“It’s nothing.” Jamil weighed the guns in his grip, and examined the leather pouch of bullets. “A scratch only. Thank you. God keep you safe.”
He turned, and walked back up the slope. A man with a club charged past, emitting a belly-deep roar. Jamil knew that sound. That was the sound of anger, summoned to drown out terror.
When Basil saw him, he touched Jamil’s arm affectionately. Jamil began firing with the dead man’s gun. But it wasn’t long before a commander brought news that they were encircled by tanks, and it was time to hide. Jamil and Basil followed the other survivors across the hillside towards a cave. They waited for nightfall, drinking water from jars and washing their faces and wounds. Jamil sat sentinel for a while at the edge, and as the battle heat cooled he rested on his heels and thought of Midhat. He felt again the weight on his arms as they had carried him to the car, when Hani had asked, with a grave look, whether Jamil could read French.
“I used to,” he replied. And Hani, with a look almost of apology, folded Midhat’s letter and its envelope into his breast pocket.
Jamil could form a rough idea of what was in that letter. He did not feel curious about it. In part, he was sure that whatever it was would not translate; but mostly, with his ears flooded by his cousin’s sobs, there had been little room to feel anything in that moment besides impotence and fear. He clenched his jaw and looked up at the trees. The sun was declining, and in the chill of the aging day the branches began to shake.
8
The detention camp at Sarafand was one converted corner of an active British military garrison. The cells were a series of pitched-roofed wooden barracks, separated by tall fences of barbed wire. At the beginning of Hani’s detention, only five of the camp beds in his barracks were occupied. But as the summer progressed, and more and more senior personnel were arrested, the beds filled, until by the hot dark of August each room was crammed with men accused of inciting violence, snoring side by side in the close night. Several times a day the barracks doors were thrust open, and two or three soldiers would march in and take a register. This happened at intervals of a precise inexactitude seemingly designed to surprise the detainees in the act of “gathering in large numbers,” which, as they were repeatedly informed, was against camp regulations.
At Hani’s request, Sahar had sent him a white kufiya and white abaya, which like the other urban detainees he wore as a gesture of solidarity with the rebels. He grew his beard long, and spent his days in a folding chair out on the small perimeter of earth they jokingly referred to as the “garden,” between the walls of the barracks and the barbed wire fence, shuffling round the barracks with the sun to keep in the revolving shade. The barracks’ single desk was reserved for the eldest among them, Hussam Effendi from Jaffa, and as the day went on the others would help Hussam Effendi carry the desk with his book and papers in pursuit of the shadow. Everyone else rested Qurans on their knees and wrote letters leaning on the covers. They never mentioned the tedium. Sometimes their eyes met, and without the usual relief of a burden shared, the inmates silently communicated to one another the same dull and tenacious sadness. Meanwhile they knew the rebels were organising, and military leaders from Syria dressed in old Ottoman regalia were setting up regional commands and courts in the mountains to judge traitors. But God gave every man his own particular battle to fight, and this was theirs: the same bland food, the same view of walls, the same worn faces, the same eyes shut in prayer, the same prayers for patience forming on the same lips.
Besides studying the sacred text, Hani spent his days reading the newspapers and writing—to his wife, to his friends and colleagues, and to British government officials. Trusting that everything he wrote would be read by the prison officers, he took the opportunity to administer any small barbs of spite that he could muster without incurring further punishment.
Aziza Sahar,
I cannot believe you are the one who gave me the idea to prove my arrest here is illegal. In your letter you said—“You think you’re being detained, but actually you are locked