Now my dreamscape shifted so that the end of the battlefield melted into the golden carpet that, it is written, leads to the throne of Allah. I knew that I must be in jannah, paradise, which meant I must be dead, martyred on the battlefield. Joy seized my heart! I had done it! I had become al-shaheed! Now, like an offering of melons, the severed heads of Jews and Christians rolled down the golden carpet to Allah’s feet, and when I looked into his face, I saw that he began to smile.
“Only my crazy Kamal would do such a thing!” Allah said to me. “Welcome! Welcome to your reward!”
2
Fouad and Amira went to Madrassa al-Riyadh, a private Muslim school in West Beirut. (Amira would be allowed to go until she was a teenager; then she would have to quit school and devote herself to learning to be a wife.) As a small boy, I was impressed with the way they could read and write, and I could not wait for the day when I would be old enough to go with them and learn important things. But the first day they took me there, I cried and cried until there were no tears left in my head. At first, it was because I suddenly realized that going to school meant leaving my mother. Later, it was because I learned school was a brutal place.
Winter had wrapped itself around Beirut. An icy wind charged in from the sea, whipping through the alleys to assault us on the streets. Amira held my hand as we trudged along past the shops. Rain dripped from the colorful awnings, making wet, smacking sounds on the pavement. My tears made my cheeks colder. I sniffled and tried to bury my face in the collar of my coat.
“Kamal, you always wanted to go to school,” Ibrahim said impatiently. “Why are you crying now?”
“Be quiet, inta majnoon!” Amira snapped, calling him crazy. “He’s only afraid to leave Mama. He will be fine when he gets to school and meets his new friends.”
Amira tried to pull me closer. At that moment, we were walking past the open garage door of a mechanic’s shop. The smells of grease and welding oozed out into the street, and I saw a man in there wearing a dark mask and holding a gun that shot blue fire.
At the sight, I sank to the sidewalk, threw my head back, and howled.
“See what you’ve done!” Amira said to Ibrahim. Clutching her book bag, she bent down beside me. My cries echoed off the concrete face of the building, and I could feel the wet ground soaking through my pants.
Through my tears, I saw two men emerge from the mechanic’s shop to stare at our little tableau.
“It is his first day of school,” Amira explained.
Dressed in blue coveralls, both men smiled and nodded sympathetically. One of them had a banana for a nose, with nostrils as big around as my thumbs. “It’s going to be alright, ya habebe,” Banana-nose said. “You’re going to go to school and become smart, and the whole neighborhood is going to be very proud of you!”
I looked up at the mechanic and saw that he had hair sticking out of the holes in his scary nose. I screamed louder.
Now, even Fouad had had enough. He grabbed my hand and lifted me firmly to my feet. “Come, brother. We’re going to be late.”
Fouad dragged me along and I followed like a sheep, sobbing all the way. Finally, I looked up to see a towering double gate made of green wrought iron. Each half of the gate was shorter at the hinges, then rose in height to where they met at the center. Each pole in the gate was topped with a point like a spear.
Inside the gates, a huge concrete stairway led down into the school proper, where five buildings housed classes of all ages. Madrassa al Riyadh was one of the largest private schools in Beirut, home to at least several hundred kids. To me, it looked like tens of thousands as Fouad, Ibrahim, and Amira led me to my classroom, which was in a building painted baby blue. Rosebushes lined the stairs and walkways. The colors and gardens soothed me, and school began to seem more friendly.
When Amira opened the door to the classroom, music spilled out: piano, French horn, clarinet. Suddenly I was mesmerized. Fouad helped me hand over my lunchbox to the smiling teacher, who assigned me a seat with a colored sticker to remind me in case I forgot. She took me by the hand and led me to my seat. Suddenly confident, I waved goodbye to my brothers and sister.
The teacher had seated me between two boys, whose names I remember to this day: Nabil and Mukhtar. Mukhtar was a kind little boy and was always trying to think of fun things to do. But Nabil was devious. He thought about everything evil he could induce me to do. It was like sitting between an angel and a devil.
