by Raja Alem
News of the victory could have raised the morale of the besieged ghosts in the cellars, but they were cut off in the vaults and had lost all communication with those aboveground. They were clinging to the weak faith that their underground city was able to withstand attacks and remain under their complete control. It was impossible for things to get any worse than they already were; they were effectively in their own graves and disappearing into another life, from which they would doubtless be resurrected without further consequences. Their goal was no longer to stay alive but to inflict maximum losses on their enemies.
December 1, 1979: Assignment Number 3016
The battle took a decisive step toward conclusion with the arrival of two men: structural engineer Dr. Salih Barqawi and GIGN- dispatched Deputy Commander Patrice Bareille.
At the insistence of the commander heading the taskforce reinforcements had been called in: Bareille, and a group of his men to lead the planned operations in the battlefield.
“We suggest another dose of gas,” Bareille announced, glancing at the military personages gathered at the table with his blue eyes and devastating smile. A heavy silence blanketed the room while Bareille waited for their reactions, especially from the admiral chairing the meeting; when he was met with silence, he dropped his bomb: “Actually, a full ton.”
The American lieutenant’s mouth fell open in disbelief. “Damn, that’s a crazy quantity! It’s enough to knock out a small city,” he protested. He objected to France’s interference in sending such a rogue; he construed it as a measure of his own failure and consequent lost credibility.
“So what?” Bareille didn’t bat an eyelid. “If we don’t, this war will go on forever and our casualties will double. Let’s amputate this irritation once and for all.”
The American lieutenant rose to leave the room in evident disgust. The GIGN officers fidgeted in their seats, watching the taut smile of support on the admiral’s lips. The admiral breathed a sigh of relief to find someone who advocated such extreme measures, and assigned Bareille and his men the task of carrying out this mad plan on the battlefield.
However, Bareille’s hopes were dashed after a telephone call with Paris. The short conversation with his superiors confirmed that “the entire French supply is just three hundred kilograms. But it will definitely be enough to drive those rats from their cave.”
The second man to prove decisive in the scales of battle appeared hard on the heels of the first. He was brought to the operations rooms to be introduced to Bareille, who greeted him with palpable delight.
“You must be the structural engineer, Dr. Salih. They say you know the cellars of the Grand Mosque like the back of your hand.”
Dr. Salih smiled self-deprecatingly. “Not without this,” he said, drawing from his bag a map of the cellars of the mosque. “This is the end result of years of study in the Center for Research on the Hajj, which was under my management for a long time.”
“You are a real find. I wonder why our American friends didn’t discover you earlier?” Bareille seemed to be boasting, clearly charmed by the elegant engineer. “This time,” he went on, “we’ll concentrate high levels of gas on those rebels. They will sample French delicacies from French experts.” Bareille bragged like a Michelin-starred chef. This plan was another lethal blow to the American’s pride; the French genius had contrived the idea of using a much more powerful substance than the American gas, which had turned the last battle into such a farce.
Below, in the hell of the darkness and amid the remnants of the tear gas, the rebels took some time to establish what was happening. A sudden roar broke out above their heads and it seemed as if their graves were falling in upon them. Terrible drills seemed to bore into their ears and hearts. Countless holes were being made in the roofs of the cellars, and before they had emerged from their shock, three hundred kilograms of gas had been pumped through the holes. Simultaneously, the army launched an attack on the cellar, advancing from different sides in a pincer movement. Sarab felt like a rat in a trap as her comrades fell dead around her. The gas mask she had hidden from the previous attacks proved its worth, but the lethal blow to all sanity came when she saw her comrades rushing into the bullets of the attacking soldiers to escape the agony of suffocating from the gas.
“It’s Mujan!”
Sarab muffled a cry of alarm when a soldier pulverized the door to a hidden room. Mujan appeared before them, standing in front of a number of his men who were on the ground, bloodstained, retching, and drowning in vomit. Mujan was still standing, despite the starvation, the gas, and the imminent collapse of the savage battle he had plunged into a fortnight earlier.
Sarab heard the captain ask, “What is your name?”
“Mujan.” The reply came calmly, steady as a breath of truth, a verification of the self. At once, the captain and his aide surrounded Mujan and furtively led him outside, careful not to alert the other soldiers to the identity of their valuable captive so they wouldn’t vent their rage on him for the victims he had culled from their ranks. To Sarab, Mujan appeared frightened, and robbed of his will; it was difficult to judge whether he was paralyzed from the effects of the gas or the effects of the defeat.
“Mujan has been arrested.” The news spread, even more lethal than the gas, and it sent a shudder throughout the mosque and into the hearts of soldiers on both sides. It was followed by the surrender of those rebels still hiding. Mujan, covered in black, his beard bushy and his hair matted, was put into an ambulance, which quickly disappeared, hurrying him through the city, which was already eager to learn how the consequences of violating its sanctity would be explained to him. It was indistinguishable from the dozens of ambulances that had darted to and fro for two weeks, carrying the wounded in that city where bloodshed was forbidden. Onlookers had no idea who its passenger was, or that he was approaching the final chapter of the tragedy that had escaped from between the lines drawn up on paper and yielded fifty thousand victims, all created by this man, who had perfect faith in the righteousness of his goal.
