Do you hear me?
Why don’t you say anything?
Didn’t you like the story?
I know what you want now. You want me to leave you alone to sleep, and you want the radio. The bastards stole the radio. Last night I left it on all night. I thought it would keep you company while you were on your own, but they stole it.
I know who they are. They haven’t forgotten their status and wealth during the revolution. Don’t they know I’m the poorest guy here? True, I’m a nurse and a doctor, but I’m also a beggar. The golden days are over, but they haven’t yet digested that we’re back to square one — poor.
And you, have you forgotten those days?
Have you forgotten how Abu Jihad al-Wazir,* God rest his soul, would take a tattered scrap of paper and use it to disburse unimaginable sums to people in need of money? Indignant, I mentioned it to you, but you didn’t agree with me. I told you so I could make the point that money had corrupted us and would destroy us, but you explained everything to me then and asked me not to say anything about Abu Jihad that I would regret later. “Two men, Son, represent all that’s best among the martyrs — Abu Ali Iyad and Abu Jihad al-Wazir.” Could you have had a premonition of his assassination in Tunis? Did you know about it then, or did you just see it coming? You said Abu Jihad used a tattered scrap of paper to disburse money to show his contempt for it, because money is nothing.
I’ll buy you a new radio tomorrow.
What?
You don’t want one?
You don’t like listening to the news any more?
I’ll buy you a tape player and some tapes. You love Fairouz, and I’ll buy you some Fairouz songs, in particular the one that goes, “I’ll see you coming under the cloudless sky, lost among the almond leaves.” Tomorrow I’ll bring you the cloudless sky and the almond leaves and Fairouz, and all the old songs of Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab. I’ll bring “The wasted lover is spurned by his bed” — how I love Ahmad Shawqi, the prince of poets! Tomorrow I’ll tell you the story of his relationship with the young singer Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab.
He was my lord, my soul was in his hands.
He squandered it — God bless his hands!
How I love love, Abu Salem! Tomorrow we’ll sing and relive our loves. You’ll love and I’ll love — you and I, alone in the only hospital in a corner of the only camp in Beirut.
Recite this Surah with me:
Say, “I seek refuge in the Lord of men,
the King of men,
the God of men,
from the evil of the slinking prompter
who whispers in the hearts of men,
of djinn and men.”*
Say the verse. The Koran will comfort your heart.
I’m going now. Goodnight.
* Liquidation by Jordanian forces of Palestinian troops based in Jordan.
* Abd al-Qadir Husseini, major figure in the Palestinian National Movement, died in combat in 1948.
* Considered the greatest of Classical Arabic poets. (915–965)
* Palestinian writer and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Assassinated by the Israeli secret service in Beirut in 1972.
* Fatah leader, assassinated by the Israeli secret service April 15, 1988.
* Koran, Surah CXIV.
WHY DON’T you answer?
Why don’t you want to tell me where the good is to be found?
Why would you believe me, anyway?
Last night I said goodnight, but I didn’t go to sleep. Every night I say the same thing and don’t go. I said goodnight because I was tired of everything. I sit with you and get upset. I sit and get fed up. I’m sick and tired of waiting. And I still can’t sleep. I yawn, exhaustion fills my body as if all I need to do to drop off is put my head on the pillow, but I can’t sleep.
Sleep is the most beautiful thing.
I lie down on the bed and close my eyes. The numbness that comes before sleep steals into my head. . and then my body convulses, and I’m jolted awake. I light a cigarette, gaze at its glowing end in the dark, and my eyelids start to droop. I put out the cigarette, close my eyes, and let the phantoms take over. I think about Kafar Shouba; for ages now Kafar Shouba’s been my sleeping companion. I lie down, and I go there and see the flares.
I was seventeen when I saw flares for the first time. At the time, I was a fedayeen fighter, one of the first cadre that came through Irneh in Syria to southern Lebanon to build the first fedayeen base.
I heard of Kafar Shouba on my way there, and the name stuck in my mind. In fact our base wasn’t in Kafar Shouba but in an olive grove belonging to a neighboring village, al-Khreibeh. All the same, when in my drowsiness I travel back to those days, I go to Kafar Shouba.
I was the youngest. Actually, I’m not completely sure anymore, but in any case I was certainly too young for the job of political commissar that Abu Ali Iyad had handed me.
I was scared.
A political commissar has no right to be scared. I covered up my fear with a lot of talk, and the military commander of the base, a twenty-eight-year-old blond lieutenant named Abu al-Fida, used to call me the talk-a-lot-ical commissar.
I talked and talked because I wanted the fedayeen to acquire political consciousness: We wanted to liberate the individual, not just the land.
During those days — July of ’69 — the Americans made it to the moon, and Armstrong walked on its white face.
That day, I remember, Abu al-Fida got very angry with me and punished me. Is that any way to deal with people — punishing a political commissar in front of his men for expressing an opinion?
In fact, as was the fashion in those days, I made no secret of my lack of faith. If man could go to the moon, that meant there was no God. May God the Exalted forgive me for such thoughts, but when I voiced them I only meant the concept. Atheism was just an idea, and I didn’t express it because I believed in it but because it seemed logical, even though, along with the rest of the young men, I fasted during Ramadan and repeated Koranic verses to myself. How can you not repeat Koranic verses when confronted with death every day? What else can you say to death than, “Count not those who were slain in God’s way as dead”?*
Abu al-Fida got angry with me and ordered me to hand over my weapon and crawl on the ground in front of the platoon. And I crawled. I won’t lie to you and say I refused to carry out his order. I crawled, got filthy, and felt like an insect. I decided to hand in my resignation and join the fedayeen in the valley of al-Safi. Things heated up soon afterwards. The Israeli planes started shelling our positions, and we were too busy dealing with the slew of martyrs to remember Armstrong and his moon, my declarations and my atheism.
It was there that I discovered the incandescent flares. They lit up the sky, and I was able to see Palestine for the first time. The clustered bursts of light spread across the shimmering olive trees. That’s how I see them now, and I see you making your way alone, carrying your rifle through the hills and looking for a drop of water between the jagged rocks leading you toward Bab al-Shams, where Nahilah was waiting for you.
I see you making your way beneath the flares, feeling no fear.
How selective our memories are! Now I remember the light falling from flares, but then, after they had ignited the camp, after the flies had devoured me on the main street of Shatila, and after I had returned to this hospital with its pervasive stench of death, all I retained was the memory of fear.