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From Chapter 3:
The End of the World or Whatever.
"THE END OF TIME!" The Cleric swept his eyes over his audience, the rapt faces, the bristling forest of gun barrels, the backdrop of blood red banners and portraits of the deceased Imam. "When you see that truth has died, and the people of truth have gone underground, when you see that injustice rules and the Koran is despised, and when you see the masters of error prevailing over the masters of truth, and when you see evil done in the open without shame, and moral depravity, men going with men and women with women, and adultery rife, and usury, and when you see what is forbidden made legal and what is legal forbidden, and when you see religion presented as a matter of opinion, The Book and its Laws flouted, the leaders drawing close to the unbelievers and away from the faithful, and when you see places of frivolity and entertainment open unchallenged, and people living together like animals, when false testimony, immorality, crime, the equality of women, repression by the imperialist and the transgressor, the hegemony of lies and the suppression of the truth are rampant, then you will know that we have entered upon the times of which the wise have spoken, the preliminary days which the Imams have forecast.
"The Imams and their followers have foreseen our predicament: That, when the flag of the Q'aim, the Lord of the Age, is raised, it will be cursed by the peoples of both East and West. For the believers will be besieged on all sides. The atheists of the East and the polytheists of the West will join hands against The Book and its people. And we have seen the signs, and the people are ready.
"We know that in each generation, the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Kerbala is re-enacted in the political sphere. The shahadat of Husayn is not only a transcen-dent act which transforms and enlightens our personal lives, but an event that occurs in reality, in our own time. For there is no difference, there is no gap, between the events on the plain of Kerbala fifty years after the death of the Prophet, Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him, and those of Lebanon, Iraq or Iran that we can read about in our daily newspapers. There is no `progress', no Marxist `dialectic of history', no materialism which determines man's fate. There are only eternal spiritual truths, articulated in the Koran, and re-enacted in our lives, if we so choose. For we can choose the light or the darkness. We can choose Husayn or Yazid, Ali or Mu'awiyah, God or Satan, Heaven or Hell. Of course, to pose such a choice is to pose a choice between the obvious and the absurd. Between the sacred and the profane. And yet, we can see, all around us, how many choose evil over good.
"Imam Ali invites us to `enjoin good and prohibit evil.' That is the foundation of our faith. To walk in the path of God and not of Satan. What is the path of God? Husayn reveals it. To defend your faith by jihad, and when jihad is impossible - shahadat - the joyful embrace of martyr-dom. When you are weak, when all the forces of the world are against you, when massed armies and battleships and warplanes and nuclear weapons can all be wielded to defeat you, when living means surrender and shame and dishonour and apostasy - then Husayn teaches us we can choose death as the white shroud signifying an eternal life. We can throw our death in the face of our oppressor with a power no nuclear bomb can equal.
"Then, when the call itself reverberates from heaven, and the great war will come upon Syria and Baghdad, when the sun will rise in the West and the star appear in the East, and the Muslims will throw off the yoke of all foreigners, when the Q'aim returns, and the Imam Husayn rides before him, with the seventy-two martyrs of Kerbala, and the three hundred and thirteen knights who fought with the Prophet, Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him, at the battle of Badr, and the other Prophets, Moses, Adam, Ibrahim and Jesus will ride at his side, you too, the shahid, the martyr of these days, will be there, your robe pure as snow, your lance glinting in the sun of the new world of peace, justice and the final judgement..."*
How does one describe the indescribable? Lets talk about man's inhumanity to man. And woman. And child. No. Let's talk about bricks and stones, about concrete things, about places and measurements, length and breadth, height and depth, about size and weight and mass, proportions and dimensions: The Jaffa Camp, Beirut, autumn of 1986 (Moharram 1406; I have stopped scratching out the dates on my flesh). Reduced, at its present extent, to about 250 meters by 250 meters. No, exactly 243 x 264 meters, according to Mad Latif, our idiot savant, who has even brought it within 10 centimeters, give or take some rubble or loose stones. There is a precisely delineated No Mans Land between us and the enemy's closest positions. Mad Latif calculates the nearest gun at 118.5 meters, going by the condition of spent bullets ricocheting off barricades and walls. At barely sixteen years old, he is a living ballistic expert, mathematician and human computer, but he cannot tie his own shoelaces and dribbles food into his clothes. There he goes now, loping down the alleyway, alone, at a time when even the armed comrades creep from wall to wall like shadows. The untouchability of the insane. Though even that, in this country which is no longer a country, has been confounded and disproved. The rubble of the asylum, on the outer perimeter of what was once the fruit market, testifies to that. Our Latif is far from being the only madman or woman thrown naked into our world.
