Wisal had even brought bread from the old ovens with her from Jenin.
Maryam laughed and said again, “It’s obvious we’re in a famine, Auntie Wisal!”
I said, “We aren’t in a famine, but we love the food from home. If you don’t want it, leave it for me.”
She retreated hurriedly, “I want it and then some! When will you make us musakhan, Auntie Wisal?”
“Now, if you like.”
“No, now you’ll drink coffee.”
We sat on the balcony. Wisal said suddenly, “Ruqayya, I haven’t seen the sea of Jaffa since we left Tantoura!”
54
By Donkey
A passing story, one of thousands of little anecdotes that pass by every day, only to fall into the crowd. Suddenly it surfaced; I recalled it, and then I ruminated on it, saying why not? The man was over a hundred and I haven’t even reached seventy. The story gave me ideas; I would have liked to hear it again from Karima, in case she could add other details that had escaped her.
It was the story of her father’s uncle, Abu Khalil. He left for Lebanon with them, and stopped like them in Rumaysh. He went back across the border with them, heading for Saffurya, and was arrested with them and put in prison in Acre. From prison they sent them to Lebanon, and the Lebanese authorities put them in Qaroun, taking them from there to Ain al-Helwa. Karima said, “We were in Ain al-Helwa when Abu Khalil announced that he was going back. My grandfather said, ‘How will you go back? They’ll kill you on the borders, or imprison you and send you back again.’ He said that he was determined: ‘If you want to come with me you’re welcome, but if you decide to stay, then I’m going.’ ‘Will you go alone?’ He said, ‘My father and mother are there, and my first son and his daughter.’ He was referring to the dead in his family, so the adults thought he had lost his mind. Then one day we woke up and couldn’t find him. We thought he had lost his way to the camp — I said he was over one hundred, and he might even have been 110. We looked for him in Ain al-Helwa and in Sidon, there was no one we didn’t ask. A week went by with no news, not a thing. Then we heard that he had bought a donkey and gone back. We didn’t rest until we found the man who had sold him the donkey and the person who showed him the way out of Sidon. We nearly accepted that the Israelis had killed him on the borders or that he had died; how could a man over a hundred cross the border alone, sleeping under an olive tree, with no provisions and not even a drink of water? He didn’t have a penny to his name, because he had paid everything he had for the donkey, and everything his wife had, too (she discovered after he left that he had taken the few liras she had hidden in the mattress). His wife said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll manage.’ My grandmother condemned her sister-in-law’s words when she was alone with my mother, and said she had a heart of stone. ‘How can she sleep all through the long night when her husband is wandering among the hyenas and the soldiers of that state? For shame, a man of a hundred, and his wife just lets him do as he pleases! If I were in her shoes I would go to him.’ We little ones began to make jokes about what she said, imitating my grandmother’s words mockingly, because the woman she wanted to take care of her husband was over eighty and toothless; she had to lean on our shoulders when she wanted to go from her house in the camp to our house next door. The family gave up on Grandfather Abu Khalil, and accepted that he must have died on the way or been killed. Four years later, when new refugees thrown out by Israel began to come to Lebanon, we learned that Grandfather Abu Khalil was still among the living. Someone from around our village said that he had seen him, and that he lived in the cemetery of Saffurya and said that he was the cemetery watchman. We asked how he managed, and they said, ‘We don’t know, but he was in good health, smoking and insisting on inviting anyone who visited the cemetery to a cup of tea!’ My grandmother talked it over with my mother, and said, ‘For sure Abu Khalil went back to get rid of his wife, because she’s spiteful and miserly and no one can put up with her.’”
Karima was laughing as she told the story. It’s strange, I remember everything she said that night, even though at the time it seemed like fleeting words, just like the rest of the talk. Then the story surfaced and became insistent. I thought, I’ll tell it to Maryam; then I wondered suddenly, am I preparing her? Perhaps, I thought to myself.
Maryam can snatch a thought from the air. When I told her the story, she commented, “You intend to do the same? You think that if a man over a hundred was able to do it, then I must be able to! Remember, Mama, that Karima was a child of five, and her grandfather who she thought was over a hundred might have been a man of sixty or even fifty-five; kids think like that, that old people are really, really old. Anyway wait until I graduate and I’ll go with you. We’ll buy two donkeys and just take off.” She said it and burst out laughing; I couldn’t take her laughter, I was furious.
At sixty or over a hundred or at Noah’s age, Noah who reached nine hundred, the man took his age in his hand, or on the back of a donkey, and did what he wanted. Neither the Israeli state nor its soldiers not the barbed wire on the border broke his will.
I’ll go back, like him. Not on the back of a donkey but by the logic of birds.
Fatima said, “The residents of al-Furaydis know the locations of the cemeteries.”
Yes, locations; the plural, not the singular. The old cemetery and the mass grave, and perhaps a third cemetery. If one of them went there with you he would point to part of the asphalt and say, “This is the mass grave, under the lot for cars, at the ‘parking.’” Ruqayya would put up a tent for herself at the parking lot. Oh my God, hold on, Ruqayya! A refugee, in a tent, in Tantoura? Where will I go then, to one of the tourist chalets on the seashore? Yes, the village has become a resort. Fatima gave me pictures and a CD that Maryam put into the computer, and I saw Tantoura, its sea and its islands and its palms and its Indian figs. Just as they were. What’s new? The chalets, the sailboats, fishing, fishing for pleasure and not for sustenance, and God only knows what else besides.
Fatima said, “At the entry of the school there’s a sign with the names of those who were killed.”
“The names of the martyrs?”
The ghost of a smile; I realized that the question was foolish.
“No, a sign with the names of their dead, killed the day of the battle. I did not take a picture of the sign or of the school, for fear that one of them would appear before me suddenly and confiscate the camera. The school has become a center for agricultural research.”
The pictures: the tomb of al-Jereini has stayed the same. Fatima said, “I found a woman praying. When she finished she greeted me and said, ‘They have no power over the sheikh or his tomb. No one can budge it.’”
I looked up and pointed, explaining to Maryam, “This was the glass factory.”
Fatima said, “Yes. They say that one of the Rothschilds, I don’t know which one, one of the Rothschilds visited the town in the forties and saw the vines. He said, ‘There’s a lot of value here, it must be put to work.’ He founded a glass factory, probably to bottle alcoholic beverages.”