“Can you spare some ammunition?” he shouted at his neighbour.
The man did not hear. Three bandoliers might be ambitious, but it looked as though he would use them all. Basil had moved off to the suggested rock cluster and was finally firing his gun. The pack with the bomb was nowhere to be seen.
“Basil!” Jamil shouted. His courage was swiftly disbanding. A second tank appeared on the opposite hilltop. He put his fingers around a stone and threw it at the convoy. It landed on a bush by the roadside. He was shaking. He lay on his front behind the rock.
Today was going to be his death day. He, like those other sacrificial peasants, must now run down the hill with a stick. He wrenched a yell into the earth. His lips were gritted with soil, his voice was painful. Gunfire echoed in the chamber of his stomach. He was seized with the desire to stand up and run away. What would he tell those women waiting at the bottom of the slope, when they saw him? That he was out of ammunition? “Courage!” they would say. Courage meant throwing rocks against artillery. Courage meant descending into the valley unarmed.
“Basil!” he shouted again, desperately.
Basil glanced up. He saw Jamil and drew one arm across his body. The canvas bag appeared in his lap: he placed it as far from himself towards Jamil as he could without exposing himself to the valley. His face glistened with concentration. Jamil heaved a vast inaudible howl and rolled into clear view. He hauled the bag back to his nook and unfastened the buckles. Kneeling, he unwound the fuse, which was tucked into a top corner of the box. He put his shaking hands into his pockets for the matches. He lit the frayed wire. He stood to full height, took a running start, and hurled down his gift. As the smoking box pirouetted towards the convoy, he threw himself onto the ground.
There was a cracking roar. The front car with its grilled maw and herringboned tyres rose in the air as on a wave, and the second car rose behind as the roof of the first car lifted. Heat swept up the valley wall, followed by a stream of fumes. The engine was aflame. A cloud of hard dust began to rain down, and Jamil covered his face. He waited for the pelting to stop. Then, through the dust, he shouted: “Basil I have no bullets!”
Basil was firing at a soldier who was trying to extricate himself from the wrecked car. The filth on his spectacles was streaked with fingermarks. Jamil crawled over and grabbed his arm.
“Come when you have none left,” he said. “I have nothing. I—I—”
“I have,” said Basil, “take—”
“No, no.”
Basil fixed on him. “I understand,” he said. “Go.”
There was enough smoke to obscure Jamil’s passage. He was not the only one: three men at different times ran past him down through the thicket towards the road. As he footed the slope a sharp gash of pain in his back made him stagger. He leaned breathless against a tree, and reaching a hand to his left shoulder fingered a rip in his jacket and shirt. In the patch of exposed skin a wound stung. His fingertips were wet, and red. He rolled his shoulder and kept walking; it moved easily, which meant the bullet had only grazed him. But as the trees thinned out he jumped at the sound of women’s voices and grasped his arm. He squeezed, pulling a face of pain and dismay. It was a mask, a performance of agony. And at the same time it was a genuine expression of horror at the direction his feet were taking him in. Not today. No, not today, unarmed on the battlefield. To die here was a waste. He wasn’t just a fighter; he was needed elsewhere. He was a vital link. He squeezed his arm. His left hand was going numb.
Two women were trying to lift a man covered in blood. At the sight of the Ottoman khakis Jamil stopped. He had seen this man earlier. The hair and kufiya were drenched scarlet where his ear had been.
“Abu Rami, Abu Rami,” wailed one of the women. She grasped the fabric on his shoulders. “I know his daughters. He is a good man.”
“He is from your village?” said Jamil.
“Yes, yes.”
“Why is he wearing this uniform?”
“They gave it to him,” she said, and finally, as though this comment had brought her to, relinquished her tough and useless grip on his jacket.
“I think—I think he is martyred,” said the younger woman. She reached for his holster and drew up a heavy pistol. It was old, with a silver barrel and wooden handle.
