Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  Back at our table, Jumana leaned toward my ear. “I’m pretty sure you just gave every man on this side of the room a hard-on and raised the blood pressure of every woman. We should probably go.”

  I glanced again at Bilal. He was still watching me. Months later, he would tell me, “Seeing you dance, lost in the music, paralyzed me. I couldn’t move or pull my eyes away.”

  In the end, the planning, risks, fear, and backbreaking work we’d undertaken had been for two useful rifles, one 9 mm pistol, and plenty of ammunition from a Russian-Israeli gangster and a Palestinian dope smuggler. Bilal had spent nearly all his savings to acquire what turned out to be a predominantly useless cache of Cold War–era Russian and American small weaponry. There was nothing we could do about it. Although Bilal and Ghassan were angry initially at having been cheated, by the time we all met again their outlook had changed to optimism. I suppose that’s what made them revolutionaries. They were all-in, with everything they had, and that meant rummaging through defeat and disappointment to find a new plan and cause for hope.

  We continued our normal routines for the next couple of weeks, during which Ghassan and Bilal managed to sneak away one Saturday for target practice deep in the forest to muffle the sound. Evading watchful eyes wasn’t easy, but they had done it before and could cover their tracks, especially on the Jewish Sabbath, when most Israeli workers were either home or anxious to be home. Surveillance was done mostly by Palestinian informers. Bilal and Ghassan constantly investigated suspected informers, and they’d succeeded in identifying several over the years. They would use them to throw Israel off their trail, or they’d see to it that they were “dealt with.” The Saturday when they sneaked out for target practice involved them going separately into crowded cities, changing clothes, and disguising themselves as women. “It’s easy, but takes time,” Bilal had said to me. The twins transported the few usable weapons to specific pickup sites, to which they would be returned and remain underground until they were needed.

  They were gone all day. Jumana and I stayed together so as not to worry alone.

  “People are talking,” she said as I threaded her eyebrows.

  “About what?”

  “Us.”

  “They think we’re lesbians?”

  “No, donkey! Me and Ghassan and you and Bilal.”

  “I thought they already gossiped about you and Ghassan.”

  “Not like this. We weren’t as much in the open before.”

  “What do you mean? You’re not open now.”

  “People see us coming to your house a lot. And folks are whispering about you and Bilal living in the house together, even though Hajjeh Um Mhammad is there.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Of course! Ouch!”

  “Look at you. A revolutionary woman who can’t handle the pain of an eyebrow hair getting pulled out.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Liar, you love me.” I gave her a handheld mirror to inspect my handiwork.

  “Looks good.”

  “It looks great. Why don’t you and Ghassan just get married already? Ignore his cranky uncle. It doesn’t even make any sense.”

  “We actually did talk about it. Most of the men in the family are on Ghassan’s side. He’s going to have a talk with his uncle … stand up to him if necessary.”

  “Finally!”

  We didn’t acknowledge it, but I suppose we were both thinking that Ghassan’s sense of urgency in wanting to marry now had to do with the danger growing closer in our lives.

  The weapons remained well hidden for two months until we could meet underground again. It was a late Friday afternoon when the men showed up for their regular card game at Samer’s house. Jumana and I closed the salon as usual and helped each other descend the rope behind the toilet. It was dingier than I remembered, suffocating even.

  We walked through the dim corridor toward the light of battery torches. The shadows of the men on the dirt walls came into view before they did. We whispered greetings and sat on the blanket spread on the ground. The earth was cold beneath my ass.

  “Good idea,” Samer said and sat on his hands when he saw me do it. He was chewing gum vigorously.

  “Ghassan and I think we have come up with a plan. We want to ensure we’re all in agreement …” Bilal began.

  “We can’t tell you the plan, but we need to go over what to say if we’re caught.” Ghassan paused to let his words sink in.

  “If anyone is captured, you must claim innocence and point the finger at me,” Bilal said.

  “And me,” Ghassan added.

  “But under no circumstances, no matter what, can any of us divulge this space,” Bilal said. Only half of his face was illuminated in the shadowy light. I kept trying to glimpse the other half as his head moved and caught the light intermittently. “If they ever find out, this entire neighborhood and everyone in it will be destroyed. Do you understand?”

  Samer began rocking on his hands. “But what are we doing?”

  “For now, you’re to just go about your normal routines,” Ghassan said.

  “We can’t tell you when or where, but we’re going to execute simultaneous operations,” Bilal said. The light moved on his face as he leaned forward, bringing all but one eye into view, as if he wore an eye patch.

  Bilal explained that a small band of trusted comrades from their days in prison also had limited and isolated roles, but the less we knew, the better.

  They had devised a plan to take out Israeli soldiers. “Then what?” I asked. It was a sincere question, but Bilal heard it as something else.

  “We have no then what here.” Bilal the Coldhearted Commander stared me down with a kind of impatience that stung me. “We do what we can to fight them, and endure the consequences, whatever and however heavy they may be.” He leaned forward. The fullness of his face was visible now. He didn’t blink. “That’s it. That’s what we can do.”

