Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  *

  They had arranged to meet inside the gallery in case it was raining. The exhibition room was warm and smelled of beeswax polish. Hector’s shoes squeaked as he walked around. There were not many visitors but he worried that he might not recognise Khaled after so many years. He studied the wood-carvings and engravings on display. One copper-plate engraving interested him. It was called The Knight, Death and the Devil. He went up close to examine the techniques which enabled Dürer to engrave the horse with such magnificent swirling lines.

  There was a tentative tap on his arm. Hector turned. The man who faced him had the same slim figure as the Khaled he had first met in Paris, but now he stooped a little and his receding hair was streaked with grey. The long humorous lop-sided face, one eyebrow higher than the other, was still the same. The two men embraced. Khaled spoke first.

  ‘Good to see you. You’ve put on weight.’

  ‘It was the prison diet in Italy.’

  Khaled threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘That’s no excuse. That was light years ago. Shall we look round the exhibition a bit then go and have coffee or a meal or something?’

  *

  They first met under a brilliant blue Paris sky on 13 May 1968 – the day on which a whole nation decided to leave the beaten track. No-one had seen it coming. There had been a few skirmishes throughout the city a few days previously and then millions of workers took to the streets. From the police helicopter hovering overhead it looked as if someone had sprinkled multi-coloured hundreds and thousands in the streets below. Hector was eighteen and on his way back to England from Italy where he was an apprentice printer. He caught the mood of exhilaration as he found himself lifted up and carried along in that outburst of pent-up hope for a new future. Medical workers in their white coats, printers, drivers and workers from the Renault factories had taken over the streets of Paris, each group singing its own songs. A man dressed in a white clown costume clambered onto a traffic bollard with a whistle and pointed the way ahead for the demonstrators. For Hector everything felt clear. His head caught fire and his heart opened up. It was one of those rare moments when people feel they belong to something bigger than themselves, a Dionysiac explosion.

  The march swung round past L’Eglise St Ambroise and Hector was swept along with it. The huge studded doors of the church were open and a wedding was taking place. The bride was visible at the altar in her white dress. Some people broke away from the demonstration and went into the church shouting: ‘Don’t do it. Come and join us. Join the revolution.’

  To Hector’s amazement the bridegroom exchanged brief glances with his bride-to-be and they joined hands and ran together up the stone aisle and out of the church into the open air. The marchers hoisted them up and the couple were carried along on the shoulders of an enormous cheering and baying crowd. The bride leaned backwards in her white dress trying to hold on to the uplifted hands of the crowd and at the same time hold down her skirts, but every time there was a glimpse of her white stockings and garters the crowd roared approval.

  Next to Hector marched a young man with a light brown skin, wearing a djellaba. There was a look of triumph in his eyes. After a while he introduced himself:

  ‘Je m’appelle Khaled. Khaled. Je suis arabe.’

  ‘You’re a what?’ Hector Rossi had been in Paris only two days. His ear was not attuned to the language.

  ‘Je suis arabe,’ Khaled yelled over the noise of the singing crowd. ‘I am an Arab.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hector laughed. He had collar-length tawny hair and pale brown Italianate eyes. His gaze was direct and curious. They shook hands. ‘My name is Hector. You speak English then?’

  ‘I should. I was at school in Berkhamsted until I was twelve. My stepfather is a rich Arab banker called Eddie Sursok. You might have heard of him.’ Khaled held up his hands to his head and wiggled his fingers like devil’s horns. ‘I personally am marching against him and all he stands for.’

  The two young men became instant friends. They were exuberant. That afternoon they went back and smoked kif in Khaled’s shabby apartment which smelled of used cat litter.

  ‘How did you come to go to school in Berkhamsted?’

  ‘My family is Palestinian. They escaped to Tunisia in 1948. I was born there when my mother was only sixteen.’

  Khaled put some Arab music on his old record player and explained how his birth had been a major scandal. He spoke about it with equanimity, shrugging as he told Hector that he did not know who his father was but rumour had it that he was a Scottish soldier, one of the British army left behind to mop up after the North Africa campaign.

