“Sir,” he said, “the man is dying.” The officer looked up scornfully. “Sir, I cleaned out his cell. I saw him with my own eyes, he’s covered in pus and is so feverish he’s practically unconscious.”
“Let the dog die!” the officer answered.
“Sir, he’s agonizing!”
“Get out of here, and mind your own business, will you!”
“Sir, I think he should be in a hospital.”
The officer jumped to his feet, cursing.
“Calling themselves feda’iyeen! Conducting their dirty little wars, they deserve to die! They’re nothing but agents, and death is all they deserve. I’ll finish him off myself!”
Private Ali Tabsh left the room, and after he told his fellow soldiers what had passed between him and the officer, no one dared take any kind of initiative whatsoever. They could hear Abu Jassem’s agony and all they could do was wish him a hasty death. They knew the poor wretch would never get better in those conditions.
Ali Tabsh even thought he might go to him in the middle of the night to finish him off and relieve Abu Jassem of his suffering, but he never did. He was too scared, they’d consider him a criminal, and he’d be expelled from the army.
But Sameer Amro, aka Abu Jassem, didn’t die.
The soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw him up and about one day, walking around the compound. He was slightly stooped, it’s true, but there he was, wearing a clean set of clothes, on his way to the examining magistrate’s office.
After the rasping rattle had stopped, everyone had forgotten Abu Jassem was in that cell.
But he hadn’t died, and when Ali Tabsh met up with him again ten years later, he almost leapt to his neck and embraced him. However, Captain Sameer’s steady gaze, calm tone, and amputated arm all restrained the soldier from showing his feelings to his officer-hero.
No one knows for sure how it came about that Sameer Amro returned to life. According to rumors circulating at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser had pressured the Lebanese president to ensure the prisoner received proper care and not be abandoned to his fate. Some people attributed it to sheer luck, it was a miracle they said, the result of untold suffering and fortitude, as his body slowly expelled the poisonous pus and the wounds began to heal, though they continued to ooze blood. Others still said it was the doing of Khodr Abul Abbas, who had appeared before Abu Jassem in the dead of night and had touched the wounds with his spear, leading Abu Jassem to recover.
Whatever the truth, the point is he recovered. And whenever people ask him about his recovery, he says nothing. He smiles enigmatically, baring a gold tooth. In actual fact, he himself doesn’t know how. Whenever he tries to remember that time, he cannot conjure up anything but a film of white gauze… but he remembers the interrogation very well.
Entering the examining magistrate’s office, Sameer Amro, the feda’i, is met by the contemptuous gaze of the officer who remains seated at his table. Sameer ignores him and scrutinizes the maps hanging on the wall behind him. The officer invites him to take a seat and offers him a cigarette.
“Thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“What will you have to drink, tea or coffee? It’s been a while since you’ve had any, surely?”
“Thanks, but I won’t.”
The officer rings a bell and orders coffee, one cup of osmalliyah and a bitter coffee for himself. While they wait for the coffee, the officer busies himself with a stack of papers before him. A soldier brings in the two cups of coffee and puts them down on the table. The officer takes a sip, sucking his lips in noisily and licking off the froth that has stuck to them. He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Sameer leaves his coffee untouched.
“Drink, man,” the officer says.
“Thank you, I don’t drink coffee.”
“You’re stubborn, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“Listen to me,” the officer says, rising. “A softly-softly approach is useless with you people. But let me tell you that it is within our power to break you. We can put you through hell, if we so wish.”
“You’ve already done it, down in that cell.”
“You think I’m joking?”
“No, I think there isn’t anything you can do.”
“Listen, we want one thing, and one thing only, from you. . Just a little information on your bases in the South.”
“I know nothing.”
“You mean you won’t talk?”
“I mean I know nothing.”
The officer rings the bell again. Two large, heavily built men enter, muscles bristling. Holding him up by the armpits, they just lift Abu Jassem out of his chair.
“The chicken treatment, Sir…?”
They took him out of the room and led him to a kind of elevated scaffold, where prisoners were suspended by their hands and feet, like a chicken on a rotisserie spit; after a few moments, they brought him back into the room.
“Looks like nothing works with you,” the officer said.
“You’ve used every method you have, and I still know nothing.”
The officer’s voice softened.
“You’re young and healthy, why waste your youth like this?. . You’re all traitors, you’re a. . you’re nothing but collaborators.”
“You must be mistaken, Sir. It is you who are the collaborators and the agents.”
The officer got up and slapped him. Facing him squarely, the feda’i Sameer Amro spat in the officer’s face. The officer wiped off the spit with a tissue and barked an order to the two strongmen to give him the “spit,” which they did.
During the next and final interrogation session, the officer said what he had to say in a couple of sentences. “Be informed,” he told Sameer as he led him to his cell, “that you shall spend the rest of your days here. Your people have split up, and every government in the Arab world is accusing them of treason.” Sameer Amro remained in that cell until the June 1967 war. When he was released, he went straight back to al-Hama camp and laid low for a while.
Stories abound of his courageous exploits inside the Occupied Territories. According to one of many such accounts, he single-handedly put an Israeli tank out of commission with an RPG missile.
Abu Jassem is now the cadre in charge of the party office where Fahd Badreddin “works,” and he is the only person who treats Fahd with any respect. He even consults him on occasion. Besides his participation in many leadership organizations, he is responsible for special operations — including, it is rumored, the 1972 Munich Operation (although no one was able to confirm this information); he is a very senior cadre in West Beirut with many duties attached to his position. He remains, however, a man of few words.
Since the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon, Abu Jassem has become rather irascible. During the Battle of the Mountains, he was very vocal about the need for decisiveness, arguing in favor of prosecuting the war to the bitter end, to victory. But, as is well-known, the “decisiveness-in-battle” principle was eschewed in favor of Arab and international intervention — in Abu Jassem’s words, a mere diversionary tactic before the coup de grâce was delivered. Waving his stump in the air, he curses the pass we have come to.
Gradually, and in spite of his reluctance, he was assigned a car, a driver, and then a bodyguard. He didn’t want them, but he was told they were “unavoidable security measures” in the changing situation and that “given the positions of responsibility we are now in, you can’t refuse.” So he agreed. But he agreed reluctantly. He dismissed the driver early as often as he could, and would find some mission or other in the South on which to dispatch his bodyguard, simply in order not to be accompanied.
The captain has not changed much over the years. He’s put on a little weight, maybe, but he remains a solid man. People say he drinks — everybody drinks — but he’s never been on a mission drunk, so it’s not a problem. He is adamant about the subject of border security, because, in his words, there is a very real danger of enemy infiltration. But when it comes to political analysis, he raises his stump in the air as if to say that he knows nothing.