Elias Khoury - White Masks

Only three days after the operation to remove the bullets from his abdomen and while still running a raging temperature, soldiers of the Lebanese Army surrounded the hospital and notified its director that they had explicit orders to arrest Abu Jassem.

The director, who was also the operating surgeon, said it was out of the question. The man was wounded, his life was still in danger, and there wasn’t a law anywhere in the world that permitted his arrest. “You may,” he told them, “station a guard outside his room.” But arresting him would be criminal, he would die.

They paid the doctor no heed, stormed Abu Jassem’s room, wrenched the IV out of his arm and carried him out on a stretcher. The officer in charge said they were taking him to the Military Hospital in Beirut. The doctor didn’t believe him. “The man will die, and I will raise hell about it,” he said. “It’s outrageous!’”

But the doctor did nothing of the sort, and news of the incident was not carried in the local press. It only appeared in an underground publication with limited circulation in Gaza City.

In actual fact, they took him straight to the Helou Barracks. Realizing that they wanted him dead, Abu Jassem refused to answer any of their questions. The interrogation had started, to all intents and purposes, inside the ambulance that transported him from Saida Hospital to Beirut. One of the soldiers had asked: “Where were you wounded? Where do you get your weapons from? How many of you are there? Where are your bases in South Lebanon?”

In enormous pain, Abu Jassem just stared up at the ceiling of the ambulance. The vehicle sped down the potholed tarmac, and every time they hit a bump, he was sure that his stitches were going to burst open. That was when he made up his mind that he would die without opening his mouth.

When they arrived at the barracks, they told him to get up and walk. “I can’t just jump out and walk…” he began, stopping in midsentence after seeing the ruthless glint in the officer’s eyes. He realized that they would shove him out of the ambulance and then claim that he had died attempting to escape. “OK, I’ll walk.”

Bracing himself against the side of the vehicle, he doubled over and slowly rose to his feet. He felt his abdomen was ripping open — dizzy with pain, he fainted and fell to the ground with a thud, like a solid plank of wood. The soldiers picked him up and threw him into a dark and dank cell, without even a blanket to lie on. He lay like that on the bare ground for another twenty-four hours, before regaining consciousness.

When he came to, his head was pounding and his body was racked by shivers.

“Where am I?” he cried. No response. Then a man came in with two tin cans, one full of water and the other empty, for him to urinate in “and keep the place clean.” He crawled to the can with water and drank, then tipped its entire contents over his head to try and bring down the raging fever. The following day, they gave him dry bread in addition to the water.

Abu Jassem became delirious, and he remained so for an entire week, drifting in and out of consciousness. A soldier at the barracks — who subsequently enlisted in the Joint Forces after the split and collapse of the national army — would later recount Captain Sameer Amro’s odyssey with nothing but admiration, always referring to him as Captain-Sir.

As he told it, loud banging, punctuated by occasional rasping cries for help, could be heard coming from the lower part of the barracks where the hallucinating Abu Jassem was being held. And although these muffled cries troubled all those who heard them, no one dared ask the commanding officer what the source of the noise was.

Ali Tabsh, the former soldier, says that after three days of this, he was detailed to clean the cell, and that when he went down, he found Abu Jassem, convulsing and delirious, in a pool of excrement and urine. When he approached the prisoner and spoke to him, there was no response. When the soldier looked more closely, he could see greenish patches dotting the flesh of his abdomen, and when he brushed against him, Abu Jassem’s entire body shuddered. After cleaning out the cell, the private went up to the duty officer’s room.

“Sir,” he said, “the man is dying.” The officer looked up scornfully. “Sir, I cleaned out his cell. I saw him with my own eyes, he’s covered in pus and is so feverish he’s practically unconscious.”

“Let the dog die!” the officer answered.

“Sir, he’s agonizing!”

“Get out of here, and mind your own business, will you!”

“Sir, I think he should be in a hospital.”

The officer jumped to his feet, cursing.

“Calling themselves feda’iyeen! Conducting their dirty little wars, they deserve to die! They’re nothing but agents, and death is all they deserve. I’ll finish him off myself!”

Private Ali Tabsh left the room, and after he told his fellow soldiers what had passed between him and the officer, no one dared take any kind of initiative whatsoever. They could hear Abu Jassem’s agony and all they could do was wish him a hasty death. They knew the poor wretch would never get better in those conditions.

Ali Tabsh even thought he might go to him in the middle of the night to finish him off and relieve Abu Jassem of his suffering, but he never did. He was too scared, they’d consider him a criminal, and he’d be expelled from the army.

But Sameer Amro, aka Abu Jassem, didn’t die.

The soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw him up and about one day, walking around the compound. He was slightly stooped, it’s true, but there he was, wearing a clean set of clothes, on his way to the examining magistrate’s office.

After the rasping rattle had stopped, everyone had forgotten Abu Jassem was in that cell.

But he hadn’t died, and when Ali Tabsh met up with him again ten years later, he almost leapt to his neck and embraced him. However, Captain Sameer’s steady gaze, calm tone, and amputated arm all restrained the soldier from showing his feelings to his officer-hero.

No one knows for sure how it came about that Sameer Amro returned to life. According to rumors circulating at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser had pressured the Lebanese president to ensure the prisoner received proper care and not be abandoned to his fate. Some people attributed it to sheer luck, it was a miracle they said, the result of untold suffering and fortitude, as his body slowly expelled the poisonous pus and the wounds began to heal, though they continued to ooze blood. Others still said it was the doing of Khodr Abul Abbas, who had appeared before Abu Jassem in the dead of night and had touched the wounds with his spear, leading Abu Jassem to recover.

Whatever the truth, the point is he recovered. And whenever people ask him about his recovery, he says nothing. He smiles enigmatically, baring a gold tooth. In actual fact, he himself doesn’t know how. Whenever he tries to remember that time, he cannot conjure up anything but a film of white gauze… but he remembers the interrogation very well.

Entering the examining magistrate’s office, Sameer Amro, the feda’i, is met by the contemptuous gaze of the officer who remains seated at his table. Sameer ignores him and scrutinizes the maps hanging on the wall behind him. The officer invites him to take a seat and offers him a cigarette.

“Thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“What will you have to drink, tea or coffee? It’s been a while since you’ve had any, surely?”

“Thanks, but I won’t.”

The officer rings a bell and orders coffee, one cup of osmalliyah and a bitter coffee for himself. While they wait for the coffee, the officer busies himself with a stack of papers before him. A soldier brings in the two cups of coffee and puts them down on the table. The officer takes a sip, sucking his lips in noisily and licking off the froth that has stuck to them. He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Sameer leaves his coffee untouched.