“Sadiq, I’m going back to Sidon.”
“On a visit?”
“No, I’ll rent an apartment and live there. In the summer we’ll all get together there.”
“God bless you, Mother, can’t you find anywhere but south Lebanon, with the Israelis as your neighbors?”
“They’ll leave.”
“General Giap has spoken. He said they would leave, and they left!”
“Who’s General Giap?”
“A leader of the Vietnamese liberation forces in the fifties and sixties. Now General Ruqayya has decided.”
I did not lose my temper over his sarcasm. I repeated coldly, “They’ll leave!”
“Even if they left, every time there’s friction or at every little crisis they’ll shell the south and storm in. Anyway Hasan and Abed won’t be able to visit you in Lebanon.”
“There’s no problem for Abed, he has a French passport.”
“And Hasan?”
I did not answer.
“Mother …” He marshaled his arguments and the call lasted half an hour before I hung up. In the evening I asked Maryam, “How much time will you stay in Alexandria after the exam?”
She said, “I’ll wait for the results, and then to get my certificates from the university and have them notarized, then I’ll leave. Maybe I’ll need a couple of months. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t want to start getting ready for the trip while you’re studying for the exams. As soon as you finish your exams I’ll begin to pack up the household.”
“You’ve decided?”
“I’ve decided.”
“Sidon?”
“Yes.”
“Did Sadiq agree?”
“He didn’t agree, but I’ve decided.”
From Alexandria I followed the liberation of the south. Maryam was in her bachelor’s exams, either in the college taking an exam or in her room studying. I would almost call her to see what I saw, and then stifle the call. But I did not stifle the tears. Maybe if she had been sitting beside me I would have stifled them out of embarrassment. It’s strange; where did all these tears come from? Why are tears linked to sadness and care? Were they tears of joy, then? No, neither sadness nor joy, but something larger, with greater depth, ambiguous, like the look in your eyes when someone holds the newborn that has just slipped out of you. The newborn is wet with your water and blood, and whoever holds him, doctor or midwife or your mother, holds him upside down, by his feet. He’s warm, about to open his eyes, about to announce with a cry that he has opened the airway in his throat to live. You’re weary, maybe suspended between life and death; you look up weakly and tears flow from your eyes, not in sadness or in joy but rather … rather what? It’s beyond my ability to put into words. Maybe it’s a spring in some obscure place inside the body or the spirit or the earth, like the spring in the southern cave, east of town. My mother says that its water is sweet, like the water of Kawthar. “What’s Kawthar, Mother?” She says it’s a river in Paradise. I find that strange — how does she know the taste of a river in Paradise, had she ever visited it? Later I heard someone say that “Paradise lies at the feet of our mothers.” I was seven and I thought, “then she did visit it; why didn’t she tell me?” Television broadcasts scenes of the liberation live, and the mothers on television, who look like my mother and my aunt, trill and rejoice. They throw rice and rose petals on those who are returning to their villages. I’ll live there, I’ll live beside the tomb of my mother and my uncle Abu Amin, and when the time comes I’ll settle beside them. One day maybe they’ll take us all there. To the parking lot? Fatima said that they are under the ‘parking,’ there; that’s the expression she used. But why move us? Maybe it would be better for us to stay where we are, like guards at the gate, between our old camp and the country that has become ours once again.
I’ll cut out everything I’ve just written; if Hasan read it he would say that there’s no call for that kind of talk, it’s emotional and exaggerated and spoils the writing. People followed the liberation of 2000 on their television screens and it was described in thousands of reports and newspapers, and written about by specialists and non-specialists alike. I want you to write about what you witnessed. Isn’t this a part of the testimony, Hasan? My fast heartbeat, the box of tissues, blowing my nose again and again as I watch the residents return to their villages twenty years later? God keep you, Sadiq, what’s left of life is less than what’s passed; let me do what I want.
Yes, I will live in the seventh and last house. I suddenly sit up in bed, after lying there between sleep and waking. I count on my fingers: our house in Tantoura; my uncle Abu Amin’s old house in Sidon; the marital home, in Sidon also; the house on the Tariq al-Jadida in Beirut; then Abu Dhabi, then Alexandria. The seventh will be there in Sidon, at the gate. I like the number seven, maybe it’s a blessing. I feel the key hung on my neck and Abed’s gift, the silver piece made by the Kurd, carrying on the trade of his teacher, the Sabian smith.
I got up and began to pack a suitcase for travel. Maryam knocked on the door, saying “I thought you were asleep.”
“Are you still studying?”
“I’m about to finish and go to bed. What are you doing, is this the time to pack?
“I’m getting ready to go.”
56
The Gate
“God bless you, as long as you were going to accept my move to Sidon anyway, why did we spend all these months arguing?” I was talking about Sadiq’s determination to rent an apartment in Sidon. He asks and inquires and inspects and compares: an apartment on the fourth floor with a balcony overlooking the sea and big windows open to the sky and the sunlight? “It’s great! What do you think, Sadiq?” “How will it hold us all when we come in the summer?” Another, bigger apartment, five rooms. “It’s far from the sea, and the building is old.” A third one, new, and overlooking the sea. “The building has no guard.” Finally we find an apartment that meets all of Sadiq’s conditions: it’s new, large, sunny, near the sea, and has a guard with a strong build and a kind face. Sadiq checked everything about him, and announced with delight, “The guard’s grandfather knew my grandfather Abu Amin, and his grandfather’s brother worked in Acre in the days of Palestine; I visited his village two years ago. Now I can rest assured, as if I were the one guarding the building. Fine, I’ll sign the contract tomorrow.” Then Sadiq meets the neighbors: “I’m not comfortable with them. Neighbors are family, closer than family — you’ll be alone for months at a time, and I won’t be able to rest easy having you among them.” Sadiq wasn’t the only one looking, either: he brought in his friends old and new, and the young men of Ain al-Helwa, some whose relatives he had employed or whose education he had paid for, and their friends and their friends’ friends, until it seemed as if all of Sidon was preoccupied with Sadiq’s search for an apartment for his mother.
At last we rented an apartment, we furnished it, and he left.
God bless you, Sadiq, what have you done? It’s as if I were a pupil in a strange town: before he left he appointed not just one guardian but a whole host of guardians for me, young and old. As I told Maryam on the phone, I had imagined that I would be alone for a few months at least, gradually meeting a neighbor here or there or finding some of my old acquaintances in Sidon, and reconnecting with Karima’s family. I figured wrong, as if I didn’t know Sadiq: one week in Sidon and he rented an apartment, furnished it, and turned it into a madafa. He introduced his friends to the house and to me, “And I don’t have to tell you, guys ….” The young men living in Sidon would ask after me daily, and those who lived in Ain al-Helwa would come all the way into Sidon to ask. Sometimes they would be too embarrassed to come in and have a cup of coffee; sometimes they would come with their mothers or wives and children, and invite me to their homes. My God, how much Sidon has changed, and how much the camp has changed!