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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Good Citizen – 67

The next day, he says “I know you know a lot of radicals.” but he never mentions any names or asks me about anyone.

“You know this is a free country?”

What am I doing there then, I am thinking to myself.

“But students often go over the top when they read a few books, and we don’t want you to do that. You can’t do just anything, even in a free country,” he says.

I’m sitting here listening to this, and it’s like a weird, surreal dream. He keeps lecturing me in this professorial tone, and I sit there, forced to listen.

In the afternoon, they tell me to go home, but I must return the next day.

I arrive home, and my father asks me what they wanted.

“They want me to be one of them…I think,” I say.

He looks at me sharply. “Are you still involved in politics? Are you hiding anything from them? From me??”

“No, I’m not.” I realize I am lying to my father, but I can not tell him the truth.

“But you are still involved in politics?”

No.”

“I went there twice,” he says. “They said you were all right both times, and that you’d soon be out. But they also told me that you were a very stubborn boy and wouldn’t tell them anything.”

My father is getting more adamant.

Listen Mohammed, I don’t expect you to join them, but they told me that if you have anything to do with politics in the future, I will never see you again. You will just disappear. Do you want me to lose what’s left of my vision or your mother lose her mind through misery?”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Nothing will happen.”

My father shakes his head, looking at me solemnly. “You can say ‘don’t worry,’ but you’re not telling the truth.”

He knows.

The next day I go back. A different agent talks to me. More or less the same things, but he asks me openly to join Ba’ath.

“I don’t want to be in Ba’ath or any other party.”

“We want you to cooperate with us. We don’t want you to feel you have to come here. We just want you to be a good citizen and tell us if you see anything wrong.”

I agree to tell them if I see anything wrong, and I leave.

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Another Prison – 63

I leave the building, shuffling along like a sleepwalker.

Fifty yards away from the building, when I am out of sight, I lean over, and uncontrollably vomit until there is nothing left in my stomach.

I walk slowly, and finally arrive home around two in the morning. When I ring the doorbell, I can hear my father’s voice saying “Oh my God, who is that now?”

When they see me enter, my father cries, my mother is crying in happiness. The noise wakes my brothers and sisters, who hardly understand what has been going on, especially as they are sleepy, but they cry and hug me anyway too.

After a while, we all go to bed and I sleep the whole of the next day.

While I sleep, many neighbors come to ask after me. There may have been no one in sight when I was taken out to the Land Rover, but many eyes had been looking through cracks in their closed shutters. None of them have seen me come back so they are thinking another time in prison was beginning for me.

In a way, it is.

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From the Country – 59

One day we are walking along, talking, when an older woman, about 25, comes up to us. It is Hala, a friend of Saida. And she says to her, “I didn’t know you knew him.” She takes us off to a dark little cafe two streets away and we talk.

She tells us that we are being stupid, being seen openly together. “They are already suspicious of you, Saida, and as for you Mohammed, do you think they think you’re innocent, just because they’ve let you out of prison? Listen. I’ve seen a list that’s circulating round the faculty and against your name it says ‘Left wing radical, group, cell and party unknown.’”

Saida and I are both surprised, but we know Hala is right. So we meet more carefully. We meet in different, distant cafes or take walks at night along the river where it is dark, or we meet at her house. We meet at mine, but only when my father is not around — he doesn’t allow me to bring girls here. But my meetings with Saida aren’t at all what he is trying to guard against, so I don’t mind hiding them from him.

Our street has several important people living on it, a government minister, a Palestinian captain, a high-ranking fighter pilot, and others who are powerful, supported by the government. Because of them, and the need to protect people others hate, patrol cars prowl through our street every five minutes or so.

Many nights, as I am coming back from walks with Saida, they stop me, Two agents leap out simultaneously — to make me frightened — and one of them says, “Hands up, don’t move!!” Although they leave their machine guns in the Land Rover, I have to do what they say. They grab whatever I am carrying, books, etc. “What are these books? Why are you carrying them? What do you want with these papers? DO you need them for your lectures?

I have to answer everything, patiently. Even so, they push me around a bit.

“Why are you going home so late? Where’s your identity card?”

If anyone comes by and sees the agents with me, they just walk on with their heads averted, or they turn off into an alley. No matter what happens in the streets, no one dares stop them, or say a word. The whole country is frightened of these people.

Once I’d left my card at home, but it was only 50 yards away. One of them slapped me a couple of times and said “Come with us.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I protested.

“Shut up! Come on, we’re taking you in!” he said

Then the other one said, “No, we can leave him.”

They had a little argument and finally let me go. I’m sure the whole thing was a performance, but it didn’t feel like it until afterwards.

Another time, after all the same old rubbish, one of them said to the other, “How do we know he’s not an Israeli?”

