The Silence and the Roar (12 page)

In the end, they were persuaded that it was an honest mistake but that nonetheless he bore full responsibility for it even though he worked in a department where nobody was ever responsible for anything. The Comrades, department heads and security agents made things even worse, noting in their reports and the testimonies of witnesses for the case that the man had never been sufficiently loyal or patriotic, that they had once heard him tell a joke about the Party and complain about the price of tomatoes. They sentenced Abu Ahmad to six months in prison, the same period of time he had already spent under interrogation, suffering from further beating and bastinado and electric prods until they let him go, sending him back to work in the same department, only now as a caretaker and under constant supervision and scrutiny.

Suddenly a nurse appeared and asked me to follow her. When Jamil al-Khayyat got up along with me the nurse threw him a look from which he understood that it was time for him to leave. After he told me he would call me sometime soon I shook the selfless man’s hand and said goodbye to him. I followed the nurse as she turned people away in a brusque manner, as if she were offended by
those unprecedented throngs. We went up the stairs to the middle of the first floor, where she rapped on a door and opened it without waiting for a response, inviting me in with a swift flick of her hand. I walked inside and she shut the door behind me.

The room was decorated like an office for the head of the division in the hospital but there was nobody there. I sat down on the chair beside the desk. The bag I was still holding against the bruise had warmed up and the ice had started to melt. I got up and placed it in the wastepaper basket underneath the sink next to the door. The bruise was bluish-wine (a depressing color if there ever was one). I was pulling my arm out of the sling when a sharp pain forced me to re-sling it once again, and I sat there, trying to remain calm. The door opened and in walked the fiftyish doctor who had treated me. When I stood up to shake his hand he stopped and courteously extended his hand to me. He did not sit down at his desk but on the chair next to me, opened a file in his hand and pulled a pen out of his coat pocket. As he got ready to write something down, he asked me, “How’s the hand?”

“As you can see,” I said, showing him the bruise.

He smiled and thanked God it wasn’t broken. I nodded and sighed.

“You didn’t know you were carrying a dead woman, right?” he asked.

“No. Have you figured out who she is?”

“Because we have so many bodies here she’ll have to be sent to be buried at the municipal cemetery unless someone comes to claim her by tomorrow morning.”

“She must have a family, a husband, children,” I said glumly.

“Naturally,” the doctor said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

I looked into his eyes as he fixed a stare on me as if making a complaint about something. We sat like that for a long time, staring at one another without blinking. He calmly glanced at the door and then got up and moved toward it without making a sound. He drew closer to the door, not in a direct line but from the side, and flung it open. There was nobody there. He looked both ways down the hall, shut the door once again and came back smiling about what he had just done.

“You think somebody’s eavesdropping?” I asked him.

“You’re a well-known personality and they wouldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Listen,” he whispered, “I’m about to lose it.”

At first I could not understand what he was trying to say.

“And why are you about to lose it, Doctor?”

“Can’t you see what’s going on? Human beings have absolutely no value whatsoever. Today they brought in more than forty-five bodies, people who were killed by trampling or suffocation in the crowd or errant celebratory gunfire. What do you call that?”

“A tragedy.”

“Are you nervous talking to me? I kept you here so we could be alone. I know very well that you’re a person who’s been beaten down. I want you to know I’m about to lose it.”

“Be careful, what happened to me doesn’t have to happen to you. You can work in silence, without complaining. Otherwise, they’ll come after you, too.”

“I know, but I beg you, give me a name for what’s going on here.”

“A name? Is that all you want from me?”

“I know we can’t be fully free in this conversation. I would love to sit with you all day today and talk but I simply don’t have the time. Downstairs there are more than three hundred people who are wounded or who got suffocated at the march. In five minutes they’ll come or page me. Anyway, I’m sure they’re going to write down in their reports how we were alone together in this room.”

“You shouldn’t have taken the risk, Doctor.”

“So I’m begging you, tell me what we should call what’s going on here. Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours. Tell me, I’m begging you!”

I stared into his blazing eyes as they flitted back and forth between the door and me. All he had to do was gasp for air in order to complete the scene. Perhaps this is precisely what would be called Surrealism, I thought. A doctor as old as my mother begging me to name what was going on for him.

“Surrealism, Surrealism,” I found myself repeating.

