Mornings in Jenin (21 page)
1982
The earth is closing on us,
pushing us through the last passage,
and we tear off our limbs to pass through . . .
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
—Mahmoud Darweesh, “The Earth Is
Closing on Us,” written in the aftermath of
the PLO’s exit from Lebanon
NINE O’CLOCK, ON the morning of May 16, 1982, twenty-six hours after I left Beirut, I was in Philadelphia, with the cheerless void of not wanting to be there. It seemed a lifetime had passed since I had first come to that city, unsure of my step, frightened that an escalator would drag me under, jealous of Lisa Haddad’s hair.
Immediate tasks in hand, I called Dr. Mohammad Maher, Majid’s former mentor in England, settled now in a Philadelphia professorship.
“Amal, I have been expecting your call,” he said in a voice husky with age and cheer. “Please. Wait for me in the baggage claim. I’ll be there in less than thirty minutes.”
Unknown to me, Majid had been corresponding with Dr. Maher for months, making arrangements. Already I had employment. I was to prepare clinical trial reports for federal audits.
“The pay is good. I’ll just need to show them proof of your degree. If you decide for something else, I’ll help you.”
Majid was like a son to him. “So please, I would love it if you called me ammo, or just Mohammad if you’d rather. But none of this
doktor
business.”
Touched and without adequate words—“thank you” conveying a dearth of gratitude—in Arabic I said, “Allah keep you in Grace and a bounty of goodness upon you. This kindness of yours, doctor . . . Ammo Mohammad . . . is humbling.”
Life was quickened here. I had forgotten that. Within two weeks I had been trained on the job, visited an obstetrician, and gone five times to the immigration office. My husband was cleared to come to the United States, but a response for Fatima’s visa would require at least another month.
With rows of taut African braids and a kind smile, the INS lady said, “I know it’s a mess over there. I’ll do all I can to push it through.”
“Thank you.”
May Allah smile on you with plenitude and love
. The city seemed to have changed while I was away. West Philadelphia had become a miasma of drug-infused poverty. I saw despair now where authority had been in the faces of the heavy matriarchs, still passing the days in the shade of habit on their porches.
Old friends—Angela Haddad, Bo Bo, and Jimmy. “It’s nice to see you again, Amal.” An apartment in the northeastern part of the city, wanting to avoid becoming a burden on the Mahers.
While I waited to receive my family, biding time with hope and sporadic telephone conversations with my husband or Fatima, Ammo Mohammad and his wife, Elizabeth, fashioned themselves into a surrogate family. Ammo and Elizabeth had been married nearly fifty years. They had served as healers, he a physician and she a nurse, living on the small salaries of aid organizations in the plains of Africa after leaving Oxford. Now in the United States, with the grand compensation of North Americans, their lives had an air of restlessness, of want for children. Though their bodies carried their seventy-odd years well, age had eroded bones and carried off vigor, forcing them to slow their pace where they could recruit young medical skill to carry on the legacy of their work. Medicine Without Borders. A labor of love, but not enough. My arrival, with life swelling my abdomen, stirred the sediments of their advanced years. Latent and undeniable, the instinctive affinity of the old for babies and children delighted them now and they protected my swollen state.
Elizabeth saw to it that I ate well, consumed vitamins, and went to regular checkups. She sat nearby each day as I dialed and redialed numbers to Lebanon and the INS, there to share the disappointment of no answers or busy circuits.
Her fading blond hair, short above her neck, curved behind her ears in a way that dismissed vanity. She moved through days tall and erect, and her long, slightly arthritic fingers took little rest from her determination to save the world while simultaneously keeping her husband’s life in order. Her mornings started with coffee, which she had been giving up for the past forty years. She would fix Ammo’s red bow tie, as much a part of him as his hazel eyes. They’d part with a brown-bag lunch and a kiss, a rite that had not wavered in all their years of marriage.
Elizabeth had retired when Ammo took a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. Her time was spent in the service of their medical charity, her newfound indulgence of spa treatments, and water aerobics three times a week. My arrival changed her patterns and, as the delivery date approached, she invested her time in me and our mother-daughter assembly. I still spent more nights in Elizabeth’s guest room than in my apartment.
The accretion of days without word from Majid, Yousef, Fatima, or the INS amassed around me. A sum total of void and portents of the evening news. Then it all crumbled on June 6, 1982.
Israel attacked Lebanon.
I wasn’t paying attention to the small screen on the kitchen counter, but Ammo was, and I noted the change in his face before hearing the news. We had all been holding our breath for weeks and now what we had feared moved languidly, like a cloud, across Ammo’s expression, pulling the color from his face and causing it to droop.
I heard the shrill broadcast as I met his sad eyes.
