Mornings in Jenin (22 page)
1982
THAT WEEK IN SEPTEMBER, starting with Yousef ’s telephone call, is the mantelpiece of my life. It is my center of gravity. It is the point on which all of my life’s turning points hinge at once. It is the deafening crescendo of a two-thousand-year-old lineage. It is the seat of a demonic God.
On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in
Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the
Washington Post
] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.”
What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been massacres before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident—how easily we used the word “incident” in Lebanon—that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.
Jenkins and I were so overwhelmed by what we found in Shatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. But there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies—blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition—tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whisky.
Did I know those women, or those babies? How many of the children had been my students?
For forty-eight hours, Israeli soldiers, sodas and chips handy, watched that malignant rush.
How does an Israeli soldier, a Jewish man, watch a refugee camp being transformed into an abattoir? Fatima. Falasteen
.
Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.
In the next passage, I found the fate of Fatima and her friends— those friends who had been at her side the day she gave birth to Falasteen. The women who had kissed me because Fatima had told them so much about me. The women who had gossiped about me when I fell in love with Majid, and who had sung, danced, and cried at my wedding.
On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
An Associated Press photographer pressed his finger and sent the scarlet darkness of that scene around the world. I saw the photo in the Arab press and first recognized the woman’s pale blue dress.
Fatima’s favorite dishdashe, worn thin in nearly two decades of use
. The curly-haired little girl behind her was my niece.
Falasteen
.
Yousef called me, screaming.
Screaming
.
Even through the telephone wires, there was enough agony in his voice to break the sky. I can still hear it shatter the wind when I walk.
“How much must we endure and how much must we give?” he wailed like a child. “Fatima! My darling, Fatima! Did you see what they did?” he asked,
screamed
, and he answered himself, “They ripped her belly, Amal!”
I had no words.
“They ripped my Fatima’s belly with a knife! . . . They killed my babies!” He screamed more. “They killed my babies, Amal. Oh God! Oh God . . .”
His sobs shook the ground beneath my feet and I thought the force of his grief would tear the sun to pieces. He hurled objects within his reach and I stood in Pennsylvania, mesmerized by the sound of breaking glass at the other end of the world. He cried with no measure of control, gripped in a seizure of pain. Tetanus. Thunder.
He cursed Israel, the Americans, Ronald Reagan, Arafat, and the world, sparing no leader and no god or devil. “Damn them to hell. Damn them to this hell they made for us.”
At the base of his voice I heard the silent howl of wrath burgeoning in him, the raw substance of despair and rage concentrating into resolve. He vowed vengeance, swore to cut their throats like pigs. He beat his head against the wall with no mercy for himself, still holding the telephone to his ear, still cursing. Still crying—the cries of a soul dying.
That frenzy of pain dismantled him. Yousef was irreparably undone. They killed my sweet brother in absentia when they murdered Fatima. And his heart now beat with the force of his rage.
“THEY SLAUGHTERED MY WIFE AND MY CHILDREN LIKE LAMBS!”
The line went dead. And I stood, besieged by the trickery of destiny. By stolen futures and the unbearable sorrow of extinguished love.
Again, I walked outside, freshly fallen leaves crackling under the weight of my steps. I overpowered my tears with a tight clench of my jaw. I was afraid to cry, lest I feel the storm inside my brother.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside
. Oh, Dalia, Mother! I understand!
I removed my shoes, took off my socks and sweater.
The better to freeze my heart.
And I imagined myself screaming at Philadelphians, who went about their daily American lives.
Ten blocks later, I collapsed at Rittenhouse Square and, I was told, did indeed grab a woman, begging her to tell me what she found so funny in the world that she could laugh at that moment, with her friend, on a bench in the park?
My water broke and an ambulance carried my wet, pregnant, and barefoot body away from the crowd of onlookers, who stared in pity at the deranged little woman about to give birth.
My obstetrician, who was called by the hospital at the behest of the medics, alerted Mohammad, who immediately summoned Elizabeth. The two of them heard the news and needed only one look at my face to know that Fatima and Falasteen had not survived. But I looked away from their eyes, afraid their sorrow might free the tears I labored to contain.
For ten hours, my body convulsed with contractions. I wanted the labor to go on until eternity. My eyes turned to glass, my heart to ice, and no breath left my body without first being stripped of its sound. I held it all in, gripped it with my fingernails. Imprisoned it all in an inexpressible clench of my jaws.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside
.
I wanted the pain to last longer, to become more intense, to kill me, too. The need to hurt was far greater than the need to push and I saw the confusion, even fright—or terror—of the nurses who came in one after the other “to check on me.”
The aging elegance of Elizabeth’s face was damp with compassion and a discernible desire to lift me out of my own fate. But in her wisdom, she said nothing, merely holding my hand without once letting go, as I gazed into space clinching my jaw tight on its trembling hinges, lamenting the few tears that escaped in a silent journey from my eyes.
At last, my baby’s instinct for life conquered me and I let go. I pushed, drenching the cloth beneath me with the pulp of childbirth and tears, freed at last.
