Hasan was right. In Alexandria, over the same telephone, from the very same seat and over the same television set I would follow the news of the Hebron massacre, the killing of Rabin and his funeral, and Abu Ammar’s insistence on offering his condolences. He bent over the widow’s hand and kissed it; I saw him. Then the events of the new Israeli incursion into South Lebanon, the Cana massacre, the funeral of the martyrs. I followed in silence, repeating Hasan’s expression. “It will take a long time,” I mutter.
I called Wisal in Jenin. Her voice comes over the phone and dispels some loneliness, or some lump in the throat that was about to choke me.
I continue to write because Hasan asks how far I’ve gotten, how much I’ve accomplished. He asks every time we speak. Sometimes the telling seems simple, it flows easily and the words are written as if of their own accord. Or it’s a pleasure, as I relive some intimate or lovely moment with the children or Uncle Abu Amin. It’s as if I summon them and they come, and fill the house for me. Then I stop; the writing is hard, and weighs me down. It seems like a weight of iron that I’ve placed on my chest of my own free will. Why, Hasan? I don’t have to obey you, I can stop; why do I obey? I sit in front of the notebook and look at an empty page, open like an abyss. The writing will kill me, I told you that, Hasan. He said, “Writing does not kill.” Why does he seem so confident?
I flee to the plants, to the sea. I suddenly decide that the window glass is dirty and makes the house dark, separating me from the sky. I bring the ladder and a rubber squeegee and both the short-handled scrub brush and the other one with a long handle, and a bucket of water and soap. I wipe the glass with the cleaning liquid and rub it well, polishing it. I dry it with the squeegee. I don’t look up until Maryam comes home. She says, “Oh no, just a week ago you cleaned all the windows in the house and washed the glass.” I say, “Just a moment, by the time you heat supper I’ll have finished.”
52
New Jersey
Hasan called me and told me that he was sending me two copies of his new book, “one for you and the other for Maryam.”
A moment of silence, and then: “It’s not a study or a research work, Mother. It’s a novel.”
“A story?”
“Yes, a story.”
I was amazed, and even more amazed when the book arrived. Unlike his previous books, it was small in format and size, ninety pages at most. He said that it was about the attack on Lebanon. How? Is it possible to tell what happened in these few pages? How could a small book, or a large one, bear thousands of corpses, the extent of the blood, the quantity of rubble, the panic. Our running for our lives, wishing for death. Anyway, New Jersey, what was this strange title? What relationship did it have to what happened in Lebanon? Does he speak about his father in his novel? Does he set aside a larger place for Acre Hospital, or does the whole novel center on what happened in Acre Hospital? Does he talk about Beirut, or write about Sidon and Ain al-Helwa, did he listen to the details from his uncle Ezz? I don’t know much about stories and novels; before that I had only read the two stories by Ghassan Kanafi that Ezz lent me in Sidon. I no longer remember more than the title of the short story: “The Land of Sad Oranges.” The longer story was about three Palestinians who wanted to be smuggled into Kuwait, so they hid in the empty tank of a water truck. The border employees delayed the driver so the three died of suffocation, without daring to knock on the sides of the tank.
I was preoccupied with Hasan’s book all day long, but I did not try to page through it or read any of its paragraphs. At night I sat in the seat next to the bed and opened the book, and read. I did not sleep until I had finished it.
The novel centers on a battleship named New Jersey. It was an amazing seagoing vessel, the size of three soccer fields put together, 887 feet long, forty-five tons, and as high as a seven-story building. Its main battery had nine canons, all sixteen inch, and its secondary battery had twenty smaller canons. Each of the large ones shoots missiles weighing 1,200 kilograms, with a range of thirty-seven kilometers. As for the smaller canons, they can reach fourteen kilometers.
The battleship is the heroine of the story. We follow the history of its birth, even its prehistory: it was one of six vessels that surpassed everything that went before. The United States decided to build them at the beginning of the Second World War, to support its forces in the probable theater of operations in the Pacific Ocean. On December 7, 1942, it was commissioned and christened, and its name was recorded on the rolls of the American Navy. Its official birthday was not celebrated until it was delivered for duty and assigned its first task in the war, on May 23 of the following year. The battleship took part in all US wars from the middle of the twentieth century on: the Second World War in Japan and the Philippines, in the forties; the Korean War in the fifties; Vietnam during the years 1968 and 1969, after an overhaul. Then at the beginning of the eighties there was another overhaul with the addition of launchers for long-range Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles, and afterward it went to the Mediterranean, bound for Lebanon. In 1991 it headed for the Gulf.
The account of the life of the battleship is gripping. We follow its movements, a floating structure wandering the high seas with more than two thousand men on board. It carries them to the Pacific Ocean, to the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, to the Mediterranean, and to the Gulf, clear under the sun, foggy and cloud-covered in the rain, shining with lights in the dark of night. We observe it closely as it carries out its task with zeal, precision, and competence: it points its guns and fires. It hits. Its crew — officers and soldiers, sailors and doctors, mechanics and janitors, those in charge of the food service and cooks — is a lively crew. All of them work. In the kitchen, for example, they produce 1,800 loaves of bread daily and 250 gallons of ice cream.
At the end of its service the New Jersey was retired, its record filled with the decorations it had collected, more than any other American battleship: nineteen medals. Two stars for its outstanding role in the Second World War, four stars for its performance in the Korean War, two stars for its accomplishments in the Vietnam War and four stars for its services in the Lebanese War and the Second Gulf War.
In the second part of the story we come to know the battleship better. In the next stage it was decommissioned and turned into a museum in Camden, New Jersey, where it’s anchored on the shore of the river. The visitors are men and women, young and old, school excursions meant to give the pupils patriotic knowledge and education. Families with their children tour all parts of the ship, going down into its depths, passing through its corridors in files. They see the officers’ rooms and the soldiers’ beds, the steering and control rooms, the admiral’s and the captain’s quarters. The dining rooms, small, comfortable rooms where the officers had their meals and the large mess where the soldiers and sailors ate. The engine room, the clinic, the repair shop. They go up to the deck and climb the towers, looking down from windows here and there. They look out at the waters of the river, at the Seaport Museum nearby, at the sky. They return to the deck and stand in front of the guns, raising their heads, dazzled by their hard steel and wide mouths. They listen carefully to the explanations of the tour guide or to the recordings they hear via small earphones. They chatter and laugh, or someone records observations in his notebook, or takes pictures of his family and friends.