The Silence and the Roar (11 page)

Two posses of marching young men held up pictures of the Leader and flyers that glorified him and the Party. Their clothes looked disheveled from sweat and the crowds; their faces and their eyes were as red as beetroot; yet despite the fact that their voices were hoarse they continued repeating chants and praises for the Leader. In a matter of minutes I found myself face to face with thousands of people, mostly young men, some of whom looked dead tired but most of whom were in a state of unnatural agitation, as
if the march had not ended and was just getting going. They were becoming more fierce. They took up the entire width of the street, waving pictures and stopping the flow of traffic as the people in cars shouted in protest and continuously honked their horns. At one junction I saw a brawl break out between the two groups of overstimulated young men and some drivers. I heard fists pounding on the cars as their chants were transformed into shouting and cursing. Then both posses were pelted with stones from a third direction even as some people—and I was among them—took shelter in the entrances of buildings out of fear that the stones would rain down on their heads. Regiments from the security forces and armed battalions of militiamen quickly arrived on the scene and proceeded to bash both groups until the young men who were still able to do so ran away and the rows of cars managed to start moving again, although there were certainly cases of drivers getting beaten up.

I came out of the foyer of the building where I had taken shelter and started walking against the flow of traffic until one of the Comrades, who had seized those hooligans and detained them up against the wall, noticed me walking toward the city center and not the reverse. He let me pass although he watched me for a while. This Comrade could tell I had not been part of the march because of the direction I was walking in. When I turned around to make sure he was not watching me any more, I bumped into the hordes and got thwacked by the end of a sign being carried by an employee who was dressed in a blue work uniform by order of the Party.

I was swimming upstream, bumping into people coming toward me. The longer I walked the more jammed the streets became, and it took greater and greater effort to clear a path through them, until I got so tired that I began to think I never should have left Lama’s flat in the first place, that I should have waited until the sun had gone down instead. I continued making my way forward, running into people, and when I reached the junction with a side street that I had assumed would be less crowded, I found it to be just like all the other streets, so I gave up on the idea and continued walking straight ahead. It wasn’t just the crowds that were bothering me, but the noise as well, which was building to a crescendo with all the car horns and the young men shouting and the megaphones strung along balconies and trees droning with patriotic anthems and military march music and the enthusiastic voices of broadcasters. I had to stop in the entrance to one of the buildings because I simply could not go on any farther. In that moment a large group of young women dressed in khaki who were returning from the march were being harassed by some of the overstimulated young men in cars right in front of me. The first car in line, filled with young men, inched its way closer to the young women, threatening to run them over. The driver revved the accelerator suggestively, which made the engine produce a terrifying sound, as if the car were about to pounce on the women. I heard shouting here and there. Some of the women were laughing while others were screaming in fright. Just then dozens of men hurried over to surround the women and protect them, forming a perimeter and turning outward to
confront the guys in the car. When one of them abruptly socked the driver in the face, all the young men leapt out of the car and a brawl ensued in which the weapons of choice were pictures of the Leader and the wooden sticks they were affixed to, as the pictures got scattered and trampled underfoot. While the men and the youths brawled and hurled the handles of those flying pictures, the women had found the perfect opportunity to skedaddle when suddenly we heard the sound of a single gunshot as a number of Party Comrades came charging at the skirmishing horde, brandishing their guns and proceeding to crack skulls with the butts of their pistols in order to break up the melee. Apparently one of the Comrades hit a man who got too big for his boots, standing up to confront the Comrade face to face as the two of them traded insults. The other Comrades stopped what they were doing and came over to repay the man with punches until he was overpowered, at which point they picked him up and ran off with him, moving away in the direction of the Party vehicles.

