Adama

by al-Hamad, Turki; Bray, Robin;

  The headmaster began summoning many of the pupils to his office, particularly those who had been active in the bulletins and extra-curricular societies, but spared Hisham. He had stopped contributing to the papers some time ago and took part in the history society solely out of loyalty to the memory of his departed teacher. He was afraid of being summoned, however, as this time he was guilty, and did not know how he would be able to face the headmaster; his nerve might fail him and expose his involvement in the affair. But time went by and still he was not summoned. With each passing day he felt an ever greater sense of relief, dogged by anxiety though he was, especially after Rashid told him they had recruited a number of spies among the pupils at the school. It was then that Hisham stopped going even to the history society gatherings.

  At the first meeting of the cell after the pamphlets had been distributed, Fahd reproached Hisham for his panicked method of pamphlet distribution. Hisham was not surprised, having caught Hasan al-Sabah spying on him, but he tried to defend himself nonetheless.

  “What difference does it make whether they were put in the desks or thrown in the air?” he said. “Isn’t the important thing that they got into the hands of the people to tell them the truth?” As he uttered the last word, Hisham could not disguise the ring of sarcasm in his voice.

  “You were ordered to do a specific thing in a specific way and you should have carried out that order as it was given, not as you saw fit,” Fahd said, angrily. “I’m warning you for the last time against arguing about what you’re instructed to do. On this occasion you have been let off, as it is the first time you have distributed pamphlets, but if it happens again you will be exposing yourself to punishment by the organisation.”

  Fahd shook his finger vigorously as he spoke, visibly agitated. Hisham felt a stab of genuine fear. For the first time he realised that all this went beyond debating principles and readings. But despite Fahd’s threat, he managed to pluck up his courage and say,

  “But Comrade Fahd, how do you know how I distributed the pamphlets?”

  For the first time since the beginning of the session Fahd smiled, slyly. “We have our spies,” he said. “Or did you think it would escape our notice?”

  Hisham was silent. ‘You have spies and they have spies,’ he thought. ‘It’s all spies, spies and more spies.’ He half-smiled at Hasan al-Sabah, who had bowed his head and was pretending to watch an ant struggling across the worn-out carpet with a grain of sugar.

  44

  When Hisham met Marzuq and Zaki on the beach that day he could not hold back his emotions, which burst out recklessly and unchecked. He erupted, voicing everything that had been pent up inside him, with no regard for caution. He told them about Hasan al-Sabah’s spying, and how he had come to hate the organisation, which was no different from any government with all its security apparatus, the very things they said they were fighting against. He told them he was sick of the ‘Act first, talk later’ routine.

  “What’s the use in talking once something’s been done?” he exploded. “What’s the use in prevention once a disease has become incurable? Even after acting there’s no discussion! It’s more like ‘Act first, then act again’. We’re just a bunch of tools, no more and no less.

  “What are we fighting for? I used to think the struggle was for principles and exalted aims, but day by day I discover that all we’re fighting for is to replace one lot of people with another. What’s the difference? Why don’t the same people stay put, if it’s all the same anyway? We’re afraid of the Secret Police, but we don’t realise that we’ve ended up working for another kind of Secret Police ourselves!”

  Marzuq and Zaki listened quietly without comment. “I’ve become a professional liar and a hypocrite in the name of the struggle,” Hisham burst out again after a short silence. “If this is the struggle, I want nothing of it, nothing.” He began wiping his glasses with the corner of his robe; he was trembling violently and his broad forehead was glistening with sweat mingled with the damp sea air in the last rays of the sun.

  Hisham felt a huge sense of relief after expressing the emotions that had been raging inside him. He filled his lungs with the sea air, tainted with the smell of dead fish and rubbish and yet somehow re-invigorating despite everything. Then he began to worry about the remarks he had come out with. He had only known these two for a short while, and who could tell what they might do? The organisation had changed the character of his friend Adnan, it had turned Hasan al-Sabah into a wretched spy and it had made even him write reports on other people, so what might it have done to these two comrades?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to find a way out for himself, “I had to say something to get it all off my chest, and you two are the only ones I can do it with.”

  They both smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” said Marzuq, waving his hand. “I’ve got a lot of bitterness inside as well. Don’t worry.”

  “So why don’t we leave the organisation?” Hisham said, regretting his words as soon as they escaped him. “I mean, why don’t we try to find a solution, any solution,” he added, trying to mitigate the effect of his previous remark. “We can’t keep going with things as they are.”

  There were still seeds of doubt in his mind. The organisation had taught him the ‘virtue’ of suspicion, though previously he had always assumed everyone to have good intentions. He had not once in his life experienced anything to make him change this belief, which he took for granted and by which he had always lived until he became a freedom fighter. It was then that many things had changed in his life, mostly unconsciously. Yet, he had never felt any affection towards Fahd or Hasan al-Sabah, from the first. Were relationships between people formed like those between chemical and physical elements as Mr Wasfi taught? Some elements attracted and others repelled one another, and there were some that were capable of joining to form molecules and others that were not. If people behaved likewise, that might also explain the notion of love at first sight that he had seen in films and read about in the novels of the Egyptian writers Ihsan Abd al-Quddus and Yousef al-Sibai.

