“Take him far away from here,” Omar said.
And they took him away.
“But why,” I asked him, “why did you do that? I promised we wouldn’t kill him.”
“You promised, huh! We did what we had to do.”
“But why? He was just an innocent, young boy! And he was our prisoner.”
“You don’t suppose that if they’d taken you prisoner you would have remained alive, do you?”
“But, even so. .”
“Do you think that if he’d captured you, he would have spared your life?”
“Still. .”
“Have you forgotten what they did to Saïd when they got him near the Nasra Tower in Ashrafiyyeh? How they roped him to a Land Rover and dragged him alive through the streets, as people gawked? Have you forgotten?”
“But I still. .”
“Have you forgotten how they hurled the children off the Nahr Beirut Bridge?”
“But even so. .”
“Even so, even so. . Just shut up will you. We have to kill them!”
“But we, too. .”
“But we, but they, but this, but that. . shut up philosophizing and get off my back!”
“Comrade Omar, I promised him, he was just a boy, without even the first signs of growth on his face. And he had nothing to do with the bridge or the Land Rover!”
“Cut it out, will you? By your logic, no one has anything to do with anything and everyone is innocent. What does it mean to have nothing to do with it? He knew what there was to know and was a fighter like the rest of them, and this is a war. We’re not playing games here, and nor are they. They kill us and we kill them.”
“But. .”
“But. . nothing.”
I went into my tent and didn’t come out for two days. I tried to forget the whole episode and to convince myself that Comrade Omar was right, that what he said was true and I was just being sentimental. And I managed to put it behind me; until the day I felt the maggots swarming over my arm.
It was dark, and we had left our dugout for more forward positions, engulfed in gunfire and shelling. As great flashes of light punctured the darkness, the very stars seemed to tremble in the sky. I was inching forward, on my belly and firing, when I suddenly collided into something. To begin with I couldn’t tell what it was. My arm had hit something taut, like inflated rubber, and then in an instant there were maggots everywhere, on my hand and up my arm. I drew back quickly, dropped my rifle, got onto my knees and started brushing my arm off frantically: from my forearm, the maggots had reached my waist, just above my cartridge belt. And then the smell exploded in my nostrils, and I froze. I was rooted to the spot, as if paralyzed. I considered retreating and returning to my tent, but I didn’t.
It was only the following morning — when the first sliver of light is still trimmed with darkness — that I saw him. It was the young boy, his body all bloated, with the first stages of decomposition already evident on his face, especially around the lips. I couldn’t help myself, I started howling. Immediately, the gunfire resumed. Still howling, I beat a retreat.
When I got back, I was raging.
“Why couldn’t you have buried him?” I screamed at Comrade Omar. I threw my rifle to the ground and went into my tent, cursing.
He followed me and said he thought I was no longer fit for combat and should return to Beirut. It wasn’t true, I was perfectly fit for combat — it was just that he couldn’t accept what I was saying. My request was simple enough: I was only asking for the boy to be buried. I didn’t see what the problem was — God alone knows how unbearable those maggots and that smell were!
So I returned to Beirut and set myself up in this office — and I have never left it since. I’m always combat-ready, but no one ever calls me up anymore; even when Israel invaded the South in 1978, I wasn’t asked to go to the front.
But what I want to know is where the maggots come from. People say they come from inside you, but I think they come from the smell. I remember the feeling to this day — it was as if I’d plunged my hand into a rubber pillow of writhing, wriggling maggots; they crawled up my chest, reached my neck and then my nostrils, and then they exploded into that smell.
It was the same smell, when they brought in Khalil Ahmad Jaber. Why didn’t they wash him — after all, he could’ve been infested too — before they questioned him? That interrogation was such a sham!
And now, here I am, I can’t say anything or go anywhere, I just can’t. They might be able to, but I can’t.
There was this guy. . I don’t know his real name, Issam we called him, that’s what he said his name was when we were in the mountains together. Anyway, I ran into him here in Beirut one day and people were calling him Ibrahim. I wonder what became of him. I saw him on the street once and he walked right past me, as if he’d never laid eyes on me before! As if we’d never been comrades-in-arms and shared those times together!
He was one of those guys who spent the length and breadth of the day talking politics. He was our political cadre, actually, and we used to gather around for hours listening to him tell us about Mao Tse-tung and about Pol Pot, who abolished the cities and liberated the imagination; he would talk to us about the people’s war, about guerrilla warfare, revolution and liberation. I’d never met someone like him before: he was a university lecturer and a fighter! I used to think that all academics were just armchair revolutionaries, you know, bespectacled and potbellied, sitting in their offices, full of hot air and flamboyant gestures. Ibrahim wasn’t like that at all, you should have seen him that time he was injured. He’d been hit in the foot and he didn’t even flinch.
I wasn’t far off and I shouted over to him, “Comrade, you’re wounded!”
“I know,” he said.
“Retreat, I’ll cover you.”
“No, we must get Talal.”
“Talal? Where is he?”
“He’s over there. He was hit in the head, I think he’s dead.”
His voice was steady as a rock even though Talal lay there dead! He suggested we belly-crawl towards the body and drag it back.
“Be careful,” he went on, “the attack’s going to be vicious, but if we don’t retrieve his body now we’ll lose him.”
I tried crawling on my belly but found I didn’t know how to.
“What’s with you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Go on, I’ll cover you.”
“No, you go back and I’ll get Talal. You’re wounded, leave me.”
But he wouldn’t, and we retrieved Talal together — Talal, handsome as a rain-filled cloud in spring, Talal for whom every girl in Arabia would have given her eyes, Talal who now lay beside us, his face drained of life. Issam, at my side and still bleeding profusely, said:
“Don’t cry… we die so that life may go on. Men don’t mourn martyrs.”
That was Ibrahim.
He asked me what I was up to these days.
“Oh, I’m just around,” I told him “and what about you?”
“Me? Nothing much,” he answered. “I’m back at the university, teaching.”
“What about the revolution?”
“Well, what about it. . Everything’s fallen apart. . hasn’t it? It’s finished. It’s all over.”
“Ibrahim, no, how can you say that! What of Talal, then? Have you forgotten?”
“Talal is a martyr. And we suffer.”
We went to his office, and there he started talking religion, telling me about praying and fasting.
“Is that you, Ibrahim, talking like this? Where have all our revolutionary ideas gone?”
He said he thought that a return to religion was the only solution.
“But, but there’s a war out there, Sir, what should we do?” I asked him.