“A massive invasion.” “Intense aerial bombardment.” “Ninety-thousand-strong invasion force moving up the coast of Lebanon.” The television headlined “Operation Peace in the Galilee.” Such was history’s name.
Operation
; how words are violated. Majid performed operations to save lives.
For five interminable hours, I dialed and redialed, but Lebanon’s telephone lines convulsed with relatives trying to reach one another as Israel began systematic destruction of communications in the country. At last, the heavens parted. A ray of sweet mercy touched my world with the sound of my husband’s voice at the other end.
“Habibti. Oh God, your voice is all I need to get me through this hell,” he said, as if reading lines of my own heart. I had reached him at the hospital, war tearing all around it. I could hear the thunder of bombs muffled by distance, the blaring of ambulance sirens. The squeal of terror far away, where I wanted to be.
“Majid, please come now,” I begged.
“Habibti, the injured are pouring in by the hundreds and the hospital is already short of staff. They need me. So many doctors have abandoned them already. Please stay put and take care of our baby. I will come . . . I promise we will be together soon.”
Not knowing when we could speak again, we held on, filling every second with the love we vowed would never die. He promised to remain in the hospital.
“I dreamed you gave birth to a baby girl, little Sara, and we were picnicking on the shore of Sidon. Remember when we wrote our names in the sand?”
I could barely speak. “Of course I remember.” I sobbed, “I saw her, in the sonogram.”
“Her?”
“Yes. We’re having a girl. We’re going to have Sara.”
A long pause followed. “In the end, you’re all that matters. It is you that I owe, more than anyone here. Isn’t that right, darling? I love you more than you imagine. Perhaps I’ve done all I can here.”
Little Sara
.
In a while it was time to hang up, a task that felt like turning a valve to expel the air from my lungs. But Majid was coming to me now and it would be a matter of only days, a week at most.
I turned to God with the immediacy of every woman’s faithful vow.
Keep my family safe through this and I’ll live to deserve your mercy
. I prayed and prayed. As Dalia had prayed in another time and another place. In another war.
Their telephone lines remained severed.
Each day, I cleared the cobwebs of my nights’ dark premonitions and shuffled through my days, my mind always tuned to the news. I dialed and redialed, infected with dread. Ariel Sharon marched his military into Lebanon—known as “the Oasis of the Middle East” for its splendor—and laid siege to Beirut for two grueling months, during which Israel deprived its people of water, electricity, and medical care.
My heart became metallic, leaded with the ink of newspapers and the tinny tone of broadcasters. In the office lounge, a television reporter: “Humanitarian organizations are warning of . . .” I couldn’t listen.
“Management needs to do something about the food in this place,” one of my co-workers said. Others went on about the dire parking situation: “It’s too damn far, especially when it’s raining.”
I had lost contact with Majid and felt as if I would also lose contact with life itself.
Bombs and more bodies to receive them. I prayed and called the Red Cross. Called the INS. Please. They were doing the best they could, and no, I couldn’t go there. All flights had been suspended.
How will my family get here?
The BBC showed high-rise buildings crumble like dried cracked clay, whoever had been inside also broken.
“Israel is striking back against the PLO, a terrorist organization whose aim is to slaughter Jews like they did the Munich athletes.” Israel’s stated aim was self-defense. To dislodge the PLO, a six-thousand-member resistance.
By August, the results were 17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless, and 100,000 without shelter. Prostrate, Lebanon lay devastated and raped, with no infrastructure for food or water. Israel claimed it had been forced to invade for peace. “We are here for peace. This is a peacekeeping mission.”
Decades later, still searching for the fate that forgot me, I sifted through the accounts of peace. In his epic memoir,
Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon
, British correspondent Robert Fisk described phosphorous Israeli shells:
Dr. Shammaa’s story was a dreadful one and her voice broke as she told it. “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames,” she said. “When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.” Next morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.
Ronald Reagan dispatched Philip Habib, who brokered a cease-fire deal in which the PLO evacuated Lebanon. Yousef had to leave or die. He left because it was the only way to keep Fatima and the babies safe. So they said.
The PLO withdrew from Lebanon only after an explicit guarantee from U.S. envoy Philip Habib and Alexander Haig that the United States of America, with the authority and promise of its president, Ronald Reagan, would ensure the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the refugee camps. Philip Habib personally signed the document.
Thus the PLO was exiled to Tunisia carrying the written promise of the United States. The fate of those I loved lay in the folds of that Ronald Reagan promise.
A Story of Forever, Forever Untold
1982
ON SEPTEMBER 10, I awoke in a terrible fright, trying to discriminate night from nightmare. The clock read 3:02
A.M
. as the telephone rang in the corner of my mind.
It was Yousef.
He had arrived at his place of exile with the PLO. Tunis was their destination at the end of an agonizing departure from Lebanon, whereby Yousef and his comrades had been forced to leave their wives, children, and parents behind. These sacrifices were the small parts of Yasser Arafat’s ragtag deals on behalf of his people.
