Love, Life and Revolution

In the following excerpt, the main character, Kan’an, reflects on his first year in hiding, a life thrust upon him by occupation forces and taken on to protect Palestinian resistance, but supplemented with the ​“trinity” of love, life and revolution.

As 1983 drew to a close, the outcome of the conflict between opposites was becoming more decisive: with the passing months, the outcome favored the ​“we,” the mind, and the requirements of action and resistance. Kan’an had grown much thinner during the first year in hiding. He had lost his appetite because his brain was exhausted, he was tense for months on end, he suffered from chronic insomnia and his mouth smelled like a chimney because he smoked three packs a day. Besides, it was strange, even nonhuman, to eat alone! He could not remember doing that except for a few times in his normal life. Now month after month, he found himself in that unusual situation. The combination of a lethal loneliness, nervousness and exhaustion had turned the act of eating into no more than a mere daily biological necessity, just to preserve life, with no desire and no enjoyment to be found in the act. He asked his comrades to bring him sleeping pills because of his insomnia, but they refused.

“Forget about that; it is bad for your health. Calm down and you will sleep. Read so your eyes will get tired and you will sleep.”

When he tried to sleep, sleep became like a woman trying to seduce him. His attempts at slumber turned into rounds of struggle between him and the thoughts that crippled his mind: his impulsive inner self, the ​“I” and its needs and desires. When he would turn on his right side, he recalled his mother and her loneliness after he left her. He was, at the very least, comforted by his correspondence with her before she traveled. His reproaching conscience kept him awake at night, which exhausted him, but when that happened, it was his emotions that denied him sleep. When his mother needed him most, the demands of resistance had forced him to abandon her. When he would turn on his left side, he remembered Muna and their memories together. He saw her in his imagination, he desired her and he reached out for her, but he grasped at nothing except recollections and images, which had started to fade and lose their glow with the passing months. He tried to conjure up an adequate picture of her in his imagination — her face, her eyes, her hair, mouth, lips, her figure, the way she spoke, her smile, the way she walked … and he found that some elements of the picture were beginning to be erased.

He spent his days anxious, his mood in upheaval, and his nights were sleepless until dawn. He would sit on the bed and smoke. He would walk from wall to wall, but the wall snubbed him with its silence. He would take advantage of Umm ​‘Isa’s absence and stand at the window watching passersby. He would observe the trees in the garden and allow his thoughts to wander to the world outside the house, the world from which he had turned his back.

Through all of that, new facts began to dawn on him. Behold how time works. It is capable of erasing all ailments and fractures of the soul that spread like weeds! Time is the most skilled surgeon in history and is capable of patching up any wound no matter how deep.

The party absorbed the results of the attack it endured, and life began to course anew through the synapses of its neurons. The party stabilized — communications were reestablished and blood flowed through the arteries of party activities once more. Kan’an began to buckle down gradually to the task at hand. He participated in decision-making, received directions, engaged in dialogue, argued, wrote and made proposals. He moved from point to point, keeping with what the secrecy and security re-required of the job. Work began to consume part of the hours of his day and he came to sense the importance of remaining between the walls, far away from their eyes and out of their reach. His productivity increased, and his political positions and visions acquired a different meaning and new vigor arising from the revolutionary nature of his reality. With each new day, he became more aware of his importance to the party and his revolutionary significance. His lived experience found the significance it had lacked for many months. But, on the other hand, this showed him that daily stability in this kind of life is not guaranteed, and that non-stability is the law governing a secret life.

One day at the beginning of 1984, his comrade arrived in a hurry, looking dead serious.

“I must get you out of here. I think someone is following me. I tried to make sure that I wasn’t being followed when I came here, but it is necessary to take precautions.”

He described in detail what had made him suspicious. There was this stranger in the city who wandered through the streets by Al-Mughtarabin Square, constantly watching and on the lookout.

He had followed Kan’an’s comrade tonight, but the comrade intentionally led him away from the route he normally took to the safe house, then slipped away from him and escaped.

Kan’an picked up his belongings and left with his comrade and they walked uphill towards the boundaries of Qaddura Camp. Some students who were friends of the party lived in a small apartment there. The party had asked them to vacate the apartment for two days and they agreed. At the time, the party did not have a lot of secret houses. Kan’an’s comrade walked in front of him so that he could warn him just in case.

At 9 p.m. they arrived at the small flat on the second floor of a three-story building. His comrade led him there and left. Kan’an entered the apartment. Everything in it indicated that the residents were students. There was little by way of furniture and what was there was in a sorry state. The apartment was a chaotic mess and the dirt seemed to be an inextricable part of it!

The building was wedged between the makeshift houses belonging to the camp. If you went to a window, you would find yourself in the middle of an active and boisterous crowd: here a woman hanging her laundry and gossiping with her neighbors, there a bunch of people hovering over cups of tea, shouting and discussing private matters, children hopping about between the houses and on the roofs all day long and the alleys crowded with pedestrians. The house in which Kan’an found himself was one of these houses, one incapable of guarding the privacy of its residents, like all houses in the camp.

“How long will I be here? This house is the perfect example of a house unfit for hiding. I will be discovered within a week here, unless I lie still all day and do not move about.”

These thoughts worried Kan’an as he woke up on the first day and looked out the windows of his new hideout, trying to familiarize himself with where he was, but his stay there was not to last long.

Reprinted with permission from 1804 Books.