They swaggered away, laughing their heads off, leaving the marines holed like colanders, with the result that the girls' first hour of that day was spent patching them from head to toe.
For living quarters, they had the three long huts, one with cubicles for women; one without cubicles for men; and a third with a so-called library for the training staff--and if they invite you to the library, said a tall Swedish girl called Fatima, don't expect too much in the way of reading. To wake them in the morning, they had a belch of martial music over a loudspeaker they couldn't turn off, followed by physical exercises on a sand flat smeared with lines of sticky dew like gigantic snail tracks.
But Fatima said the other places were worse. Fatima, to believe her version of herself, was a training freak. She had been trained in the Yemen, and in Libya, and in Kiev. She was playing the circuit like a tennis pro until somebody decided what to do with her. She had a three-year-old son, called Knut,who ran around naked and looked lonely, but when Charlie talked to him he cried.
Their guards were a new kind of Arab she hadn't met till now and didn't need to meet again: strutting, near-silent cowboys whose game was humiliating Westerners. They postured on the perimeters of the fort and rode six up in jeeps at breakneck speed. Fatima said they were a special militia raised on the Syrian border. Some were so young Charlie wondered their feet could reach the pedals. At night, till Charlie and a Japanese girl raised hell, the same kids arrived in raiding parties of twos and threes and tried to persuade the girls to take a ride into the desert. Fatima usually went, so did an East German, and they came back looking impressed. But the rest of the girls, if they bothered, played safe with Western instructors, which made the Arab boys even crazier.
All the trainers were men, and for morning prayers they ranged themselves before the comrade students like a rabble army while one of them read an aggressive condemnation of the day's arch-enemy: Zionism, Egyptian treachery, European capitalist exploitation, Zionism again, and a new one to Charlie called Christian expansionism--but perhaps that was because it was Christmas Day, a feast celebrated by determined official neglect. The East Germans were cropped and sullen and pretended that women bored them; the Cubans were by turns flamboyant, homesick, and arrogant, and most of them stank and had rotting teeth, except for gentle Fidel, who was everybody's favourite. The Arabs were the most volatile and acted toughest, screaming at the stragglers and, more than once, spraying bullets at the feet of the supposedly inattentive, so that one of the Irish boys bit clean through his finger in a panic, to the great amusement of Abdul the American who was watching from a distance, which he often did, smirking and slopping after them like a stills man on a film set, taking notes on a pad for his great revolutionary novel.
But the star of the place during those first insane days was a bomb-crazed Czech called Bubi,who on their first morning shot his own combat hat along the sand, first with a Kalashnikov, then with a massive.45 target pistol, and lastly, to finish the brute off, with a Russian grenade, which blew it fifty feet in the air.
Lingua franca for political discussion was O-level English with a bit of French here and there, and if Charlie ever got home alive she swore in her secret heart that she would dine out on those cretinous midnight exchanges concerning the "Dawn of the Revolution" for the rest of her unnatural life. Meanwhile, she laughed at nothing. She had not laughed since the bastards blew up her lover on the road to Munich; and her recent vision of the agony of his people had only intensified her bitter need for retribution.
You will treat everything with a great and lonely seriousness,Joseph had told her, himself as lonely and serious as he could wish her. You will be aloof, maybe a little crazy, they are used to that. You will ask no questions, you will be private to yourself, day and night.
Their numbers vacillated from the first day. When their lorry left Tyre, their party was five boys and three girls and conversation was forbidden by order of two guards with cordite smears on their faces who rode with them in the back while their lorry bucked and slithered over the stony hill trail. A girl who turned out to be Basque managed to whisper to her that they were in Aden; two Turkish boys said they were in Cyprus. They arrived to find ten other students waiting, but by the second day the two Turks and the Basque had vanished, presumably at night when lorries could be heard arriving and leaving without lights.
For their inauguration they were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Anti-Imperialist Revolution and to study the "Rules for This Camp," which were set out like the Ten Commandments on a flat space of white wall in the Comrades' Reception Centre. All comrades to use their Arab names at all times, no drugs, no nudity, no swearing by God, no private conversations, no alcohol, no cohabitation, no masturbation. While Charlie was still wondering which of these injunctions to break first, a recorded address of welcome, no credits, was played over the loudspeaker.
"My comrades. Who are we? We are the ones with no name, no uniform. We are the escaped rats from the capitalist occupation. From the pain-ridden camps of the Lebanon--we come! And shall fight the genocide! From the concrete tombs of Western cities--we come! And find each other! And together we shall light the torch on behalf of eight hundred million starving mouths across the world!"
But when it was over, she felt a cold sweat on her back and a pounding anger in her breastwork shall, she thought. We shall, we shall. Glancing at an Arab girl beside her, she saw the same fervour in her eye.
Day and night,Joseph had said.
Day and night, therefore, she strove--for Michel, for her own mad sanity, for Palestine, for Fatmeh and for Salma and the bombed children in the Sidon prison; driving herself outward in order to escape the chaos inside; gathering together the elements of her second character as never before, welding them into a single combative identity.
I am a grieving, outraged widow and I have come here to take up my dead lover's fight.
I am the awakened militant who has wasted too long on half measures and now stands before you sword in hand.
I have put my hand on the Palestinian heart; I am pledged to lift the world up by its ears to make it listen.
I am on fire but I am cunning and resourceful. I am the sleepy wasp that can wait all winter long to sting.
I'm Comrade Leila, a citizen of the world revolution.
Day and night.