That should have been clear from my Damascus accent, but these two were both from the country, so perhaps they didn’t realize. No, I think they did realize, perfectly well.

Sometimes when they hit or push me, I have to return home with my clothing torn. My mother always notices, of course, and I have to say I was playing about with my friends, to keep her from knowing the truth. It is better to have her angry than in tears.

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Anticlimax- 58

Finally the holidays end and it is time to go to university.

Our university has only been there since 1945 when the old Hamidiyya Barracks were converted into a university. Already it was horribly overcrowded. Nevertheless, there is no other university to attend.

Abdulatif has gotten better marks, and he is on the engineering course, but that isn’t open to me.

So I am to study natural science. It is not what I want to study, but my last, distracted months in school brought down my exam marks, and it is the program I’ve been assigned to study.

It is like still being in school in some ways, I still walk there across the city every day, carrying my books, and still return for dinner at home every evening.

Life at the university is an anticlimax, really — so much has happened in my life in the past year that concentrating on a frog’s stomach seems almost irrelevant.

Students come to the university from all over the country, including lots of boys from the country who are not used to city life at all. I feel sorry for them. They seem so out of place. Some of them leave and return home and others hold their country ideas tight and never do get used to living in a city.

But even the students from Damascus are a disappointment to me. Remember that was the first time in our lives we are being educated with girls, and most of the boys think of nothing but fucking them. They try to act like heroes in front of the girls. They act silly. It isn’t easy to get these boys to think of anything else for half an hour.

All I can think is that we’ll never get Palestine back with this bloody generation.

I am unhappy there. Everything seems trivial.

I find a few boys who seem a bit better than the others and I can talk to them. But I can’t trust them.

There are plenty of Ba’ath party people in the university and some of them mention me in their reports, but really they have nothing to report and I am safe for the time being.

When I was released from prison, one of the agents had said to me, “Now you are not going to see Saida any more, are you?” I had said no, but I begin seeing more of her once I am in university. My dossier in the prison said she was “pushing” me politically — that was rubbish, but I do learn from her, and teach her, too.

She is a Communist, but I am not, really. Perhaps I move a bit closer, through knowing her, and she perhaps alters her position a little.

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The Dance – 57

It’s not hard to imagine that there are plenty of reasons pushing me towards their idea of “being good” but I’ve had a lot of time in prison to think, and other politicals there have given me lots more to think about too. I can’t just stop.

Everything I believed in before, I still believe in now. All my hopes for our people and our country are the same. My beliefs and hopes have gotten stronger, in fact strengthened, almost you could say, “proved” or tested by my experiences.

I don’t want to make excuses though. I know it isn’t just my safety I was endangering. But I simply can not stop; it is what I live for and am ready to die for. If only I could be somewhere else, where the innocent needn’t be in danger.

I am wanting to form a new group, with new people. I begin seeing some others I hadn’t really known before. How do I meet them? The way people with the same ideas always find each other, I suppose. Through introductions, or delicate conversations leading to bolder ones — that sort of thing.

It isn’t a group yet, but we are talking a lot and just beginning to form into a group.

I’ve learnt a lot and this time everything is going to be planned more carefully and more practically. My basic ideas about my country and our government haven’t changed at all, but my ideas about how to change them have.

I am no longer interested in killing anymore — thank God no one had gotten killed while I was still learning that that wasn’t the answer to our problems. Education is. What’s the point of getting rid of a terrible government if the people are so ignorant. They’ll only get another government just as bad and all our sacrifices will be for nothing.

I say to my friends that we must start educating people, not thousands at a time, just start with neighbors and friends. Be gentle with them, and don’t put more on them than they can bear, even if we think we’ve watered down what we’d like to say a little. There’s no need to mention politics directly at all. Wait until people are ready for it.

We talk for hours and hours…but I have to be careful. I can’t be seen talking to anyone too often, or suspicion will fall on them. I know I am being watched.

I am also more careful than I’ve been before about getting home late. I don’t want my family to know I am getting involved in politics again. It is all a dangerous game, and not just for me.

My group was letting me take on the leadership role, even though they were all older than me. Somehow, I am the leader, though no one ever said so.

I tell them that first we have to educate ourselves, that we have to try to understand other countries and their governments and our own. “We’re not in a hurry,” I say. “Killing is quick, but education is slow.”

We have to help the people as the dervishes dance, with their left palms up, accepting blessings, and then right one down, passing on those blessings to the world.

Boys and men from other groups try to get in touch with us, and sometimes do. With everyone having to be so careful all the time, that takes ages sometimes.

When a government operates in secret, exposing their actions to the sunlight is necessary: the people want proof, and should have it. We hope, eventually, to win over some agents or young Army officers so they can get us secret government documents, but that doesn’t happen.

