We arrive at Sadiq’s house. Coffee, a full table, and more coffee. Conversation. Good night, good night. Maryam and I are in the area set aside for us, which Sadiq calls a suite. Maryam goes to sleep; I open the balcony to smoke a cigarette. There is no air; I put it out and close the balcony. The noise of the air conditioner is like a hidden train. There are no tears, where have the tears gone? I go back to open the balcony and smoke a cigarette, then I get in bed. I wonder what Sadiq would say if I asked him tomorrow to return to Beirut.
I think the banquet during the week following our arrival settled the matter. It settled it early on, even though it took me years to make the decision and follow through with it.
Sadiq’s wife wanted to honor me; she meant well. She announced two days after my arrival that she was having a dinner in my honor. She invited her relatives and friends and acquaintances, to introduce them to me and me to them. For three days she was issuing orders and directions and giving instructions, as well as taking part in the preparations. There were two servants in the house. Sadiq explained, “One is an educated Filipina, whom we entrust with the childcare. Her salary is double that of the Sri Lankan; her English is excellent. The Sri Lankan comes from the country, but we have trained and taught her. Her job is to clean the house and cook. When she came she didn’t know anything, just barely how to cook the food of her country; then Randa taught her, and she has become excellent.”
I wanted to help but there was no place for me in the kitchen. I remembered my aunt and Ezz’s wife, and smiled, nearly laughing, although the situation was different. During the two days preceding the banquet Sumana and Evelyn prepared what was asked of them, under Randa’s supervision. On the day of the banquet two other girls arrived, whom I later learned were the servants of Randa’s sister and cousin, a Sri Lankan and a dark-skinned African. Randa later told me that she was from Somalia: “My cousin is very religious and will accept only Muslim servants.”
I nearly asked what being religious had to do with the matter, but I didn’t. I asked about her name.
“Muslima.”
“Her name is just ‘Muslim’?”
“She has another name but my cousin decided to call her Muslima. In fact she always names her servants Muslima; she used the same name with the previous one and the one before that also. It’s simpler!” Randa laughed.
I don’t remember many details of that banquet. Perhaps the details of other banquets floating in my mind have become mixed with them, so that I don’t know if they were part of that day or of other days in which the house was packed with guests. Sadiq is generous and his wife is too; they have banquets once every two or three weeks, to which they invite their relatives and friends and the friends of their relatives and friends. The four servants stood in the corners, at our disposal. It seemed they wore special clothes for the occasion, dresses of the same color and cut, with a starched white apron tied at the waist. They passed around cups of juice, placed the plates and cleared them, took away ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and replaced them with shining clean ashtrays. The dining table was spread with varieties of food, and on a side table were rows of plates, small and large. Each guest took his plate and helped himself to what he liked, then moved to small square or round tables, each of which was covered by an embroidered white tablecloth, carefully starched and ironed, on which were forks, knives, spoons, and cups. Each one took his plate and sat at a designated place at this table or that. They repeated the process when the servants took the plates and they moved to serve themselves sweets and fruit. At that first banquet the whole scene was new to me, in all its details. Before, during, and after the dinner, as the girls passed coffee, tea, and “white coffee” made from orange blossoms, I did not open my mouth to say a single word, as if I had been struck with the old muteness. After the guests left, Sadiq said to me, reproachfully, “They came to meet you — you should have favored them by speaking to them. They wanted to hear about what’s happening in Lebanon.”
It seemed as if I was not going to answer; then I was surprised to find myself saying, “The news of Lebanon is in the daily papers, and if they are illiterate they can follow it on the radio and television. Are there any illiterates among them?”
His face paled, and he did not comment. After a while I broke silence, “Thank you, Sadiq, thank you, Randa. Good night.”
I withdrew to the “suite.” I was angry. Was it because I had wounded Sadiq when he had wanted to honor me? Angry over the scene itself? Angry with Sadiq because he didn’t understand? He didn’t understand. Why, when he’s smart and perceptive, why did he want me to make polite conversation with his guests, why? Didn’t he want his guests to enjoy the delicacies his wife had spent three days preparing? He was angry when I told his wife’s family, the day we went to them to propose in Amman, that we were children of the camps. There were three wars and a massacre between the two banquets.
There was a sea there, a closed gulf to which we went in an air-conditioned car, which carried us from here to there. The car is always air conditioned, twenty-four hours a day. Between sleeping and waking, I thought to myself that my legs were going to lose the ability to walk. And my hands?
I’ll put them to work. I look from afar: Ruqayya works non-stop, there in Sadiq’s house, knitting. Next to her is a nylon bag with balls of wool, one or two or three, and in her hands are two metal needles she moves mechanically, the index finger and thumb of her right hand joining in when she loops the thread over the needle, rapidly and repeatedly. Sadiq comments, laughing, “It’s beautiful, Mother. But knitting wool in a country where no one wears wool, that’s comical!”
I say, “I’m making sweaters for my friends’ children in Lebanon.”
I finished seven wool jackets which I sent to Lebanon. Then I made a sweater for Hasan in Canada, and another for Abed in Paris. In the future when I looked at the pictures of one of the children in Shatila or one of my children or grandchildren wearing the sweaters I had made them, I would stop and let my thoughts wander. Not just because I was happy that they were wearing what I had made for them, but also because I knew that knitting, during those years, was more like a refuge in which I sought shelter from shelling. I correct myself, how can I say that? Under shelling one is terrified and knows that death is watching. The simile doesn’t suit the purpose, it’s mistaken. But perhaps the image of shelling isn’t far from the truth, for shelling is frightening and earth-shaking, and so was my memory of Beirut during the last year I lived there. The siege and the Israeli planes, even the massacre seemed understandable, reasonable even in their unreason. The enemies were known and specific. You realize they want to get rid of you, to wipe you out if possible, so you rally, because the people who are confronted defend themselves. But the war of the camps crushed me. At first it seemed as if it was a stupid, passing conflict, ridiculous, like the ones that spring up suddenly between the young men of two different Palestinian factions. It starts with a difference or a quarrel, then each draws his weapon on the other, and instead of fighting with words one shoots the other, and the foolish lawlessness turns into a conflict. Oh my God, a conflict! I thought, it’s the first of Ramadan, nerves are out of control, with the accumulated tension and pressure of the last three years. They will calm down and things will go back to normal. But they didn’t calm down; the siege continued, and the army and Amal were shelling Shatila, shelling the camp mosque. The young men in the camp shelled Amal positions. Oh my God, as if the sons of Amal had become Israelis, as if the sons of the camp had become the enemies of the Shia, as if the young men here and there had not fought together, as if their blood had not mingled behind the same barricade. Who was responsible? The leaders of Amal, the policies of Abu Ammar, Syria? I would go to Umm Ali and she would come to me, trying to understand. I left Beirut and I still didn’t understand; I left defeated, with a lump in my throat that would not go away. It was stuck near the uvula, neither strangling me so that I could be done with the whole story nor dissolving, so that I could breathe like other people, and live.