by Ian Buruma
I felt as though I had suddenly grown a few inches. Beirut never looked more beautiful—the sky a glorious Kodachrome blue; smiling faces everywhere; the smell of kebabs. I didn’t even mind when the taxi driver asked me about China, as we wound our way through the streets of West Beirut to the Abi Nasr café, where I would be picked up by another driver who would take me to a rendezvous with Georges Jabara and Abu Wahid.
Jabara was a shadowy figure, whom I seldom saw, and even when I did, it was hard to make out exactly what he looked like, since he was always sitting in the darkest corner, behind a screen of smoke from the pungent French cigarettes that he favored. Since he never took off his sunglasses, I don’t recall ever seeing his eyes. Jabara was the only person to whom Abu Wahid was abjectly, even slavishly, deferential. I could smell his fear as he groveled to his master. I know it was unworthy of me, but I wished Hanako had been there to see it.
I was shown into a private room at the back of a small, dingy café. There were a few old men silently smoking their waterpipes, making soft bubbling noises. The backroom was dimly lit with one desk lamp. Abu Wahid offered to bring coffee and sweet snacks for Jabara, who waved him away as though he were an annoying fly. Jabara, dressed in a black leather jacket, spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him. Since he also spoke slowly, in perfect grammatical sentences, I had no trouble understanding him, however.
“Comrade,” he said, “do you know the story of Lydda?” I said I did not. “Then let me tell you, my friend. Lydda was a beautiful Palestinian town, between Yafa and Al Quds. The first settlement was built by the ancient Greeks. They called it Lydda. We Arabs call it al-Lud. It was occupied for a time by the Crusaders because they believed it was the birthplace of St. George. My name was chosen by my parents for that reason. Our family lived in Lydda as Christians for many centuries. As you know, comrade, we Arabs are hospitable people and we made no distinction between Muslims, Christians, or Jews. All lived in peace in al-Lud. Until that day of catastrophe which no true Arab will ever forget, April 11, 1948.
“I was a young medical student, visiting my parents on that day of catastrophe. We were sitting in the garden of the house of my birth, eating figs, and enjoying the quiet beauty of the olive trees that my father had planted with his own hands. We were proud of our olive oil, famous all over Palestine for its subtle flavor and heavenly fragrance. Many tried to imitate it, none succeeded. Anyway, comrade, it was around two or three o’clock in the afternoon when I heard the first screams of terror, which came ever closer to our house, like a rolling tide. I rushed to our front gate and saw a cloud of dust at the end of our street. The screaming was joined by the sharp cracks of gunfire and the roar of engines. The youngest child of our neighbors rushed into the street, followed by her mother, who shouted for her to come back. I heard the stuttering noise of a machine gun and the little girl dropped like a floppy doll caught in a gust of wind. Her mother, howling like an animal, tried to reach her child, when another shot cut her down as well. A pool of blood spread like a fan around her covered head.
“Then I saw the column of armored vehicles speeding in the direction of our gate. In the front car stood a man, whose cold killer’s countenance I shall not forget until my last day on earth. He wore an eyepatch. I did not know it then, but this was Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dayan. As they raced through our town, the soldiers fired their guns at innocent people, as though they were on a hunting expedition. In the wake of this caravan of death, comrade, lay the first martyrs of Lydda, like beasts of prey. We were not even allowed to gather our martyrs and give them a dignified burial. The men were rounded up and sent to camps, and the women and children were herded into churches and mosques, assured that they would be safe there, while the Jews stripped our town of everything that took their fancy.
“The women and children suffered, but at least their lives were spared. Until July 12. Two Jews were shot in a firefight by our Jordanian comrades. That is when the monster bared its fangs once more and the Zionists demonstrated to the world that they could be worse than the Nazis. Like killer rats, their soldiers entered the churches and mosques and murdered the women and children in cold blood. Some of us, including me and my parents, who survived the massacre, were forced to march across the fields for many miles in the blinding sun, until we got to the nearest Arab town. Children were the first to die, of thirst and exhaustion. I saw one child drowning in a fetid well, while others tried to lick the slimy moisture off the inside wall. Stragglers were shot or beaten to death. My dear friend, Salim, was carrying a pillow. It was the only thing he had been able to salvage from his home. The soldiers, thinking perhaps that he was hiding money from them, shot him in the head. Right where I was standing, comrade. He slumped to the ground with a sigh, his eyes rolling in his head, like a slaughtered animal. I tried to hold my friend, but the butt of a rifle crashed into the small of my back, and I was forced to leave him, to rot in the sun.
