Karnak Café (8 page)

“With that my hopes of being released perked up again.

“ ‘You're still not saying anything,' he continued, ‘out of respect for the sanctity of friendship, no doubt.' For a
moment he just sat there, but then he went on, ‘It's that same faith in the power of friendship that makes us want to be your friends as well.'

“When was he going to order my release? I wondered.

“ ‘Be a friend of ours,' he said. ‘You told us you were devoted to the revolution. I believe you. So why don't you be one of our friends? How do you like the idea?'

“ ‘I'm delighted, sir.'

“ ‘We're all children of the same revolution. We're honor-bound to protect it with all due vigor, isn't that so?'

“ ‘Of course.'

“ ‘But there has to be a positive attitude as well. The friendship we require has to be a positive one.'

“ ‘I've regarded myself as a friend of the revolution from the very beginning.'

“ ‘So how would you feel if you learned that the revolution was being threatened? Would that make you happy? Would you keep your mouth shut about it?'

“ ‘Certainly not!'

“ ‘That's exactly what we're asking for. You'll be going to see a colleague of ours who'll tell you the proper way to do things. But I'd like to remind you that we're a force that is in complete control of things. There are no secrets from us. Friends are rewarded, and traitors are punished. That's the way it is.' ”

Isma‘il's face clouded over as he recalled this particular incident. If anything, he now looked even more miserable than before.

“Could you have said no?” I asked, trying to relieve his misery a bit.

“You can always find some excuse or other,” he said, “but there's no point.”

So that is the way he emerged from his imprisonment,
an informer with a fixed salary and a tortured conscience. However hard he struggled with himself to conceptualize his new job in terms of his strong ties to the revolution, he always ended up feeling utterly appalled at what he was doing.

“When I met Zaynab again,” he said, “for the first time ever I felt like some kind of stranger. Now I had a private life of my own about which she neither knew nor was supposed to know anything.”

“So you kept it from her, did you?”

“Yes. I was following direct orders.”

“Did you really believe they had that much authority over you?”

“Absolutely! I certainly believed it. You can add to the equation the terror factor that had totally destroyed my spirit, and also my own profound sense of shame. I couldn't manage to convince myself that honor meant anything any more. I had to act in a totally reckless manner, and that was no easy matter when you consider not only my moral make-up but also my spiritual integrity. I started meandering around in never-ending torment. What made it that much worse was that, as far as I was concerned, Zaynab was a changed person too. She seemed to be overwhelmed by a profound sense of grief; the way she kept behaving provided no clue as to how she was going to get out of it. That made me feel even more of a stranger to her.”

“But that was all to be expected, wasn't it?” I commented. “Things would have improved eventually.”

“But I never caught even a glimpse of the Zaynab I had once known. She had always been so happy and lively; I thought nothing could ever dampen her spirit. But something
had. I tried offering her encouragement, but one day she stunned me by saying that I was the one who needed encouraging!”

The week after Isma‘il had been released, something absolutely incredible had happened. They had left the college grounds and were walking together.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“To the Karnak Café for an hour or so, then I'll go home.”

“I'd like to walk alone with you for a while,” she said, almost as though she were talking to herself.

He imagined that she had a secret she wanted to share with him. “Let's go to the zoo, then,” he suggested.

“I want it to be somewhere safe.”

Hilmi Hamada solved the problem for them both by inviting them up to Qurunfula's apartment (which was his as well). He left the two of them alone.

“Qurunfula will get the impression we're up to something,” he said in a tone of innocent concern.

“Let her say what she likes!” replied Zaynab disdainfully.

He was not quite sure what to do. He took her hand in his, but she grabbed his and raised it to her neck. Their lips came together in a long kiss, and then she gave herself to him.

“The whole thing was a complete surprise,” he confided to me. “I was thrilled, of course, but at the same time I couldn't help worrying. A number of unfocused questions formed a cluster inside my head. I almost asked her why she had decided to do it now, but didn't.”

