Taking Flight – 103

In the morning, though, I feel better as you usually do in the sunlight. Soon I get a message to go to the Palestinian. I know what it means… I will have my passport.

I didn’t know what to expect a false passport to look like, but it’s wasn’t like forged currency or counterfeit looking. It is a regular passport, with all the right stamps. It’s a perfectly real passport in every respect except that I shouldn’t have it.

Mine isn’t from my country or from Lebanon. It is from Jordan.

I buy my ticket to Tripoli, and I’m leaving tomorrow. I send a message to Walid in his camp 5 miles away to say I am leaving. I go to see a Palestinian guy I know who wants to go on the same flight, but he hasn’t gotten a passport yet. When he sees I have mine, he gets dreadfully jealous, and won’t speak to me. I keep running into him all day long, in different places, and he ignores me, each time. Strange.

All day I go around with my ticket in my pocket, kissing my friends good-bye, maybe more than 10 days away calls for. But I don’t know whether I’m going to see people again or not.

I turn in my Kalashnikov.

The next morning I put on my denim suit and the shirt a friend of mine lends me and take the taxi to the airport. It uses up my last penny but I know Abu Ammar will meet me at the airport in Tripoli, so it doesn’t matter.

I am tense, I have to admit, because of the danger of being interrogated by Syrians at the checkpoints. I have a Jordanian passport, but I have a Syrian accent. I’ve never been to Jordan and know very little about it. I can only say I come from Amman — but if anyone asks me ” Where in Amman?” I won’t be able to answer.

In the taxi, I don’t talk or listen to anyone, I just look at the scenes we are driving through. I am putting it all together in my head — the poverty, the disease, fear, weapons, depressing future, children without arms and legs. No end to the blood. Everything seems so vivid.

Am I betraying them. Am I really just afraid?

Or do I really not believe in it, anymore? Or is it something more personal, more selfish?

I am afraid of myself. Have I changed so much in my months in Beirut?

Has my power run down? Did I expect revolution to be easy, a straight road?

I never knew until Beirut that the enemy of the revolution is not just the official “enemy.” We are our own enemies.

In the end, I don’t have any answers, so I tell myself I’ll leave it all “floating” until I can talk to Abu Ammar.

I’ve never been to an airport before, and I don’t know what to do so I watch other people for a few minutes, first, checking in and all that. Then I do it too.

I am given a form to fill in. I don’t know how I can be so stupid, but I have a lot of things filling my mind, and so I am distracted. I put my real surname on the form. When I give it to the Immigration official he notices that the name and the false one on my passport don’t match.

He asks about it for a second and then my brain switched off completely. I said: “This is my tribe’s name back in Jordan.

“Really” he says. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

He must think I’m terribly stupid, putting my tribe’s name instead of my own, but amazingly, he believes me and I change the name on the form.

Then he asks me “Why did you come to Lebanon?”

Why am I not prepared for any question they ask?

Somehow, a lie is ready instantly.

“My brother came here, a year ago, and my family hasn’t heard from him in months, so they sent me to look for him.

“Did you find him?”

“No,” I say. “Someone told me he’d gone to Libya, that’s why I’m going there, to find him.”

He believes that too.

A Palestinian friend of mine, who has traveled a lot on false passports, has told me,”Whatever happens, the false name is you. Let them beat you, give you shocks, throw you in prison, but even if you’re there a year or two, stick to that name. Don’t worry. They’ll let you out eventually. Invent a whole life for that character — whatever you like — but stick to it.”

I’m standing here, wondering if my end will come at a piece of paper. Will it all collapse — false passport, false nationality, illegally staying in Lebanon – everything? I see myself in a flash back in prison in Syria. But my face is like a statue.

There is still one more thing wrong.

I haven’t paid much attention to the visa stamps in the passport — Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Lebanese visa had run out 3 weeks before. It’s not a huge issue, but still my heart is beating like crazy. “It doesn’t matter, “ says the man, “but you’ll have to pay the usual fine for breaking the visa.”

I ask how much that is – realizing that the taxi had used up my last penny — and he tells me it is 1/2 pound Lebanese, just a few pence. It is a joke, not a very funny one. Everything is inefficient or silly like this in Beirut — it isn’t even worth the time to collect it. But I don’t even have a tiny amount like this. I’ve gotten through three potential disasters in a few minutes, and now I was going to go down for a few pence.

