Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“That Josèph of yours is full of shit,” one of them said. He started telling tales of Josèph’s cowardice, telling how during the battle of the Holiday Inn, ^*he threw himself from the fourth floor to escape and ran on a broken leg.

“A dopehead and an asshole,” said another.

“Look how he’s ended up – calling himself a boss, just when there aren’t any bosses left,” said Nasri.

I felt a desire to defend Boss Josèph. I thought it wasn’t fair to talk about him behind his back and that if he were there, he’d show them what being a boss meant. And as to his being a coward, I didn’t believe it, especially after what my writer friend had told me about how particularly brutal he’d been during the Shatila massacre. However, I preferred to remain silent. I was in a strange position. How can I describe it? I really can’t say there had been no crimes. We, too, killed and destroyed, but at that moment I sensed the banality of evil. Evil has no meaning, and we were just its tools. We’re nothing. We make war and kill and die, and we’re nothing – just fuel for a huge machine whose name is War. I said to myself, It’s impossible. Especially with this Nasri, I felt as though I were standing in front of a mirror, as though he resembled me! If I’d been able to talk, I’d have talked more than he did, but a big stone stopped up my mouth. Then the stone started crumbling to the rhythm of the girl’s hand that reached out for Nasri’s hand and then pulled back. He was drinking arak in a special way: He’d suck the glass, leave a little of the white liquid on its lip and then lick it off. He had fair skin and broad shoulders. I think he must have been a body builder because his chest rippled under his blue shirt. He kept coming back to the story of the parachute training and what he’d felt while flying over Israel.

He’d say Israeland look at me apologetically: “Sorry, sorry – Palestine– is that better?” He said he’d flown over Palestine and would look at me with eyes full of irony and complicity.

After my third glass I asked about the war: “What do you feel now?”

“Nothing at all,” said Nasri. “And you?”

“I feel sad,” I said.

Nasri said he didn’t feel regret or sorrow for his friends who’d died in the war. “That’s life,” he said, shrugging his shoulders indifferently.

“But you were defeated,” I said.

“And you were defeated,” he said.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Tell me about your life in the camps, and then talk to me about victory and defeat.”

“I’ll tell you about my death,” I said. “You killed me.”

“We killed you, and you killed us. That’s what I was trying to explain to you,” said Nasri. “We were defeated, and you were defeated.”

“All of us were defeated,” said Maro, raising his glass. “Knock it back, boys – a toast to defeat.”

The young men raised their glasses and drained them to the last drop.

“We have to go. It was good to meet you, Doctor. Don’t be upset, we’ll talk some more,” said Nasri, who asked for the bill and paid it. Then they all left.

I wanted to – but didn’t – mention the intifadaand say, “It’s true we were defeated, but the game’s not over.” But that stone stopped up my mouth.

Nasri paid and left, and I was embarrassed because my friend the writer didn’t even take out his wallet.

I felt nauseous among the stacks of empty dishes, but I wasn’t drunk. I’d only drunk three glasses of arak, but it was the emotion. I looked at my watch and said Josèph wasn’t coming.

“How about a coffee?” asked Baroudi.

I said, “Great,” and raised my hand to order, but Baroudi pulled it down.

“Not here,” he said. “Let’s go to a café.”

I sat next to him in his red Renault, and he took me through streets I didn’t know. That’s how I finally became acquainted with al-Ashrafiyyeh, East Beirut’s Christian quarter that they also call Little Mountain. He switched the car’s tape recorder to the Fairouz song, “Old Jerusalem.”

“We’re enemies,” I said to Baroudi.

“Don’t worry about it,” he answered me. “It’s all bullshit.”

Then we entered a beautiful street. It was how I imagined the streets of Haifa. My grandmother told me tales of the city by the sea, where the streets were shaded by trees and jasmine and there was the scent of frangipani. “We’re in the Circassian quarter,” Baroudi said. “This is where the rich people live. They were just translators for the foreign consuls in the days of the Ottomans, and look at their palaces now!”

He said he dreamt of having a house here.