For a moment we just looked at each other.

“Maybe things had stirred her up?”

“Could be.”

“Afterwards I regretted what I'd done. I blamed myself for taking advantage of a moment of weakness when she herself was obviously in a state of collapse as well.”

“Did it happen again?”

“No.”

“Neither of you thought of trying?”

“No. On the surface our ties remained strong, but something inside, in the very depths of our souls, had started to come apart.”

“What a peculiar situation!”

“It felt like a lingering death. From my side, there are things that can explain it. But where she's concerned, it's a total mystery to me.”

“I noticed a change in your relationship while we were at the Karnak Café, but I thought it was just something temporary that would blow over.”

“I asked her what she had had to go through during her short time in prison, but she assured me it had all been short and trivial. From this point on, our beliefs in the revolution were contaminated by a deep-seated anger. We were much more willing to listen to criticism. The enthusiasm was gone; the spark was no longer there. Sure enough, the basic framework was still in place, but what we kept saying was that the style had to be changed; corruption had to be eradicated, and all those sadistic bodyguards had to go. Our glorious revolution had turned into a siege.”

One evening they had discussed the subject again with Hilmi Hamada.

“I'm surprised you can still believe in the revolution!” Hilmi had said.

“Just because the body has bowels,” Isma‘il had replied, “doesn't diminish the nobility of the human mind.”

“Aha,” commented Hilmi sarcastically, “now I can see that, like everyone else, you resort to similes and metaphors whenever your arguments are weak!”

He had looked at them both. “It's time for us to do something,” he went on.

He showed them a secret pamphlet that he and some of his colleagues were circulating.

“I was absolutely astonished at his frankness,” Isma‘il told me. “Or, more accurately, I was stunned. I dearly wished I had never heard him say it. I remembered my secret assignment that required me to report him immediately. The very thought of it made my entire universe start to shake. The reality of the deep abyss into which I was falling now became all too apparent to me.

“By now the two of us had been talking for well over an hour; Hilmi was doing the talking while I sat there or made a few terse comments. I was completely at a loss and at the same time felt utterly disconsolate.

“ ‘Stop those activities of yours,' I told him, ‘and tear up that pamphlet!'

“ ‘What a joker you are!' he scoffed. ‘This one isn't the first, and it certainly won't be the last.'

“We left his house at about ten and walked in silence. By now the time we were spending alone together was agonizing and difficult for both of us. We parted company. She needed to go back to the tenement building, while I felt like going to the Karnak Café. I wandered around the streets, unable to make the fateful decision. All the time I was feeling scared, scared for me and for Zaynab as well. In the end I made no decision, but returned to the tenement building at about midnight. I threw myself down on the bench in the courtyard without even taking my clothes off. I told myself that I faced a choice: either make the decision or go out of
my mind. Even then I couldn't make up my mind. I postponed things till the morning, but I didn't get any sleep at all. I'd hardly fallen asleep when they came for me.”

“The security police, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“That very same night?”

“Yes, the same night.”

“But that's staggering, unbelievable!”

“It's magic. The only explanation I have is that they must have been watching us both and listening in from a distance.”

“But, in any case, you had decided not to report your friend,” I said, trying as best I could to give him a bit of consolation.

“I can't even claim that much,” he replied. “After all, I had decided not to decide.”

And that is how his third prison term came about. Before dawn had even broken he found himself facing Khalid Safwan again.

“You've betrayed our trust in you,” said Khalid Safwan. “You failed the very first test.”

Isma‘il said nothing.

“Very well,” he went on. “We never force anyone to be friends with us.”

He was given a hundred lashes and then thrown into the cell again, that eternal darkness.

Isma‘il then proceeded to tell me about Hilmi Hamada's final battle. They said he died in the interrogation room. He had both commitment and guts. The answers he gave them stunned them. They started hitting him and in a rage he tried to retaliate. A guard pummeled him with blows until he fainted. It then emerged that he was already dead.