The bus is loading up to take people to the plane, and finally all the passengers are on the plane except me. I am still standing there by that guy’s desk, stranded and helpless.

The stewardess realizes that someone is missing and comes back into the terminal. She sees me holding my boarding pass and said, “Come on, we’re late taking off.” The immigration officer tells her I have to pay that 1/2 pound first, and says, “He doesn’t have it.“

She looks at me sweetly. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a coin, and, laughing, throws it to the immigration officer. “”There…now let him go!”

Then he laughs too and says “OK, go.”

And now I am sitting in the airplane seat, and I can’t believe the plane is really taking off. It is wonderful. I have made it. I hardly take a breath until we are in the air. It is my first flight.

I look back toward the airport, and I can see it there, near the seashore, the sea, silver and glistening beside it.

It is a four-hour flight, and I spend most of it looking out the window. I feel free.

The stewardess comes by several times, she jokes with me, and even flirts a bit. She laughs about that 1/2 pound, but she doesn’t realize that I owe her a lot more than she knows. I’ve always owed so much to strangers.

I have no idea about the future. I just want to get to Libya.

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Last Day – 102

But a few days have passed, and things are moving. Fast. Hisham has come and said, “Where is the money? We need it quick — the passport is almost ready.”

I have managed to save up the money, and I go to the guy who had driven me. After any twisted trip, I handed the money over and he swore to me he wasn’t getting anything out of it.

“I’m asking only for what I have to pay. I am doing this because of my respect for Abu Ammar.”

I don’t get anything for my money, and I don’t know if my contact really is genuine or not, but what can I do? You get doubted as much as you doubt others, there, but if you want anything from others, you have to take chances.

The next day, I have a sense that it may be my last day in Beirut for a while. So I give away my tape recorder, books and a few other things. There is a lot of giving away like that, here. If you return, you take them back.

I buy a pair of jeans and a denim jacket.

After I make sure I have enough plane fare to Tripoli a taxi fare to the airport, I also gave away whatever money I have. I even pack the little bag I am taking. I may still be weeks before I leave, but I can’t think of that.

I go to bed happy, but I wake up a few hours later. The earth is shaking, people are screaming, rockets are exploding like thunder. I think it must be another Israeli raid, and run out into the hellish scene and see women and children running in the streets, heading for the shelters.

It turns out to be a huge fight between the Christian Militia, the Palestinians and the Syrians. It goes on for hours, but it doesn’t last very long in my neighborhood in the camp.

I see the flashes in the night, feel the explosions near or far, and hear sirens, shouts. I stand there, thinking, switched off from the fighting. It is hell. I see lies everywhere. The poor people in the dark shelters, and in the dark all the time: they suffer so patiently and die, lots of them, at the front or at home. Such misery and so little you can do for them. And what do you really doesn’t change anything for them.

And the leaders, the intellectuals, always sound optimistic about the struggle, but it is all just propaganda…none of them believe it anymore. Factions and corruption have done too much. How depressing it is.

The damage in my mind is so great by now that I can’t connect the innocent revolutionary I’d been when I arrived in Beirut just months ago—versus the cynical despairing man I’ve become. I’ve lost my innocence without getting much in its place.

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Trapped – 101

One day, I accidentally run into a guy who’d been part of that group of mine, the one that used to meet in the woods to talk until they broke us up. He is a Moroccan and he tells me that his official group — if I can use that term — had known about our meetings, and right after some of us were sent out of Beirut, he was put in prison. I don’t mean a proper prison building, but he was locked up. They kept him a prisoner for 20 days, but they didn’t torture him. But I am understanding better and better how much they fear more division, these groups, and how inflexible they are about their own structures.

A few days later, a boy I don’t know comes looking for me and tells me the Palestinian who’d said he’d help me get the passport wants me to come that night.

So I meet him, and about midnight, we get in his car and start driving through the city, but strangely, he keeps driving in and out of the little streets, twisting this way and that, sometimes I feel I’ve seen a shop or sign or something before, but he seems confident and I don’t say anything. It is very confusing and finally I have no idea where I am. I think it is deliberate.

