BLACK SUN

by Etel Adnan

Translator’s note: Published in 1973, L’Oeil Noir takes place in the Beirut of that same year, where Etel Adnan was working at the time as a newspaper editor. Adnan died in 2021 at the age of 96. Throughout her long career, she produced several books of experimental poetry and prose, essays and cultural criticism, as well as landscape paintings. One of the few short stories in her various and expansive oeuvre, L’Oeil Noir resists generic categorization. Featuring a well-known historical figure, the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, L’Oeil Noir follows an unnamed woman’s attempts to befriend a mysterious Palestinian émigré, Farid, who claims to have been Dayan’s right-hand man. The story is animated by the competing political visions of its historical moment: Pan-Arab unity, Palestinian national liberation, and Zionist expansionism. It is, equally, a window onto the troubled relationship that unfolds between these two men, one a Palestinian raised by a Jewish Israeli family and the other a renowned Israeli politician. Disputes over contested land take on phantasmatic form as Dayan and Farid veer into hashish-induced delirium, with no signs of returning to the realm of reason. The story bespeaks its author’s prescient vision and unsettling attention to the political urgencies of her time and ours.

— Laila Riazi

The following day at the hotel, at around the same hour, I saw Farid again. This time alone, I approached him. He was much younger than me, which made it easier to strike up a conversation. At first, he tried to wriggle away, but soon enough we warmed to each other. I thought I should say something surprising, to hold his attention. So, I lied and told him I had just returned from America to launch a company in Beirut that would make me a fortune. “You, a woman, from Lebanon?” he cried, near-incredulous and amused. He had flinched at the word America, but eventually softened and showed himself to be quite friendly.

First of all, I will tell you that he was called Farid.

The wind carried his name to where I was sitting, on the terrace of the Saint-Georges hotel. He was with two women, both completely veiled. One of them, the one who called him by his name, had her face covered. The other revealed two eyes, and the hint of a nose that must have been quite large. All three were animated. I can’t say why, but I had a feeling that they the women, I mean were almost certainly wicked.

They made me want to know more about them. I called the waiter, who described them as clients of the hotel. “From Qatar,” he added. “What’s it to you?” It was getting late and still they were chatting between themselves, in hushed voices. It came time for me to leave. I went home to my small apartment, even though I wanted to stay, sipping lemonade on the terrace, talking with them.

When I asked about the two women, he explained that they were just acquaintances, and that he’d come with them from Qatar. “I work at a hospital there,” he added. “I brought them to Beirut so that they could have surgery at the American University Medical Center — it’s worldrenowned.” I wondered: “Are their families very rich?” He responded, “Very rich, yes. Very,” without elaborating. His face was dark and his gaze opaque, his air troubled. Yet, in a sense, I grew attached to him, and quite quickly. I made him promise to find me once more in the same place. He wouldn’t have to go out of his way if it was his hotel where I wanted to meet. But when I tried to call his room a day later, again at the Saint-Georges, the receptionist informed me they’d checked out all three of them without leaving an address.

•

One year later, seated at the Horse Shoe Cafe and sipping another lemonade, the kind that arrives at your table with its ice cubes already melted, I see Farid enter. He is aged, and breathless — as if he has just eluded capture. I am pleased to see him. He recognizes me instantly, and probably feels like he should say something. I take pleasure in thinking he is happy to see me.

“Please, sit down,” I say. Though distant, the scene shines in my memory: certain things live on in my head, beneath a bulb constantly alight.

“Where are the two women the ones you were with?”

“They were discharged from the hospital and flew back to Qatar.”

“You disappeared.”

“No. We changed hotels. All of that was a while ago …”

“So, they returned without you?”

“Yes.”

“And your job in Qatar?”

“I didn’t want it anymore. I stayed here.”

“You’ve been in Beirut this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the two of them? Are they ok?”

“Yes, certainly!”

“And you, have you found work here?”

“No.”