  I stared back at him, angry and betrayed. How could he speak to me like that in front of others, especially Ghassan?

  Samer pulled his hands out from under him. “The problem is that it’s so difficult to organize anything bigger when there are traitors running around.”

  “You’re right,” Wadee and Faisal said in unison. Jumana jumped in to say how hard it was to have an organized resistance under the intense surveillance and rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority.

  I was still stewing over Bilal’s words, struggling not to be defensive. So I laughed.

  “We need chaos, not organization,” I said, deliberately not looking at Bilal. “No one is more organized than Palestinians,” I began, mockery framing my words. “Look how we all stand so orderly at checkpoints, obediently producing our little green passes for our masters.” I looked around the room. Bilal had leaned back into the shadows and only a faint outline of his face was visible. “Remember when I fizzed a soda bottle in a soldier’s face? You all thought it was such a big deal, and the soldiers nearly shit their pants. Why?” I answered myself, pushing my neck forward: “Because it was a little bit of chaos in a theater of organization!”

  I couldn’t tell if they were listening intently because what I was saying was profound, or because it was so ridiculous that they didn’t know how to respond.

  “Soldiers love facing huge crowds throwing rocks at them, but they panicked at that damn soda fizz. Why? Because they expect rocks and Molotovs. We don’t surprise them. We’re organized into color-coded spaces, color-coded car plates. Just think of dancing,” I continued. “People don’t need to be told to dance. You just play music and their bodies know what to do. You can organize them all day to dance, but no one will move until you play the music. We just have to figure out what that music is that will compel individuals and small circles of people to act however they can all over the country, without trying to organize them in advance.”

  Bilal began rubbing his brow. “You think resistance against a colonizing military occupation is like da
ncing?” The derisiveness in his voice cut me. Samer, who had slowed his chewing while I spoke but had gone back to audible speed, tried to change the subject.

  Fuck this, I thought, and got up to leave.

  “Wait,” Ghassan spoke. “I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense … in a strange way.” All eyes turned to Ghassan.

  A look passed between Ghassan and Jumana. It was almost imperceptible, but it held an unexpressed smile. They had spoken about me in private; perhaps she had admonished him for being too hard on me?

  “We don’t need a lot of people, not initially at least. We can make use of the few weapons we have for a couple of small operations. Depending on how successful we are, maybe we could confiscate more weapons from soldiers,” Ghassan said. “Maybe that should be our first goal, to conduct operations that would allow us to amass guns.”

  They still don’t get it, I thought, though I wasn’t sure why and didn’t have answers to offer. “I think whatever we start should be with the goal of igniting imaginations for people to act in their own ways, and trust that they will imagine what we’ve not,” I said.

  The silence that followed was suffused with possibility and history, like the underground space itself.

  “I’ve been working with our contact in Jordan,” Samer said, and for some reason they all turned to me, then looked away. Samer squirmed a bit, but continued, “He—I mean, they made connections abroad. We’ll be able to set up a website to communicate without being traced.”

  Jumana and I, and perhaps Ghassan, were not as technically savvy as the others. We used the Internet sparingly and mostly for e-mail, although in the past few months I had learned to use search engines. But I didn’t do it much since dial-up Internet service at home and in cafés charged by the minute.

  Jumana asked Samer the question in my mind. “What’s that for?”

  Her brothers answered, finishing each other’s sentences. “It’s a way for us to broadcast ideas, create message boards throughout Palestine and the rest of the world. The website will be hosted overseas… .”

  “Why wouldn’t you just put up posters or send e-mails?” I asked. They chuckled, which annoyed me.

  “Well, e-mails are easily traced. The website can’t be traced to us,” Samer said.

  “Oh.” I turned to Jumana. “That makes sense.”

  Bilal had been quiet, and it was growing late. “We should wrap up,” he said. “This has been really good.” He turned to Samer: “Let us know about the website”; then to me: “Nahr, you gave us a lot to think about”; then to Samer, Faisal, and Wadee: “Brothers, we have these weapons because of you. We’re able to have these plans because of your bravery and your labor.”

  Just as we couldn’t arrive together, we couldn’t leave at the same time. Bilal and Ghassan were the first to go. Jumana and I were next, leaving the twins and Samer to tidy up and follow a short while later.

  Bilal was already home when Jumana dropped me off. He wasn’t the same person at home as he had been in moments past.

  “Before you say anything, Nahr, I just want to apologize,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I was wrong, and I knew it immediately.” I wanted to ask why he didn’t just admit it in the moment, but I let him continue. “I think I just harden when I imagine resistance. Maybe it’s feeling the weight of our humiliation in those hours, but I realize I become unsympathetic. It’s not who I want to be.” He wrapped his arms around me, his embrace more and more my home.

  “I also want to tell you that your insight was profound. I understand that now,” he said.

  I pulled back. “Say that to me while you’re looking at me.”

  “I think you’re brilliant,” he said. “You have a deep intelligence and natural insight that can’t be taught.”

