UMM SAAD LIVED FOR COUNTLESS YEARS WITH MY family in al-Ghabasiya, and since then she has lived for a crushing load of years in the torment of the camps. She still comes to our house every Tuesday. She looks at things, conscious of her part in them to the marrow of her bones, and she looks on me as a son, pouring into my ear the tales of her misery, her joy, and her troubles. But never once does she complain.
She is a woman of about forty, I think, with a strength greater than rock and a patience more than endurance itself. She spends every day of her week coming and going, living her life ten times over in toil to snatch for herself and her children an honest bit to eat.
I have known her for years. She represents something in my life that I cannot do without. When she knocks on the door and puts her poor belongings down in the hall, I am enveloped in the smell of the camps, in their misery and deep-rooted steadfastness, their poverty and hopes. Again my mouth is filled with the bitterness that I have tasted year after year until it has sickened me.
Last Tuesday she came as usual, put down her poor bundle, and turned to face me.
“Cousin, I want to tell you something. Saad has gone.”
“Where?”
“To them.”
“Who?”
“The fedayeen.”
A cautious silence fell between us, and suddenly I saw her sitting there, ageing, strong, her life worn away by wretched toil. Her hands were folded in her lap, and I could see the palms, dry as blocks of wood, cracked like an old tree trunk. Through the furrows that years of hard work had traced in them, I could see her sorry journey with Saad, from the time when he was a child until he grew to maturity. Those firm hands had nourished him as the earth nourishes the stem of a tender plant, and now they had opened suddenly, and the bird that had nestled there for twenty years had flown away.
“He’s joined the fedayeen.”
I was still gazing at her hands, folded palms upwards like two disappointed creatures, crying out from the heart, chasing the man who was leaving everything for danger and the unknown. Why, O God, must mothers lose their sons? For the first time I was seeing that heartbreaking situation, at a word’s distance from me, as though we were in a Greek theatre living out a scene of inconsolable grief. Trying to distract her and myself, I asked her:
“What did he tell you?”
“He didn’t say anything. He simply went. In the morning his friend told me he had gone to join them.”
“Didn’t he tell you before that he would go?”
“Oh, yes. And I believed him. I know Saad, and I knew that he would go.”
“Then why were you surprised?”
“Me? I wasn’t surprised. I’m just telling you about it. I said to myself: ‘You may be interested to know what’s become of Saad.’”
The hands, folded in her lap, moved, and I could see them, beautiful, strong, always capable of making something. I doubted whether they were really lamenting. She added:
“No, I said to my neighbor this morning: ‘I wish I had ten like him.’ I’m tired, cousin. I’ve worn my life threadbare in that camp. Every morning I say ‘O, Lord.’ Twenty years have passed now, and if Saad doesn’t go, who will?” She stood up, and an air of simplicity came over the room. Everything seemed more familiar, and I could see the houses of al-Ghabasiya in it again. But I followed her to the kitchen. There she laughed as she looked at me, saying:
“I told the woman sitting beside me on the bus that my son had become a combatant…. I told her that I loved him and missed him, but he was a true son of his mother. Do you think they’ll give him a machine gun?”
“They always give their men machine guns.”
“And what about food?”
“They have enough to eat, and they’re given cigarettes.”
“Saad doesn’t smoke, but I’m sure that he will learn to there. Light of his mother’s eyes! I wish he were nearby, so I could take him food every day that I had cooked myself.”
“He’ll eat the same as his companions.”
“God bless them all.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned to face me. “Do you think he’d be pleased if I went to see him? I can save the money for the journey, and get there in two days.” She remembered something and finished off: “Do you know something? Children are slavery. If I didn’t have these two children, I’d have followed him. I’d have lived there with him. In a tent, yes, a tent in a refugee camp is quite different from one in a guerrilla base. I would have lived with them, cooked for them, done all I could for them. But children are slavery.”
I replied:
“There’s no need to visit him there. Let him manage alone. A man who joins the fedayeen doesn’t need his mother to look after him anymore.”
She wiped her hands on her apron. Deep in her eyes I glimpsed something like disappointment, that terrifying moment when a mother feels that she can be dispensed with and thrown into a corner like an object worn out with use. She came closer, asking:
“Do you really think so? Do you think there’s no point in my going to the commander there and asking him to keep an eye on him?” She hesitated, feeling torn in two. Then she asked:
“Or could you ask his commander to keep an eye on him? Say to him: ‘Look after Saad, may God give your children long life.’”
“How?” I replied. “You can’t ask someone to look after a guerrilla.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d be asking his commander to arrange things so that he stayed out of danger. But Saad himself, and his companions, believe the best way to look after them would be to send them to war immediately.”
Again she sat there, but she seemed stronger than I had ever seen her. I watched a mother’s perplexity and torment in her eyes and hard hands. At last she made up her mind.
“I tell you what. When you tell his commander to look after him, advise him not to annoy him. Say to him: ‘Umm Saad begs you, for your mother’s sake, to let Saad do what he wants. He’s a good lad, and when he wants something and it doesn’t happen, he gets very miserable.’ Tell him, I beg you, to let Saad do what he wants. If he wants to go to war, then why doesn’t his commander send him?”