Bone Ash Sky (61 page)
Issa’s voice was frail, intimate. Selim shocked himself by sobbing.
‘I don’t care if you kill me. Just let me speak to Sanaya.’
There was silence at the other end of the line. Selim brought the receiver closer to his mouth, stood up as best he could and yelled into it. ‘Sanaya! Listen to me! I’ve been wrong. Everything’s wrong. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do.’
He put the receiver down on its cradle, whispered, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
A
fter finishing a new article by working solidly for five hours, I perch on my stool at Che Guevara’s, imagining commuters hurrying back to work from their afternoon naps, shopkeepers pulling up cranky roller doors, unfurling awnings. Arranging displays of fruit or flowers or lining up cups of Arabic coffee. Like so many open wounds.
Stop it,
I tell myself.
Don’t be so negative.
A day of writing and no human contact always does this to me, makes me cynical: all that work with the awful possibility of it slipping straight into the void, never to be seen. I’ve put aside the article about the Sabra-Shatila massacres; my editor needs a travel piece about Beirut for the weekend supplement, its history and architecture, a paean to the city full of post-war hope.
I steady myself to read the information I found yesterday and photocopied at the American University library. Somehow I feel these reports might contextualise the situation of the prisoner Sayed Ali, help me understand what I need to do.
I order olives and bread from the barman, at the same time knowing I won’t be able to eat them. There are sliced cucumbers and chunks of white cheese on the countertop, free meze that have obviously been there all day. The smell is overpowering. I try to read through claims made by Human Rights Watch, the Israeli Human Rights Coalition, Amnesty International statistics on prisons in the Occupied Territories, as well as in occupied south Lebanon.
I called Sayed Ali this morning, ostensibly to ask him if there was anything I was allowed to bring when I come to conduct the interview. He’s being held in the south of Lebanon at the Khiam Detention Center, prior to a mention hearing, when the judge will allocate a date and place for the court case. Sayed said he expected to be sent to the Russian Compound in West Jerusalem after the relevant documents were exchanged, unless his defence lawyer could think of a good reason why he should stay in occupied territory to be tried.
Not that there is any virtue or respite in being held in occupied territory. I’ve now read all the reports: Lebanese and Palestinians detained without charge, teachers, clerics, teenagers, journalists just like me. The ‘clean’ beatings to the head and belly with rubber hoses, sandbags, open hands, jets of water, beatings that leave no visible marks. The videotaped rapes and threats of blackmail, so there’s no chance the victims will ever tell their families, preoccupied with their unrelenting shame. Sleep deprivation for weeks as an interrogation technique, intimidation at gunpoint, humiliation at the hands of young, female Shin Bet agents, detainees hooded and made to stand wet and naked for hours in the air-conditioned cold of their cells. Swelling feet, dehydration, bursting kidneys. Again, there are no bruises, no blood. Nothing to point the finger at. Little food. Less water. I had an image of Sayed Ali being tortured in this way, but the calm masculinity of his voice on the phone belied it.
‘Anything allowed in?’ I asked.
‘For people like me? With American friends? With media scrutiny? A lot. For the other unfortunates, not much at all.’
I was silent.
‘Packaged food,’ he continued. ‘Magazines. Smokes. Marlboros, if you can get them.’
He seemed modern, educated, his Arabic accent barely recognisable when he spoke English. I asked him for details of his lawyer, legal aid provided by the Israeli government, wrote down the phone numbers of his university professors, the Pakistani man he worked for in America, selling sweets and chewing gum and cigarettes between lectures. He was born in the Sabra-Shatila camp but spent his final college year in New York on a scholarship arranged by Hezbollah. He’d been studying Industrial Design. I asked him what made him come back.
‘The Americans wouldn’t let me stay,’ he replied.
There was nothing I could say to that. I didn’t want to probe any further about his alleged crime and incarceration, at least not before I managed to contact his lawyer, ask more questions of Bilqis, of Amal, his teachers and friends. I made to end the conversation then, unwilling to implicate myself. And he had already mentioned that the guards were listening, and that the phone was more than likely tapped.
‘Shin Bet and Mossad crawling all over this place,’ he whispered. ‘They train the jailers.’
Yet there was one thing Sayed said that kept me there and continues to stay with me now. I asked him if he was at all religious. He hesitated before he spoke and I grew impatient at the silence, as if he were falsely striving for dramatic effect. When he finally spoke he hardly answered my question.
‘Well, Islam means surrender, you know? I never believed it as a kid in the camp. What, submit to our oppressors? I was fighting them back then with stones and taunts and rotting vegetables, since I was six years old. And I’m not surrendering now.’
Sayed seemed unafraid yet acceptant of his privations: a dangerous combination. I turn back to my notes, give up after reading three paragraphs. I’m not taking in a single word. I lean both elbows on the table, look around, can’t see any of the commuters I take such pleasure in conjuring. The tiny bar has red plywood in place of windows, for no reason I can imagine. Instead I look around the room, as I have so many times before, at the smoke-obscured posters of Che and Fidel, Marx and Lenin, and the former Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt darkening the walls.
I stop here most evenings now, ever since Chaim first introduced me to the place weeks ago. I usually arrive at six and drink one or two shots of arak, feeling that the alcohol settles my stomach for my one meal of the day – my poor stomach that has protested at the very air I breathe in Beirut. It can only be that; I drink bottled water, boil everything I eat to death, take supplements like a good American. I wonder why my stomach can’t remember I was in fact born here, lived here for sixteen years. Instead it reacts with the flutter of every tourist: the drawing-in of breath, the surrender to blackness, the rush to the toilet, then such fleeting relief.