Soon we reached the ten o’clock break. In the center of the school stood a little shop with a door that opened on top while the bottom stayed shut. My brothers and sister had told me that inside that wonderful little building were candy and cakes and petit fours, and even little toys like tiny soldiers and cowboys. From inside came the smell of fresh popcorn and, best of all, freshly fried potato chips. I could see a long line of children forming at the door. Nabil and I drew near them and I saw that each student who went to the little door-gate came away with a treat.
So I got in line. My mouth began to water as other students passed by with white paper cones filled with the glistening hot chips which, my brothers and sister had told me, were dropped in a fryer, drained in a big steel net, then sprinkled with sea salt.
Child by child, I edged closer to the shop, where I saw that a teenager manned the door. He had dirty blond hair and blue eyes.
“Potato chips, please,” I said when I reached him.
He scowled like a prince looking upon a beggar and handed me a wide paper cone, twisted at the bottom and filled with chips.
“Two kroosh,” he said.
I know my face was a question mark.
“Two kroosh!” he snapped. “People are waiting.”
“But I do not have any money,” I said. I had not known that the other children were buying their food. Only that they got in line and that when they came out, they had a treat.
The young shopkeeper snatched the cone away from me as if I were a thief, and I heard the light clatter of chips being thrown back into a bin. “Stupid boy! Get out of the way!”
Tears squirted from my eyes. Frightened, I backed away, afraid he might box my head for trying to steal. Worried that someone might tell my parents I had dishonored them, I scurried away to find Mukhtar. School was turning out to be a treacherous place.
At the end of the break, all the classes lined up near one of the buildings, each rank facing out, with the tallest child’s back to the wall and each student going forward shorter than the one behind him. I saw the other children spacing themselves by putting their right arm on the shoulder of the child ahead. Since it was our first day, our teacher was there to show us how to do it like the older students.
At that moment, a loud squealing, like a wounded animal, cut through the general chatter. I was already standing in line and now saw the headmaster, a fat man wearing a blue suit and red moustache, striding from the direction of the snack shop. A boy trotted along beside him, dancing strangely on his toes, howling as he went. Behind those two walked a tall, dark man and a woman wearing a long red dress.
I knew the man with the red moustache was the headmaster because we had lined up and passed by him earlier that day. He had inspected our uniforms: Were they laundered? Were they ironed? And our fingernails—were they clean? I had heard from Fouad that if the headmaster found dirt or wrinkles, he would whack your hand with a ruler.
Now the headmaster turned toward the ranks of students, and I saw that the boy was the blue-eyed shopkeeper who had snatched away my chips. Tears streaked his scarlet face. His ear, the handle the headmaster had used to drag him center-stage, glowed the color of pickled beets.
“This boy’s name is Amal, and he is a thief,” the headmaster announced. “When we came to collect the money from today’s shop sales, we found part of it in Amal’s socks.”
Amal’s chest heaved, and I could hear his breath hitching. He kept his head down, his eyes glued to the pavement. The dark man standing on the boy’s right looked on grimly. In
his hand, he held a raw plank of wood, about two feet long, with a rope dangling from one end. The woman stood on his left, holding a thick length of dark-stained wood, wide at the front and tapered back to form a handle.
For the second time since I stepped through the green gate made of spears, I began to cry.
“This is the only time we will warn Amal,” the headmaster went on. “If he ever steals again, we will call the police and he will be dismissed from this school.”
Then he turned to Amal. “Take off your shoes.”
Shaking and crying, the boy obeyed.
“Sit down and raise your legs,” the headmaster ordered.
My stomach knotted. I could feel more tears sliding down my cheeks. The boy behind me in line began to sniffle, too.
Amal lay down on the concrete and raised his legs in the air. Lunging forward, the dark man placed the new plank behind the boy’s ankles, and wrapped the rope around the front of his ankles. After two passes with the rope, the dark man tied it to a nail that stuck out from one end of the board.
