Intissar gets up. Ahmad is watching Habib and the others play cards, discussing the negotiations. Rumors. Possible destinations. Where will they go to play cards, and for how long? Intissar suddenly wonders if she’ll go with them. Without Marwan. For an unknown destination. To fight for what? There will always be time to think about it. Now, courage. She has to convince them to go look for the body.
She goes over to the group of cardplayers.
Ahmad is staring at her. She doesn’t know if she should see compassion in his gaze or lust. Or both at once, maybe.
“I. . I want to go look for him,” she says.
Habib sighs. Ahmad opens his eyes wide. The others drop their cards.
“Intissar, wait. You can’t go there alone. We’ll go tonight.”
Habib looks as if he has resigned himself to accompanying her. He didn’t even try to refuse or mention the danger of the expedition.
Suddenly, a low-flying plane rips through the sky. Then another. The players get up.
“It’s started up again,” says Ahmad.
At over 400 meters a second you can cross Palestine and Lebanon in so little time. The Israeli aircraft need only a few minutes to reach their bases in the Negev or in Tel Aviv. A bomb explodes, far behind them. The phosphorus burns on contact with the air for hours. The wounds it causes are terrible, they don’t stop burning.
They are too close to the Israeli lines to risk anything. Without a doubt it’s civilians who are burning. She remembers the first bombings at the beginning of the invasion. Dozens of victims in the hospital in Gaza, so many children. Horribly burned. The doctors couldn’t believe their eyes — for phosphorus, they consulted the manuals to learn how to treat the wounds, you needed copper sulfate; they didn’t have any, so they watched the hands or feet melt until they disappeared. Then the hospital itself was bombed. Then the neighborhood was reduced to ashes. Then there was the battle for Khalde, then the battle for the airport, then a ceasefire, then the siege, then sporadic battles, and now Marwan is dead.
Which doesn’t stop the Israelis from continuing to drop a few bombs on the crumbling city now and then. A candle wavering. From Mazraa to Hamra passing through Raouche, West Beirut is an immense refugee camp, a giant field hospital. Those who fled from the South have joined the displaced from Fakhani, from Shatila, from Burj al Barajinah, from Ouzay where the houses are in ruins. No more water, no more electricity, no more gas for the generators, no more medicine, no more food. The only respite is at night, when the relative coolness of the sea air coincides with the pause in the bombings. Until the early morning. In the bedroom in that apartment in Hamra, in the last days, that was when they made love, in silence so as not to disturb anyone, with the window open to take advantage of the breeze. Four days? Four quiet days during the negotiations between Arafat and the Americans. A respite, an idle period before the inevitable fall.
“It’s begun again,” Ahmad says.
The second bomb sounds closer, they can hear the shrill cry of the plane moving away from the anti-aircraft fire. She wonders what the pilots can see, from so high up. They must see as far as Damascus, beyond the mountain. Apparently, when Leila Khaled hijacked the TWA plane, she forced the pilot to fly over Haifa, to see Galilee from above. Marwan told her that. He will never see Palestine. Does it still exist, even? She does not believe that there is a city in Palestine as beautiful as Beirut, in winter, when you can see snow on Mount Sannine from the Corniche. A city plunging into the sea like Beirut in Raouche or in Ramlet el Bayda. A city with a lighthouse, hills, luxury hotels, shops, cafés, restaurants, fishermen, lovers by the water’s edge, more nightclubs, brothels, universities, politicians, and journalists than you know what to do with. Dead people, too, so many you don’t know where to put them. What will she do with Marwan’s body? She’ll undress it. She’ll wash it herself. She’ll bury it. If it weren’t forbidden by religion, she’d build a big bonfire and burn it. On the beach. Like a beacon. She’d watch Marwan go up in smoke into the summer sky and rejoin Palestine through the air, with the Israeli planes. No, she’ll bury him in Lebanese soil. In an improvised, temporary cemetery full of Palestinian graves. To whom does the land belong, anyway? To farmers and to the dead.
“Another one,” says Ahmad.
This time the explosion is huge. The building trembles and they are covered with dust. The cataclysmic noise and the vibrations threw Intissar to the ground. Her ears are whistling. She gets back up, dusting herself off. Carefully, two fighters go out the back to see where the bomb fell.
Why go on bombing if they know they’ve won? What isn’t already shattered? She feels an impotent rage building up inside her, a white-hot fury, as happens every time. What can you do against planes? The few SAM-7 and -8 missiles they have are unusable; not enough people know how to use them properly. Marwan. Tonight they’ll go look for Marwan’s body, she’ll bury it, she’ll cry, and she’ll wait for everything to collapse.
•
The war had displaced her many times since 1975. From her parents’ house to this room in Hamra. Seven years. The first autumn of the conflict, around the time of her twentieth birthday, it was butchery. Armed posses, axe massacres, shootings, pillages, bombings. Then habit set in. She remembers demonstrations, strikes, universities closed, the massacres of the Quarantaine, the siege of Tell Zaatar, it became a kind of macabre routine. Until that morning in August 1978, almost four years ago to the day, when her parents died. Both of them. The attack completely destroyed the PLO headquarters, 150 dead. Mourning struck her down. For the months that followed, she was wiped out. Wandered ghostlike with no weight on the ground. The apartment empty, the windows taped to keep them from shattering when the bombs fell. Permanent twilight. Endless menstruation, a body that kept bleeding. No willpower, nothing. She was floating, like Beirut, according to international agreements. Losing Marwan today isn’t any harder. Or less hard. Start everything over again, always. Lose the city, each time, the city that began to liquefy beneath the bombs, to empty itself out slowly into the sea, the enemy at its ramparts, everywhere. Thinking is useless. Let come what may. She’ll go recover Marwan’s body, wash it and bury it, and then, then, according to what the Americans, the Israelis, the Russians, and other distant gods decide, they’ll do with her what they like.
Nightfall comes slowly. She remembers waiting for the end of the Ramadan fast, in spring or summer, endless. When she was little she cheated — she was too thirsty in the late afternoon, she went to drink in the bathroom, and then, ashamed, asked God for forgiveness. Helping prepare the iftar dishes and the countless pastries was a real torture. Her mother suspected that she cheated, of course, but she didn’t say anything. She smiled all the time. How did she manage to resist, her mother, with her hands in the food, preparing the soups, the dumplings, the cakes, the drinks — her father arrived a few minutes before the adhan and the breaking of the fast, the sky of Beirut was already tinged with pink and saffron, Intissar was seated at the dinner table, the dishes were served, she felt like a runner at the starting line. Her parents were not religious. They belonged to the Marxist left of the Fatah. Ramadan had nothing to do with religion. It was a victory over self, and a tradition. A victory for Palestine, almost. A tradition that linked you to a world, to the world of childhood and the orange qamar eddin imported from Syria, to lentil soup, to tamarind juice from India, to cinnamon, to cardamom, to the night falling gently over an entire people who were stuffing themselves, before singing, laughing, or watching Egyptian movies, old celebratory movies where Samya Gamal always bewitched Farid el Atrash. Intissar tried to dance like her, swaying her bony hips, moving the chest that she didn’t have yet, and late at night they slept a little, until the shouts of dawn and the beginning of the new day of fasting.