We stop at last in a poor neighborhood and go in to his friend’s house, which is pleasant and cozy, actually, in spite of the area. His wife is very sweet.

After a while, he sends his wife out of the room and then he says, “Look, we’re going to have to do something about this passport of yours. Abu Ammar is making a big fuss about you.” Abu Ammar seems to be behind everything.

I’ve only been with this man an hour or so and his being a friend of the man who’d brought me to that house doesn’t matter, because I hardly know him either, and I am worried, not knowing if I can trust them or not. But I am sort of trapped. No one I know well enough to trust can help me, so when this guy asks me for two passport photos, I’d have given them to him, but I don’t have any. I’ve given them all away already. I tell him I’ll get some for him.

The man tells me the passport will cost me 300 or 400 Lebanese pounds – several hundred dollars — but that is no problem. He says he’ll get in touch.

I am driven back to camp the same confusing way, but I keep my eyes open.

In Beirut, there really is no government, nothing is forbidden, and getting a false passport can be difficult, but not because of the law, and not because it’s dangerous for anyone’s job. The terrible spider web of loyalties and enemies makes the whole business difficult and dangerous.

The Palestinians have thousands of blank passports I’ve heard, even European ones, and all the visa stamps in them that they need. So most of my dead ends are the result of dealing with men who are all talk — oh how confident they sound. You won’t believe it. The number of meetings that are set up and never take place, the people who claim to be able to arrange everything who, when I meet them, say they can’t do anything…but a friend of theirs can, and so on.

I really don’t believe anyone at this point.

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Trust – 100

Abu Ammar has written to friends of his in Beirut, who contacted Hisham, who tells me to get some passport photos done. As much as I want to leave, I am not very happy about this — it makes me nervous because once you start passing pictures around, who knows who is going to see them or recognize you?

I only need two, but I got ten because I am probably going to need to follow several paths toward a passport – I can’t be sure any one person, no matter what he says, is going to get it for me. So I give some pictures to Abu Ammar’s friend, some the journalist, and some to Hisham.

A few days later, a Palestinian friend of Hisham sends for me. I’ve never met him before, though Hisham has mentioned him. He is an important man in his group, and I wonder if he is important enough to get my passport for me. I am going to pay for it, but no amount of money will get you one without influence — knowing a man who knows a man whose cousin knows something — etc. That’s what it takes.

I meet that man in a cafe and he surprises me by saying “I’ve heard of you already.” He also knows about Abu Ammar, but I don’t ask him if Abu Ammar had written to him about me. He talks a lot about Abu Ammar. He is beginning to go on about what a great writer he is, and all that, when I say: “Look, I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’m not here to talk about Abu Ammar. I need a passport.”

I don’t like being in this strange part of the city, really, and I want to get down to business and get back to my camp.

“Okay, okay, listen, I’m going to take you to see a friend of mine.”

He takes me to another Palestinian, not far away. I think I’ll have to talk about myself — well, a version of myself, and about my wanting a passport, and all — but he already knows from Abu Ammar’s journalist friend.

My first Palestinian contact leaves.

I talk to the new guy for a long time — I don’t think he is especially interested in what I have to say – he’s just sounding me out. I never know who I can trust, and no one else knows if they can trust me either. That’s why each step of this search for a passport will take so long.

Anyway, that Palestinian finally says he’ll take me to see a friend of his who might be able to help. He doesn’t know when he can go, or when his friend will welcome us, though, so he says he’ll get in touch with me at my camp.

As I walk back, I wonder what kind of trap Beirut was: so easy to get into, so difficult to get out of.

Meanwhile, as I’m waiting, I continue to teach children to read and write, I fire weapons, I sweep streets, I do what I can to help people, I talk…the same things I have been doing for five months, but now I am waiting, not for a chance at the enemy — whichever one — but to get out. I feel I have to talk over all I’ve seen and heard and felt with Abu Ammar, at least for a few days

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Violence Machine – 98

There is another air-raid in my fifth month in the city. Everything is more or less the same — a prior warning, people heading to the shelters, taking perhaps a last look at their poor houses as they went, the planes coming into the sun, from over the sea.

