Friendly Fire

by Alaa Al Aswany

  In a few minutes the entire column had broken ranks and the soldiers were swept up with the natives in an irresistible popular demonstration. Shoulders competed in sincere desire to be the ones to carry the heroes of Jordan and the crowds overflowed the lanes of Jenin, ending up in the square of the Great Mosque (Jenin’s largest), where the preacher, finding himself in a unprecedented situation, in no way fell short of the required ardor, organizing everyone into rows and leading a one-of-a-kind prayer, as to whose religious propriety no one gave a hoot, and then delivered a fiery sermon, whole chunks of which he would repeat in subsequent years to his children. To start, the preacher spoke of the first of the Prophet’s followers who migrated to Medina and of those who supported his cause there. Then he shifted to the concept of holy struggle in Islam. By the time he came to the verse of the Qur’an that says, “O believers, if you help God, He will help you,” things had slipped out of his control and the prayerful masses were transformed into a veritable volcano of cheering and shouts of “God is Great!”

  It was a day of truth in the life of Jenin. In the evening, the enthusiasm did not flag but became somewhat calmer and the commander of the Jordanian forces, whom they called the Officer in Command (such was his rank), met with the sheikhs and leading men of Jenin to go over arrangements for the defense of the city. Those gathered there spoke of certain ancient canons situated on the high hill and the meeting broke up quickly, the sheikhs and notables emerging well-satisfied to reassure the people and bring them the glad tidings of the clear impending victory.

  Thus it was, good people, that Jenin lived June 4, 1967, and on that night, the night of June 4 and 5, 1967, the people of Jenin slept, as they had to, calmly, their breathing regular. When war broke out the following day, the people received the news of the fighting with high spirits and unshakeable optimism. How could anyone be afraid? How could anyone think, even for an instant, of anything less than total victory, or of retreat? How could such a thing be, when the day was to be one of victory? The day was a day of victory—God’s hand guided ours, we would crush them—and on that day too we would destroy the Jewish State and its citizens would be scattered once more to the ends of the earth. This was a reality of scriptural certainty; if it were not, then what was the meaning of Abdel Nasser? What was the meaning of the heroes of Jordan, thirsting to rip apart the Jews? How, otherwise, were we to interpret the communiqués from Cairo about Israeli planes dropping like flies? Could all this mean any but one thing? And for a whole hour, on the morning of June 5, from nine o’clock to ten o’clock, a rosy hour granted by God in His mercy, all hearts enjoyed their victory over Israel. And what a victory! A final and absolute victory, a mighty victory from days of old that brought with it memories of Hattin and the sword of Khalid combined with the battle cries of the first Muslim conquests.* But such moments of happiness pass quickly, like dreams, and in Jenin, as the clock struck ten, the time of dismay arrived.

  Turn the cooling dial all the way up, my dear sir. The sweat is starting to drip.

  It all started with a foolish word, a silly rumor that no one could repeat without sarcasm but which, to the amazement of all, kept going, spreading and becoming more insistent until the whispering in the lanes of Jenin was transformed into clear and pitiful cries: “The Jordanians are withdrawing.” Until the last moment the people remained half in belief, half in denial and doubt, until the Officer in Command appeared, gathered a goodly number of the sheikhs, and informed them of the new orders: “The Jordanian army will withdraw from Jenin.” When the people asked him why, he answered curtly, “The plan of defense has changed.”

  “And who will protect Jenin, sir?”

  At this, the Officer in Command almost lost his temper. “I can assure you that we are not simpletons,” he said. “We know exactly what we are doing. We shall withdraw, and then an entire division of the Iraqi army will come and defend the city.”

  For the second, and last, time, the Jordanians drew themselves up in their implacable ranks and shouldered their choleric weapons. Then they began their withdrawal.

  We report both the positive and the negative. Thanks to the skills and long experience of the Officer in Command, the withdrawal from Jenin took place with notable alacrity, and the people of Jenin stood and watched, surrendering one and all to a deep silence that was simultaneously both restful and eloquent. The chains of the withdrawing tanks grated over the earth, creating a doleful rattling sound, and from time to time (one knows not whether to laugh or cry) a passing breeze would gust over the withdrawing forces causing one of the broad banners proclaiming “Welcome, Heroes of Jordan” to move over their heads.

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  I must reaffirm that my story is innocent of any ill intent or slander. If the people of Jenin did not understand—and still do not understand—why the Jordanian army withdrew and left them on the morning of June 5, that is perfectly natural, for soldiers have their rules and their regulations, which must of necessity lie beyond the ken of the minds of naive growers of oranges. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, God forbid that the Officer in Command should have lied or erred; by the same token, let God bear witness that everything the Officer in Command prophesied would happen did happen, and exactly as he prophesied it. Not an hour had passed after the Jordanian withdrawal before Iraqi tanks arrived, come to defend Jenin in accordance with the plan. But it seems there must have been some kind of mix-up, for the moment the Iraqi tanks got close to Jenin, they started shelling.

