Authors: Ryszard Kapuscinski
Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat-belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seat-belts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.
I met him in Damascus, in the elevator of a small hotel. He is a Palestinian, but he looks as if he has come straight from Siberia. Felt boots, a heavy coat tied with a belt, a fur cap with ear-flaps. Fortunately, the evenings are chilly in Damascus and you can walk around in a thick quilted jacket without roasting inside it. During the elevator ride, he reaches into his bag and hands me an apple. The Palestinian way of making acquaintances: offer fruit to the person you’ve just met. Fruit is the largest, and in fact the only, natural wealth of Palestine, and to give someone fruit is to give him everything you have.
He invites me to his room. He is the commander of one of the
fedayeen
groups that are fighting on Mount Hermon. It would be out of place to ask for his name or any details connected with his identity. He is from Galilee, let that suffice.
They have to dress warmly on the front, in down coats and ear-flaps, because Hermon is a mountain the same height as Mount Olympus, covered in snow and raked by icy winds. People die of exposure at night. And sometimes, when the shelling is heavy during the day, they lie motionless for hours and freeze to the rock. Unfortunately, they cannot get used to the snow or the cold; they might as well be fighting on an alien planet. The mountain keeps changing hands. Whoever takes the summit plants his flag there. Then another battle takes place, and, usually, a change of flags. Whoever dies, stays on the mountain, but it is worst for the wounded: there is no way to carry them down and they suffer a lot, because cold magnifies pain.
The
fedayeen
are waging their Palestinian war in the snows of Mount Hermon. The fiercest fighting takes place on the mountain, at short range, face to face, with both
sides on the same piece of rock, on a narrow ledge from which one pushes the other over the precipice.
At the foot of the precipice stretches softly folded country, grey, naked, ruined country: this is the Golan Heights. There, the war between Israel and Syria goes on.
The commander from Mount Hermon asks me what I think about the battles on the Golan Heights, what I think about this war.
I tell him that I have never seen such a war.
Our war looked different and it ended long ago, in Berlin, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1945. It was a war of millions and millions of people. The trenches stretched for an unending number of kilometres. Even today, you can find traces of fortifications in every Polish forest. Each person made an enormous effort to survive that war; we dug up our whole country with our own hands. When the order to attack came, the soldiers broke out of the trenches like ants, and a great human mass covered the fields, filling the forests and the roads. You could meet people carrying guns everywhere. In my country, the war did not pass anyone by; it went through every home, it smashed its rifle butt against every door, it burned dozens of cities and thousands of villages. The war wounded everyone, and those who survived cannot cure themselves of it. A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war. Everyone has to live out his own war to the end. War is the most brutal of things for a simple reason: it demands horrendous sacrifices. The people from my country that made it to the Brandenburg Gate can say how much victory costs.
Anybody who wants to know how much you have to pay to win a war should look at our cemeteries. Anyone who says that you can achieve a lasting victory without great losses, that you can have the war without the cemeteries, does not know what he is talking about. I want to emphasize the following: the essence of war lies in the fact that war gathers everyone under its black wings. Nobody can remain on the sidelines, nobody can sit drinking coffee when the moment comes to be throwing grenades. Every Algerian took part in the Algerian war. Every Vietnamese took part in the Vietnam war. The Arabs have never waged such a war against Israel.
Why did the Arabs lose the 1967 war? A lot has been said on that subject. You could hear that Israel won because Jews are brave and Arabs are cowards. Jews are intelligent, and Arabs are primitive. The Jews have better weapons, and the Arabs worse. All of it untrue! The Arabs are also intelligent and brave and they have good weapons. The difference lay elsewhere—in the approach to war, in varying theories of war. In Israel, everybody takes part in war, but in the Arab countries—only the army. When war breaks out, everyone in Israel goes to the front and civilian life dies out. While in Syria, many people did not find out about the 1967 war until it was over. And yet Syria lost its most important strategic area, the Golan Heights, in that war. Syria was losing the Golan Heights and at the same time, that same day, that same hour, in Damascus—twenty kilometres from the Golan Heights—the cafés were full of people, and others were walking around, worrying about whether they would find a free table. Syria lost fewer than 100 soldiers in the 1967 war. A year earlier, 200 people had died in Damascus during a palace
coup
. Twice as many people die because of a political quarrel as because of a war in which the country loses its most important territory and
the enemy approaches within shooting distance of the capital.
The front line soldier might be better or worse, but every soldier is: a person. A young man runs a particular risk, because his full life is just beginning. And now the whole world crashes down on this person. Death attacks him from all sides. Mines go off under his feet, bullets whistle through the air, bombs drop from the sky. It is very difficult to endure in such a hell. We know that, aside from the worst enemy, there exists an even worse enemy: loneliness in the face of death. The soldier cannot be alone; he will never hold out if he feels like a man under a sentence, if he knows that his brother is sitting in a nightclub playing dominoes, his other brother is horsing around in a swimming pool, and somebody else is worrying about how to find a free table. He must have the feeling that what he is doing is necessary to someone, that it is important to someone, that someone is watching him and someone is helping him, is with him. Otherwise, the soldier will throw everything down and go home.
War cannot be a matter for the army alone, because the burden of war is too great and the army itself will not manage to support it. The Arabs thought otherwise and—they lost. I told the commander from Mount Hermon that I was struck in the Arab world by the drastic gap, by the complete lack of contact between the front and the country, between the life of a soldier and the life of a shopkeeper during the war—they existed in two different worlds and they had different problems—one of them was thinking about how to live through another hour, and the other was thinking about how to sell his merchandise, and these are very different worries indeed.