“There were foreign witnesses to these atrocities. One was an American reporter. He described the ‘Death March of Lydda’ as a wave of humanity leaving a long trail of detritus: first the pathetic bundles of abandoned possessions, then the corpses of children, then of old women and men, and finally of the younger people who had been murdered simply because the soldiers were annoyed with them, or bored, or drunk with the feeling of their own power.”
Abu Wahid was in tears as Jabara related these sickening events. Jabara himself seemed strangely unmoved. The words were vivid, but he spoke them softly, rhythmically, as though reciting a poem. Myself, I felt a deep anger welling up inside me, an anger that only needed focusing on a clear target for it to explode.
“Now for the good news,” said Jabara, in the same low voice. “We are ready at last to pay the murderers back for what they have done. The ancient Arab town of al-Lud, known to the Greeks as Lydda, is now the site of an international airport which the Zionists call Lod. On May 30, a Jewish scientist will be arriving there, with plans to build a Jewish bomb that will threaten the lives of all the Arabs. We will have to stop him for the sake not just of the Arab people but of humanity. And you, Comrade Sato, have been chosen for this sacred task. You, and Comrade Yasuda, and Comrade Okudaira.
“You will arrive from Paris on an Air France flight, dressed as Japanese businessmen. They will not suspect you of anything. You will carry attaché cases, which will contain hand grenades and light automatic weapons. You will have a few minutes to assemble them in the restroom. You will then walk over to the Customs area, where the Jewish scientist, Aharon Katzir, will be picking up his luggage from his El Al flight. You will know where to find him and eliminate him and anyone who stands in your way. Remember that in this war all Zionists are enemy combatants. Armed struggle is the only humanistic way to advance the cause of all the oppressed peoples.”
I knew we would almost certainly die, but death was not real to me, even when we disembarked at the enemy airport, from which there could be no escape for us. Even at this moment of supreme peril, I found my own death unimaginable. It was as if I were a spectator in my own movie, deeply involved yet strangely detached. I wonder if it had been like this for our kamikaze pilots? They were so young when they died. What went through their heads, as they drank their farewell saké with their comrades? Much the same things, I guess, that went through mine. That is to say, very little, except for the task at hand. The future is a blank. I have heard it said that the proprietress of a well-known bar near a wartime kamikaze base would sleep with the young pilots on their last night. I have even heard it said that this last favor was sometimes granted by the pilots’ own mothers. Hanako performed this service for me, in Paris, in a hotel room near the airport. I remember thinking that I would never forget it, and then realizing that I would, for there would be no memory to remember. I would be gone. My time would be up. Extinguished. But others would remember me, as one who had helped to blaze the trail of freedom. As long as my name was remembered, something of me would survive.
&
nbsp; It all happened so quickly that my memory of the battle itself is a blur. I remembered what Ban-chan had once said to me: when the moment comes, don’t think, just act. I can’t recall who first began the shooting. Okudaira, perhaps. Or it could have been me. The noise was deafening. I saw people falling all over the place. I felt a rush of excitement , so powerful that it is beyond my ability to express in words. People have compared the thrill of combat to sex, but that doesn’t quite describe it. It’s more intense, better than sex. In those few moments of total power, you lose all sense of fear. In a way, you lose yourself, you merge with the universe. Maybe it is like dying, except that I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t die.
