“He suggests that some signs are unmistakable.”
At this particular moment, I don’t give a damn about the war, good causes, heaven and earth, or martyrs and their monuments. It’s a miracle that I’m still standing. My heart’s beating like mad in my chest; my guts are awash in the corrosive juice of their own decay. My words outstrip my anxieties, flashing out from the core of my being like incendiary sparks. I’m afraid of every word that goes out of my mouth, afraid it’ll come back on me like a boomerang, loaded with something that will annihilate me on the spot. But my need for clarity, my need to clear my mind, is stronger than anything else. It’s as though I were playing Russian roulette: my fate isn’t important, since the moment of truth is going to decide between us once and for all. I don’t care about finding out exactly when Sihem sank into suicidal militancy or knowing whether I wronged her somehow, whether I contributed in one way or another to her ruin. All that has been pushed into the background. What I want to know first and foremost, what has supreme importance in my eyes, is whether or not Sihem was cheating on me.
Adel sees, at last, what I’m getting at. He’s outraged.
“What do you mean by that?” he says in a strangled voice. “No, it’s not possible. What are you trying to say? Are you insinuating that . . . that . . . No! You can’t be! How dare you?”
“She certainly kept her political activity a secret from me.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is the same thing. When you lie, you’re cheating.”
“She didn’t lie to you. I forbid you—”
“You? You’ve got the nerve to forbid me—”
“Yes, I forbid you!” he shouts, decompressing like a spring. “I will not permit you to soil her memory. Sihem was a pious woman. And you can’t cheat on your husband without offending the Lord. It would make no sense. Once you’ve chosen to give your life to God, that means you’ve renounced the things of this life, all earthly things, without exception. Sihem was a saint. An angel. I would have been damned just for looking at her too long.”
And I believe him, my God! I believe him. His words save me from my doubt, from my misery, from myself. I drink them in to the dregs; I fill myself with them. The black clouds above my head go whirling away dizzily, leaving a clear sky. A gust of air blows through me, chasing away the fumes that were poisoning me inside and brightening my blood. My God! I’m saved! And now that I’ve brought the salvation of humanity down to my own infinitesimal person, now that my honor has been spared, I lose sight of my anger and my rage and I’m almost tempted to forgive everything. My eyes fill with tears, but I don’t allow them to spoil this hypothetical reconciliation with myself, these intimate reconnections that I celebrate alone somewhere in my flesh and my spirit. However, it’s all too much for a man as reduced as I am; my knees buckle, and I collapse onto the pallet with my head in my hands.
I’m not ready to go out onto the patio. It’s too soon for me. I prefer to stay in my cell a little while longer, long enough to pull myself together and find my place in this sequence of revelations, which seem to branch off in every direction. Adel sits down beside me. His arm hesitates for a long time before wrapping itself around my neck—a gesture that repulses me and overwhelms me, but which I don’t reject. He starts to cry—remorse or sympathy? In either case, it’s not what I was expecting. Do I really expect anything at all from a man like Adel? It seems highly unlikely. We have radically different ideas about what people should expect from one another. For him, Paradise is at the end of a man’s life; for me, it’s at the tips of your fingers. For him, Sihem was an angel; for me, she was my wife. For him, angels are eternal; for me, they’re dying of our wounds. No, he and I have hardly anything to say to each other. It’s a lucky break that he’s even noticed I’m in pain. His sobs shake me harder and harder, down to the deepest part of my being. Without my realizing it, and without my being able to justify it, my hand gets away from me and grasps his in consolation. . . . And then we talk and talk and talk, as if we’re striving for total exorcism. When Adel went to Tel Aviv, it wasn’t for his business; he was there to supply the local cell of the Intifada with funds. He took advantage of my reputation and my hospitality to place himself above suspicion. One day, by accident, Sihem found a briefcase hidden under the bed he was using. When she took hold of it, some documents and a handgun fell out. Upon his return, Adel realized right away that his hiding place had been discovered. He thought about raising the alarm and vanishing. He even thought about killing her so nothing would be left to chance. In fact, he was planning Sihem’s “accidental death” when she came into his room with a wad of shekels. “That’s for the Cause,” she said. Adel says it was months before he started to trust her. Sihem wanted to join him in the resistance. The cell put her to the test, and she convinced them. Why didn’t she tell me anything?
