“In some countries I know, Mr. Ghaled, the man would have been shot”
“Better to shoot him than to destroy what makes his life.”
“His wife and children might not agree. Besides, as you pointed out earlier, a state of war exists between Israel and her neighbours. I take it that your man had not crossed the border just to pay a social call.”
“He was a courier, that is all.”
“When was this sentence carried out?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“What was the name of the village?”
“Majd el-Krum. But I mention this incident, Mr. Prescott, not because it is rare or special, but to remind you how Arabs live under the Zionist police dictatorship.” He fumbled inside his sheepskin coat. “I will show you something.” He dragged out a fat tooled-leather wallet and pulled a sheaf of photographs from it.
From the size and the way the edges of the prints were trimmed I could see that they had been made with an old-style black-and-white Polaroid. There were ten or twelve of them in plastic covers. He sorted them through, then thrust the lot into my hands.
“Take them, Mr. Prescott. Look at them.”
For a moment his eagerness reminded me, incongruously, of the lonely man on the long plane flight who wants to share his homesickness with you. “Look, there’s a shot of us all together up at the lake last summer.”
Only these were not family snaps. The top one was a picture of a young woman. Her throat had been cut and she was dead.
She was lying on a patch of bloodstained earth at the base of a concrete wall. The cut in the throat was deep and gaping; you could see the severed ends of the veins and arteries. Her clothing was up over her waist and there were stab wounds in her thighs and belly.
Ghaled said something else and again Miss Hammad interpreted.
“Look well, Mr. Prescott, look well.”
I slid the top print aside and looked at the next. It was of a dead man. He was naked except for a torn shirt, and his genitals had been cut off. The next was of a child of ten or so. I went through the rest of them.
The attitudes of violent death do not vary much. When the cause has been sudden, the rag-doll effect is usual, though muscular spasm can sometimes freeze the limbs in strange ways; when death comes less suddenly the knees and arms are often drawn up together in the fetal position; a human being incinerated by napalm becomes a gray-black clinker effigy of a dwarf boxer with fists up ready to do battle. There were no burn cases among these pictures, however; all the subjects had been cut, stabbed, or hacked to death; you could believe that they had been human beings. One or two of the bodies, those of children, had obviously been rearranged, by or for the photographer, and posed so as to dramatize the death agonies.
In war it is possible, as well as necessary and advisable, to get used to horrors. What I have never been able quite to get used to is the man who chooses to collect and keep pictures of them. Ghaled’s private gallery would have an ostensible propaganda purpose, of course, but the prints had been well thumbed before they had been protected by plastic. The last collection I had seen like it had been carried by a Special Forces lieutenant in Vietnam. He had claimed a propaganda purpose. He had said piously that he kept it to remind him of what he was fighting against. I didn’t believe him. He kept it for kicks. The British policeman in Malaya who treasured a jungle photograph of himself, shotgun in hand with one raised foot resting sportively on the disembowelled body of a Liberation Army Chinese, had been less inhibited. He was grinning proudly in the picture and he had grinned proudly when he had shown it to me.
I handed his photographs back to Ghaled.
“Well, Mr. Prescott?”
“Well what, Mr. Ghaled? I’ve seen pictures like that before. What are those dead bodies supposed to prove?”
“Those were Arab villagers murdered and mutilated by Zionist forces.”
“You say so, Mr. Ghaled. I say that they could equally well be Arab villagers killed by other Arabs, or Israeli villagers killed by the fedayeen. Where were the pictures taken? When were they taken? On one occasion or several? Who was the photographer or was there more than one? Of what value are these photographs as evidence?”
“These photographs were taken on my orders and under my supervision after a raid, a typical raid, by Druse commando traitors of the Zionist army, on a refugee village in Jordan.”
“In this typical raid were no bullets used?”
“What do you mean?”
“None of the wounds shown in those photographs was made by a bullet. For a commando raid that seems odd.”
“They do not waste bullets on helpless women and children and crippled men.”
“I must accept what you say, of course.” In fact, all I would have accepted from him after that was his claim to have supervised the taking of the pictures; but there was no point in pursuing the argument. I wanted no more of him, and it seemed a good moment to bring the interview to an end.
“One or two final questions, Mr. Ghaled. Does the fact that so many of your Palestinian colleagues, your fellow leaders in the guerrilla movement, profoundly disagree with your views and policies ever cause you to question them yourself?”
“Naturally. Self-examination and self-criticism are always necessary. As for disagreement, I would remind you that many of Lenin’s closest colleagues profoundly disagreed with him. But who in the end was proved right?”
“You see yourself as the Lenin of the Palestinian revolutionary guerrilla movement?”
“I see myself as the Ghaled of the Palestinian Action Force.”
“And time in the end will no doubt prove you right. I see. Thank you, Mr. Ghaled. You have been most patient and helpful.”
When Miss Hammad had translated that she looked at me questioningly.
“That’s all,” I said.
“Interview between Salah Ghaled and Lewis Prescott concluded,” she said and switched off the recorders. While she packed them up again Ghaled took the bottle of arrack and refilled the glasses.
He seemed pleased with the way the interview had gone and lit up a fresh cigar with the air of a man who has just concluded a successful deal. If he had spoken enough English he would probably have fished for some expression of satisfaction on my part.
He took the two tape cassettes which Miss Hammad handed him and one of the recorders. While she showed him how to operate it, I sipped the arrack and wondered how I was going to get back to Beirut The prospect of being driven down that mountain road in the darkness by Miss Hammad was not attractive.
I need not have worried. After the ceremonial leave-taking and the scramble back down to the Volkswagen, she explained the position. There was no question of our driving back to Beirut right away. During the hours of darkness nobody was allowed through the military roadblocks. We would have to wait at the chalet until it was light.
There I had a Scotch to take away the taste of the arrack, and Miss Hammad began to question me about my “impressions” of Ghaled.
I had expected that and was ready for her.