“You didn’t survive Tall al-Zaatar to die here! Women can also be a cause. . ours is not the only one. But don’t get the two mixed up!”
Nabeel had been so seriously wounded, it was a wonder he was alive. Yet here he was, practically blind, leaping around the streets of Madrid as if it were outer space.
“Tell me about Tall al-Zaatar,” I said, “tell me how you escaped.”
“We just did,” he said, adding that the hardest thing was the march through the hills. “Dozens of us, fighters, left the camp and found ourselves walking through the wilderness. We were completely lost: the gunfire was so intense, bullets were flying everywhere, screeching past us, whizzing around our heads, and still we could hear the women’s cries ringing in our ears. And even though the whole sky was lit up, we had no sense of direction whatsoever. We stumbled along, falling into ditches as we went, uprooted wild plants as if we’d done it all our lives, and bumped into corpses — the corpses of fighters like us who had also tried to escape — their faces swollen, arms spread wide, weapons nearby. We never made a stop. Even when we thought we recognized someone, we didn’t stop to bury him, there was no time… we just plowed on through the inky night of the forest-turned-graveyard. And we would have all been killed were it not for God creating darkness. It was terrifying: every rustling noise, every footstep you heard, you never knew whether you were coming up against a foe or a friend. Still, we walked on, without bearings, until at some point, in the midst of all of this darkness and terror, I wanted a smoke. Feeling around my shirt pocket, I found a pack of cigarettes — it was all scrunched up, like someone cowering with fear. I thought maybe it happened when I bumped into a tree and hadn’t noticed or maybe I’d scrunched it up myself and returned it to my pocket, Lord only knows. Anyway, I didn’t smoke until after we’d arrived.
“When we got there, the city was teeming with people, there were refugees screaming and shouting everywhere, and the streets heaved with people’s cries and honking horns. I wasn’t hungry in the slightest. In Tall al-Zaatar, I was never hungry: all we had was stale bread and cigarettes; the people of the camp had eaten all the lentils because they had run out of bread. I’d been assigned to a hilltop, and after we were completely encircled, we withdrew towards the mountains. It was only when we got to Beirut that I saw the state people were in. You know, when you’re fighting you don’t see anything, you can’t see, but once I got over there after the fall of the camp, I really saw them for the first time. And it was terrifying: here I was, an eager volunteer returned from Germany, standing before our party office in Beirut, absolutely terror-struck.
“They took us to Shiyyah, that’s where I was injured. Did you know that when you’re hit, at first you don’t feel anything?. . I was setting up a mortar position on the third floor of a building overlooking Ain al-Remmaneh, when I saw this huge flash of light. There wasn’t an inch of me that was unhurt,” he said, pulling up his pants to show me the scars from the bullet and shrapnel wounds.
We kept walking, and Nabeel dreamed of returning to Berlin.
“The operation on my eye will succeed,” he’d say, “and I’ll go back to Berlin, to my job and to. . Anna-Maria. She’s a salesgirl in a toy store, I met her in a disco; I’m going to go back, we’ll get married and I’ll take her to al-Khalil. She never believes the ’annaybeh story when I tell her. . now she won’t believe that I’ve been hit by so many bullets and I’m still alive!”
What was Madrid like? Madrid was full of medical words we didn’t understand the meaning of and which our hunch-backed minder made heroic efforts to translate. Madrid was the shafts of light that streamed through my healthy eye; it was the voices of nurses and doctors, the long corridors, the faces with bandaged eyes — we were all eye patients; and the doctor telling the hunched-backed minder that they would operate tomorrow… Tomorrow, he said, they would fit me with a new eye. . an eye that wouldn’t cry, because it was a glass eye, and glass doesn’t cry. After the operation, it felt like I had a mountain inside my eye socket! I wanted to rip it out, it felt so leaden and heavy, it was stupid and immobile! Like having another person inside my eye who could see me but whom I couldn’t see. All I wanted was to rip it out. But I got used to it. It stayed put and now I don’t even feel it, it’s as if it weren’t there.
I never saw the Yemeni or Nabeel again. The hunch-backed minder said they’d been sent to a hospital in Barcelona, because their cases were difficult, and I would be returning to Beirut.
Beirut. . Beirut seemed an eternity away. I’d spent an entire month amidst the whispers of nurses, the smell of anesthetics and medicines, with one glass eye and one healthy eye, which wept and stung and filled up with fog. . Beirut was so far away, it seemed another lifetime…
An entire month had gone by, in which I’d completely forgotten Beirut, and the sound of the shells booming across the city; during which I’d forgotten even the color of my clothes. Here I was, alone in Spain one day and back in Beirut the next! I was going back the following day!
I’d said I’d be back. I’d told Sameer and Aatef, “I’ll be back.” Sameer said I would be a retired fighter.
“No,” I told him, “not retired! I will come back and hold the sky between my fingers!”
Just the way we said we would when we filled the streets with our noisy demonstrations, when we chanted that we would hoe the earth and plough it anew and be the seeds of a new beginning.
And here it was: Beirut, a jumble of buildings, the sun glinting off its cement high-rises and its blue sea. The very same sea that filled with sailors searching the deep. . As beautiful as the women, whose shimmering bodies lay on the sand that stretched all the way from Beirut and back, like the midriff of the world.
I took off my dark glasses, the city glistened white. I was sure they’d be waiting for me. No, I wouldn’t go back to Cana, I’m no Jesus Christ, and the yearning ache in my belly for Beirut had been coursing through me, like wine through my veins.
And so there I was, back. Descending the steps from the plane I can see that no one is there waiting for me; inside the airport terminal, people suddenly begin scurrying around and jostling each other as shells begin landing in the vicinity. A steward groans and predicts the airport will close. I go to the party office. . no one there either. I’m told they’ve left for the mountains, far away. Marwan says they’re all up there, where everything is covered in snow. “Then we’ll go skiing down the slopes!” I said.
Boy, and what a steep descent it’s been!
I’m the only one left here now. My old buddies have all gone. Sameer is in France, finishing his studies; Aatef went back to his old job at the Social Security Department; and I’m left with this new bunch of recruits who don’t even know the meaning of the word war. They just strut around toting their guns, talking about war. They don’t know what it means to die, how terrible it is. They talk about it as if it were something beautiful. But death is terrible. When I tell them, they don’t believe me. I don’t go with them on their patrols. I stay here, no, I don’t go. . I’d rather just stay here and wait.
Samar’s advice was that I should go back to university. I told her I wouldn’t. Samar was a student at AUB, who also worked at the film institute. That’s where we first met in a big room covered in a pall of cigarette smoke. I was there because someone who knew about it told me they were making a film about the war and wanted it to include a fighter’s testimonial. The director — whose name I forget, but he spoke like such a know-it-all — wanted a fighter to stand up in front of the camera and recount what he had experienced while the camera panned from place to place.