We talk what feels like millions of hours, but it is political talk, A lot of it is really just keying each other up about things we all know already. So we talk, and plan, and I continue in school, but I still am not able to concentrate.

Finally, we have our exams. I pass, but only barely. I’ve fallen a long way down from where I’ve always been before prison. But I’ve begun a different kind of education there. And now the long holiday of more than three months begins.

It is during this holiday that I really form my group.

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Isolation – 55

A few days after I arrive home, Ramadan ends, and our big festival, the Eid, begins. We always visit family graves at Eid, so my father and I go to the cemetery where his father is buried and my father prays for a while and reads a few surahs from the Koran. It is still and peaceful there.

As we are leaving, we meet my uncle, the one who’d told my parents I’d be in that prison forever, and who said that people like me were only interested in taking away his possessions. He stares at me a couple of seconds, and then he gives us all the usual Eid wishes. But he doesn’t congratulate me on getting out of prison or even mention it. He never does.

* * *

I continue in school, but within days, it’s clear that I am unable to concentrate. I can’t concentrate anywhere, really, not home, school…it’s impossible. Far from being the first in my class, as I’d always been, I begin to slide, and realize that I have no way to get back up again.

Soon it is the first day that I am required to report back to the prison. I hate going there again so much — a leaf blown against me could stop me, but I go.

It takes me a long time to go through that door again. If not for a guard shouting to me, “What are you hanging around for, kid?” I don’t know if I could make myself enter. My appointment is with General Suhail. I don’t know him. I’d only been with him that time when I was blindfolded, and on my last day.

He asks me, “Well, what have you heard? Anyone talking against us?”

I say that I haven’t heard anything.

“I want you to keep your eyes and ears open, he continued. Is that clear?”

Like a robot, I say yes.

“We’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, Mohammed. You know that, so we even know when someone doesn’t tell us something he’s heard. Now, for instance, someone’s been passing out some sort of propaganda near your house. What do you know about it?”

I have no idea what he is talking about, and I say so. But he gets colder and more nasty-looking and I am beginning to get frightened. I can feel cold sweat on my face.

“Next time you come, if you haven’t got any information I’m going to throw you back in here, and this time you really won’t enjoy it as much as last time, I promise you.”

He then asks a lot of questions about what I have been doing, school and my school friends – I can’t even think straight, because what he has said about coming back to prison has numbed my mind. He gives me three private phone numbers — I suppose one of them is his — so I can ring immediately if I have anything important to report. He sets another date for me to come in, in three more days, and I leave.

That night I tell my father I am never going back there again.

He begs me, “Please go, Mohammed, please. They won’t do anything to you if you forget about politics.”

I am not as innocent as my father.

I promise him, after we talk for a long time, that I will go back. But I feel the sweat on my face, as if a corpse has laid its hand on my forehead.

I know another reason why they keep making you report….besides keeping you reminded of your stay there — that’s a threat — they also know that if you spend two afternoons a week there, people will find out. Eventually, although you have not become an agent, everyone will think you have, and avoid you anyway.

I was getting isolated enough without that.

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Contagion – 51

I’d had plenty of time, recently, to think about things like this, and I’d met and talked to many people who knew more than I had. I hadn’t been in school, but that didn’t mean my education had stopped.

I notice Mamdour around, but somehow he always seems to be on the outside edges, never near me. I know why: he feels guilty and maybe ashamed. I’d have killed myself if I had a conscience like his.

But then, he doesn’t know that I knew he’d written that report on me. I look at him hard: my eyes go into his like knives. He looks away. I have the feeling he wants me to hit him: he’d have felt better then — but I have no intention of making him feel better, and I ignore him coolly.

When I think of him, trying to make people believe he’d been in prison himself, and getting my mother’s sympathy, I feel like vomiting.

But ignoring him isn’t enough; so I go over to him.

The other boys follow me.

“How was it, Mohammed?” Mamdour asks.

“It was a long trip, but now it’s finished. The time’s coming, thought, when they’re going to pay for what they’ve done, and they’ll be trodden underfoot.”

I mean the agents, apparently, but I don’t.

“I know someone who’s become a little leader — but God knows how,” I say. He has become some sort of junior section chief in the Ba’ath party. Only a couple of my best friends know who I was talking about. But Mamdour know.

There is an awkward pause between us and I ask him, “How long were you in prison.”

“Eighteen days.”

“Really? I didn’t see you there. Where did they put you?”

“On the roof,” he says. “There’s another prison on the roof.”

“And how did you manage to get out so soon?”

He says his uncle got him released. “Wwhat a wonderful uncle you must have,” I say. “If only I’d had one like that.”

