What Remains
By Fatima Hanan El Reda
“I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.”
― Mahmoud Darwish
Returning may be more difficult than leaving, it seems to Lama. Even so, it is still etched in her mind: how she was removed from her home, how summer came to be measured with befores and afters, how the words stopped coming out. Language had betrayed her when meaning would form bubbles that would burst into nothingness. It all plays out again before her eyes in flashing succinct images: the explosions, the frantic packing, the screams, running out of the shaking building, her own heart's thud against her rib cage. And today, like any other day, memory is her worst enemy.
July 12, 2006. 5:37 am. Beirut International Airport is bombed by Israeli warplanes. Outside the window, the sky has donned a spectacular gown of mourning, black and ruffled, as if she were mourning a beloved child. Thick clouds of smoke appear over the cityscape, billowing from various targets of aggression-- taking away any sense of security, and, more importantly, the possibility of escape. The city is shrouded in a strange stench like that of a body decomposing before death, a stomach-churning warning of an imminent end. Beirut is burning.
The night before, Lama was having tea on the balcony with her grandmother when she noticed red lights flickering in the distance.
“What’s that over there?” she asked suspiciously.
“Where?” her grandmother raised her reading glasses to get a better look. “Nothing, habibti. Those are probably aviation light signals. That’s where the airport is located,” she answered nonchalantly, as she sipped her yerba mate through a silver-coated straw from a special gourd cup that had her name engraved on. It was a gift from jiddo.
I should’ve known, Lama’s thoughts whip with self-reproach. It was too quiet in the neighborhood which, even on weekends, was usually full of its residents. Teenagers and adults alike smoked argileh in small cafes that were exclusively for men (though there was no actual rule that said so) well into the night, shouting in protest whenever their favorite football team missed a goal or a player was slapped with a yellow card, and cheering triumphantly when they scored. That night, a petrifying stillness took over the street.
Before she had a chance to respond to her grandmother, a noise pierced the dense atmosphere, so she arched her body to glance down their seven story-building, hoping for a sign to assuage her apprehension. It seemed to her that the neighborhood was completely deserted. Just then, she saw a man forcefully shut the trunk of his car, as his wife and three children huddled in the backseat, while an old man sat in the front. The car hurtled down the street and made a turn into the night. She would paint this scene years later, her last memory before everything went up in smoke.
Looking back, she doesn’t know how they missed it. Everyone was fleeing. Everyone, except for them it turns out, knew that the war had begun. Now, as she sits in the back of her father's car, Lama tinkers with the idea of hope. After thirty-three days of moving from one place to another: their neighbors’ house in the mountains, a family friend’s apartment in Zahle, a condo in Damascus, it is time to go home. Home. The word came apart. Like a sugar cube in her clenched hand, it dissolved because she had held on too firmly. Disremembering is a process of decay. And, like memory, words can be lost, broken apart, and misinterpreted. On the other hand, Lama is certain that forgetting is the only way she can retrieve what was taken away from her. And she is trapped there, somewhere between remembrance and loss.
It is an exceptionally blue day, the August heat seeping through her skin. Lama is resting her shoulder against the window, sandwiched between her brother Ali and the door. When the car abruptly stops, her head jolts against the side window. Before she could ask why they stopped, or try to, everyone else was already getting out of the car. She follows tentatively. The air is heavy with silence, a shared concern they communicate without words. They had arrived at the closest point possible by car. From here on, they would have to walk.
A man approaches them introducing himself as Abu Mohammad. He is wearing a khaki vest and white bucket hat, an identification card dangling from his neck.
“Where are you from? Where do you live? And why are you back?” he asks these questions speedily while gazing at her father’s face and hands as if he could detect lies just by looking at a person's reactions. A human lie detector, she thinks, curiously watching him. She remembers the detectives from the thrilling crime shows she knew she wasn’t supposed to watch. He jots down their surname and address in detail. They think it’s for a census, but they are informed it’s for security reasons. Spies usually lurk in the area, assessing the damage and reporting to the Israelis about their military targets, the extent of the destruction, and scanning locations for intel. This is their way of keeping record. He says it could be anybody. A friend. A neighbor. A brother.
