The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  “Are you still praying for me, Mama?”

  She would smile and say:

  “You are in need of my prayers. I wish that God would guide you and give you back your senses.”

  As far as my mother was concerned, I had gone completely and utterly mad. How could a girl who had everything – a good marriage, abeautiful house, money – how could she spend all her time chasing the cares and tribulations of this world? My family tried to convince me to stay away from dangerous situations, particularly since Ayntab had begun to live in anxiety with acts of violence happening all around the town. I asked Issam, during his first visit to me after his escape from Harran, whether I could go back to my old job in the camp as soon as I was able to go out again. I missed those open faces and I knew all about the misfortunes and difficulties that they had suffered. After three months away, I felt a great sense of relief at the thought of going back to normal life. Instead of reading – devouring, I should say – the bodies of my friends, the poets and writers, I would go to my office in the morning and immerse myself in the everyday details of the lives of people who had remained, in spite of everything that had happened, unarguably real. One could always cast doubts on Aristotle and Hericlitus, and Costas Acselus, but you cannot ignore the onset of winter, or the threat of rheumatism and fever to the people of the camps. A strange longing for sunshine inhabited my body and it settled in the place where the foetus used to be. I was surprised how easy we find it to fill our bellies with lies and food, with living and laughter …

  My baby died!

  I was in the depths of wretchedness and exhaustion. For a time I had believed my baby had dark eyes, like the sons of the East. I had dreamt of birth and life inside me – I, who for so long had been locked in an embrace with death. As usual, I tried to lose myself in the memory of Abu Mashour.

  Dark moments passed over me when I put my hand where the foetus had been. I felt it alive. I felt it kicking its feet against the walls of darkness, screaming, stroking my face, trying to lift the burden of life from my shoulders.

  Khalid tried to change our lives, to break down the walls of silence and ice between us. He said to me:

  “You are still young. You can have another baby.”

  He did not let me know the whole truth, however. He did not tell me that the gynaecologists had pronounced their judgement on my case: she will never be a mother. All I shall be is the lover of a child’s face who will never be here. Ever since that time, I considered the defeat in Harran a personal vendetta which I have been living. One day I shall be able to take my revenge.

  The days passed slowly while I was confined to the house. Khalid’s face reminded me of the life which was going on without stopping on the other side of the walls. The faces of my mother and father return me to the sea and the olive groves and holm oaks. Poetry books rebuild bridges between me and my past once again. In poetry alone could I find my tranquillity. Through the brave words of Neruda, I regained the face that I had lost in the tragedy.

  I was dogged by a yearning to return to the refugee camps. I yearned for the women and children, for the sun which washed away my fear of death and which had come to inhabit my veins. How difficult life becomes when you are waiting for your object of yearning.

  The comrades were rebuilding their strength in Ayntab and the Palestinian camps bore as many children as there were stars in the sky. We were waiting for these children to grow and for rifles to bloom in their hands. I had a long wait. I was waiting for the day when the doctors would allow me to return to my usual life. I could not wait any longer.

  My comrades, with whom I shared war and fear, and the refugee camps, come to me in the cold evenings and talk about the hardships which rule their lives. The Arab battleground has changed. The bridge of dreams which used to bind us together has fallen. The rosary was broken and the beads were scattered on the ground. Compromise was everywhere. It even reached our own ranks, and many succumbed. When I asked Issam about my future, he said to me:

  “Why, you’ll go back to the information bureau. That is where you are needed.”

  There was another reality that I was living: again I thought of the death of my child. Just a month or two before. I don’t remember when exactly. I remembered something that Abu Mashour had said to me, at the time when I was circling the skies looking for revolution and homeland, just over a year ago. We were on the gleaming tarmac of one of the airports of the world, and he told me that he could hear the cries of children in the air. He said it sounded like a mysterious, ethereal sound penetrating everything. I listened to see if I could hear them as well but I could hear nothing. That was the day that I told him that he was confusing his desires and reality. I was not moved by what Abu Mashour used to say to me in those days.

  But it is my child this time. My child, whom I carried inside me for three months. He shared everything with me; my love, my trips to the camp, my work on those ideological publications. The baby’s decision to resign from this life so prematurely gave me a little consolation. I took it as a sign of his grief about what had happened in Harran. He could not face that kind of shame. It was a sign of his good faith – better than mine in that respect. For a while I dreamt of that darkeyed child of the East. I wanted him to be a male child because we do not have enough men any more. I was insistent on creating a man, on bringing one into the world. I would look at every face I saw with hope, I would study it, and I always came to the conclusion that, after the Fifth of June, all our men had fallen to the bottom of a pit of fire where Medusa had turned them into black stones which could no longer move or love.

  I would look to Abu Mashour for consolation. I would seek his face in my memory and find refuge there. Why did it have to be like that? Why wasn’t he by my side? It seems to mean that he was not the best of men. But he was; that is why he picked up his things and went to his death.