“I languished in that awful dark cell,” he said. “I've no idea how long it went on, but I just seemed to fade into the darkness.”

One day he was summoned again. He assumed that he would be seeing Khalid Safwan, but this time there was a new face. He was informed that he would be released.

“I'd found out everything that had happened even before I left the building.” He paused for a moment. “From beginning to end,” he went on, “I heard every single detail about the flood.”

“The June War, you mean?”

“That's right. May, June, even the fact that Khalid Safwan had been arrested.”

“What a time that must have been.”

“Just imagine, if you can, how it felt to me.”

“I think I can.”

“Our entire world had gone through the trauma of the June War; now it was emerging from the initial daze of defeat. I found the entire social arena abuzz with phantoms, tales, stories, rumors, and jokes. The general consensus was that we had been living through the biggest lie in our entire lives.”

“Do you agree with that?”

“Yes, I do, and with all the vigor used in the torture that had tried to tear me limb from limb. My beliefs in everything were completely shattered. I had the feeling that I'd lost everything.”

“Fair enough. By now though you've gone beyond that phase, haven't you?”

“To a certain extent, yes. At least I can now raise some enthusiasm for the revolution's heritage.”

“And how were things for Zaynab?”

“The same as for me. At first she had very little to say, then she clammed up for good. I can still vividly recall our first meeting after I was released. We embraced each other mechanically, and I told her bitterly that we would have to get to know each other all over again. We were both faced with an entirely new world and had to deal with it. She told me that, in such a scenario, she would be presenting herself to me as someone with no name or identity. I told her that I could now understand the full meaning of the phrase ‘in the eye of the storm,' to which she replied that it would be much better for us if we acknowledged our own stupidity and learned how to deal with it, since it was the only thing we had left. When I told her that Hilmi Hamada had died in prison, she went very pale and spent a long time buried in her own thoughts. She told me that we were the ones who had killed him; not only him, but thousands like him. Although I didn't really believe what I was saying, I replied that we were really the victims. After all, stupid people could be considered victims too, couldn't they? Her reply came in an angrily sarcastic tone, to the effect that it all depended on quite how stupid people had actually been.

“And then, as you well know, everyone fell into the vortex. We were all assailed by various plans: plans for war, plans for peace. In such a stormy sea all solutions seemed like a far-off shore. But then there came that single ray of hope in the emergence of the fedayeen.”

“So you believe in them do you?”

“I'm in touch with them, yes. Actually I'm seriously thinking of joining them. Their importance doesn't lie simply in the extraordinary things they're doing; equally significant are the unique qualities they possess, as clearly shown by these events. They're telling us that the Arabs are not the
kind of people others think they are, nor indeed the kind of people they themselves think they are. If the Arabs really wanted it, they could perform wonders of courage. That's what the fedayeen believe.”

“But does Zaynab agree with you?”

For a long time he said nothing. “Don't you realize,” he eventually went on, “that there's nothing between us any more? All we have left are memories of an old friendship.”

Needless to say, I was anticipating such a response, or something like it, since it corroborated all my own observations and deductions. Even so, I was astonished to hear him describe it that way. “Did it happen suddenly?” I asked.

“No, it didn't,” he replied. “But it's difficult to hide a corpse's stench, even when you've buried it. There came the point, especially after we'd both graduated, when we had to think about getting married. I discussed it with her, keeping all my suppressed and bitter feelings to myself. For her part, she neither refused nor consented; better put, she wasn't enthusiastic. I couldn't fathom the reason why, but I had to accept the situation the way it was. After that, we only broached the topic on rare occasions and no longer felt the need to spend all our time together as we'd done in the past. We used to sit in Karnak Café acting like colleagues, not lovers. I can clearly remember that signs of this situation began to show themselves after our second term in prison, but they began to assume major proportions after the third. It was then that our personal relationship started to flag. It kept gradually falling apart until it died completely.”