He received the word from my lips and then happily leaned back in his chair, stared up at the ceiling and hissed repeatedly, “Surrealism, yes, Surrealism. That’s it.”

“Do you feel better now?”

He straightened up in his chair and proclaimed his happiness. “Yes, I feel much better! Thank you for your valuable assistance. We can’t call what’s going on here anything else.”

He was about to get up and thank me again when there was a knock on the door that stopped him, and the door was
opened to reveal that same nurse. “Dr. Raymond, they’re waiting for you downstairs.”

Concealing the happiness that had overwhelmed him just a moment before, he got up and said, “I’m coming right now.”

Then he turned toward me and pointed at the file, putting the pen back in his pocket. “Well then, thank you very much for all this information about that woman, Mr. Fathi, sir.”

I got up to shake his hand. Squeezing it reassuringly, I left the two of them behind me and walked out, down the stairs to the ground floor with all its stenches of corpses and wounded people.

I took a deep breath as soon as I stepped outside the hospital. The streets had become less crowded and the traffic had returned to normal. But the air was dusty and the street and the sidewalks were incredibly filthy. The wind blew softly against the leftover pictures and slogans and scraps of newspapers and empty bags of food, sweeping them along and then spinning them upward as they flew into the air and then came back down to the ground until suddenly the wind would sweep them along once again. The heat had eased up and the breeze was refreshing, even though the ground and the walls were still warm. I inhaled deeply and blew out all the smells of putrescence and disinfectants from the public hospital that had hung suspended in my lungs. I was glad not to be Dr. Raymond, who was afraid of being spied on and of reports, having to hunt for a name for what has been going on just in order to calm himself down. He wanted
to trade that label I had offered him for the many hours he had spent trying to understand what was happening. Now he is submerged in stenches once again even as I set off, free, breathing in the dusty air. But I had first left Lama’s flat to deal with other matters! If Doctor Raymond had had to confront them instead of me, he would have worried about finding more than just a name for what was going on.

I looked down at my left wrist and saw that my watch was missing. I must have lost it in the crowd or perhaps it got smashed the moment that woman’s head landed on my hand. I asked someone passing by what time it was and he told me six thirty. I decided to go to the Party building to pick up my ID card because the march was over and perhaps the Comrades had made it back to base. I hailed a cab and told him my destination: the Party building.

The radio in the taxi was recounting the events of today’s march and every minute or so the broadcaster announced they were going to replay the address the Leader gave on this awesome day. The radio was only broadcasting a meaningless roar, noise in which all sounds get jumbled together, until the voice of the broadcaster emanated from the studio to announce the rebroadcast of the speech every few minutes. I asked the driver to switch off the radio. He wheeled around in disbelief. I repeated my request.

“Please turn off the radio.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes, turn it off.” He said it wouldn’t be his responsibility.

“Your responsibility?”

“That’s what I said, my responsibility.”

He shrugged his shoulders, pursed his lips and switched off the radio. He drove me to the gigantic Party building and parked in a parking lot far away from the guards who were armed to the teeth. I paid him and then asked him to turn the radio back on. He switched it on and I got out. As he drove away my ears caught the voice of the Leader beginning his speech.

I
N ORDER TO GET INSIDE
the Party building you have to show your ID card. Several times I told the Comrades at the door that I had come there to reclaim my ID card, which the Comrades had taken away from me at the march. Still for some reason not a single one of them was able to grasp the situation. The one sitting inside the door called for another Comrade and I had to explain the problem all over again. But he didn’t allow me to enter either, calling instead for an even higher-ranking Comrade who showed up in order to resolve the problem but ended up making it even more complicated. After hearing my problem, instead of letting me in he asked who had allowed me to get as far as I had in the first place. When I asked him what I was supposed to have done, he told me I should have waited far outside the building. Finally they allowed me to enter and I walked through the door into a wide interior lobby that was filled with armed Comrades who were all drinking tea out of small glasses and glued to the TV set hanging on the wall airing a video of one of the Leader’s speeches.