The security personnel tells them to watch out for anyone who looks suspicious and to stay safe as he clicks the pen back into place and hands back their IDs, which they were able to take when they fled thanks to her mother’s Samsonite. The brand had become the bag, had become their safety because it preserved their most precious possessions: family photos, their passports and identification papers, deeds to the land her mother inherited from her father, her gold dowry, and some cash her parents had stowed away for emergencies. Their elderly neighbor, Um Haitham, was a Palestinian who married a Lebanese man, but never missed a chance to advise everybody to prepare an emergency bag, in case they were ever to be displaced like her family was when she was just 4 years old. When Lama was younger, she used to accompany her mother on her weekly visits to Um Haitham’s. On every visit, after she’d served Arabic coffee for her mother, and filled Lama’s palms with strawberry-packaged hard candy, she would show off her father’s rusty key to the house they own in al-Birwa near Akka.
“My father, Allah Yerhamo, called it the key of memory,” she would say. Then she would tell the story of how they were forced to flee in 1948, supposedly to return a few weeks later when it was safe again. If there’s one thing she would take with her this time, it would be this key. And her famous zaatar mix too, thinks Lama.
They are led to a makeshift tent with two separate entryways, one designated for women and another for men. Lama is searched by a black-clad woman in her twenties, while the one sitting down, an older lady of about 55, thoroughly goes through her backpack.
“Where are you heading?” asks the woman in the abaya.
Lama does not answer. Her mother was behind her before she was ambushed by Um Haitham who wanted to catch up. She wants to say: home. Home. In her head, it sounds so simple. Walls, floor, bed, door. She could see every part of it in her mind. She could touch the face of her blue-eyed porcelain doll, which her mother had protested against, insisting it did not look like her. She would buy her a brown-eyed, black-haired, olive-skinned doll in place of it. She could smell her vanilla perfume on her pillowcase. She could remember the order in which she arranged titles of the books on her slightly-crooked bookshelf. Books everyone thought she was too young to be reading: Gibran’s Broken Wings, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Bint al-Huda’s short story collection. Even the chipped lavender wall paint comes to life in her mind. But when it comes to vocalizing the word, she is paralyzed. Her hands begin to sweat, her heart palpitates, and her lips quiver.
Memory is a creepy doll looking back at you with vacant eyes. Memory is a grapevine climbing a wall. Memory is a living thing, imposing itself on your mind. It gives and takes from its own belly, losing and gaining. It grows as you empty it. It is the answer to a riddle. An infinite ditch.
The woman notices her anxiousness. “Are you ok? Is there anyone with you?”
Just then, her mother enters and explains the situation. The ‘Lama situation’, as it is currently referred to among the adults in her family. What this has come to mean is the unsayable, as was the case with most mental illnesses back then. They are allowed to go through.
“Welcome home,” the volunteer says, as she gestures for them to exit through the opposite passage with a wave of her hand.
“I’m sorry.” Lama’s mother is looking at her consolingly, with cognizance of the expanse of the loneliness that engulfed her during these episodes, but says nothing to further disturb her. For this Lama is grateful, for the understanding in her mother’s eyes, the unrelenting support she has been endowed with, even though she sensed her mother’s helplessness and, frankly, lack of knowledge on the subject. Her mother squeezes her arm tenderly and leads her through the mayhem.
Memory is a jasmine tree enmeshed in a wire-link fence.
Before she can adjust her eyes to the light, Lama is overwhelmed with nostalgia. She remembers the dekene where she used to buy whatever her mother had asked for through the intercom as soon as the bus dropped her off from school. Packs of Farfalle pasta and dried basil, a jar of tomato paste for the sauce, bread, labne and tea for dinner. Something sweet for her.
“Put it on the tab. Baba will pay later.”
She would complain: “Pasta? Again?”, slam her bedroom door, take off her school uniform, and throw herself on the bed. “Why can't we be like normal Lebanese people?” she would protest, arguing that her friends’ moms made them stuffed vine leaves, potato lamb stew, and spiced rice.
“Well, your friends’ mothers who don’t work night shifts nursing sick people can gladly cook for you if you wish them to,” was her mother’s usual reply.