We go into our first class, but I can’t concentrate that first day. I only stay at school about two hours. Nobody tries to stop me when I leave.

Some people, I discover later, don’t want to have anything do with me after I get out. My kind of political disfavor could be contagious. Well, some of them were activists and had to keep a low profile. Their families didn’t want them associating with me, and I understood that. And even with those who stuck by me, I felt I ought to cut down seeing them. I didn’t want to make trouble for them.

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Different – 50

I am looking forward to seeing people in the streets and the trees in the sunlight, kids going to school. Girls. Life. I got up at 6 and got dressed fast. I find my mother in the kitchen and I talk to her for about five minutes while she is getting my coffee ready, and then I go out.

I am going to school, but first I stand at our gate for awhile, happy as a child, just watching people go by, talking, laughing, arguing. Thoughts of the prison keep coming into my mind: I think how no one is awake there yet. And it all comes flooding back to me, comparing myself to them. I don’t know whether to shout or cry.

A school friend of mine comes along. He sees me standing there and he stops, staring at me for a least 20 seconds. He looks almost frightened, as if I am a ghost back from the dead. Then he comes over and we embrace and kiss without saying a word.

After that, he asks me all the questions you’d expect. They all know where I’d been for the past three months. I walk with him to the next corner, where we used to meet on our way to school every day, and we stay there a little while.

There are several girls’ schools around here and lots of girls are in the street. I look at their smiling faces, at their legs, and I think how much gentler they are than men.

I am registering everything. Everything ought to be different, but it is just the same. And different.

I feel like I am a man, now, looking at all that I’ve been there for three months, but the changes in me feel like it has been three years.

Lots of other friends come along. They all embrace and kiss me. I am like a toy and they are like children — they all wanted to hold me. I can see they are proud of me.

We walk towards school together, without paying attention to where we are going. They all joke with me. “Did you have a ride in that nice tyre?”

Oh yes, everyone knows about that sort of thing. I hadn’t told them.

“Did they behave like gentlemen? Did they treat you well?

Everyone knows the government, and their agents, are Alawite and quite backwards, so one of my friends joked, “Naturally, the people who work there are very sophisticated?

“Naturally,” I say. He mimicks their uncouth dialect and we all laugh.

We get to school. More embracing and kissing. A few of the boys avoid me, though. It depends on their politics, really. All the Communists come and congratulate me on my release.

I have an interesting conversation with one of them. He may have had more theoretical knowledge than me, but I can see he thinks my experiences have given me some kind of superiority. He always used to say that the only way to change the government was from inside, peacefully — and in fact, the Communists had three seats in our parliament. But now I object to that idea.

“How can a clean hand shake a dirty one, my friend?” I ask. “I know what they’re like. They’re dirty and vicious and fighting for power. They only tolerate you Communists because they know there are lots of Communist sympathizers and they don’t want to have to fight on another front. While you’re small and quiet, they’ll embrace you, but when you grow up — or before you grow up, they’ll eat you. The only way anyone will change them is by being strong and fighting them openly.”

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Carelessness- 42

I am still making that silver-paper belt for my mother. When it is about half finished, I suddenly think, there’s a lot of paper in this: why not use it?

I’d stolen the stub of a pencil from an empty office I’d had to clean a few days before. Anything you could write with was absolutely forbidden. And I write on the back of the outside wrapper of a cigarette packet. “Don’t worry about me. It sounds worse than it is. Remember you are not to ask my uncle for anything. I don’t know how long I’m going to be in here, but I got in my myself and I’ll get out by myself. Get rid of anything you think suspicious that you find in my desk. Look underneath the drawers.”

I fold it up with the foil around it like all the others, and continue making the belt. I beg packets from everyone so I can finish it quickly. I have to be sure it is ready when my mother comes again, and I never have any idea when that might be. Once it is finished, I have to wait three or four days, but finally she comes again. I have to ask permission to give her the belt, and the guard says I can.

While I am embracing her, I whisper, “Take the belt apart at home…there’s a message.” She is surprised but she controls herself.

I’ve been so keyed up to get the belt finished and give it to her that I haven’t thought about it enough. Carelessness is dangerous in situations like this, and it had been a stupid thing to do, I realize only an hour or so after she’s left. My interrogation was finished and if they’d found that message, it will start all over again.

Fortunately, nothing comes of my stupidity…and as it happens, the whole thing was unnecessary. A few days after I’d been arrested, my father had practically taken my desk apart. All the carbon-copy propaganda sheets that friends had given me to comment on, all the secret handouts from various antigovernment groups, and every book that wasn’t obviously a schoolbook or a novel; everything was carried out into the garden and burnt. There was far too much to burn in the grill…they had to empty the fish pool — it reminded me of my childish escapade with the fish when I heard of it. And burn everything in there.

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