“I was scared. I was living through an interminable war, and Fawwaz didn’t seem to want it to end. I’d ask him when he was going to go back to his work, and he’d look at me in amazement and say he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t want to go back to his job at the tile factory.
“‘What’s wrong with it?’ I’d ask him. ‘Those things aren’t important. My father was a pasta twister, but we still had our dignity. What matters are morals.’
“He’d frown. ‘Morals! Whore! I got stuck with a whore!’
“I don’t know — maybe he wanted me to be a whore, maybe he was afraid of me, but I didn’t do anything. I swear I didn’t look at another man. Well, it did happen, but that was much later, during our evacuation from the camp after it fell.
“Do you know what he did?
“He left his position and rushed over to the house. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to withdraw with the other fighters. You surrender with the women. We’ll meet in Beirut,’ and he gave me the address of someone called Karim Abd al-Fattah, Abu Rami, in the district of al-Fakahani.
“‘I’ll go with you,’ I told him.
“‘No. This is safer,’ he said.
“He looked at me with fierce eyes. ‘You’re afraid of getting raped!’ and he left.
“What can I tell you? Of course I was afraid, and I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me with him. Did he want me to die? What had I done to him? I’d lived through the toughest times with him. You know what life’s like during a siege. All we could find to eat were lentils. I lived on my own like a stranger. I’d go to the public water pipe and wait in the line of death: The water was in their line of fire. We called it ‘the blood pipe.’ I lived alone with nothing to do but wait for him. He’d come, caked with dust and gravel, sleep with me, and leave. He wouldn’t eat the lentils I’d cooked because he’d eat with the boys.
“All I wanted was one thing — to go back to my family in Amman. But how could I leave? The camp was closed by the siege. I wanted him to pay attention to me, but I didn’t dare ask for anything: He was a fighter and we were at war. Even his visits and his sex were rapid-fire. And every time he slept with me, he’d bang his head against the wall, accuse me of being unfaithful, raving that I was a whore and that my body was a place of evil.
“He came to tell me he was withdrawing and asked me to surrender with the women.
“I knew what I could expect, so I decided to withdraw with the fighters and went toward the eastern edge of the camp. I put on jeans and a green shirt and went to look for Fawwaz. I couldn’t find him. It seems he was in one of the first groups to withdraw.
“That was when I met Ahmad Kayyali, who gave me a Kalashnikov and said, ‘Come with us.’
“We crossed the Monte Verde, which is full of pines. We walked by night and laid up by day. And there, in the midst of the scattered bullets and the nights of death, I made up my mind to leave Fawwaz. If I lived, I wouldn’t go back to him. Ahmad was my first lover. With him I discovered I had a body and that my body deserved the pleasures of life. When Fawwaz had sex with me, he’d say, ‘Pleasure me,’ but I had no idea how to ‘pleasure’ him. All I was aware of was his panting on top of me and that thing that penetrated me below, as though it were wounding me. With him I’d reach the edge of pleasure but never get there. Ahmad was different. I asked him to come to me, and I slept with him. We were lost in the forest, we’d left the camp with about twenty fighters, and we walked the entire night. When dawn came, we decided to split up to wait for dark. They started setting off in different directions, but I didn’t know what to do. Ahmad took me with him, and we hid on a rocky slope, not daring to breathe. He was around my age, and like all the men, he’d use colloquial mixed with Classical Arabic to make me feel he was serious. He asked me where I was going to go in Beirut. I said, to the house of Abu Rami, Karim Abd al-Fattah.
“‘Do you know him?’ he asked.
“‘No. They gave me his name,’ I said.
“‘And your family, where are they?’
“‘In Amman,’ I said.
“‘Mine’s in Nablus.’
“‘Why did you come to Beirut?’
“‘To join the fedayeen. And you?’
“I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Ahmad moved closer to me and put his hand on my head. I said, ‘Take me,’ and he took me. With him I discovered what it means for a woman to make love with a man. Ahmad disappeared after that; he disappeared at Hammana, when we got to the assembly point. I don’t know where he went, I didn’t know anything about him. We reached Hammana, he disappeared, and I went down with the groups of fighters to Beirut and considered not going to Abu Rami’s house. But where could I go? I thought of going to one of the Fatah offices, but I wasn’t a member and didn’t carry a card. Stupid — who’d have asked for a card in those days? So I did go to Abu Rami’s house, and I didn’t find Fawwaz. Umm Rami said he was staying with the boys in the museum district, waiting for me.
“‘Go to him now,’ said Umm Rami.
“‘But I don’t know Beirut — I don’t know the museum, or anything else.’
“She asked her son, Rami, to accompany me. I got into the orange Renault 12 next to him, and we left. Suddenly, he stopped the car so he could open the back windows; I must have smelled awful. He parked the car in a side street, pointed out a square where people were congregating, and said, ‘Over there.’
“I got out, my rifle in hand, and walked among the crowds. I was exhausted and Ahmad’s smell went with me everywhere. I looked for Fawwaz for a long time before I found him among the weeping women. Lamenting and wailing, the women had just been dropped off in Lebanese Red Cross vehicles. Women, children, tears, pushing and shoving in front of the missing persons registration office; women telling of rapes, of executions against walls, of bodies being dragged through streets like in Roman times. Fawwaz was in the middle of them. I went up to him until I was almost right in front of him, but he didn’t notice me, perhaps because I was wearing trousers and carrying a rifle. I forgot to mention that he’d forbidden me to wear trousers.
“‘It’s me, Fawwaz.’
“When he saw me, he jumped like a madman. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m crazy. I should have brought you with me.’
“He took me by the arm and lifted the rifle from my hands as though he wanted to toss it aside.
“‘That’s my rifle. Leave it alone.’
“I snatched the rifle back, and we left. He stopped a car and told the driver, ‘To Hamra.’ There, near the Cinema Sarola stop, we went into a cheap hotel, where he rented a room on the second floor. As soon as we got inside the room, he attacked me and started tearing at my clothes.
“‘Take it easy. I want to wash.’
“He slept with me with Ahmad’s smell still clinging to me. I don’t know if he smelled the other man, but he hit me. Before that, he’d banged his head against the wall and cursed at me. But in the hotel on Hamra Street, he hit me after he’d had sex with me two times in a row. He said he’d fixed up a house in the camp in Burj al-Barajneh.”
Shams lived in Burj al-Barajneh until 1982, in other words, until the fedayeen left Beirut. She led with Fawwaz a wild sort of life that can barely be believed. True, I’m a doctor, or something like it, and true, doctors — through contact with their patients — come to understand the psychologies of their patients, since at least half of all illnesses are psychological in origin. But still I couldn’t understand. I asked Shams about Fawwaz’s childhood, but what she knew of it didn’t provide me with an explanation.