  “That wouldn’t be a wise decision,” said Zaki, commenting on Hisham’s suggestion. “You don’t know what they might do to you if you left the organisation. Do you really think they’d let you go just like that, with everything you know about them and their secrets? We’ve got to go on, until whatever God has decreed comes to pass.”

  Strange, noted Hisham, this was the first time he had heard God mentioned since joining the party. He often heard the word used everywhere else, except therein. Zaki’s comment, though, struck a terrible fear into him. What could they really do if he decided to leave? But he did not want to think about it any more, and after the sun died down in the waters of the Gulf he got up and said goodbye to his comrades. All the way home, the phrase repeated itself over and over inside him, involuntarily: “Until whatever God has decreed comes to pass ... until whatever God has decreed comes to pass.”

  45

  The organisation became just another part of Hisham’s routine. He attended the meetings of the cell with no enthusiasm, staying out of the discussions and repeating the slogans robotically at the beginning and end of the sessions without any emotion or conviction. Lately they had let him off the hook a great deal, requiring nothing of him, whether writing reports or distributing pamphlets; Hasan al-Sabah had become the one they counted on for all that, in accordance with a decision taken by the leadership.

  Soon even Hasan al-Sabah no longer came to the sessions, having been transferred to a different cell in another city, as Comrade Fahd gave them to understand. But in fact that was untrue: Muwafiq was still a pupil at the school, where occasionally Hisham saw him in the courtyard. Hisham surmised that Hasan al-Sabah must have been promoted in the organisational hierarchy for his loyalty and conviction. He was replaced by a new comrade, whose arrival was quite a surprise to Hisham: it was none other than his friend Adnan, known as ‘Comrade Renoir’. Hisham had no idea when or how Adnan had bec
ome a party member, despite the fact that they saw one another every day, and so he was all the more jolted when he entered Fahd’s house one day and found Adnan sitting there. When Fahd introduced them to their new comrade he looked at Hisham with the trace of a smile on his lips, with a meaning Hisham thought he understood. Hisham kept his feelings to himself, but at that moment he hated Adnan and felt as though something had broken inside him that he could not quite identify.

  Hisham’s relationship with Marzuq and Zaki grew stronger as the days went by; they would visit each other in al-Khobar or Dammam, and spend time on the beach or sitting in one of the cafés on al-Hubb Street or the alleyways off Prince Khalid Street in al-Khobar. Once he invited them to Abd al-Karim’s house and introduced them to his friends, including Adnan, and they all had a fun time. His friends had liked them and Abd al-Karim invited them to come again. They promised they would, but only did so on one other occasion, and that was the last his friends saw of them. (By that time things had happened to make Marzuq and Zaki decide against visiting again, and to make Hisham despise the organisation in general and Adnan in particular to the point of utter contempt.) At first his friends asked after them, but in time they were forgotten and the gang returned to the way it had always been, its harmony undisturbed.

  It was during this period that two things happened which had a most profound effect on Hisham and caused him to loathe the organisation to the point of seriously considering resignation, come what may. Things couldn’t get worse than they were already, he used to tell himself. One day he was standing in the corridor overlooking the school courtyard during break watching the other pupils come and go. He did not feel like eating or being with Adnan or anyone else; these days he found himself wanting to be alone more than ever before. Suddenly, while deep in thought, he felt someone pat him on the shoulder and a familiar voice say,

  “What’s up? Did the kids go without their supper last night?”

  Hisham looked round and saw Mansur standing behind him with a smirk on his face as usual. “No,” he said, smiling back. “I’m just a bit uptight, what with the exams around the corner, you know.”

  Mansur nodded. “I hope I’m not disturbing you?” he asked.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Hisham. “What –” he hesitated, looking at Mansur directly. He was about to say ‘What a pleasant surprise’, but said instead, “What brings you here? Aren’t we supposed not to meet?”

  “True,” said Mansur, “but I couldn’t resist the urge to talk to you, especially when I saw you on your own and the place empty like this. Believe me, Hisham, I have a great deal of affection for you,” he said, looking straight into Hisham’s eyes, the emotion visible on his stern face.

  “And I have a lot of respect for you, too,” said Hisham, somewhat taken aback and saying to himself, ‘No I don’t; I detest you. What do you want? And what’s this yarn you’re spinning me about affection?’ He felt a creeping suspicion about Mansur’s intentions as he recalled his mother’s advice against going around with people older than himself and his father’s advice to steer clear of Shi‘ites because they weren’t trustworthy in their dealings with Sunnis. But he pushed these involuntary thoughts out of his mind, regarding them as prejudices unworthy of a young intellectual like himself. After all, he knew and liked Zaki and knew he was a Shi‘ite, but there was a world of difference between him and this monkey Mansur.

  “Have you started revising yet?” Hisham asked. “There are less than two months to go between now and the exams.” It was just a question to put those black thoughts out of his head.

