The China Lover (38 page)

   9   

I
F THE TARMAC
hadn’t been melting in the heat on the day I arrived, I would have gladly kissed the ground of Beirut International Airport. A week later, I was in a training camp learning how to fire a Kalashnikov and throw hand grenades. The hand grenades, frankly, left me cold. But the gun was something else. I’m not a military type. So in the beginning my shoulder felt sore from the kick, and I burned my fingers on the gun metal. But there is nothing, nothing at all, more satisfying than holding a warm Kalashnikov and letting it rip. We used pictures of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir for target practice. I didn’t kill them that day, unfortunately.

There were people from all over in the training camp, from Argentina and Peru, from Africa and the Philippines. At night, sharing the flatbread and hummus with our Palestinian instructors, we felt like an international family, a family of revolutionaries. My English was poor, and some of the South Americans spoke it even worse, but I loved listening to their stories, about fighting the white Fascists to liberate the peasants. I was embarrassed when they asked me about the Ainu or the Koreans in Japan, for I had never given them much thought. Sure, I had envied my schoolmates when they left for North Korea, but not for any political reason. Their lives just sounded more interesting than ours. I went along to the Korean bars with my friend Hayashi, because he liked going there and I quite liked the kimchi, but that was
about the extent of my involvement with the Koreans. Hanako, who visited the camp from time to time, had lectured our comrades on the discrimination of minorities in Japan, so they may well have known more about the subject than I did. I had to be careful. I made sure to look serious and nod in agreement when they talked about racism in Japan. What else could I do, without looking like a complete hypocrite?

I felt closest to the Germans, especially Dieter and Anke, commandos in the German Red Army Faction. Like me, they had had no military training before. Dieter was a philosophy major from Tübingen and Anke was a high school teacher. They were both tall and skinny. His bony face and thin blond wisp of a beard always reminded me of Don Quixote, a Nordic Don Quixote. Anke had straight dark hair and dreamy brown eyes. She loved German literature. She told me all about Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass. I hadn’t read either of them. We also talked a lot about the Second World War and the failure of our parents to resist fascism. I even talked about my father, but only because they went on about their parents so often. I felt I had to reciprocate, to be fair to them. Anke’s father had been a member of the Nazi Party, and she was terribly ashamed of him. Dieter’s father, like mine, had gone missing in the war, somewhere on the Russian front. Although they were foreigners, I felt closer to them than anyone, except Hanako, of course. We understood one another on a profound level, in our minds, but especially in our hearts. Our friendship went deeper even than my friendship with Okuni. There was no idle chatter among us. There was no time for that.

The camp closed down early. The streets were too dark to hang around in. The electricity supply was limited and most people went to bed as soon as the streetlights were turned off. All you heard was the sound of crying children and, in the early morning, the call to prayers. Our instructors took little notice of this. They were socialists. The Arab revolution was their creed. Dieter, Anke, and I often talked until
late at night, by candlelight, when everyone else was asleep, about history, politics, art, and literature. We agreed about almost everything and they opened up a whole new world for me of German writers. Apart from Böll and Grass, I learned about Novalis, Hölderlin, and Rilke.

Just once did we have a serious quarrel. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a quarrel. It was more like a misunderstanding, about something I said, inadvertently, which put my friends in a rage. But I didn’t really argue with them. I didn’t have the words in English. We were discussing strategies in our armed struggle against Israel. I favored hijackings, while they saw more hope in bombing raids on Israeli targets. Dieter was convinced that “every Israeli citizen should be made to feel the pain of the Palestinian people.” I didn’t disagree, but added, rather matter-of-factly, “So here you are again, fighting against the Jews.”

I thought Dieter was going to explode. His bony face went horribly pale, making him look more than ever like a Nordic Don Quixote. He banged the hard mud floor with his fist and screamed something at me in German. Anke was shaking, and stared at me with a look of horror, as though I’d swallowed a live rat. Dieter was beside himself: “We are not fighting the Jews! That’s what the Nazis did! How dare you insinuate that we are like the Nazis!” I protested that I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but with my stammer and my broken English, perhaps I hadn’t made myself clear. “You were clear,” shrieked Anke. “Quite clear!” Then she started to sob: “We thought you were our friend and comrade, so why do you have to insult us?”

People sleeping around us were beginning to stir. A light was switched on. One of the Peruvians asked what was going on. “He insulted us,” said Dieter. “He called us Nazis.” An Italian Red Brigadist called Marcello, who had been woken up by the commotion, asked me why I said that. I suddenly felt very alone, and horribly misunderstood. I stammered something about fighting the Jews. Marcello, a peaceful, friendly guy, tried to calm the German comrades down. He
said that as a Japanese I might not understand the historical nuances. We weren’t fighting the Jews, he said, only the Zionists. And I should apologize to our German comrades.