  My husband, the official one, who was calm and intellectual, who loved Johann Strauss and Saint-Jean Perse, carried on living his life’s strange rhythmical tranquillity, with events that turned everyone else’s lives upside-down hardly affecting him at all. Up at seven. Breakfast. The morning paper. Off to work. The sound of the car at exactly five minutes to eight. I could have set my watch by his car ignition. The motor again at three o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch and then into the bedroom and a few verses of Ezra Pound, whom he admired greatly.

  “Draggled by griefs, which I by these incur,

  My every strength turns my abandoner,

  And I know not what place I am toward,

  Save that Death hath me in his castle-yard.”

  My confinement at home allowed me a glimpse into my husband’s life and his habits. There was no doubt in my mind that he had chosen his comfort and safety. He was his own homeland. The wider homeland around us meant nothing to him. I told him this one evening over supper. He remained completely unmoved, calmly finishing off his piece of French cheese. He had to have a piece of French cheese at the end of his evening meal, my husband. We could try to bring our bodies closer to each other in bed, but I found it impossible to become one with this kingdom of resolution and decisiveness, this world of numbers and split second timing. My God! How long had I been living with all that?

  One of the savage summer nights of the encampment up in the north. Nothing was left of the night but an hour or two. I was never able to tell the time. Abu Mashour came to me in my tent with the latest communiqué from the leadership in Harran. It contained orders to move on to another location in order to complete our training before our mission to Europe. I stretched lazily in my blanket on the ground. Suddenly I felt the sharp pain of a thistle pricking into my leg. I must have missed it when I was clearing the ground for my bedding. I sat up with a start. I watched the blood trickling slowly and pleasurably down my thigh. I said to Abu Mashour:

  “Even our blood complies with the awful progression of life. Why does a man die when the blood flows out of his body?”

  He smiled at me and sai
d:

  “Death can be with you, just like life.”

  Our blankets were filthy yet our situation was spotless in its purity and our bodies were joined together while the smell of the earth crept onto our skin. A small moment of magic on the side of a hill covered in olive trees. When we saw each other’s faces in the first light of the sun, we smiled and quickly gathered our belongings. We were parted and we didn’t know whether tomorrow would bring us together again.

  My husband chose his own inner peace. His own inner homeland. He built a fence around himself and there lived in peace. But what sort of peace did that afford? One day I asked him:

  “Why did you marry me, Khalid? You knew perfectly well that I… ”

  He interrupted me before I could finish what I was saying:

  “I wanted to see poems in you that I had not read before. I wanted to show you how life can be lived at its own pace and how we do not have to try to leap over history.”

  Once upon a time Khalid had been part of the struggle, but by now he was nothing more than a jumble of emotions looking for an inner peace which he thought could protect him from the terrifying jungle where we live out our existence.

  Issam came over to our house on New Year’s Eve, 1971. We went out onto the balcony and looked down over Ayntab. The whole town stretched away below us, throwing the tresses of its hair into the sea as it drew its body out of the water. The scent of orange blossom is mixed with the stink of salt and fish, swamping our words. The smells seem broken up in the midst of these celebrations of a defeated people. Celebrations of the losing side are hard to bear. They seem like bad funerals which fail to convey a holy and reverent sorrow about death. Issam looked at me and said:

  “We have decided to carry out some more external operations.”

  I could not believe my ears. I thought that they had put that behind them for good. The strategy had done its job and we ought to be moving on now. That’s what I thought, anyway. In fact, when the adventurers and scandalmongers got involved, the whole thing became amess. The first operations were necessary to pierce the wall of silence which was put around us by the Western and Arab media. But the events of September in Harran had convinced me that our fundamental base had to be the Arab masses. There was no sense in our going further afield. With the words of Abu Mashour on the eve of the Geneva operation ringing in my ears, I said:

  “No, Issam. Don’t go back to that kind of operation. They just don’t work any more. What we must do now is concentrate on spreading the struggle among the Arab peoples. We must unite with the masses of our host countries. If the fighting breaks out again here, we will have no one to turn to but them.”

  It was as though Issam had not heard a word that I had said.

  “I have come to ask you to take part in the planning and preparation of three missions which we intend to carry out during the next couple of months in Europe. You have got insights into this kind of operation which will be lacking in those who do not have the benefit of your experience.”

  I tried to keep myself as calm as I could, and not to scream in his face. But I was thinking: Will you ever be able to face up to the truth? Why can’t you learn from your mistakes instead of just repeating them over and over again? Doesn’t what happened in Harran tell you anything? The mass of the Arab peoples have abandoned us!

  Issam was aware of the brooding silence within me. He asked:

  “How do you see these matters then, Nadia?”

  “It’s very simple. What you must do is concentrate your forces in the south, close to the Occupied Land. There you must build up a revolutionary climate which will get the people rallying to the cause. As things stand at the moment, when the bombs start dropping on people’s homes, the first thing those people will do is kick us out. That is what happens when they have no real reason to drive themselves to self-sacrifice.”