But this time, I do something. I am in charge of an antiaircraft gun mounted on a jeep. There is a kid to help, belts of ammunition and a driver. Somehow, I am not worried about messing it up this time. I fire off rounds like crazy. I knew I would.

The driver is tearing round the streets of Beirut, following the planes, driving crazily. Tyres squealing, suddenly reversing, it is like an action film.

The planes are breaking the sound-barrier — it is terrifying, right over our heads — and the noise and the vibration shake the city like the worst thunderstorm one could imagine.

The planes aren’t bombing the city, but two areas about 12 miles to our south.

I fire until the barrel has a dull red glow. The boy who is with me bangs me on the shoulder and shouts, “If you fire any more, the barrel will explode!”

I stop and we change barrels quickly. I go on firing, possessed.

It is all over in a few minutes. I have to be stopped when the planes have gone. I am a machine that needs switching off.

Since they weren’t bombing us, there are no bodies or sirens or ambulances or crying — but there is plenty of shouting.

Gradually it gets quiet again and people are walking around and talking.

But it isn’t quiet inside me. The adrenaline must be pumping like crazy during the raid. I am high.

I’ve done something.

A day or two passes, and the adrenaline leaves me, and I realize that nothing is different.

Except that I am pushing down a lot of violence. Everything is building up in me, but I really have nothing to aim it at — no sensible way to use it. It is almost choking me.

I want to go to Libya to visit Abu Ammar. I need to go.

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The Gap – 97

The journalist tells me that Hisham, the Iraqi I’d known in prison, is in Beirut. I am so eager to see him again. He says he’ll send him to my camp.

A few days later, we do meet. It is the first time we’ve ever seen each other outside the prison, but we only talk about that, and the people we knew there, for about ten minutes.

The rest of the time we sit on the beach. The hot summer sun makes the sea look like tin foil, it was hot. Two lovers are half-lying on a rock, kissing. People are swimming — their shouts seem to come from far away. Hisham and I are often silent, looking towards the white hot sun, on the sea. There really isn’t a to say.

When I tell him I am trying to get a passport, he tells me a man he knows might be able to help me. It is another Iraqi. I’ve heard of him — Abu Ammar knows him well. This Iraqi is also in Beirut too.

A week or so later, Hisham tells me to forget about the other guy helping me. He says that the group, all Iraqis in opposition to their government, had discovered that the man was dealing with the government in Baghdad. Not against them or even against the Opposition, but still dealing with the government and without their knowledge. They tried him and shot him.

I feel sick, but I don’t show it. Everywhere in front of me, I see the gap, the huge gap between the beautiful theory and the ugly reality.

I hate it all. I can’t trust anyone. The killings, the disappearances, the jealousies.

I am trapped in Beirut. I still have no ID card. I think if I can only spend 10 days or so in Libya with Abu Ammar, I will have my ideas sorted out and be ready to really do something in Beirut.

Everyone is talking about the latest news. The Israelis have invaded South Lebanon, but the only change here in Beirut is that more bodies are being brought up from the south, sometimes with long lines of people with tears plastering down the dust on their faces– dusty black lines with a coffin bumping along on a jeep.

Dead, or violent eyes. The hopelessness in those eyes. What are they going on for?

The enemy isn’t just Israel.

There is poverty and misery and frustration — Israel hasn’t created all that.

The little funeral processions are worse – not a hero, but just some widow’s kid who has just gone to the front and come straight back, while a few people pull the coffin along on a cart. What is it all for?

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Café Society- 96

We meet Bassam as we’d planned that evening, and they leave for my city, for Damascus. The camp seems small and grubby afterwards. She was so beautiful and so feminine. A strange world it was, there, a place not right for a goddess, to pass through it, or love.

The next day, I decide to meet the journalist that Abu Ammar has told me to look up, but I have a problem: I’ve lost my ID card and so I can’t go to his camp. My group has given me the card I’d lost — but without a card, no stranger knows who you are, or what group sponsors and protects you, or even that you aren’t a spy. They aren’t kidding around in the camp — identification is serious.

Anyway, I’ve asked Walid to find Abu Ammar’s journalist and arrange a meeting. When he returns, he says the guy will meet me in a certain cafe that afternoon.

