Zone. Mathias Enard
She knows he’s right. Now the front is calm. Defeat. She imagines Marwan’s body decomposing in the sun between the lines. A burning tear trickles out of her left eye. She goes to sit down a little farther away, her back to the wall. Here the smell of urine has replaced that of hashish. The comrades leave her to her pain. The silence is terrifying. Not one plane, not one explosion, not one tank engine, not one word. The crushing sun of midday. Marwan a hundred meters away. Maybe the Israelis have picked him up. No one likes having bodies decomposing in his camp. Ahmad. He had to have fallen in the company of Ahmad the coward. Treacherous, cunning, vicious. He might have been lying to cover himself. Maybe he shot himself in the foot. Maybe he killed Marwan. She mechanically loads her Kalashnikov, all the combatants turn around, surprised. The metallic click of the breech resounded like a knife on cement. She wishes the fighting would begin again immediately. She wants to shoot. To fight. To avenge Marwan stretched out over there. At this moment Arafat and the others are with American envoys negotiating their departure. To go where? 10,000 Fedayeen. How many civilians? 500,000 maybe. To go to Cyprus? Algiers? To fight whom? And who is going to protect the ones that stay? The Lebanese? This silence is unbearable, maybe just as unbearable as the heat.
Habib and the others have begun playing cards, without much enthusiasm. The weight of defeat.
Most of the fighters are nomads. Some are escapees from Jordan, who settled in Beirut in the late 1970s; others took part in operations in the South; still others joined the PLO after 1975. All of them nomads, whether they’re children from the camps or refugees from 1948, or from 1967, whom war surprised far from their homes and who were never able to go back. Abu Nasser crossed the Lebanese border on foot. He never returned to Galilee. Marwan neither. Intissar was born in Lebanon, in 1951; her parents, from Haifa, had already settled in Beirut before the creation of Israel. Often, watching the old railroad tracks in Mar Mikhail, she thinks that the trains used to come slowly down the coast to Palestine, passing through Saida, Tyre, and Acre; today the space has grown so much smaller around her that it’s impossible for her to even go to Forn El Chebbak or Jounieh. The only ones that can travel through the region without difficulty are the Israeli planes. Even the sea is forbidden to us. The Israeli navy is patrolling and firing missiles. Habib and the shabab are children of the camps, sons of refugees of 1948. Palestinians from the outside. Palestinians. Who resuscitated this biblical term, and when? The English probably. Under the Ottomans there was no Palestine. There was the vilâyet of Jerusalem, the department of Haifa or Safed. Palestinians had existed for barely thirty years before they lost their territory and sent a million refugees on the roads. Marwan was a militant as soon as he was old enough to speak. Marwan sincerely thought that only war could return Palestine to the Palestinians. Or at least something to the Palestinians. The injustice was intolerable. Marwan was an admirer of Leila Khaled and the members of the PFLP who hijacked airplanes and kidnapped diplomats. Intissar thought you had to defend yourself. That you couldn’t let yourself be massacred by fascists, then by F16s and tanks without reacting.
Now Marwan is dead, his body is turning black under the Beirut sun near the airport, a scant hundred kilometers from his birthplace.
Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence next to Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were joined solely by a common cause and a cold hatred. But the first time she saw Ahmad something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some combatants were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried in triumph. He was handsome, crowned with victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, had confronted a unit of the Israeli army and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion that they produce. The false power they give. What you think you can obtain by using them.
What earthly purpose can the Kalashnikov, which is lying across her thighs like a newborn child, serve now? What can she get with her rifle, three olive trees and four stones? A kilo of Jaffa oranges? Vengeance. She will get peace for her soul. Avenge the man she loves. Then defeat will be consummate, the city will sink into the sea, and everything will disappear.
