It would be very difficult for me to describe my feelings as I followed the thousands of people setting out for their liberated villages, making their way along dusty tracks, climbing the hills either on foot, or by car or motorcycle. Yellow flags, green flags, and flags of a white background coloured with green and red. Bulldozers removing the barriers. The gate that had closed off the road to them opened by hands, arms, and shoulders. The people passed through, and kept on ascending, getting closer, reaching their destination: women strewed the new arrivals with rice and rose petals. Ahlan wa sahlan! Welcome home! ‘Twenty years we’ve been dead, and now we are reborn.’ These words were spoken by an old man as he greeted the new arrivals. A woman wearing an army uniform was asked by another who was there with the media whether the uniform was part of ‘the spoils of victory’. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘these clothes belonged to a comrade of my son — both of them martyrs.’
‘Are you happy on this day?’ the journalist asked her.
The woman replied, ‘Happy, yes, but my happiness will be complete when the detainees come back from the Israeli prisons, and the bodies of our martyred sons are returned to us.’
A youth pulled down a poster displaying a picture of one of the leaders of the collaborating army, tore it to pieces, and continued on his way. Young girls wept, women ululated and sang, two men embraced and held the embrace for a long time, as if afraid that if one of them let go of the other he might find his friend behind barbed wire that would once again keep them apart. In a dusty village square, a prayer was held that united those returning with those who had stayed on in the village. A group photograph of the residents of Bent Jbail, taken in front of the town’s telephone company, which had been the collaborators’ headquarters, laughing faces, people pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, yellow flags fluttering, in a still shot, as if addressing time itself: ‘Take this picture — document this.’
The men of Lahad’s army, which had collaborated with Israel, gave themselves up. The camera moved in on them as they sat in a large transport vehicle. They hid their faces. The jig was up. Their leaders had asked permission to take refuge with their families in Israel. A long line of people and cars stood awaiting permits to cross. The Fatima Gate closed behind the last Israeli soldier leaving Lebanon — the television showed the great iron gate and broadcast the loud creaking noise it made as its two panels swung on their hinges. An Israeli soldier on the other side encircled it with heavy chains. Then the iron lock.
At Bent Jbail, Hasan Nasrallah said in his speech on the twenty-sixth of May, 2000, ‘Put away your despair. Arm yourselves,’ he said, ‘with hope.’
Antoine Lahad, in a statement from Paris, said, ‘We dedicated ourselves to Israel for twenty-five years, but Israel betrayed and abandoned us in a single night.’
Nasrallah said in his speech, ‘The age of defeat is over.’
The next day (the twenty-seventh of May), I got out of bed the moment I awoke, took a shower, and put on a brightly coloured dress — it was the first time I had shed mourning garb since Hazem’s death. I made myself a cup of tea, picked up a pen, and sat down to write to him:
‘Couldn’t you have held on for five months? You only needed to wait four months and twenty days — no more — and then your life would have gone on for years. I miss you so much, but I’m going to set that aside now and tell you what’s happened.’ And I told the story, told in detail what I had seen via live television broadcast; then I drew a map for him showing the locations of the villages and towns. At the end of the letter, I told him that I meant to visit southern Lebanon as soon as I got the chance. (Hazem was the first person I told of my travel plans.) When I finished the letter, I put it in an envelope, but when I went to write the address, I felt perplexed; I put the letter in my handbag, and got up to make myself another cup of tea and get ready for work.
It seemed to me for a moment that I might continue writing letters to Hazem. I told myself that this could be the beginning of one of my sudden manias. Or it could be true madness, the kind that would remove me from the rational world. But I wrote him only one more letter after that, which I began when I was at Beirut Airport, waiting for my flight. I continued writing on the plane. When I finished this letter, the flight attendant was telling us to fasten our safety belts, because the plane was about to land at Cairo Airport.
In my letter to Hazem I told him about the road to the town of Al-Khiam, about the colour photographs of young men that were to be found along the way: ‘At every position where there had been an operation by the resistance was a pole — like a lamp-post, only instead of being topped by a light it bore a picture of a martyr who took part in the operation: a large colour photograph in which the facial features stood out clearly, and underneath the picture was the young man’s name, with the date and the year in which he was martyred.’
I told him about the prison at Al-Khiam: its location overlooking Palestine and Syria and Mount Amil in Lebanon. I described it to him minutely, beginning with the list hung on the left side of the entrance to the courtyard: a record of all the gaolers who had engaged in torture. I described to him the interrogation chamber, the ‘hanging rod’, the large cells and the small ones — these were one square metre and not quite two metres in height, where a prisoner would spend a month or two with no opportunity to stretch out or to extend his legs fully. I said, ‘I went into one of them and pushed the door shut — I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, in the gloom.’ I told him about the box: A prisoner would sit cross-legged in there for days, in a space whose dimensions measured one cubic metre. I told him about the exercise yard in the sun, roofed with barbed wire, where prisoners were allowed to go for twenty minutes once every three weeks. The prison was left as it was after liberation, to become a museum for visitors, but the walls were repainted, and so we lost everything that had been written or inscribed or drawn on them. There was nothing, now, on the walls.
I did not tell him what I had heard about the various kinds of torture, or the breakouts that had been attempted despite the minefield encircling the prison, but I related in detail two of the many stories I had heard: the tale of Ali Qashmar, who had spent ten years in the prison, and that of Abdallah Hamza, who had stayed there only three weeks.
‘Ali was from the town of Al-Khiam. They arrested him when he was fourteen years old. He didn’t know what the charge was. He said, “I was like other boys my age: I hated the occupation, but all I thought about was fun and games. I wasn’t much concerned with the future, and if I did think about it, then my thoughts went no further than the hope that I would pass my examinations.”
‘He was arrested and tortured, tortured extensively.
‘His mother went up to the roof of her house every day. She gazed toward the buildings of the nearby prison and talked to her son, as if her words might reach him, as if he would respond to the things she told him. The neighbours would hear her, and gently bring her back down from the roof.
‘When he got out of prison, his mother didn’t recognise him. In her mind he was a small boy, and standing before her was a tall young man with a beard. Smiling, he said to her, “Mother, it’s me, Ali!”