He said that during the illness of his aged father, who was now dead, he’d come to walk with him every day in this street. His father loved to walk here. “I want to die and take these colors with me to the grave,” he would say. Then Baroudi told me a strange story about a woman his father had been in love with before he married his mother. He spoke of an old hunchbacked woman who lived close to the cemetery: “She was ten years older than my father, worked as a seamstress and spent her money on him. She had no family; her only brother had died when he was young. My father didn’t marry her. His family forced him to marry his cousin, my mother. The strange thing was that this woman encouraged him to get married. He went on loving her even when she grew old and her back was bent, but he would send me to see her because his heart could no longer bear to see her in her miserable old age. A woman with a hunched back, who wore black clothes, and walked as though she were crawling – as though she’d turned into a tortoise. I was afraid of her; I’d place the basket of food at the entrance to her house, knock on the door, and flee. She’d yell at me to come in, but I was scared of the tortoise shell that had sprouted on her back.”

He stopped the car, turned to me, and said, “And you?”

“And me what?”

“What about your father?”

“My father died a long time ago, and I don’t remember him.”

Before we got to the café, he pointed out the cemetery of Mar Mitri. I saw what looked like marble palaces adorned with statuettes of angels and doves taking flight.

“These are their tombs,” he said.

“Whose tombs?”

“The tombs of the owners of the palaces we saw along the avenue.”

“Those are tombs!”

“Indeed, my friend. They live in palaces, and they’re buried in palaces. It’s the way of the world.”

We sat in Joachim’s Café close to Sasin Square in al-Ashrafiyyeh, whose name has been changed to Phalange Martyrs’ Square. In the middle of the square is a memorial to the victims of the explosion of the House of Phalanges on the day of the Feast of the Cross, September 14, 1982, when President-elect Bashir Jmayil met his end. The base of the monument bears a large photograph of Jmayil crossed with gray lines. His assassination, a few days before he was to assume the post of President of the Lebanese Republic, was the declared pretext for the Shatila massacre. It was said that his men committed the massacre, in coordination with the Israeli army because they were so blinded by sorrow for their leader.

Pointing to the monument, Baroudi said the massacre was an instinctive act of revenge, and he just wished Boss Josèph had come so I could hear his version of the events.

I said I knew very well what had happened; I didn’t need Josèph to tell me because I’d been there.

“You know nothing,” he said and told me what Josèph would have told me. As I listened, the cold crept into my bones, as though the words were bits of ice dropping onto my spine.

What did he hope to achieve?

I’d believed at first that he sympathized with us and wanted to build a memorial to the victims. Then he brings me to this café and talks to me as though he were Josèph.

When I think of him now I can only see him in the form of Josèph. After that trip to al-Ashrafiyyeh, he disappeared. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and promised he’d come back with the plan for the memorial garden, but he didn’t. The war started up again, and with it the long siege that destroyed the camp and the cemetery and the memories of the massacre. As with all disasters, the only thing that can make one forget a massacre is an even bigger massacre, and we’re a people whose fate is to be forgotten as a result of its accumulated calamities. Massacre erases massacre, and all that remains in the memory is the smell of blood.

Baroudi disappeared; he never contacted me again. I phoned the newspaper where he worked a number of times but didn’t find him. The switchboard operator said he wasn’t in even though I was sure he was there. I didn’t want anything from him, I just wanted him to publish our news, for in those days I was living within two deserts: My little desert was the blockade, and my big desert was Shams.

I left the camp to get some antibiotics, got held up in Mar Elias, and couldn’t go back to Shatila. In the Mar Elias camp I met Shams and was smitten, and then she disappeared. When I think of that day, Father, I feel ashamed, but I wasn’t interested in the fate of the camp, I was running after the shadow of that woman. Something inside me was stronger than I was. Something made me forget everything and nailed me to the cross of her eyes. I was like a madman. You understand; you must have gone through a similar experience with Nahilah. Like me, you weren’t married. Okay, well, let’s say that your marriage wasn’t like a marriage. You didn’t possess the woman you loved in such a way that could quench your thirst, and you were suspended between places just as I was during the siege. I used to feel a cruel loneliness, that’s why I phoned Georges Baroudi, but he avoided me because he didn’t want to get involved.

