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THE UNKNOWN.
Amazing, what one can become accustomed to in the iron grip of necessity: I am blindfolded in transit from one place to another. A mixed blessing. Now I can see no evil. But I can still hear and smell it:
The grunts, sighs, cries and farts of my captors as they go about their obscure business...
The rip, scrape and clatter of their pouches and arsenals being set aside for a brief moment of rest, a cigarette break or a shit...
The shock of a misfired bullet, or bursts of gunfire from near or far, denoting someone fallen out with someone else, or perhaps only target practice...
The planes, passing overhead, the recognisable buzz of the robot drones, the sudden shriek of more serious hardware, the sonic boom of hi-technology. Just randomly feeling for some place to drop their bombs, or in search, ominously, of Joe Dekel? The way they hunted Yassir Arafat from building to building in besieged Beirut in 1982, rocketing apartment blocks to rubble two minutes after the Chairman had left to a new temporarily safe hiding hole? The long arm of Meisinger, pre-empting a deal? How far can paranoia stretch? Best not to answer that, in our battered part of the globe...
The smells: indeterminate vermin dung, piss, shit, sweat of my jailors, the dry sweetness of abandoned apartment rooms, the mustiness of cellars, the pungent reek of deserted garages... These interiors at least I am allowed to see, the blindfold removed, my starved eyes feasting on the peeling whitewash, the crumbling brickwork, the concrete reality of the whiffs of petrol fumes, motor oil and grease: brokendown chassis of jeeps, family cars whose families have been long since scattered or killed, heaps of rubber tyres, piles of rags, rusted carburettors, gearboxes and shafts. Metallic graveyards of an indeterminate Levant, with one live Jew lying among the spark plugs. Most of these places were arms dumps, too, altars to the grim reaper: Kalashnikovs, M16s, FNs, carbines, rocket-propelled grenades, mines, machine guns, flamethrowers, fragmentation bombs, explosive caps, fuses. Not much use against the horrors dropped by Phantom or Mirage, but effective enough on the ground... And beside the ammunition boxes, the piles of lethal ordnance - crates of Seven-up and Pepsi-Cola bottles, courtesy of the big bad wolf of Imperialism, via Syrian Ba'ath "Socialism".
(Location: Probably somewhere in the Bek'a valley, home of all that is alien: Syrians, Lybians, Iranian zealots, our own home-grown Palestinians ... Bloodthirsty terrorists of every ilk and hue, dreaming of carnage in King George Street and posthumous fame on television. Our own Orwellian room 101, the expanded, open-air, drive-in version...)
Seven-ups apart, I was kept alive on Israeli K-rations looted from an ambushed patrol. My captors thought I might expire on the Syrian army issue they themselves viewed with extreme suspicion, as if it might be larded with special chemicals on the orders of President Assad, to turn them all into rabbits or obedient robots or annihilate their virility. Also they seemed to have taken note of my hattie, and had evidently decided to preserve my soul from hellfire by providing kosher. This must have been Sami Khatib's idea. He had adopted me as one adopts a mongrel one hasn't quite resolved to pass on to the glue factory. He even brought me a siddur which had been taken off a dead IDF soldier. There had been some blood on it, which Sami washed off carefully with a piece of wet, torn blanket. He himself had a copy of Menahem Begin's The Revolt, which he spent hours enthusing over, eager to make conversation but utterly determined not to answer any of my questions: Why? What? When? "You'll find out, Dekel, just have Patience The book was dog-eared, its pages marked with copious underlinings and margin scribbles. “- The Historical and linguistic origins of the political term terror" prove that it cannot be applied to a revolutionary war of liberation."' He read out to me the words of my ex-terrorist ex-PM, as I sat on my rolled mattress reluctantly shovelling Israeli army beans into my face. Seven years spent trying to avoid this menu. There are destinies one cannot escape. "'In a revolutionary war both sides use force. Tyranny is armed. Otherwise it would be liquidated overnight. Fighters for freedom must arm; otherwise they would be crushed overnight."'
