When we returned to our house in Yarmouk camp in the summer of 2020, there was no furniture left. Weeping, my mother named every piece of furniture, and reminded us how she had sold her earrings to buy the sofa she’d fallen in love with. My father enumerated the stolen items as he called my uncle, who was a refugee in Jordan: “They’ve stolen everything, even the door and windows. They pulled the electric wiring out of the wall, man, stole the water tank and the taps. Everything, everything, my brother.” To me the house looked naked, desecrated, violated. My grandmother Fatima told me how her family house had been desecrated in Tantura in Palestine in 1948. “The house was unable to defend us,” she said. “But it still weeps for us.”
When I laughed, she said reproachfully: “Don’t laugh. Houses have hearts that yearn and weep.”
2
My grandmother Fatima died in my arms on the prayer rug in the Omari mosque in the town of Qudsaya. She died wearing the sandy dress she loved. She was the one who named it the sandy dress because it was the color of sand. It was one of the few things she took with her when we were displaced from Yarmouk camp. A few hours before she died, she smiled and repeated the phrase she often used to praise me. “You’re the firstborn of the firstborn,” she said, implying that this fact granted me superior status among her grandchildren.
My grandmother’s smile was so sweet you felt as if her whole face, and even her dress, were smiling. I told her I hadn’t chosen to be the firstborn and couldn’t claim any credit for it. She frowned. Pointing to a pot of roses that one of the women displaced from Yarmouk had brought with her and placed at the door of the mosque, she said, “And did that rose choose to be beautiful?” She was silent for a while, before adding with her irresistible smile, “Did the gazelles of Rantis choose to have beautiful eyes?” She winked so I would understand she meant to compliment my eyes, which she had frequently compared to the eyes of the gazelles of Rantis in Palestine. Then she was overcome by a coughing fit and I rushed to give her some tissues. The box of tissues was one of the few things I brought with me when I left the camp, because I was haunted by my grandmother’s needs.
3
We left the camp walking in a crowd of people, my aunt muttering, “This is the fifth time I’ve been displaced.”
My brother Hakim, who was seven years old, brought his face as close up to mine as he could and said, “What about you? How many times have you been displaced, Maryam?”
I looked at him. “I’m like you,” I said, trying my best to hide the sadness that overwhelmed me. “This is the first time I’ve had to leave the house where I was born.”
“How many times does a person have to be displaced in their life?” asked Hakim.
“Why are you asking?” I said.
“So I know how many more times I have left,” he replied gravely.
My grandmother hugged him in the middle of the crowded road and said, “Only God knows.”
Like my father who was leading us, Hakim looked lost. He ran to keep up with us but soon grew tired and begged us to walk more slowly.
My aunt was muttering things we didn’t understand, and didn’t need to understand, since she wasn’t addressing any of us. Wiping her tears on the sleeve of her brown overcoat, she talked to the air, which seemed heavy with our sorrows.
4
In the camp I used to spend part of the day making sure my grandmother’s room was clean and noticing what she needed, paper handkerchiefs in particular. My grandmother was obsessed with cleanliness, but she suffered from a severe chronic cough. In the last year, before we left the camp and took refuge in the Omari mosque, I’d grown accustomed to hearing her say after every bout of coughing, “This time I’m going to die. I’m really going to die.”
I was also used to seeing my mother’s tears, whenever my grandmother hurled her prophesies of death into the room. She would repeatedly plead with my grandmother not to mention the word death, which came without any of the usual invocations to ward off evil.
“Mother, surely you’re used to her constant talk of death by now?” I said.
“We are surrounded by death on all sides,” replied my mother, her eyes filling with tears again. “It restricts our past and our present. Death is ugly and I don’t like people mentioning it in front of me.”
My grandmother smiles and covers her mouth with her hand. “Your mother’s very sensitive,” she whispers to me, “but she’s talking nonsense.”
“The doctors are puzzled by your grandmother’s cough, and so are we,” remarked my father one day.
Doctor Ahmad, famous for his medical expertise, said, “God knows what kind of allergy causes this cough.”
The truth is that secretly, so as not to upset Doctor Ahmad, my father took my grandmother to see other doctors, but they were equally baffled by the bouts of coughing. My grandmother tells me that she held her breath and suppressed her cough when she was in hiding, during the Tantura massacre in Palestine.
“I was young,” she said. “I stopped myself coughing as I ran along beside my mother towards the village of Fureidis at the foot of Mount Carmel. I saw how they put men in barrels, men I knew.” She sighs and looks towards the window as if her eyes were drilling through the glass and the weight of accumulated time. “That day the hot weather had begun and the wheat was ready for harvesting. No more than a few weeks after the founding of Israel, the newborn Israeli army shelled our village and attacked it with firearms. People called these soldiers the Alexandroni Brigade. They forced the men to climb into the barrels and opened fire on them. I heard the voices of the trapped men and saw blood flowing from the holes left by the bullets in the bodies of the barrels that summer. They say they forced our people to dig trenches, and then buried them there. My son Zahdi says they levelled the ground over the dead men and turned it into a parking lot.”
My mother cries. My mother cries if a branch snaps in the wind. My grandmother’s tales are full of stories of death, displacement, poverty and the ingenious ways people find to carry on living when times are hard.
“Your mother’s crying as if the past is with us in this living room,” says my grandmother smiling. “We have to think of our today and our tomorrow. What’s the point of crying?”
“Your grandmother is strong,” says my mother. “She can make fun of everything, even death.”
