by Hamida Na'na
“Please Frank, don’t let’s dwell on the past. I’m here now, with you. That’s enough isn’t it?”
A whole year has gone by. We have discovered each other’s bodies and the nature of time together. In fact it was just about a year ago that we met in a lecture hall at the university, a year ago that we set off on the journey of life together. Two ships going wherever the wind took us, not knowing what lay ahead, or if indeed there was anything ahead. Two ships lost in a salty sea. If we stayed afloat all we had to drink was brine and if we went down, the sharks were waiting for us below.
I talked a lot about my father. About my ancient blood. About the trees. About the old lies which they baptized me with. I told you about my mother’s face and her constant prayers, her passionate prayers. Her saviour isn’t like anyone else’s god. He is merciful and loving and tender. He lives in the forest and among the waves of the sea. He feeds the children and spares the rod from their backs. How serene life was for my mother.
But I did not tell you about my past. I did not tell you of my life with the struggle. I did not tell you about the Palestinians. I never told you about the open wound in my side which never heals. Nor did I tell you that I tried to seek oblivion in the bodies of men. Fleeing from you and to you. Between you and my past. Paris. Exile. You. For a time you were my homeland while I was waiting for the real thing.
I come over to your side of the bed. I put my cheek next to yours. I kiss you and then get out of bed to go to your study. I begin writing a letter to my mother. Your voice calls out:
“Have you really forgotten about your husband?”
“Yes, Frank. I’ve forgotten everything. Yesterday I bumped into this man in La Coupole. I tried to think where I had seen him before. Suddenly, I realised. I’d seen him in bed. He was my ex-husband.”
I heard a quiver in your voice.
“You frighten me sometimes, you know.”
I stopped writing and started to read the book which lay open in front of me on the desk. I become engrossed in the words and phrases. I am no longer aware of what is around me. I go over towards the window and open it. I start mouthing meaningless expressions. You look over and realise that I have gone off into a world of my own. Your questions cease, we lapse into silence.
If I had been able to own up to my weakness there and then, I could have told you everything. I used to be a fighter, a ‘terrorist’. I was forced to withdraw from the field of combat because of my wounds. But the morning dew rose within me, causing me to sigh. I thought back to the prison vaults where I was tortured.
“Frank, I’m here because I can’t be there.”
You have come close to me. You pull my head towards your chest and stroke my hair, and you reply:
“My dear little demagogue. Thank you so much for that dazzling insight into your condition.” You carry on for a while in this sarcastic vein, “You are right. Why should I search for your past? Isn’t it enough that you are here with me now? It’s not as though you were some fearsome terrorist who went around hijacking aeroplanes.”
I could hardly believe that you had spoken those words. I turned towards the wall so you did not see the blood rushing to my cheeks. I tried to laugh out loud, anything to eclipse that moment of discovery.
Another time at your house on the Place Dauphine.
Your hand touches my hair, which is hanging loosely over my shoulders, wet after the drizzle.
“What is it that you want from me,” you say.
I answer quietly and calmly:
“I don’t know. Maybe a fellow traveller.”
Your face changes to sadness.
“Well, my intransigent friend, what if I told you that I loved you?”
“Then I would ask you to come with me to the Middle East. We would start a revolution there using the methods advocated by you.”
Your face turns to anger and you shout at me:
“You’re mad. You don’t still believe that stuff, do you?”
I was amazed:
“Of course I do. As far as I am concerned, what you wrote then was the best thing you, or anybody, has written on the subject.”
“But since the Congo, I have renounced every one of those principles. You can’t send people to their deaths like that. It’s cheap robbery of the lives of men. It’s not heroism, it’s butchery. You can’t make history in the cauldron. It takes continuity, progression, peace. How long does it take to make a man? Twenty years? Well, it only takes one bullet and he’s gone.”
“Whose history are you talking about, Frank? Europe? France? You had your revolution here two hundred years ago. In the Third World we are still waiting for ours. We have to change the status quo.”
This time you show real anger:
“But that’s not the way to do it. History takes its own course. You’ve tried using force in the Middle East, and look what happened. Do you think that putting a gun to the head of an airline pilot and telling him to fly wherever you want, terrorising hundreds of innocent people, killing, do you think any of that has altered the course of history? Are the conditions in your country any better now? Has anything changed? Of course not! Your fighters just became pirates.”
Although you know nothing of my past, I feel the finger pointed at me. The guerrilla fighter’s spirit stirs in my blood.
“Palestinian ‘terrorists’ in other words.”
“You know perfectly well what my views are on that matter. The Palestinians and all the others who have … ”
“Please don’t start, Frank. You know as well as I do that you can’t impose the values and laws of safe, comfortable Western Europe on a people who have lost their land.”
I can see you are about to answer but suddenly I lose control of the anger which has been building up inside me.
“It was Europe that threw Palestine out into the cold. It was Europe that turned her into the harlot she’s become today, hanging around the margins of the international community, begging for her crust of bread and offering her meagre wares. It’s Europe that’s done all that. So don’t be surprised if we come along and turn Europe into a shithole.”
This drives you mad.