Amal’s legs were secured to the plank and the bottoms of his long, skinny feet exposed. Now the boy began to cry in earnest. “Please, I promise never to do it again! Please!”
His pleading was pitiful but they did not stop the proceedings. The woman handed the red-veneered paddle to the headmaster, then stepped up to hold one end of the plank that bound Amal’s feet. The dark man held the other end of the plank. The headmaster then swung the paddle back like a tennis racket and swung it forward again, landing blow after blow on the bottoms of Amal’s feet.
The boy screamed and so did I.
It was terrifying, a nightmare unfolding in the flesh. I imagined they would grab me next for one reason or another. What if Amal told them I had tried to steal chips?
3
As we got older, there were times when my father and mother taught the boys and girls separately. My father took Fouad, Omer, Ibrahim, and me and taught us some things the girls did not need to know. He taught us that we were superior to our sisters and, in fact, to all women, because the woman had sinned in the Garden of Eden. She was the weaker vessel, not perfect like Adam, and Satan was able to deceive her easily through lust.
“Satan seduced her physically,” Father said. “Women are not strong. They bring sin to the house. This is why they must cover themselves from the tops of their heads to the bottoms of their feet.”
Meanwhile, my mother taught my sisters how to be good wives, how to honor their husbands, how to cook and clean and serve. Among the strict Muslim families we knew, no girl was allowed to go to school beyond the twelfth grade.
Reading from the Koran, Father taught us more about jannah. I learned that it was a wondrous place, dripping with fat grapes so juicy and sweet that the smell of them alone would fill you up.
“If you see a bird in paradise and you desire to eat it,” Father told us, “it will fall down from the air cooked three different ways.”
In jannah, plush empty beds flew through the air, available at any moment you wanted to sleep or relax. Father read to us from the Sura that jannah was populated with young boys, with bodies soft like velvet and smooth like marble, reclining naked on the ground.
Why would they do that? I wondered.
When I got older and understood more thoroughly what the seventy-two hūrīyah and young boys were for, I asked our imam, Shiekh Rajab, “How do the al-shaheed have the strength to service so many women?”
He looked at me, amused. “Allah gives the al-shaheed extra horsepower to attend to them.”
Basically, he said, the martyrs became like Superman.
4
One fall day, my best friend Eli and I were playing tag in the street, when suddenly he stopped and turned to me, huffing and puffing.
“Kamal, when I grow up, I will go on journeys and see the world. I will go places and eat delicious things, and you will not be able to go with me because Islam will not let you.”
Eli was a Christian. The Christian children were allowed to go to the chalets and on vacations and eat forbidden foods. I was a little envious and wished I could enjoy life in this way. On the other hand, these were Christians and not worthy, so what did it matter to me? I knew that someday I would probably have to rise up against them anyway.
But one night, I had another dream: I was a little child running away with Eli. Strings of light like streamers fell down from the night sky. We ran through them, as though through a festival where the decorations were fashioned by angels. In my dream, I felt the cool night whispering against my skin as Eli and I ran toward the sea where, strangely, a helicopter was parked in the sand. Its blades turned around and around, slow and silent.
Eli ushered me into the helicopter, and as it floated away from the beach, fireworks lit up the heavens around me, bursting blue and scarlet, white and gold. Looking down, I could see Eli waving up at me as he receded.
The sky shimmered with chrysanthemums of light, and I heard Eli’s voice echo up into the sparkling night: “Run away, Kamal! Run away!”
Beirut, Lebanon
1965
1
Life was getting more expensive for my father. He had many children now, many mouths to feed but not enough hands to contribute. In the Muslim world, the prevailing view is that it is better to bear boys than girls. Boys can go out and work, as my older brothers did. They can produce, contribute, carry on the family name. But girls cannot go out and work. They stay in the house and eat and drink until they get married. Girls are raised up for somebody else.
