Gate of the Sun (56 page)

I know nothing about my mother's family. My grandmother said her
mother had died and her father agreed to the marriage quickly because he'd found a job in Kuwait and didn't want to take his daughter there with his second wife and her children.

“The wedding was like any other wedding – a party, a procession,
youyous
, and the usual fuss. But the girl remained a stranger among us, and your father changed after he got married. It was all the fault of the girl from al-Tirah. He would come home in the evening after work, close the door of his room, and read for hours. She'd sit with me in the house doing nothing – I swear she did nothing. I'd do all the cooking, wash the clothes, wash the dishes, everything. Even you, Son: I looked after you, and your father took no interest. He began staying away from home a lot and not coming back until the morning. It seems he left his job. I think Adnan Abu Odeh put ideas into his head. Then Najwah had her daughter, and Yasin died, and his daughter followed him.”

T
ELL ME
about those days. My grandmother didn't know much. Tell me about the beginning and how you formed the first groups of fedayeen, why my father died, why you disappeared, and why Adnan left the camp.

Tell me why Najwah disappeared.

In Jordan no one knew her address. It was as though she'd melted into thin air. My grandmother said she'd gone to her family in Amman, but she didn't have family. Her father was in Kuwait. So where was she? The subject didn't interest me much because when she disappeared, I was a child, and when I grew older, I held a grudge against her and didn't pay much attention to her story. Then I met Samih and his wife, Samya. You didn't meet Samih Barakeh; you hate intellectuals, especially the ones who come and visit the fighters, theorize and philosophize, and then go back to their comfortable homes.

I first met Samih in '73 when clashes erupted between the army and the camps. He came to the camp with a group of workers from the Palestine Research Center. They toured the camp and then all went home. Except for him. Samih stayed for more than ten days, we were posted in the same
positions and we became friends. I liked him a lot. There was great suffering in his face, which was broad and brown and etched with pain. He told me he was waiting for Samya to come from America so they could get married in Beirut. He said he'd fallen in love with her in Ramallah and then had gone to prison, and in the meantime, she had to leave with her family for Detroit, which has the world's largest concentration of inhabitants of Ramallah. I asked why he didn't go to her, complete his education in America, and marry her there. He told me he had his hands full here because he wanted to liberate Palestine. He spoke of his lengthy imprisonment in Hebron and of his dream of living with Samya in the stone house he'd inherited from his father in Ramallah. Samya did come and marry him, and now she lives in the stone house in Ramallah while Samih sleeps in his grave.

Samih said he was arrested for the first time in October of '67.

He was distributing pamphlets against the Israeli occupation in the city. “In prison,” he said, “the Israeli officer taught me the most important lesson of my life. He interrogated me with a copy of the pamphlet in his hand and flung questions at me. At first I said I'd been reading the pamphlet and had nothing to do with distributing it, when in fact I was the one who'd written it, which called on schools to strike in protest against the occupation. He looked me in the eye and said I was a coward. He said that if he were in my place, and if his country were occupied, he wouldn't go around distributing pamphlets – that would be shameful – he'd be distributing bombs instead. I confessed I was the one who'd written the pamphlet, and then he grew even more contemptuous and said I deserved to be beaten. I finished my one-year sentence in Ramallah, and when I came out, we started the real resistance. We began organizing a network for Fatah, but they arrested us before we could undertake any operations. They seized one of the members of the network who'd gone to Jordan and had come back in clandestinely, with explosives. And it was in the second prison that I learned my lesson.”

Samih said he'd been in the Hebron prison.

“It was February; it was bitter cold, and snowing. They took me to the interrogator, who ordered me to take off my clothes. Around the interrogator were four men with rippling muscles. I took off my shirt. ‘Go on,' he said. I took off my vest. ‘Your trousers,' he said. I hesitated, but a punch in the face that made my nose bleed persuaded me. I took off my trousers and my shoes and stood naked except for my underpants. With a wave of the hand, the interrogator ordered them to take me away, and we went through the door of the prison and walked to a high mound. It was icy. I was certain they were going to kill me and dump me on the ice as food for the birds. At the top of the mound, the beating started. They attacked my entire body. They used their hands and their feet and their leather belts. They threw me down on the ground and kicked me and stamped on my face, my blood turning into icy red spots. At first I screamed with pain, and I heard the interrogator say, ‘Coward.' I remembered the first interrogator and the contempt in his eyes as he flung the political pamphlet in my face, and I went dumb. They beat me, and I swallowed blood and groans. I rolled naked in the ice, and my skin was torn from me. The beating stopped after a stretch that seemed interminable, and they took me back to the prison. At the door to the interrogator's room, where they ordered me to go in and get my clothes, I understood everything.”

Samih said he understood.

The naked, bleeding man stood at the door. He heard the order to enter so he could be given his clothes. The naked man turned to the interrogator, took hold of the sleeve of his thick coat, and said to him, “Please, Sir, don't go.”

The interrogator turned in disgust. He tried to pull his arm away, but Samih tightened his grip and said, “Please, Sir. I want to tell you something.”

“Quickly, quickly,” said the interrogator.

Samih swallowed his blood and saliva and little bits that he later realized were pieces of his teeth and said, “Listen, Sir. Listen to me well. I didn't cry out. You beat me and stamped on me, and I didn't cry out even once.
Next time, when you fall into my hands, please don't cry out. I can't stand pity.”

Samih didn't know what happened after he said that because he woke up in solitary confinement. When he returned to the common wing, he told the other prisoners only part of his story. He told of the beating on the mound but didn't tell them what happened afterwards in the interrogator's room. He said his words had to remain a secret between him and the interrogator.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“Do you know the interrogator's name?” I asked him.

