•
Defeat has beginnings. The fissures presage collapse, fine cracks predict catastrophe. The will begins to give out, hope wavers. Intissar watches her tears falling onto the dead man’s chest. Her desire had soon changed into hatred. She hated Ahmad. When Marwan returned he guessed something. Her hatred was too visible. The silence. She hadn’t said anything, he had promised to be by her side forever. The war, the front, and disaster. Intissar takes Marwan’s stiff hand as if it were alive. Now you know. She strokes the dead fingers. Her sorrow is so great that it covers everything. Marwan spoke to her often about his mother, his mother’s tenderness, her generosity. So pure. So perfect. She who had loved her husband passionately, always near him, she took care of him when he was wounded, fed him when he was hungry. She cuddled her children, embroidered and sewed for them. She tried not to think about Palestine, not to think about going back. Her country was her family, nothing more. Marwan was like Abu Nasser. He would fight to the end, he said. Die standing up. Like a tree. Not let himself be demeaned by the Israelis. Now he was lying there, beneath Intissar’s last caresses, before joining the roots of trees felled by the bombs.
Urgent knocking on her door snaps her out of her funereal daydream. Probably someone alerted by the smoke in the kitchen. She puts the sponge down and tears herself away from Marwan’s body. She picks up the lamp. The neighbors have to be reassured that the building isn’t on fire. There are so many corpses in the city that no one would be surprised to find one here. But flames make them anxious. She opens the door halfway. A violent shove of a shoulder on the door sends her sprawling onto the floor, half unconscious. She glimpsed Ahmad in the opening. She tries to gather her wits, she has tears of pain in her eyes, her nose aches. Ahmad has closed the door behind him.
“I came to bring you this.”
He throws a piece of white cloth in her face, which she doesn’t immediately recognize.
“You left it on purpose, didn’t you?”
The bra she abandoned in a corner of the post. Ahmad is looking at her legs and her underwear beneath the raised nightdress.
“You’re mine now. Marwan isn’t here anymore.”
Everything has its price. Everything has a cost. If only he could get up. God, make Marwan get up, make Ahmad disappear. She feels exhausted, overwhelmed, aching, powerless. She won’t have the strength to fight. She won’t resist. Ahmad’s real face dances in the orange light.
He bends over her, catches her by the hair and pulls her violently into the apartment, she slides over the tile, half raises herself, shouts with surprise and pain, falls silent, he throws her onto the unmade bed, she buries her head into the pillow. Her gun is still at the front. Her strength, her willpower are there too. She wants to disappear. She hears Ahmad’s belt and pants fall onto the floor next the bed. She doesn’t want to look. She doesn’t want to see him. She stiffens when a feverish hand searches between her legs to undress her. She struggles instinctively, Ahmad takes her by the hair and crushes a knee into her kidneys, Ahmad is talking but she doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t want to hear him, she feels a moist contact, Ahmad spat on her closed thighs, she doesn’t want to hear him she doesn’t want to feel him she doesn’t want to feel those two clumsy fingers penetrating her sex she doesn’t even want to groan. Marwan, please. Marwan help me. Ahmad crushes her he is lying on top of her his breath against her neck she doesn’t hear him he doesn’t succeed he pushes her roughly shakes her he tries to turn her over she clings to the edge of the bed she doesn’t want to see him she doesn’t want to see him he hits her pulls at one of her legs she resists he spits again hits her again Ahmad presses with all his weight on her he doesn’t succeed he gets annoyed she feels sick she feels sick and suddenly there’s a terrible noise in her ears, a huge detonation, very close, deafening, followed by a warm liquid pouring onto her left shoulder, into her hair, against her cheek, a smell of powder, a smell of blood, Ahmad collapsed on top of her, she pushes him away and rolls to the bottom of the bed, she is on the ground, she crawls in the dark to the bathroom, she touches Marwan’s cold body, she stretches out, she faints next to him.