Here was the moment I was waiting for to slip away as everyone else stood there watching the scene. I started walking but after a few minutes I stumbled over a body I had not noticed because of how crowded it was (others besides me tripped over it as well). When I turned around I discovered it was the body of a veiled woman who had fainted from the crowds and the heat, which had slackened off a little but was still pretty awful. I pulled the woman up and leaned her back against the wall, shouting at everyone around me not to trample her or trip over her. I also started yelling for water but nobody had any. Another
woman came over, bent down and started gently slapping the overwhelmed woman’s cheeks to wake her up, but to no avail. Three men made a human fence around her to protect her from the flood of people, and as I stared up at the higher floors of the building we were in front of, searching for someone who might lower us a bucket of water to wash the woman’s face, machine-gun fire exploded. The crackle of the shots was very close. We had no idea why the security forces would open fire, but this initiated a terrible panic among the people, who shoved each other and ran for cover, pushing us along with them. I fell to the ground. The frightened people pushed away everyone who had been standing around this woman with me until some of them even fell down on top of me. The panicky people were kicking me, trampling me underfoot. I tried to get up before the situation got any worse but failed because as soon as I managed to lift myself up they knocked me right down again. If the shoving had not slackened somewhat thanks to the abatement of people’s fear, I might never have been able to stand up on my own two feet. I went back to check on the woman and found her in a very dire condition: blood was gushing out in several places on her face, her hands and her legs. I held her under the armpits and lifted her up, slinging her over my right shoulder and walking down the street with her, weaving between the cars and the people, shouting for them to get out of the way. People started responding to my shouts, thank God, and I was able to move faster and faster until some people volunteered to run out in front of me and clear a path.

I knew that woman would die if I left her there, but it was impossible to get her to the public hospital in time. One man ran in front of me clearing a path but even when we reached the intersection leading to the public hospital we still had a long way to go. The man encouraged me to keep going and I barely noticed the weight of the woman or the heat bearing down on me. This selfless man was shouting at me to keep running, assuring me we were almost there even though it was still a fair distance away. Without warning I found myself losing strength. It was hard to catch my breath, and my legs started to get weak. Despite all of that, however, I pledged to myself to keep going. If I put her down so that I could rest that woman might have died. Just then I took one false step and tripped over something—perhaps my feet got twisted around one another—and fell down with the woman on top of me. It was a terrifying fall. I drifted horizontally in the air for a second and because of the weight of that woman my head swiveled toward the ground. I clutched her body as she fell down, first on her bum, and then her torso bounced up into the air as her head flew toward the ground. I believed the woman would be killed if her head slammed against the ground with such force, so I threw my left hand out as far as I could and her head came down smack on top of it, painfully smashing into it. It felt like a giant hammer had come crashing down on the palm of my hand, possibly fracturing it.

When the selfless man in front of me turned around and saw us we were already falling. He instinctively reached out his hands to try and catch us even though he was two
feet away. He saw how the woman’s head would have been cracked open if it hadn’t fallen on my hand. I was writhing in pain as he stopped and ordered people to be careful not to trample on us. Later at the public hospital he told me how astonished people were to see a man and a woman lying on the street at their feet. He found it difficult to keep them away. When it became clear to him that I might have broken my hand, he started begging some people to help us. Three young men volunteered to carry the woman while he helped me up and we all ran together until, after extreme effort, we finally made it to the hospital.

They determined that the woman had been dead for a little less than an hour but that they would not know the cause of death until an autopsy could be performed, which was not going to be right away because lots of people fall down at marches as a sacrifice to the Leader and nobody would ever suspect that a crime had been committed. Death by suffocation or trampling underfoot at Party and patriotic occasions is an everyday occurrence. Ordinarily it’s enough to catalogue the names of the dead and file the list with the relevant authorities so they can be mourned as martyrs later on. They concluded that my middle finger was broken and that my left hand was badly sprained as a result of the woman’s head falling on it so forcefully, which left a bruise two inches across.

They set my finger and offered me a bag of ice to treat the bruise, telling me that keeping my hand horizontal would lessen the pain. They helped me to avoid using it at all by hanging a sling around my neck; then they asked me to wait in the hallway so they could take down some information
about the woman. I found the selfless man who had helped me get there sitting and waiting for me.