That day at Joachim’s Café, however, Baroudi forgot himself and assumed the character of Josèph. At first I thought he was going on the way he was because he was drunk, but then again maybe he was with them in the camp! How, though? He was an intellectual, a writer, a journalist, and those people don’t go to war or get involved; they observe death and write about it, believing they’ve experienced death.

On that rainy day, however, he was different.

I forgot to mention it was raining and in Beirut, as in Haifa, the rain comes down like ropes, then suddenly stops. I almost said the man was raining! I can see him in front of me through the café window, the ropes of rain around his thick lips, the smoke rising from his cigarette abandoned in the ashtray; his words hurt my ears, and the sloosh of the rain drowning the road that descends from Place Sasin to the church of Our Lady of the Entry.

Why did he tell me all that?

I’m certain he wasn’t seeking my reactions – a drunk doesn’t observe a drunk. So why? Because he was one of them? Did he want to confess? Christians confess in front of a priest. Their confessions are like the self-criticism sessions I learned in China and tried to apply here. It was ridiculous. I’d call a self-criticism session and start with myself to encourage the others, and the meeting would end in jokes. No one was capable of assuming responsibility for his mistakes, and they’d all find justifications for their actions and blame others. To put an end to the joking around and the obnoxiousness, I’d be forced to agree with them that we hadn’t made any mistakes at all, even in the case of the village of al-Aishiyyeh in South Lebanon, which we entered in the summer of ’75 after a grueling battle with the Phalangists. Our commanding officer ordered the armed fighters who’d surrendered to stand against a wall and executed them all with machine guns. The execution of prisoners is forbidden, as you know, by the laws of the Fatah Movement, but we found justifications for the criminal error that we’d committed. We said we were taking revenge for the massacres that had been committed against us, that civil wars always involved massacres, etc. Rasim, the militia commander, God rest his soul, went as far as citing Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don, saying that during the civil war in Russia the Bolsheviks would ask their captives to take off their clothes before executing them so they wouldn’t get torn by the bullets. Standing naked in the snow, shivering, they waited their turn to be executed, before falling into the graves they’d dug with their own hands.

“We’re more merciful than the Bolsheviks,” said Rasim. “We aren’t forcing them to dig their own graves or take off their clothes.”

That was when I became convinced that self-criticism was useless, since everything will be found to have its motives, its pretexts, its special circumstances, and so on.

Sitting in the café, Georges Baroudi took advantage of the rhythm of the rain with its long ropes to confess. He said he’d recorded more than three hours of confessions by Boss Josèph and wanted to publish them in a book that he’d call The Banality of Man. He said he’d brought a tape recorder with him to record our conversation, and that he’d make that the introduction to his book. But Josèph didn’t come, so he asked me to tell him my version of what happened, so he could put the two versions into the book. “A page for you and a page for him – what do you think? The killer and the killed in conversation.”

“But I wasn’t killed,” I said.

“You represent the dead,” he said.

“The dead don’t talk and they don’t have representatives,” I said.

“Aren’t you a Palestinian like them? Look at Israel; it represents the victims of the Holocaust.”

“That’s the difference,” I said. “I don’t believe victims have representatives, that they. . that they. .”

“You understand nothing,” he said.

I told him his project didn’t make sense, that you couldn’t sit the victim down next to the perpetrator. “Your book will be as banal as its title.” Then I burst out laughing.

At that instant, the man before me was transformed. Even his white face became tinged with green. He said, as though it were Josèph speaking, “They took us to the airport – I was leading a detachment of twenty boys. We were wasted. Bashir died and Abu Mash’al gave me a load of cocaine and asked me to distribute it to the boys. We were sniffing cocaine like a snack, as if we were eating pistachios. Then we went down to the camp and began. We didn’t take any prisoners and there was no face-to-face combat. We went into the houses, sprayed them with bullets, stabbed and killed. It was like a party, like we were at scouts’ camp dancing around the campfire. The fireworks came from above, from the flares the Israelis were sending up, and we were down below having a party.”

“A party,” he said!

