It’s strange; it’s as if the dream were a vision, Amin. One of the neighbors spoke to me, saying that she wanted to ask for Maryam for her son. She was speaking of the son who was studying in Cairo; she showed me his picture. I said, “Maryam is young, and she will go to the university after she finishes high school.” The neighbor, who is a very nice woman, said, “Let’s not talk about marriage now. When he comes during the vacation you will meet him, and he will meet Maryam and she him. If she likes him we would be honored by the relationship, Sitt Ruqayya.” I told Sadiq and he laughed as if I had told a joke. When I steered the conversation back to seriousness, he refused decisively. He said, “No one now commits himself at fifteen nor even at seventeen. Maryam is young, why would you tie her down with marriage and children and responsibilities! She has responsibilities of another kind, her studies and her professional future.” I spoke to Maryam and she reacted just like Sadiq, and since she has a sharper tongue, she began to comment on the young man who was asking for her hand without having seen her, relying on his mother’s eyes. “Am I going to marry his mother?” Then she and Sadiq began to make jokes about it, twisting and turning it until it became a laughingstock.
Maryam has decided to study medicine, Amin. She doesn’t miss an opportunity to announce her decision. Sadiq seems worried; he’s not certain she wants it, he thinks she wants to be like you. He told me that privately, and he also told Abed on his second visit to us, in Abu Dhabi. Abed has not changed; just like the first time, he came for a week with the same small leather bag hung from his shoulder, in pants and a shirt and rubber-soled shoes. He announced on his arrival that he had only used the suit once, and that the suit, the shirt and the tie were all new, just as they had been. “This is a forewarning, Mr. Sadiq, so you don’t do anything stupid again!” Just as he had before, he only remembered the gifts on the day he left. We laughed, and Sadiq said, “I think Abed is deceiving us, claiming that he forgot in order to make us laugh when we are seeing him off.” Abed laughed and jokingly quoted an old film, “You wrong me, Sir!” So we laughed more. During his visit he sat down with Maryam to discuss her studies with her. He said, “Maryam, when you choose a field, don’t pay a lot of attention to which academic subjects you like and which you don’t; take a longer view. Think about what you want to do with your life. Are you with me? For example, if you decided to dig a ditch, it would be important for you to know how, I mean for you to acquire the skills needed to know the nature of the soil and the styles of digging and of shoring up the sides, etc. Isn’t that so?”
She said, “Yes, it is.”
He laughed, and said, “No it’s not. The most important thing is to know where to put the ditch, from where to where and why, I mean why you are digging this ditch here precisely and not in another place, what its function is, and what your goal for it is.”
I intervened: “I don’t understand anything you’re saying, Abed, and Maryam doesn’t understand either.”
Maryam looked at me and said, “Mama, wait a little. Go on, Abed.”
Abed said, “In short, think about what you want to do with your life. It takes thought for all of us to choose who we want to be, what we will be, where we will stand, and why.”
She interrupted him, “I want to be a doctor.”
“You want to be like Father?”
“Maybe!”
“I was studying architecture. Perhaps I wanted to be like Sadiq because he was the eldest, and because Mother and Father were always praising his outstanding achievement. Perhaps because I was infatuated with building, infatuated with architecture books. After 1982 I looked up one day, as I was looking around me at the ruins and the destruction in the city and the camps, and I thought: what use is it to build beautiful houses and to plan cities if they are going to bring them down on our heads, what’s the use? I said to myself, you have two choices, boy, and only two: that you specialize in military science and become a well-qualified resistance fighter — I mean, able to plan on the basis of real knowledge — or that you specialize in law. Protect the place first and secure it, and then let your imagination run wild, if you want to plan cities as beautiful as dreams. The first choice was not possible, so I went for the second. Do you understand, Maryuma?”
“I understand, Abud.”
“And you understand, Mother?”
I did not answer his question. I was thinking about the day when he told me that he was going to leave the College of Engineering, and we had an argument. I was angry at his decision to leave a subject on which he had spent three years, in order to start all over again. I told myself that the boy had answered my question, nine years later. Is it a convincing answer, Amin?
He said, “Where do you want to study, Beirut?”
“I don’t want Beirut.”
“Where, then?”
“Egypt.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Egypt. Because the expense will be less for Sadiq, I mean less than Europe, for example, and less than Beirut too.”
“In Cairo?”
“In Alexandria, if my scores allow it — they require very high scores. If not Alexandria then one of the provincial universities.”
“Why Alexandria? Because you love Fairuz’s song?”
She sang the beginning to him: “Alexandrian shore, O you shore of love, We went to Alexandria, and it cast its spell on us.” She laughed. “No, because of Sheikh Imam’s song.” She sang,
O Alexandria, how wondrous your sea,
Ah, if only I had some of your love!
I’m tossed about from wave to wave,
As the fishing’s good and the tide is high.
She said, “Frankly, it’s Alexandria for Mama’s sake.”
“Will you take Mama with you?”
“Naturally.”
“How will you learn when you’re snuggled in your mother’s arms?”
“I’ll snuggle, then I’ll get up and go to the university and learn a little, then come back and snuggle. Every day a little learning, and a little plus a little will make a lot, even if I do snuggle!”
He laughed at the image. She became serious, “Mama wants to go with me; she’s not happy here. When she came back from Beirut she was sick for a whole month. Mama loves the sea, and so I chose Alexandria and not Cairo.”
Abed looked at me, “Do you agree to Alexandria, Mama?”
I didn’t answer; I didn’t know.
49
Beirut (III)
“Birds of a feather flock together.” The proverb came to me between waking and sleep, as I was preoccupied with the thought of going to a city we didn’t know, where we didn’t know anyone. Why not go back to Lebanon and live in Beirut, or return to Sidon and live like the rest of our people there, come what may? Sadiq said that the situation of the Palestinians in Lebanon was getting more difficult by the day. He said that a friend of his visited Beirut recently and met a young man who suddenly lifted his eyes and whispered, “I’m a Palestinian!” as if he were telling him something secret or embarrassing, calling for an explanation or an apology. He said that society there has come to reject the Palestinians, telling them in a thousand ways, we don’t want you. Young men don’t find work and the government doesn’t permit them to hold dozens of jobs, not to mention the daily insults in casual words here and there about the foreigners who demolished the city and brought on its devastation.