  My heart ached with love, and I longed for physical closeness as much as I feared it. But we would not disrespect Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s trust. So I held him tighter and longer, unsure what to do with my body’s yearning.

  Samer’s website went up. He called it Chaos Orchestra. “I named it after your theory of chaos,” he told me. I liked that.

  Jumana bought five aerosol cans of wasp and hornet killer. “It’s better than Mace, because this stuff will spray up to six meters away.” She took credit for having the first creative idea for an isolated confrontation. “I thought we could choose one of the smaller checkpoints without a watchtower. We could take them out, especially if Bilal and Ghassan planted themselves nearby with the rifles.”

  “You make it sound simple,” Wadee said. “You’re talking about killing heavily armed soldiers who can summon a whole battalion in a matter of minutes—”

  Faisal interrupted. “The Surda checkpoint would be ideal, especially when it starts getting dark and there’s hardly anyone passing by. It has only one military jeep and at most four soldiers.”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been to Birzeit, but I thought they dismantled that one,” Bilal said.

  “It’s back. We should do it before they dismantle it again,” Faisal said.

  “If we do, the Jews will set all our towns on fire,” Wadee said, obviously having second thoughts, perhaps thinking of his fiancée. We all had doubts, of course, but Wadee was the most willing to express them, now that the possibilities of love, marriage, and family were within his grasp.

  Ghassan chimed in: “Wadee, brother, you don’t have to be part of this. No one will blame you if you walk away right now. But they’ll come for you eventually, and they’ll burn our towns whether we fight them or not. And if you’re spared, the people you love will not be.”

  Chaos Orchestra looked harmless enough, reporting news and selecting a “song of the month,” which Samer thought was a clever way to pay homage to music, the origin of what he’d dubbed “chaos theory.”

  “That term is already taken, my friend,” Bilal said, sucking on the argileh pipe as we all sat on our terrace overlooking the valley.

  “Really?” Samer said, then turned to me. “You plagiarized the whole dance and chaos thing?”

  “I have no idea what Bilal is talking about.”

  Ghassan laughed. “Bro, take it easy on the hash,” he said to Bilal, and took a turn on the argileh.

  “Hash?” Jumana and I said it at the same time, eyes widening. I wondered if they had been smoking hash all along instead of tobacco.

  Ghassan offered the pipe to me, but I declined. “I appreciate my lungs,” I said. But Jumana gave it a go. They all did, except Samer and me. “I heard some people get high and never recover,” Samer said.

  “Anyway, chaos theory is an entire field of mathematics. It is not about disorder. In fact, chaos is not random. It forms predictable patterns,” said Bilal the Stoned Professor. “In what appears to be random, there are actually very complex but deterministic systems, with repeating patterns, constant feedback, and organization that is very sensitive to the starting conditions.”

  I had no idea what he was saying and looked around to see if the others understood. We all appeared lost. But Bilal went on: “It’s important to understand that deterministic doesn’t mean that it’s predictable. And unpredictable doesn’t mean random. The weather is an example of chaos theory. The stock market. They are deterministic, they have repeating patterns and constant feedback, and they’re self-organizing. Unpredictable, but not random. A butterfly flapping its wings in Japan could initiate a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s part of chaos theory.” Bilal thought for a moment, and added, “You see, Nahr? You were right. Dancing is a good example of a chaotic system, and I believe you are also right that revolution could be as well.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself from beaming.

  “I don’t understand a word you said, but at the same time it all makes perfect sense, bro,” Faisal said.

  “Me too,” Wadee added, and after a pause, “Y’all, I can’t believe Rula is going to marry me.”

  We laughed and nearly in unison said, “We can’t either,” except J
umana, who caressed his hair like a mother. “She’s lucky to have you, my sweet little brother.”

  In addition to the news section and song-of-the-month pick, the website was a gateway to a private message board, which was restricted to known and verified individuals. It promised privacy, but the conversations were monitored by “the Contact” in Jordan. They wouldn’t tell me who it was, but this person used the chat board to identify potential recruits. I suspected the Jordan Contact might be Jehad, but waited to see how long they would keep it from me.

  Essays and political analyses about revolutions throughout the world, and profiles of the revolutionaries behind them, were features that emerged on the website. This part sprouted from the private and public chat boards. Samer and the Contact saved interesting posts into a section that evolved into a repository of historic events and personalities, which became a resource for study groups that began popping up on the message board.

  Jumana immersed herself in these posts, and it altered our daily conversations. Talk of chores, customers, money, men, and beauty were slowly replaced with stories about the likes of Dalal Mughrabi, Leila Khaled, Angela Davis, Harriet Tubman, and Kathleen Cleaver. Jumana said, “Most of these women had ordinary lives, but life pulled the extraordinary out of them.”

  “When is it going to happen?” Faisal asked what we all wanted to know. Wadee had stopped coming to our Friday get-togethers, but no one mentioned it, even though we could see Faisal was only half of himself without his twin.