Authors: Elias Khoury
“But!” said Karim.
“No buts! Am I right or am I wrong?” Danny responded.
He reverted to the celebrated expression he used to use to put an end to any discussion at cell meetings, when he’d ask, “Am I right or am I wrong?” so his listeners had no choice but to say “right” because the tone of “or am I wrong?” left no room for “wrong.”
“But Saint-Exupéry,” said Karim.
“You’re right, but Saint-Exupéry wrote
The Little Prince
and didn’t write about war. Plus I’m not talking about that kind of writer, I’m talking about the revolutionary writers.”
“Right,” said Karim.
“The problem,” said Danny, “is that heroes don’t collapse in the face of death, they collapse in the face of writing. This is the great illusion. They want to become writers, or find someone to write about them, which is what I shall refer to in my study as ‘the folly of immortality.’ They believe that writing is a way to stay alive after death, which is nonsense.”
“Right,” said Karim, “but you’re a hero. I don’t understand why you want to become a writer.”
Danny explained to Karim that the problem of heroes was called retirement. Withdrawal from the struggle was equivalent to death, “which is why you may consider me dead, my friend.”
Karim had wanted to ask his friend about the mystery of his disappearance immediately after the killing of Khaled, but did not. What use were questions after all these years? Danny was the reason, Karim had told himself when he decided to flee Lebanon. Danny was the guide who’d led
Karim to Nahr el-Bared, introduced him to Khaled and the boys of the Qubbeh district, and placed him in the midst of the maelstrom of terror that had led to his decision to go to France.
In Karim’s memory those days appeared as black patches. The medical student at the American University of Beirut had fallen under the spell of the appearance of Malak Malak at Tall el-Zaatar Camp following his arrest immediately after killing two deans at AUB. It was claimed that Danny had masterminded Malak’s escape from Roumieh Prison and was waiting for him at Hammana when he withdrew with fighters fleeing the camp following its fall in 1976, in one of the Lebanese Civil War’s biggest massacres.
Karim hadn’t been particularly interested in politics. The famous AUB students’ strike of 1974 had meant little to him. He’d taken part in the strike, which had erupted because of an increase in tuition fees, just as he’d participated in the sit-in at the Assembly Hall when students occupied the AUB buildings, but he hadn’t felt involved and had remained on the margins of the movement. That was why Karim wasn’t one of the 103 students expelled from the university when the strike ended.
The strike was a proclamation that the Palestinian resistance and its left-wing Lebanese allies had become an axis of political life in Lebanon. “He who holds the university holds Beirut,” said Danny to the circle of students he directed. It never crossed anyone’s mind that the university administration would call in the Lebanese police to break into the buildings and put an end to the strike, and then expel all the strike leaders.
The strike had to be defeated so that it could achieve victory through blood. Malak Malak, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Engineering – from a Christian Palestinian family from the area of Haifa which had joined the flood of refugees in 1948 – was the hero of the story.
After trying to complete his studies in Iraq, where he was subjected to arrest and torture at the hands of the Iraqi intelligence services who
attempted to force him into collaborating with them, Malak succeeded in escaping and returning to Lebanon, becoming the killer of the two deans Najemy and Ghosn, and saving by this insane act the future of all his fellows.
Malak’s crime, the blood that flowed, the collapse of the university’s administration, and its consent to the return of the expelled students all formed the final chapter of symbolic violence that paved the way for the transformation of Beirut into an arena of blood.
Danny didn’t hide his pride in having helped Malak to escape from Roumieh Prison and in advising him to take refuge in Tall el-Zaatar Camp. To Danny the incident was a declaration that revolutionary violence had become the sole language through which change could be achieved.
“You’ve changed a lot,” said Karim.
“We’ve grown old,” answered Danny.
“Any news of Malak?” asked Karim.
“What Malak?” asked Danny.
