Next to the nostalgia for everything, Abu Hassan’s face looks like an old vessel with inscriptions of a story too long to recount. The man who has aged as if life had eaten the sides of his body, worn down as he arranges flower pots on the metallic balcony balustrade, where he likes to snatch quietude and plunge into it as an ally of silence, over a cup of coffee and the soft sound coming from his radio broadcasting the songs of Fairouz, Wadih el-Safi and Nasri Shamseddine, watching the steps of Umm Hassan, who aged alongside him, and three “flowers” inside the house who are a lifetime’s harvest.
The members of that family in the neighborhood had nothing to do with any of the things that made it into the Guinness Book, or the summits of the Arab nation for that matter. They are people who call things as they are – shelter, wall, work. From the windows of his one-story house, life looks like a relay race. The father leaves at dawn with his fava bean cart, looking over the smell of cumin, sliced onions, gas burning on low, and the spices leaving you with a taste that ties you to the place. You don’t forget a corner where Abu Hassan stands. At noon, his daughters come out of school; at night, thousands of stories he inherited from grandmothers and mothers and the earth, which only passed down to him a cart for toil and a family for happiness.
Every day, his three daughters leave for school, accompanied by their mother’s prayers, as if these hundred meters were a path in a wild forest, inhospitable to everything but the mercy of God. At school, all days seem alike – girl secrets, dreams arranged on shelves and in drawers being erected and tumbling down. Some of them dream of universities away from the neighborhood that comes to a standstill in the morning and comes back to life late into the evening. Others dream of a knight of flesh and blood, astride a happy life. Reading, languages and sports. They were three roses on the stage of life summed up in two weary faces bearing the name of Hassan, a boy they never had.
Shadow Box, an artwork by one of the children taking part in the “Forsa” (Opportunity) project organized by Search for Common Ground as part of drawing workshops aiming to integrate host and nurturing environments through the arts
The mother spreads the aromas of her cooking around the neighborhood, the aromas of spices seasoning traditional dishes, of the mujaddara [brown lentil porridge] laid out in the center and surrounded by yoghurt, onions and bread… winter soups during a season that goes by like a familiar foe whose movements they know well, making them desert the balcony, but taking care of the pots that grew with every prayer, every detail of the life of a family that build its home with love and warmth. The floor was spacious enough to accommodate their meals, sitting on sponge mattresses with their legs crossed, in an oriental position that traces a circle around the fire place, brought together around it like a choir in unison before coming out on stage, putting down charters of support and all for one.
The rain washes the neighborhood all at once. The smell of dirt paints a line of life in silence and in the hustle and bustle. The cold leaves a red flush on faces like that of shyness. The cart positioned at the corner becomes a haven of warmth for those escaping the hellish biting cold. Abu Hassan sits next to it, placing firewood in a can, worn-out like his lifetime, like all journeys he had lived through – as a boy, young man and old man – and the owner of a cart that provides for a family, pushing it towards the top of comfort, with devotion and steadfastness.
He blows out smoke on another balcony, looking out at a new path, a path in a new country, different to the one in which he had piled joy and memories in. The war years ground on past. Sadness gnawed at him about what he had left behind and all those that passed away. Bombs, rockets and car bombs have levelled everything. Corners now hide murderers of all forms, all the details of the love that ties them to their place of origin, their place of birth, and what the wind of the last days there bore, has been lost in the jostle of track vehicles and bullets.
The picture passed as cruel as death, before this arrival, and before the attempts they had set their eyes on in the new place. The last thing they remember of their land is that the bus was swaying, like a toy car in the hands of a child, with marks of wear and tear after hours of playing with it, now living its final seconds. Everybody turned around to their land, as if bidding farewell to a dead person just before laying in the ground, with the whistling of shells, the ringing of bombs landing in the hearts, as if the earth has been given out to dark-skinned people who cannot count to ten before love, cannot leave God alone, and cannot flee but together.
The road to Lebanon was long. They had to come across all the faces that forced them to leave, with all their different flags. It was enough for someone to say, "What would have happened if this kid hadn’t done that," and the salvo of voices would ring in unison, “Allah had decreed it and what He willed has happened.” And in the silence of each the condemnation of all by all, that they are the victims of all the mistakes – the mistake of the parents, the mistake of the land, and the mistake of the leaders and the young man who stabbed the heart, and left them another appearance in a bus swaying on the road to Lebanon.
This night is heavy with a stony silence. There is another farewell to go through, and another memory they have to live with. Two journeys.
Here, the houses have become closer to them. They have become the children of the place, new neighbors to people who know who the newcomers were, what sadness they bear, and what windows they open to restore something from an old neighborhood they had lived in.
Abu Hassan put his life in order on a cart of corn, fava beans, and lupin beans. He began pushing joy on mountain roads, near schools to house them, next to people looking into each other’s hearts so that grief for what they had lost there would not be extinguished. But the place became their identity that did not force them as before to tremble.
His daughters became more beautiful from all what they had suffered. The schools were easing his grief, the roads that everyone walked on, to everyone, life became windows opening up to hope. They set up in the place everything that resembled them: the meals of their women, the clothes of their little ones, their dialect, shyness, and their eyes that were beginning to forget the grief reserved for them.
The city with all its fear grew accustomed to them. It reconciled with the new faces, with their cries for livelihoods. Painters, electricians and cart vendors. It reconciled with all that had passed as if it were other people. Life became shared, or at least for Abu Hassan, shared without sadness, fear or confusion about an identity that is still in their hands.
The heart of the matter is that he was tired of paying the price of a sin he did not commit, nor that those sharing the bus with him the first time and probably the second committed. Everybody gathered their things. Abu Hassan placed the things from his second home on the cart that was swaying on the road to a new dwelling. Their curse was repeated. Every time someone stabs their hearts, they leave without a land. The journey of fear and the fleeting moments of respite in between forces them to run towards any salvation. The pose of those leaving mourns the girl whose image was the sadness of the whole earth. She was their daughter, their sister, their neighbor and of an identity that did not confuse them. She was the daughter of their kinspeople. Abu Hasan turned and his weeping was louder than the voice of everyone else. No moan coming out, as a man with two hearts, one beating in an old corner and the other awaiting his new dwelling.