Boss Josèph had come across three children. He’d asked one of his comrades to help him grab them. He’d asked his comrade to push them together on a table. “I took out my revolver. I wanted to find out how far a shot from a Magnum could go. One of the children slipped off onto the floor. The light was burning our eyes, and I asked my comrade to turn his face away. He didn’t understand what I wanted, so he let go of the two children and left the house. I went up to them. I wanted to tie them up and then move back from them but I couldn’t find a rope, so I jammed them together, put the muzzle of the revolver close to the head of the first one, and fired. My bullet went through both heads, so they died right off. I didn’t see the blood, I couldn’t see it, in that strange Israeli light. When I left the house, I came across the third child, the one who’d fallen. I stepped back and fired at this small moving thing, and it came to a sudden stop where it was.”

At this point Monsieur Georges got into a complicated analysis of Boss Josèph’s state of mind, saying he wasn’t aware of what he was doing and so couldn’t be considered responsible for his crime, and he got into a complex theory about death. Then he asked me if I’d killed anyone.

“Listen, Monsieur Georges, I’m a fighter, your friend is a butcher. Can’t you tell the difference between a criminal and a soldier?”

“You’re right, you’re right, but I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I’m asking you if you’ve ever killed anyone and what you felt afterward.”

In the middle of this maelstrom, he asks me if I’ve killed anyone! Where does this man live?

“Of course,” I said. I said it simply, even though I’d never asked myself that question before. I hadn’t killed anyone, in the sense of getting close to an unarmed man and firing at him and seeing him die. But I said with a simplicity that astonished Monsieur Georges that I’d killed.

He asked me about my feelings.

“What feelings? There are no feelings.”

Imagine, Abu Salem. Imagine if Monsieur Georges came to you and asked you the same question. How would you answer him? For sure you’d throw him out of your house and tell him to go to hell. What kind of questions are these? Doesn’t this genius know that death means nothing, all his talk of blood instinct means nothing, it’s just literary talk? In war, we kill like we breathe. Killing means not thinking about killing, just shooting.

Is it possible that someone would come along in the middle of the whirlwind of this war and ask me about my feelings when I kill?

First of all, I haven’t killed.

Second of all, even if I’d killed, there would have been no feelings.

And finally, I’m a fighter. Either I die or I live. What am I supposed to do?

Monsieur Georges wanted to focus on the first experience. He said he was starting to understand my response, because anything could become a habit, and habitual behavior loses its impact.

“Tell me about the first time,” he said.

“There wasn’t a first time,” I said.

“No, no, try to remember.”

“The first time I saw a man die, he was screaming that he wanted to die.”

That was my first time.

Do you remember your first time, master?

I think that this kind of question leads nowhere.

When Monsieur Georges asked me about my first time, I could only remember myself as a cadet. I could see myself running with the other boys with shaved heads and crying out: “We’ll die, we’ll die, but we will never submit!”

The trainer running in front of us shouting, “We’ll die,” and us behind him, our mouths full of the fruit of death. That was my first experience – putting death in my mouth like a piece of gum, chewing on it, running with it to the end of the world and then spitting it out. But Monsieur Georges wanted to know my feelings when I killed a man – so I asked him about his feelings. He said he’d never fought in his life. I don’t understand how a man can be an intellectual and a writer and let war go on right next to him and not try to find out what it’s like.

He said his first time was when he truly saw, and then he told me the story of the barrels in the camp Jisr al-Basha.

He told me he went with them to provide press coverage and saw how they forced their prisoners to get into the barrels. He said the fall of the Tal al-Za’atar and Jisr al-Basha camps had been barbaric.

I told him I didn’t want to hear about it – about the barrels that seeped blood, or the prisoners rolling around inside the barrels, or the rapes, the killings, or the eating of human flesh.

I have enough to deal with as it is.

I told him I hated myself now. I hated myself for the way I’d stood spellbound in front of that yellow poster designed by an Italian artist – I’ve forgotten his name – as a salute to the martyrs of Tal al-Za’atar. I hate those three thousand vertical lines the artist put on his poster. I hate our way of celebrating death. The number of our dead was our distinguishing feature – the more deaths, the more important we became.

I said I no longer liked our way of playing with death.

He said death was a symbolic number and numbers had been the sole stable element since the dawn of history. “Numbers are magic,” he said. “Nothing fascinates men more than numbers; that’s why death expressed in numbers turns into a magic formula.”