“Look, I spent four years of my life pushed against the walls of a prison. I paid dearly for the mistakes that I made in my revolutionary days. And look what happened in Central America. Look how the revolution has failed the people there. Anyway, I’m French. I’m going to live in France, and from now on my struggle will be to change the situation in France.”
“Oh how proud you must be of your dear France!”
“Yes I am.”
“And Algeria, and Vietnam, and the bombardment of Damascus? A fine example to revolutionaries the world over, I’m sure.”
“It’s true, I used to be ashamed of what my country did. I used to be ashamed of the torture and persecution. But now I realize that for all its faults France is better than most at defending individual human freedom.”
Silence settles upon us, a silence emanating from a distant star. Our heads become detached from our bodies, from our past. We can’t talk about the past, yet we can barely take our eyes away from it. The silence plays tricks on my imagination. I feel that we are in the middle of a huge open space. Night and day are torn to shreds within us in this unknown land. If only we could leave Paris behind us now, returning only when we are old and grey. We would drink in this great human civilization as we drink from our glasses of cognac at the ‘Marlein’.
The telephone rings like a young puppy barking for its breakfast. Who could be calling us at that early hour of the morning? I hurry towards the phone and the voice of Olivier greets me:
“Hello. Is that Nadia? Can I speak to Frank, please?”
Before I have time to say anything, he continues:
“Do you know who this is?”
I knew all right; Olivier, the millionaire socialist, with his palaces and his fortunes. I wondered what new deal there was to be made from the struggle this time. I did not answer him but
signalled to you to come and take the telephone.
As I get dressed, I listen to you massacring your past in the other room, crucifying it on the wall of a temple before the gathered faithful who prostrate themselves before it. The deity looks down at them from the sky and laughs. You are temple, gods and prayers. A past betrayed.
A comrade stabbed on a sultry tropical night … the flaming green of the banana groves.
“Yes, Olivier, I am still writing my memoirs about my time in prison.” Then you add: “Nadia’s fine. She’s started to become interested in African history.”
The conversation carries on. I remember Olivier’s face on the day we met at the Tour d’Argent restaurant, the face of a war profiteer, with that infuriating grin on his lips making me want to scream. You introduced us, smiling broadly:
“This is Olivier, our favourite socialist millionaire.”
I shook my head that day. I could not see how someone could be a socialist and a millionaire at the same time. However, the woman-tree had not been reawakened at that time. We were still in the beginning of our relationship and the desire to forget was carrying me before it like a wild horse. The next time we met was at Clara’s house, surrounded by your friends, the career revolutionaries, the writers, the poets talking of anything but poetry, and the beautiful women, their skins exuding the beautiful smells of decadence. I was out of place among all of you and I spent most of the evening in a profound silence. I looked at those faces which lived in the comfort of the towns of ease and irresponsibility. Then Olivier came over to me and like the crass, knownothing he was, said:
“So, why are you so concerned about Irish republicanism then.”
Clara pressed my hand and laughed that laugh of hers, like the beating of African drums:
“Don’t take any notice of Olivier. He is a film director, absolutely mad and terribly rich. His daddy owns the largest military shipyard in France.”
I escaped from Olivier and went and stuck by your side. That day I found out that arms manufacturers also enjoy music and painting, and the company of retired revolutionaries like yourself.
On the way back home from Clara’s, I said to you:
“I just don’t understand it. How can you, a revolutionary, bear to associate with a merchant of death like Olivier? Isn’t that taking conciliation a bit too far?”
With your usual detachment, you reply:
“Do you think that I should spend all my time with workers and revolutionaries? To tell you the truth I find it very hard to mix with them or to gain their confidence completely. They dismiss me as an intellectual. They spurn me.”
Olivier carries on talking to you on the phone. Maybe he is going on about new wars for his frigates to fight, or films, or music, or perhaps the latest exploits of his fabulously wealthy father. I go back into your study. My eyes look at you behind the table. Your head is between your hands and it looks as though the telephone is blowing cigarette smoke out into the room. I start listening in to the conversation:
“At the weekend … no … no … the book’s coming out at the end of the month … what? … about my time in the Congo … yes … when I was in prison … oh … no, not at all … lucrative? Not very, I’m afraid, and the publishers weren’t exactly behind me on this one … what? … a trip at the weekend … in your yacht … yes, lovely … I’ll bring Nadia along, but don’t talk about you know what, okay … She still remembers that time you met at Clara’s flat … No, my dear Olivier, no. She’s just an old pupil of mine … yes, very left wing indeed.”
I am sitting on the sofa across from your study and I stare at you. My eyes are fixed on your face. Your head is bowed in your hands. You looked like that when they captured you in the country which was just about to erupt in revolution. The photo of you after you were arrested, when you left your comrades in the jungle. The photo of you in the court-room surrounded by your lawyers, who had come from all corners of the world to defend you. You symbolized defiance of death. That picture is there on your wall, your face unblemished, like that of a child. It is there before my eyes hanging on the wall behind your desk, the desk where you have probably just made a deal with one of the greatest of the class exploiters of our time, whose defence you always come to. I close my eyes, Frank, and I push the real picture away from me. I think back to the night when we came out on a demonstration for you, raising our cracked and tired voices in belief and love, demanding that you be allowed to defend yourself. I remember the blood on the street, and those who fell, their eyes still looking up to you. The memory burns me. I feel something choking in my throat. My head spins. I see, on one side, millions of veteran revolutionaries, their heads in their hands, and on the other a judge tries them for their pasts and their present. They give in and are carried away by the current.
