Yes, I was wanted by State Security, the highest security authority in the land. I, who had come with my wife to lay our heads for five nights in the bosom of the Mother of the World, and to tour the country and its river . . . I was wanted by the highest authority in the land. Yes, indeed, O joy! O happiness! Forty years after being imprisoned and deported from Egypt for political reasons that had never bowed my head, the Egyptian security officials had still not forgotten me. Here they were, explaining to me how technological developments had enabled them to transfer my records—with the lists in their old records now covered in ancient national dust—to clean computer files. Now I was wanted digitally.
As I breathed a reluctant sigh of admiration at the Egyptian security apparatus, which had remembered me after forty years, I reprimanded the fraternal Syrian security units, which quickly forgot their most important operations. I had been visited just before midnight on 10 August 1976 by a unit of ‘Protectors of the Homeland’ made up of fourteen armed security men led by an officer. The unit had raided my apartment, number 54 in building 6, Baghdad Street, in the ‘Beating Heart of Arabism,’ Damascus. They had killed my companion, Wajih, 19 years old, who was living with me, throwing his body from the fifth floor. They subjected me to torture that lasted for a full week. Then they forgot me, leaving me, for several weeks, with the shadow of Wajih falling from the window of my dark room to the foot of the building, until I left Syria altogether. I recorded all the details in my book The Taste of Separation: Three Palestinian Generations Remembered.
My wife left the airport for the center of Cairo, and it was decided to send me back to London on the first plane. A policeman led me to some side offices, then to a prison cell a little further inside, where he threw me into a group of young detainees. And what detainees!
During my happy stay in the cell, I was privileged to meet a Bahraini wanted by the international police; another, a Pakistani who had arrived at Cairo Airport without a passport; and a third, a hashish smuggler just like his prototypes in old Egyptian films. There was a fourth, a man who claimed to be Lebanese, and who spoke with the accent of a Sunni from the Basta quarter of Beirut—like the Beiruti Abul Abd, the well-known Lebanese popular character—though our friend spoke it with an Egyptian twang. This obvious undercover policeman behaved like someone renting the cell, and sometimes like the general manager, administering it by virtue of his long residence, or so it appeared. To emphasize that, he marked himself out by using a worn-out mattress, which stank of damp and which he spread out in the left-hand corner opposite the door. The others envied him for it. A fifth resident of this restroom for important personalities joined us at midnight—a Palestinian from Gaza, who had arrived from Libya with the intention of returning to the Strip via the Rafah crossing point. There were hundreds of people returning, and the Egyptian authorities had reduced the daily quota of buses permitted to transport people to Rafah. For some reason, which was never revealed, it wasn’t permitted for the lucky returnee to stay in a hotel until he was able to travel, so he found himself a guest of the authorities, just like me.
That December night, I slept on a cold floor that was infused with the smell of decay. I was covered by a double layer of nervousness and tension, which gave me recurrent nightmares throughout the night—a night full of foreboding and anger. I gathered myself together in a mass of national humiliation and insult, in a plastic chair that had once been white. I shivered for a while and slept a little. I woke up from a nightmare, the voice of a policeman still humiliating me with a clumsy apology: “Excuse me, doctor . . . .”
During the twenty-four hours I spent in detention, I was subjected to two rounds of interrogation, in a room where an officer with the rank of colonel in the State Security apparatus sat behind a desk. If I had been in his place, I would have been embarrassed by the requirements of my job.
I was astonished at what I read in the newspaper, as if borders were just borders, ports were ports, and airports airports for a Palestinian. I would stop the owner of this paper as soon as he emerged from the interrogation room, and ask him about himself. What was his connection, if any, to the author of the article? I hesitated before doing so.
The door of the room opened, and the man appeared at the door with his wife, smiles on their faces. He turned toward me, then looked at the chair opposite, where he and his wife had been sitting a short time ago. When I offered him back the newspaper, he said, “Keep it, if you like!” then hurried toward the exit with his wife.
I was called by name from inside the room by what sounded like the voice of a woman, though it was hard to be sure. I got up from my seat and went into the room. Julie stayed where she was, for she hadn’t been called, and might not be subject to any interrogation.
Inside the featureless room, a female officer from Internal Security—Shin Bet—in her midthirties was sitting at a low desk. She reminded me of my aunt in the 1950s, sitting behind an old hand-operated Singer sewing machine, creating underwear from a piece of spare cloth.
The officer waved her hand to indicate that I should sit down on a small chair beside her, which I did. Without turning toward me, she asked me the purpose of my visit, and I replied to her.
The woman with the heavy bottom
