A Balcony Over the Fakihani

Liyana Badr. Interlink, 1993, 127 pp. List: $9.95; AET: $7.50.

Reviewed by Marilyn Raschka

In July 1981, scores of balconies in the Fakihani neighborhood of Beirut made the news when the Israeli air force dropped bombs on this crowded area with its mixed Palestinian and Lebanese population. In the U.S., however, what might otherwise have been front-page material was squeezed out by a domestic news story on the same day which, ironically, was about a balcony or walkway which collapsed in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri.

Palestinian author Liyana Badr focuses on just one balcony in Fakihani in her title story, one of three narrative novellas in this collection. The neighborhood looks as rundown today as it did in the 1982 setting Badr chose for her story. But Fakihani’s commercial role as a bus and taxi center for areas east and south of Beirut gives it a lively look and it’s easy to forget the years of violence that were played out here.

In Badr’s first piece, “A Land of Rock and Thyme,” Yusra, a young widow, cries out inconsolably: “Don’t talk to me about forgetting.” This theme is written into all the scenarios the author recreates from real-life events. Her intent of breathing life and its counterpart, death, into what are now archival newspaper reports is accomplished with skill and credibility. The stories are fiction only in format. The chronology and places are actual.

Each tells of the misery of Palestinian life in Lebanon, of endless flight and struggle. Telling of the siege of Tal al-Zaatar refugee camp by Christian militias, Badr focuses on the daily fight to get water. While the young Yusra is in line for water, her father is dying at home from a shrapnel wound. It is he who insists she not be summoned so that she won’t lose her place in line.

So desperate for water, people would risk their lives and stubbornly stay in line even when the area was being shelled. Only when one of the men would turn off the tap would they abandon the line and seek cover.

The violence of everyday life fills page after page. A piece of shrapnel is embedded in the stomach of an 11-year-old boy. The mother tries to take him to the Red Cross but can’t get there. Badr tells the story no further but shifts back to the search for water.

She presents the brutality of those times in short single-paragraph episodes devoid of blame or accusation. Her main characters are young and have lived with violence all their lives. There is no surprise or fanfare.

When Yusra marries Ahmad, the couple move into a house in a deserted village, the only accommodation they can find: She describes it as “an eerie house with no doors, no windows, no floor and no sanitation... Stripped of its tile, the floor was just sand and gravel...”

Death follows life and life follows death in these stories. Young brides become widows. Wives become widowed mothers. Sons are made martyrs in an afternoon. Sunny afternoons of conversation on the balcony are remembered in the same thought as searching through the rubble of those balconies for bodies after that July 1981 Israeli raid.

Jerusalem-born Badr tells of the inevitability of death in a macabre “urban legend.” In Tal al-Zaatar refugee camp, coffins were made from cupboard doors for lack of wood. One young man morbidly stands next to such a door and measures his body, saying, “When I die, put me in this coffin.” A moment later he is killed by shrapnel and he is put in the coffin he’d measured for himself.

Badr’s characters are not heroines but mourners and survivors of tragedy who must always be prepared for more. When Tal al-Zaatar camp falls and the camp residents leave, the Christian Phalangists stand watching as they march by. They grab a man who cries out in fear: “For God’s sake!” “Which God?” the Phalangists demand to know. A single shot ends the interrogation and the man’s life.

Badr ends her trilogy with “The Canary and the Sea,” a story of Diaspora told through a Palestinian named Abu Husain al-Shuwaiki. This story of flight is rooted in the first Diaspora and tells of his uncle, who as an 11-year-old was separated from his mother in the 1948 panic. She ended up in Amman, Jordan, and he in Acre, Israel. He wandered the streets until an old lady in Acre, who had neither husband nor children, took him in and brought him up. Years later mother and son find each other through the Red Cross, but only for a brief meeting at the Mandelbaum Gate. She didn’t recognize him. He was then 22.

Abu Husain describes the pariah existence of many Palestinians in Beirut. “We lived in Sunaubara in Ras Beirut, and I soon came to feel that the word Palestinian had a different meaning in Lebanon, conjuring up, immediately, the army, authority and the secret police.”

The young man becomes a fighter during the war in Lebanon. Badr’s most brilliant passages describe his almost fatal encounter in the 1982 Israeli invasion with a contingent of Israeli soldiers and Phalangists. Seriously wounded and mistreated by the Israeli soldiers, he is taken as a prisoner of war to Israel for medical treatment and interrogation, released through the offices of the Red Cross, bused back to Lebanon and then sent into exile on the last boat of PLO fighters to leave Beirut for Tunis. On the trip out of Israel, he passes the village his uncle and grandmother once called home. “Widowed” from his homeland, he too could cry, “Don’t talk to me about forgetting.”