We left the café. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and went away. I don’t know what he wrote in his newspaper about the meeting with Boss Josèph that never took place; I lost interest the moment I got back to the camp. Even the idea of reconciliation stopped making any sense: The reconciliation has happened without happening, as should be clear from my telling you about the incident without getting upset.

The reconciliation happened when Dunya became the victim of her own story; when her story was transformed into a scandal, the woman fell from grace and all that was left were her two eyes suspended in the emptiness of her sand-colored face.

I believe she became separated from her own story when she agreed to participate in Professor Muna’s game. I saw her on TV; I saw how she bent over the microphone after the horrible clatter of her crutches hitting the ground. And she was lying, I swear she was lying. How can you rape a girl with a shattered pelvis? She said she’d been hit in her right thigh, meaning her pelvis, and then that she fell and they threw themselves on top of her – which is impossible. But that was the story the public wanted to hear. Rape is a symbol. I’m not talking just about Arabs but about everyone on earth. Man connects war with rape. Victory signifies the victor raping the defeated enemy’s women; it’s only complete when the women are subjected to rape. This isn’t something that happens in reality, of course; it’s a fantasy. No! God forbid – Dunya didn’t say she was raped because she wanted that. I don’t accept the superficial, simplistic point of view that so many men hold about women wanting to be raped; rape is one of the most savage and painful things there is. Dunya said she was raped to please the psychologists, the sociologists, and the journalists, who were expecting to hear that word from her. She said it, and they relaxed.

That’s the problem with the Lebanese war. It entered the world’s imagination pre-packaged as insanity. When we say that its insanity was normal, the same insanity as in any war, our listeners feel thwarted and think we’re lying. Even Boss Josèph’s story – I won’t say it didn’t happen; it probably did, and there may have been worse outrages. The issue isn’t what happened but how we report and remember it.

I’m convinced that if Boss Josèph had come to the restaurant and told the story to me, he would’ve been compelled to introduce fundamental modifications. He was used to telling it in front of people who believe that what happened in the camps was heroic. With me, however, he wouldn’t have been able to talk about heroism. He would have had to describe what he did in a cold and neutral, maybe even apologetic, fashion. And that would’ve changed everything; even the significance of that bullet penetrating the heads of two children thrown down on a table in a house somewhere in the camp would have changed.

I will never forget how the clusters of flies hovered over me and pursued me. I won’t forget the buzzing blue flies over those bodies acting as reservoirs for all the death in the world. I won’t forget how we stepped over the distended vertical bodies, holding our noses.

I told Monsieur Georges that “the first time” didn’t exist, that there was a beginning only in stories.

YOU USED to say, “Back to the beginning.” You would talk, and we’d listen. It was enough for us to hear your footsteps for “the beginning” to return, for things to get started.

Not now.

Now there’s no one, there’s no beginning.

The issue is war, and war has no beginning.

I was willing to meet Boss Josèph even though I felt no curiosity about him. I was willing to meet him because I’d learned the secret of war. This secret is the mirror. I know no one will agree with me, and they’ll say I talk like this because I’m afraid, but it’s not true. If you’re afraid, you don’t say your enemy is your mirror, you run away from him.

I agreed to meet with Boss Josèph despite the fact that I didn’t expect to hear anything I didn’t already know. The man would start – as indeed he did start – with cocaine. He’d say he took huge amounts of cocaine before going to the camp, so he’d be exonerated from responsibility for his acts. He’d say the Israelis lit the place up and that his superior, who was sitting with the Israeli officers on the roof of the Kuwaiti embassy overlooking the camp, expected something extra special from him. He’d say that when he entered the darkened camp, he was stumbling on the stones and the flares blinded him, which made him fire randomly, without thinking. When he entered that particular house and opened fire and saw people collapsing on the sofas where they were sitting, he felt a strange intoxication, and that he never meant to kill the two children but was just joking around with his buddy about the effectiveness of the gun and then he killed them, just like that, without thinking.

This is something about us that you won’t understand, Father.

You didn’t get caught up in your war the way we did in ours. You went to war, but we didn’t. Our situation was more like yours when you were in Sha’ab, except that we couldn’t withdraw. Do you remember Sha’ab after you took it back from the Jews? Did you hesitate even once? Of course not. The only time you hesitated was when the ALA informed you of the decision to withdraw before the Lebanese borders closed. Then you hesitated, but you withdrew with the rest. When you met Nahilah, you told her you’d made a mistake and asked her to stay because you thought it would be possible to correct that mistake quickly enough.