Jamil looked at the dead man. The mouth was open in a bloody snarl, the eyes grimaced shut. A chill of cowardice ran over Jamil’s skin and his gullet rose with animal disgust. That was what a noble death looked like. Poor Abu Rami. His brains lay so close to the air. All that blood, draining into the ground—something must have struck Jamil blind on the hilltop for he could no longer see in the blood what he was supposed to see. Where in that red muck was the move transcendent? Where the doubled symbol of faith, the brave struggle for the homeland and its heavenly reward? He could only see an ugly mess, a vile human content. He loathed himself. The virtue of his own desire to live appeared strongly in doubt.
“Allah yirhamo,” he said. His voice was thick in his throat.
“Allah yirhamo,” repeated the elder woman.
What made him better than this ill-shod peasant? Recruited with nothing to lose on the jobless docks, or else a simple farmer answering the call to mobilize, as these women had, united with their fellows by the doctrine of self-sacrifice. Jamil was not better than them: only arrogance told him he was. On the contrary, Abu Rami was three times as pure as he, Jamil Kamal, sullied by his upbringing among fine things in Turkish halls.
“Take his weapons, take his bullets,” said the older woman, lifting the man’s rifle. Her eyes were polished by tears. “Take them. Yalla. Yalla. Go back khalti, go mama.”
“Ah—but you’re bleeding,” said the young woman.
“It’s nothing.” Jamil weighed the guns in his grip, and examined the leather pouch of bullets. “A scratch only. Thank you. God keep you safe.”
He turned, and walked back up the slope. A man with a club charged past, emitting a belly-deep roar. Jamil knew that sound. That was the sound of anger, summoned to drown out terror.
When Basil saw him, he touched Jamil’s arm affectionately. Jamil began firing with the dead man’s gun. But it wasn’t long before a commander brought news that they were encircled by tanks, and it was time to hide. Jamil and Basil followed the other survivors across the hillside towards a cave. They waited for nightfall, drinking water from jars and washing their faces and wounds. Jamil sat sentinel for a while at the edge, and as the battle heat cooled he rested on his heels and thought of Midhat. He felt again the weight on his arms as they had carried him to the car, when Hani had asked, with a grave look, whether Jamil could read French.
“I used to,” he replied. And Hani, with a look almost of apology, folded Midhat’s letter and its envelope into his breast pocket.
Jamil could form a rough idea of what was in that letter. He did not feel curious about it. In part, he was sure that whatever it was would not translate; but mostly, with his ears flooded by his cousin’s sobs, there had been little room to feel anything in that moment besides impotence and fear. He clenched his jaw and looked up at the trees. The sun was declining, and in the chill of the aging day the branches began to shake.
8
The detention camp at Sarafand was one converted corner of an active British military garrison. The cells were a series of pitched-roofed wooden barracks, separated by tall fences of barbed wire. At the beginning of Hani’s detention, only five of the camp beds in his barracks were occupied. But as the summer progressed, and more and more senior personnel were arrested, the beds filled, until by the hot dark of August each room was crammed with men accused of inciting violence, snoring side by side in the close night. Several times a day the barracks doors were thrust open, and two or three soldiers would march in and take a register. This happened at intervals of a precise inexactitude seemingly designed to surprise the detainees in the act of “gathering in large numbers,” which, as they were repeatedly informed, was against camp regulations
.
At Hani’s request, Sahar had sent him a white kufiya and white abaya, which like the other urban detainees he wore as a gesture of solidarity with the rebels. He grew his beard long, and spent his days in a folding chair out on the small perimeter of earth they jokingly referred to as the “garden,” between the walls of the barracks and the barbed wire fence, shuffling round the barracks with the sun to keep in the revolving shade. The barracks’ single desk was reserved for the eldest among them, Hussam Effendi from Jaffa, and as the day went on the others would help Hussam Effendi carry the desk with his book and papers in pursuit of the shadow. Everyone else rested Qurans on their knees and wrote letters leaning on the covers. They never mentioned the tedium. Sometimes their eyes met, and without the usual relief of a burden shared, the inmates silently communicated to one another the same dull and tenacious sadness. Meanwhile they knew the rebels were organising, and military leaders from Syria dressed in old Ottoman regalia were setting up regional commands and courts in the mountains to judge traitors. But God gave every man his own particular battle to fight, and this was theirs: the same bland food, the same view of walls, the same worn faces, the same eyes shut in prayer, the same prayers for patience forming on the same lips.
