Title card:
Maryam Yaqub, age 45 [continued].
“… We stopped at another roadblock and they took us out of the truck to search us. I had a little sugar and salt in a teapot, and a lot of photos of my children and the deeds to our land in Palestine inside a box…”
Title card:
Tharya Qasim, age 48, mother of five.
“… I had a son — God have mercy on his soul. His name was Muhammad and he was around eighteen. He had fire in his belly. He never let the gun out of his hands. But God made it his fate to die a martyr on July 2, 1976, on the field of honor and heroism. About a week later, my other son Ibrahim was martyred. He wasn’t yet fourteen years old. I was very sad. I mourned for them the way any mother would, and also because I no longer had any young men I could offer to fight and defend our honor. My husband is an older man and he’s not in good health.
“As for my daughters, may God protect them, wherever they are. I had three daughters: Lamia, who was twenty, Ayida, who was twenty-two, and Dina, who was seventeen. They used to help at the aid stations, and then they went up into the mountains. To this day, I’ve heard no news, good or bad, about them. I don’t know whether they were martyred or if they’re still alive…”
Title card:
Randa Ibrahim al-Duqi, age 14 [continued].
‘‘… On the last night, we were able to get through to Yasser Arafat on the two-way radio, and we asked him what we should do. He told us: ‘Don’t surrender.’ ’’
Title card:
A woman who didn’t give her name.
“… Tel Zaatar was the last holdout in East Beirut. It was obvious that the isolationists won because they had the support of Syria and Israel, and because Tel Zaatar was cut off from our areas. An early surrender could have been negotiated. But instead, more than 2,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were martyred unnecessarily.”
Title card:
Watifa Shahada Dahir, age 35, mother of seven.
“It was obvious to everybody the camp would fall, because there were more martyred and wounded than there were fighters. Our brothers in West Beirut didn’t send us a single fighter or ammunition for the artillery and other weapons to replace what we lost in over fifty-eight attacks by the isolationists.”
Title card:
Nuzha Hasan al-Duqi, age 65, mother of five sons and grandmother of ten [continued].
‘‘… What did we do wrong, Miss? I don’t know. What did we do wrong, that we have to die to return to our land? Is that so wrong? What do they want from us… Make us disappear?’’
Chapter 16
Jacques LeRot and his wife welcomed us warmly. With a laugh, he began repeatedly welcoming us in Arabic: “Ahleen … ahleen.”
He was of medium build, like most Frenchmen, around thirty-five, with a sardonic look beaming from his smiling eyes, and always laughing for no apparent reason. His wife had a full head of black hair, and looked older than he was.
They walked us to a spacious room lit by side-table lamps. I shook hands with Marwan, the one with the thick mustache, and his friend the film director, and another young man with a thick beard that covered his entire face.
I sat down in a comfortable chair with polished wooden armrests. Grinning, Jacques addressed me in perfect Arabic that had no trace of a foreign accent: “We’re always bumping into each other.”
“The last time you were studying the minarets of Cairo,” I replied.
He laughed out loud. “Now I’m studying the Lebanese dialect,” he said.
He turned to Antoinette.
“How’s the film going?” he inquired.
“Good. It’s coming along,” she replied.
“Are you sure?” he asked, winking in my direction as he leaned over a small table with a row of liquor bottles on it.
He poured each of us a glass of gin, then walked to a big stereo that had a clear plastic cover on it, and asked: “Fairuz or Umm Kulthum?”
“Bach,” I said.
He laughed as he flipped through his record collection.
“This is the real reason for the failure of the Arab left. Chasing after European culture and being disconnected from the masses.”
“Bach belongs to everyone,” I objected.
He picked up a record, and said: “How about something modern, close to Bach and Arab music as well? Have you heard of Charette?”
I shook my head. He put the record on the turntable, and placed the needle on it, then went back to his seat.
Antoinette was engrossed in a conversation in French with Jacques’s wife. Jacques directed his speech toward Marwan, while pointing at a piece of paper lying on the table in front of him: “Not a single newspaper in France will publish the petition in its current form.”
Marwan’s eyes were sharply focused on him.
“Why?” the young man with the beard asked in a challenging tone.
He laughed. “Because it’s talking about the detention of several dozen leftists, while there are thousands of others being detained in Syria, from the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups. Plus, it doesn’t clearly establish responsibility. We all know that if it weren’t for the Soviet Union, the Syrian regime would collapse. The petition doesn’t point that out directly.”
Marwan bowed his head, saying: “I see your point. The wording of the petition has to be changed.”
“That’s impossible,” the young man with the beard angrily interjected.
Antoinette joined in, saying: “If you change the wording of the petition, I will withdraw my name from it.”
Jacques laughed. “You don’t have to change it,” he said. “You can do a different wording for the French text.”
I followed the conversation while listening to the music. It was quite similar to pieces played on the Arab instrument known as the qanun. But its structure was complex, and bit by bit it ascended until it was on the verge of reaching a climax, at which point it retreated to the beginning, only to begin a new attempt.
Jacques’s wife invited us to a table, laden with platters and gold-trimmed porcelain dishes. We started with soup, followed by the rest of the courses, according to the traditional sequence. We finished with coffee and cognac in the first room.
“Do you know that tomorrow will be the third anniversary of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem?” Jacques asked, as he took a small wrapped package the size of a matchbox out of a cigar box and placed it on the table.
Marwan picked up the package and opened the thin wrapping, then brought it up to his nose and said: “This is an excellent variety.”
“I got it yesterday from Baalbek,” Jacques explained.
He took a wooden peg out of the cigar box and handed it to the film director. With a practiced motion, the director stuck it into the tip of a cigarette and began moving it in and out. He took a small lump of hashish from the package, rubbed it thoroughly between his fingers, and rolled it between his palms. Then he pushed it into the cigarette, in the empty space made by the wooden peg. He offered the cigarette to Jacques’s wife and lit it for her.
The Frenchwoman took a deep drag that made the end of it glow, extending more than a centimeter up the joint. Then she passed it to Antoinette, saying: “I was in Cairo this spring when the Israeli ambassador arrived. The sight of his car making its way across downtown, flying the Israeli flag, was truly jaw-dropping.”