Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

The record ended, and automatically Felix turned it over and placed the needle on the second side.

“ONE DAY, Jamil disappeared. Weeks passed, and neither his mother nor I had any word of him; I understood that woman who clung to her simple, feudal, traditional life. Was it true, I asked myself, that her values represented backwardness, and ours, progress? I traveled to Jerusalem and exhausted all official channels. I don’t know whether I’ve been under suspicion since then; I simply stated that the young man was my colleague and I was worried about his disappearance. No one knew anything. Jamil had vanished. I contacted a Jewish Communist lawyer I’ll call Beata. She was the only person who dared get to the bottom of the matter. What anguishing contradictions, Felix, please try to understand. I am repelled by Communism, but in this case, only a Communist had the courage to expose herself for me and for Jamil in the name of justice. An injustice had been committed against my lover, but in Israel I could count on the means to challenge it through legal channels. Would that have been possible in an Arab country?

“I left everything in Beata’s hands and returned to the village where I taught. Now Jamil’s mother had disappeared. She returned a few days later, beyond tears. I thought Jamil was dead. His mother’s dry eyes expressed greater grief than any tears. She said no. She didn’t want to say more than that. Hours later, Beata informed me that Jamil was a prisoner, accused of being a terrorist. He was imprisoned in a place called Moscobiya in Jerusalem, an ancient inn frequented in olden days by Orthodox Russian pilgrims, and now converted into a military prison. The questions I asked Jamil’s mother remained unanswered; I saw only that the woman no longer knew how to cry. She trembled constantly and fell ill with fever. I brought a doctor; she didn’t want to see him; I insisted. She fought like a tiger to keep him from examining her. Later the doctor told me; a large object, probably a pole, had been forced into her vagina; it was destroyed.

“Two days later, Beata asked me to come to Jerusalem. She took me to a military hospital where Jamil was a patient. His face was that of an old man. I remembered the happy eyes of Israel. Now I saw the sad eyes of Palestine. Those eyes looked at me and did not know me. I wept, and Beata told me Jamil had been sentenced to two years in prison. She showed me a copy of the confession signed in my lover’s hand; he declared himself guilty of acts of terrorism. Beata said she had exhausted all her sources to prove that the confession had been obtained by torture. I went back to our village. After a year, Jamil was freed. He arrived in a Red Cross bus. For the first few days, he didn’t speak. Then, little by little, he told me what had happened.

“He’d been taken prisoner as he returned from school, and blindfolded. He lost all sense of direction. Several hours later, the car stopped near heavy traffic, a city, or a highway. He was led to a place where he was asked to confess. He refused. He was brutally beaten. His captors pulled hair from his head and forced him to eat it. Then they placed a hood with two air holes over his head and transported him to a different place. There they made him kneel in a dog kennel. He could hear the barking, but dogs never attacked him. The following day they returned and again asked for his confession. When he refused, they locked him for several days in a tiny cell in which he could neither stand nor lie down. Occasionally he was released and forced to bend over while pressure was exerted on his testicles from behind. Again he was returned to the cement chamber. Later he was released and his hood was removed. His mother was before him. He determined not to recognize her, not to compromise her. But she burst out weeping and told him not to worry, she was the guilty one, she had aided the terrorists, not he, she had confessed. Then Jamil said no, he was the only guilty party. They beat him in front of his mother, and he was taken to the hospital. When I visited him there, he had decided not to recognize or remember the people he loved. He spent one year of his sentence in the jail at Sarafand. Beata succeeded in getting his sentence reduced, but a guard told him they were letting him go so that he could return to his village and serve as an example to other rebels. Beata said that this was a standard practice in the occupied territories; to make an example of one person and his family so that his experience would demoralize the others.

“Jamil asked me to leave. He feared for my safety. I accepted his need to be alone with his mother. Before anything else, he had to reestablish his relationship with her. I understood that here was something unfathomable to me, and that it had to do with the Palestinian world of honor. From those depths, Jamil would subsequently learn to remember me. I went to Jerusalem and awaited Bernstein’s annual visit. I didn’t tell him what I knew. Understand me, please. I became Bernstein’s lover to learn more, that’s true, to tear down the wall of his pathetic vanity and hear his naked voice. I hinted at the problem of torture. He told me quietly that torture was necessary in a life-and-death struggle like ours. Did I know anything about prisons in Syria or Iraq? I asked him whether we, the victims of Nazism, were capable of repeating the horrors perpetrated by our executioners. He answered that the weakness of the Israeli state could not be compared to the strength of Germany. He didn’t give me the opportunity to reply that neither was the weakness of the Palestinians comparable to the strength of the Israelis. He was too busy explaining to me in detail how costly it would be to prevent the investigation of such accusations; he knew it well because that, precisely, was one of his jobs outside Israel.

“But I’m lying, Felix. I went to bed with Bernstein to fulfill the cycle of my own penance, to purge in my own body the perverted reason for our revenge against Nazism; our suffering, imposed now on beings weaker than we. We sought a place where we might be masters, not slaves. But one is master of himself only when he has no slaves. We did not know how to be masters without new slaves, so we ended by being executioners in order not to be victims. We found victims to escape being victims. With Bernstein, I sank into eternal suffering. What unites Jews and Palestinians is sorrow, not violence. Each of us looks at the other and sees only his own suffering in the eyes of the enemy. To reject the other’s suffering, inevitably a mirror image of our own, our only recourse is violence. I am not lying, Felix. I went to bed with Bernstein so you would hate him as much as I do. Jamil and I are allies of a civilization that will never die; Bernstein is merely an agent of transitory power. And because power knows itself to be temporary, it is always cruel. Bernstein knows that this is the revenge against civilization anticipated by power. He has forced me to add new names to the geography of terror. Say Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen only if you add Moscobiya, Ramallah, and Sarafand. You can question the history of our entire century, but never the universality of its terror. No one escapes the stigma, not the French in Algeria, not the North Americans in Vietnam, not the Mexicans at Tlatelolco, not the Chileans at Dawson, not the Soviets in their immense Gulag. No one. So why would we Jews be any different? The passport of modern history accepts only one visa, that of terror. It doesn’t matter. I am returning to my true homeland to fight, along with Jamil, against the injustices one people impose upon another. This is why I went to Israel twelve years ago. Only in this way can I be faithful to the death of my parents in Auschwitz.