Haniya arrived at one in the morning; it was three before she responded to my insistence that she lie down on the bed for a while, until morning came and we could go together to the camp to find out what happened. I was stretched out on the couch in the living room, between sleep and waking, beset by nightmares; I would doze off a little and then become alert again, horrified by the question: what if they invaded the hospitals? What would they do to Amin? And Abed, where could Abed be? The office of the Popular Front was very close to Acre Hospital; it was still open and Abed went there sometimes. Was he there now? Maybe he was with his friends, dispelling their boredom by playing cards or arguing about what Abu Ammar did: this one curses Abu Ammar and holds him responsible, and that one thinks that the man did as much as he could to protect the Palestinian people. A daily battle that ended in shouting or that came to blows between the supporter of Abu Ammar and his decision and the one who was angry with the leadership and its policies. Abed was like a bull in a pen. He had spent three days after the resistance left without leaving his bed, then he began to stay away from home, saying, “I’ll stay with my friends.” Or he would come back late with the smell of whiskey on him, and I would reproach him for being drunk. Once I scolded him and he answered me, “Leave me alone. If I had hashish I would smoke it and if I had opium I would sniff it.” I wonder where Abed was now? Why did the director of the Gaza hospital say what she did to Haniya? Had Haniya lost her mind with the long shelling and the terror? What if what she said was true? What would we do?
I found her standing in front of me, “Sitt Ruqayya, if I may, I’ll leave the two little ones with you so I can go see what happened to my husband and my mother and father and my sister and her children.”
I looked at my watch. It was five in the morning.
“I’ll go with you.”
I gave her one of my dresses and asked her to change into it. I knocked on Umm Ali’s door; I knew that she woke up early for the dawn prayer. I decided not to tell her anything, only to ask her to take care of Haniya’s children until we came back, and to tell my aunt and Maryam when they woke up that I had gone out and would not be late. No sooner did Umm Ali open the door, before good morning and good morning to you, she asked, “Have the Israelis gone into the camps?”
I said, “It seems that they have gone in with the Lebanese Forces.”
“Lord have mercy! But where are you going?”
Haniya said, “We’re going back to Horsh Tabet to reassure my family, then we’ll go to Acre Hospital, and God willing everyone will be fine. I’ll come back and pick up the kids and take them to my mother, and then go to the hospital. It’s not right for me to be away from my work; there must be a lot of wounded.”
We did not succeed in getting close to the camp nor to Acre Hospital; the place was tightly encircled. Haniya suggested that we go to the Israeli barricade, talk to the soldiers and ask them to allow us to pass. I tried to talk her out of it, unsuccessfully. She insisted. She said, “That’s all we can do. I’ll go. Come with me, Sitt Ruqayya.” I was not afraid of them; I would go up to them, and maybe they would smile. What would I do? I had no weapon. All I could do was spit on them. How absurd! Spitting on one side of the scale, and on the other three months of shelling and killing and destruction. No, that’s not correct; on the other side were all the years of my life. My father and my brothers. I was nailed to the ground.
“Haniya, they won’t help us. Let’s go back to the house.”
“I must find my husband and my sister and my mother and father.”
I saw her go, almost hurrying toward the Israeli barricade. What would I do now if they fired on her? Would I leave her wounded or maybe a stiffening corpse, and run away … or would I go up and carry her away and add a new victim to their tally? They did not fire. I saw her stopping at the barricade, speaking with them. They allowed her to pass. What generosity, what kindness. Haniya entered the camp at seven in the morning on September 17, and I stood waiting for her an hour or two, and then returned to the house to care for her little ones, and to wait.
28
A Letter to Hasan
Dear Hasan,
Why have you entangled me in this writing? What sense does it make for me to live through the details of the disaster twice? I stopped last week at the morning of Friday, September 17. The day was before me: I had to face it again, to retrieve it from a memory that struggles with me as I struggle with it, as if we were wrestling in a ring. The simile is not exact, Hasan, for it’s not a game and in the end there is no victor or vanquished, no audience applauding in admiration for the victory. It’s not a game. And if it is, then it’s a strange game, dangerous and lethal.
What do you want from me? To transmit my feelings then, or my feelings now, or what was recorded by people who know more than I do and are more capable, in articles and testimonies and books? Twenty years ago Sitt Bayan Nuwayhid, the wife of Shafiq al-Hout who was the director of the Lebanese chapter of the PLO, contacted me. She told me that she was gathering the testimony of those who escaped from the massacre, the people of Shatila and Sabra and the adjacent neighborhoods. She wanted me to bring her together with those I knew among them, and I did so. Sitt Bayan listened to Haniya here in my house, she listened to Abed and to other men and women whom I arranged for her to meet. Twenty years later Sitt Bayan called me and said that she had finished the book and it had come out. She took my address in Alexandria and sent it to me. The book arrived, and I opened the envelope. It was a hardback book, with a jacket that had a colored picture of three of those killed: a young man whose mustache had barely appeared, sprawled on the ground fully dressed, his head resting on the shoulder of another victim; on his left thigh were the feet of a third victim, of whom we could see only his running shoes and his legs in their jeans. (Running shoes exactly like the shoes your brother Abed used to wear in those days. Maybe if I had seen the picture at the time, before I saw Abed, I would have screamed that my son was gone.) On the upper left there was another, smaller picture, of two blackened corpses; it was hard to make out anything of their features. I could not bear the book jacket. I tore it off and hid it in one of the bedroom drawers. The huge book remained, with its sturdy, blue cover; that was bearable. I said I would read it. Two years have passed with the book on the small table next to the bed; I have not placed it upright among the rows of books in the bookshelf, nor have I opened it. Sitt Bayan must have spoken at length about what happened in Acre Hospital. She must have mentioned Intisar, whom I found charming, and whom they raped until she died. She must have mentioned her other coworker, whose name doesn’t come to me but whose face and tone of voice I remember, I mean the other nurse they took turns raping until they killed her.
Dearest Hasan, your mother can’t bear to read a book that recalls what happened and examines the details, so how can you ask me to write about the subject?