I didn’t see Yasuda die, but can remember him shouting that he had no more bullets left. He died a soldier’s death at the hands of the enemy. Okudaira—again I didn’t see this—ran out of the building onto the tarmac and managed to kill a few enemies coming off an El Al flight before dying a warrior’s death by holding his hand grenade to his chest and pulling the pin. He was the bravest of us all. I don’t know whether I would have had the courage. I often think about whether I would have passed the ultimate test. It tormented me for some years after, the fear that I might not have passed. Would I blow myself up rather than surrender? Would I lead a suicidal charge? If I saw armed men about to rape Hanako, and they hadn’t spotted me, would I hide, slink off, run away, or risk getting cut to pieces?
In any case, I fell into enemy hands. When the battle was over, we had killed twenty-six people. My only regret is that not all of them were Jews. A number of Christian pilgrims got caught in the crossfire. This was regrettable, but in war the innocent suffer along with the guilty. That’s just the way it is. We can regret this, but that doesn’t change anything. In prison, the Zionists did everything they could to break me. I won’t dwell on this, except to say that on many occasions I was close to losing my mind. For three days and three nights they tied me to a chair in a dark room, pumping terrible noise into my ears, shaking me until I thought my head would explode. I was put in the “refrigerator cell,” after being made to stand naked in a barrel of ice-cold water. They shackled me to the wall and blasted me with freezing air. They made me squat on my toes—the “frog position”—until I passed out, and they revived me with more icy water. They forced me to lick up my own mess after I had vomited or shitted myself. I had lost all sense of time. Sleep was rare and always short, and made a torment by nightmares. Not that I always knew whether I was awake or not; delirium was an almost constant state. I had visions of Hanako being ravished by a huge Arab male, while I was tied to a chair. She was screaming with obscene pleasure, a helpless tool in his thick hairy arms. I tried to escape from my bonds, but couldn’t move. Hanako turned her face toward me, laughing at my impotence, but it wasn’t Hanako. It was Yamaguchi-san, whose laughter still rang in my ears, as I woke bathed in sweat in a cold, stinking cell.
I came close to dying, but I didn’t break. Even in the worst moments, I still felt I was holding on to a fragment of myself, just large enough to survive. I don’t want to sound mystical, or sentimental, but there was another image of Yamaguchi-san that played through my head, over and over, like a cinematic loop, an image that was the opposite of the Satanic one in my nightmare, telling me that I was making up for the errors of her generation. My resistance was a way to redeem the honor of the Japanese people. She was proud of me. She was my guardian angel. We modern Japanese don’t have gods anymore. Unlike the ancient Greeks, we don’t believe in divine intervention. Yet she was there, when I needed her most. Her spirit surely saved my life.
13
THE JAPANESE PRESS called us “terrorists.” That is not how we were treated in the Arab world. In Beirut, Damascus, Amman, or any other Arab city, we—Okudaira, Yasuda, and myself—became legends. I had the solitary distinction of being a legend in my own lifetime. Everyone knew us as “the Japanese victors of Lydda.” Arab children were given the names of our martyrs, Okudaira and Yasuda. Proud parents asked me to bless the innocent souls of these Okudaira Yussufs or Yasuda Al Afghanis.
I was released in an exchange for an Israeli soldier. Almost straightaway, still weak and more than a little confused by my sudden change of fortune, I was taken on a tour through the Middle East. I remember when the Beatles came to Japan in 1966. That’s what it felt like when I landed in Damascus, or Amman, or Beirut. Total strangers would come up to me in the street and thank me for what we had done. People went home happy to have held my eyes for just a second, or touched my sleeve. I was proud of what we had accomplished, of course. Ours was the first real victory in the armed struggle for Palestinian freedom. But I also felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed by all the adulation. I was treated as though I were a deity. It was as if I was no longer a living human being. Besides, like the first men who landed on the moon, what could I do to top our moment of triumph? I was too famous now to go back to making propaganda films. The PFLP would support me for life. But what could I possibly do? I wanted to live again.