Eventually, she would surrender to the smell of the sauce permeating the air. Sitting at the table with a look of defeat, Lama secretly salivated over her dish. Now, she would give anything to be home again, the smell of her mother’s cooking filling every room of the apartment, homework spread on her bed, pretending to study for her Brevet exams while was covertly reading Wuthering Heights or listening to the Backstreet Boys on an outdated walkman.
From where she stands today, it seems so far in the past even though this was only a little over a month ago. Time had expanded and stretched like dough. Any other summer it would've been the opposite. Passed in the blink of an eye, lazy days progressing to the symphony of the electric fan in front of the TV, amid fights with her brother over who gets to turn on the air conditioner in their room. Watermelon slices, bowls of cherry, and sunflower seeds. Days on the beach. Sleepless nights and electricity cuts. Some days the heat would be so unbearable that the only way she could fall asleep was if she ate a lemon popsicle and lay on the tile floors. Even the coolness of the cold floor wouldn’t last long and she’d return to tossing and turning, furnishing herself onto fresh tiles until her back surrendered. When school was announced, she couldn't believe that it was over. Just like that.
The store, owned by an elderly man called Ammo Hasan, had stood next to a little bookshop. It had a distinct smell, a musk if there was any, a mishmash of dampness, gumballs, and tobacco. Rumor had it that Hasan had brought shame to his father by collaborating with the Israelis, but Lama’s father said that this was not true. They should not accept or circulate rumors, lest they cause an injustice. He unfurled his palms and recited al-Fatiha for Ammo Hasan’s soul. Lama, Ali, and their mother lowered their gaze and mumbled along.
The magnitude of the destruction is mind-boggling. Instead of walking on sidewalks they trapeze, traverse, climb, and descend mounds of debris. The bombings had swallowed the neighborhood, homes were reduced to rubble, stories flattened, photographs lost forever (she mourned those the most).
How do you retrieve any of that? How do you get back the time you lost? Who do you become after you’ve been deprived of everything that once defined you?
For thirty-three days, Lama has not spoken. Every time she tries to articulate a word, something stops her-- a silent grief that blockades her throat. Her mother worries she has become mute like her uncle who was diagnosed with “a certain disease of the mind”, the phrase tainted with ambiguity and inestimable pity. It happened after a bomb exploded near him while he was filling a jar of water from a creek in their village in South Lebanon. His nightmares were so vivid he would walk around the house, re-enact the events of that day, and howl uncontrollably. During the day, he wouldn’t even utter a sound. He never recovered. Even after the electroshock therapy sessions, which the doctors had insisted on, he never came back.
Not locked in, locked out. I’m knocking at the door and no one is answering. In this dream, there’s a door and nothing else.
The problem is quintessentially psychological. That’s what the psychiatrist said when Lama’s parents called to ask about her condition.
“It’s normal for kids to show signs of trauma during or after experiencing war,” she said. Dr. Rana put them down for an appointment as soon as it was possible to visit the clinic, that is, when the restoration work was done.
“Soon, inshallah,” she reassured them. The damage was superficial, only broken windows and wrecked furniture that needed to be replaced. “In the meantime, journaling can help her cope, maybe even heal.”
What Lama couldn’t find an explanation for was what she felt in her body. Her bones ached and she turned around on her mattress at night unable to sleep. She had gotten used to the sound of the Israeli reconnaissance drone over their heads. It was the pain she felt in her body that awakened at night, a suffering she felt akin to having one’s bones pulled and twisted and then poorly screwed back on. This was something she couldn’t admit to anyone. She did not want to be pitied or told it was all in her head. She certainly didn’t want to aggrieve her family. Perhaps this is why her tongue had also failed her. Soon enough, she would begin to hypothesize about her condition, writing down her symptoms and the conditions under which they appeared in a journal her mother bought her after the doctor’s suggestion. She would later type in her symptoms into a search engine on the computer and try to figure out what was wrong with her.
How does
One begin to rebuild
Memory from broken pieces without
Ever tumbling down?
Lama writes and rewrites an acrostic poem in her journal, convinced for one reason or another, that if she can take apart the word and reassemble it enough times, she will be able to say it. For a long time, she felt like she didn’t belong. But, after a while, she realized that she needed to erase what had been written. She will reconstruct everything that was hers; her room, her language, her body, her home. Yes, even home. Because she’s sure it has never left her. Tomorrow, her words will take a less sanguine tone.
