Blue Lorries

by Radwa Ashour

  It is essential that I unravel the threads – surely I will find a way out. What is the problem? I must identify the problem before trying to solve it. What is the problem?

  Chapter twenty-one

  The big feast

  Sometimes I am visited by my good angel, and at such times I think there is much to life that makes it worth living. I remember the moments that shone brightly, and conclude that the world, in spite of everything, has been kind to me.

  When Nadir and Nadeem turned sixteen, I suggested we have a party to celebrate. We weren’t in the habit of giving birthday parties; it was enough to wish ‘many happy returns’ to the person whose birthday it was, or perhaps mark the event with a bouquet of flowers, a card, or a shirt whose purchase was urged by the occasion.

  We didn’t hold the party on the day itself, but rather some days afterward, when the boys came home, each with his identity card confirming that he had officially become a full and independent citizen. ‘Friday evening?’ I suggested, and they agreed. I spent Thursday night and Friday morning preparing the sweets. Then I announced, ‘The kitchen is closed – no spongers admitted!’ This was in reference to Nadir and Nadeem, for Hamdiya had worked with me on the preparations. I took a bath and let down my hair, which I normally kept tied back in a ponytail. I put on my prettiest outfit. The guests arrived and the party became a feast. We sang, danced, played, laughed, and made fun, words flying all around like ping-pong balls in games of repartee, with jokes and sarcastic jibes targeting everything, not least of all ourselves.

  When the boys graduated with their high school baccalaureate, we held a second celebration, and we had a third when they graduated from the university. At the end of every celebration I would go to bed – or to put it more accurately, I would drop into bed like a sack of onions or potatoes tossed from a transport lorry. I would sink into a deep and peaceful sleep, while the party continued until the next morning. As soon as I awoke, I would hurry to the bathroom, run the hot water and take a long, leisurely bath, the steam thick around me, while I sang my heart out, songs I loved by Fayrouz or Abdel Wahhab.

  My feelings were similar to this on that sweltering day in July when I said goodbye to the boys at the Cairo airport, and if I hadn’t been too shy I would have raised up my voice and belted out the song I was singing in an undertone and the airport would have come to a stop in consternation at this woman past the age of forty (it might not have seemed to the casual observer that I was over forty, because of my clothes and the arrangement of my hair tied back in a ponytail, but I had reached the age of forty-six – or, in classical Arabic, I was ‘a woman in the fifth decade of her life’, having covered more than half the distance between the fifth and the sixth) – I say, had I vociferated in song (this word ‘vociferate’ is one of the more unfortunate specimens of our beautiful language), the airport would have come to a stop in consternation at such bizarre behaviour, perhaps also at my exceptional ability to reduce any melody to a discordant cacophony. At any rate, I carried on singing in a low voice as I handed over my passport to the Middle East Airlines employee, and then I stopped, perforce, to answer her question. ‘I only have this one small bag with me,’ I said, ‘and I’ll carry it on.’ I took my passport, went back to singing, and continued singing as I stood in the queue for passport security, held out the passport for the officer to administer the exit stamp, and finally as I settled into a seat at the airport café, to wait for departure.

  I had followed the drama minutely, every day, every hour. The first day, I sat watching the television from the time I got home from work until evening. On the second day, I dashed to work, did what was required of me, and dashed back home. For the next two days I didn’t leave the house or my spot in front of the television. To begin with, there was the liberation of Qantara, Deir Seriane, Al-Qsair, and Taibe. Then more villages and towns followed: Markaba, Beit Yahoun, Al-Adaisse, Al-Houla, Beni Haiyane, Tallouse, Meiss al-Jabal, Kfar Kila, Al-Khiam, Al-Naqoura, Bent Jbail, Marj‘oyun. I corroborated the events by going back to the map, to ascertain the location of each. In a matter of days, these villages and towns, previously unknown to me, became places that were intimately familiar. When Nadir and Nadeem got home from work, I would recount to them the details of what I had seen; after naming each village and town, I would point out its specific location. Suddenly I laughed, remembering my aunt, when she talked about the villages neighbouring ours – how she took great care to say just where they were: on the land to the east or the land to the west, bordering our village or some other place; and the distance between the two: as if she feared that her listener would mistake the location of our village and lose his way.