We take a taxi to that cafe but some Palestinians stop us at an improvised roadblock, just what I’d been afraid of. Walid shows his card, but when I can’t, the Palestinians take me out of the taxi and to their headquarters. Walid goes on to meet the journalist.

I am frightened. It may not make sense, but there are so many groups and parties savagely opposed to each other, even if in theory they all have a common enemy. Besides, this place is full of spies and agents of this or that Arab government. Your group is your safety, even your identity. Outside it, no one knows if you can be trusted and you don’t dare trust anyone else.

Sitting in the group’s headquarters, I don’t know what will happen. The leader questions me. I don’t know what party they belong to, and I can’t tell him about my living in the camp; they could be Syrian — even if I can tell that the leader isn’t. If they’re Syrian, I could end up tied up, and loaded into the next car back to Damascus.

Anyway, I tell him I am living in the Egyptian’s hotel, the place I’d stayed my first night.

Without my ID card, I need them to believe me. And thankfully, they do, and they let me go.

Asking people where that cafe is, I run through the streets and get there just as Walid and the journalist are about to leave. The journalist sits down again and Walid goes for a walk.

We talk about Abu Ammar. That is necessary because he is the connection each of us has to each other. When we finally start talking about a passport for me, the conversation becomes very businesslike. I tell him I can’t go back to Syria…that I have no security in Lebanon, and that Abu Ammar has told me to go to Libya to see him, etc.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll get you out of here.”

We leave it at that.

In a way I am still a sleepwalker: I am putting one foot in front of the other, towards getting a false passport. The only reason for getting it is to get out of Beirut, but my dream of right and justice is, in spite of everything, still so strong that I can’t let myself think I am going to abandon the struggle here. I want to talk over everything I’d learned and seen with Abu Ammar. I can always come back to Lebanon, after that visit.

Sleepwalking or not, at least I am moving.

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The Kiss – 95

I can’t remember exactly, but I’ve moved at least once since Bassam came before, so he doesn’t know where to find me. But by chance, I see him in the street and Saida is just behind him. I stand there in my uniform — the guy who’d been killed at Orly left it to me — and watch them come towards me, but I don’t move until they spotted me.

Saida and Bassam don’t know each other very well, but she knows he is a good friend of mine, and so she believed him when he told her I’d like to see her again and she pretended that she was going to university as usual but left with Bassam instead.

I kiss Saida — it is the first time — passionately. She is very soft in my arms almost like dough. I feel I could mold her. Her breath is hot.

It’s strange…I’ve never kissed her in Damascus, we were too politically passionate for that — but here, in Beirut, it just happened, naturally. I suddenly want us to relate in a human way, not just politically.

She is the most beautiful thing in the camp, maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since I’ve arrived in Beirut four months ago. Pale and blonde and luminous, she makes everything in the camp look dark and dingy.

We go around the camp and I introduce Bassam and Saida to many friends. Saida is very impressed with the camp. I try to explain the poverty and misery there. She looks like a goddess walking through the dirt and cockroaches. She says, “You really do have to see this; what you read or hear doesn’t tell you enough.”

We see Walid — and as he and Bassam know each other quite well, they go off together for a coffee. Saida and I are alone.

I take her to the woods. It is cool sitting under the pines. The camp seems so far away. The breeze moves silkily through the pines.

She starts telling me about her brother who is still in the horrible Tadmor desert prison in Palmyra. She is a real fighter, beautiful though, and she is thinking all the time of his escape.

“You know he won’t get out of there by force, we’re not ready for that.” I say. “But if he can escape from there by himself…”

She’s brought two passport photos of him with her — she wants me to get him a passport. Me!?

“Look, the passport can wait,” I say. “That’s no problem. If he can get to Beirut over the mountains, he’ll be safe and he won’t need a passport until he wants to leave here.”

But she keeps on and on about it. Tadmor is out in the desert, with nothing near it for miles. Only by corrupting guards can anyone get out of there. Even if you can get over the wall, running won’t get you anywhere. You’ll be shot from a jeep before you’d get 200 metres.

But I feel she is talking to me truly from her heart for the first time. She is human – where before she’d been as pure and hard as glass. Now she was so soft, vulnerable.