‘What have you been writing today, little Miss?’
The barman leans his mutton-red elbows on the glass surface, trying to peer over my shoulder. I note his low-slung gun with a shiver of apprehension, as I do every time I see it.
‘I’m trying to find a Samaritan to interview. Do you know any?’
‘Aren’t they all in the Bible? Long dead now.’
Chaim pushes open the heavy doors and the barman retreats. He leans to kiss me on the cheek and orders a drink in that way he always does, with a crook of his finger and a nod.
‘What’s he saying about the Bible?’
‘I want to find some Samaritans. There are about five hundred of them left.’
‘They’re Jews, aren’t they? I might be able to find someone my mother knows.’
‘They speak Arabic but pray in Hebrew. I don’t know if they’re Muslim or Jewish. Maybe some hybrid of the two.’
‘Hybrid of the two? How can they believe in Mohammed being the Prophet and be Jewish as well? And why would that be interesting enough for an American paper to pick up?’
‘Such a potent symbol of peace, Chaim! They claim to be both Palestinian and Israelite from way back.’
‘Rubbish. Impossible.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘It’s just an outlandish claim. They must be cracked. How can they be both? It goes against what this whole conflict is about. Either they’re Jewish or Muslim. Either they got to Israel thousands of years ago as Jews or they didn’t. Who cares which language they pray in?’
He downs his beer. ‘Listen, Anoush. I’m an Israeli, and I live in Lebanon. I identify with Arabs, and the Palestinian cause. But no matter what I do, no matter how sensitive and helpful I am, nothing changes the fact that I’m Jewish and Israeli first.’
I decide not to argue; he could be right for once. Then I catch myself in my cynicism. For once? He’s right most of the time, and I already begrudge it. Especially when he speaks of the conflict, of the need not to hate. He’s right. And I’m resentful. Are we becoming an old married couple – after only a few weeks?
‘Want another drink?’
I nod, finishing my arak. Chaim comes back with another two glasses and a bowl of pumpkin seeds.
‘What about the story you had about that terrorist guy?’
‘I don’t know if I believe he’s innocent.’
‘Only one way to find out.’
Sayed walks down the corridor to meet the journalist woman they call Anoush Pakradounian. She seemed okay on the phone but not the least bit compassionate of his plight. Yet she’s been sent by the family. Aunt Bilqis vouched for her. ‘She’s sensitive to our cause; she could get you released.’ She hadn’t said any more. Wasn’t her name familiar? But his aunt said she was trustworthy, was even born in Beirut. She’s Christian – he knows that. Armenian, Orthodox, Western, no matter where she was born. She told him she spent her college years in America, just as he had for that one anxious year, along with his brief stint at a
madrassa
in Peshawar, learning the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence and how to assemble a dirty bomb from ordinary household substances. The Harvard of Al Qaeda, some would call it.
He sighs. Such a long time ago it seems now, so many fine ideals, so many dreams ago. He adjusts the regulation pants around his crotch. Sniffs his underarms. Wouldn’t do to give the wrong impression. He needs her to believe him. Does he believe what he’s saying himself? Maybe. He didn’t do it. But he would have done it if he’d had half a chance. He sits on the ripped plastic chair provided for him and waits.
I go through my notes on the bus taking me south to Sidon. The driver stops for a toilet break at a pastry shop and passengers troop back in a reek of rosewater, holding boxes of cakes. One veiled woman offers me a crumbly pistachio biscuit like the kind Lilit would make. I smile, refuse. My stomach is churning with dread.
Again, I read the legal report on Sayed Ali. I had a hard time finding any credible information on him: searching the Web, finding his college records – he was a middling student – talking to the infuriatingly impenetrable Israeli defence lawyer from legal aid, appealing directly to the Israeli prosecution, trawling through old newspapers on file. I talked to a committee that supports Lebanese prisoners in Israel. They were helpful, then roughly realistic: ‘You can’t help him.’ I left their offices in a plummet of despair.
The report eventually arrived from legal aid, a photocopy so bad I can hardly make out the words. It doesn’t reveal anything incriminating of Sayed. I try to read through to the end but it’s hard to concentrate; the sun gives me a headache. I lean back, close my eyes. By far the most important information thus far has been volunteered by Bilqis and Amal, by cousins and uncles with explicitly divided motivations. Some, I soon realised, were out to blacken Sayed’s name, perhaps to avoid any investigation of their own activities. The old grocer in the camp was too obviously effusive, the sort of man giving cash freely to Islamic charities whose funds went straight to the training camps and bombing operations. Others pronounced the facts so slowly and carefully, with such close attention to detail, that I was wary of disbelieving them.
Fatwas against Israel and the United States faxed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi dissident, were found buried under Amal’s shed in the camp. Amal and Bilqis both admitted this. Sayed allegedly transmitted the faxes throughout Lebanon to other operatives last year via email. Also found was a CD-ROM version of a key four-hundredpage text,
The Encyclopaedia of the Afghan Jihad
. The most damning evidence of all: Sayed knew the supposed operational leader of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, personally. Thus he is implicated, along with some one hundred other Middle Eastern men, as a co-conspirator. This could mean any involvement ranging from financing to recruiting, to engineering to keeping records, or being an unpaid cook in a training centre in Syria or Pakistan.