  The Israeli army had fled.

  A desperate attempt on the part of Lahad’s men. Bombardment of the people of Bent Jbail returning to their hometown. Another attempt: The Israelis opened fire and struck their own agents in Lahad’s army. A third attempt: They poured petrol from the tanks onto the roads. No use. At Al-Shaqif, the last fortified position in which they had a presence, a group was besieged, waiting to be airlifted by helicopter to Israel. Then the collapse – complete and final collapse. They left behind their tanks, transport vehicles, heavy artillery, rifles, pistols, ammunition, and an army of their agents.

  It would be very difficult for me to describe my feelings as I followed the thousands of people setting out for their liberated villages, making their way along dusty tracks, climbing the hills either on foot, or by car or motorcycle. Yellow flags, green flags, and flags of a white background coloured with green and red. Bulldozers removing the barriers. The gate that had closed off the road to them opened by hands, arms, and shoulders. The people passed through, and kept on ascending, getting closer, reaching their destination: women strewed the new arrivals with rice and rose petals. Ahlan wa sahlan! Welcome home! ‘Twenty years we’ve been dead, and now we are reborn.’ These words were spoken by an old man as he greeted the new arrivals. A woman wearing an army uniform was asked by another who was there with the media whether the uniform was part of ‘the spoils of victory’. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘these clothes belonged to a comrade of my son – both of them martyrs.’

  ‘Are you happy on this day?’ the journalist asked her.

  The woman replied, ‘Happy, yes, but my happiness will be complete when the detainees come back from the Israeli prisons, and the bodies of our martyred sons are returned to us.’

  A youth pulled down a poster displaying a picture of one of the leaders of the collaborating army, tore it to pieces, and continued on his way. Young girls wept, women ululated and sang, two men embraced and held the embrace for a long time, as if afraid that if one of them let go of the other he might find his friend behind barbed wire that would once again keep them apart. In a dusty village square, a prayer was held that united those returning with those who had stayed on in the village. A group photograph of the residents of Bent Jbail, taken in front of the town’s telephone company, which had been the collaborators’ headquarters, laughing faces, people pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, yellow flags fluttering, in a still shot, as if addressing time itself: ‘Take this picture – document this.’

  The men of Lahad’s army, which had collaborated with Israel, gave themselves up. The camera moved in on them as they sat in a large transport vehicle. They hid their faces. The jig was up. Their leaders had asked permission to take refuge with their families in Israel. A long line of people and cars stood awaiting permits to cross. The Fatima Gate closed behind the last Israeli soldier leaving Lebanon – the television showed the great iron gate and broadcast the loud creaking noise it made as its two panels swung on their hinges. An Israeli soldier on the other side encircled it with heavy chains. Then the iron lock.

  At Bent Jbail, Hasan Nasrallah said in his speech on the twenty-sixth of May, 2000, ‘Put away your despair. Arm yourselves,’ he said, ‘with hope.’

  Antoine Lahad, in a statement from Paris, said, ‘We dedicated ourselves to Israel for twenty-five years, but
Israel betrayed and abandoned us in a single night.’

  Nasrallah said in his speech, ‘The age of defeat is over.’

  The next day (the twenty-seventh of May), I got out of bed the moment I awoke, took a shower, and put on a brightly coloured dress – it was the first time I had shed mourning garb since Hazem’s death. I made myself a cup of tea, picked up a pen, and sat down to write to him:

  ‘Couldn’t you have held on for five months? You only needed to wait four months and twenty days – no more – and then your life would have gone on for years. I miss you so much, but I’m going to set that aside now and tell you what’s happened.’ And I told the story, told in detail what I had seen via live television broadcast; then I drew a map for him showing the locations of the villages and towns. At the end of the letter, I told him that I meant to visit southern Lebanon as soon as I got the chance. (Hazem was the first person I told of my travel plans.) When I finished the letter, I put it in an envelope, but when I went to write the address, I felt perplexed; I put the letter in my handbag, and got up to make myself another cup of tea and get ready for work.

