The Woman From Tantoura by Radwa Ashour Read Free Book Online Page B

moment when we sat together, something that had never happened before and that would notbe given to me again. He was speaking only to me. Everyone was asleep except for us two, and he was confiding in me as if he weren’t my father, who ordered and forbade and to whom my brothers and I didn’t dare lift up our eyes, for fear of meeting his eyes. We would stand like soldiers at attention in his presence, not moving or making a sound. But here I was sitting near him, not glancing at him furtively but looking at him directly, noticing, as he spoke, that his face was handsome, sweet, and good, and that his eyes were an ambiguous color between green and blue, more blue than green, and that in his very black hair there were three white strands.
    My father spoke to me, saying, “When we would go to Damascus, your uncle and I, we would take the train from the Haifa East station and arrive in Samakh in a little over two hours. There would be many tourists in the train with us; they would get off at Samakh because they wanted to see the lake where our Lord Jesus walked on the water. There was a walkway connecting the station to the lake, so they would take it to ride in little boats on the lake and look at the city of Tiberias, and then they would take the train back to Haifa. As for us, we would continue on to Damascus.
    “At the end of the First World War fierce battles took place between the Turks and the English. Some of them took place in the station buildings, when the fighting was house to house. Samakh is important because it’s the key to the road from Tiberias to Damascus. At the time of the revolt in ’36, ’37, and ’38, your uncle Abu Amin and I would go to Samakh a lot, but we would avoid riding the train because the English had created a team of Jewish wardens to guard the railway from the rebels, a team the English trained along with the Hagana. They would inspect the trains and bridges and surrounding areas for fear of rebel strikes. There were a lot of colonies in the area.
    “The Hijaz line connected Haifa to Daraa and Daraa to Damascus and Amman, arriving in Medina The Blessed in Arabia. People called it the Hamidiyeh Railway because Sultan Abd al-Hamid was the one who was enthusiastic about the project and ordered itstarted, and he was the first who contributed to creating it. In the Hijaz they called it ‘the sultan’s donkey.’”
    I laughed, and repeated after him, “The sultan’s donkey!” He laughed, and continued, “The line was created from the contributions of the Muslims, Arabs, and Turks and Iranians and Indians, and it was considered an inalienable Islamic trust. The intention was for it to extend from Medina to Mecca and from there to Yemen. When the Turks left and the English came, the project stopped. The existing railroad in Palestine came under the control of the English occupying power, and they named it ‘Palestine Railways.’ It ended in Samakh, and after that the line was under the control of the French occupying power in Syria. The train stopped at al-Himma, and when it arrived in Daraa the line branched into a railway for trains headed to Damascus and a railway headed for Amman.
    “Two years before the beginning of the First World War your grandfather traveled to the hajj pilgrimage by train. My mother bade him farewell at the door of the house, and my uncles, God have mercy on them all, accompanied him to Haifa. Your uncle Abu Amin was four, and he clung to my father and started to cry. My uncles took pity on him and decided to take him with them. I looked up at them. I didn’t cry, I didn’t say a thing, I just looked up. They said, ‘Come with us, boy.’
    “We took a horse-drawn carriage to Haifa. We bade my father farewell at the Haifa East station, the station for the Hijaz line. I began to look everywhere, dazzled by what I saw—the station building, the gate, the monument that was higher than anything I had ever seen before, the train. It was colored; I remember