feet, your legs, your stomach, your rifle yield to the defeat that is seeping in everywhere and is suddenly replacing the rightness of your cause, the songs, the anthems, the sharing of food and caresses, you’ll never be able to cross the mountain, never reach the top of that hill; the wounded are unbearable mirrors and the dead become strangers about whom you wonder, day after day, defeat after defeat, what will become of them—they’re no longer heroes, brothers, just victims, conquered people that history will hide on its bad side in that earth pounded now by the heavy feet of deserters, the boots of abandonment and fear. Everything follows quickly after that: after walking slowly at the front you find yourself walking silently in town, under the betrayed stares of civilians who blame you for their desperate grief, those women in front of their empty houses, those men, who recently, too recently, used to cheer you on, now they all are getting ready to cheer the new conquerors as from the ground they watch the fierce shadows of planes, doing their funereal work and finishing the defeat.
Tonight, Marwan died, boots on his feet, near the airport. He must have smelled the scent of the sea as he died. The heat is unbearable. Apparently Arafat is negotiating. In Hamra, turbulence is at its height. No one understands a thing. The ones who were supposed to be fighting are no longer fighting. The Lebanese left is still defending West Beirut. Marwan is dead. If he had died the day before yesterday, or in May, Intissar would have collapsed. But today she has a ball and chain on her feet, conquered by heat, thirst, and the bombs. The city is suspended in air, no one knows on which side it will fall.
This morning in headquarters there was motionless turmoil. The planes have destroyed a whole group of buildings in Chiah.
It’s unfair and no one can do anything about it. The Russian clodhoppers are so heavy that Intissar feels as if she’s glued to the ground.
She plays at loading and unloading her rifle as she thinks about Marwan. The well-oiled mechanism is reassuring, it’s still working perfectly. A little after noon. At dawn Beirut smelled not of thyme but of burning trash. Yesterday too. She slept in a stairway. Abu Nasser woke her gently around six in the morning. He said: Marwan has fallen.
Now he’s the martyr Marwan. They’ll print posters with his photo and paste them onto the walls of the city. If there’s still a city left. If there’s still anything left to print posters with. If they still have time. If time still exists.
The sea is everywhere. Beirut is an island. Where could they go? Intissar has never left Beirut. She has never slept anywhere but in Beirut. No, that’s wrong, once she slept in Tripoli and, when she was little, a few days in the mountains. Beirut is her island.
Defeat is all the more obvious when no one wants to acknowledge it. Their possible exile is proclaimed as a victory. The Palestinians have gloriously resisted the Israeli army. The resistance continues. The glorious fight for the liberation of Palestine continues. In the stench spread by the bombardments, Intissar wonders whether Palestine really exists. Whether something besides the Palestinians themselves (a piece of land, a homeland) exists, Palestinians who scatter their dead throughout the Middle East like wheat. There are Palestinian graves all over the world, now. And Marwan lying dead somewhere. Intissar closes her eyes to keep back tears of impotent rage. Despite herself she sees again the most horrible corpse of the siege—in Khalde, a combatant crushed by a tank on the road, as easily as a rat or a bird. His faceless head was a flat puddle of reddened hair. The first-aid people from the Red Crescent had had to peel him off of the asphalt with a shovel. Around the body, a circular pool of viscera and blood, as if someone had stepped on a tomato. Palestinians cling to the land.
She goes on playing mechanically with the rifle. Marwan is dead. When she asked Abu Nasser how he had died, he didn’t know what to say. He said: I wasn’t there, Intissar. Abu Nasser has four sons. He was born in Jerusalem. He has a fine greying beard and lives in a big apartment in Raouche.
She’d like to know how he fell. Ya Intissar, ya Intissar, istashhad Marwan. That’s all she knows. She hears the bombings, it’s like everyday music, a drumbeat or heartbeat. The planes are tearing the sky apart. She wishes Marwan a fine death. Without pain, without anxiety, a sudden flight, a disappearance into the sea or into the sun. She sees again Marwan’s hands, Marwan’s smile, feels the absence of Marwan’s mouth, his chest.
She goes out to go to the main command post. Fighters are running, shouting, calling to each other, the battle is still raging, she discovers. At the southern entrance to the city. In the mountain. Everywhere. The Israelis are making statements on the radio, on television. In the South the Shiites welcomed them as liberators. Villages tired of supporting Palestinian fighters. Tired of being poor, bombed, and despised. Cowards. Traitors. Abu Nasser hesitates to send Intissar to the front. She insists. I want to know what happened to Marwan, she says. Did . . . Did they bring back his body? Abu Nasser doesn’t know. His voice catches in his throat. Everything’s going badly, my little one, everything’s going badly. Look for Habib Barghouti and the others, they were with him yesterday. Take care of yourself. I’ll come soon.
Without Marwan she’d never have taken up arms. Defeat would have another taste. She’d be looking desperately for water in the midst of rubble. Or dead at home in Borj Barajne, in unbearable heat, in the burning wind from the bombs. How much time now? Soon nothing of the city will be left. The sea, that’s all. The indestructible sea.
She sees a Jeep full of comrades leaving for the front. The front. That’s a funny word. You defend yourself. You’re besieged. Finally being as close as possible to the Israeli tanks is an enviable position, you don’t risk a napalm bomb or a phosphorus shell. Near the southern part of the city the streets are strewn with debris, charred cars, the heat from explosions drew waves in the asphalt, like a rippling black rug. The civilians are hiding. To the east Israelis are in the museum, where they’ve been fighting for weeks, she thinks. Or maybe just a few days. By the airport too. Yesterday she drank half a bottle of water for the entire day. Bread is rationed. Just thinking about the smell of canned tuna or sardines makes her nauseous.
The only Israeli she ever saw was the corpse of a soldier, fallen in a skirmish. Brown-haired, young, not many things distinguished him from the Palestinian fighters, once he was dead. Only once he was dead. On the other side they have things to drink and eat, weapons, ammunition, tanks, planes. Here there’s nothing but a city stuck between the sky and the sea, dry and burning. They already have Palestine. Beirut is the last star in Palestine’s sky, flickering. And about to go out, to become a meteor and sink into the Mediterranean.
•
“Intissar? Marwan is . . .”
“I know. Abu Nasser told me.”
On the ground floor of a half-destroyed building, fortified by the rubble and fallen rocks from the upper storeys, in the midst of anti-tank rockets and two 30-caliber machine guns, the four Fatah fighters smoke joints, bare-chested. The smoke makes you thirsty. The smell of hashish softens the smell of sweat a little. From time to time one of them looks out onto the street through an opening in the wall. Intissar sits down on the floor. Habib makes as if to pass her the joint, but she shakes her head.
“We’re waiting. No one knows what’s going to happen.”
“How . . . how did he . . . ?”
Habib is a giant of great gentleness, with a childlike face.
“Last night. A little further away, there, at the front. With Ahmad. On reconnaissance just before dawn. Ahmad is in the hospital, lightly wounded. He told us he saw Marwan fall, hit by many machine-gun bullets in the back. He couldn’t bring him back.”
The possibility that Marwan might still be alive makes her heart skip a beat.
“But then how can you be sure?”
“You know how it is, Intissar. He’s dead, that’s for sure.”
“We could call the Red Crescent maybe, so they could go look for him?”
“They won’t come this far, Intissar, not right away in any case. They’ll wait to be sure, to have authorization from the Israelis. There’s nothing to do.”
Habib