" Don't blame me," I said, "I voted McGovern." But he turned out to be a kokhelefl par excellence and I was the original captive audience. This abandoned, locked garage must have been the fifth hiding place I'd been dumped in. Or was it the sixth? I'd lost count… After the long blinded hike down the mountains of Golan, the nightmare at lights out, bound and gagged, not certain whether Anat was safe or not, or whether she still existed, I had been thrust, somewhere, into a vehicle and thereafter lost all sense of time... Dragged out, a couple of centuries later, pulled past shouting Arabic voices, up several flights of stairs. Vision restored at last, in a bare room with just one decoration - a colour portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. Godl Not theml But Sami Khatib reassured me: "Don't worry about the old fart. This is only a temporary bivouac." "What is all this about?" I asked, again. "Don't worry, Dekel, just keep going." I slept on a bed, oh bliss, till night fell, which I could tell by the slatted shutters, closed but broken, over the room's only window. A bizarre slumber, levitated by the tenseness of my nerves, no dreams necessary to overlay the genuine nightmare of "reality". Then, another century later, shaken awake in darkness, blindfolded again, seated in a jeep or commandcar, jolted for an aeon over pot-holed roads to arrive at my first dumping ground, abode of machine oil, sweat, piss, Sevenup and Sami Khatib, bending my ear with Begin, reciting the names of the martyrs of the Jewish Irgun's war against the British, which he had learned from The Revolt by heart:
“ 'Dov Gruner, hanged in Acre prison. Yehiel Drezner, hanged in Acre prison. Alkoshi, Kashani, Nakar, Haviv, Weiss, hanged in Acre prison. Barazani and Meir Feinstein, suicide, by grenade, in the death cell. They sang their national anthem before they died. Do you expect us to do any less?"
" No," I said, "by all means, the national anthem." But he spared me on that occasion. Not that I had any idea what the fight for freedom had to do with keeping Joe Dekel cooped up in cellars, but no one enlightened me on that score...
My three other kidnapper-guardians were markedly less learned, though the youngest, Marwan, was no less gabby. He was a tousled-haired eighteen-year-old who had grown up within Israel in a village in the "triangle", spending his teens swabbing the floors of Jewish restaurants in Tel Aviv and Haifa. His view of Jews was somewhat like Harriet Beecher Stowe's view of Simon Legree. "Why are they always shouting?" he asked, perplexedly, "perhaps they will all die, of heart failure." I agreed that his view of the Final Solution was not utterly unlikely. He was undergoing the Levantine male obsessive phase, and spoke for hours about two Belgian sisters from Brugge he had apparently snared by his nifty broom action. When the War for the Liberation of the Homeland would be over he would marry both of them and live in Denmark where, it appeared, mixed marriages were ten a penny. For the moment they were presumably keeping vigil in Brugge while he kicked his heels in No-Man's-Valley guarding yours truly for unknown reasons. He was even more baffled than I was about the point of his duties. "Are you a nephew of Shimon Peres?" he asked me one morning. I did not speak to him for several hours. Of my other two jailors there is not much to say. Number Three, Ibrahim, a dour refugee product, spoke little, but fetched and carried. Number Four, Abbas, was a killer, with that look of someone one did not fuck with. Chicken necks, human gizzards, he could clearly wring either without a blink of that gaze. He and I maintained an unspoken agreement - to survive our forced companionship...
What was it all in aid of? Khatib kept promising an answer - "In due course, Dekel, just keep going." I bombarded him, whenever I could, with questions, about Meisinger, the Gingi, Father Parry. Was there really a Gingi envelope? Was it your lot who tried the Meisinger hit in Safad? But he just stroked his chin silently, fiddling with his moustache. "If this is all in aid of Moishe Sherman's mystery treasure," I informed him, "you have got hold of the wrong key." But he was not drawn even on that, and retired to do his regular push ups. He did five sessions a day, perhaps in lieu of prayer, or to keep in trim for a Begin re-read. "'There can be only one policy for an oppressed people: a struggle for: liberation."' Indeed. Just so. Myself nodding politely, burrowing through the corned beef ...
Another night, and we were on the run again. No reason at all was given. Me, lying on my mouldy straw mattress, fingering the dead man's siddur. Young Marwan dozing over his AK47, dreaming of blonde Brugge pubes. Dour Ibrahim and Mad Dog Abbas burst in, spewing spit and flicking lights off. Was this the end of it all? Instructions received: waste the bugger and close the shop down? No, just the same rough ritual, tugging my arms, securing my blindfold which had become like Linus's blanket to me. I could go nowhere without it. I remembered West Bank nights, back in '67, watching the lines of prisoners detained for interrogation, torn shirts or rags secured round their heads, trembling in the yards of military barracks, faceless and shorn of identity. Now it was my turn. Clutching the dead man's siddur, ushered from darkness to darkness. Ibrahim humphing my K-rations, as was his wont, probably with bandoliers and three rifles. The fresh smell of a crisp late May night. Or was it already early June? Was there a whiff, saints above, of orange groves? The coastal plain of my long lost Homeland? No, just the mockery of the Levan scoffing at one's deepest aspirations, debunking all one illusions. The magic country, where everyone is a stranger because all its natives are dead.
In my distress I cried unto the Lord, but He must have had urgent business, elsewhere.
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