During my season in the Zionist hell, I had tried not to think too much about Hanako, for it was just too painful. To dwell on the past or think of the future would have driven me mad. I had to take every minute as it came. But of course I did think of her. How could I not have? Only always in terms of the past. I couldn’t afford to have illusions about the future. As a result, perhaps, we drifted apart without wanting to. She became a distant image more than a living presence. When I was with her once more, in Beirut, it was as if an invisible wall had grown between us. Too much had happened. I could not share my experiences with her. She wouldn’t have understood. What was perhaps most painful was that she too treated me as a public figure, a hero. She wanted me to describe what it was like on the front lines, at Lydda. I said that I couldn’t remember exactly what it had been like. It all happened too fast. I tried to convey the sense of power that I felt. This confused her. It was not supposed to be like that. She asked me whether I meant the power of the Palestinian people. I replied that I was Japanese. Yes, she said, but it was the cause that gave me power. I said that it wasn’t quite like that. I didn’t want it to end this way, but it was clear that we couldn’t resume where we had left off, as lovers. And even if we could, it was not possible. She was with Georges Jabara now. He didn’t share his lovers with anyone.
I never saw Yamaguchi-san again. She had come to Beirut twice, while I was still in captivity. The first time was right after the battle of Lydda, when she interviewed Hanako, as the senior Japanese Red Army commander on the spot. To get to see Hanako at all was considered to be a great journalistic coup. For a while, Hanako was number one on the most wanted list of Interpol. Yamaguchi-san was the envy of her colleagues. Her program won the top Japanese television award that year. She came back just once more, this time for an interview with Chairman Arafat. The PLO people seemed pleased with it. I never saw the program myself.
But I did hear from her, for she was a loyal correspondent, and one of the few friends who kept me informed on Japanese affairs. Not that we were altogether cut off from the news in Beirut. People sometimes spoke of us as if we were living on the other side of the moon. In fact, we led quite normal lives. It’s perfectly true, however, that Japanese news rarely reached the Beirut newspapers or television broadcasts. What happened in Japan didn’t affect us much. But what happened here did affect Japan. When the Japanese government slavishly followed the West in supporting Israel during the 1973 war, provoked by the Zionists, the Arab powers quite rightly punished Japan with an oil embargo. The weak have to use every weapon at their disposal. It was only a few months after the embargo that I received the following letter:
Dear Sato-kun,
Winter in Tokyo has been colder than usual. Heavy snow fell in February. The first plum blossoms are yet to be in bloom.
I hope you are well on your way to recovery from the difficult times you have endured. I think of you often, always with affection and gratitude. Without your talents as a writer a
nd a political analyst, I could never have had so much success. I feel that much of the credit for the prizes I was lucky enough to receive, despite my deep unworthiness, really belongs to you. It was a privilege to work with you, and it would have been such a pleasure to do so again. However, we must move on in life, and do whatever we can to achieve our goals. My main aim has always been to foster peace and international understanding. You have done so much to help me understand the tragedies of the Arab world, especially of the Palestinian people. As for peace . . . well, I’ll never understand why men have to go on fighting wars. Perhaps it’s in their nature. That is why I believe that we women must take a more active part in public affairs.
As you may have heard already, my days as a journalist have come to an end. I have no regrets about that. Being a journalist was always one of my great ambitions. But, as I said, we must move on, and I know that my next step will give me an even better chance to accomplish the tasks I have set for myself in the short time allotted to me. Life is a fleeting thing, and we must make the most of it.
You would naturally have been very critical of our government’s policies during the Israeli war. I understand your feelings perfectly. Indeed, to a large extent, I share them. But we are a small island nation without natural resources, entirely dependent on oil for our survival. We are also a weak Asian nation, dedicated to peace but living in a dangerous world. That means, alas, that our security has to be guaranteed by the United States. Since Jewish opinion is highly influential in that country, we were forced to support Israel in the last war, whatever our private feelings may be, and are now paying the price for it. It can’t be helped.
If I were still a journalist, without any responsibility for the politics of our country, I would be as critical of our government as you are. Thinking freely is the writer’s prerogative. I have seen myself, in the dark days of my foolish youth, what happens when governments take that freedom away. We should be grateful that Japan is a free country now, and writers must continue to think as they please, even if their thoughts are irresponsible, which of course they often are. That can’t be helped either.