Gate of the Sun (43 page)

“We're more merciful than the Bolsheviks,” said Rasim. “We aren't forcing them to dig their own graves or take off their clothes.”

That was when I became convinced that self-criticism was useless, since everything will be found to have its motives, its pretexts, its special circumstances, and so on.

Sitting in the café, Georges Baroudi took advantage of the rhythm of the rain with its long ropes to confess. He said he'd recorded more than three hours of confessions by Boss Josèph and wanted to publish them in a book that he'd call
The Banality of Man
. He said he'd brought a tape recorder with him to record our conversation, and that he'd make that the introduction to his book. But Josèph didn't come, so he asked me to tell him my version of what happened, so he could put the two versions into the book. “A page for you and a page for him – what do you think? The killer and the killed in conversation.”

“But I wasn't killed,” I said.

“You represent the dead,” he said.

“The dead don't talk and they don't have representatives,” I said.

“Aren't you a Palestinian like them? Look at Israel; it represents the victims of the Holocaust.”

“That's the difference,” I said. “I don't believe victims have representatives, that they . . . that they . . .”

“You understand nothing,” he said.

I told him his project didn't make sense, that you couldn't sit the victim down next to the perpetrator. “Your book will be as banal as its title.” Then I burst out laughing.

At that instant, the man before me was transformed. Even his white face became tinged with green. He said, as though it were Josèph speaking, “They took us to the airport – I was leading a detachment of twenty boys. We were wasted. Bashir died and Abu Mash'al gave me a load of cocaine and asked me to distribute it to the boys. We were sniffing cocaine like a snack, as if we were eating pistachios. Then we went down to the camp and began. We didn't take any prisoners and there was no face-to-face combat. We went into the houses, sprayed them with bullets, stabbed and killed. It was like a party, like we were at scouts' camp dancing around the campfire. The fireworks came from above, from the flares the Israelis were sending up, and we were down below having a party.”

“A party,” he said!

Boss Josèph had come across three children. He'd asked one of his comrades to help him grab them. He'd asked his comrade to push them together on a table. “I took out my revolver. I wanted to find out how far a shot from a Magnum could go. One of the children slipped off onto the floor. The light was burning our eyes, and I asked my comrade to turn his face away. He didn't understand what I wanted, so he let go of the two children and left the house. I went up to them. I wanted to tie them up and then move back from them but I couldn't find a rope, so I jammed them together, put the muzzle of the revolver close to the head of the first one, and fired. My bullet went through both heads, so they died right off. I didn't see the blood, I couldn't see it, in that strange Israeli light. When I left the house, I came across the third child, the one who'd fallen. I stepped back and fired at this small moving thing, and it came to a sudden stop where it was.”

At this point Monsieur Georges got into a complicated analysis of Boss Josèph's state of mind, saying he wasn't aware of what he was doing and so couldn't be considered responsible for his crime, and he got into a complex theory about death. Then he asked me if I'd killed anyone.

“Listen, Monsieur Georges, I'm a fighter, your friend is a butcher. Can't you tell the difference between a criminal and a soldier?”

“You're right, you're right, but I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I'm asking you if you've ever killed anyone and what you felt afterward.”

In the middle of this maelstrom, he asks me if I've killed anyone! Where does this man live?

“Of course,” I said. I said it simply, even though I'd never asked myself that question before. I hadn't killed anyone, in the sense of getting close to an unarmed man and firing at him and seeing him die. But I said with a simplicity that astonished Monsieur Georges that I'd killed.

He asked me about my feelings.

“What feelings? There are no feelings.”

Imagine, Abu Salem. Imagine if Monsieur Georges came to you and asked you the same question. How would you answer him? For sure you'd throw him out of your house and tell him to go to hell. What kind of questions are these? Doesn't this genius know that death means nothing, all his talk of blood instinct means nothing, it's just literary talk? In war, we kill like we breathe. Killing means not thinking about killing, just shooting.

Is it possible that someone would come along in the middle of the whirlwind of this war and ask me about my feelings when I kill?

First of all, I haven't killed.

Second of all, even if I'd killed, there would have been no feelings.

And finally, I'm a fighter. Either I die or I live. What am I supposed to do?

Monsieur Georges wanted to focus on the first experience. He said he was starting to understand my response, because anything could become a habit, and habitual behavior loses its impact.

“Tell me about the first time,” he said.

“There wasn't a first time,” I said.

“No, no, try to remember.”

“The first time I saw a man die, he was screaming that he wanted to die.”

That was my first time.

Do you remember your first time, master?

I think that this kind of question leads nowhere.

When Monsieur Georges asked me about my first time, I could only remember myself as a cadet. I could see myself running with the other boys with shaved heads and crying out: “We'll die, we'll die, but we will never submit!”

The trainer running in front of us shouting, “We'll die,” and us behind him, our mouths full of the fruit of death. That was my first experience – putting death in my mouth like a piece of gum, chewing on it, running with it to the end of the world and then spitting it out. But Monsieur Georges wanted to know my feelings when I killed a man – so I asked him about his feelings. He said he'd never fought in his life. I don't understand how a man can be an intellectual and a writer and let war go on right next to him and not try to find out what it's like.

He said his first time was when he truly saw, and then he told me the story of the barrels in the camp Jisr al-Basha.

