The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (5 page)

“If you see a bird in paradise and you desire to eat it,” Father told us, “it will fall down from the air cooked three different ways.”

In
jannah,
plush empty beds flew through the air, available at any moment you wanted to sleep or relax. Father read to us from the Sura that
jannah
was populated with young boys, with bodies soft like velvet and smooth like marble, reclining naked on the ground.

Why would they do that?
I wondered.

When I got older and understood more thoroughly what the seventy-two
hūrīyah
and young boys were for, I asked our imam, Shiekh Rajab, “How do the
al-shaheed
have the strength to service so many women?”

He looked at me, amused. “Allah gives the
al-shaheed
extra horsepower to attend to them.”

Basically, he said, the martyrs became like Superman.

4

One fall day, my best friend Eli and I were playing tag in the street, when suddenly he stopped and turned to me, huffing and puffing.

“Kamal, when I grow up, I will go on journeys and see the world. I will go places and eat delicious things, and you will not be able to go with me because Islam will not let you.”

Eli was a Christian. The Christian children were allowed to go to the chalets and on vacations and eat forbidden foods. I was a little envious and wished I could enjoy life in this way. On the other hand, these were Christians and not worthy, so what did it matter to me? I knew that someday I would probably have to rise up against them anyway.

But one night, I had another dream: I was a little child running away with Eli. Strings of light like streamers fell down from the night sky. We ran through them, as though through a festival where the decorations
were fashioned by angels. In my dream, I felt the cool night whispering against my skin as Eli and I ran toward the sea where, strangely, a helicopter was parked in the sand. Its blades turned around and around, slow and silent.

Eli ushered me into the helicopter, and as it floated away from the beach, fireworks lit up the heavens around me, bursting blue and scarlet, white and gold. Looking down, I could see Eli waving up at me as he receded.

The sky shimmered with chrysanthemums of light, and I heard Eli’s voice echo up into the sparkling night: “Run away, Kamal! Run away!”

1

Life was getting more expensive for my father. He had many children now, many mouths to feed but not enough hands to contribute. In the Muslim world, the prevailing view is that it is better to bear boys than girls. Boys can go out and work, as my older brothers did. They can produce, contribute, carry on the family name. But girls cannot go out and work. They stay in the house and eat and drink until they get married. Girls are raised up for somebody else.

Where there had been joy in my household, warmth and good food, something began to change. By the time I was seven, my mom and dad had seven kids. With each new child, I watched my father change, grow old before my eyes. I did not know it then, but the blacksmith trade was falling out of demand. People were buying ready-made water heaters and washtubs and cabinets. A new world was leaving his old-world trade behind.

Suddenly, Father was not coming home until much later in the evenings. I would wait and wait for him to come with his cologne and metal scent, with bags of pomegranates from the
souk
. But now, many times, my mother would send me to bed before he arrived. Even when I was still awake, my father did not want to play with me anymore.

I did not know what was happening behind the bedroom wall, where my parents talked in private. Where I had seen warmth and affection in
their eyes, I now saw tension, like piano wires tightly strung. Some evenings, I heard my father yelling at my mother about the smallest things. It seemed nothing pleased him anymore.

I sensed we were poorer now. My mother had always sewn most of our clothes, only buying ready-made ones for the festivals. Now, though, even for the festivals, we wore old and handmade things. Only Fouad got new shoes. The rest of the brothers passed his old ones down the line. I also noticed that, where meat had been a rare luxury in our home, now there was none.

As one of the youngest boys, I was in a zone where my father did not know what to do with me. The girls he treated with affection; they were not expected to earn their keep. My older brothers he treated with affection because they brought home money each week. But when I came to my father seeking his attention, he turned cold.

“Not now, Kamal. I am tired,” he would say.

Then one night, he broke my heart. I had scraped together a little money to buy a new Superman comic book and was standing in the living room showing it to my brother when Father walked in from work.

He glared down at the book in my hands, then scorched my eyes with his. “You are so stupid wasting your money on this trash!” he said. “I wish you were a girl. At least then I could give you away in marriage!”

One evening, at the beginning of a new school year, my father came home early. I leapt on him to give him a kiss, to feel his moustache against my face, but he took me by both shoulders and guided me into the kitchen, where he stood in front of me and looked down. I could not read the look in his eyes, but I could see that he looked very tired, very sad.

“Kamal, you are not going back to school.”

This shocked me. Why would I not go back to school? “But I love school, Father. All my friends are there.”

“If you live in this house, you work,” he said, his eyes turning hard in a way I had not seen before. “You have to work.”

Fouad was already working as an apprentice welder. Amira had already been pulled from school for her training as a wife.

“
Please
, Father. I am making you proud in school. My grades are good!”

He kept his eyes hard. “I have already arranged a job for you, answering the phone for Uncle Abdul Al-Karim.”

My uncle’s plumbing business was all the way across the city, many neighborhoods away. I fell on my father’s feet and grabbed his legs with both arms. “Please, Father! Please! I want to go to school! I want to make you proud!”

He pulled his legs from the circle of my thin arms, first one and then the other, and walked away, leaving me lying on the cold tile. At the kitchen door, he turned back and looked at me. The hardness was gone, and I could not tell what this other look in his eyes meant. Then he turned and went out of the kitchen. We never spoke of school again.

School started in August. The worst thing was when I passed my friends, me in my ragged clothes, them neatly turned out in their uniforms. I was embarrassed to let them see me. For the first few weeks, Sana, a girl I knew from school, stopped to talk with me. But after a while, we were not the same anymore. Not of the same class. She was a student, dressed smart and clean. I was now among the street people. Before, I had been poor but educated. Now I was only poor. Sana stopped talking to me, and instead began to pass me quickly with a hurried wave. Maybe her father told her I was not good enough anymore.

My uncle was a plumber and a pipe fitter who had landed a big job putting in all the plumbing in a tall building at the other end of Beirut. All that summer and fall, I worked until sunset, answering the big, black dial phone in my uncle’s office. I was working six days for about twenty Lebanese lira—about three dollars. When someone called, I took notes. But many times, he could not read my handwriting and he could not figure out who called. At that, he would fly into a rage and punch and kick me right in my guts.

“What good are you?” he yelled. “I am stuck with you as a favor to your mother, and you are good for nothing!”

We could not afford for me to take the
serviz
, a cross between a shuttle and a taxi, so I had to walk there, leaving very early each morning. If I went the long way, I had to get up before sunrise to make it on time. If
I went the short way, through certain neighborhoods, the bad kids waited.

2

These were older boys, some teenagers, who did not go to school and hung about on the street corners looking for trouble. They cussed and spit and waited for someone they could harass to come along. I had heard some of them carried big knives, sharp and deadly knives that opened with seven clicks. One stab would put you to sleep.

“What did you bring us today,
ya ibn al-sharmouta?
” they would taunt, calling me a son of a female dog. I tried to alter my times—to get up before sunrise and still take the shortcut, running to avoid the bullies. Then I would fall asleep at work, and my uncle would beat me.

I remember the day I found my saviors. Summer and fall had passed, and the winter streets were cold and wet from the rain that sweeps from the sea up the mountainsides, only to dapple back down on the city. That morning, I got up very early to make the trip to my uncle’s building. Since the day was cold, I decided on the shortest route. I reasoned that I might escape the gangs by the grace of Allah, but if I was late, a beating from my uncle was certain.

Dressed in a white shirt, hand-me-down black pants, and a black vest I had bought at a secondhand store, I set out that morning with lunch in a paper sack and my father’s good umbrella. He did not usually let me use it, but with the wretched weather, I suspected he judged it better to risk losing it than forfeit my pay. My journey began pleasantly in the misty streets of my own neighborhood. The streets were freshly watered, the air crisp and cold. I headed up Verdan Street past the main police barracks, nodding at shopkeepers as they raised their roll-up metal doors with long hooks and whisked the sidewalks with homemade brooms.

I walked with my head down, zigging and zagging between the rain
puddles. This was my quiet time, my safe time, the only time I was able to relax. I used it to try to keep the water from soaking through the
lira
-sized holes my brothers had worn in the soles of my shoes before passing them down to me.

Soon, though, I passed out of my safe zone onto a wide street, four lanes, two leading in each direction. The buildings were a mix of old and new, mostly houses and apartments with a couple of businesses: Bata, a shoe store, and Coiffure, a fancy hair salon. Also there was a corner bakery that sold a few groceries and was famous for its
lamajoun
, an Armenian meat dish served on thin, pizza-like dough.

That was the trouble: The Armenians. They were Christians, and almost every time I walked through there, a nasty little band of teenagers stole everything I had. On Monday, they would steal my lunch; Tuesday, the
kroosh
in my pocket; Wednesday, my shoes. Which is why I was now wearing shoes that had belonged to two brothers before me. If I didn’t take a lunch, so that they could plainly see I had nothing for them to steal, they would make a circle around me and push me back and forth between them, screaming, “What’s the matter, little son of a whore? Doesn’t your whore mother love you enough to make you a lunch? Or did you eat it already? Steal it from our mouths?”

Once, a tall, skinny teenager slashed the palm of my hand with a seven-click knife. I screamed.

That was the time a Maronite Christian lady came running out to rescue me. In her fifties, at least, the woman was standing on the terrace of her home, which looked to me like a mansion with its tall, fluted columns and banisters of stone.

She was slim and elegantly dressed, so I was surprised when she opened her mouth. “Get away from him!” she shouted, peppering the boys with curses. “I will call the police or beat you myself!”

The gang of about five boys laughed at her.

“You will beat
us
, woman?” said the teenager. “And I will come and visit your house at night!”

But the woman stood her ground until the teenager folded his knife and signaled to the others to walk away. Then the woman hurried down from her porch, through her gate to meet me. She took my bleeding hand in both of hers and examined it for a moment. Then she put one
hand under my chin, lifted it, and looked into my eyes. “What’s your name, child?”

“Kamal,” I said through my tears.

“Come with me, Kamal,” she said. And putting her arm around my shoulder, she guided me to her terrace. After a brief trip inside, she came out and sifted a little ground coffee onto the wound. “That will take the sting out,” she said. Then she wrapped my hand with a clean white bandage.

After that day, I always walked on the mansion side of the street, and the Maronite lady was always waiting, watching the Armenian boys with a falcon’s eye until I had passed safely out of sight.

Now, walking down the rain-slick street, I made a straight line to her house. And at almost the same moment, I noticed two things: First, the Armenian boys were standing on the bakery corner, watching my approach. Second, the Maronite lady was absent from her terrace.

3

Quickly, I averted my eyes to the sidewalk squares, walking far to the left side of the wide street, heading east, passing with the boys on my right. My stomach jangled with fear, as though I were passing a tiger’s cage and I knew the zookeeper had left it unlocked. I could feel their stares from across the street. They wanted to lock eyes with me, the signal of challenge, but I did not want to exchange eyes with them. My heartbeat quickened and I walked a little faster, hoping they would not notice.

Suddenly, a shout and the sound of shoes on pavement. “Get him!”

Instantly, I threw my lunch sack into the street like bait to wolves and sprinted down the sidewalk, pumping Father’s good umbrella up and down like a piston.

The thunder of twenty feet pounded the pavement behind me. “Get him! Tackle him!”

Homes and stores flashed past. I tried to look for an open shop door, a refuge. But I knew it could not be an Armenian shop. They would only side with the bullies, who were just steps behind me now. From a cobbler’s shop twenty feet ahead, a young man stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked toward our commotion.

“Farouge!” the boys called to the man. “Grab him!”

An Armenian. My heart sank. I tried to dodge to the right, but this Farouge, a man in his twenties, lunged out and snatched me by the back of my collar, dragging me instantly to a stop.

“What did you do?” he asked. It was an accusation.

The boys ran up and crowded around us.

“Nothing!” I said, panting. “I did not do anything! They just want to beat me up!”

“He is lying, Farouge,” said a tall boy who emerged from the back of the pack. I looked up and saw that he was the same one who had cut my hand before. “He stole my umbrella.”

I swung my head back and forth, eyes pleading with Farouge. But he only shrugged and gave me a small shove toward the others. “Take it easy, boys. Don’t hurt him,” he said, and walked back into his shop.

The tall teen’s arm darted forward, and he yanked me toward him by a handful of my hair. “Don’t
ever
run from us, you little faggot. We will
always
catch you!”

Laughter broke out around me. My eyes flickered from face to face, hoping for mercy. But I saw only mean grins. I looked at the Armenian boy who held me. He had strange slanted eyes and pockmarks in his face, like the craters of the moon. The other boys pressed in on me. Two grabbed my arms and I felt hands snaking all over my body, searching my pockets, patting down my socks, looking for money.

“I…I don’t have any money,” I said.

A hand dove down into my underwear, a good hiding place for a wallet, giving me a painful tweak when it found none.

I pleaded, still hoping to appease. “I get paid on the weekend. I can…can bring…bring some then.”

“Can—can. Bring—bring,”
the tall teen mocked, mewling in a little-girl voice. The others laughed. The teen drew back his arm and his fist smashed into my face. My back crashed down on the sidewalk. Speckles
of silver light swirled before me and a warm jet of blood spurted from my nose, seeping into my mouth.

“That’s for running away,” the teenager said. I tried to get up, but he took one step forward and, with his square-toed black boot, kicked me in the face. Pain exploded through my mouth and nose, and I screamed. Fresh blood sprayed the sidewalk like a fountain.

Feet surrounded me and taunts showered down. “Your sister is a stinking whore! Your mother sells herself at the chalets!”