When I ask him this, he says, “Tell you what? She couldn’t tell you anything; she didn’t have the right. And furthermore, she had no intention of letting anyone get in her way. A commitment like this, you keep quiet about it. If you’ve taken oaths that are to be observed in absolute secrecy, then you don’t cry them from the rooftops. My mother and father think I’m in business. The two of them are waiting for me to make my fortune so I can raise them up out of their misery. They don’t know I’m a militant; they don’t know a thing about my activities in the Intifada. They’re militants, too, in their way. They wouldn’t hesitate to give their lives for Palestine—but they wouldn’t give their child. That’s not normal. Children are their parents’ survival, their little piece of eternity. When they hear the news of my death, they’ll be inconsolable. I’ve taken full measure of the grief I’m going to cause them, but that will be just one more sorrow to add to a long list. In time, their mourning will be over, and they’ll wind up forgiving me. Sacrifice isn’t a duty just for other people. If we accept that other people’s children die for ours, we must accept that our children die for other people’s; otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair. And that’s where you can’t follow, Ammu. Sihem was a woman, not just your woman. She died for others.”
“Why her?”
“Why not her? Why should Sihem remain outside the history of her people? What did she have more or less than the women who sacrificed themselves before her? It’s the price of freedom.”
“She was free. Sihem was free. She had everything she wanted. I deprived her of nothing.”
“Freedom isn’t a passport issued by the authorities, Ammu. Going where you want to go isn’t freedom. Having enough to eat isn’t success. Freedom’s a deep conviction, the mother of all certitudes. Now, Sihem wasn’t so sure she deserved her good fortune. You lived under the same roof and enjoyed the same privileges, but you weren’t looking in the same direction. Sihem felt closer to her people than she did in your image of her. Maybe she was happy, but not happy enough to be like you. She didn’t hold a grudge against you for prizing so highly the honors you were showered with, but that wasn’t the happiness she wanted to see in you; she found it a little indecent, a bit incongruous. It was as if you were firing up a barbecue in a burned-out yard. You saw only the barbecue; she saw the rest, the desolation all around, spoiling all delight. It wasn’t your fault; all the same, she couldn’t bear sharing your blindness anymore.”
“I just didn’t see it coming, Adel. She seemed so happy.”
“It was you. You wanted so much to make her happy that you refused to think about what might throw a shadow on her happiness. Sihem didn’t want your kind of happiness. She came to see it as morally questionable, and the only way for her to atone was to join the ranks of the Cause. It’s a natural progression when you’re the child of a suffering people. There’s no happiness without dignity, and no dream is possible without freedom. The fact of being a woman doesn’t disqualify or exempt a resistance fighter. Men invented war; women invented resistance. Sihem was the daughter of a people noted for resistance. She was in a very good position to know exactly wha
t she was doing, Ammu. She wanted to deserve to live, deserve her reflection in the mirror, deserve to laugh out loud, not just to enjoy her good fortune. Same goes for me. I could go into business and get rich quicker than Onassis. But how can I accept blindness in order to be happy? How can a man turn his back on himself without coming face-to-face with his own negation? You can’t water a flower with one hand and pluck it with the other. When you put a rose in a vase, you don’t restore its charm; you denature it. You think you’re beautifying your room, but, in fact, all you’re doing is disfiguring your garden.”