I wanted to forestall his departure, but I didn’t know what else to ask him, resolved as he seemed to give nothing away. I wanted to make our conversation last, to never see him leave. That same night I had a dinner to attend at the home of a friend. She had invited a few journalists, her friend the Polish consul, the editor of the France-Press Agency, an indifferent theater director, and a Tunisian singer, rather well-known. This friend of mine is charming; at her house you will find plenty of people, whisky, and hashish. Even if the food is bad a rarity in Beirut — you always feel good there. I suggested to Farid that we go together, sure he’d refuse. To my surprise, he didn’t. He accepted my invitation without question. I figured he must be very tired, and very lonely.

•

At around nine p.m., I met Farid at the Horse Shoe Cafe. He stepped into my red Mini Cooper, barely noticing it. On our way to the party, he took my arm and whispered, in a familiar vernacular Arabic, “You know, I should tell you. I’m not Lebanese. I’ll explain more later.”

The party was animated. Farid drank and drank. The hashish that evening was plentiful and fresh. It had come directly from Békaa, its fragrance like poison. I told Farid it was excellent. “Hashish is my best friend,” he muttered in response. “It liberated Palestine.” I was shocked to hear him say this, even though, in Beirut, nothing really surprises anyone.

No one overheard what he’d said. This confession rare as it was endeared him to me. Of course, the least mention of Palestine’s liberation always pulled me into a trance: tragedy can become euphoria for those who have long despaired of everything. In this case, however, something else was at work. There was Farid’s soft voice, and this aura he had, no closer to reason than to madness. •

On Saturday the sixth of October 1973, the Arab armies launched a war against Israel. I learned this around mid-morning. In the evening, from my balcony in the Patriarcat quarter, I watched Mount Sannine’s water-green glint turn fire-pink as a wing of flame embraced the sky. The light died slowly; the twin crests receded into darkness. Night came, and with it, Farid. We were up to our necks in the news. A torrent of headlines, one after the other.

Farid turned down the radio. Against a low thrum, he began to speak:

“I’m Palestinian,” he said. “My family survived the war of 1948. Me, I was born in 1953. Twenty years ago, in winter, in Saint Jean D’Acre. I’m from Akko! Akko! Like an orange, yes.”

He turned down the radio once more. You could hardly hear it. And then he went on:

“My parents died in a bus explosion. Both of them. I was their first and their only child. They were farmhands whose families had stayed on the other side of the border, in Jenin. I was taken in and adopted by their Jewish neighbors, a couple who is still there, who I called papa and mama, who had no child but me. I must have been two years old or so, it’s all very vague in my mind. They did not lie to me, they told me when I was six who I was, what had happened. They sent me to school. I spoke Hebrew as well as I spoke Arabic, if not better.”

“And you, what side were you on?”

“You mean politically? Neither. The war of ’67 I watched with disinterest. It happened so quickly, and I was barely fourteen. My parents — my new parents — didn’t speak much of it. It resembled, this war I mean, the passing of a black cloud, a shower of rain. On our coast nothing changed, at least not for me. At the time I was preoccupied with making summer last for as long as possible, swimming from spring to the end of October, eating plentifully and sleeping.”

“And this war, do you believe it will last?”

“I don’t know. Let me finish my story.

One day, not long after the ’67 war, a masked man set off a bomb on a bus I happened to be in. The engine didn’t explode. Out of instinct, I’m not sure how or why perhaps I had thought of my parents I grabbed the grenade and defused it. The next day, there was a photograph of me in every newspaper. I was the little Arab boy who had saved all those Jews.

“A few days later, a military official appeared at our house. After a long discussion with my adoptive parents, he told me that Moshe Dayan had summoned me to his office in Tel Aviv. So, I went. When I saw him up close, with his covered eye, I shrank back in fear. A kind of black sun seemed to watch over me. You know how we fear such markings, us Arabs. We take them for signs. You know how superstitious we can be. Moshe applauded me: ‘Farid,’ he said, ‘we are very proud.’

“The following month, he summoned me again. ‘We propose to pay for your studies,’ he said. ‘Serious studies. You will go to the School for Intelligence Services. It’s complicated. They’ll explain to you what it’s about. It’s reserved for young minds like yours.’

“I was pleased.”

“Pleased?”