Besides studying the sacred text, Hani spent his days reading the newspapers and writing—to his wife, to his friends and colleagues, and to British government officials. Trusting that everything he wrote would be read by the prison officers, he took the opportunity to administer any small barbs of spite that he could muster without incurring further punishment.
Aziza Sahar,
I cannot believe you are the one who gave me the idea to prove my arrest here is illegal. In your letter you said—“You think you’re being detained, but actually you are locked up.” And I was surprised at first—but now—I admit that I am in fact imprisoned and not arrested or detained—because a detainee should be detained only until he is brought to court. And from this idea I have immediately progressed to the fact that neither the Governor of the Brigade nor the High Commissioner himself has any right to imprison anyone. In any case—the detention of around fifty of us is due to end on about the 22nd or 23rd of this month—but I do not know if the authority will renew the detention period—we shall see. It would not surprise me—everything here is insulting.
Although the August heat had not abated, something in the air began whistling of autumn, and the sun seemed always to be setting. Hani started writing letters to a newspaper in Jaffa for publication, as a more formal outlet for his frustration. With plenty of time to think in Sarafand, he had been contemplating how adept the British always were at naming: they bombed Jaffa, and named it urban renewal. They arrested a nationalist, and named him a criminal, and naturally Palestinians were all known as Muslims. And since they had announced a plan to declare martial law, and reinforcements were arriving at Haifa in the thousands, with no other weapons at his disposal but the power of his mind and his pen, this was one more battle Hani might try to fight. He began to spend the hours between the bland lunch of bread and tomato sauce and the bland dinner of rice and meat sauce constructing dispassionate arguments in Arabic, describing with phrases borrowed from legal records and Arabic rhetorical tradition the most striking examples of British injustice.
He was in the garden one afternoon writing one of these letters, on the difference between a prisoner and a detainee, consulting Sahar’s correspondence for inspiration, when he looked up from his lap and saw, through an aperture between the neighbouring barracks’ walls, a procession of Arabs in single file with their hands behind their backs. In one of the split seconds allowed by the aperture, Hani saw and recognised the compact body and bright eyes of Abd al-Hamid Shuman, and groaned.
“What is wrong now?” said Hussam Effendi, putting his hands down on his desk.
“They’ve got Shuman,” said Hani. The last soldier vanished behind the wall, and a cloud of dust filled the breach.
Abd al-Hamid Shuman was the founder of the Arab Bank, and Secretary of the Strike Fund Committee. The detainees in Hani’s barracks had often comforted each other by remarking that the British might cut off “organisers” like Hani all they wished and have no discernible effect on their struggle. Once the spirit of revolution was abroad in the chest of the fellah, it would not be repressed. But now it looked as though they had finally gone for the coffers. A wiser strategy; one must at least give them that credit.
Abd al-Hamid did not seem in low spirits, however. During the exercise hour he greeted Hani with four kisses and a grin, and asked for his news in a non-particular way as if they had happened to run into each other on the street. Then, with a spurt of energy, he turned on his heel and approached one of the guards. The sun baked down. Hani watched; they seemed to be laughing. The guard addressed his colleague, then a fourth man joined them, and within a few minutes, Abd al-Hamid emerged from the exchange carrying a football.
“What are you doing with that?” said Hani.
“Yalla everyone,” called Abd al-Hamid.
Across the yard, heads lifted.
“I need two teams.”