  ‘It was a huge disgrace which drove the family briefly to Paris where we lived in luxury in the Avenue Foch. When I was about two my mother, who was still very beautiful, married Eddie Sursok from another wealthy Palestinian family. We went to live in England until I was twelve when that marriage broke up. I was sent to school in Lebanon but hated it. At fifteen I went back to live with my grandparents in Tunisia then came to the Sorbonne as a student. That’s me. C’est moi.’

  That evening the two of them, still chattering, were out of breath as they made their way through the back streets towards L’Odeon Theatre.

  ‘I don’t want to stay at the Sorbonne,’ Khaled announced. ‘I want to go back and see what is happening at home. I live in Tunisia. Apparently loads of resistance fighters are passing through on their way to the Palestinian camps in Jordan.’

  ‘Things are moving in Italy too.’ Hector spoke seriously as if the weight of the world were on his eighteen-year-old shoulders. ‘I’m apprenticed to printers in Milan. When I go back I shall work with the anti-fascists. I would join the Italian Communist Party but it’s a bit stick-in-the-mud.’

  It was eleven o’clock at night when they reached L’Odeon. Hundreds of students and demonstrators were pushing past the theatre-goers and pouring into the building. Khaled and Hector joined them. Inside it was warm and dark and full of people. The interior of the theatre was a seething indistinguishable mass, a swarm of humming bees in the darkness of a hive. A young student spoke from the centre aisle of the theatre. Someone else answered from one of the gilt-edged boxes. The debate flowed backwards and forwards. Arguments swirled to and from the balconies.

  Working lights lit the stage and a thin man with a delicate face stood there giving instructions to the theatre electrician. At that moment the dim lights of the auditorium came on at full strength illuminating the flamboyant portraits on the ceiling, figures from mythology inspired by Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Aristophanes.

  ‘Did you ever see Les Enfants du Paradis?’ Khaled pointed to the stage. ‘That man on the stage is Jean-Louis Barrault.’

  The man on stage in the grey suit gave a cursory look around the auditorium before leaving. Later Barrault was to describe how hurt he had been by accusations that his theatre was for the bourgeoisie and how he had turned the theatre over to the mob for fear that they would otherwise tear it to pieces. For a month Barrault’s theatre was occupied and used as a forum for housewives, shopkeepers, factory workers and intellectuals. Barrault was sacked for turning on the lights.

  ‘In Paris lightning struck,’ said Barrault. ‘The storm came from far away and it is still wandering around the world.’

  By the end of June it was all over and Paris had returned to the daily grind of rumbling metros and commuters travelling to and from work.

  ‘The mistake was to take over the theatres,’ said Khaled when the two friends next met in the Palestinian camp at Irbid. ‘We should have taken over the law courts.’

  *

  It was October 1970, a month after Black September, when the two met again in Jordan. At Khaled’s invitation Hector arrived at the Palestinian camp in Irbid by truck late one night. Someone took Hector to one of the tents and showed him to a camp-bed the width of a stretcher alongside the thirty other young soldiers who slept there. Despite being wrapped in two blankets he was freezing cold. He shiv
ered with excitement. At last he was on the front-line of a just war. Two youths waited outside with their hands on the pins of their grenades in case Hussein’s army or the Bedouins arrived. Somewhere behind his head he could hear the torrent of an icy running stream. That night he could not sleep and spent most of it propped up on his elbow staring through the open flap of the tent. He watched as the black sky became tinged with blue and the Milky Way dissolved into an Arabian morning.

  Early next morning Khaled approached him with his hand held out. He wore a green combat shirt and camouflage trousers. Khaled was now a commander in charge of fifteen men. Hector noticed a new gravitas about his friend since their time together in Paris. He invited Hector over to a trestle table where they tucked into pancakes, lettuce, boiled eggs, cheese and sardines. Globules of light filtered through the trees and bobbed around on the rough wooden table-top. Hector fished in his pocket to find the ‘permission’ papers signed by Arafat. Khaled waved them away.

