‘Yes, I participated in the sit-in. I participated in the march. I participated in the conference. I participated in the activities of the supporters of the Palestinian revolution. I participated in the call for establishing committees for the defence of democracy.’
‘Yes, in my articles I criticised the authorities for their repressive actions and unjust policy in addressing national concerns.’
She says, ‘On 26 December 1972, while I was at the College of Engineering, some students from the Law School came and told me that the student union was holding a conference there, and that any student expressing a dissenting opinion was accused of communism, and was at risk of being attacked with knives. And in fact four students were wounded and taken to hospital. No one was interrogated about that.’
She says, ‘On 27 December 1972 the student union and the organisation for Islamic youth in support of the government tore down the wall-journals in the Law School and threatened the students with knives. In response to this provocation the students gathered for a rally, and it was my responsibility to move the rally out of the College of Engineering quickly, to avoid a dangerous riot. I stood in front of the crowd of students and started shouting, “To the courtyard, to Gamal Abdel Nasser Hall!” As the group was leaving the College of Engineering, the group hostile to us was calling out slogans against us and breaking the wooden rods used for hanging the magazines in order to use them against us as clubs. I decided to stay at my college to confront them. They surrounded me and said, “Get out of here, you Communist! If you don’t get out, we’ll pick you up and carry you out and beat you up. We don’t want you to open your mouth at this college, ever.” I sat down on the ground and said, ‘This is my college, and I’m not leaving it, and I will speak. You want to beat me up, carry on.” ’
The students had begun heading down the stairs, and they found a girl, by herself, sitting on the ground surrounded by youths threatening her with clubs; they found themselves in an embarrassing position, and began to disperse. No one was interrogated about that.
The prosecutor general’s office made no investigation into the perpetration of various types of brutality, such as the beating of students with truncheons and chains, on the day of the 3 January demonstration.
No investigation was made into the matter of the knife one of them was carrying and using to threaten the students.
There was no investigation into the injuries suffered by dozens of students, who were carried by their classmates on to the main campus of the university. Some of them had head injuries, and some were bleeding; others were choking from the effects of the tear-gas bombs, and still others were unconscious.
The prosecutor’s office made no investigation into what the security officers did when they smashed cars and shattered their windows with huge clubs, so that afterwards they could accuse the students of causing unrest.
There was no investigation of what one of the security men did when he dragged a handicapped student behind him, yanking him sharply along; the student, unable to keep up with his rapid pace, tripped, stumbled, and fell on the ground, while, from behind, soldiers beat and kicked him, shoving him and trying to force him to stand up and run — he would get up and make the attempt, but, hampered by his condition, would fall down again, and the kicking would resume.
The prosecutor general’s office never made any investigation.
I read Siham’s testimony as if I were back in the 1970s, following in her footsteps. Having heard her once I had wanted to hear more from her. There were only three years’ difference in age between us. What? I said, ‘So it’s possible.’ If I hurried, I thought, maybe in three years I could be like her. A flood-tide of feelings; images, scenes, sounds, questions, all rise to the surface. A lump in the throat wells up, then goes away: pride, self-assurance. I know what it means to be innocent; the thought brings a smile to my lips. I’m no longer the girl I once was, but a mother trying to protect her little girl from a devouring world. ‘It did devour her,’ I murmur. What’s done is done. ‘It devoured her,’ I say again, ‘many times.’ A shudder overtakes me. My eye catches the words, ‘the aforementioned’, and I laugh. The phrase is conspicuously repeated in the procès-verbal, and in the reports of the secret service, as it is in the charges brought against Siham: a comment in a wall-journal, the composition of an article or communiqué, participation in a conference or a sit-in or a demonstration.
In imagination and in principle it seems that the references of the secret service and the public prosecutor to those quite ordinary student activities as suspicious behaviour — necessitating secret reports and denouncers and witnesses for the prosecution; the knock on the door at dawn, the police on duty all night; prisons with budgets, administrations, officers and guards; vast blue lorries transporting people from here to there and from there to here; prosecuting attorneys opening investigations and closing them, applying themselves minutely to their signatures, followed by the date (day-month-year), after long hours of interrogation — this is what is laughable. But I laugh only at the words, ‘the aforementioned.’ No sooner does my eye fall upon the words than I start laughing — laughter I am at pains to keep in check, but I quickly discover, as it escapes from me and rises to a raucous crescendo that I’m incapable of restraining it.
Siham is not the only ‘aforementioned’. All of them are referred to as ‘the aforementioned’ — my close friends, all of whose height and girth I know well; I know the lineaments of their faces in joy, anger, despair; I know the nuances of each one’s voice and intonation; I know their gait; I know whom they loved, went about with, married; I know when it all came down on their heads, with or without their children looking on. Likewise I know a thousand details of their lives, of episodes both meaningful (the great, the earthshaking) and meaningless, or seemingly so.
I go back to the files, and all those facts slip out from their hiding places in the memory, to reclaim their body, their presence, their role in the creation of what I find written in the dossiers. And every time the same question surfaces: Does death constitute a barrier or does it, on the contrary, draw aside a curtain? For example, I read the words of my comrade who committed suicide by throwing herself, in a highly dramatic scene, from a twelfth-storey balcony. I read about the suicide after the fact and I wonder: am I seeing it more clearly, or less? Does reading across the line between life and death, across more than thirty years, with all that happened in the course of those years, form a thick lens, like prescription glasses, that improves vision, or blinders that shield the eyes from the sun’s glare? Or is the whole premise inadequate? Should we consider each case on its own merits?
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the files are much like a mirror, in which I stare at my own face, which is not mine alone, but is rather the face that belongs to us all together, as a collective of young men and women who took part in a dream, a movement, a pulse; in terror and confusion and disappointment — a face some strip bare and then call history; others feel in it the throb of life and the structure of the consciousness it created, so difficult to annul, however rigorous the attempt… a mirror, or a group picture taken of us one morning thirty years ago in a sunny square. I look more closely, and cry, ‘This is me, and this… Good Lord, look how thin he was, and that one… as if it were someone else, and here’s so-and-so, may she rest in peace, and there — my God, how she’s changed. And that one… incredible, he was so handsome — he still is, so why does he look so grubby and dishevelled in the picture, like a student’s dormitory room that for a month no one has lifted a finger to clean or tidy? And here’s Siham…’ I gaze at her image for a long time, and see us together in Qanatir Prison, reciting a French poem we’d both memorised in primary schooclass="underline"