It was obvious that Danny had forgotten Malak and his story. Everyone had forgotten the tall dark-skinned young man who had escaped from Roumieh Prison to become a fighter in Tall el-Zaatar before disappearing. Even the story of the killing of the deans of Engineering and of Students at AUB had died and became part of the unsaid.
And Malak had said nothing.
His girlfriend, Hala, said he’d changed a lot in Iraq. She said he told her only scraps of his bitter experience there, contenting himself with saying that death was preferable to prison. When she asked him to tell her what had happened he gave her a copy of Abd el-Rahman Munif’s novel
East of the Mediterranean
.
“Read this novel if you want to get to know the Arab world,” he said.
“A man who had entered the darkness of silence,” said Hala. “I didn’t
know him anymore, it was as though he’d become another man. Does that other person live inside us, only to emerge suddenly from we know not where and perform acts that would never have occurred to us?”
The Lebanese interrogator who had detained Hala as part of his attempt to uncover Malak’s partners in crime was impressed by the young woman’s ability to avoid answering his questions.
“I’m not avoiding them,” she said. “It’s the truth. The night of the crime we drank a cappuccino at the Café Express on Hamra and he told me he didn’t love me anymore because love was over and that he was going to Johnny’s to play cards. He said playing tarneeb was better than wasting his time with a girl like me who didn’t understand anything he said anymore, and he turned and left.”
“…”
“No, he didn’t say anything about killing the professors at the university and he was in a good mood. He may have been talking to me and telling me things from a place I couldn’t reach. Maybe he was right. After his expulsion from the university and his travel to Iraq and imprisonment and torture there, maybe he’d found a solution in a language I don’t know, the language that’s inside one’s soul and that we can’t measure in words because it’s fashioned without words.”
“What are you studying at the university, mademoiselle?”
“Philosophy,” she said.
“I must say I’ve never come across a case like you. Just between you and me, I didn’t understand a word you said except what everyone knows about him being arrested in Iraq. That must have been something all right! What imaginations they have! I used to hear stuff about imprisonment in Iraq and couldn’t believe it. Perhaps we should learn a thing or two from them. But that’s not what matters now. What matters is that I didn’t understand
a word you said, perhaps because you were talking to me in philosophical language.”
“No, officer, that wasn’t the language of philosophy, that was the language of crime,” she said.
“You’re talking about the philosophy of crime, right? The new generation, God help us! You’ve been no use to us. Get out of here and good riddance.”
Hala hadn’t been talking about the philosophy of crime. She’d been talking about the war that had made her feel she’d lost her balance. She’d fallen in love with her fellow student, a Palestinian, only to find herself covered in blood. She’d rebelled against her conservative Beirut Sunni environment and told her father, Hajj Yahya Fakhani, that she was going to marry Malak in spite of everything. She said he’d graduate in a year and they’d go to Cyprus and have a civil wedding like everyone else.
Her father threatened to kill her.
She paid no attention. The strike took place and everything went to hell. Malak was expelled along with the others. He left to continue his civil engineering studies in Iraq, then cut them short and returned to Beirut. But the man who returned wasn’t the Malak she knew. It was as though he’d left his laughter and endless jokes in Baghdad and come back wearing a new face.
He’d become laconic, dissatisfied with everything. In response to her insistence, he’d told her what happened, how they’d asked him to work with Iraqi intelligence, how he’d been detained a number of times for short periods, and the kinds of torture to which he’d been subjected.
He said he’d discovered in the prisons of Iraq that a person can become separated from his body and had been astonished to find himself praying to the Virgin and asking her help.
“I’m telling you, people are dogs. They forget themselves and their
masks when faced with disaster and go back to being like Grandma and Grandpa, sunk in superstition.”
He said he’d sunk into superstition, and if he hadn’t believed that his grandmother was praying for him, he would have fallen apart and become one of their intelligence agents.
“Do you still love me?” Hala asked.
“How should I know what love means? For God’s sake, stop asking questions like that!”