  A minor mishap of the sort that happens all the time in war! The Iraqi tanks went on shelling Jenin until they had razed it to the ground. Then the negligible mistake was made complete, and Jewish soldiers descended from the Iraqi tanks and entered Jenin, which, to this day, they haven’t left.

  On the evening of June 6, 1967, when Major Levy was appointed military governor of the city of Jenin, one of the sheikhs, wanting to have a joke with him, told him the story of the Iraqi tanks, and when Major Levy discovered that the people of Jenin had been on the verge of welcoming the tanks with roses, he removed his pipe from his mouth, jerked his body backward, and then burst out laughing so hard that he ended up coughing and weeping.

  My dear Air Conditioning Attendant of the hall,

  My dear Sound Engineer,

  My dear Acrobat,

  My thanks to you all.

  Now my boorish Arab tale is done, and the ladies and gentlemen seated in the hall are still enjoying the air conditioning.

  An Administrative Order

  HIS NAME, IN FULL, WAS ‘UNCLE IBRAHIM’ and despite his poverty and pallid face, a surprisingly large paunch hung through the opening of his threadbare coat. While a paunch is considered among the middle classes a medical condition to be treated by diet and exercise, and merchants regard it as a palpable indication of blessings whose constant presence is to be desired, the paunches of the poor are and ever will be mere swellings that they carry around for no obvious reason.

  Uncle Ibrahim’s shameless paunch had ruined him a full set of clothes that the doctors at the hospital had bought him the year before.

  The records give Worker Muhammad Ibrahim’s job as ‘cleaner,’ at a wage of twenty pounds and thirty piasters precisely per month, but because Uncle Ibrahim was a kindly man with a cheerful manner, and because he was clean (and cleanliness was very important), the doctors had chosen him to make the coffee and tea, replacing Uncle Salih, who had retired.

  Life thus became intermittently bearable. Given that Uncle Ibrahim had no other duties than his new job of “doing the tea and coffee” he would earn in tips more than half again over and above his basic wages. This enabled him to smoke as he wished, buy gallabiyas and shoes for his children (of whom the eldest was ten), and purchase a small piece of hashish so that he could prolong the act of sex with his wife. Uncle Ibrahim was even able (this happened twice) to pay for a place in a shared taxi when he was late for work.

  Uncle Ibrahim counted on his thick fingers “five years of
living decently”—living decently meaning that a soul didn’t have to beg; five years of “blessings for which we thank God.” And whatever he might do on a Thursday night, which was his wife’s preferred time for staying up late, Uncle Ibrahim was careful to be in the little mosque for the Friday prayer, and was accustomed to go there with clean body and clothes, and smelling good.

  When the sermon started, Uncle Ibrahim would take his head in his hands and lower his eyes. One day, after a heated sermon on alms-giving, Uncle Ibrahim became aware of a guilty unease and made up his mind to do something, and thereafter he made a habit of selecting one of the hospital’s penniless patients and making coffee for him for nothing.

  Uncle Ibrahim was a good man.

  As the preacher at the mosque often said, nothing lasts forever.

  A few months later, Worker Muhammad Ibrahim received an administrative order assigning him to the hospital gate, the supervisor saying as he handed it to him, “Congratulations, Ibrahim. Now you’re on the security staff.” Ibrahim felt an obscure sense of panic, but the scene played itself out and he took receipt of a black wool overcoat and huge military boots and started standing every day at the hospital gate, keeping out the visitors and saluting the doctors as they entered in their cars. For the first month, the smell of tea and hot water tormented Uncle Ibrahim, and he also had no choice but to beg, so he started talking all the time about his children’s illnesses and how they were falling behind at school. The doctors’ smiles turned tepid. “God willing, He will find you a way, Uncle Ibrahim,” they would say.

  The second month, Uncle Ibrahim went to his supervisor and put a stop to his begging with the words, “I want to go back,” and the supervisor quietly raised his hand and removed his glasses, as he pronounced in a hateful voice, “It’s an administrative order, Ibrahim.”

  The third month, Uncle Ibrahim changed greatly. He stopped greeting the doctors as they entered in their cars. He took to sitting on his seat by the gate and holding his black coat tightly closed. His face acquired a fixed expression and his looks turned hard and unrelenting.

  Those who were present at the scene say that the old lady had wanted to enter the hospital to visit her sick son. Because visits were not permitted at that hour of the morning and because she kept on insisting, Uncle Ibrahim stood, went over to her, looked at her for a while, and proceeded to beat her up.

  When the Glass Shatters

  1

  THE PAPER SELLER SHOUTED, the signal changed, and a black car started off at high speed, almost running over a fat lady wearing a headscarf and causing the lady’s husband to get into a violent altercation with the driver. He seemed to see all this through thick, cold glass—the faces of the passersby, the roar of the traffic, the colors of the fluorescent lights on the storefronts all blending into a distant and distorted backdrop. Everything was outside of him. His mind had come to a stop at one particular instant, which it could not get beyond—a frozen instant of horrified realization permeated by clouds and incoherent sounds, just like that experienced by the mind before drowsiness overwhelms it in that brief, infinitely small portion of time that separates waking from sleeping. When he came to himself again, he was crossing Suleiman Pasha Square, it was after eight o’clock, and the shop owners were pulling down over their doors the elongated metal shutters, painted a uniform gray. Cold air struck his face and he started thinking about a place to go. He remembered a small bar on Emad el-Din Street where he used to drink when he was in college and where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. He turned and walked a few steps in the direction of the bar, but a voice inside his head mocked him, saying that now he looked like a bad actor in a movie by Hasan el-Imam. He slowed his pace and hesitated for a little, but in the end assured himself that he did indeed need a couple of drinks and time to think.