“Yes, I was pleased. I had been raised by Jews, was comfortable among them. My life and theirs it had become the same life. And then, I think, I was proud that they needed me, a young Arab man.

“I needed to please, to be loved, by whomever. I needed to occupy myself with something, to prove that I was just as clever as everyone else. To be less alone, too. I told myself there were unforeseen things on the horizon if I accepted, perhaps some trips, a house or a car, an end to all this … What did I know? I said yes. I attended the school for two years. It was indeed a technical school. We learned everything there: how to repair tires and build ladders, how to tie knots and assemble radios … We also learned more difficult things, like how to decipher codes, how to be tough, how to anticipate anything. Above all, we learned how to hide what we were thinking.”

“But how did you feel during your training? Did you not feel you were on your way to becoming a traitor? Did it not disgust you?”

“No. You should know that something very curious happened at the school. I was one of three Arabs. We made up a cell of our own, they put us on a parallel track. They spoke to us of an inevitable friendship that would one day emerge between Jews and Arabs. They told us that Arabs were brave and nonviolent, that the fedayins had infiltrated our peaceful brotherhood. They made us believe that the fedayins were fighting for money, that all of them were mercenaries fanatical and dangerous. In the meantime, everything was fine, and nothing was fine. I was growing used to a drug. I understood later that I’d been tamed, like a dog. They had accustomed me to hashish. ‘You see this hashish?’ they’d say. ‘It comes from Lebanon. Its fragrance is one of a kind. Asli, asli it’s the real thing!’ This is how, between me and your country, there developed a kind of memory, a collusion and familiarity, the strongest link of all: that of the dream. Whenever I felt unhappy, or abandoned, I smoked some more. This is how hashish became my father.

“And then. Something else happened I still don’t understand. I grew attached to Moshe Dayan. The thought of him consumed me. I pitied him and admired him at once. I said to myself: the one who triumphs is always great. No matter who he is. I mentioned to you that we traveled parallel paths. I saw this as true for the others as well. Arabs or Jews, we clung we cling to the past, as though it were Noah’s Ark, the last redoubt. And yet. We are feverish for tomorrow, lurching forward, hypnotized by it a future that offers itself to us as both guarantee and impossibility, all of this simultaneously, in a clash of ideals and images and aching hearts.”

“And Moshe Dayan? Did you see him often? When did you see him for the last time?”

“Well, yes, I saw him again … Listen, turn off the radio. There’s always so much noise in this city! Yes, I saw him again, many times. He ‘followed’ me, by which I mean, he followed my progress at the school. Asking for updates. He said that I was a good addition. I still ask myself if he ever felt a real fondness for me. I doubt it. Now, I no longer care.

“One time they nearly dismissed me, because of a scuffle where I came out on top, and it’s Dayan who let me stay. I should add that, shortly after that, towards the end of my second year, I was asked to stand by as they interrogated a Palestinian. He looked like me, was probably my age. I fixed my eyes on his shirt, which was stained through with blood. The stains multiplied he yelped. Then he began to moan like a child, and then like a newborn, but part human, part beast. I fainted.

“Moshe Dayan must have read in my dossier a report of what had happened. He called me into his office. I will never forget this. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the sea. Oh god, I thought. What will happen next? The school year will end soon. I will return to my home. How is it the sea is so beautiful? Dayan had prepared for me a little speech. ‘I know you fainted,’ he told me. ‘But you must understand: all of what we do what you do is in order to save human lives. Precision is necessary for our security, and, indeed, for yours. And there is no security without precise information. We must know everything. Everything. Do you understand? It is preventative. So that we don’t punish the innocent. One day you will understand that this life is a laboratory, where each of us must discover the science of survival. In any case, you won’t have to do this dirty work anymore. I’ll soon be needing your services personally.’

“And yes how he needed me! It’s hot in here, look at us sweating! It’s worse than Tel Aviv. Listen, I have more to say, I won’t go on for much longer, leave the radio be, don’t interrupt me.”

“But I’m not interrupting you!”