  Mansur had leaned against the wall of the corridor and was looking into the distance with his hands tightly clasped. “Exams!” he said. “We’ve got a test of fate ahead that’ll be much harder than any of that: the test of the revolution that’s sure to come now, a test in which some people will be honoured and others humiliated ... Tomorrow,” he continued after a pause, “tomorrow gallows will stretch from Jeddah to Dammam, from coast to coast.” As he uttered these words he waved his fist in the air, and the expression on his face became even fiercer.

  Hisham shuddered and looked around, afraid that someone might be eavesdropping. “Gallows!” he exclaimed. “Why?”

  Mansur continued looking into the horizon. “For the enemies of the Arab nation, the Islamic people and mankind.”

  “Are there really that many of them, then?”

  “The Islamic people will only become powerful and strong again when half of them are exterminated and the other half remain, the good half. They’re rotten to the core. The bad limbs must be amputated if the body is to recover its health and well-being.”

  With this Mansur struck the wall as Hisham looked on in alarm, with a mixture of confusion, embarrassment and fear. “These are serious things you’re saying, Mansur,” he said. “Gallows! Blood! What kind of revolution is this you’re talking about?”

  Mansur looked at him with a faint smile. “The revolution of the enraged masses,” he said. “There can be no revolution without blood. Lots of it.”

  “That’s revenge, not revolution.”

  “Call it what you like, but it’s what’s got to happen. And it’s what’s going to happen, too.”

  Hisham was about to say something, but Mansur looked at him once more and said, “Your problem, Hisham, is that you’re an idealist, a utopian. A sentimental intellectual. We need freedom fighters who aren’t prisoners of their own emotions.”

  Hisham couldn’t help smiling bitterly when he heard the words ‘freedom fighter’.

  “What would be left of life if we stripped it of all feeling and emotion?” he asked. “All its warmth, all its charm would be lost; life itself would be lost. There’s nothing in the world worth all this violence and blood you’re talking about,” he said, catching his breath in the intensity of the moment. “You’d exterminate one half of the people for the sake of the other half! And how would you know that the half you’d finished off was the corrupt half? By what right would you make yourself judge and executioner? You might discover that half of the half that was left was also corrupt, and then you’d kill them, too, until not one member of your masses was left. Is this the revolution you’re talking about? This isn’t revolution, it’s madness.”

  Mansur laughed with glee as he listened to Hisham. “What a pity, Hisham! What a pity.” He wiped a tear from his eye once he had stopped laughing. “Didn’t I say you were a utopian, whatever your claims to be a Marxist and a scientific socialist? Everything has a price, comrade, and the price of revolution is blood. Haven’t you read Voltaire, where he says, ‘The world will not be saved until the last bourgeois has been hanged with the guts of the last priest’? That’s revolution, my dreamer friend.”

  Hisham smiled wanly. “Voltaire was a satirical philosopher. He intended those words as an ironic criticism, he didn’t mean them literally.”

  “Life is a struggle, the class struggle. Or don’t you believe that, for all your Marxist convictions?”

  “The class struggle, yes. Class blood, no. I think you’re the one who hasn’t understood Marx.”

  “Not understood Marx!” said Mansur angrily, riled at Hisham’s assumed superiority. “I’ve read all the writings of Lenin and Stalin.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  At that moment the bell rang and the first pupils began to appear at the top of the stairs on their way back from the courtyard. Mansur moved off, waving to Hisham and saying hurriedly,

  “That day will come, you’ll see. And I’ll remind you of that.”

  “If you’re in the good half, that is,” replied Hisham once Mansur was out of earshot, and headed off to his classroom as Mansur went downstairs: it looked as though he was not going to the next lesson. Mr Naji had already entered the room and begun the Arabic lesson for the day by the time Hisham got there and asked his permission to come in.

  Hisham felt a growing sense
of dread following the conversation with Mansur, along with an aversion to everything connected with the organisation and its ideology. His close identification with Marxism remained, but to his mind there was a vast difference between the Marxism as found in The Poverty of Philosophy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and The German Ideology, and that espoused by the party’s deeds and thoughts. But his repugnance towards the party grew with the unfolding of another event, which would remain long engraved on his heart before he was able to forget it; perhaps in reality he never did forget it, and it stayed tucked away in some unknown corner of his soul.

  One day he was revising with Adnan, as they did every year before the exams. Hisham would snatch a few moments here and there to read Naguib Mahfouz’s new novel, Children of the Alley, moments that were full of excitement and pleasure in the imaginary company of the book’s characters. During one tea break, Hisham was immersed in the novel while Adnan rummaged through the books in his little bookcase. As he took one out, a thin piece of paper that had been folded up slipped out from between its pages. Adnan began reading it. When he finished he turned to Hisham, who was sitting on the floor, and held out the paper, saying, “Hisham, what’s this?”

  “Everything all right?” said Hisham blandly, slowly looking up from his book with an irritated expression. He recognised the paper as one of the party’s pamphlets and went back to his novel, saying casually, “You know what it is.”