How do we tell them from the sane? The Amal militiamen, crouching behind sandbags to shoot children bearing sacks of flour. The Syrian artillerymen, behind them, in the stadium, training 150 mm cannons, with armour piercing shells, on our battered piles of old bricks, fortified with corrugated iron and sacks of earth and stones. The politicians and army commanders, who sit in marble palaces and move the pieces of their human chessboards about their fields of dreams. Our own comrades, fighting shoulder to shoulder by day, separating at night into their basements, whispering and wondering whether their rivals are stooges and spies of the other side. All of us, hunched in our cellars, swatting off the sounds of the constant bombardment like light sleepers plagued by mutant flies.
Mad Latif sees nothing of this. He just sees numbers, shapes, quantities, volumes, abstract relations between things. What is a man to him? A human being? A voice is a travelling wave of sound. The Cause is an agglomeration of data, things overheard without comprehension: Dates of PNC's, names of representatives, delegates, spokesmen, leaders of the twisting maze of sects and parties. Dates and procedures of armed operations. The number and composition of our enemies' troops, as read out to him from files and journals, by Limping Nabil, the commander, who thought up the trick of entrusting information to the mad boy's brain in case of destruction or loss. The cardboard boxes piled in the Movement's Office, now doubling as Umm Bathir's kitchen, amid the smell of what little cooking can be done, the blend of corn and sour cream, herbs to spice starvation diets, flavouring the tattered pages of old reports and academic treatises by distant Professors in the safety of their Universities and Colleges, in other lands, in other worlds.
We are an object of study. This we can't escape or deny. Like five legged horses, or two headed sheep, we are strange subjects of fascination for people sitting in the calm of their homes, throughout the "civilised" world, drinking their beers, watching their televisions, while we scurry in our enclosures, killing and being killed, like scorpions sealed in a jar. Exotic throwbacks to some age of cave dwellers. The kaleidoscope of our desperate diversity dissected on the desks of journalists and politicians: Amal, Hizballah, Fatah, Popular and Democratic Popular Fronts, Liberation Fronts, National Liberation Fronts, Popular Struggles, Kataebs, Communist Parties, Rejection Fronts, Steadfastness Fronts, Lightnings, Baathists (Iraqui or Syrian), Nasserists, neo-Nasserists, Shehabists, Joumblatis, Yazbekis, Social Nationalists, "Phoenicians", ad nauseam.
But to Latif, and God, one presumes, we are all bags of bones and sacks of sinews, musculature, flesh, gristle, blood. A glutinous mass of molecules. Is that all we have of a common humanity?
We are returned to primal fears: Fear of Death. Of Isolation. Of Loss. A sniper's bullet whistles past the idiot. It has left the barrel of its gun at a velocity of 750 meters per second, he would no doubt inform us, cutting through the resistance of the air, which is, at the best of times, minimal. It misses, and ricochets off a naked girder. Someone shouts out to the fool, who takes cover behind a pile of sandbags, looking impassively around. At least he has a sense of self preservation. I am alive, therefore I am alive. We cannot go further than that.
Loss. Of course, when one has lost everything. Country, home, family,friends. Paradoxically, we now have them all, in the most concentrated form. A country of five hundred square meters. A home of a mattress, when lucky, and a knapsack of salvaged personal belongings - a dwindling stash of cigarettes, matches, sewing kit, soap - no, the Angel requisitioned the last bars two months ago - three ballpoint pens, three soggy note-books. A map of the city, showing when it was possible to simply walk from street to street, without passing five dozen check-points, or being shot for one wrong step. A dozen homelands, now, where previously there was one corner of a subdistrict of a precinct...