I sat down next to him on a chair near where the woman’s corpse had been left on a stretcher in front of us, her body covered with a white sheet. When we asked them why she was there, they told us the hospital morgue was full and that other dead bodies had been left in hallways as well. The hospital reeked of corpses that naturally emitted foul odors because of the extreme heat. The man and I sat there in silence, shocked by the news of the death of this woman we had tried to do the impossible in order to save. The hallway was swarming with people who had fallen victim to various accidents during the march. After receiving emergency care they were asked to wait outside so they could be re-examined or so the X-rays of their limbs that had been broken, like mine, could be developed. More people arrived every moment while others still waited. As the chairs filled up, people could no longer find seats and were forced to sit on the floor or lean against the wall. It was so crowded that a patient who was bleeding profusely might have got their blood all over and also unwittingly stepped on dead bodies or on the feet of those sitting on the ground. Groups of men would frequently come in carrying someone who had fainted and start a big ruckus, while others fell after being shoved by one of the rescuers. Chaos and death, bloodshed and broken bones, the stenches of anesthetic, disinfectants and putrescence—anyone who witnessed this scene would get dizzy.

As I mentioned, the selfless man and I sat where we were because all the other chairs were occupied. We were silent
because of everything we saw, heard and smelled. I asked him what his name was and he said, “Jamil al-Khayyat, also known as Abu Ahmad, at your service.”

After I told him my name he stared back at me for a long time. I smiled and asked him what was wrong and he said he had not recognized me but that perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. He must have been older than fifty-five and apparently he had been searching for my address for some time in order to tell me his story, which he thought I might want to include in my next book. I did not want to disappoint him by telling him I was not publishing much of anything any more and that I had given up writing, so I gave him my telephone number instead and told him he could call me in a week, that is, once the celebration season had passed, but he proceeded to tell me his story anyway, right there in that unbearable setting.

Abu Ahmad was in charge of photocopying documents at a government department. One day the machine malfunctioned and started leaving large black splotches on the documents, so he took it to be repaired, and when it came back two weeks later, it worked a little bit better. It still left black splotches but in smaller, more acceptable sizes, especially insofar as his photocopies were considered auxiliary copies for everyday use whereas the original documents were kept safe in file folders. One day last year a Party committee at the department asked him to make ten thousand copies of a picture of the Leader from a color original in order to plaster the walls completely. Everyone knows the walls at state institutions must be totally covered with images of the Leader even if they are all the same. And they are, for
the most part, all the same. He warned them about the photocopier malfunction but he received no formal response from his department head or anyone else. He had to fulfill this assignment or suffer the consequences. Time was short, the celebrations were going to start soon and the walls had to be plastered with pictures.

He made ten thousand copies from the original image. Comrades and security forces came and carted off piles of them, plastering them on the walls overnight. Workers and employees saw the walls covered with pictures when the institution opened its doors the next morning. When he showed up for work the security forces were waiting for him in his cramped little office. They seized him and marched him in for questioning at one of the security branches and he was not released until six months later, during which time he was beaten and tortured beyond what a human being can bear. He was accused of intentionally defacing pictures of the Leader that he had copied with his machine. The pictures were all splotched with black ink. It was his misfortune that those splotches appeared directly over one of the Leader’s eyes, making him look like a one-eyed pirate with a patch. He was interrogated by dozens of investigators who made an art out of beating and torturing him, to the point that he lost all the flesh on his feet, his back split open, his testicles shriveled up after having electrodes applied and they terrorized him by threatening to put him in the German Chair—the chair that, when fitted to someone, folds them in half and is capable of snapping their spine—because they wanted him to confess who his accomplices were, which opposition groups they were affiliated with and
who had floated the idea in the first place of disfiguring ten thousand pictures of the Leader in order to make him look like a pirate. They wanted a confession, no matter what it was, so they could close the file and issue a verdict. The crime was obvious to them—having employees show up in the morning to find the walls covered with pictures of the Leader looking like a pirate is a criminal act that is no laughing matter.