Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Betrayal

“I know. I lied about the Summer Garden,” she said, holding her hand to her cheek, the marks of his fingers on her skin.

“That doesn’t count. I didn’t believe you. It’s the part about trying to have me killed that I resent.”

“It’s killing me. I don’t know what’s worse, having you dead or alive,” she said, clutching at him, her eyes filling with tears.

“Stop it! Stop the play-acting, inti sharmoota, you whore,” he said in Arabic, shoving her back against the wall. He put the muzzle of his gun against her forehead. “We’re done playing. Where’s the bomb?”

“It’s not here,” she said.

“You’re lying,” he said, slapping her again and pressing the muzzle of the gun against her forehead deep enough to leave an imprint. “Where’s the fucking bomb?”

“I can’t tell you,” she cried, tears sliding down her cheeks.

“I will kill you. I don’t want to, but I will,” he said, cocking the hammer. “Do you really want to kill a million people? Women, children? Is that who you really are?”

“Who I am?” she laughed, with a touch of hysteria. “Don’t you understand? That’s the whole point! I’m a Palestinian! Who am I? What am I? I don’t belong! Don’t you see? I don’t belong anywhere. No family, no country, nothing! I wanted to belong to you, that’s the horrible joke!” She laughed wildly. “To the enemy!”

“Keep your voice down,” he said, putting his hand over her mouth. He put the gun to her head again and took his hand away. “I won’t ask again. Where’s the bomb?”

“You can’t threaten me, habibi, habib albi, love of my heart,” she said, touching the gun with her fingers as if to push it away. “You see, I die today no matter what. Both of us do.”

Scorpion started to pull the trigger, looking into her dark shining eyes, then unable to stop himself, leaned over and kissed her, his hand to the back of her head. She kissed him back as if she knew it was the last thing she would ever do. Whatever happened, he knew he would never forget it.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since we met,” he said.

“I know. I almost went crazy lying next to you in that room in Amsterdam.” She put her hand to his cheek and looked into his eyes. “What do we do now?”

“Tell the truth. It’s all we have left.” He eased the hammer down and rested the gun on his thigh. He glanced at the door. They would be coming, he knew, but for now there was time. “How did we come to this? Who are you?”

“I can’t,” she said, her eyes welling again with tears.

“You have to,” he said.

“Let me have a cigarette,” she said. He found her pack of cigarettes on the table next to her handbag and handed it to her. She lit it and inhaled deeply. “I’ve been Najla Kafoury for so long. My real name is Alia. When I told you I was from Lebanon, I told you the truth, habib albi, but not the whole truth. No one knows the whole truth, not even Allah.”

“How old were you when you left Lebanon?”

“Five.”

“What about your parents?”

“Dead, both of them on the same day. Do you really want to know?” looking at him while holding the cigarette, and he thought that in the brightening light creeping through the edges of the window shade, her hair covering part of the side of her face, that she had never looked so beautiful.

“This is all about Lebanon, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You know about that, do you?” She smiled wryly. “You know everything and understand nothing,” tapping the cigarette ash into a little dish by the bed. “You want to know who I am? That day made me who or what I am, only it wasn’t what you think. Losing my parents. It was something else that happened that day. It began in the morning when Israeli tanks surrounded the camp.”

“You were in the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut?”

“It wasn’t the killing,” she said. “In Lebanon, there was always killing, especially if you were a Palestinian. And it wasn’t just the Israelis or the Maronites or the Druze. You had Palestinians killing Palestinians. If you disagreed with them, the PLO would kill you. We weren’t citizens of Lebanon, we were refugees, even though we had lived there as long as most Lebanese. If you were a Palestinian you couldn’t get a passport or even a job. Still, we lived. As a child I was happy there, playing in the narrow streets, running past the men working in makeshift shops in the street amidst the garbage and the dust. Everyone knew everyone on our street, even what you were cooking for dinner and my mother would comb my hair and call me ‘Princess Alia’ and tell me someday a prince would come to our little street and everyone would see I was a princess. And he would take me away and marry me. Even when the Israelis came and the PLO left, we felt we would live, but then somebody murdered Bashir Gemayel, the president of Lebanon. I didn’t understand any of it, but my father, who was an educated man, even though he had no work and sometimes made money fixing auto parts, which he had taught himself to do, told us, ‘You will see, they will blame the Palestinians. They will want their revenge,’ and although I did not know it, he made a plan.

“The Israelis came with their tanks in the dark before dawn. That day, when the sun came, was burning hot. Maybe it’s a trick of memory, but in my mind that was the hottest day in my life. The heat in our little apartment was stifling, the air so hot it felt like it was burning your skin even with every window open and a fan going, and when you breathed, you could feel it burning your lungs. I wanted to go outside and play, but my father said no one would go out to play that day. I looked out of our window at the dusty street, baking in the sun, but no one went outside. Then we heard the shooting.

“All that day we heard shooting and shouting, sometimes far away, sometimes closer. You could not make out the words they were saying, only the sounds, and I clung to my mother’s skirt and would not leave her. My mother did not cook that day. We ate day-old bread and water from the sink, and Father made us fill up every bottle and basin with water, in case it stopped flowing. I don’t remember that day. All I remember was the heat and the shooting and the smell of gunpowder and garbage rotting in the sun.

“My father came into the apartment-I didn’t even know he had gone out-and said, ‘It’s the Phalange.’ He started to say something else, but my mother said, ‘Not in front of the children,’ looking at my brother and me. I wanted to go to the window to see the Phalangists, the Christians, whoever they were, because I had never seen one, but my mother kept me away from the window and I saw nothing. But the night, I remember.

“You never saw a night like that, habib albi. Here in the North you have White Nights, where the sun is up most of the night in summer, but that night was no night. The air was still hot from the day, and the sky was intensely bright from the flares the Israelis shot into the sky. So many flares, trailing light like lightning floating in the sky. It was like a football stadium lit up at night. The light cast sharp shadows into the room where we huddled on the floor, now and then hearing the crack of a rifle or the firing of a machine gun, and once, a terrible scream. I must’ve fallen asleep, because when I woke, my parents and my older brother were asleep on the floor, and for a moment I was afraid to touch them in case they were dead.

“I crept to the window and I saw the body of a man lying in the street below. He was just lying there as though he had gone to sleep. And then my parents got up, and when my mother turned on the water in the sink, there was no water. That day was just as hot as the day before, only now we could hear the sounds of jeeps and trucks and men shouting and more shooting, much more shooting, only it was getting closer. We were thirsty and hungry, but there was no more food. My mother couldn’t cook and we drank the water from the bottles and the bowls my father had us fill the day before.