  2

  It was early and the place empty of all but a few customers, who sat at scattered tables. He proceeded quietly to the end of the saloon without looking at any of them so that he wouldn’t be obliged to acknowledge them. The lighting was weak, the tablecloth worn and dirty, and the place had an unpleasant smell of damp. The aged Nubian waiter with wrecked teeth smiled politely. The lupine seeds and Pepsi softened the harsh taste of the first, second, and third double brandy, and he was overcome by astonishment. He was possessed by an astonishment that, while genuine, was unlike that ephemeral sensation that he experienced every day. It was, rather, that same feeling of incomprehension that he’d known before only once, when he saw death for the first time. Then, it was his father who was laid out on the bed, covered to the chest with a white sheet, his mouth fastened shut, his eyes closed, and looking as ordinary as though he were sleeping, the only difference being a very slight moroseness of expression, one that was certain to escape notice at first sight and might not even be noticed at all, but which was death itself. He had had the same sensation then as he had now, a feeling that he didn’t understand, that he was sad, that suddenly and for no good reason he had been defeated, that his defeat was oppressive, cruel, and final, and that, when the glass shatters, the breaking fragments make a loud noise, then scatter once and for all and are no more.

  3

  He was waiting for her in the cold morning, standing next to the gas station with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat to keep himself warm, staring at the end of the street, where she would appear. She always came late, laughing and apologizing, her short hair bobbing with every step she took. Did anyone else know the reason for that lock of hair, the little one that hung down over her forehead to hide a scar left from an old injury? When they were first married, they had spent days in a cheap boarding house in Alexandria, and she had said to him on the way back, “If our friends ask, we’ll say we stayed at the Palestine.” He had laughed and answered that rich people didn’t visit Alexandria when it was cold like this because they had Luxor and Aswan to go to.

  4

  Those little black intertwined letters had eyes! Real eyes that stared and came alive with joy or clouded over with sorrow and that were now gazing out, hesitantly, anxiously, and with something that swung, with equal force, between mockery and pity.

  “My darling Nahid,

  “The twentieth of May! Do you remember? My darling, I….”

  He couldn’t remember now how he’d climbed the stairs or how he got to his apartment, but he remembered clearly finding the lights on in the main room and seeing on the table the dinner she’d made for him and covered with a piece of newspaper (containing the sports section). Then he had gone to the bedroom, opened the door quietly, and turned on the light. She was sleeping and the little boy had curled up snuggled close to her, sticking his head between her arms. He stretched out his hand and shook her, and she woke and smiled when she saw him. He gestured to her to get up, so she did so and followed him outside, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake the child. Then she sat down on the couch in the main room. She was wearing the pink nightdress with the long sleeves and asked him, in a normal tone of voice, though she still hadn’t woken up completely, “How are you?”

  He said nothing, turned his back, and walked slowly away until he was close to the door of the apartment. Then he came back similarly slowly and said suddenly, looking at the floor, “Nahid, we have to get a divorce.”

  She looked at him and saw everything in his eyes. Her gaze was fixed and doubtful and a moment went by. Then she said in a steady voice (as though what he had said was something quite ordinary and familiar and happened every day and the only thing that bothered her was that it occurred so often), “What is it this time?”

  He thrust his hand into his pocket and gave her the letter (doing so immediately and as though he had been waiting for her question, his haste seeming somewhat childish) and she mumbled something as she spread open the folded piece of paper and read it, or pretended to read it, for a few minutes in order to give herself time. Then she pulled herself together, placed the letter calmly on the couch beside her, sighed, and said something to the
effect that some sort of misunderstanding had occurred and things weren’t the way he thought and he had to give her a chance to explain things in full, after which he could make up his mind. Then she stopped speaking because he had suddenly yelled, in a loud, gasping voice that sounded strange even to him, “You’re a prostitute” (or a whore, or something like that, he couldn’t remember exactly) and she seized a final opportunity and glared at him and shouted vehemently and angrily, “I will not permit you to…”

  The first slap silenced her. It struck her head hard, pushing it to one side so that it collided with the dark wooden back of the couch and he slapped her on her face once more and then again, harder. Then he formed a fist and pounded her face and neck and chest and started kicking her naked legs and he didn’t stop hitting her until he saw a thin thread of blood trickling from her nose. He looked at her, panting. She wasn’t crying and she bowed her head slowly and the blood flowed onto the nightshirt. After a few minutes, she said in a voice that was completely lifeless, “May I go now?”