Why were you holding your head in your hands? It is as though I see you for the first time, sitting there like that talking to Olivier. Time and distances and men have disappeared … I felt my past and my present being consumed in the flames.
I went up to you, filled with madness and anxiety. I pulled your head out of your hands. I went up to the wall with my rage making the blood boil in my veins. I tore down a drawing of you in court. It showed you with your face in your hands while everyone else in the court was looking towards you. I screamed at you:
“You have no right to put your head in your hands like that. You are spoiling one image with the other. Negotiate if you have to, but my dear Marxist, at least choose a different pose.”
My voice betrays me. I look at the old mariner on the wall as he battles against a wave on one of the seven seas. I wish the sea would become inflamed and I wish the room which supports us would ignite. At that moment all the energy of the world was used up. I held up a knife, the one you use for opening letters. I plunged it into the breast of the poor old sailor. I dismember the sorry continents which are crucified on your walls. You look at me in amazement. Quickly you say goodbye to Olivier and hang up the phone.
You call out my name, but I do not answer. I can’t hear any more. The sound of gunfire has returned to haunt my ears, my eyes and my body. I become a thing of lead and silence. I run towards the door ignoring your questions. I burst out onto the street, into the town, towards the River Seine. I run like a madwoman. A bullet of rage and silence. At the first shelter I come to, I throw myself down on a stone bench and listen to the sound of my sobs mixing with the cry of the autumn winds. I cry as I think back to your past. I cry as I think of what you have become. I cry and kiss the face of Abu Mashour which comes to me from the past. Only then do I feel the tension being lifted from me.
You had finished with me at that moment. I felt a heavy weight falling from my shoulders. It was as if I had been trying to stand between you and your past and to liberate you from yourself, to restore the old face which you used to have … In short it was as if I had to save Frank from Frank. The Frank who inflamed my conscience with his words, who made me ask questions about future revolution and how we could make it happen in the Third World. The Frank whom I met after the years of European ‘civilization’ had killed him off, after he agreed his cease-fire with the bourgeoisie, while the rest of the world erupted in screams and conflagrations. Nothing looks like anything any more. No picture looks like its subject. Between reality and imagination there lies a wasteland of untruth, hypocrisy and treachery. We are just a bunch of naïve fools who believe everything that we hear. Why did I believe all the things which they taught me in school, and everything that the political parties told me, and the secret organisations? Why did I believe that heroism lies waiting in the hearts of men? Everything is just a vain grasping at shadows. Heroism is a big lie which we must believe in. Courage is a smaller lie which we use to wipe out our weakness and our cowardice. Love is a crime which covers the imperfections of possessiveness, selfishness, desire and subjugation. Everything falls. Everything was finished at that moment. Do I still believe everything that I am told? Do I still believe that this plane
t is a fit place for song, for joy, for making love?
I shout out loud, vainly trying to make excuses for you, the myriad excuses which I am looking for, for you but primarily for myself.
“There is a dispute between you and your comrades … You can’t go on with them … You do not share the same concepts of revolution … Your position is an honourable one … You don’t accept being made into a cheap tool of the media … The revolution ended when its leaders started to make compromises … You have lost part of your life and you need to search for yourself.”
All these excuses are waiting there in my memory, still lined up ready for use, as they were on the day that I decided to split with my comrades. The day I left them under the flames of Ayntab. The day I abandoned them to become the wife of a man as beaten as myself. Abu Mashour’s tanned body was blown to pieces. His arms and legs were thrown through the air and here I am looking for peace. But I can smell his rotting remains. I can feel the rags of his clothes pulling me towards the bars and the hashish smokers. Here I am, a coal of revolt which burns no more. And you? The stage where so many revolutions were played out. The masks have fallen now, haven’t they? The gods have spoken. Yes, I still believe in the gods, in miracles. I need to believe in them so that I can escape from the hell that is your arduous silence. A tramp comes up to me and asks me, through the wine fumes, for a few coins so that he can get drunk and see Paris as a field of joy. I put my hand in my bag and look for some change, the remains of the compromises we make with this world. I fish out a few coins and give them to this most respectable of drunks. At least he is more respectable than the lapsed revolutionaries and fugitives of forgetfulness whom I normally mix with. He takes the money and disappears. I gather up my body, my face, my failure, and I set out to Place Saint Michel. At the Gilbert Bookshop I see a familiar face. Could that be Ahmad, so early in the day? No doubt he was on the hunt for Marx. Once he’s had a couple of whiskies he’ll start wanting to kill him. His face made me nervous in the past. I was very much confused by the dreams which he drew from within himself like legends, and which he threw back at us once he gets drunk. He comes up to me and says: