36

He repeated the story of the laboratories and how they blew up the Jewish agency on Ben Yahuda Street. It was done with the explosives that the leader had prepared in his laboratory. He told me about the arms dealers who wanted to buy the formula for these explosives, because they were ten times stronger than the commercial ones. They wanted to know how he made them, but the leader told them, “This is my formula and my secret, and I do not sell my secrets.”

Rabie then looked at me and said provocatively, “He is like you.”

“Like me?”

“You do not reveal your secrets, and he did not reveal his secrets.”

I remembered what I had said about my secrets, and I smiled with a mixture of pride and modesty. I was proud because he had compared me to the leader, and I was modest because I knew who I was, and I knew my importance and that of my secrets in these times. The leader’s secrets consisted of explosives prepared in laboratories, and battles that used to shake the world. Whereas my secrets consisted of words like those of Majida El Roumi, Nizar Qabbani, and Mahmoud Darwish; just words. In the end, those words were simply words.

He said, in a serious tone which I did not expect, “In my opinion, words are explosives.”

He continued with a conviction that seemed unshakable at that moment: “If words were not like explosives, why did we write manifestos and pamphlets? Why did we publish a newspaper? And why did your uncle Amin write his articles?”

I said sadly, “What is left of the pamphlets and the manifestos?”

“This is what is left.” He shook my uncle Amin’s papers that he was holding in his right hand, and said, “This is history.”

“Whose history?”

“Our history.”

“But are we what we are?” I asked, saddened.

He stared at me, trying to understand what I meant. I explained: “Are you that Rabie? Am I that Nidal? Is Abu Kamal that Abu Kamal? And is that leader the actual leader? Was Widad the real Widad, or the Widad she imagined herself to be? You say that she was madly in love with the leader, but how did you know? Where did you read about it? I read the same papers and I did not find anything of what you said. Did you witness it? You said that you saw her kiss his hands while he was asleep and when he was in a coma—are you sure of what you saw? Even if she did kiss his hands while he was asleep or unconscious, did that prove that she loved him, that she was passionately in love with him? Wasn’t it possible that she kissed his hands as an expression of gratitude for his bravery and sacrifices? A celebration of his manliness and his sense of honor? An expression of thanks for what his hands offered in terms of accomplishments and explosives they had made? You said that he was creative in his inventions, courageous and adventurous in his spontaneity. He gave everything, even his life. He forgot about his wife and his children. He forgot his family’s standing and lived in caves and quarries. Didn’t such a man deserve to have his hands kissed? If you had been in her place, you might have kissed his hands.”

He said enthusiastically, defending his point of view, “But she kissed his hands while he was asleep!”

“So what if she did? Doesn’t a man who sacrificed so much deserve to have his hands kissed!”

“Why would she kiss his hands while he was asleep?”

“Because he was wounded and unconscious, because he was a hero, because he was a man, because he meant to her what Abdel-Nasser meant to us then.”

“If Abdel-Nasser came now, would you kiss his hands?”

“I would have done it then, at the time, but now, in this siege, I am accountable.”

“What about me, Nidal?”

“What about you?”

“At that time?”

“At that time, I was probably like Widad—or rather, Widad was like me. How would I know?”

“You mean she loved him the way you loved me?”

“Or I loved you like she loved him—I mean the hero and Abdel-Nasser. But did she truly love him? If you had not been that Rabie, and if Rabie is different from that Rabie, would I have loved him?”

“We are back to your ambiguity and your secrets.”

I turned up the volume on the radio so that we could hear Majida El Roumi’s voice: “Listen, listen. There is nothing left for her but words.”