Free Zone by Mathias Enard Page A

one explosion, not one tank engine, not one word. The crushing sun of midday. Marwan a hundred meters away. Maybe the Israelis have picked him up. No one likes having bodies decomposing in his camp. Ahmad. He had to have fallen in the company of Ahmad the coward. Treacherous, cunning, vicious. He might have been lying to cover himself. Maybe he shot himself in the foot. Maybe he killed Marwan. She mechanically loads her Kalashnikov, all the combatants turn around, surprised. The metallic click of the breech resounded like a knife on cement. She wishes the fighting would begin again immediately. She wants to shoot. To fight. To avenge Marwan stretched out over there. At this moment Arafat and the others are with American envoys negotiating their departure. To go where? 10,000 Fedayeen. How many civilians? 500,000 maybe. To go to Cyprus? Algiers? To fight whom? And who is going to protect the ones that stay? The Lebanese? This silence is unbearable, maybe just as unbearable as the heat.
    Habib and the others have begun playing cards, without much enthusiasm. The weight of defeat.
    Most of the fighters are nomads. Some are escapees from Jordan, who settled in Beirut in the late 1970s; others took part in operations in the South; still others joined the PLO after 1975. All of them nomads, whether they’re children from the camps or refugees from 1948, or from 1967, whom war surprised far from their homes and who were never able to go back. Abu Nasser crossed the Lebanese border on foot. He never returned to Galilee. Marwan neither. Intissar was born in Lebanon, in 1951; her parents, from Haifa, had already settled in Beirut before the creation of Israel. Often, watching the old railroad tracks in Mar Mikhail, she thinks that the trains used to come slowly down the coast to Palestine, passing through Saida, Tyre, and Acre; today the space has grown so much smaller around her that it’s impossible for her to even go to Forn El Chebbak or Jounieh. The only ones that can travel through the region without difficulty are the Israeli planes. Even the sea is forbidden to us. The Israeli navy is patrolling and firing missiles. Habib and the shabab are children of the camps, sons of refugees of 1948. Palestinians from the outside. Palestinians. Who resuscitated this biblical term, and when? The English probably. Under the Ottomans there was no Palestine. There was the vilâyet of Jerusalem, the department of Haifa or Safed. Palestinians had existed for barely thirty years before they lost their territory and sent a million refugees on the roads. Marwan was a militant as soon as he was old enough to speak. Marwan sincerely thought that only war could return Palestine to the Palestinians. Or at least something to the Palestinians. The injustice was intolerable. Marwan was an admirer of Leila Khaled and the members of the PFLP who hijacked airplanes and kidnapped diplomats. Intissar thought you had to defend yourself. That you couldn’t let yourself be massacred by fascists, then by F16s and tanks without reacting.
    Now Marwan is dead, his body is turning black under the Beirut sun near the airport, a scant hundred kilometers from his birthplace.
    Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence next to Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were joined solely by a common cause and a cold hatred. But the first time she saw Ahmad something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some combatants were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried in triumph. He was handsome, crowned with victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, had confronted a unit of the Israeli army and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion that they produce. The false power they give. What you think you can obtain by using