The arrival of Abd al-Hamid thus inaugurated a strange period in the detention camp when, at any one time, one could find at least fourteen men playing football on the sports field under his umpirage.
Hani did not participate in these games. Occasionally he would sit and watch, but increasingly he took advantage of the peace in the garden while everyone was on the field. One day in the middle of August, he was composing a new letter to the newspaper on the topic of martial law when he developed a terrible toothache.
He assumed it was a muscular injury. But over the course of the afternoon the ache narrowed its focus to three particular teeth, around which the gum became so inflamed that at dinner he was forced to chew exclusively on the other side of his mouth. The doctor at the medical centre gave him a bag of salt with which to gargle, but even gargling every hour did nothing to improve his condition. Over the next few days, biting his food without fully closing his mouth, Hani had the unpleasant impression that he resembled a dog at the dinner table.
“Ask special permission,” Hussam Effendi called suddenly from across his desk.
Hani dropped the hand grasping his head; he had not realised Hussam was watching him.
“Go to Jaffa,” Hussam went on. “I know a very good dentist. Greek.”
“God keep you,” said Hani. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I will.”
“Ask,” said Hussam, sliding the glasses he had pulled onto his head back down to his nose. “No harm in asking.”
Hani looked at his newspaper. “Outdo others in patience,” he murmured. “Remain resolute, and be mindful of Allah, that you may succeed.”
Was there no harm in asking? Hani did not want to ask. He doubted the wisdom of it, and if one doubted, one must not do. Over the next two days, the pain expanded along his jaw and annexed two more teeth. Incapable of much beyond reflecting on the pain and his unwillingness to ask for a dentist, he concluded that he was hesitating less at the prospect of being refused permission to leave, and more at the idea that he might be spared before the other detainees. It would not do to break their solidarity; this was simply another battle he must fight. Besides, regardless of how excruciating it was, there was something a little ignominious about a toothache.
“Mister Murad.”
“Yes?”
“Someone here to see you.”
It was so rare to receive visitors that at first Hani thought they must have called a dentist for him, and his chest softened with relief. The soldier’s steps heaved and clanked with his weapon-laden uniform, and behind him, Hani flowed in his white abaya on silent, sandalled feet.
Six soldiers stood to attention at the entrance of another barracks. Hani ducked his head to enter, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he perceived two men seated beside a third empty chair. The first man rose, a heavy figure with large eyes: it was one of his colleagues in the diplom
atic leadership of the revolt, Elias Darwish. Hani reached out and kissed his friend. He rarely saw Darwish except during the exercise hour, in which there was little time or privacy to talk. As the two top “ringleaders,” he and Darwish had been deliberately separated by the British, and kept in barracks on opposite sides of the camp.
“Hani Bey!” said the other man, who was wearing a suit. It was the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Nuri Said.
“Nuri.” Hani stepped forward for a handshake and a kiss. “It has been a long time. I heard you were in Jerusalem—how are you, what’s your news? You look exactly the same.”
This was almost true: Nuri had put on quite a lot of weight since Hani last saw him in Baghdad, both around the middle and under his chin, which he ducked with an arch smile of greeting. But his curly side parting remained in place, grey at the temples above where his ears stuck out. He was wearing a thick blue knitted tie.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said, “please, please.”
Darwish grunted at the guards: “Will you leave us?”
Nuri folded his hands, and threw Hani a significant look. Hani had known this man for almost twenty years. Nuri’s career began with the Hejazi Revolt against the Ottomans during the war. After that he had remained one of Faisal’s men, first in Paris at the Conference, where he and Hani became acquainted, and afterwards in Damascus, and then in Iraq.
“The Iraqi people are in despair,” said Nuri smoothly, plucking the tops of his trouser legs as he sat. “It is the same in Saudi Arabia, and in Transjordan. We are all agitated by the situation in Palestine.”
Hani had the strong impression of a prepared speech, perhaps on its third or fourth outing.
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