  It seemed to me for a moment that I might continue writing letters to Hazem. I told myself that this could be the beginning of one of my sudden manias. Or it could be true madness, the kind that would remove me from the rational world. But I wrote him only one more letter after that, which I began when I was at Beirut Airport, waiting for my flight. I continued writing on the plane. When I finished this letter, the flight attendant was telling us to fasten our safety belts, because the plane was about to land at Cairo Airport.

  In my letter to Hazem I told him about the road to the town of Al-Khiam, about the colour photographs of young men that were to be found along the way: ‘At every position where there had been an operation by the resistance was a pole – like a lamp-post, only instead of being topped by a light it bore a picture of a martyr who took part in the oper­ation: a large colour photograph in which the facial features stood out clearly, and underneath the picture was the young man’s name, with the date and the year in which he was martyred.’

  I told him about the prison at Al-Khiam: its location overlooking Palestine and Syria and Mount Amil in Lebanon. I described it to him minutely, beginning with the list hung on the left side of the entrance to the courtyard: a record of all the gaolers who had engaged in torture. I described to him the interrogation chamber, the ‘hanging rod’, the large cells and the small ones – these were one square metre and not quite two metres in height, where a prisoner would spend a month or two with no opportunity to stretch out or to extend his legs fully. I said, ‘I went into one of them and pushed the door shut – I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, in the gloom.’ I told him about the box: A prisoner would sit cross-legged in there for days, in a space whose dimensions measured one cubic metre. I told him about the exercise yard in the sun, roofed with barbed wire, where prisoners were allowed to go for twenty minutes once every three weeks. The prison was left as it was after liberation, to become a museum for visitors, but the walls were repainted, and so we lost everything that had been written or inscribed or drawn on them. There was nothing, now, on the walls.

  I did not tell him what I had heard about the various kinds of torture, or the breakouts that had been attempted despite the minefield encircling the prison, but I related in detail two of the many stories I had heard: the tale of Ali Qashmar, who had spent ten years in the prison, and that of Abdallah Hamza, who had stayed there only three weeks.

  ‘Ali was from the town of Al-Khiam. They arrested him when he was fourteen years old. He didn’t know what the charge was. He said, “I was like other boys my age: I hated the occupation, but all I thought about was fun and games. I wasn’t much concerned with the future, and if I did think about it, then my thoughts went no further than the hope that I would pass my examinations.”

  ‘He was arrested and tortured, tortured extensively.

  ‘His mother went up to the roof of her house every day. She gazed toward the buildings of the nearby prison and talked to her son, as if her words might reach him, as if he would respond to the things she told him. The neighbours would hear her, and gently bring her back down from the roof.

  ‘When he got out of prison, his mother didn’t recognise him. In her mind he was a small boy, and standing before her was a tall young man with a beard. Smiling, he said to her, “Mother, it’s me, Ali!”

  ‘She knew him by his smile.

  ‘He, too, failed to recognise himself one day when he looked at himself in the mirror in the guard’s room. He said, “Reflected in its surface I saw someone I didn’t know. I turned to look behind me, but found no one.

  ‘ “I had spent ten years in prison. The teacher Abdallah Hamza, on the other hand, was there only three weeks. They hung him on the ‘hanging rod’ and kept beating him and pouring cold water on him (this was in February) until he died. For two and a half years Fayrouz, his wife and the mother of his three children, continued to visit the prison, travelling the fifty kilometres from her village to Al-Khiam, bringing her husband clothes and food, which she would leave with the guard and then go home. For two and a half years she was unaware that she was a widow; unaware, for two and a half years, that her children were fatherless.”