I come up against the clarity of his logic like a fly striking a windowpane; I see his message plainly, but I can’t possibly absorb it. When I ponder what Sihem did, I find it unconscionable and inexcusable. The more I think about it, the less I accept it. How could she have reached the point where she would do such a thing? “And it can happen to anybody.” Navid told me. “Either it falls on your head like a roof tile or it attaches itself to your insides like a tapeworm. Afterward, you no longer see the world in the same way.” Sihem must have been carrying that hatred inside her forever, long before she met me. She grew up among the oppressed, as an orphan and an Arab in a world that pardons neither. She must necessarily have had to bow very low, like me, except that she could never straighten up. The memory of certain compromises imposes a heavier burden than the weight of the passing years. To go so far as to pack herself with explosives and walk out to her death with such determination, she must have been carrying around a wound so awful, so hideous, that she was too ashamed to show it to me; the only way for her to be rid of it was to destroy it and herself together, like a possessed man who jumps off a cliff in order to triumph over his demons and his weakness at once. It’s true that she hid her scars admirably well. Maybe she tried to disguise them, without success, and all it took was a simple little click to awaken the beast that was sleeping inside her. When did that happen, that click? Adel didn’t ask her, and probably even Sihem herself didn’t know when it was. One more atrocity on the TV news, some mistreatment on the street, a random insult: When you’ve got hate inside of you, it doesn’t take much to push you past the point of no return. . . . Adel’s talking, talking and smoking like a fiend. . . . I realize I’m not listening to him anymore. I don’t want to hear anything else. I don’t fit in the world he’s describing. There, death is an end in itself. For a physician, that’s too much to swallow. I’ve brought so many patients back from the next world that I started taking myself for a god. And when I lost a patient, when one of them slipped away from me on the operating table, I became the vulnerable, sad mortal I’ve always refused to be. I don’t recognize myself in what kills; my vocation is to be on the side of what saves. I’m a surgeon. And Adel’s asking me to come to terms with death as an ambition, a dearest wish, a legitimacy; he’s asking me to accept what my wife did—that is, to accept exactly what my physician’s calling forbids me even in the most desperate cases, even if it’s euthanasia. That’s not what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be proud of being a widower, I resent having to give up the happiness that made me a husband and a lover, a master and a slave, and I don’t want to bury the dream that made life worth living as it will never be for me again.
I push away the sack at my feet and stand up. “Let’s go, Adel.”
He’s a bit miffed at being cut off so abruptly, but he gets up in his turn.
“You’re right, Ammu. This isn’t the best place to talk about such things.”
“I don’t want to talk about them at all. Not here and not anywhere else.”
He acquiesces. “Your great-uncle Omr knows you’re in Jenin. He’s asking to see you. If you don’t have enough time, that’s no problem. I’ll explain it to him.”
“There’s nothing to explain, Adel. I’ve never renounced my family.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You were just thinking out loud.”
He avoids my eyes.
“You don’t want to have a bite to eat first? Or take a bath?”
“No. I don’t want anything from your friends. I don’t appreciate their cuisine or their hygiene. I don’t want their clothes, either,” I add, kicking the sack out of my way. “I’ve got to go back to my hotel and pick up my things, assuming they haven’t been distributed to the needy.”
The sunlight on the patio assaults my eyes, but the sun does me good. The fighters have left. The only person I see is a smiling young man standing beside a dusty automobile.
“This is Wissam,” Adel says. “Omr’s grandson.”
The young man throws his arms around my neck and hugs me tightly. When I step back to have a look at him, he hides behind his smile, embarrassed by the tears filling his eyes. Wissam! I knew him when he was a squalling baby in diapers, hardly bigger than my fist, and look at him now, a head taller than me, with a mustache like an inscription and one foot already in the grave. It’s always touching to see a person his age adrift, except when he drifts in the direction Wissam’s chosen. The pistol peeking out from under his belt breaks my heart.
“Take him to his hotel first,” Adel orders him. “He’s got some stuff to collect there. If the clerk’s forgotten where he put them, you refresh his memory for him.”
“You’re not coming with us?” Wissam says, surprised.
“No.”
“You were up for it a little while ago.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Fine with me. Whatever you say. See you tomorrow, maybe.”
“Who knows?”
I expect Adel to come and embrace me, but he stays where he is, head bent down, hands on his hips, worrying a pebble with the tip of his shoe.
“Okay, see you soon,” Wissam says.
Adel looks at me with eyes full of darkness.
That look!
The same look Sihem gave me that morning when I dropped her off at the bus terminal.
“I’m really very sorry, Ammu.”
“So am I.”
He doesn’t dare approach me. For my part, I don’t give him any help, much less make the first move myself. I don’t want him imagining things; I want him to know that my wound is incurable. Wissam opens the door for me, waits for me to settle in my seat, and then runs around the car and gets in on the driver’s side. The car makes a circle in the little parking area, nearly grazes Adel—who stands there as though paralyzed, sunk in his thoughts—and turns into the street. I’d like to see that look again, to examine it; I don’t turn around. As we drive downhill, the street branches off into a multitude of narrow side streets. The noises of the town reach me; the movement of the crowds exhilarates me; I lay my head on the back of the seat and try to think about nothing.
