“Only until we’ve been interrogated—‘investigated,’ I mean,” I replied nervously, leaning back against the wall.
A man roughly my own age came down the hall. His face had an Arab appearance, with a dusting of troubles similar to those on my own face. He was of medium build, with a plain face. He was carrying a small black leather case, and was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, of average beauty but extreme elegance. The pair walked down the hall toward where Julie and I were waiting. The man put his case on the ground, then threw his backside onto the seat opposite us. The woman sat down beside him with more concern for her own behind. The man leaned back. Between us sat a silent tension of the sort that invites curiosity.
Suddenly, the man straightened up and his back left the wall. He started to read my face with something like recognition. As if he knew me. I’d never seen him before, nor had I seen the elegant woman who was accompanying him. But perhaps he did know me. I thought of asking him, then hesitated, for he suddenly looked away. Then he put his hand into his bag and took out an Arabic newspaper. Perhaps he was also a Palestinian, summoned like me for an interrogation for that reason alone. His position would be worse if he was a real Palestinian.
The man opened the newspaper, and disappeared behind its pages. The face of Amjad Nasir peeped out at me from the photograph that hung over his weekly column, Fresh Air, on the back page. So it was al-Quds al-Arabi.
I still couldn’t place the man’s face, and started to ask Julie in a whisper if she had seen him on the plane, or even at some other time, but suddenly another female security officer appeared, slender where the last one had been heavy, putting an end to my whispering as it began.
She gestured to the man with the newspaper. He stood up and followed her, leaving his paper on the seat. The woman who was with him caught up, and the three of them disappeared inside the room. The officer then shut the door.
He’ll doubtless now be interrogated with questions that will shortly be repeated to me, I thought. I turned over all the possibilities, and went through all the questions—old and new—that awaited me, including the questions that my American neighbor on the plane had put to me. He had constantly repeated the name of Israel, rather than using ‘there’: “Is this your first visit to Israel? Why are you visiting Israel? Do you have relations in Israel? Where will you stay in Israel? How long will you stay in Israel?” Then, and this was more important: “Will you visit the territories?” Which territories? The administered territories. The disputed territories. As if our ‘territories’ didn’t have a name! “Do you have a Palestinian Authority identity card? A passport issued by them? Number of your identity card?” These were all personal effects that it was forbidden to smuggle into the country.
*
I had answered questions like these again after we’d landed, when Julie and I were lined up in a short queue, fed by passengers who rushed along in the hope of a speedy passage through passport inspection. I gave our two passports to a female security officer in her twenties, with a face that seemed slightly too small to contain all her features, so that they almost spilled out of it. The officer asked me the same questions that had been put to twenty other travelers. When I realized that she was bored with her questions, and perhaps with my answers, and was about to stamp the passports, I asked her not to, but to put the entry visas on separate pieces of paper instead.
She eyed me with obvious disgust, then let her tongue loose on me:
“Why don’t you want an Israeli stamp in your passports?”
“Apologies, madam, but that would hinder our travel throughout the whole region.”
“Wait there!” she said, waving us away from the window with her fist, which she used like a remote control. We moved away in silence.
The official with the backside arrived.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dahman, follow me, please,” she said. So Julie and I had followed her to the ‘Restriction of Entry Procedures’ room, where we now were.
While we waited for the couple to emerge from the room—dignity in tatters from their questioning—I decided to leaf through al-Quds al-Arabi.
I took the newspaper from the seat opposite and returned to my place. Julie had paid no attention to any of this. Since we had sat down, she hadn’t lifted her eyes from Ahdaf Soueif’s novel.
I opened the newspaper surreptitiously, and flicked through its pages. On the second half of the second culture page, my attention was caught by an article titled, “Don’t Believe Them: After Forty Years They Haven’t Forgotten Me.” The name of the author gave me a jolt: Rabai al-Madhoun.
Oh my God! I thought to myself. The familiar name was sparking various dormant connections in my mind. I started to read the article:
“Wait for a bit,” the officer at Cairo International Airport had said. We waited. He raised his head toward my wife, who was standing behind me, then handed her her passport. “Welcome, madam, have a good stay in Cairo!”
Then, abandoning his politeness, he turned to me, and reverted to the traditional security service lexicon: “Okay, sir, please come with us for a moment.”
I swallowed my feelings. “It will be a pleasure.”
The officer asked an employee standing in front of him—a detective like him, of course—to do a computer search for me in the security files. Some minutes later (I was still standing and blocking the queue of passengers waiting their turn behind me), the employee concluded his search with a public confirmation:
“Wanted, sir!”
The word, which appeared before my eyes at the top of an extremely official piece of paper like a ten-meter-wide banner carried by an army of detectives, sounded more like
