Would you like me to make a vow to Ayyoub for your recovery?
I’m certain you know Aziz Ayyoub. You may not have liked him because he wasn’t a fighter. You told me you despised anybody who didn’t carry a gun: “The country was slipping away before our eyes, and they sat there doing nothing.” Aziz Ayyoub didn’t carry a gun, and he didn’t fight, but look what he became and what we’ve become. He’s now a saint to whom people make vows, and we’re on our own.
Leave Aziz Ayyoub in his tomb and come with me to look for Shahineh. We left her in front of her tent in Deir al-Qasi. She went into the tent and lay down next to her children after her long journey to al-Ghabsiyyeh. And before she fell asleep, she smelled her own sweat, left the tent and asked Munirah to help her bathe. Later she divided her wealth into two halves, and managed to live off it for more than a year.
From Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif, from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah, from al-Mansourah to Qana. Shahineh told how the people were like locusts: “The Israeli planes sailed overhead while we scurried through the emptiness looking for a refuge, until we reached al-Mansourah. There we crossed the border, the noise stopped, and the terror was extinguished. We found ourselves in Qana, and there we rented a house from the Atiyyeh family. Yasin went to school, and the girls and I sat in the house, and I spent all my money. Qana was beautiful and quiet, like our village in Palestine.”
My grandmother didn’t tell me much about Qana because she believed her exile only really began when they gathered everyone together in the camps around Tyre.
“In Qana, we weren’t in exile, or refugees. We were waiting.”
Do you know what waiting, and the hope of return, meant to these people, Abu Salem? Of course you don’t. However, the story of the buffalo of al-Khalsah astonished me. When my grandmother told me the story, I thought she was telling me something like the stories grownups tell children that they don’t expect them to believe. The story concerns a man called Abu Aref, a Bedouin of the village of al-Khalsah, belonging to the tribe of Heyb. He came to Qana along with everyone else and stayed there with his wife and five daughters. And he brought his buffalo. Seven buffalo cows, God protect them. “We all drank their milk, for the man used to give it away to everybody. He refused to sell it, saying the buffalo were an offering to al-Khalsah — ‘When we go back, we can buy and sell.’ He was generous and stubborn, like all Bedouin. When spring came, the season when buffalo become fertile, people saw the man leading his herd toward the south. His wife said he was crazy because he believed the buffalo could only conceive in al-Khalsah, and he’d agreed with a cousin of his to hand the buffalo over to him at the Lebanese-Palestinian border on the condition that he return them two weeks later. The man set off for the border, and his wife stood in the square at Qana to bid him farewell, mourning him and mourning the buffalo, but the man would have nothing to do with her. Then the buffalo disappeared from view, and everyone forgot about the matter.”
My grandmother said Abu Aref returned alone, cowering, his spirit broken. He wouldn’t speak. “He was bathed in tears, and we didn’t dare ask him anything. He returned alone, without the buffalo.”
“We’ve lost everything,” said Umm Aref.
Abu Aref drove his buffalo to al-Khalsah because he was convinced the buffalo could only conceive on the land where they were raised, and, at the border post, the firing started. The buffalo sank to the ground, their blood splashing the sky, and Abu Aref stood there in the midst of the massacre.
He told his wife he was standing at the border making signs to his cousin when the firing started.
He said he ran from buffalo to buffalo. He said it was all blood. He said he raised his hands and screamed, but they were killed anyway.
He said his dog of a cousin never turned up. He said he’d taken off his white kufiyyeh and raised it as a sign of surrender, then started running with it from buffalo to buffalo, trying to staunch their wounds, the kufiyyeh becoming drenched in blood. He said he raised the stained kufiyyeh and shouted and begged, but they didn’t stop. “The ground was covered in blood, the buffalo were dying, and I was weeping. Why didn’t they kill me too? I wiped my face with the blood-soaked kufiyyeh and sat down among the buffalo.”
The man returned to his wife cowering, frightened. He returned without his buffalo, carrying the blood-stained kufiyyeh and the marks of despair.
That was Qana.
My father went to the school, and my grandmother got out her Palestinian lira and spent them one by one, then sold her gold bracelets and her necklace; she didn’t, however, sell the signet ring, which remained on her finger until her death. I think my aunt Munirah took it. I don’t know. She sold everything and then started working with her daughters crushing stone in the village. Waiting was no longer viable. The borders were closed; people had entered a labyrinth. The Lebanese police came and said they had an order to gather the Palestinians into the camp at al-Rashidiyyeh. This was when the agony began. They drove Abu Aref, tied up with ropes, whipping him while he bellowed that he couldn’t bear to be taken away from his buffalo.
They brought everyone together in the village square, put them onto trucks and trains, and moved them away from the borders of their country.
My grandmother said the agony started in the camp. “They dumped us on the seashore in winter. The wind blew hard from all directions, and we were left in the dark.”
She said she couldn’t remember daylight. “During those days, everything was black. Even the rain was black, Son.
“We drowned in the mud. Your poor father, God rest his soul, was only knee-high. Afraid for him, I told the girls to watch out for Yasin because he’d drown in the mud. I’d yell and hear nothing; my voice flew away in the wind. God, what terrible days those were!”
How can I tell you of those days, Father, when I didn’t experience them myself and my father never spoke of them? My father died before we reached the age when fathers tell their sons their stories.
They were known as “the banana days.”
The only shelter people could find was under big, dry banana leaves. They’d buy ten leaves for five Lebanese piasters and make roofs for their tents and spread the leaves on the ground.
“They were the banana days,” said Shahineh.
When Shahineh spoke about those days, you had the feeling that she wasn’t telling of the past — it was as though time had stopped. She told of the crowded buses, of the wooden pattens they wore as protection from the hot sand, of the tents in which the wind was a permanent occupant, of the rain that penetrated the bone.
She told of moving from Qana and of how the Lebanese officer came, surrounded by his men, and ordered the Palestinians to congregate in the square, of how he whipped Abu Aref until he was soaked in blood.
“We only had banana leaves,” she said.
“We spread the leaves over the ground and covered the roofs and the sides of the tents with them, and lived with the rottenness. The leaves rotted, and we rotted beneath them and on top of them.”
It was then that Shahineh decided Yasin’s schooling was over, and it was time for him to work.
“No, that’s not true,” she said. “I begged him not to leave school. I said we’d live off the rations we were allotted with the relief card.” But he refused. He found work in the sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn, which landed him in prison, though that’s another story.
Shahineh told of three months in the camp before their departure to Beirut. She and her children lived for about two months in an old Beirut house that had belonged to the Hammouds — a family of fighters from ’36 — before moving to the camp at Shatila.