And then, when Bernadette asked him his name, he’d answered in his moment of drunkenness that it was Sinalcol!
“Do you still remember, Karim, what I always used to say though nobody believed me? Now all of you can see with your own eyes how right I was.”
“You’re always right, Danny.”
“My name’s Faris, not Danny. Danny was the political name I used in the days of the Fedayeen. Now it’s over. Danny’s dead and it’s Faris sitting in front of you. Really though, I don’t know what to call myself. When I hear the students calling me Mr. Faris, I split my sides laughing. Imagine the insult to one’s dignity when one doesn’t know what one’s name is any longer! As I used to say, ‘The bastards ride boats and the heroes have to swim back.’ ”
“Is it true what they say about Maroun, that he had a tall blond girl with him and she disappeared?” asked Karim.
“It’s not important,” answered Danny. “Maroun came to see me before he started shooting the film and told me the storyline. I told him, ‘That’s stupid. We can’t make a film about forgiveness because the war isn’t over. First the war has to end and then we can write about it.’ But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that everything was wrong. Poor fellow, he embodied the Lebanese lie in his name and then paid for it with his life. His name was all wrong. He was called Maroun but he wasn’t a Maronite, and he was from the Baghdadi family but he wasn’t an Iraqi. That’s the philosophy of the Lebanese war — the names are borrowed but the deaths of those who bear them are all too real.”
Karim said Maroun’s death was a symbolic expression of the extinction of the revolutionary generation in Lebanon. “I met him in France and he told me about the film and I could see death in his eyes,” said Karim.
“Don’t say that!” said Danny. “You know very well that anyone who sees death dies because his death is traced in the eyes of the murderer, and you know who I’m talking about.”
What a bizarre lunch! Karim had wanted his meeting with Danny to put together what had been broken and had found himself faced with a man who hunched over his terrible back pains as he walked, broke instead of joined, and painted what was present in the colors of absence.
“The war would have broken out with or without us and it kept going without us, so I regret nothing. Or at least I’m sorry about one thing, which is that instead of devoting myself to writing a book of philosophy I became a fighter, and once you’ve written with bullets it’s hard to write with a pen. I’m working now on a study that proves that none of the literary types who wrote about war did any serious fighting. They were basically adventurers who stayed on the margins. Neither Hemingway nor Malraux fought in the Spanish Civil War. Malraux fought with the French resistance to Nazi occupation, it’s true, but after that he stopped writing so he could become a minister. My study will deconstruct the myth of the writer fighting or being committed to the struggle. That’s nonsense. Lorca wasn’t a hero and Neruda wasn’t a resistance fighter. As for Nazim Hikmet, who reduced his readers to tears with his poems about his Munevver when he was in prison, as soon as he was released he got rid of her and married a Russian nurse.”
“But!” said Karim.
“No buts! Am I right or am I wrong?” Danny responded.
He reverted to the celebrated expression he used to use to put an end to any discussion at cell meetings, when he’d ask, “Am I right or am I wrong?” so his listeners had no choice but to say “right” because the tone of “or am I wrong?” left no room for “wrong.”
“But Saint-Exupéry,” said Karim.
“You’re right, but Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince and didn’t write about war. Plus I’m not talking about that kind of writer, I’m talking about the revolutionary writers.”
“Right,” said Karim.
“The problem,” said Danny, “is that heroes don’t collapse in the face of death, they collapse in the face of writing. This is the great illusion. They want to become writers, or find someone to write about them, which is what I shall refer to in my study as ‘the folly of immortality.’ They believe that writing is a way to stay alive after death, which is nonsense.”
“Right,” said Karim, “but you’re a hero. I don’t understand why you want to become a writer.”
Danny explained to Karim that the problem of heroes was called retirement. Withdrawal from the struggle was equivalent to death, “which is why you may consider me dead, my friend.”
Karim had wanted to ask his friend about the mystery of his disappearance immediately after the killing of Khaled, but did not. What use were questions after all these years? Danny was the reason, Karim had told himself when he decided to flee Lebanon. Danny was the guide who’d led Karim to Nahr el-Bared, introduced him to Khaled and the boys of the Qubbeh district, and placed him in the midst of the maelstrom of terror that had led to his decision to go to France.
In Karim’s memory those days appeared as black patches. The medical student at the American University of Beirut had fallen under the spell of the appearance of Malak Malak at Tall el-Zaatar Camp following his arrest immediately after killing two deans at AUB. It was claimed that Danny had masterminded Malak’s escape from Roumieh Prison and was waiting for him at Hammana when he withdrew with fighters fleeing the camp following its fall in 1976, in one of the Lebanese Civil War’s biggest massacres.
Karim hadn’t been particularly interested in politics. The famous AUB students’ strike of 1974 had meant little to him. He’d taken part in the strike, which had erupted because of an increase in tuition fees, just as he’d participated in the sit-in at the Assembly Hall when students occupied the AUB buildings, but he hadn’t felt involved and had remained on the margins of the movement. That was why Karim wasn’t one of the 103 students expelled from the university when the strike ended.
The strike was a proclamation that the Palestinian resistance and its left-wing Lebanese allies had become an axis of political life in Lebanon. “He who holds the university holds Beirut,” said Danny to the circle of students he directed. It never crossed anyone’s mind that the university administration would call in the Lebanese police to break into the buildings and put an end to the strike, and then expel all the strike leaders.
The strike had to be defeated so that it could achieve victory through blood. Malak Malak, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Engineering — from a Christian Palestinian family from the area of Haifa which had joined the flood of refugees in 1948 — was the hero of the story.
After trying to complete his studies in Iraq, where he was subjected to arrest and torture at the hands of the Iraqi intelligence services who attempted to force him into collaborating with them, Malak succeeded in escaping and returning to Lebanon, becoming the killer of the two deans Najemy and Ghosn, and saving by this insane act the future of all his fellows.
Malak’s crime, the blood that flowed, the collapse of the university’s administration, and its consent to the return of the expelled students all formed the final chapter of symbolic violence that paved the way for the transformation of Beirut into an arena of blood.
Danny didn’t hide his pride in having helped Malak to escape from Roumieh Prison and in advising him to take refuge in Tall el-Zaatar Camp. To Danny the incident was a declaration that revolutionary violence had become the sole language through which change could be achieved.
“You’ve changed a lot,” said Karim.
“We’ve grown old,” answered Danny.
“Any news of Malak?” asked Karim.
“What Malak?” asked Danny.
It was obvious that Danny had forgotten Malak and his story. Everyone had forgotten the tall dark-skinned young man who had escaped from Roumieh Prison to become a fighter in Tall el-Zaatar before disappearing. Even the story of the killing of the deans of Engineering and of Students at AUB had died and became part of the unsaid.