We lie there under the trees, and it is as if the hard male world of the dirty camp has no existence at all. She says she wants to stay with me that night, but I felt as if she thinks she ought to pay me, somehow. She is ready to do anything for her brother — but I can’t really do anything for him. I also can’t let her stay, because of her family.

“What would they think if you didn’t come home tonight? They think you just went to your classes this morning; there are your books on the ground now.”

I want her, but I sent her back to Damascus. Some day, when it is the right time, I will let my love for her explode.

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The Escape Business – 93

Go there? He might as suggest I go to Mars. I can’t go anywhere without a passport. When I tell him that in a next letter, he writes back to say, “Surely you know someone there who can help you get a passport?”

The only one I know who is a possibility is Abu Samir, the one-legged guy whose house I’d lived in for a while. He is always telling me to leave, to go to Abu Ammar and tell him what Beirut is like. There was all his talk about his brothers, himself, and me going to Germany on all that money he had, but I have never quite believed him. He isn’t a bad man, I don’t think, but he is fantasizing about all this escape business. It never seems to get one step beyond talk.

I don’t think I can count on him to get me a passport.

I write again to Abu Ammar, and say that I’d love to go there and talk over everything I am feeling with him, but I don’t know anyone who can help me get a passport. I think I am stuck in Beirut forever.

Before, I’d been happy about it. Now, it is feeling like a prison sentence.

He writes back and says, “You must see a journalist friend of mine. He’s in Beirut now.”

He gives me the address, but before I can see him, I have a visit of my own.

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Not Blind – 92

There are all sorts and degrees of engagement here in Beirut.

One of the passionately involved is Mehdi, a Moroccan, who was in my group — the group that used to meet in the woods to talk, the one they split up a while ago. Mehdi is part of a group of Moroccans hoping to overthrow the government in their country. We all encourage them because we don’t think it really matters where democracy starts, as long as it starts somewhere.

He lives on nothing but milk — he has an ulcer — and he is as thin as a pencil. That makes him look literally consumed with his mission.

He has the most worked-out plan of all of us about what his group is going to do. He shows me a map and tells me where the cells are, cells of men ready at a signal to rise up and fight.

His plan is to get about 500 of those men into Algeria — to train and coordinate their plans — he says he can get any number of false passports in Algeria for those revolutionaries.

After our group split up, Mehdi and I are among those left in Beirut and he talks to me a lot about all this. He says he wants to go to Morocco to talk to the men in the cells, but I still am not sure about him. I want to believe him, I want passionately to believe him. I want so badly to meet some real resistance members in the Arab world. Anywhere. That is my mistake. I needed to believe in someone really doing something so much that I put aside vague doubts about Mehdi.

He says he had plenty of money in Tunisia. There’s no doubt that lots more money than will be needed, and he has to go there, so I give him practically every penny I have for the fare.

I walk with him to the taxi depot carrying his care, and say good-bye. He left.

The next morning when I wake up, I have a kind of immediate conviction that the men in the cells only exist in Mehdi’s mind, and that if I ever could leave Beirut, the meeting in Morocco won’t take place, and that the king of Morocco needn’t stay awake because of anything in that wonderful plan. I feel sick, and silly, and used, and stupid.

I really am beginning to hate it all, the corruption, the pettiness, the jealousies. The killings – yes, on our own side– and the mysterious disappearances.

A Palestinian friend of mine, who I trust, says to me often, “You’ve got to get out of here — Beirut is no good for people like you.”

But how can I, even if I decide I want to? I have no passport, and with only an ID card, the only place I can go is back home.

I have been sharing all this with Abu Ammar in my letters to him. We are writing regularly. I tell him much more about what is in my heart than I tell anyone around me. He feels my frustration and my doubt. He writes to one in one letter: “I know you and I know the rest of the men there, too, even without having seen most of them. They listen to you, they treat you with respect, they’re attracted to you because of your purity and integrity and because of the ideals they have, still, a bit or, at least remember, guiltily, but they don’t believe in those ideals enough to give up the other, smaller, things they want. You can see that if you’re not blind. You must leave. Come here. I must talk to you.”

He is still in Libya.

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