The head began to emerge, tearing my flesh, and I thought of Fatima’s belly ripping at a murderer’s blade. I yelled her name like a battle cry—“Fatima!”—pushing harder and harder to rip my body as hers had been ripped. I wanted to bleed for the penance and torment of purgatory. Why should I live while Fatima lay rotting in an unmarked mass grave? Why should my baby be born while hers was torn from her womb? I pushed with a heart that loved and longed for Majid. I pushed again, with the determined force of self-punishment, of contrition and apology for living.
At last, my child lay wrapped in my arms, like a flower bud. I settled my being in the rhythm of her jaw suckling at my breast, while she spooned life over my hardened heart, like moss cushioning a stone. But I kept my distance, going only through the mechanics of caring for a newborn. This fragile infant had forced upon me the will to live, and I resented her for that, for all I really wanted then was to die.
Helpless
1982–1983
But you do not see, nor do you hear, and it is well.
The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,
And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it.
And you shall see.
And you shall hear.
Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.
For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things,
And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.
—Khalil Gibran, “The Farewell”
I EMBARKED ON MOTHERHOOD WITHOUT Majid and with only a thread of will. Elizabeth and Mohammad were there, steady and compassionate. I moved in with them, at their insistence. In many ways, they saved us, Sara and me.
I watched my child with curiosity, nourished her body for the sake of duty. I held my emotions in a tight fist and hard jaw. But Sara’s scent was irresistible, an intoxicating, wordless promise that weakened me. So, at times, I sneaked over my heart’s fortress to inhale her baby smell into the deep parts of myself that still craved love. And I would lose myself in the rhythm of her suckling jaw, the warmth of her helplessness, the insistence of her endless needs.
A week after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila,
Newsweek
magazine determined that the most important story of the previous seven days had been the death of Princess Grace.
The following week, the cover story was “Israel in Torment.”
Israel, a victim
.
American press “reports” agitated the ghosts crowding my mind. Aisha’s sweet face would smile before my eyes, annoyed. Fatima and Falasteen, too, would come knocking at my visions in search of a decent grave, for an honest reckoning of what had happened to them. Thoughts of Mama, Baba, and Yousef, and a deluge of longing for Majid’s touch, would build up an oppressive weight that then would crumble over my heart, like the concrete of our building that had crushed my husband in his sleep. The only way to stop the emotional storm from gathering was to splash cold water over me. Literally, I needed physical coldness to mute it all. Otherwise, I’d have gone mad, I’m sure of it. But the storm was always there, latent, lurking in the vast clench of my iron jaw. So I stopped reading or watching the news and I feared touching Sara, lest I infect her with my destiny. Lest she warm my heart and unthaw the wrath and the ghosts and madness I feared lived inside me.
I shut down. My defenses pricked anyone who dared to come near me, including Sara, though I secretly continued to consume her scent at night while she slept, to fill my lungs with the reason I needed to breathe. I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably. Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at the world.
Ariel Sharon remained free to pursue the politics of violence, until eventually he rose to the highest office of power in Israel, becoming prime minister of the Jewish state. The citizens of Israel elected him on February 6, 2001, more than a year into the second Palestinian uprising, and the American press described him as “a portly old warrior” and a “tough veteran of Israel’s many wars.” The forty-third president of the United States of America, George W. Bush, referred to him as a “man of peace.”
How the memory and horrors of Sabra and Shatila were vanquished.
The last time Yousef and I spoke was in January 1983, though he said he would try to call again before “this was over.”
“Before what’s over?” I asked.
“Yasser Arafat is a coward who leads his people to slaughter with the rope of American lies,” he said.
“Brother, you sound ill. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I left the PLO,” he said. He had done so shortly after they had been exiled to Tunis and now he spoke to me from Lebanon.
“Lebanon?” I gasped. “How did you get back there?” I was sure the Americans did not know. He must have sneaked in. But how? Who was he working with? And, my God! Why was he there?
He answered nothing and I began to feel the frost in his voice. “Don’t ask questions, Amal . . . I just called to be sure you were fine and secure,” he said, each word emerging stiff, isolated, chilling.
“Yousef. I love you. Please leave Lebanon. Please, my sweet brother. We can come together again and find a life, maybe in France . . .”
He didn’t answer.
“I named my daughter Sara. You should see her. She looks like Majid. Are you there? Hello! Yousef! Please . . . Yousef. Yousef? Please answer me, I can hear your breathing.”
Silence.
“Yousef, please. You aren’t alone. There are thousands of fighters who lost as you did. As we all did. You and I still have each other. I know your pain, Yousef. You know I know it. I have hateful thoughts just like you. But please just . . . brother. Don’t get yourself killed. I couldn’t bear it. I need, Yousef.”
The telephone connection was severed. My brother was irretrievably gone. He had traversed the burning abyss, before which I still cowered, and landed on the calm, detached shore of vengeance. He had left his soul to rummage through Sabra and Shatila, where his wife and daughter lay in a mass grave beneath a garbage dump, under the impunity of their killers, under the broken promises of superpowers and under the world’s indifference to spilled Arab blood.