  Issam began going through the same old sickening phrases which I had heard so many times before: the self-sacrifice, internationalism, pan-Arabism. I looked at his face and was horrified to see that he now looked exactly like my old leaders in the party I had once been a member of.

  I went with Issam to the military command and I made it very clear what I thought of them. I told them that I no longer believed in taking our struggle out into areas that did not directly concern us. I told them that the operations which we undertook in the past only served to obscure what was going on within our own sphere of combat. That was where the only reality was as far as I was concerned. I also told them I hated to see people treating me like a superstar, while all the time our comrades were dying without so much as a whisper about their sacrifice. I told them about my memories of the women and children who got caught up in our deadly operations and how their voices still haunted me. I remember a woman at London Airport shouting, “Haven’t you got children of your own to fear for?” That day my answer was that our enemies did not allow us to have children.

  But things had changed, and my comrades had to face up to that. Ayntab was not Harran. 1971 was not 1969.

  They were silent, staring at me like imbeciles. Then they started to lay down their plans for the coming months, starting with the hijacking of an airliner. I attempted to raise an objection but Naif interrupted me, saying:

  “Comrade Nadia. We are grateful for what you have achieved for our struggle and there is no shame in being weary of it now. Don’t worry, we are not asking you to do anything in the active operational side. We just want the benefit of your experience and it is your revolutionary duty to offer it to us.”

  I was horrified by what I was hearing. I felt a sickening stab to my innards. I picked up my papers and stormed out of the room. This is how I parted company with them. I walked alone in the humidity of the night of the seaside town. I had to be aware that, from that day on, I was to face the world on my own.

  In the following days, the rumour spread that I had left the Organization on account of personal reasons and people said that I could not carry on the struggle because of my health. I was prevented from getting into contact with the military camps and I was similarly banished from the refugee camps. In a nutshell, I was finished.

  The first days passed with extreme difficulty. I spent the nights staring at the ceiling of my room, with Khalid by my side asking me to forget about it and to devote myself to my writing and to living my own life. He did not know how hard it is to forget. I couldn’t escape the sharp pain which the slightest memory of what had happened caused me. It is as though the comforting ability to dream is dismissed and I am always brought back to the pulse of existence and reality, which I recall as the sleeper recalls a painful dream. The night that I came home after parting with them, I collected all my cuttings and papers that I had kept about the hijackings, the testaments to my courage, all the other little things which had only a personal, sentimental value, carrying that smell of a world where I had lived in my own personal vortex before the passing of the days convinced me that no good would come of it. I gathered together everything that I could find and I burnt the lot in the fireplace. I sat and watched the flames with an air of perfect calm.

  The days passed with me looking everywhere for the truth which held me up and all the time I was tense with anger and the fear of being alone. I paced up and down the house like a jinn looking for something that I had lost. I faced a spiritual storm which upset my sense of balance and equilibrium. I discovered that I lived by a set of values which bore no relation to those of my husband. I reverted to my desperate search in books and the revolutionary heritage, and I found that I was separated from them by a bottomless chasm. An unworldly flood had picked us up and deposited each of us on a mountain somewhere on this planet. I loved my comrades and my revolutionary forebears like I loved my weapon, I knew them as well as I knew myself, and I sincerely hoped to be mistaken in my view of the way things were. My only consolation was the satisfaction that I was in the right and that what I did was in the interests of the struggle and the future of our revolt.
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  Five months passed after the split. I lived with the real pain of separation and alienation which overwhelmed my soul. My comrades had worked their way into my life and my thoughts and into my deepest emotions. For five months I was so near and yet so far from them and they received strict instructions not to contact me. I heard, or rather I saw in the papers, that they carried out two of the three hijackings that were planned, and that both ended in tragic circumstances. Three of our comrades died in the first one and both resulted in a number of our fighters being expelled from a European country with little or nothing to show for their efforts.

  Five months passed, with Khalid living his symphony of inner peace. I, on the other hand, was like a burning coal smouldering in the corner of the spacious house. The bread was the colour of ash. The sky was the colour of ash. Joy itself was the colour of ash.

  I tried to get back to normal life. I went with my husband to see his friends. I read the corpses of writers and picked over their philosophies. But I found it hard to succumb to the order of everyday life, just as everyday life refused to find a place in it for me. The friends’ faces seemed colourless. We went out to eat in the restaurants of Ayntab where I was given beautifully presented helpings of poison. The nights were long and cold, filled with the unknown, and the cries of children in the camps, and the victims of Harran. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to rid myself of the terrible suffering which I was living in Ayntab. One day Khalid came to me and told me that his name had been put forward for a delegation which was to be sent to France. I said without hesitation:

  “I’ll go with you!”

  He was very pleased. He had hardly expected that I would want to come with him. We packed our bags and I said farewell to my mother and father. I left Ayntab with a resolution which I had come to make during the long period of loneliness: to forget … to forget … to forget.