  ‘I know. I’m to take care of you and see you across the border when you leave. The Syrian border is like a sieve. Any amount of people come streaming through. But you have to know when. Sometimes the authorities shut down the exit points.’

  In the bright sunshine the two of them talked against a constant drumming noise from tents flapping in the breeze. ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ by the Stones blared out from a radio. Khaled was tired from being on duty all night but his manner was open and friendly:

  ‘What’s happening in Europe?’

  ‘Bombs and strikes all over the place. Northern Ireland has gone up in flames. Have you heard of Gladio? It’s an Italian government plan connected with NATO. It’s neo-fascist. I’m involved in organising a defence in Milan to fight against it. Some comrades have gone underground. That’s why I’m here. You said come for a visit but I also need training with arms and explosives.’

  Khaled grinned at the earnest face of his friend who still wore his dark honey-coloured hair at the collar-length fashionable in Europe.

  ‘You look like Mick Jagger. Where did you get that jacket? I want one. I can organise arms training for you. Just the basics anyway.’

  They were like lovers, serious and chaste but speaking only about explosives: Kalashnikovs, grenades, rocket-launchers, remote control mechanisms, gelignite, fuses. The conversation resembled the language of love with its meaningful glances, tenderness and offers of help, tips and advice. It was love, in its own way.

  At that moment the exchange was broken by a boy of not more than fourteen who passed behind Khaled, swinging his rifle as casually as a young girl swings her handbag, and who clipped him playfully on the back of the head. Khaled leaned back in his chair and acknowledged the boy with a friendly touch on the arm then turned to Hector. He gestured around him at the other young soldiers.

  ‘For me, this was bound to happen. Everything was so dull when I went back to Tunisia after Paris. I was helping out as a waiter in my grandparents’ hotel in Sfax.’ Khaled pulled a face of mock despair. ‘Tunisia is a nation of waiters. Head waiters, hotel waiters, restaurant waiters, café waiters. I was in a café with a friend one day when a hump-backed old waiter in a black jacket passed by our table. “That’s my destiny if I stay here,” said my friend. “Your family is rich. But I will end up like him.” I just said: “Let’s go.”’ Khaled laughed. ‘It was a hot afternoon. I went back to the house and grabbed some stuff. I set off with that same friend while my grandfather was snoring on his back taking his two o’clock siesta. We jumped on a train. Ticket inspectors always look the other way for people like us. Twenty-four hours later I was here with the fedayeen.’

  Later that morning a young fedayeen called Wazir taught Hector some elementary techniques with munitions. Hector pushed his hair behind his ears and squatted in the sand behind the tents. The grit penetrated his clothes and a warm breeze blew tiny dust-devils into his face. Wazir showed him how to load and handle a variety of handguns; how to make incendiary devices with non fire-suppressed fertiliser, sugar and sulphuric acid, and how to use them to set off gelignite; how to make clock-timed devices with resistance wire and batteries. Hector wanted experience with machine guns but there were none available so he learned how to make up cartridges for shotguns. He practised pouring small amounts of grey glittering gunpowder into cartridge cases and rolling the wad of thick tissue to insert in the cartridge, tamping it down to make sure it was a tight fit. Then came the little balls of shot. Then another wad of tissue and finally the rest of the cap was fitted over it. That night in the tent with the help of a torch under his blanket he studied the notes and diagrams he had made, panicking that he would get it wrong and forget how everything worked.

  Two days later Khaled himself drove Hector to the border and they said goodbye.

  ‘Good luck. I’ll keep in touch whenever possible,’ said Khaled, his asymmetrical face breaking into a grin as he waved goodbye from the window of the truck. ‘Send me that Dusty Springfield album.’

  *

  Many years later, when Hector looked back on the way they all gambled so freely with their lives – tossing cigarette packs, cartridges and grenades between each other as casually as if they were fielding in a ball game – he reflected on how those brushes with death seemed to give the young fighters an airy elegance and lightness that made them almost skyborne – as if they were eating air. Fleet, breathtaking decisions were taken easily with a light heart and unshakeable certainty. They were not weighed down with personal plans. They possessed nothing. Hector wondered whether that lightness existed amongst them all because they had no future.