V
half-starved wretch sublime those Palestinians with the heavy shoes what a story I wonder if it’s true Intissar pretty name I imagine her beautiful and strong, I am luckier than she is, I went to Palestine, to Israel, to Jerusalem I saw paralyzed pilgrims one-armed people one-legged people people with no legs weird people bigots tourists mystics visionaries one-eyed people blind people priests Catholic and Orthodox pastors monks nuns every kind of habit all the rites Greeks Armenians Latins Irish Melchites Syriacs Ethiopians Germans Russians and when they weren’t too busy “fighting over cherry stems while ignoring the cherries” as the French saying goes all these lovely folk mourned the death of Christ on the cross the Jews lamented their temple the Muslims their martyrs fallen the day before and all these lamentations rose up in the Jerusalem sky sparkling with gold at sunset, the bells accompanied the muezzins at top volume the ambulance sirens drowned out the bells the haughty soldiers shouted bo, bo at suspects and loaded their assault rifles one finger on the trigger ready to fire at ten-year-old kids if they had to, fear strangely was in their camp, the Israeli soldiers sweated from fear, at the checkpoints there was always a sniper ready to fire a bullet into the heads of terrorists, staked out behind bags of sand a twenty-year-old conscript spent his day keeping Palestinians in his sights, their faces in his cross-hairs: the Israelis know that something will happen sooner or later, the whole point is to guess where, who, and when, the Israelis wait for catastrophe and it always ends up coming, a bus, a restaurant, a café, Nathan said that was the most discouraging aspect of their work, Nathan Strasberg the one in charge of “foreign relations” for the Mossad took me around Jerusalem and stuffed me with falafel, don’t believe the Lebanese or the Syrians, he said, the best falafel is Israeli, Nathan was born in Tel Aviv in the 1950s his parents, survivors from Łódź, were still alive, that’s all I knew about him, he was a good officer the Mossad is an excellent agency, never losing sight of its objectives, cooperation with them was always cordial, sometimes effective—out of dozens of Palestinian, Lebanese, American sources they were the best on international Islamic terrorism, on Syrian, Iraqi, or Iranian activities, they kept watch over the traffic in arms and drugs, anything that could finance Arab agencies or parties at close range or from a distance, all the way to American and European politics, that was the game, they readily collaborated with us on some cases while trying to block us on others—Lebanon especially, where they thought that any political support for Hezbollah was a danger for Israel, Hezbollah was for them hard to penetrate, nothing at all like the divided, greedy Palestinians: the sources on Hezbollah were fragile not very reliable very expensive and always liable to be manipulated from above, of course with Nathan we never spoke about that, he showed me thrice-holy Jerusalem with a real pleasure, in the old city you heard dozens of languages being spoken from Yiddish to Arabic not counting the liturgical languages and the contemporary dialects of tourists or pilgrims from all over the world, the Holy City could duplicate all joys and all conflicts, as well as all the various cuisines smells tastes from the borscht and kreplach of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman basturma and soujouk in a mélange of religious fervor commercial buzz sumptuous lights chants shouts and hatred where the history of Europe and the Muslim world seemed to wind up despite itself, Herod Rome the caliphs the Crusaders Saladin Suleiman the Magnificent the British Israel the Palestinians confronted each other there argued over the place in the narrow walls that we watched grow blanketed with purple at sunset, over a drink with Nathan at the King David Hotel, the sumptuous luxury hotel that also seemed to be at the heart of the world: famous for the attack of the Irgun Zionist terrorists who had killed a hundred people in 1946, the hotel had also welcomed exiles, unfortunate monarchs dislodged from their thrones by one conflict or another, Haile Selassie pious emperor of Ethiopia driven away by the Italians in 1936 or the disastrous Alfonso XIII of Spain put to flight by the Republic in 1931 who ended his days in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra in Rome, for a few weeks Alfonso XIII occupied a suite on the fifth floor of the King David in Jerusalem where he had a view over the gardens and the old city, I wonder what the Iberian sovereign thought about when he contemplated the landscape, about Christ probably, about the Spanish monarchy that he saw go out in one last golden reflection on the Dome of the Rock and that he hoped to see come to life again: they say