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The Silence and the Roar

Page 9

by Nihad Sirees


  Here was the moment I was waiting for to slip away as everyone else stood there watching the scene. I started walking but after a few minutes I stumbled over a body I had not noticed because of how crowded it was (others besides me tripped over it as well). When I turned around I discovered it was the body of a veiled woman who had fainted from the crowds and the heat, which had slackened off a little but was still pretty awful. I pulled the woman up and leaned her back against the wall, shouting at everyone around me not to trample her or trip over her. I also started yelling for water but nobody had any. Another woman came over, bent down and started gently slapping the overwhelmed woman’s cheeks to wake her up, but to no avail. Three men made a human fence around her to protect her from the flood of people, and as I stared up at the higher floors of the building we were in front of, searching for someone who might lower us a bucket of water to wash the woman’s face, machine-gun fire exploded. The crackle of the shots was very close. We had no idea why the security forces would open fire, but this initiated a terrible panic among the people, who shoved each other and ran for cover, pushing us along with them. I fell to the ground. The frightened people pushed away everyone who had been standing around this woman with me until some of them even fell down on top of me. The panicky people were kicking me, trampling me underfoot. I tried to get up before the situation got any worse but failed because as soon as I managed to lift myself up they knocked me right down again. If the shoving had not slackened somewhat thanks to the abatement of people’s fear, I might never have been able to stand up on my own two feet. I went back to check on the woman and found her in a very dire condition: blood was gushing out in several places on her face, her hands and her legs. I held her under the armpits and lifted her up, slinging her over my right shoulder and walking down the street with her, weaving between the cars and the people, shouting for them to get out of the way. People started responding to my shouts, thank God, and I was able to move faster and faster until some people volunteered to run out in front of me and clear a path.

  I knew that woman would die if I left her there, but it was impossible to get her to the public hospital in time. One man ran in front of me clearing a path but even when we reached the intersection leading to the public hospital we still had a long way to go. The man encouraged me to keep going and I barely noticed the weight of the woman or the heat bearing down on me. This selfless man was shouting at me to keep running, assuring me we were almost there even though it was still a fair distance away. Without warning I found myself losing strength. It was hard to catch my breath, and my legs started to get weak. Despite all of that, however, I pledged to myself to keep going. If I put her down so that I could rest that woman might have died. Just then I took one false step and tripped over something—perhaps my feet got twisted around one another—and fell down with the woman on top of me. It was a terrifying fall. I drifted horizontally in the air for a second and because of the weight of that woman my head swiveled toward the ground. I clutched her body as she fell down, first on her bum, and then her torso bounced up into the air as her head flew toward the ground. I believed the woman would be killed if her head slammed against the ground with such force, so I threw my left hand out as far as I could and her head came down smack on top of it, painfully smashing into it. It felt like a giant hammer had come crashing down on the palm of my hand, possibly fracturing it.

  When the selfless man in front of me turned around and saw us we were already falling. He instinctively reached out his hands to try and catch us even though he was two feet away. He saw how the woman’s head would have been cracked open if it hadn’t fallen on my hand. I was writhing in pain as he stopped and ordered people to be careful not to trample on us. Later at the public hospital he told me how astonished people were to see a man and a woman lying on the street at their feet. He found it difficult to keep them away. When it became clear to him that I might have broken my hand, he started begging some people to help us. Three young men volunteered to carry the woman while he helped me up and we all ran together until, after extreme effort, we finally made it to the hospital.

  They determined that the woman had been dead for a little less than an hour but that they would not know the cause of death until an autopsy could be performed, which was not going to be right away because lots of people fall down at marches as a sacrifice to the Leader and nobody would ever suspect that a crime had been committed. Death by suffocation or trampling underfoot at Party and patriotic occasions is an everyday occurrence. Ordinarily it’s enough to catalogue the names of the dead and file the list with the relevant authorities so they can be mourned as martyrs later on. They concluded that my middle finger was broken and that my left hand was badly sprained as a result of the woman’s head falling on it so forcefully, which left a bruise two inches across.

  They set my finger and offered me a bag of ice to treat the bruise, telling me that keeping my hand horizontal would lessen the pain. They helped me to avoid using it at all by hanging a sling around my neck; then they asked me to wait in the hallway so they could take down some information about the woman. I found the selfless man who had helped me get there sitting and waiting for me.

  I sat down next to him on a chair near where the woman’s corpse had been left on a stretcher in front of us, her body covered with a white sheet. When we asked them why she was there, they told us the hospital morgue was full and that other dead bodies had been left in hallways as well. The hospital reeked of corpses that naturally emitted foul odors because of the extreme heat. The man and I sat there in silence, shocked by the news of the death of this woman we had tried to do the impossible in order to save. The hallway was swarming with people who had fallen victim to various accidents during the march. After receiving emergency care they were asked to wait outside so they could be re-examined or so the X-rays of their limbs that had been broken, like mine, could be developed. More people arrived every moment while others still waited. As the chairs filled up, people could no longer find seats and were forced to sit on the floor or lean against the wall. It was so crowded that a patient who was bleeding profusely might have got their blood all over and also unwittingly stepped on dead bodies or on the feet of those sitting on the ground. Groups of men would frequently come in carrying someone who had fainted and start a big ruckus, while others fell after being shoved by one of the rescuers. Chaos and death, bloodshed and broken bones, the stenches of anesthetic, disinfectants and putrescence—anyone who witnessed this scene would get dizzy.