Her thoughts churn and she makes another journal entry:
I can write, so why do I feel like speaking is impossible? Have I simply forgotten how to? Has my mind acquiesced to my body? Or is it the other way around? Is this somehow linked to the loss of my home? Was losing my home, my bedroom, my bookshelves, a trigger for a series of losses? Is my body simulating the agonies of my homeland? Death, dispossession, mourning, destruction; the scenes replay in my mind like a black-and-white Egyptian film.
She hides the journal inside the floral pillow cover and positions it neatly under her head when she pretends to sleep, afraid someone might read her thoughts and reprimand her for what she herself thinks: There’s nothing poetic about this. Your body doesn’t carry the burdens of the homeland. It’s all in your mind.
But why does it feel like I’m carrying the weight of leaving?
No matter, loss has become a habit. A thread that does not match the fabric on her school uniform, white against navy blue, her grandmother had once stitched for her. Something that will make you stand out. She had picked at it absentmindedly the entire school year until it came undone. She thinks about her grandmother’s hands, her eyeglasses, her hair-- the gaping chasm she has carved, the effect of which was worse than the wreckage that surrounded her.
Her jiddo was the first to leave, that’s what she thought of it, death, a departure, a gonenss that is permanent, that, no matter how hard she tried to make sense of, still left her in disbelief like pinching a phantom limb incredulously. When her grandmother died of a heart attack earlier this month, she became more sceptical of the meaning of absence.
She doesn’t know this yet, but she will experience this again at the beginning of the school year, as she will fumble toward her desk and see the space she shared with Jameela. A white chrysanthemum wreath sitting atop the desk. Jameela with the glass eye and slightly noticeable limp, who was always the first to raise her hand to answer the teacher’s questions, survived the Qana massacre in 1996. Whereas she and her sister were injured when the roof fell on top of them, her brother and mother were not harmed. Her father did not survive. She was proud of her survival, but always wrote poems about yearning to meet her father. Her essays almost always began with an anecdote, often about their neighbors or relatives who were massacred when the Israelis fired artillery shells at a UN compound where they had taken refuge during Operation Grapes of Wrath. She told stories about seeing her father in her dreams which solicited soft strokes on her head, a customary form of consoling orphans. For her English class project, she filmed a short documentary about her village, awkwardly pointing at the graves as she tried to be a reporter for a day. Lama remembered rolling her eyes when the whole class applauded the signoff, feeling a pulsating twinge of guilt.
On the first day of the school year, the principal will enter their class with great sorrow yet in a composed demeanour that three students from their school had been killed in the war. The whole class will stand for a moment of silence in their remembrance. Jameela’s name will be announced as one of the victims of the Second Qana massacre. Lama would contemplate the irony for a year before she realizes that this is what Jameela had always wanted.
Where else in the world did children want to live and die, when life was a puzzle with missing pieces, and death meant they could see their loved ones again?
The debris rolls before her, blanketing the streets like they never even existed. They will have a couple of hours when they reach the street where they once lived as they are told the location will be cordoned off after dark. She sees the top floor of their building crookedly sitting above the demolished storeys, because, even at fourteen years old, she knows warplanes strike lower floors first so that the whole structure crumbles down. Something about this newly-learned fact distresses her. She resents the inhumanity of wanting to erase something from existence, of course, but also how systematic and scientific cruelty can be. A grief smolders in her, and it pains her all the more, that she cannot give it a word.
Her hands tremble. Her eyes well up with the anger she has been pressing down. Such was the force of memory crushing everything around and within.
Lama returns to where her mind had diverted, unreeling the peripheral world she escapes to oftentimes, as she pitches her feet in the now uneven earth of reality. She begins to look for her things in the rubble hoping she could salvage some of her belongings, perhaps even what remains of herself.
*
Fatima Hanan El Reda has an MA in English Language and Literature from the Lebanese University and a BA in journalism. A lover of words and literature, she writes poetry and the occasional short story, reads voraciously, and is part of the bookstagram community. She lives in Dubai, but her heart is in Beirut.