Now Yousef suffered the surreal and oppressive responsibility of delivering news he wished he did not have to utter to his only sister.
Majid had kept his promise to me, living in the shelter of his hospital, which was clearly marked on every side and on its roof with the universal symbol of medicine, a red cross. But at the urging of his co-workers, he had returned to our apartment for a respite from the constant blare of sirens. He had slept deeply and soundly in our bed, the place where we once had found deliverance in love and where we had conceived our child; and when he had returned to his duties, he had found an inferno where the hospital had been. My brother was there, searching for Majid, and together they had helped rescue as many people as they could.
“Only by the Grace of Allah were you spared, brother,” Yousef had said, relieved to see Majid alive.
Yousef did not know what surged through my husband then, only that it filled him with determination enough to spend the next twenty-six hours tilling the destruction in that garden of dismembered corpses and perished souls. Carnal ash materialized in thin air and thickened, clotting their windpipes as they trudged through puddles of blood toward screams for help. They pulled out Majid’s patients, dead under the rubble. His colleagues who had urged him to go home and get some rest were found in crimson pieces.
Exhaustion dulled their senses and weighted down their bodies until Yousef and Majid finally left, spent.
They were dragging themselves on borrowed strength when they came upon a dead woman whose stiff body clutched the body of her child, a small girl with a ribbon in her hair—whose body in turn was gripping her mother. They had seen worse, but the sight of that mother and her child summoned a small reserve of energy in them both, enough for them to throw their arms around one another. And sob.
Majid turned to Yousef and asked, “Have you been able to reach Amal?” Yousef had not. “Amal is having a little girl. I’m going to be a father, brother,” Majid said calmly, as if everything around his words was paralyzed. “I’m going back to London in the morning, and from there I will join Amal or she will come to England. Look at what these pigs do. I can’t risk making a widow of Amal and an orphan of my Sara.”
“Allah be with you, brother.” Yousef embraced his comrade again and they parted in silence, Majid heading to our apartment on the fifth floor of al-Tamaria apartment building, and Yousef returning to the refugee camp of Shatila.
Five hours later, an Israeli bomb leveled the al-Tamaria, and another leveled the adjacent building.
“I looked everywhere, Amal. But I’m sure he was inside. No one survived it,” my brother sobbed through the telephone, his speech torn and mangled by love and by the general impotence of perpetual victims.
“I’m sorry, Amal.” My brother was somber, his voice so terribly heavy in my ears. So full of sadness. “I should have insisted he come with me. I’ve been trying to reach you since then but I couldn’t get through until we reached Tunis . . .”
I listened . . . the heavy syllables pounding my sense of what was real. Rocking on the floor in my own two arms, I pressed the telephone receiver to my ear. I was not filled with grief, anger, or even love. Nothing came over me. But everything rushed out. Yousef ’s words now traveled through me like a stream, pulling life from the cells of my body and gathering it beneath me. Memories of rain beating on the windshield of Majid’s Fiat; the calluses on his feet when they rubbed against my bare legs; the hair on his chest when I lay my head there; the lines around his mouth when he laughed; the arch in his brow that was a smile of its own; the small wrinkles beneath his ears; the smooth skin on his back when he sat up in bed; his touch, his kiss, his integrity, his love . . .
All of it pooled on the floor around me like a tenebrous underbelly. Until at last, I sat captive in a vacuum of thought, numb and rocking on the floor, still holding the receiver as my brother’s voice, with its unbearable sadness, faded in that emptiness.
Majid. My love.
The dreams he and I had dreamed circled around this new reality. The children we would have, the places we would go, the home we would build, the laughter we’d share and the songs we’d sing, the life we’d live, the love . . . oh the love we would love, danced like ring-around-the-rosy, around the reality that Majid was dead. Killed. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
I confronted the weather outside my apartment, walking in a daze along the leaf-strewn sidewalk. A fiery display of fall’s orange, green, yellow, and red lined both sides of my Philadelphia street. An old woman walking her dog nodded hello. I passed young lovers on a park bench as I continued through the cool wind, entranced and numbed to fate, until I reached Elizabeth’s door, ten miles later. Startled from his sleep, Mohammad cracked the door suspiciously, then opened it wide for my enormous body.
“They killed Majid,” I said, matter-of-fact.
I love you eternally. What we have is made of forever.
Majid. My forever story of love, forever untold.
Love. Eternally. Forever.
My husband’s words at the airport the day I had left Beirut.
They remain in my mind, like ashes in an urn. The glory of love, like life, quite simply reduced to dust.
“Oh dear God!” Mohammad helped me inside. Just then, I felt the intimate kick of the baby inside me, and I noticed that the sun had also risen.