The Attack

by Yasmina Khadra

  My guide walks too fast for me; from time to time, he’s obliged to stop and wait.

  “This doesn’t look like the way,” I point out.

  “It’s going to be night soon,” he explains. “Certain sectors are off-limits at night. To avoid mistakes. We’re very disciplined in Jenin. Instructions are followed to the letter. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to hold out.”

  He turns to me and adds, “As long as you’re with me, you’re not running any risk. This is my sector. In a year or two, I’ll be in command here.”

  We come to an unlit cul-de-sac. An armed silhouette is standing guard in front of a gate. The boy pushes me toward it.

  “Here’s our doctor,” he says, proud of having accomplished his mission.

  “Very good, kid,” the sentinel says. “Now go back home and forget about us.”

  The boy’s a little mortified by the guard’s peremptory tone. He takes his leave and hastens to disappear into the darkness.

  The guard invites me to follow him into a patio, where two paramilitaries are cleaning their rifles by the light of a flashlight. A tall man in a parachutist’s jacket too small for him stands at the entrance to a large room full of camp beds and sleeping bags. He runs this outfit. He’s got a spotted face and white-hot eyes, and he’s not overjoyed to see me.

  “You’re out for a little revenge, Doctor?” he asks me point-blank, so abruptly that it takes me a minute to recover my wits.

  I say, “What?”

  “You heard me,” he replies, leading me into a concealed room. “The Shin Bet has sent you to stir us up so we’ll come out of our holes and give their drones target practice.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Shut up,” he says menacingly, slamming me into a wall. “We’ve had our eye on you for a good long time. Your holiday in Bethlehem caused quite a sensation. What exactly is it that you want? Your throat slit in a gutter? A public hanging in the square?”

  All at once, this man inspires a feeling of stark terror in me.

  He sticks the barrel of his pistol in my side and forces me to kneel down. One of his fighters, whom I didn’t see when I came in, pulls my hands behind my back and handcuffs me without any brutality at all, as though he were performing an exercise. I’m so surprised by the turn that events have taken and the confident ease with which I stepped into the trap that I can hardly believe what’s happening.

  The man squats down to look at me closely. “End of the line, Doctor. Everybody gets off. You shouldn’t have pushed things this far. We have no patience with assholes here, and we don’t let them ruin our lives.”

  “I’ve come to see Khalil. He’s my cousin.”

  “Khalil got the hell out as soon as he got wind of your visit. He’s not stupid. Do you have any idea of how much you fucked up in Bethlehem? Because of you, the imam of the Grand Mosque had to move out of it. Now we must suspend all operations there while we try to see if our networks have been uncovered. I don’t know why Abu Mukaum agreed to meet you, but it was a very bad initiative on his part. He, too, has had to move. And now you’re in Jenin for more of the same?”

  “I’m not working for anybody. No one’s manipulating me.”

  “Is that right? They arrest you after your wife’s attack; then, three days later, they turn you loose, just like that, no charges, no indictment. They did everything but apologize for the inconveniences they caused you. Why? Because of your pretty eyes? I admit, we’d be almost tempted to believe that, except no one’s ever seen such a thing before. No prisoner of the Shin Bet has ever been set free without having first sold his soul to the devil.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He grabs me by the jaws and presses my face to keep my mouth open. “The good doctor has a grudge against us. His wife died because of us. But she was so happy in her gilded cage, wasn’t she? She ate well, slept well, enjoyed herself. She lacked nothing. And then, look, a bunch of mental cases turn her away from her happiness and send her to—how did you put it?—to ‘blow herself away.’ The good doctor lives next door to a war, but he doesn’t want to hear a word about it. And he thinks that his wife shouldn’t worry about it, either. Ah well, the good doctor is wrong.”

  “They released me because I had nothing to do with the attack. No one recruited me. I simply want to know what happened. That’s why I’m looking for Adel.”

  “But what happened is clear. We’re at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That’s life. But as long as everyone stays in his proper place, there’s no problem. Difficulties begin when those who are living the good life come and lecture those who are up to their necks in shit. Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face?”

  He stands up, shaking with rage, pushes me against the wall with his knee, and leaves the room, locking the door behind him.