Sarab stood a step away from the room where the massacre was brought to an end. She was paralyzed, in utter disbelief at the conclusion that was summarized in that serene response: Mujan.
The echo of that word reverberated around her head, emptied of all meaning after Mujan’s departure. Everything she had lived through and fought for on his account lost its substance, and she was whirled into a void. She could neither leave nor stay; she had to do something to return to life, to substantiality.
She was terrified at the thought of being identified as a soldier as she left the cellar. Her brain was in a state of stubborn confusion; it seemed to her that any action taken to survive was a betrayal of the dead, and of her brother most of all. She took a few aimless steps and realized she was in the room with the broken minbar.
At that moment a huge soldier appeared in front of her, a response to her need for suicide. Again, she was given the opportunity to shoot and confirm she was worthy of her family name, but there seemed to be a rupture between her body and the killing machine it carried. She had been paralyzed by her feeble, feminine genes when facing her first easy prey, and now she was being swept with a horrifying sense of being cursed. In response, a piece of the blackness suddenly fell from the ceiling and pounced on her opponent; it activated her body, which proceeded to leap onto the enemy soldier and take him prisoner. Her body moved of its own accord, seeking the way out through the sewers, which she had found under the broken minbar. It was the last way she could leave honorably. In the total darkness, Sarab stumbled over the opening and, with utter self-contempt, she pushed her captive in front her and followed close behind, out of that hell at last.
If Only You Were Dead
Sarab felt that she had gathered a bombshell out of the horrors of the siege and buried it deep inside her chest. She had taken courage and dug it up at last, and displayed its contents to the light so she could face what she had done. She carried all those sins as if they were
her personal transgressions, convinced that she deserved to be cursed and expelled from God’s mercy.
She sat there, appreciating the light on her face, facing the jijin officer, and thinking, “Why did I kidnap him in the first place? Why did I drag anything out of the hell I escaped from without a scratch?” Was it a final, desperate attempt to raise her mother’s estimation of her? An attempt to convince people that she could be an extraordinary jihadi and succeed where everyone else had failed? God, how pathetic!
Like a scratched record, her mother’s voice repeated, “You disgrace! What kind of courage is this? What did you do other than retreat? You’re nothing but a pathetic fugitive.”
Sarab leaped up and shook off those voices obsessed with the past. She looked straight at the girl on the wallpaper and, without anger, said, “All through the siege—no. All your life, you wished your brother was dead.”
This denunciation shocked the girl on the wallpaper, as well as the young girl buried deep within Sarab herself. It snatched her out of her rambling capitulation. Sarab realized she was facing the world alone at last, simultaneously her own master and torturer.
“They’re all dead now.” She shrugged indifferently, echoing this fact to herself. “The dead won’t have any part in our world or our decisions. They are busy with their new existence, God help them,” she said, her words verging on the malicious. “When they face the angels Raqib and Atid and Munkar and Nakir, their deeds in this world will be have been recorded.”
Perhaps her brother would face the pile of souls he had annihilated without a shred of remorse, and her mother might pay for the seed she had planted in her son. Sarab felt wicked for devising punishments for them after their deaths. But most important, there was no longer anyone to pin their hopes on her for the heroic deeds she would never commit. She had survived, and not a drop of blood stained her hands. That had been her own independent decision, her first ever. And she had kept to it until the very end; or more properly, till this moment.
“And now it’s you—just you. What are you going to do with yourself?”
She was struck by a rush of faith that she could exist on her own, according to her own free will. Her ready willingness to do so made her feel guilty and so she evaded it, conversing scornfully with that “I.”
“First, you have to pay the price of accompanying Mujan and his men, and of helping them in the siege and the killings in the Grand Mosque.” Time stopped while Sarab passed judgment on herself and her dead comrades.
She shared a harmonious silence with her French adversary. Neither of them felt the need for the rifle, which Raphael had left to one side, as if he had forgotten about it. It appeared that they were both caught in a lethal trap. They didn’t know what would happen, but neither headed to the door demanding release; it was as if their fate hung on a fine thread, independent of them both. Each retreated to their usual corner, Sarab still shaking from their encounter, Raphael avoiding even a glance in her direction. A quiet space was created between them.
“My father died when I was five. He was the only person who was gentle with my heart. When he passed away, I felt that life had betrayed me by leaving me in the hands of the dragon. Yes, my mother was a real dragon, for me.”
Sarab didn’t want to listen. Raphael’s words made him into a human, which disturbed her. She didn’t want this light shone on their points of resemblance.
Raphael continued talking to himself: “My father and I were one soul. We had moments when he was the child and I was the adult.” He was surprised to be reviving these long-buried memories. Since he had become a soldier he hadn’t allowed his childhood to drag him back and disturb his cruelty. He had convinced himself that he had been born from the ashes of the battlefield as a grown man.
