At the sewing machine by me

I dont remember her, though the city of Haifa and she have become associated in my mind. She was named after one of the mountains in Haifa, Carmel. Having been in Afula for the past three weeks, and driven past Haifa and then been to Haifa, she came through my mind. While my grandfather, Abu Abdo, was from Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank that is close to Jerusalem, and he lived there almost all of this life, the story with my grandmother, Im Abdo, was different.

The only remenant connection to her home, the north, nanely Shfa Amer, remained through her cousins who would occastionally come visit her and her family in Bethelhem. Still, till today, her family of Nasrallah is prominent in Shfa Amr. By getting married, moving to a husband's house, and starting a family, I had the feeling that a part of a woman's story, at least my grandmother's story, becomes blurry, and in time, forgotten. Mother's stories are passed down, sometimes through their daughters, especially when they only have daughter. Wisdom leavened a mystery in women, their bodies, their stories.

The story has it that my grandmother, Carmel, escaped in 1948 with her family from Shfa Amer to Lebanon where she lived until she moved back to Bethelhem having married my grandfather, Abu Abdo. I still have cousins living in Lebanon, part of the Nasrallah family. But with no internet and the dispersed letters and pictures sent of the news of cousins, my grandmother's family, story and so on seem to have gotten lost somewhere between Lebanon, the north of Israel and the West Bank, on this very mountain in Haifa after which she was named: Carmel.

My aunt gave my mother some pictures that my grandfather, Abu Abdo, had taken throughout his life. My grandfather was a historian who continously documented everything from family life, religious celebrations and so on with his camera. Posing for the camera was annoying, especially during winter time when I would have to look at his head and the warm hat he always wore. The pile of pictures left in my mother's drawer had some dates, but not all.

Family from Lebanon, grandmother and daughter in Iraq, more people I did not know, black and white pictures. And then came the picture that remained imprinted in my memory, leaving its effects without remembering the story, much like Carmel's story was also fogotten. The picture was taken around the early ninties, and I must have been 10 or 12. Carmel was lying on the couch, dressed in her PJs, looking at the camera, at my grandfather, Abu Abdo. I was sitting accross from her at the couch, and we were playing tunj, a card game she would always beat me at! It was a family tradition to play tunj, and Carmel was known to win. I looked at the cards on the couch, remembered my evident defeat, despite my deterimination to win. Carmel was a master at tunj!

The next picture, she had drawn me near her, standing, with wraped gifts, and we both posed to my grandfather for yet again another picture. It was christmas time, the exciting time to get gifts, and yet a fear lingered inside of me at the time, among the pile of cards on the couch next to my grandmother, Im Abdo. It was cold and rainy in Bethelhem and I had somehow known that it might be her last christmas with us.

She had been diganosed with "that disease whose name we cannot mention", a few years ago, and went through surgery. She was in her early 60s, about twenty years ago, when breast cancer and its treatment were not that well known or even accepted in the community in Bethelhem. She refused to have chemotherapy and had a bilteral mastectomy in Augusta Victoria hospital in Jerualem. At the time, it was easy for people living in the West Bank to reach Jerusalem.

What remained with me as a child of Im Abdo was her look, her smile and her hands. She was a tailor who learned it from her sister, Rose, who took lessons for it. Im Abdo owned a sewing machine that she kept in the bedroom of my aunt, and she would often sew my own clothes. She was the first one to introduce me to velvet fabric, having made me and my sister our dresses.


Sitting at her sewing machine, she would take out her measuing meter, wrap it around my waist- the way I do it with my patients to measure their waste. She then would measure the length from my waste to my feet, the length from my chest to my arms and write down the measurements. It was a delight to get a new dress that she had made. She was not much of a story-teller like my grandmother Im Saleem, but the noise of the sewing machine, while i rocked my baby sister in her pram, remains with me till today.

Her fine eye for detail, her soft hands that measured my 6 year old body remained with her on that christmas eve as we both posed for the picture. "You have grown so much," she said, having been 10 and yet with a body of an older teenager. She turned me around for the picture but this time, she was not eyeballing my size to make another measurement for another dress. My grandfather, Abu Abdo, took another picture.

Today, I am a tailor myself, constantly eye balling people's bodies, doing measurements and sitting at my own sewing machine like Carmel Nassrallah, Im Abdo, used to do.