Two Comrades showed me the way to the Comrade who had been assigned to my case. We walked to the end of the lobby and then descended a wide staircase that wound
around several times. We passed by many other Comrades who were just like them. The Party building teemed with armed men who occupied every space and stood guard outside every door. I saw speakers installed at every corner, broadcasting the Leader’s speech throughout the place, which reeked of cigarette smoke. The fact that most of the Comrades smoked caught my attention; many of them carried a weapon in one hand and held a lit cigarette in the other. As I mentioned they also seemed to like drinking tea out of small glasses. I never fully understood why they loved smoking and tea so much but this was a small matter compared to my discovery of the building and what was going on inside. It was the first time I had ever been inside a Party compound. Passing by I had never thought about what I would see inside or how it would look, mainly because the roads surrounding it were always so crowded with traffic.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs we were at one end of a vast basement corridor that seemed to go on forever. Its walls were plastered with pictures of the Leader and more than one TV set hung from the ceiling with the Leader gazing out of the screen as he gave his speech. A great many Comrades were coming and going in the basement without taking their eyes off the TV screens. I knew we were at least thirty feet below street level but the ventilation was good and I was surprised to see more than one Mercedes parked in alcoves branching off from the corridor. How did those cars get down there? There must be a secret entrance that runs beneath the building from one of the surface streets, but why had the existence
of such an entrance never occurred to me before? How could I never have seen it? I would venture a guess that one of the car washes, which are typically located underground, must be a secret entrance to the Party building. I noticed some Comrades whispering to one another when they spotted me; they weren’t stingy with casting spiteful looks my way. As far as they were concerned I was nothing but an unpatriotic traitor. I wasn’t concerned with them or with what they thought of me. No, I was much more preoccupied with that strange world in which I found myself submerged.

At last the two men stopped outside a room, and told me to take a seat on a nearby chair. One of them went inside and the other one stayed there, lighting a cigarette and chatting about me with the guard by the door. I took out my pipe, cleaned it out and filled it with some American tobacco, and then started smoking as I leaned back comfortably in the chair. I was actually enjoying what was going on down in that cavernous basement space. The loud sound booming from the television was the one thing that bothered me but I didn’t let it get to me. My day had been exhausting and chaotic enough to shield me against all forms of the roar. The most important lesson I was to learn today was how to ignore noise. I’d like to take a moment to explain this technique so that any readers who are, like me, highly sensitive to loud noises might also benefit. The technique is quite simple. All you have to do is withdraw inside yourself and listen to your own inner voice and forget all about the annoying sounds that constitute the roar. Sitting in that chair down in that basement outside the room where I was about
to be seen regarding the matter of my personal ID card, I started taking long drags on my pipe and then exhaling the tobacco smoke as I listened to my own inner voice reverberate inside of me. I would listen to myself as I talked about things that I enjoy in the world or else responded to specific questions I would ask myself: for example, Do I like springtime in this country? After answering yes or no, I would then demonstrate the soundness of my reply with specific evidence. Do I love this country? Yes. Do I love what’s happening to me presently in this country? Not so much. And so forth and so on.

Talking to oneself may be a sickness but it can be effective in keeping a person from going insane. When I was a young man I used to love to walk the city streets and talk to myself. I would do the same thing as I lay down in bed at night to wait for the angel of sleep to whisk me away. Once I saw someone else walking aimlessly through the streets who was also talking to himself; then he began scolding, berating himself even, laughing and gesticulating the way he might address someone else. I was afraid of becoming like him so I began to monitor myself more closely. Instead of talking to myself I started coming up with stories and narrating them to myself; if I arrived at my destination without getting to the end of the story, I would keep walking, circling around the school or the house or wherever I was going until the story was finished. Only then would I end my walk. I came to realize how talking to oneself can keep a person insulated from his environment and make him more accepting of the world and all its burdens. And so there I was, talking to myself in the basement in
the Party building. At that moment nobody would have been able to guess that I was asking myself whether I love springtime in my country or whether I love the country in general. Alternatively, I might describe what I was seeing to myself. The most beautiful description I could come up with there was of how the Comrades held their weapons. I would say to myself: Look at how this one cradles his rifle, as though it were a little child, or how that one waves it around without fear of it bumping against the wall or anything. There was a crouching Comrade who had laid the rifle on his lap while his hands were busy smoking and drinking tea. Another Comrade made me laugh (in secret, of course) as I very carefully watched how he handled his rifle. He had jammed it in the corner where the floor meets the wall and sat his bum down on the firearm, resting the wooden butt between his thighs, straight up his asshole to be precise, and because he wasn’t very well balanced he started swaying this way and that, as if he were scratching his ass with the butt of the rifle. Look, I said to myself, look, he’s getting off on it!