  A few hours later, still handcuffed, I’m gagged and blindfolded and thrown into the trunk of a car. I believe this is the end. They’re going to take me out to some field and execute me. But what really disturbs me is my docility, the way I submitted to them. A lamb would have defended himself better. When the trunk lid slammed down, it took away the last shreds of my self-esteem at the same time that it cut me off from the rest of the world. To have come all this way, to have made this arduous journey, just to wind up in the trunk of a car, like a common bundle! How could I fall so low? How could I tolerate being treated like this without lifting so much as a finger? A feeling of impotent rage sends me far back into the past. I remember a morning when Grandfather was driving me to see a quack dentist in his old jalopy, and he skidded on a rut and knocked over a mule cart. The fallen driver rose to his feet and began calling Grandfather every name he could think of. I was waiting for the patriarch to fly into an epic rage in his turn, the sort of rage he used when he wanted to reduce recalcitrant members of the tribe to trembling, and how disappointed I was to see my own personal centaur, the person I revered so much that I confounded him with a divinity, apologizing effusively and picking up his kaffiyeh after the muleteer snatched it out of his hands and threw it on the ground. I was so sad that my cavity stopped hurting. I was seven or eight. I didn’t want to believe that Grandfather would let anyone humiliate him like that. I was outraged and impotent, and every cry of the muleteer lowered me down another notch. All I could do was to look at my idol collapsing before my eyes, like a sea captain watching his ship slip beneath the waves. And the sadness that takes hold of me when the lid of the trunk comes down is exactly the same. I’m ashamed for submitting to so many insults so passively—so ashamed that I don’t care what fate awaits me. I’m not anything anymore.

  15.

  * * *

  They shut me up in a blind cave, with no window and no light.

  “Not exactly luxury accommodations,” says the man in the parachute jacket, “but the service is top-notch. You have no chance of escaping from here, so don’t try anything clever. If it was up to me, you’d already be starting to stink. Unfortunately, I’m part of a hierarchy, and it doesn’t always share my qualms.”

  My heart almost stops beating when he slams the door behind him.

  I embrace my knees and remain still.

  The next day, they come to get me, and here I am in the trunk of a car again, handcuffed, my head in a sack and a gag in my mouth. After a long, bumpy ride, they take me out and throw me on the ground. Then they pull me to my knees and remove the sack. The first thing my eyes focus on is a large stone, stained with clotted blood and riddled with the traces of bullets. Death has a strong stench in this place. A lot of people must have been executed here. Someone puts the barrel of a rifle against my temple. “I know you have no idea where the Kaaba is, but it
’s always a good idea to say a prayer.” The metallic bite devours me from head to feet. I’m not afraid, but I’m trembling so much, my teeth are chattering violently. I close my eyes, gather up whatever dignity I have remaining, and wait for them to get it over with. The spit and crackle of a walkie-talkie saves me at the last moment; my executioners are ordered to postpone their dirty job and return me to the place where they’re holding me.

  Once again, the darkness, except this time I’m alone in the world, without any shadow watching over me and without any memories, except for this sickening fear in my guts and the trace of the rifle barrel on my temple.

  The following day, they come and get me again. At the end of our walk, there’s the same big soiled rock, the same stage business, the same spitting walkie-talkie. I realize that what’s going on is a crudely faked execution; they’re trying to make me crack.

  After this, no one comes to disturb me anymore.

  I spend six days and six nights in this pestilential rat hole, fair game to fleas and cockroaches, living on cold soup and grinding my vertebrae against a pallet hard as a gravestone.

  I was expecting muscular interrogations, torture sessions, or things of that nature; instead, nothing. Some galvanized teenagers, brandishing their submachine guns like trophies, have been charged with guarding me. If by chance they bring me something to eat, they don’t speak a word, ignoring me haughtily.

  On the seventh day, a commander under heavy escort pays me a visit in my cave. He’s a young man in his thirties, somewhat frail-looking, with a face like a knife blade scorched on one side and two yellowish eyes. He’s wearing faded combat fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung across his back.

  He waits for me to get to my feet, hands me a pistol, and steps back a couple of paces. “It’s loaded, Doctor,” he says. “Shoot me.”

  I lay the gun on the floor.

  “Shoot me. It’s your right. Afterward, you can go back home and start your life over again. No one here will touch a hair of your head.”

  He comes closer and tries to put the pistol back in my hand.

  I refuse to take it.

  “Conscientious objector?” he asks.

  “Surgeon,” I say.

  He shrugs, stuffs his pistol into his belt, and speaks to me confidentially: “I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded, Doctor, but I wanted you to experience, physically and mentally, the kind of hatred that’s eating away at us. I have requested and obtained a detailed report on you. I’m told that you’re a decent man and an eminent humanist, and that you’ve got no reason to wish people ill. So it was difficult for me to make you understand my point of view without stripping you of your social rank and dragging you through the mud. Now that you’ve touched, if only with your fingertips, the dirty realities your professional success has spared you, I have a chance of making myself understood. Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I’ve known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That’s all I’ve seen for my whole life.”

  He makes a small hand gesture. One of his men throws a sack at my feet.

  “I’ve brought you some new clothes. Paid for out of my own pocket.”

  I’m having trouble following him.

  “You’re free to go, Doctor. You requested a meeting with Adel. He’s waiting for you in a car outside. And your great-uncle would like to receive you in the patriarch’s house. If you don’t want to see him, that’s not a problem. We’ll tell him you were prevented by unforeseen circumstances. We’ve prepared a bath for you, and a better meal than what you’ve been getting. If that’s all right with you.”

  I remain on my guard, unmoving.