My grandmother tried all kinds of cough medicine and all the herbs advised by herb doctors. We boiled thyme and ginger for her, and when my aunt Fathiyya was displaced from Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli in Lebanon and came to live with us, she recommended another new treatment, rubbing my grandmother’s chest with black seed oil and from time to time feeding her a teaspoonful of the oil. My grandmother used to say she’d rather cough than take this medicine, but when my aunt gave me a spoonful it didn’t taste as horrible as my grandmother made it out to be. Maybe she was joking or being melodramatic.
Aunt Fathiyya was displaced from Nahr al-Bared camp in 2007 during the war between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, and my father welcomed her into our home in Yarmouk camp. She talks about the horrors in Nahr al-Bared, where she lost her only son during the bombing of the camp. My mother starts to cry again. My aunt says her tears have dried and she has wept for all the widows and bereaved mothers in the world. She laughs and then bursts into floods of tears again. Her husband died during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He was selling grilled corn on the cob in the street when a stray bullet ended his life. My aunt insists it wasn’t a stray bullet: “We Palestinians don’t die from stray bullets. We die from intended bullets.”
My mother loved Aunt Fathiyya, and my grandmother agreed to let her share her bedroom. This room was small, with a single bed, and no room for another bed unless we took the table out. Aunt Fathiyya said she would sleep in the living room on the metal sofa, but my grandmother insisted she sleep in her room and replaced the big table with a small table. My father bought a second-hand sofa that opened out to make a bed, and the room became a bedroom for my grandmother and aunt. I continued to be a regular visitor there, perhaps because I enjoyed my grandmother’s obvious love for me.
5
On December 17 2012, my father decided we should leave Yarmouk camp, and none of us objected.
“Death follows us wherever we go,” declared my aunt. “It would have been better to die in Palestine.”
“Now I’m going to die,” repeated my grandmother.
My mother cried as usual while she packed everybody’s suitcases and looked at the sofa she had bought with the money from the sale of her earrings. She had a tale to tell about every piece of furniture in our house. After the Russian MiGs bombed the heart of the camp and Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini mosque, my father said, “The important thing is that we all survived. None of us died.”
The crowd grew bigger as we went on. A man walking near me said, “In Palestine, American F16s bomb us, and here it’s Russian MiGs. It is as if they’re developing aircraft to test them on us.”
We didn’t know where we were going. My father was like a wounded bird. He had no idea where his feet were taking him. All the same we followed him in a human stream, the like of which I had never witnessed before. We left the camp, and in the Maidan Gate neighborhood my father managed to charge his cell phone at a restaurant, where we ate ful beans and hummus. As soon as the battery regained some power, the phone rang. Abu Khalil, our bald neighbor, who always wore a white shirt and thick glasses, was on the other end of the line.
“You can go to the Omari mosque in Qudsaya,” he told my father.
That was the first time I’d heard of this place. My grandmother didn’t cough the whole way there, but as soon as we reached the mosque she started to cough violently, as if compensating for the time she had spent without speaking or coughing or even sighing.
6
During our stay in the Omari mosque with more than a hundred displaced people from the camp, Abu Khalil talked about the killing of two hundred people in Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini mosque.
“And here we are, taking refuge in a mosque again,” said Abu Yasin. “How do we know it won’t be bombed too?”
My mother, like all the women, took great care of the bundle she kept hidden inside her bra. It contained her wedding ring and some cash she was secretly saving.
In the mosque my grandmother felt her end was approaching, and she too had a bundle of precious things hidden inside her bra. Her coughing fits grew more severe, but her resolve had weakened considerably. Leaning on my shoulder as we went to the bathroom, she began to speak again. “In Tantura,” she said, “the soldiers put my father into one of those barrels. His smothered voice still haunts me. He was one of the dead men inside the barrels, but my ears picked up his death rattle and that’s when the cough started. Doctors don’t know the cure for it. I’ll recover the day I return to our home there in Tantura, and then I’ll get rid of it at once.”
7
That evening my grandmother said, “Death seems closer than ever now. I don’t want you to inherit this cough from me.”
She took out her bundle and gently opened it, then began to bequeath its contents to me in front of all the people seeking refuge in the mosque. She held out a green bank note. “This is a Palestinian pound that my father gave me to give to my uncle Salim, but he died with my father on the day of the massacre.”
Then she gave me a single gold earring. “My husband gave me these earrings,” she said laughing. “I lost the other one on our exodus from Beirut to Damascus.”
Next she handed me an old key that she had kept polished and shiny. “This is the key to our house in Tantura,” she said. “This is the most important thing you’re going to inherit.” She laughed again. “You’ll inherit the worry, generation after generation, until we return to Tantura and open our houses with these keys. You may not find the door,” she added, “but you’ll find a wall in a house where you can hang this key.”
My grandmother made me promise to bathe her in the fountain set aside for women’s ablutions in the mosque and we agreed that I would arrange her hair nicely when she died and bury her in her sandy dress.
“I think it’s suitable for meeting the Lord,” she said smiling.
My grandmother confused me and I didn’t know if she meant what she said or was just making fun of everything.
That evening she talked a lot about her journey from Palestine to Sidon, then to Tyre, Beirut and eventually Damascus. Her memory seemed as clear as a stream and flowed as gently. Many of the displaced people gathered around her and listened to her recount her history full of pain and witnessed the sweet way she spoke. They also witnessed her final coughing fit, which ended this time with her dying in my arms as I sat on a prayer rug in the Omari mosque in Qudsaya in Damascus. Now I, like my mother and grandmother, carry a small bundle hidden in my bra, which contains the key to our house in Tantura, a single earring and a Palestinian pound.
