A boy of ten years could understand the success of the Popular Front in capturing airliners of enemies, but a boy of ten years did not understand that such a capture could be regarded as a legitimate provocation by the king of Jordan, justification for terminating the state within a state, the Palestinian autonomy inside the kingdom. His grandfather was dead, his grandmother was blinded, the family tribe was again destitute, again uprooted.
Abu Hamid was pale faced when he emerged from the latrine. He left the rat to eye the next man. He walked away towards the perimeter fence, sucking in the clean air. And it was the same each morning. Each morning he thought he would be sick, throw up in front of the recruits, when he came out of the latrine.
Memories of the family settling in another tent on the edge of the Rachadiye camp outside the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. The family tribe was a rolling stone, tumbling from a tent at Jericho to a tent at Amman to a tent at Tyre. By the time he was aged 15, by the time-that Abu Hamid took the oath of the Popular Front, his unseeing grandmother had died. It was the end of 1975.
He knew all the events of that year. He knew of the martyrdom of the Comrades who had captured the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv and given their lives at cost to the enemy. He knew of the heroism of the commando who had killed and wounded nearly a hundred enemy with his bomb in the cafe by Zion Square in Jerusalem.
He knew of the men who had captured the OPEC conference and turned the eyes of the world on the suffering of the Palestinian people.
He gazed out over the quiet hillside beyond the perimeter fence. He watched the stillness. He listened to the silence. So great a stillness, so great a silence, as if the possibility of warfare did not exist.
His memories told him of the dispersal of his family tribe. He did not know where were his uncles and his aunts, his cousins, his nephews and his nieces. He knew that his brother, two years older than himself, had died fighting the Israelis in 1982 at Sidon. He knew that his sister had been wounded at Damour that same bitter summer. He knew that his parents were besieged by the Shi'a militia in the camp at Rachadiye.
He walked slowly along the perimeter fence. He saw the rat holes and the paper rubbish caught on the coiled wire. Since he had joined the Popular Front, twelve years ago, he had suffered the dream. The dream was to walk the street in Jaffa until he came to the house that was now an Italian restaurant. The dream was to put out of his grandfather's house those who had made a home into a restaurant, put them out on the street and there bayonet them. The dream was to take the hands of his father and mother and to lead them from Rachadiye to Jaffa and to take them to the house that had been his grandfather's and to give them the key and to tell them that what was rightfully theirs was theirs once more.
The dream was in his mind as he walked the fence.
When he had the dream he had strength. The girl had given him the strength to dream of the house in Jaffa.
The girl had taken the promise from him, the promise to go to Israel, the promise to kill Jews. As if he had never wavered. Margarethe had fashioned the courage lor him to dream of walking on the street in Jaffa. He saw her in the badly lit dormitory for the orphans.
He was jolted from his thoughts.
He had stumbled against the rail post that marked the entrance to an air raid bunker.
Abu Hamid looked at the filled sleeping bag at the bottom of the steps, he saw the black hair that was the crown of a head peeping from the bag.
His anger flashed. He thought a recruit was hiding in the bunker to avoid duties. He scratched up a handful of small stones, threw them down on the head. He heard the oath, he watched the convulsive movement, he saw Fawzi's face.
He almost laughed, whatever his own instinctive anger had been was nothing set against the disturbed fury of the Syrian officer.
"I thought you were a malingerer," Abu Hamid said.
"I did not think to find our Political Liaison hiding in an air raid bunker."
"That stuffs in my eye."
"You sleep better there than in a bed?"
"Are you a fool or are you still asleep?"
"Are you telling me that if I don't take my sleeping bag into a bunker then I am a fool?"
Fawzi wriggled his shoulders clear of the bag. He was shouting up from the dank dark of the bottom of the steps. "I was back late last night. I walked into this place, like it was a hotel on the Beirut Corniche. Try getting out of your bed in the night, hero, and try checking your sentries. Try counting how many are asleep. I walked in here, if I had been an enemy you would have been dead."
Abu Hamid sneered, "I thought we were under the protection of the omnipotent forces of the army of the Syrian Arab Republic. Do you think so little of that protection that you sleep in a bunker?"
"When I sleep in this camp, now that I am back with you, I will sleep in a bunker until… "
"Until what?"
"Until the air raid."
"What air raid?"
"Then you are a fool, Abu Hamid, you are stupid."
"Give me the breadth of your wisdom."
"Even a fool knows there will be an air raid… Six days ago a bomb was exploded at the bus station in Tel Aviv… A fool knows that each time there is a major attack inside Israel that they retaliate with their aircraft, or has Abu Hamid forgotten? We have not yet had the air raid, but do not think the Israeli sleeps, he never sleeps. The Israeli will bomb us. The Israeli has to find a target. I do not want to be woken to the sound of you idiots trying to launch Strelas, trying to fire the DShKMs. I want to be able merely to crawl a few metres into the depths of a bunker should they strike our camp. Until they have bombed only an idiot would choose to sleep in a tent."
The fight was gone from Abu Hamid. He asked quietly, "Why our camp? They died both of them, they were not interrogated."
"I am just careful, because I am careful I will live to be an old man. It is my intention to die in my bed, Abu Hamid."
He saw the surprise cloud fast across the face of the old man on the steps of the Oreanda Hotel. He saw the shock spread into the eyes of the girl who walked in front of him. He could not know whether he was marked, whether he was identified. He trembled.
"If we hide in holes in the ground we show them our fear."
Fawzi rolled his bag, climbed the steps, belched.
"And that to me is a small matter."
"Then you are a coward."
"Then I am a survivor."
Abu Hamid gazed into the clearness of the skies. He saw an eagle wheel, high on a thermal draft. He saw the peace of the valley.
The telephone rang.
Rebecca reached for the receiver.
She wrote on her notepad. She never spoke. She put down the telephone.
"The Chief of the Air Staff will see you in his office, immediately," she said. "And for love's sake, tidy yourself."
"So they both died, brave boys."
"They died in the cause of freedom."
The Arab traveller shrugged. He leaned against the wall of sandbags. The marijuana had been passed, a package hidden in rolled newspaper, for circulation amongst the NORBAT platoon.
The traveller and Hendrik Olaffson talked quietly.
The other troops manning the UNIFIL post were engaged in searching vehicles. They talked without being overheard.
"From our positien we were able to see the girl who came with the bomb on her donkey, yesterday. She had not come through our check, she must have skirted us and gone across country, but we could see her getting towards the SLA and Israeli block. I tell you this, friend, they were waiting for her. That is certain. Even before she came within sight they had moved their people back behind the fortifications, as soon as she appeared, when she was hundreds of metres away, they were all behind cover. For certain they were waiting for her, ready for her."
"A sweet child of courage."