I had a family, once. Mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Wife. Children. But I cannot speak of that now. That was yesterday. This is just me, now: Tewfiq Abd-el Saddiq. A Palestinian. That is, no one, as recognised by the world. I was a journalist, too, once. Now I have nothing to report. I exist neither in space nor in time. I am a fragment, torn off history, tumbling over and over in a vacuum. I am a moving target, trapped in a frame like those electronic dots on video games randomly darting to escape the player. The player, who is God, or the CIA, or the clever, desperate men in Tel Aviv, or the clever, ruthless wolf in Damascus, or God knows who or what.
Volition, will, and self-determination. I peek out through a hole in the wall. "Latif!" The call again. I read somewhere, about idiot-savants, that these prodigies who seem to articulate only in numbers live in a profound harmonic field - that they perceive the world around them as a symphony of shapes and sizes and resonances. What mad symphony might our Latif be secretly constructing of our tiny, caged world, in the sharp crashes and thuds of bombardment, in the twisting, wailing piles of flesh cut down by gunpowder and steel? The blood, seeping into the ground, staining our clothes, hands, souls as we rush the wounded and the almost dead to Doctor Angel's clinic...
A stomach, spilled on a carpet. Intestines glistening in dark red flow. It was a second hand carpet. I remember the shop we bought it in on Hamra, in 1979. We had just rented the apartment and decided to refurbish it completely. It was an old, Turkish design. The shopkeeper, Abu-Fakri, gave us a special discount because, he said, he saw the light of a new life in our eyes. It cost us 95 Lebanese pounds. We couldn't afford anything more lavish. The bathroom had to be completely refitted, as its wall had taken an indirect hit in the Civil War, three years earlier. But it was close to the newspaper's office. Beggars can't be choosers. I remember, it was an optimistic phase, despite the usual political betrayals which we expect like winter chills...
"Latif!"
It's Benjamin calling, our Israeli hostage. He has adopted the crazy adolescent as a sort of mascot. A sense of guilt? Who knows. We did not intend to keep a hostage, in this mess, but we were trapped with him, as he was transferred to the camp, as part of a succession of "safe" houses, which turned out safe neither for him nor us. A Skyhawk pilot, he fell into our hands during a reconnaissance flight above the city, in '84. Until this year he was kept locked in rooms and cellars, but now, paradoxically, we can give him the freedom to roam with us about the cage. Dr Angel convinced us there was no point in guarding him, wasting human resources. "Will he defect to Amal? Or to Hizballah?" Angelopoulos had his own reasons, as Benjamin, trained as a medic, was a piece of gold dust for our Angel. "He can't run and he can't hide," said Angel. "Toguard him here you tie up at least two men. Give him to me."
We gave him to Angel. We give Angel everything. Our electricity, our rations, our trust, our hopes, our fears. Most of all, our bodies, shattered and mangled and broken, which only he can repair. Crushed, fractured, lacerated, limbs practically severed, insides thrusting through shreds of flesh, only Doctor Angel can save us. The last resort, the only bulwark between ourselves and God...
So how does one describe the indescribable? The Cabinet of Doctor Angelopoulos: In the basement of our makeshift hospital, formerly a three storey apartment block belonging to a family who managed to escape to Europe just before the siege began - late in '85 - Dr Angel stands, in his white gown (ah, the saga of the laundry!) arms poised, hands in rubber gloves (the short supply endlessly rewashed), over the operating table, formerly the family's kitchen table, its wooden top gashed by a thousand cuts of knives that chopped tomatos, onions, parsley, herbs, spices, now swabbed clean and prepared for the slab of humanity laid out for his scissors, scalpels, stapling guns and sutures, sacs of intravenous fluids and vials of drugs on the shelves which previously held the jars of sugar, flour, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, chives. An ordinary anglepoise side lamp fixed at the head of the table, by the anaesthesia machine plugged into the basement generator, grinding away in a niche, aside from the cylinders of oxygen and anaesthetic gas, the diathermy coagulator and the suction machine. The nurses, readying the patient, who has been rushed in, fresh from the killing ground, laid upon the chopping table, almost single handedly, by Anneka, the blonde Norwegian giant who is Angel's head nurse. In her country, cold seas and rivers cut into mountains, people earn their living, shop, watch game shows on television.