•
Abu Nasser wakes her gently in the Beirut dawn. The pale light dazzles her. Abu Nasser supports her, helps her get up, pours water over her face, she drinks, sees herself in the mirror, covered with blackened blood. Marwan is lying on a white sheet. Abu Nasser almost carries her to the bedroom. On the bed, Ahmad is stretched out, half his head gone. The wall is splattered with flesh and blood. Abu Nasser has tears in his eyes. His handsome uniform is stained now. He was dressed for the burial of his son, she thinks. Abu Nasser helps her put on a bathrobe. Two soldiers carry Marwan’s body on a stretcher.
“I’m taking you home, Intissar, it’s over.”
He gently takes her arm. She hears him shout orders to the fighters accompanying him, throw this bastard into the first ditch you see. Abu Nasser will have Intissar move to his house in Raouche. He will go alone to bury his son. Marwan will disappear into the ground.
Intissar will not be there to hear the din of the city falling behind her, exile will open up like a precipice in the middle of the empty sea, an immense shadow into which useless rifles and abandoned tanks will sink, caresses of the dead and the living, far from the enemy and from the fight that gave its fragile and vertiginous meaning to the existence that defeat has just annihilated to send her into anxious wandering, a roaming where her feet, which felt the disaster first, listlessly strike the earth and, as if they were afraid now of wounding it, will never leave their mark on it again.
By dint of tenderness, Abu Nasser managed to make her let go of Marwan’s heavy 9-millimeter that she was still hugging with all her strength, like a part of herself.
XXI
what a story poor Intissar Marwan puts his gun in her hand, his ghost saves her, there are loves, promises that withstand death, especially in books, books and plays, the Palestinians will be scattered throughout the Mediterranean, some to Tunis, some to Algiers, some to Syria, Arafat the grey will try to return to Lebanon to Tripoli in 1984 with his fighters before the Syrians send him back to the sea with a nice kick in the rear, the way you’d kick a dog, poor Intissar, Ahmad poor guy victim of his desire and his violence, victim who makes victims, like us in Bosnia, like the fair-greaved Achaeans, the ones that will sack Troy kill children and carry off women into slavery, me I haven’t saved anyone, either by letting my gun lie by the bedside or by being resurrected from the dead, no one, neither Andi nor Vlaho, and no one has saved me, not Marianne not Stéphanie not Sashka the blonde, I wonder if Rafael Kahla is like me, why does he write these terrifying stories, did he try to strangle his wife like Lowry, or did he kill her like Burroughs, did he incite people to hatred and murder like Brasillach or Pound, maybe he’s a victim like Choukri the wretched, or a man three times vanquished like Cervantes — who will wash my body once I’m dead, it’s very sad this story, very sad, a city falling, collapsing, a city breaking like glass in the hands of those who think they’re defending it, Barcelona in 1939 Beirut in 1982 Algiers in 1992 Sarajevo in 1993 and so many others, so many others with the masses of fighters doomed to death or exile, like Intissar, alone with Abu Nasser, Intissar the innocent who thinks she’s paying for a sin she did not commit, I still have two stories left to read by this Rafael Kahla, other war stories, sometimes you come across books that resemble you, they open up your chest from chin to navel, stun you, I’d like to have Marwan’s nobility, is that still possible, let’s think about it Yvan what are we going to do in Rome aside from getting properly plastered taking a bath and treating ourselves to a new suit, dark and luxurious, how to become Marwan, tomorrow morning, once the money is acquired and the dead in the suitcase are buried in the Vatican archives, what am I going to do with the piece of gold of Charon the ferryman, how to set death’s obol on each eye of all my corpses, Cocteau said about Ezra Pound the old madman that he was “the rower on the river of dead,” now I’m in the same situation or very nearly, Ezra Pound has a beautiful grave in San Michele the cemetery by the sea in Venice, the foggy little island off the Fondamente Nuove where the celebrities are crammed in, a green plot with a tiny plaque in the shade of the cypress trees for the fascist preacher of Radio Roma, obsessed with money and Jews, to the point of madness, of course in Venice I had no inkling of the magical