  The commander squats down, opens the sack, and shows me some clothes and a pair of shoes to prove his good faith.

  “So how have you spent the last six days in this stinking cellar?” he asks, straightening up with his hands on his hips. “I daresay you’ve learned how to hate. If not, this experiment has been useless. I shut you up in here so you could develop a taste for hatred and a desire to act on it. I haven’t humiliated you as a matter of form. I don’t like humiliating people. I’ve felt humiliation, and I know what it is. When a person has been scorned, when his self-esteem has been wounded, all tragedies become possible. Especially if he recognizes that he’s impotent, with no means of restoring his dignity. I believe that the best school for hatred is located in this very place. The instant when you really learn to hate is the one in which you become aware of your impotence. It’s a tragic moment—the most appalling, the most abominable of all.”

  He grabs me forcefully by the shoulders.

  “I wanted you to understand why we’ve taken up arms, Dr. Jaafari, why our teenagers throw themselves on tanks as though they were candy boxes, why our cemeteries are filled to overflowing, why I want to die with my weapons in my hand, and why your wife went and blew herself up in a restaurant. There’s no worse cataclysm than humiliation. It’s an evil beyond measure, Doctor. It takes away your taste for life. And until you die, you have only one idea in your head: How can I come to a worthy end after having lived miserable, and blind, and naked?”

  He notices that his fingers are hurting me and removes his hands.

  “No one joins our ranks for the pleasure of it, Doctor. All the young men you’ve seen, the ones with slingshots as well as the ones with rocket launchers, loathe war unspeakably. Because every day, enemy fire carries off one of them. They’d like to be respectable, too; they’d like to be surgeons or pop singers or film actors, ride around in fine cars and live their dreams every day. The problem, Doctor, is that other people deny them those dreams. Other people are trying to confine them to ghettos until they’re trapped in them for good. And that’s the reason why they prefer to die. When dreams are turned away, death becomes the ultimate salvation. Sihem understood this, Doctor. You must respect her choice and let her rest in peace.”

  He starts to withdraw, then stops and speaks again. “There are only two extreme moments in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It’s a question of accepting one’s madness, Doctor, or suffering it.”

  Whereupon he pivots on his heels and departs. His lieutenants fall in behind him.

  I remain as though planted in the middle of my cell, facing the wide-open door, through which I see a patio white with sunlight. The rays ricochet into my brain. I hear several vehicles start up and drive off, and then silence. I think I’m dreaming, but I don’t dare pinch myself. Is this another trick?

  A silhouette appears in the doorway. I recognize who it is right away—the squat, thick body, the sloping shoulders, the short, slightly bowed legs: It’s Adel. I don’t know why, but when I see him coming to me in my dark hole, a sob shakes me from my head to my feet.

  “Ammu?” he says in a ravaged voice.

  He comes toward me, taking little steps, as though he were venturing into a bear’s den.

  “Uncle? It’s me, Adel. I was told you were looking for me. Well, here I am.”

  “You took your time.”

  “I wasn’t in Jenin—it was only yesterday evening that Zakaria ordered me to return here. I arrived less than an hour ago. And I didn’t know I was coming back for you. What’s going on, Ammu?”

  “Don’t call me uncle. Times have changed since I welcomed you in my home and treated you like a son.”

  “I see,” he says, lowering his head.

  “How can you see anything, when you’re not even twenty-five? Look at the state you’ve reduced me to.”

  “It’s not my fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. I didn’t want her to blow herself up, but she was determined. Even Imam Marwan was unable to dissuade her. She said she was a full-blooded Palestinian, and she didn’t see why she should let others do what she ought to do herself. I swear to you, she wouldn’t listen to
anybody. We told her she was much more useful to us alive than dead. She’d given us a lot of help in Tel Aviv. We held all our most important meetings at your house. We disguised ourselves as plumbers or electricians and went there with our equipment. We drove service vans so as not to arouse suspicion. Sihem put her bank account at our disposal—we would deposit money into it for the Cause. She was the keystone of our Tel Aviv section.”

  “And Nazareth?”

  “Yes, Nazareth, too,” he says without any embarrassment at all.

  “And where did you hold your meetings in Nazareth?”

  “No meetings in Nazareth. We did fund-raising there. After we made the rounds of our benefactors, Sihem assumed the responsibility of transporting the money to Tel Aviv.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of relationship did you have with her?”

  “We were comrades in arms.”

  “Just comrades? Well, a Cause is certainly a convenient thing to have.”

  Adel scratches the crown of his head. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s perplexed or desperate. The light’s coming from behind him, and I can’t see the expression on his face.

  I say, “Abbas has a different take on the matter.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Sihem’s uncle. The one who wanted to smash your skull with a pickax at Kafr Kanna.”

  “Ah! The nutcase.”

  “He’s perfectly sane. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and what he’s saying. He saw you two hanging out together in Nazareth.”

  “So what?”