At the hotel, they give me back my things and allow me to take a bath. I shave and change my clothes, and then I ask Wissam to drive me out to see the lands where my ancestors came from. We leave Jenin without a hitch. For some time now, the fighting has stopped, and a good part of the Israeli forces have withdrawn from the town. Several teams of TV reporters and cameramen are scouring the rubble, looking for some horror they might profitably record. Our car crosses an interminable series of fields before we reach the shabby road that leads to the orchards of the patriarch. I let my gaze run over the plains like a child running after his imaginings. But I can’t stop thinking about the way Adel looked at me, and about the darkness enveloping him. He made a strange impression on me, a feeling like a flag at half-mast. I can still see him standing there on that white-hot patio. He’s not the funny, generous Adel I used to know; he’s someone else, someone tragic, driven like a wolf whose ambition doesn’t ever project past the next meal, the next prey, the next mass killing. He smokes his cigarette as if he’ll never smoke another, he talks about himself as though he no longer exists, and the shadows of funeral parlors darken his eyes. It’s obvious: Adel doesn’t belong to the living anymore. He has irreversibly turned his back on the future, into which he refuses to survive, as if he’s afraid it
may disappoint him. He has chosen the status that, according to him, best suits his character: the status of martyr. That’s the way he wants to wind up: at one with the Cause he defends. Stone slabs already bear his name; his family’s memory bristles with his feats of arms. If he has nothing on his conscience, if he doesn’t reproach himself in any way for having set Sihem on the road to the supreme sacrifice, if war has become his only chance of gaining self-esteem, that’s all because he’s dead himself and he’s just waiting to be laid in the earth so he can rest in peace.
I believe I’ve arrived at my destination. The route I took has been terrible, and I don’t have the impression that I’ve reached anything or learned anything redemptive. At the same time, I feel liberated; I tell myself that my suffering is over, and from now on nothing can catch me off my guard. This painful search for the truth has been my personal voyage of initiation, my very own. Am I going to reconsider the order of things now? Am I going to call it into question, reposition myself in relation to it? Of course, but I won’t feel as though I’m contributing to anything major. For me, the only truth that counts is the one that will help me one day to pull myself together and go back to my patients. Because the only battle I believe in, the only one that really deserves bleeding for, is the battle the surgeon fights, which consists in re-creating life in the place where death has chosen to conduct its maneuvers.
16.
* * *
Omr, the chief elder of the tribe, the last survivor of an era whose sagas were the bedtime stories of our childhood; Omr, my great-uncle, the man who passed through the last century like a shooting star, so bright and swift that his prayers were never able to catch up with him; there he is, in the patriarch’s courtyard, smiling at me. He’s happy to see me again. His deeply creased faced quivers with a joy so poignant, you would think him a child reunited with his father after a long separation. A hajji many times over, he has known glory and honors, traveled to many countries, and ridden through exalted lands on the backs of celebrated purebreds. He fought in the troops led by Lawrence of Arabia—“that pallid jinni come from the foggy north to stir up the Bedouins against the Ottomans and sow discord among Muslims”—and served in King Ibn Saud’s royal bodyguard before falling in love with an odalisque and fleeing the Arabian Peninsula with her. Then restless wandering, followed by a period of decline, put an end to their union. Abandoned by his muse, he dragged his kit from principality to sultanate in search of exploitable opportunities, committed the odd act of brigandage here and there, and then became, in succession, an arms trafficker in San’a and a rug merchant in Alexandria before being gravely wounded in the defense of Al-Qods in 1947. In my first memories of him, he’s limping around because of the bullet in his knee; later, I remember him bent over a cane after the heart attack he suffered the day he watched Israeli bulldozers laying waste to the patriarch’s orchards in order to make way for a Jewish colony. Today, I find him terribly diminished, with a cadaverous face and bleary eyes, little more than a bundle of bones huddled in a wheelchair.
The Attack Page 18