rifles, rifles that don’t even work unless luck is with us!”
But ‘fickle February,’ for all it brought with it, was gentle and kind compared to the months that followed. When the almond trees flowered the whole village knew that war was breaking out here and there, and that weapons were now as needed as a drink of water, necessary to stay alive. Talk about buying arms had begun to be common even among the women of the village. The names of Zionist gangs and their leaders, names that were strange and hard to pronounce, started to circulate among them: they knew who Hagana was, and Stern, and Etzel, and Ben-Gurion. Then the news about Muhammad al-Huneiti, commander of the Haifa militia, reached the town: he and his companions had fallen into an ambush as they were returning from Lebanon with two truckloads of weapons, and two weeks later Haifa fell. None of us, girls or boys, noticed that the almonds had turned green on the trees.
It was at night when we heard a knock on the door. My mother sprang up in alarm, for who would come at such a late hour except to deliver bad news? She rushed to the door and I followed her, and there were my two brothers, covered in dust, their hair matted. They had come from Haifa on foot, through the woods and by winding mountain paths. My father did not say, “Let’s be off to the madafa to give the men the news of Haifa.” The news had reached them two days before, two days in which the house had nearly caught fire from the burning feelings of everyone in it. My mother ceaselessly lamented her boys, who had not appeared since the fall of the city, saying that her heart told her that she would not see them again. Her fears would spread to me and I would leave my own fears aside and chide her, repeating to her that it was a bad omen and she was tempting providence; but unlike the previous time she did not listen to my words and was incapable of making any agreements with the Lord of the universe who ordered all things. She continued to weep, in anticipation. My father seemed like a minefield, with one mine after another exploding in my mother’s face or in mine, because scheduling the guard shifts and the training for the young men who had not yet received it was not enough of an outlet for his anxiety over the fate of his boys and the fate of the country.