  As I mentioned, the selfless man and I sat where we were because all the other chairs were occupied. We were silent because of everything we saw, heard and smelled. I asked him what his name was and he said, “Jamil al-Khayyat, also known as Abu Ahmad, at your service.”

  After I told him my name he stared back at me for a long time. I smiled and asked him what was wrong and he said he had not recognized me but that perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. He must have been older than fifty-five and apparently he had been searching for my address for some time in order to tell me his story, which he thought I might want to include in my next book. I did not want to disappoint him by telling him I was not publishing much of anything any more and that I had given up writing, so I gave him my telephone number instead and told him he could call me in a week, that is, once the celebration season had passed, but he proceeded to tell me his story anyway, right there in that unbearable setting.

  Abu Ahmad was in charge of photocopying documents at a government department. One day the machine malfunctioned and started leaving large black splotches on the documents, so he took it to be repaired, and when it came back two weeks later, it worked a little bit better. It still left black splotches but in smaller, more acceptable sizes, especially insofar as his photocopies were considered auxiliary copies for everyday use whereas the original documents were kept safe in file folders. One day last year a Party committee at the department asked him to make ten thousand copies of a picture of the Leader fr
om a color original in order to plaster the walls completely. Everyone knows the walls at state institutions must be totally covered with images of the Leader even if they are all the same. And they are, for the most part, all the same. He warned them about the photocopier malfunction but he received no formal response from his department head or anyone else. He had to fulfill this assignment or suffer the consequences. Time was short, the celebrations were going to start soon and the walls had to be plastered with pictures.

  He made ten thousand copies from the original image. Comrades and security forces came and carted off piles of them, plastering them on the walls overnight. Workers and employees saw the walls covered with pictures when the institution opened its doors the next morning. When he showed up for work the security forces were waiting for him in his cramped little office. They seized him and marched him in for questioning at one of the security branches and he was not released until six months later, during which time he was beaten and tortured beyond what a human being can bear. He was accused of intentionally defacing pictures of the Leader that he had copied with his machine. The pictures were all splotched with black ink. It was his misfortune that those splotches appeared directly over one of the Leader’s eyes, making him look like a one-eyed pirate with a patch. He was interrogated by dozens of investigators who made an art out of beating and torturing him, to the point that he lost all the flesh on his feet, his back split open, his testicles shriveled up after having electrodes applied and they terrorized him by threatening to put him in the German Chair—the chair that, when fitted to someone, folds them in half and is capable of snapping their spine—because they wanted him to confess who his accomplices were, which opposition groups they were affiliated with and who had floated the idea in the first place of disfiguring ten thousand pictures of the Leader in order to make him look like a pirate. They wanted a confession, no matter what it was, so they could close the file and issue a verdict. The crime was obvious to them—having employees show up in the morning to find the walls covered with pictures of the Leader looking like a pirate is a criminal act that is no laughing matter.

  In the end, they were persuaded that it was an honest mistake but that nonetheless he bore full responsibility for it even though he worked in a department where nobody was ever responsible for anything. The Comrades, department heads and security agents made things even worse, noting in their reports and the testimonies of witnesses for the case that the man had never been sufficiently loyal or patriotic, that they had once heard him tell a joke about the Party and complain about the price of tomatoes. They sentenced Abu Ahmad to six months in prison, the same period of time he had already spent under interrogation, suffering from further beating and bastinado and electric prods until they let him go, sending him back to work in the same department, only now as a caretaker and under constant supervision and scrutiny.

  Suddenly a nurse appeared and asked me to follow her. When Jamil al-Khayyat got up along with me the nurse threw him a look from which he understood that it was time for him to leave. After he told me he would call me sometime soon I shook the selfless man’s hand and said goodbye to him. I followed the nurse as she turned people away in a brusque manner, as if she were offended by those unprecedented throngs. We went up the stairs to the middle of the first floor, where she rapped on a door and opened it without waiting for a response, inviting me in with a swift flick of her hand. I walked inside and she shut the door behind me.

  The room was decorated like an office for the head of the division in the hospital but there was nobody there. I sat down on the chair beside the desk. The bag I was still holding against the bruise had warmed up and the ice had started to melt. I got up and placed it in the wastepaper basket underneath the sink next to the door. The bruise was bluish-wine (a depressing color if there ever was one). I was pulling my arm out of the sling when a sharp pain forced me to re-sling it once again, and I sat there, trying to remain calm. The door opened and in walked the fiftyish doctor who had treated me. When I stood up to shake his hand he stopped and courteously extended his hand to me. He did not sit down at his desk but on the chair next to me, opened a file in his hand and pulled a pen out of his coat pocket. As he got ready to write something down, he asked me, “How’s the hand?”