He told me he went with them to provide press coverage and saw how they forced their prisoners to get into the barrels. He said the fall of the Tal al-Za'atar and Jisr al-Basha camps had been barbaric.

I told him I didn't want to hear about it – about the barrels that seeped blood, or the prisoners rolling around inside the barrels, or the rapes, the killings, or the eating of human flesh.

I have enough to deal with as it is.

I told him I hated myself now. I hated myself for the way I'd stood spellbound in front of that yellow poster designed by an Italian artist – I've forgotten his name – as a salute to the martyrs of Tal al-Za'atar. I hate those three thousand vertical lines the artist put on his poster. I hate our way of celebrating death. The number of our dead was our distinguishing feature – the more deaths, the more important we became.

I said I no longer liked our way of playing with death.

He said death was a symbolic number and numbers had been the sole stable element since the dawn of history. “Numbers are magic,” he said. “Nothing fascinates men more than numbers; that's why death expressed in numbers turns into a magic formula.”

We left the café. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and went
away. I don't know what he wrote in his newspaper about the meeting with Boss Josèph that never took place; I lost interest the moment I got back to the camp. Even the idea of reconciliation stopped making any sense: The reconciliation has happened without happening, as should be clear from my telling you about the incident without getting upset.

The reconciliation happened when Dunya became the victim of her own story; when her story was transformed into a scandal, the woman fell from grace and all that was left were her two eyes suspended in the emptiness of her sand-colored face.

I believe she became separated from her own story when she agreed to participate in Professor Muna's game. I saw her on
TV
; I saw how she bent over the microphone after the horrible clatter of her crutches hitting the ground. And she was lying, I swear she was lying. How can you rape a girl with a shattered pelvis? She said she'd been hit in her right thigh, meaning her pelvis, and then that she fell and they threw themselves on top of her – which is impossible. But that was the story the public wanted to hear. Rape is a symbol. I'm not talking just about Arabs but about everyone on earth. Man connects war with rape. Victory signifies the victor raping the defeated enemy's women; it's only complete when the women are subjected to rape. This isn't something that happens in reality, of course; it's a fantasy. No! God forbid – Dunya didn't say she was raped because she wanted that. I don't accept the superficial, simplistic point of view that so many men hold about women wanting to be raped; rape is one of the most savage and painful things there is. Dunya said she was raped to please the psychologists, the sociologists, and the journalists, who were expecting to hear that word from her. She said it, and they relaxed.

That's the problem with the Lebanese war. It entered the world's imagination pre-packaged as insanity. When we say that its insanity was normal, the same insanity as in any war, our listeners feel thwarted and think we're lying. Even Boss Josèph's story – I won't say it didn't happen; it probably did, and there may have been worse outrages. The issue isn't what happened but how we report and remember it.

I'm convinced that if Boss Josèph had come to the restaurant and told the story to me, he would've been compelled to introduce fundamental modifications. He was used to telling it in front of people who believe that what happened in the camps was heroic. With me, however, he wouldn't have been able to talk about heroism. He would have had to describe what he did in a cold and neutral, maybe even apologetic, fashion. And that would've changed everything; even the significance of that bullet penetrating the heads of two children thrown down on a table in a house somewhere in the camp would have changed.

I will never forget how the clusters of flies hovered over me and pursued me. I won't forget the buzzing blue flies over those bodies acting as reservoirs for all the death in the world. I won't forget how we stepped over the distended vertical bodies, holding our noses.

I told Monsieur Georges that “the first time” didn't exist, that there was a beginning only in stories.

Y
OU USED
to say, “Back to the beginning.” You would talk, and we'd listen. It was enough for us to hear your footsteps for “the beginning” to return, for things to get started.

Not now.

Now there's no one, there's no beginning.

The issue is war, and war has no beginning.

I was willing to meet Boss Josèph even though I felt no curiosity about him. I was willing to meet him because I'd learned the secret of war. This secret is the mirror. I know no one will agree with me, and they'll say I talk like this because I'm afraid, but it's not true. If you're afraid, you don't say your enemy is your mirror, you run away from him.

I agreed to meet with Boss Josèph despite the fact that I didn't expect to hear anything I didn't already know. The man would start – as indeed he did start – with cocaine. He'd say he took huge amounts of cocaine before going to the camp, so he'd be exonerated from responsibility for his acts. He'd say the Israelis lit the place up and that his superior, who was sitting
with the Israeli officers on the roof of the Kuwaiti embassy overlooking the camp, expected something extra special from him. He'd say that when he entered the darkened camp, he was stumbling on the stones and the flares blinded him, which made him fire randomly, without thinking. When he entered that particular house and opened fire and saw people collapsing on the sofas where they were sitting, he felt a strange intoxication, and that he never meant to kill the two children but was just joking around with his buddy about the effectiveness of the gun and then he killed them, just like that, without thinking.

This is something about us that you won't understand, Father.

You didn't get caught up in your war the way we did in ours. You went to war, but we didn't. Our situation was more like yours when you were in Sha'ab, except that we couldn't withdraw. Do you remember Sha'ab after you took it back from the Jews? Did you hesitate even once? Of course not. The only time you hesitated was when the ALA informed you of the decision to withdraw before the Lebanese borders closed. Then you hesitated, but you withdrew with the rest. When you met Nahilah, you told her you'd made a mistake and asked her to stay because you thought it would be possible to correct that mistake quickly enough.

Do you remember those long months after Ibrahim died?