  ‘The stories of Ali Qashmar and Abdallah Hamza were told to me by the guide who conducted me through the prison. He, too, was a former prisoner. He did not tell me his own story. He spoke of himself only as one member of a larger group, as he led me from cell to cell, from the interrogation chambers to the “hanging rod”, explaining everything, exhaustively.’

  At the end of the letter, I told Hazem, ‘In my book about prison, I’ll devote a chapter to Al-Khiam, which, unlike the other chapters, will discuss the moment of liberation. Perhaps I’ll devote two chapters to it – one to be the focal point in a book about life in prison, and the other, with which I’ll conclude, on liberation.’

  Chapter twenty-two

  Novelty

  Nadir was training me to use the computer. I found it confusing, and felt completely stupid at first, then less so. I groped my way as timidly as someone taking up a pen for the first time, or someone expected to be responsive in a language of which he has learned only the rudiments. Losing patience, I would say, ‘I get it now. Let me figure it out.’ He would leave me alone to flounder for a bit, and then I would call for help, demanding explanations every few minutes. Nadir would come and sort me out, but he would overdo the explanation, going on and on until I protested, ‘What, do you think I’m an idiot?’ He would go away again, and things would seem simpler for a bit, then get complicated again. Then I would summon Nadeem.

  For the first week, working with the programmes and files and windows and message boxes that jumped on to the screen in front of me – to which I didn’t know whether I should answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ – I felt I was wandering a maze in the streets of an unknown city. I would stop. Then I would make up my mind and say, ‘This is the way,’ and proceed with some degree of confidence, but this would gradually fade, until I became convinced that I was simply lost, with no idea how to get to where I wanted to go, or how to go back the way I had come. I said, ‘Teach me how to work with just the documents.’ I was good at writing quickly on the keyboard; now I wanted to learn how to open a new document, how to close it, how to get back to it, and how to organise what I’d written and edit text by adding to it or cutting from it. He taught me.

  The following day, I opened a new document, and began translating. I put the text on my right and looked at the Arabic sentences, moving my fingers easily on the keyboard, as the French sentences took shape on the screen before me. I usually translated quickly, and as a rule I would go back over the draft of what I had translated at the end of each paragraph. Now the emendation process was simpler and faster: I could delete a letter or a word or a line and substitute another. No need to draft text only to white it out and then go back to it for the final adaptation, to be copied
for the third time. I worked assiduously on the document for four days, during which I translated fifty pages.

  I was happy, as I generally was, when my translation of a text pleased me, and happier still about my success in working with a device that, only one week earlier, had seemed like an insoluble puzzle.

  What had happened? Some keystroke resulting in some action or other. The document had disappeared. For two hours, I tried to get it back, but I got nowhere. I was certain it was hiding somewhere in the depths of the machine, so I sat waiting for one or the other of the boys to return and find it.

  Nadir came home and as usual declared that he was starving to death, that if he didn’t eat immediately we would have to summon an ambulance, and that before the ambulance could get there the doctor would have pronounced him dead!

  I took him by the hand and sat him down before the computer. ‘The document first,’ I told him, ‘and then you can perish at your leisure, I won’t stop you!’ Hamdiya stared, astonished, but held her tongue.

  Nadir sat at the computer and asked me the name of the document, the date it was created, and the last time I had worked on it. He searched. ‘It’s not there,’ he said. Then his fingers began a series of rapid clicks on the mouse. Boxes and lists appeared, while he indicated ‘no’ or ‘yes’, closing this, opening that, closing the other. At last he announced, ‘I have a right to eat now. I worked for my snack. You’ve lost the document, Miss Nada!’

  ‘That can’t be! How did it go missing?’

  ‘You must have needed to press “save”, but . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, “press ‘save’”?’

  ‘That means you preserve the document. That’s computerese: “Saving” means preserving your work.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The document got lost because you shut down the computer without saving it.’