So I apologized, bowing to my friends, asking them to forgive me. Dieter said okay, and accepted my handshake. Anke was still sobbing, tugging at her straight dark hair with both hands. But I wasn’t satisfied. Something wasn’t right here. I couldn’t leave the subject dangling like this. So, just as people were lying down to sleep, I said: “But what about Jewish capital?” “What about it?” said Marcello. Well, I said, clearly Jewish money was pressing the Western powers to support the Zionists. “Tomorrow,” said Marcello, “we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” No, said Dieter, who was very calm now, “we’ll talk about it
now
.” And he gave a typical Dieter-like lecture, concise, logical, about the subject at hand. “Jewish capital,” he explained, “is USA capital. We must resist the USA in our struggle against fascism. But that doesn’t mean we fight the Jews. On the contrary, the Jews were victims of fascism. Our resistance against fascism now is part of our solidarity with the Jews, to make up for the cowardice of our parents.
Gute Nacht
.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept arguing with Dieter in my mind. There was something wrong with his logic. But I decided to leave it at that. We all have to live with the burdens of our own histories. Dieter and Anke have to live with a German past that is hard for us Japanese to understand. I still don’t see why the suffering of Jews in the Second World War should be an excuse for them behaving like Nazis today. We should be fighting the Jews precisely because they are like the Nazis. That is the honest way to resist fascism. I actually believe that Dieter and Anke secretly agreed with me, but couldn’t bring themselves to say so. For the sake of our friendship and the success of our cause, I decided never to bring up the subject of the Jews with them again.

   10   

H
ANAKO BELIEVED IN
free love. As did I, in principle. But I savored every second we could be together. I wished our nights in the top-floor apartment on the rue Sanayeh could have gone on forever. I thought I knew all about making love to a woman. In fact, I knew nothing. She was my teacher, my mentor, my guide through the portals of paradise. I had never imagined that such pleasure was possible. But she also made me aware that I was still a reactionary at heart. As we lay together, smoking, gazing at the starlit sky over the old city, she made it clear that I could never possess her, since she was a free human being, who gave me her love freely. She didn’t belong to any man. Her only master, she said, was the revolution.

Of course, I knew I was being a hypocrite, no better than those Japanese salarymen who go home to their faithful wives after jerking off to a pink movie about raping hot schoolgirls. But I wanted to have Hanako to myself. The idea of her melting into the arms of another man, offering herself to his passion, filled me with jealous rage. I knew that she had slept with Abu Bassam, and continued to sleep with Abu Wahid, the chief of propaganda, a thick, dark-skinned man, who took women as his lovers as though it were his natural right. When I told Hanako that I loved her, she said that she loved me too, but not just me. Once, when I argued about this, she got angry. “Who do you think you are?” she screamed. “What do you think we’re doing here? This isn’t a
girls’ high school, you know. We’re fighting for our freedom. Not just the freedom of Palestine. Freedom for all of us.”

I knew I couldn’t honestly disagree. So I tried a different tack. “But Abu Wahid is a bully,” I said. “He
does
want to possess you.” She walked away in a fury. Days later, when we were back on speaking terms, she said: “Abu Wahid is a hero of the revolution.” Quite why this gave him a special right to Hanako was not immediately apparent, but I stopped arguing. I learned to live with the idea of sharing her. Better a fishtail than no fish at all.

Not that I saw all that much of Hanako, for she was usually working on various missions, moving from one safe house to another, often with Abu Wahid, who was effectively my boss, since the PFLP cadres had decided that I would best be employed as a maker of propaganda films. I liked the work, even if all the scenes I shot—of commandos shooting at Zionist targets, women working on the home front, children singing revolutionary songs—were staged to show the Palestinians to their best advantage. But this didn’t bother me at all. Bourgeois television was staged as well, to promote consumerism, and the capitalist imperialist system. I saw myself in the same mold as the early Soviet filmmakers. Like Pudovkin. Art is never neutral. Everything is a reflection of power relations. My films, shot on sixteen-millimeter stock, were made to empower the powerless.

I didn’t miss Japan much. The one thing I did sometimes pine for was a steaming bowl of Sapporo ramen swimming in miso soup. They have Chinese noodles in Beirut, but they don’t taste the same. And sometimes I missed my friends. Once, Hayashi visited us in Beirut, but he felt homesick after three days, couldn’t stomach the food, and flew back to Tokyo. I received a long letter from Yamaguchi-san, full of enthusiasm as usual. She was proud of being the first Japanese TV reporter to interview Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang.

She wrote:

Reading her letter, I was close to tears myself. There was such sincerity in her feelings, so rare among Japanese. Here, among the Palestinians, it was different. There was no time to think selfishly, for everyone was dedicated to the same cause. Perhaps it takes extreme hardships to bring out the best in a people. Peace had weakened the Japanese, made them soft and self-centered, like babies.

There was no chance of us going soft. Some of my comrades, including Dieter and Anke, had left Beirut to continue the struggle in Europe and elsewhere. Their names would sometimes crop up in the newspaper headlines. When that happened, you usually knew it couldn’t mean good news. Our commandos prefer to stay anonymous. Those of us who stayed behind were kept busy in the camps, lecturing on world politics, practicing rifle drills, learning how to detonate car
bombs, working in the free clinics, making propaganda. If I had any complaint in those days, it was that I grew tired of training. I longed to practice the skills I had acquired. Making films was fine. But films don’t change the world. Films can’t deliver a direct blow to the enemy. Films can’t kill.

I was reassured by the men in the PFLP office. “Your time will come, Comrade Sato,” Abu Wahid said one day, when I’d pestered him yet again for a more important job. “We have plans for you.” But he didn’t tell me what they were, and I knew it wasn’t my place to push him for more information. Secrecy was essential. Hanako always knew more than I did, because of her proximity to the leaders. “One day we’ll be very proud of you,” she said with her sweet smile that never failed to get my spirits up.