I’m going to stay put, I’m not going to move; I’m just going to wait. Talal said I should, and so I am: I’m waiting for my mother, I’m waiting to get married, I’m waiting to die, I’m waiting for the revolution, I’m waiting for. . nothing in particular, just here, waiting for nothing.
They’re all the same! The difference is that when they say they’re brave, they’re lying. I’m brave but I don’t expect anything, I’m brave because I know and expect nothing.
Ladies and Gentlemen. .
I put on my dark glasses, then I take them off, and I tell you that the end does not exist. I am the only actor in the world to admit that that there is no such thing as an end. You may go now, but don’t expect an end as there isn’t one. Have you understood? No one understands. Still I wait. I’m the one who expects nothing. I’m the one who expects everything.
Captain Sameer Amro, or Abu Jassem, as he is known by everyone, is thirty-five, short, stocky, and powerfully built. He uses a cane, which he holds with his right hand, and from his waist bulges a leather cartridge belt, with bullets for his Smith and Wesson. Though his left arm is amputated at the elbow, he is quite unself-conscious about it.
The man’s reputation is legendary. His hand was severed during Black September, the month of pitched battles between the feda’iyeen and the Jordanian Army, in 1970. He was sent to one of the Eastern bloc countries for treatment, but refused to have a prosthesis fitted. “It’s better this way,” he says, and so his arm ends in a stump at the elbow. People say that even though the severed limb went on being terribly painful for over a year, but he was stoical about it, displaying exemplary fortitude and never complaining.
Abu Jassem is the stuff of legends. He was among the very first to join the revolution in 1966, abandoning his studies in electronic engineering at a university in Germany. He is reputed to have been part of Abu Ali Ayyad’s inner circle, and makes constant references to the man. Recalling the military training camp at al-Hama, off the Damascus highway, he emphasizes Abu Ali’s harsh but fatherly manner with the young recruits. If it weren’t for his fatherliness, how do you suppose we could’ve become feda’iyeen, he likes to say.
The story has it that in 1966 Abu Jassem was wounded in an operation against the Israeli army, but that he somehow managed to crawl back to the Lebanese border with seven bullets lodged in his abdomen. After a patriotic border officer picked him up and dispatched him to a hospital in Saida, the Deuxième Bureau 9 got wind of the matter and Abu Jassem was arrested. Held for over a year in the Helou Barracks with his wounds unhealed and open, he bore the pain with outstanding courage.
They say he was held there with Jalal Ka’wash, the feda’i who died in custody after he was dragged around the compound roped to the back of a vehicle. At the time, the Lebanese government issued a statement alleging that Jalal Ka’wash had taken his own life by throwing himself off the third floor of the building. Abu Jassem never talks about Jalal — if you ask him, he just shakes his head and gazes into the distance. He will only talk about the period of his interrogation.
A terrible period.
Only three days after the operation to remove the bullets from his abdomen and while still running a raging temperature, soldiers of the Lebanese Army surrounded the hospital and notified its director that they had explicit orders to arrest Abu Jassem.
The director, who was also the operating surgeon, said it was out of the question. The man was wounded, his life was still in danger, and there wasn’t a law anywhere in the world that permitted his arrest. “You may,” he told them, “station a guard outside his room.” But arresting him would be criminal, he would die.
They paid the doctor no heed, stormed Abu Jassem’s room, wrenched the IV out of his arm and carried him out on a stretcher. The officer in charge said they were taking him to the Military Hospital in Beirut. The doctor didn’t believe him. “The man will die, and I will raise hell about it,” he said. “It’s outrageous!’”
But the doctor did nothing of the sort, and news of the incident was not carried in the local press. It only appeared in an underground publication with limited circulation in Gaza City.
In actual fact, they took him straight to the Helou Barracks. Realizing that they wanted him dead, Abu Jassem refused to answer any of their questions. The interrogation had started, to all intents and purposes, inside the ambulance that transported him from Saida Hospital to Beirut. One of the soldiers had asked: “Where were you wounded? Where do you get your weapons from? How many of you are there? Where are your bases in South Lebanon?”
In enormous pain, Abu Jassem just stared up at the ceiling of the ambulance. The vehicle sped down the potholed tarmac, and every time they hit a bump, he was sure that his stitches were going to burst open. That was when he made up his mind that he would die without opening his mouth.
When they arrived at the barracks, they told him to get up and walk. “I can’t just jump out and walk…” he began, stopping in midsentence after seeing the ruthless glint in the officer’s eyes. He realized that they would shove him out of the ambulance and then claim that he had died attempting to escape. “OK, I’ll walk.”
Bracing himself against the side of the vehicle, he doubled over and slowly rose to his feet. He felt his abdomen was ripping open — dizzy with pain, he fainted and fell to the ground with a thud, like a solid plank of wood. The soldiers picked him up and threw him into a dark and dank cell, without even a blanket to lie on. He lay like that on the bare ground for another twenty-four hours, before regaining consciousness.
When he came to, his head was pounding and his body was racked by shivers.
“Where am I?” he cried. No response. Then a man came in with two tin cans, one full of water and the other empty, for him to urinate in “and keep the place clean.” He crawled to the can with water and drank, then tipped its entire contents over his head to try and bring down the raging fever. The following day, they gave him dry bread in addition to the water.
Abu Jassem became delirious, and he remained so for an entire week, drifting in and out of consciousness. A soldier at the barracks — who subsequently enlisted in the Joint Forces after the split and collapse of the national army — would later recount Captain Sameer Amro’s odyssey with nothing but admiration, always referring to him as Captain-Sir.
As he told it, loud banging, punctuated by occasional rasping cries for help, could be heard coming from the lower part of the barracks where the hallucinating Abu Jassem was being held. And although these muffled cries troubled all those who heard them, no one dared ask the commanding officer what the source of the noise was.
Ali Tabsh, the former soldier, says that after three days of this, he was detailed to clean the cell, and that when he went down, he found Abu Jassem, convulsing and delirious, in a pool of excrement and urine. When he approached the prisoner and spoke to him, there was no response. When the soldier looked more closely, he could see greenish patches dotting the flesh of his abdomen, and when he brushed against him, Abu Jassem’s entire body shuddered. After cleaning out the cell, the private went up to the duty officer’s room.