Your brother, Abed
Beirut, December 17, 1982
31
To Cut a Path
Abed did not show me this letter when he wrote it, nor when he gave a copy of it to Sitt Bayan. I read it, and was brought up short by the date. Nearly twenty years later I understood Abed’s strange behavior on the day his grandmother died.
She died on December 16, 1982 and we buried her the next day, the same date as the one Abed had placed on his letter to Sadiq and Hasan.
I found her motionless in her bed. I ran to Abed. For two days he had not left his room, sitting at his desk with his beard growing and his hair as disheveled as the papers and newspaper clippings that he surrounded himself with.
I said, “Abed … your grandmother ….”
He got up from his seat and followed me to her room. He confirmed that she had died. He said, “I’ll go look for a doctor and do what’s necessary.” But when he was putting on his clothes he was swearing and cursing as if his grandmother had played a trick on him with the timing of her death and had died purposely to make him miserable. The next day he suddenly asked me, “We buried her and it’s over, and people came to pay their condolences today. Will they come tomorrow?”
I said, “Usually condolences last three days.”
“I don’t want any visitors here tomorrow, I’ll throw them out if they come. She lived her full life and died in her bed, and we buried her fittingly. It’s over.”
He shouted again, “It’s over!”
Abed was twenty-eight years old, could I slap him? I nearly did. I don’t remember what I said, or how I reacted to his insolence. All I remember is that he was shouting at the top of his lungs like a deranged person, and that Ezz put his arm around his shoulders and led him gently into his room and closed the door; it stayed closed for an hour or more. Maryam was sitting beside me, then she put her head in my lap and went to sleep; I stayed still as a stone, without moving or thinking, until I heard the door open and saw Ezz coming out of the room. It seemed to me that I had not seen him for years. The dark blue circles under his eyes had become fuller; when had he gotten so old? Why hadn’t I noticed it before? He noticed Maryam and said in a whisper, “She’ll get cold.” He took her and placed her in her bed, and came and sat next to me. He extended his hand with a pack of cigarettes, giving me one and taking another. We sat smoking in silence.
Two or three days later, Abed surprised me: “I’m going to leave the College of Engineering.”
“You’ll graduate next year.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You chose to specialize in architecture, no one imposed it on you.”
“I’ll transfer to studying law.”
“You’ll start over?”
“I’ll start over.”
“Can you explain the reason to me?”
“I have reasons, but it takes a long time to explain them.”
“I’m listening. Explain, even if it takes days.”
He left me and went out of the house.
We would peck at each other daily, like roosters. He couldn’t stand me and I couldn’t stand him. I told myself again and again that I had to be patient. You are his mother, Ruqayya, and he’s a boy, a young man laboring under a burden. I would try; then he would explode in my face like a mine, and I would explode. The house seemed like a war zone; no sooner did we put out one fire than another sprang up. Even Maryam would run all over to put out the fires. The thought makes me smile: a girl not yet seven, in second grade, wearing a helmet and jumping up the ladder to face the burning fire with a water hose many times longer than she was tall. She said to me, “Mama … don’t you love Abed like you love me?”
I smiled.
“And doesn’t he love you like I love you?”
“I don’t know, Maryam.”
“He loves you and you love him, so why do you fight every day?”
“We aren’t fighting.”
We were fighting, and we kept fighting, as if we were a married couple on a boat that was about to break up, after which each one would go off on one piece of wood. I complained to Sadiq, and he said, “Abed is devastated. If you don’t put up with him, who will?” It seems as if he called Abed and spoke to him about the subject, because Abed came to me like a crazy person and said, “Sadiq called me to tell me to take care of you. He said, ‘Your mother is tired, be more considerate of her.’ God damn Sadiq, he talks as if you were my stepmother, and as if he were responsible. Of course he’s responsible as long as he sends a few dollars every month. Do you know what your responsible son said? He said that he’s arranging to take you and Maryam to live with him in Abu Dhabi. He said that next July he’ll take his wife and children to Europe, for a change of scene. He said, ‘Two weeks only, then Mama will come here and we’ll register Maryam in the school here.’ Did he tell you that? Do you want to live with him? Have you decided to leave Lebanon? God damn him!”
I hadn’t had the slightest idea of Sadiq’s intentions, even though my surprise was lost in the sharpness with which Abed threw it out. It was as if he were a prosecutor about to send me to prison after he got the confession.
I wouldn’t leave my home, I wouldn’t leave Beirut. Stubbornness? Maybe. It seemed as if it was a decision I had made and could not reexamine. Why? Why wouldn’t I take my son and daughter and escape with them, far from this place that had come to say implicitly to us, ‘Get out of the country, you’re aliens.’ Did I say implicitly? That’s a mistake, they said it frankly every day. I saw it with my own eyes written on the walls. In the newspapers there were leaks about plans to reduce the number of Palestinians in Lebanon from half a million to fifty thousand. Did they want to throw us into the sea? They threw leaflets into the camp, menacing and threatening us. And it wasn’t just empty words: the army tyrannized the camps, and the Forces did what they pleased. Daily arrests, killing at the barricades, kidnapping, destruction of any wall built in the camp — how can people live in houses without walls? And strangulation: there was no work, there were no work permits. The men of the camp were killed or imprisoned or had left with the evacuation, and the few remaining were unemployed. Once again women took care of themselves and their dependents as if they had just emerged from the summer of 1948. No, it wasn’t only the Palestinians who were undesirables; the Lebanese who had immigrated from the south and al-Metn, who lived in Ouzai and the southern suburbs, were exposed like us. The army clashed with them and martyrs fell among them. They wanted to destroy their houses, or more precisely to remove them, as the houses had been destroyed since the invasion and the battles that had occurred in the area with the Israeli army. The government did not allow the residents to rebuild or repair their houses, to bring back water and electricity to them, to remove the debris or the waste. All that was forbidden; they were required to leave. But where to?