Where there had been joy in my household, warmth and good food, something began to change. By the time I was seven, my mom and dad had seven kids. With each new child, I watched my father change, grow old before my eyes. I did not know it then, but the blacksmith trade was falling out of demand. People were buying ready-made water heaters and washtubs and cabinets. A new world was leaving his old-world trade behind.
Suddenly, Father was not coming home until much later in the evenings. I would wait and wait for him to come with his cologne and metal scent, with bags of pomegranates from the souk. But now, many times, my mother would send me to bed before he arrived. Even when I was still awake, my father did not want to play with me anymore.
I did not know what was happening behind the bedroom wall, where my parents talked in private. Where I had seen warmth and affection in their eyes, I now saw tension, like piano wires tightly strung. Some evenings, I heard my father yelling at my mother about the smallest things. It seemed nothing pleased him anymore.
I sensed we were poorer now. My mother had always sewn most of our clothes, only buying ready-made ones for the festivals. Now, though, even for the festivals, we wore old and handmade things. Only Fouad got new shoes. The rest of the brothers passed his old ones down the line. I also noticed that, where meat had been a rare luxury in our home, now there was none.
As one of the youngest boys, I was in a zone where my father did not know what to do with me. The girls he treated with affection; they were not expected to earn their keep. My older brothers he treated with affection because they brought home money each week. But when I came to my father seeking his attention, he turned cold.
“Not now, Kamal. I am tired,” he would say.
Then one night, he broke my heart. I had scraped together a little money to buy a new Superman comic book and was standing in the living room showing it to my brother when Father walked in from work.
He glared down at the book in my hands, then scorched my eyes with his. “You are so stupid wasting your money on this trash!” he said. “I wish you were a girl. At least then I could give you away in marriage!”
One evening, at the beginning of a new school year, my father came home early. I leapt on him to give him a kiss, to feel his moustache against my face, but he took me by both shoulders and guided me into the kitchen, where he stood in front of me and looked down. I could not read the look in his eyes, but I could see that he looked very
tired, very sad.
“Kamal, you are not going back to school.”
This shocked me. Why would I not go back to school? “But I love school, Father. All my friends are there.”
“If you live in this house, you work,” he said, his eyes turning hard in a way I had not seen before. “You have to work.”
Fouad was already working as an apprentice welder. Amira had already been pulled from school for her training as a wife.
“Please, Father. I am making you proud in school. My grades are good!”
He kept his eyes hard. “I have already arranged a job for you, answering the phone for Uncle Abdul Al-Karim.”
My uncle’s plumbing business was all the way across the city, many neighborhoods away. I fell on my father’s feet and grabbed his legs with both arms. “Please, Father! Please! I want to go to school! I want to make you proud!”
He pulled his legs from the circle of my thin arms, first one and then the other, and walked away, leaving me lying on the cold tile. At the kitchen door, he turned back and looked at me. The hardness was gone, and I could not tell what this other look in his eyes meant. Then he turned and went out of the kitchen. We never spoke of school again.
School started in August. The worst thing was when I passed my friends, me in my ragged clothes, them neatly turned out in their uniforms. I was embarrassed to let them see me. For the first few weeks, Sana, a girl I knew from school, stopped to talk with me. But after a while, we were not the same anymore. Not of the same class. She was a student, dressed smart and clean. I was now among the street people. Before, I had been poor but educated. Now I was only poor. Sana stopped talking to me, and instead began to pass me quickly with a hurried wave. Maybe her father told her I was not good enough anymore.
My uncle was a plumber and a pipe fitter who had landed a big job putting in all the plumbing in a tall building at the other end of Beirut. All that summer and fall, I worked until sunset, answering the big, black dial phone in my uncle’s office. I was working six days for about twenty Lebanese lira—about three dollars. When someone called, I took notes. But many times, he could not read my handwriting and he could not figure out who called. At that, he would fly into a rage and punch and kick me right in my guts.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 4