They are members of the European Community. We are members of the community of the damned. Climbing down from her mountain, she has joined our shrunken nation of troglodytes, out of the dictates of her conscience and the greatness of her heart. Or is it merely chance that drives such people across the oceans of indifference? At any rate, she has been with us from the moment the Syrians and Amal sealed off the last exits from the camp and stopped all movement in or out. Although they offerred safe passage to "trapped foreigners", Anneka and the two West Germans, Klaus and Heinz, her assistants. All three decided to remain.
The prognosis is not rosy. Angel moves forward to the table, masked and capped, eyes glinting, the fatigue of eighteen hour shifts gashed in his forehead, the sweat wiped away by nurse Nabiha, who was a schoolgirl only the other day, the last time I blinked, several months, or several years, ago? Impossible to tell. The patient, Anis, the old iron-monger's son, his calves and thighs shattered by the shrapnel of a 105 shell. An amputation. This boy will leave this room a half man. A heroic stump. I was once a whole man myself, with ambitions, hopes, even expectations. I was going to procreate, build a future, wielding the weapon of fertility and the word. Now I am just a body with a gun, shooting at phantoms in armour. Angel stands, poised over the table, the surgical mask hiding his thick moustache, the cheeks which were once chubby, I dimly remember, from our first meeting, in a different Beirut, a decade ago, but none of us need mirrors now, we see our emaciation in each other's faces. Reduced to bags of bones, rattling as we walk, like empty gourds with a spoonful of dried up peas. Our legs no longer bend, our limbs creak like ancient furniture that's always just about to break, but somehow never quite does. Blood seeps, spurts, stains the white smock and gloves. Soon enough, on a busy shift, our Angel will resemble a butcher in a malfunctioningabbatoir, bloodspattered like a Frankenstein monster, pieces of bone, tissue, viscera, sticking to his hands, eyebrows, nose, hair.
All of us, including the hostage, Benjamin, totally merged with his enemies, living on thin gruel and yoghourt, looking like cadavers on amphetamines. At the end of the shift, we all collapse together, in Doctor Angel's little "private" room - the only private room in our entire kingdom, two meters by two as it may be, to unravel our fatigue in all night debates which often take the place of sleep, on nights when none of us can close an eye, and Doctor Angel has the camp's only supply of booze, arak or even whiskey in bottles of lemon or orange pop, or even labelled surgical supplies, a necessary item smuggled in to keep him topped up with his own vital anaesthetic for the overloaded mind. We no longer notice Benjamin among us, sitting there as if he naturally belongs, with Faisal, Rashid, Daoud Abu Ali, Nabil, Kamal, myself and whoever else drops in to Angel's cell.
"So tell us about yourself, winged stranger! What are you doing here, you fucking Greek Yankee! You're not a Palestinian, not even a fucking Israeli, like Benny. What's your excuse? You Goddamn fucking masochist! Haven't you a home to go to?"
"A home? What in the name of God is that?"
"Pass us some more of that embalming fluid..."
"A home? Yes, I suppose I did have a home, once. Come to think of it I had it twice, if you count the brief passage with my wife... She was a doctor, too, you know. A saint. She worked in hospitals in Harlem. She stood with her finger in the dyke of poverty, racism, violence. I never saw her, from our honeymoon onwards, except asleep, in the bed. We communicated by phone, in sound bites, like American politicians. I cheated on her, and she severed all relations. I couldn't notice the difference, so I left. She had this huge dog, which never left the house, and was fed on hamburger meat by her brother, who lived on the ground floor. It began as a small, cuddly puppy, and grew up into a colossal monster, about five feet high at the shoulder. I woke up one day to find that I had married the Hound of the Baskervilles, instead of my wife..."
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