“Real training, by God! Tzahal is amazing, it may be the best training in the world!”
“What does Tzahal mean?” asked Nasim.
“It’s Hebrew. It means ‘defense force.’ ”
“You know Hebrew?”
“No. The training there will all be in Arabic, but one has to learn Hebrew, it’s the language of the future,” said Said, launching into a lengthy paean in praise of the Jews. “A minority like us, but they knew how to walk all over the Arabs and bust their heads.”
At that moment Nasri appeared in the living room. He was shivering in gray pajamas that hung loosely on his thin body.
“Do you need anything, Father?” Nasim asked.
“How do you do, sir?” enquired Said.
“Fine, but it seems to me I heard something about you boys going to train in Israel? Be careful, fellows! It’s silly tricks like that which will end up sending us all to hell.”
“The boys are just gabbing,” said Nasim. “Go finish your nap. If you don’t have your siesta you’ll get a headache.”
Nasim told his comrades that ever since reaching forty his father had routinely taken an hour’s siesta, sleep in the afternoon being the best way to rest the brain via descent of blood to the stomach. “Tell them about your siesta, Father, before you go back to sleep.”
“A siesta is a necessity for the preservation of the health of both body and soul. As the proverb has it, ‘Eat lunch and stretch out. Eat dinner and go out.’ But Israel? No way! Be careful!” said Nasri.
At this point Said, whose smile had never left his visage as he watched the elderly man in pajamas saying strange things dredged up from the world of the ghosts of the past, wiped it off his face, knit his brows, and told the man he’d do better not to interfere in things that didn’t concern him. “We’re discussing very important matters, old fellow, that have to do with the destiny of the Christians throughout the East and not just Lebanon. You’d do better not to worry your head over it.”
“I told the bastards,” said Nasri, pointing to his son Nasim. “One calls himself a communist and wants to save the Palestinians and the other calls himself a Fascist. They’ve become like Cain and Abel, brother is going to kill brother and then die himself. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I explained to them we’re a minority in the East and minorities have to mind their p’s and q’s and not behave like assholes with the majority, because in the future they’ll have to pay the price on their own and the price will be very high.”
“What kind of a zimmi mentality is that? We aren’t zimmis anymore and we won’t put up with being treated that way.”
Said turned to Nasim and said, “It seems your father’s still living in Ottoman times. The Ottomans have gone, old man, they’re over and done with.”
“Gone, yes,” said Nasri, “but it’s not clear they’re over and done with. What goes comes back and what sleeps awakes. Where do you think you’re living? We’re a minority in this East and we have to maintain our existence in a rational fashion. Watch out for Israel! Allying ourselves with the enemy of the Arabs will mean the end of us, forever. Be careful!”
“Stop talking that shit, Father! You’re making me look a fool in front of my friends. Us a minority!? The Ottomans coming back!? That’s drivel, Nasri. Did you hear what Bashir Gemayel said: ‘We’re the devils of the East, and its saints!’?”
“Devils, maybe, saints would be better, but devils and saints together doesn’t work. You’re crazy. Your leader will be the ruin of us all.”
“Okay, so take the Jews — a minority like us, and look at all the stuff they’ve pulled off and how they’ve won victories over all the Arabs.”
“A minority, true, and they’ve won victories, true as well. But no one can be victorious all the time. Fortune is a wheel, which is why they have to learn to be polite and get off the Palestinians’ backs. Wasn’t it enough for them to steal their country? Explain to me why they still occupy the West Bank and Gaza.”
“The Palestinians are the enemies of Lebanon!” screamed Said. “You’re defending the enemies of the Christians!”
“Enemies of Lebanon? It’s not so clear, but let us suppose hypothetically you’re right on that point. You shouldn’t go where you’re going. It means ruin.”
“The Jews are a minority and they’ve won and it follows naturally that they should make alliances with other minorities,” said Nasim. “Please, Father, go and sleep! What are my friends going to say about you?”
The gray ghost turned his back and returned to his room, muttering incomprehensibly. That evening he told his son they were crazy and that the destiny of the Jews of Israel would be no better than that of the Christians of Lebanon. “Soon, after I’m dead, you’ll think of me and say, ‘Nasri was right.’ The Israelis’ problem is that they’re drunk on their military power. They’ll discover soon enough that power doesn’t last. If they want to stay in the East, they’re going to have to behave better. There’s a thought for you and a nice one too — that you’ve got to behave better, which means being humble and knowing who you are and where you live.”
Unlike many of his comrades, Nasim didn’t go to the training camp set up by the Israeli army on the lands of the Palestinian village of Saffouriyyeh, whose inhabitants had been chased out in 1948 and which had been converted into a settlement under the name of Tzippori. During the Hundred Days’ War he was hit in the foot by a piece of shrapnel, which kept him limping for about three months and prevented him from going on the main course, in which three hundred Phalangist fighters participated. At the same time the death of Michel Hajji and the sight of his corpse, rigid in the morgue at the Greek Orthodox hospital, made him distance himself from the fighting and follow his own course in life, far from the trenches.
Was Nasri right? Nasim had wanted to tell his twin that these truths, which Nasri had uttered before anyone else, in no way meant that Karim had been correct in the political choices he’d made and that had led him to exile. “We’re wrong and you’re wrong, which is why we both got shafted. The Palestinians and the leftists you belonged to lost and the Phalanges and the forces I belonged to were defeated, and Syria came and swept the board.”
“The Syrian regime, not Syria,” said Karim. “They swept the board with the brush you gave them, but what do I know? Maybe it was all wrong from beginning to end. God have mercy on those who lost their lives.”
Karim hadn’t come to East Beirut in a mood of penitence or regret. He didn’t believe the history of the war could be summed up in the expression “It was all wrong from beginning to end”; it might apply to him personally — because, despite not being a member of the Communist Party, as his father had believed, he hadn’t been able to take the consequences of the defeat of the Lebanese Left after the Syrian army entered Lebanon — but it didn’t apply to the war. He’d wanted to tell his brother that the Lebanese had to acknowledge their mistakes in the war. Everyone had made mistakes, but there was a difference between a mistake and a sin. Likewise there was a difference between those who had fought for a secular republic and those who had fought in defense of the sectarian system. What could he say though, now that he’d lost the power of speech? Khaled Nabulsi had turned him into something not unlike a mute; since the day of the man’s killing he’d felt he no longer had the right to speak of anything. Anyone who’d been afraid to provide refuge to a widow and her daughter upon the assassination of the woman’s husband and who later found out that both the woman and her daughter had had their throats slit would do better to keep his mouth shut.