The man disappeared, it became difficult to get in touch with him, and Hala had to go to Johnny’s apartment to look for him. There she found him hunched over a game of cards, the cigarette never leaving his lips. He saw her, threw the cards down, and they left together to sit in the Café Express, where Malak could find nothing to say to the girl whom he’d promised he would one day marry and, on the liberation of Haifa, take to the Abbas Effendi Garden on Carmel.
Their love was over, Malak said. It was over because after his experience in Iraq he could no longer talk. He said he’d discovered that a person has inside him words that have no language, and she wouldn’t be able to grasp the meanings of those words because she hadn’t lived the experience with him.
She said she loved him and understood his pain but “this isn’t right, my darling. Let’s get married and then we can see what to do.”
He looked at her with empty eyes, as though her words had slipped past his ears.
Hala decided not to contact him again but wait until the psychological crisis through which he was stumbling had passed. Then she was taken aback to see pictures of him in handcuffs filling the front pages of the newspapers and to hear of his double crime.
She went to the home of his friend Johnny, a Jordanian-Palestinian
student who’d also been expelled from the university, to find out what had happened. She knocked for a long time on the door of the apartment on the third floor of the Fleihan Building on Abd el-Aziz Street, but it stayed closed. She descended the stairway of the dark building and found policemen waiting for her and spent the night at the Hbeish police station before the officer released her as immaterial to the investigation.
Hala wasn’t committed to the struggle like the other members of their university coterie. She was a student of philosophy at the Lebanese University and didn’t feel she could associate herself with the political atmosphere that prevailed in the Beirut universities. But she was in love and willing to do anything for the Palestinian who had occupied her heart and hurt it. She told him that her love for him made her feel a pain in the heart and that she would stay with him and put up with his way of life even though she didn’t believe that this struggle would lead anywhere. All the same, she hadn’t expected the byways of that struggle to lead her beloved to madness.
She told Johnny when she met him that Malak was different from them all because he’d taken his convictions to their conclusion, whereas they spent their time elaborating statements condemning the crime, this being part of the deal that allowed them to return to the university.
Johnny said, hiding a scowl, that Malak was insane. “It was an insane act. The organization had nothing to do with it and we condemned it because assassination is an act to be condemned.”
“If you’re against assassination, can you explain to me why you used the crime so you could all return to the university while Malak is in prison and they’re going to sentence him to death?”
Johnny tried to explain to her that politics was like that; she wasn’t committed to political action and couldn’t be expected to understand its complexities and shouldn’t worry “because there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”
Hala disappeared from the scene. Danny, who told the boys of Hala’s
detention and release, said the girl had nothing to do with anything. “I don’t know how Malak could have been her boyfriend and promised to marry her. A conservative girl in the full sense of the word who had nothing to do with the political struggle. I don’t know what he saw in her. It’s not enough for a girl to have brown skin and green eyes for one to take her as one’s life companion.”
“Politics is like that,” Danny had said, stressing the difference between mass struggle and assassination. Karim couldn’t think what to say. He didn’t say that the statement was tendentious nonsense, though that was what had occurred to him. He felt lost because sometimes he fought with the boys and was a part of the civil war, but he didn’t know how to tell his comrades that playing with the fire of wars like this could lead only to the abyss. In fact, he did say this to Danny once when they were drinking vodka. Sahar was there, filling the apartment with her vivacity and beauty – a svelte woman with penciled eyebrows, honey-colored eyes, and a loving smile that never left her lips. With her was her daughter, Suha, who was seven, and whom everyone who saw her thought was a miniature of her mother. They were like two sisters competing for the heart of one man, and Danny relished this double love.
Karim said that playing with the sectarian fires of Lebanon and reviving the bloody scores of the civil war of 1860 would mean an end to all revolutionary thinking and a return to the dark ages.
Danny smiled contemptuously as he tried to explain to his hesitant comrade that, unlike Nevsky Prospekt, revolution doesn’t go in a straight line and that Lenin had known, as he led the world’s first socialist revolution, that it would have to get its feet dirty in the mud of history.