  “As you can see,” I said, showing him the bruise.

  He smiled and thanked God it wasn’t broken. I nodded and sighed.

  “You didn’t know you were carrying a dead woman, right?” he asked.

  “No. Have you figured out who she is?”

  “Because we have so many bodies here she’ll have to be sent to be buried at the municipal cemetery unless someone comes to claim her by tomorrow morning.”

  “She must have a family, a husband, children,” I said glumly.

  “Naturally,” the doctor said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  I looked into his eyes as he fixed a stare on me as if making a complaint about something. We sat like that for a long time, staring at one another without blinking. He calmly glanced at the door and then got up and moved toward it without making a sound. He drew closer to the door, not in a direct line but from the side, and flung it open. There was nobody there. He looked both ways down the hall, shut the door once again and came back smiling about what he had just done.

  “You think somebody’s eavesdropping?” I asked him.

  “You’re a well-known personality and they wouldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Listen,” he whispered, “I’m about to lose it.”

  At first I could not understand what he was trying to say.

  “And why are you about to lose it, Doctor?”

  “Can’t you see what’s going on? Human beings have absolutely no value whatsoever. Today they brought in more than forty-five bodies, people who were killed by trampling or suffocation in the crowd or errant celebratory gunfire. What do you call that?”

  “A tragedy.”

  “Are you nervous talking to me? I kept you here so we could be alone. I know very well that you’re a person who’s been beaten down. I want you to know I’m about to lose it.”

  “Be careful, what happened to me doesn’t have to happen to you. You can work in silence, without complaining. Otherwise, they’ll come after you, too.”

  “I know, but I beg you, give me a name for what’s going on here.”

  “A name? Is that all you want from me?”

  “I know we can’t be fully free in this conversation. I would love to sit with you all day today and talk but I simply don’t have the time. Downstairs there are more than three hundred people who are wounded or who got suffocated at the march. In five minutes they’ll come or page me. Anyway, I’m sure they’re going to write down in their reports how we were alone together in this room.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken the risk, Doctor.”

  “So I’m begging you, tell me what we should call what’s going on here. Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours. Tell me, I’m begging you!”

  I stared into his blazing eyes as they flitted back and forth between the door and me. All he had to do was gasp for air in order to complete the scene. Perhaps this is precisely what would be called Surrealism, I thought. A doctor as old as my mother begging me to name what was going on for him.

  “Surrealism, Surrealism,” I found myself repeating.

  He received the word from my lips and then happily leaned back in his chair, stared up at the ceiling and hissed repeatedly, “Surrealism, yes, Surrealism. That’s it.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  He straightened up in his chair and proclaimed his happiness. “Yes, I feel much better! Thank you for your valuable assistance. We can’t call what’s going on here anything else.”

  He was about to get up and thank me again when there was a knock on the door that stopped him, and the door was opened to reveal that same nurse. “Dr. Raymond, they’re waiting for you downstairs.”

  C
oncealing the happiness that had overwhelmed him just a moment before, he got up and said, “I’m coming right now.”

  Then he turned toward me and pointed at the file, putting the pen back in his pocket. “Well then, thank you very much for all this information about that woman, Mr. Fathi, sir.”

  I got up to shake his hand. Squeezing it reassuringly, I left the two of them behind me and walked out, down the stairs to the ground floor with all its stenches of corpses and wounded people.

  I took a deep breath as soon as I stepped outside the hospital. The streets had become less crowded and the traffic had returned to normal. But the air was dusty and the street and the sidewalks were incredibly filthy. The wind blew softly against the leftover pictures and slogans and scraps of newspapers and empty bags of food, sweeping them along and then spinning them upward as they flew into the air and then came back down to the ground until suddenly the wind would sweep them along once again. The heat had eased up and the breeze was refreshing, even though the ground and the walls were still warm. I inhaled deeply and blew out all the smells of putrescence and disinfectants from the public hospital that had hung suspended in my lungs. I was glad not to be Dr. Raymond, who was afraid of being spied on and of reports, having to hunt for a name for what has been going on just in order to calm himself down. He wanted to trade that label I had offered him for the many hours he had spent trying to understand what was happening. Now he is submerged in stenches once again even as I set off, free, breathing in the dusty air. But I had first left Lama’s flat to deal with other matters! If Doctor Raymond had had to confront them instead of me, he would have worried about finding more than just a name for what was going on.

  I looked down at my left wrist and saw that my watch was missing. I must have lost it in the crowd or perhaps it got smashed the moment that woman’s head landed on my hand. I asked someone passing by what time it was and he told me six thirty. I decided to go to the Party building to pick up my ID card because the march was over and perhaps the Comrades had made it back to base. I hailed a cab and told him my destination: the Party building.

 

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