He went on: “My mother tormented my father with her betrayals and he always came to me, even when I was an infant. I recently read in his diary that our closeness was the only peace he found in his life. When I learned to speak, my words, whatever they were, gave him comfort. Everything I said that struck him deeply he wrote down in his diary, and he lived according to it. My father didn’t ask for much.”
Against her will, Sarab was moved. She had never heard anyone speaking like this, in a way that exhumed the heart and laid bare its suffering and joy.
“God offered you a small taste of Hell.” Sarab astonished herself by this explosion of hostility, which she had intended to break the sympathy that was beginning to grow between them. Raphael regarded her impassively, perhaps encouraging her to vomit and be rid of the bile in her stomach.
“These hypocritical societies were made by your own hands.” She couldn’t control the violence of the words gushing from her mouth. “You created them and you will all burn for it. In Wajir, people like you and your father were wiped off the face of the earth. It is a man’s duty to kill a wife who betrays him like your mother did, and he should be honored for his actions.”
“Kill her? I never even saw my father get angry, let alone resort to violence. He was as soft as water. Every Sunday he used to take me to the bird market and we would buy a bird and go to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, and he would ask me to open the door of the cage and set it free. I would burst out crying and protest—I wanted to keep the bird. When I asked him why we were releasing it, he would say, ‘Why do you think birds were created with wings?’”
Sarab felt that only an imbecile would be moved by this nonsense about birds. In Wajir, children pelted birds with stones, and broke their necks and wings; she herself had hunted them. It was all a childish game. She ignored the pain she had felt on that first hunting trip, when her mother forced her to shoot.
Raphael went on: “I was that bird. I made sure to leave all cages and all negativity behind me. Negativity is like seaweed—well, maybe you know don’t know seaweed . . . negativity is like quicksand. I vowed to myself not to let this sand build up around me and drag me down. And so I always hovered high above life.”
Immediately Raphael felt the spuriousness of his words, because by plunging into warfare he had avoided having any compassion for himself. He had hovered, enjoying life, by averting his eyes from the harm he caused. He had merged with the currents of life, like death itself, like disease, like an indomitable virus. This was what he had become in his blind obedience to military orders. His revolt against his father’s weakness pushed him to join the army, and the army pushed him to become something like a god, wreaking vengeance on all who thwarted him.
His comment troubled Sarab, who had been caught by the picture he had drawn of himself as a bird. The vulnerability of his confession touched her, and perhaps she even envied him that early awareness of freedom.
“You talk about freedom,” she said, “while you infidels are enslaved by your blind love for this world and its pleasures. That is the biggest cage that surrounds you, and you don’t want to leave it, even though it will close in and crush you.” She couldn’t believe she was saying these words, reviving her brother’s convictions. She felt he was haunting her through his identity card, and she was powerless to prevent him. “You are terrified by death and the thought of leaving this vain earth behind you, and you will always be enslaved by your sins and by the clay within you, unless you believe that death is another life where there is no death.”
To the surprise of them both, Raphael burst out laughing. “You know what?” he said. “Your cage is your eternal obsession about sin. Poor little bird, you dare to criticize me? Life was given to us so we could live it truly, doing good and bad. Otherwise God would have been content with creating angels free from sin in Heaven.” He paused to let his words sink in, then went on: “This desire for suicide is the greatest sin of all. A reverence for life is the faith He cherishes, and that’s what I fight for, while you fight for death, either your own or someone else’s. I don’t think your Lord will look kindly on you or on this bloodlust that possesses you now.”
He despised himself for his determination to change this girl,
to extract her from the desire for self-destruction that was the mirror of his desire to destroy. Why not leave her alone, secure in her beliefs? But without realizing it, his attempts to destroy her convictions were in fact destroying his own.
“Talk about your demons, but take care when you talk about my Lord,” she said.
“You’re right. Who can predict God’s will? Let’s relax. Let’s leave Satan and God’s justice out of our discussion. Let me tell you something about life; or really, about flying.”
As soon as he made this hollow offer, he realized that he didn’t really know how to save himself, now that he had revealed his deepest secrets. How could he reconcile the fighter and the bird inside him?
“I don’t have anything to exchange with you other than bullets,” she said, “and you have the last word as long as you have the weapon, so go on: shoot.”
“What kind of believer are you, ignoring the opportunity to offer guidance to an infidel?” The question startled her, and he capitalized on her confusion to continue his encouragement. “Yes, now you’re thinking outside the cage of clichés.”
Sarab looked away.
“For the first time since we met,” he continued, “I feel you’re listening with your own ears, not with your brother’s. You know, you weren’t yourself; you were just a cassette player reeling off something it didn’t understand or believe in. This is your first real encounter with life. Not there, facing bullets, but here, facing the truth. With every day, with the truth of life, you’ve lost all the clichés that enclosed you like a shell.”
Raphael moved closer and reached out an open palm to touch Sarab under her collarbone, but she slapped it away furiously.
“My father used to put his hand on my heart,” Raphael said, “and I could feel all my pains and doubts and worries dissolving under it. Then, when he lifted it, it was as if he had scraped them away. I always felt renewed afterward.”