When I recall my moments at the stadium, where the fedayeen gathered amidst rice and youyous, I don’t know what happened to me. I had no justification for staying in Beirut. I had no family, only Nuha, who I didn’t want.
“You should have gone with them,” Zainab said when she learned they’d decided I wasn’t a doctor and had to work as a trainee nurse.
Do you see the significance of the insult, Father? A trainee nurse! After all those years of being treated as a doctor, I’ve become a miserable servant in the hospital whose founding physician I once was. But let’s suppose I had gone with the fedayeen, where would I find myself today?
I’d probably be in Gaza, and my status would be ambiguous. Do you think they’d have accepted me as a doctor there? Our leaders, as I understand it, are setting up a legal authority, and this authority needs educated people, crooks, merchants, contractors, business men, and security services. Our role has come to an end; they won’t be needing fedayeen anymore. If I’d gone with them, I’d have to choose between working as a nurse or joining one of the intelligence groups. My destiny would be in limbo.
We’ve ended up in limbo, dear friend. Our lives have become a burden to us.
The decision to return to Shatila from the stadium wasn’t a mistake. It’s true it wasn’t a conscious decision, but, like all critical decisions, we take them, or they take us, and that’s the end of the matter.
In China I had no choice, I had to accept my role as a doctor because after two weeks of intensive nonstop military training, the doctor discovered I was unfit for war. She didn’t take me into the X-ray room or subject me to medical tests; she simply looked at me and understood everything.
I went to see her bare chested as my comrades had done. She looked at me attentively, walked around me, asked me to bend over, put her finger on the place where it hurt and pressed. I screamed in pain.
“When did your spinal chord get broken?” she asked.
“What?. . Two months ago.”
She asked me to bend over again, brought her face close to the place where it hurt, and I don’t know what she did, but I could feel her hot breath scorching my bones. Then she went back behind the desk and asked me to get dressed and wait.
After everyone had left, she came and sat down beside me. She was wearing khaki pants, a khaki shirt, and a khaki cap. All I could see of her was a small face and Mongol eyes. I couldn’t work out her age; I had guessed about thirty, but then someone mentioned she was in her fifties. I have no idea.
She sat down beside me and explained that my broken spine had knitted in such a way that to continue training, or any military work, was out of the question. The pain might erupt again at any moment. This meant that I had to get ready to go home.
I tried to explain that she was cutting off my future and that I had to continue military training at any cost.
She patted my hand to reassure me — the only time my hand touched a Chinese woman’s. She advised me to go back to Palestine to work with the peasants, saying that her most beautiful memories were of the time when she’d worked in the countryside.
“But I can’t go back.”
“Of course you can.”
“If I go back, I won’t work with the peasants because we’re not living in our own country and because there aren’t any peasants. .”
My response stunned her. I explained that we were a people of refugees, and she was even more stunned. I said we were orchestrating our revolution from the outside, surrounding our land because we were unable to enter it.
“You are surrounding the cities,” she said, looking relieved, “as we did on the Long March.”
“No,” I said. “We’re surrounding the countryside because we’re outside our country.”
Numerous questions flitted across her face, but she didn’t say anything more; she didn’t understand how you could surround the countryside or how there could be no peasants. She asked me to pack my bags, so I left the clinic and went back to the barracks as though nothing had happened.
The next morning, I went out to join the lineup as usual, but the trainer, who was accompanied by a social worker who spoke Classical Arabic, ordered me to leave. I went back to my room to wait to go home, but instead of sending me to Beirut, they took me to another camp, where I spent the training period in a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People’s Army. It seems that what I’d said had had some effect on the doctor. Medical training wasn’t very different from military training. We drank the same water, ate the same food, ran in morning lineups and practiced using medical instruments as though they were weapons. The only difference was the language.
In the military camp, we used Arabic, while in the field hospital, it was English. It’s true that I don’t know the language very well, but I could understand everything. The truth is I learned English in China! Imagine the paradox; imagine that I learned the importance of drinking water warm in English! In China they always drink their water tepid, almost hot. That’s why no one gets fat there. You open your eyes in the morning, and you’re desperate for a drink of cold water. But you get warm water, so you drink and you drink and you’re still thirsty. For the first few days, I was thirsty all the time. The more I drank, the thirstier I would get. Then I became accustomed to their water, discovered the secret and grew to like it. Warm water enters you as if through your pores: You drink as though you aren’t drinking, as if the water were already inside you. To this day I yearn for warm water, but I don’t drink it anymore the way I used to during the first days after I returned to Beirut. Perhaps the climate is the reason. The climate is what makes our men fat.
After the first days in China, we were overwhelmed by the feeling that we were outsiders. This happened when we visited the tunnels of Beijing — there were tunnels everywhere, tunnels full of rice and wheat depots, tunnels amazingly camouflaged. Once we went into a small shop to buy clothes. The salesman stood up and pushed aside piles of khaki garments, and we found ourselves descending into a tunnel more than thirty meters deep, equipped for people to live in for months.
An underground universe. A universe of war, a universe of history. In China we learned how a human being could live in history. How can I describe history to you?
Some middle school children came one day to take part in our military training. We competed with them at target practice with Simonov rifles. It’s a useless rifle, or that’s what we think here, but over there they respect the Simonov enormously, because it’s the rifle that played such an important role in bringing American planes down in Vietnam.
The point is that Chinese kids, not more than fifteen years old, beat professional officers at target practice! That was our first lesson — respect your weapon. Of course, you’ll say, we forgot everything the moment we returned to Beirut, but that’s not true. I didn’t forget everything, but I wasn’t able to keep things up on my own. How can you convince people from here to drink water warm? How can you teach them to respect an ordinary rifle when Kalashnikovs are dirt cheap, along with Belgian and American rifles and all the others?
This isn’t what I wanted to tell you.
I wanted to try to describe for you the sight of the people doing their morning exercises. I know this is difficult to believe, but I saw it with my own eyes. At seven in the morning, in the streets, music blasts out of loudspeakers scattered everywhere, and millions of men, women, and children of all ages pour into the streets for their calisthenics. The entire Chinese people doing morning stretches!
Can you imagine how these scenes affected us?
First the warm water, then the Simonov children, then the morning exercises, then the soybean that swells up in water that we ate, and then the long, thin bag of rice that every Chinese soldier would wrap around his neck and waist.