  *

  Hector and Khaled ambled through the gallery studying the exhibits. Khaled called Hector over to look at a wood engraving.

  ‘Here. Come and look at this.’

  The work that had caught Khaled’s attention was entitled The Four Avenging Angels of the Euphrates. Khaled raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘Do you still feel the same about things?’

  They sat down together on a bench in front of the artwork and regarded the scene of angels bent on slaughter. Hector shifted his raincoat from over one arm to the other.

  ‘I’m not active now but I believe in the same things.’ He looked at Khaled and smiled. ‘Once the political bug has bitten it’s impossible to remove it from the bloodstream. I feel sorry for youngsters now. They have nothing to believe in. It’s not their fault. A huge sand-blanket of commercial pragmatism has fallen over them. Still, you can’t buck the times you are born in. I’ve learned that people are more like their times than like their parents.’

  Khaled got to his feet. Hector stretched and joined him. Khaled noticed an unfamiliar scar on Hector’s lower lip.

  ‘What’s the story with the scar?’

  ‘The Italian police. They gave me electric shocks. I bit through my lip. The ridiculous thing is that it happened when I was anticipating another shock and before they actually gave it to me. I’m fine except that I can’t bear to use an electric toothbrush or shaver.’

  Khaled put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry. We all had problems in those years.’ He stopped and frowned for a moment. ‘The trouble is that when you’ve invested your suffering in an idea, you become unwilling to give up that idea. Everything in the world just seems to confirm it.’

  *

  They found a cheap Italian restaurant just off Leicester Square full of bright plastic surfaces, fairy lights and cheerful clatter. Khaled broke off part of a bread roll and dipped it into his minestrone as he spoke:

  ‘I left the Middle East for good after Beirut in 1982. My wife Nabila was killed there. It was hopeless. We’d all been heading into a web of treachery and deceit woven by the Israelis, the Jordanians, Bedouins, Syrians, Lebanese Phalangists – the whole blasted lot of them. Fatah was corrupt.’ There was an air of humorous exasperation as he spoke. ‘I should have realised that in the very beginning when I saw the Palestinian taxi driver calmly taking down the picture of King Huss
ein stuck in the front window of his cab and replacing it with one of Yasser Arafat as he neared the camp.’

  Khaled exhibited a moment’s bitterness.

  ‘The invisible Palestine. The phantom nation. The fulcrum around which the whole of the Middle East turns. Everybody is frightened of a people without a country. I had a dream just before I left. I dreamed of graves falling from an aeroplane. And suddenly I saw all my comrades as if they did not have their own shadows, the shadow of a human figure, but instead they had the rectangular shadow of a grave at their feet. I looked down at my own feet and saw that I still had my own properly formed shadow. I left while there was still time.’

  A Ukrainian waitress with a chalk-white face and a vicious slice of red hennaed hair that swung across her forehead cleared their plates. Khaled smiled a sad one-sided smile then immediately cheered up.

  ‘I married again ten years ago. I’m living in Hamburg. We have three children. I’m happy. I speak good German – with the verbs at the end of the sentences. I work for a software company. It’s not much. And I’m a cinemaniac now. I love movies. I swap old for new. Well, we live in the age of image. Now I understand why all those photographers got us to stand on a rock with a Kalashnikov and the desert sun setting behind us before they flew off to cover the Oscars.’ He shook his head in rueful amusement.

  ‘What about you?’

  Hector frowned.

  ‘Well, it’s a long time since revolution was in the air – and a lot of air freshener used by governments ever since to get rid of the aphrodisiac smell of it. What am I doing now? Just working quietly in a small firm of printers and bookbinders in Kent. I’m still married to the same woman, Barbara. We have a young Down’s syndrome daughter. She came late and she’s adorable. My wife says that we were all losers with pie-in-the-sky ideas – that all revolutionaries end up dead or in jail and that after every revolution comes the guillotine. I used to argue with her. I don’t any more.’