Do you remember those long months after Ibrahim died?

Do you remember how many decisions you made and how often you swore you’d stay? You lived in caves. The earth, the rocks, the trees and the wild animals were your companions, and you said you’d never leave. And when you recovered from the shock of your son’s death, you went back to Lebanon and began forging your own path as a permanent journey between the two Galilees. You’d go from Lebanese Galilee in the south to Palestinian Galilee in the north. You created your existence, like a story.

But we moved from war to war. We didn’t fight a war, Father, we lived war. For us war became numbers added to numbers.

When the Lebanese war ended, I didn’t realize it had. The war ended but didn’t end, which is why I didn’t pay any attention to the question of what and how our life would be afterwards.

My expedition to that restaurant in al-Ashrafiyyeh permitted me to meet my enemies, but unfortunately I didn’t feel they were my enemies. At Rayyis’ restaurant it was as if I were in front of a mirror and were seeing my own image. No, I’m not defending them. If the war began again, I’d fight them again. Despite that, I want to say that the real war begins when your enemy becomes your mirror so that you kill him in order to kill yourself. That’s what history is. Can you see the sordidness and inanity of history? History is inane because it dislikes victors and defeats everybody.

Take yourself. When you told the tale of your journeys and your wars, when you saw that woman kneeling close to the Roman olive tree in the middle of the red sphere of the sun, you were designing your mirror. You saw your own image in their mirrors. No, I’m not equating executioner and victim. But I do see a mirror broken into two halves, which can only be mended by joining the parts together. Dear God, this is the tragedy: to see two halves that come together only in war and ruination.

I say these things to you, and you can do nothing nailed there to your bed, which has become your ship on the sea of death. I hear you saying no and telling me the story of Nahilah before the Israeli investigator.

“I’m a prostitute. Write that I’m a prostitute, what more do you want from me?”

Please tell me that story again, I like it so much. The first time you told it to me you didn’t say the word prostitute. You said she said, “I’m a pro. .” And when I asked what that meant you burst out laughing and said, “Prostitute. You’ve always been stubborn, you don’t understand much, do you?”

I asked you, “What did she say? Did she say pro. .or prostitute?”

“She said prostitute. She said the word the way it is. A mouthful, huh?”

Nahilah was pregnant with her fourth child: Ibrahim had died, Samir was two, Noor nine months, and Nahilah found herself pregnant once again.

Noor saved her. After the birth of her daughter, Nahilah recovered from her sorrow, and the chronicle of her never-ending pregnancy began: Her beauty would round out, her long black hair flowed down her back, and she’d sway as she walked. When pregnant, it seemed as if she were filled with a secret light that radiated from her face and eyes.

You told me that your lust for her would explode whenever you saw her belly growing round. Nahilah would get as round as a ripe apple and give off a smell of thyme mixed with green apples. She would ripen. When she came to you pregnant at the cave of Bab al-Shams, she’d be overflowing with love and drowsiness.

The incident with the Israeli military investigator occurred nine months after Noor was born. Your mother went to register the girl and get an Israeli identity card for her. They refused to register her.

The Israeli registrar asked for the father’s name, and the old woman said it was registered on the headman’s document as Yunes Ibrahim al-Asadi.

The registrar said he wouldn’t register the girl until he’d seen her father. This happened even though your mother had brought an official document from the headman of Deir al-Asad and had thought that registering Noor would be a mere formality. But the Israeli official insisted on the father coming, so the old woman took the document and went back home.

Nahilah told the headman and all the men of the village that she wouldn’t register the girl. “Forget it,” she said. “I’m the one responsible for my children.” From that moment, Nahilah ceased to be an ordinary woman in the eyes of the villagers: She began to mix with the men and sit in their councils.

Soon after, some soldiers came and escorted her to an interrogation. They entered the house, turned it upside down, and found nothing except the blind sheikh, his wife, and two young children. They took Nahilah and put her in a dark solitary-confinement cell for three days before starting to ask her questions.