We went out into the city. Our hotel stood near the main post office and the train station in the busy centre of
Damascus. A long line of shoeshine boys sat in front of the post office building. This place is green with soldiers’ uniforms. The fighting on the Golan Heights lasts from daybreak until dusk, and in the evening the soldiers drive into Damascus. They walk the streets in groups, buy something in a shop and usually go to a movie. But before, they stop in front of the post office to have their boots shined. The Golan Heights are dust, which is why the soldiers’ boots are always grey, always in need of the brush. The boys that bestow elegance on the soldiers’ boots know everything about the war. Terribly dusty boots—there was heavy fighting. Dusty boots, but, ach, only so-so—quiet on the front. Wet boots, as if they’d been pulled out of the water—the
fedayeen
are fighting on Mount Hermon, where there is snow. Boots stinking of diesel oil, smeared with grease—there must have been an armoured clash, and the tank crews have had a rough day.
Boots—these are the war communiqués.
The commander from Mount Hermon remarks that you can see so many soldiers at once only in Damascus, and on the other side probably in Haifa or Tel Aviv, because the army is not visible on the Golan Heights. Both armies are dug into the ground, in bunkers or shelters, or buttoned up inside the armour of their tanks. Nobody walks along the Heights, nobody runs there, you cannot meet a soul on the roads, and the villages are destroyed—an emptiness like the surface of the moon. Whoever wants to see soldiers fighting like in the old days has to scramble up Mount Hermon.
Times have changed now, and the face of war has changed. Man has been removed from the field of vision on the battlefield. We see equipment. We see tanks, self-propelled artillery, rockets and aircraft. Officers push buttons in a bunker, observe the jumps of a green line across a screen, manipulate a joy-stick and press another
button: a boom, whistling, and somewhere in the distance a tank disintegrates, somewhere in the sky an airplane flies to pieces.
The ordinary human face has disappeared from the image of war. ‘Hey, Dick!’ the chief of the Camera Press office shouts over the telephone to his photographer, who is working on the Golan Heights, ‘quit sending me rockets all the time. Send me a picture of the living mug of one of those guys that are slugging it out up there!’
But the living mugs are hidden behind the view-slits of the tanks.
Straight off the plane, they push me into a car and set off, racing along a winding road, not telling me where we are going. The Greek next to me finally says that we are on our way to a refugee camp, a rally, and we might be late. He checks his watch and scolds the driver. This is my first trip to Cyprus, and the beauty of the island has already gone to my head. We are speeding over hill after hill; cypress trees line the road; there are endless vineyards; the villages are of white limestone; the sea beyond them—always the sea.
A quarter of an hour and we turn into a space, flat, big, covered with tents, and a large crowd is standing at one end of it. Someone is on the platform waving his hands, the loudspeakers reverberating with a speech that I cannot understand. The people with me (I don’t know their names) start pushing through the crowd, pulling me along; in the crush I smell that stuffy, peasant smell, milk, wool, something else; and then I see their faces, silent, intense, rocky, sallow. The Greek who is pulling me through the crowd by my hand says these are all refugees from the north, poor people without—he adds, clearing the way now with his elbow—houses or possessions. But these are hardly the conditions for a longer conversation, if only because, before I can grasp what is going on, I have been pushed on to the platform and handed a microphone by a young man.
Speak, says someone else. I’ll translate.
I am sure that there has been a mistake, that they have taken me for someone else—a dignitary, a minister, an international figure who is meant to tell these unfortunate people about their fate and about who will improve their lot.
The sun is intense and I am soaked with sweat.
I want to get down off the platform and clear up the misunderstanding with the organizers. I am not going to speak; public speaking is torture for me. I know nothing about Cyprus; I have only been here half an hour. I do not know these people and I have nothing to say—at least nothing they couldn’t live without.
There is no organizer in sight. There is nobody to whom I can explain the misunderstanding. There are children clinging all around the edge of the platform, like bees on a honeycomb, making it impossible to get down. The crowd is waiting, silently. I stand in this silence; thousands of people are watching me, stupid, lost, trapped. I wipe my face with my handkerchief, playing for time, trying to collect my thoughts. The one who handed me the microphone and the other one who offered to translate are both starting to look impatient. The chidren are staring at me with particular attention.
I have the presence of mind to look around me. The men stand close to the rostrum. Powerful, massively built peasants with angular heads and black, closely-cropped hair. They are unemployed. The war has cut them off from work and deprived them of their fields, their orchards. What could this man have been yesterday? A sower in the spring, a harvester in the fall, the lord of himself all year round. And today? A refugee, with a bowl in his hand, queueing for soup. What a waste of human energy, I think, an abasement of dignity. The peasants on the outskirts of Lima and Bogota, or the ones in India and Thailand, or the young people in Nigeria and Kenya: a billion people capable of work with nothing or almost nothing to do for the duration of their lives. Nobody needs them or wants them in a world where there is already so much to be done. If they could be given worthwhile occupations, humanity could make dizzying progress. The world’s wealth would be
doubled. Pyramids of merchandise would rise in even the poorest countries. Granaries would overflow. Water would flood the largest deserts. And here, on Cyprus (I want to tell them), couldn’t we perform miracles and make your island—a paradise of nature—into a paradise of affluence and plenty? But the war has destroyed everything you had. It has cut down the trees in your orchards and trampled your fields, torn off the roofs of your houses and scattered your sheep. And now the war has sentenced you to be idle spectators of your own misfortune.