“No.”

“So?”

“Any one of them will do.”

“And if he cries out?”

“I'll kill him.”

Samih died in Tunis, and his wife returned to Ramallah. I learned that he died in his small house in Menzah VI. It's said he died of shock at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in '82, but I'm not convinced that was the reason. I mean, after all those who were killed fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment! It's too much. But in her letter, Samya said that heart disease ran in Samih's family and his two brothers died of angina before reaching the age of fifty.

Samih said that nothing – not the ice, not the solitary confinement – frightened him as much as the day the prisoners beat him. “In the cell I lost all sense of time. But when the prisoners beat me, I lost my soul.”

He said he opened his eyes to find himself in darkness.

The cell was very small, and the darkness extended into every corner. He tried to stand, and his head hit the ceiling. He sat and began to suffocate.

“There wasn't enough air,” he said, and he almost went mad worrying about it. He struck the walls of the cell with his fists and discovered that he couldn't find where the door was. The walls seemed to be covered in seamless iron in which the door was lost.

He said he was suffocating, that he opened his mouth wide to capture the air.

He said he felt a terrible thirst inside. This was true thirst: True thirst is having no air.

He said it took a while to get used to the lack of air. Then, once he'd regulated his breathing, he relaxed a little and tamed the darkness.

“Do you know what darkness means?” he asked. “No one knows the meaning of the darkness of the grave. Darkness can't be described. A gluey emptiness creeps over your body and seals your eyes and your pores.”

He said he no longer knew who or where he was. Time was lost and with it the man. “To regain my sense of time, I started to count. Eureka! I thought. I opened my ten fingers and started counting. On the count of sixty, I reached a minute. I'd count sixty minutes and reach an hour. But I began to get confused. Had I reached two hours, or was it more? I'd go back to the beginning and count over again. I'd count and the numbers would get confused, and then I couldn't go on any longer and passed into silence.”

He said he waited for daybreak, when they brought him water and food.

He said that the day didn't come. “I didn't have a watch, I had nothing. I was alone in the darkness, with the darkness.”

He said he hit his head on the walls. He said he bled and screamed until he was hoarse. He said he only wanted one thing from them, that they tell him what day and what time it was.

As Samih told his story, the fear would steal into his words, and he'd shudder and say, “That's the worst torment, being deprived of time. Eternity is true agony.”

I asked him what he felt when they took him out of the dark. He was silent for a long time before saying that he felt the beauty of old age. “The prisoner doesn't see himself in the mirror; there are no mirrors there. His only mirror is the eyes of other prisoners.” When he saw his own image in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were struck with terror at how he'd aged, he felt comforted.

“And the beating?” I asked.

“That was my mistake,” he said.

Do you know what Samih did when he left solitary confinement? He joined the prisoners' Sufi circle. He said he started joining in their prayers and their ritual
dhikr
. In fact, he became close to their sheikh, Hamid al-Khalili, until they found out he wasn't a Muslim.

“When Sheikh Hamid found out I was a Christian, I was terrified,” said Samih. “On the mound I wasn't afraid. I thought I'd die on the ice, so I surrendered to the ice; it inhabited my eyes and took me into the whiteness of death. With the sheikh it was a different matter. I think an informer told the sheikh I was a Christian; he said he'd seen my mother with the other visitors, and she was wearing a cross around her neck.”

“Is it true?” asked the sheikh.

Samih didn't know what to answer. All he could do was confess. They pounced on him, but the sheikh raised his hand and they stopped in their tracks. The sheikh approached him.

“I said yes. I couldn't find words to justify my position. How could I, how could I tell him that after the darkness of solitary confinement, I felt the need to be among them?

“He asked me if I was mocking them.

“I said, ‘No, no, I swear.'

“In the midst of the devotees, as their fury took shape around me, a murmur spread. I wished I were dead.

“The sheikh questioned me and I tried to explain, but my words were the cause of my downfall.

“I said I was Christian, but also not, that I believed in God and loved Christ, but still I was . . .

“‘A communist, maybe?' said the sheikh.

“I told him I was a member of Fatah.

“‘So you're an atheist,' said the sheikh.”

This was where Samih made the mistake that almost cost him his life. He said he saw religion as a social phenomenon, an ethic. He said he loved Arabic literature and knew the Koran and pre-Islamic poetry by heart, and wanted to join in their experience.

“But that's not what you told us at the beginning,” said the sheikh.

The sheikh held his hand up and said, “What do you think, brothers?” The brothers, however, rather than responding, attacked. The sheikh managed to extricate himself, but Samih fell beneath their blows and howls.

“On the ice,” said Samih, “when I saw death, I didn't open my mouth. But there, I screamed and wept and was afraid. The circles revolved around me and by the time I opened my eyes, I was in solitary confinement. Then they took me to a new communal cell, where I found Sheikh Hamid, and we became friends.

“I explained to him and he explained to me. He wanted to convert me to Islam, and I wanted to convince him of the mixture of secularism, humanism, and Marxism that I believed in. We parted ways without him converting me or me convincing him, but he came to understand that I hadn't been mocking them and that I loved religious ritual.”

Samih was an intellectual. He'd had two books published, plus a number of articles. He had his own particular theory on Israel, basically that it would collapse from within and that the moment of liberation was near. He'd mention dates. He was convinced that Israel would collapse at the end of the eighties as a result of its internal contradictions. It was difficult to discuss anything with him because he knew everything. He read Hebrew and English and kept an amazing amount of numbers in his head, which he would toss down in front of you so you could do nothing but agree. Naturally, his predictions didn't come true. The only part that came true was that his remains were transported to Ramallah, where he was buried in his family's grave. Samya was the one who arranged it.