“That has nothing to do with it. Listen, you never listen. Anyway as I was saying. I was again in his office, and he rushed to close the door behind me. As usual, I sat down facing the sea. The window appeared enormous, as if it had swallowed the wall. I heard his voice, lost sight of him in the light. With a startling abruptness, he emerged from the white shadows. He explained to me that we were going to Lebanon, by way of Cyprus, that it was already too late for me to stop by my house, that I was forbidden to speak to anyone, and that we would set off on our route in 24 hours.

“My knees were quaking. I did not have a voice with which to say yes. The fear of leaving the school, of taking on a mission so singular, with a person so impressive, pummeled my entire body. My gaze flickered across his. He was calm.

“There. Those two women you saw me with, last year, on the terrace at SaintGeorges? Those two women? One of them was him. He was hiding beneath loose clothes, the black robe. He was covering his face. The other person, also disguised, was his assistant.

“When we arrived in Beirut, at the hotel, Dayan specified the plan we had come there to execute. The American Secretary of State was visiting the capital to consult with the Lebanese government. I had to kill him, in an attack, and in such a manner that the crime could be blamed on a Palestinian. I had to be spotted but not captured. Our operation would revise the world map. This is what Dayan kept saying. And then, we had to disappear by night, on a raft that would be waiting for us in the south of Beirut. Every detail had been worked out, we had just to wait, for 48 hours.

“Dayan figured that he would put this time to good use for a reconnaissance mission. He decided to station himself in Békaa and from there to contact one of our agents. His assistant stayed in Beirut. It was me that accompanied him. When we descended upon that remarkable valley, I noticed that an irrepressible happiness had surged up in him. We marched towards a hut, tucked away behind some trees. We were still far from the hut when, in an instant, we found ourselves at the foot of a hill, in the middle of a field, which had a view of the valley as it stretched towards the Euphrates and Rakka. The valley swept Dayan into a trance. He saw himself as a Roman conquering Aleppo, and then Turkey. He compared himself to Field Marshal Rommel slicing through the Libyan desert. To King David, leading his troops to the gates of Babylon, laying the city waste.

“He began a long speech, a monologue. ‘Farid,’ he spat. ‘For too long, the History of Nations has galloped past the Jews without even a glance. Every people has had its triumphs, its empires, its art of cruelty. We, we have been I repeat for too long, the audience of a play to which no one invited us! Now, it is once more our turn. We will blow into this valley like the wind. We will puncture the beating heart of Asia. No longer will they say that the Turk fights better than us, or that the Persian is more powerful, or that only the Afghan can rattle Russia. We will gut the lands of our enemies, a pregnant woman whose water has burst. We will go so far as to thwart the designs of China and bring down its plans like so many stacked cards …!’

“My mind was elsewhere. We were amid hashish plants that reached up to our belts. The particular odor of this plant enveloped me in its bath. My hands skimmed a tablecloth, undulating and green, with a sense of endless recognition. The universe took on a new shape. I was struck by a counter-vertigo, my point of focus growing clearer, narrowing. This lucidity was hard for me to bear. I exist, I am, I am irreducible, I am other. This is what I heard myself saying to myself. I had been plucked from a long torpor. The light was dancing, the clay hills cast an Arab land against the blue sky. I understood that I had just abandoned an enclosure, that I was free, that I was living in a forever open space.”

“Were you hallucinating?”

“No. On the contrary. In these plantations of hashish, the drug abandoned me. I was not swallowed by it instead, I was swimming, drifting even, over the green and oily plants, the slender shrubs, real forests in miniature that would have sunk my mind but which, in that instant, my mind had escaped. A fresh vision overtook me. Plunging into this meadow, into the heart of the Arab valley, I entered the home of my father that was the truth, the origin so that I could take possession of it and liberate myself of it. I became an adult. In the naked sun, I understood. In a terrible revelation, the sheer force of the unoccupied earth. On the path to Yammouneh, I saw Palestine from afar, bled of its poison, the city of the future. I thought aloud.

“Dayan heard me, and this stopped him in his tracks. He began to yell and, addressing himself to me, continued his speech: ‘Yes, I will go from victory to victory, and Palestinians like you, I’ll make them my workhands, the slaves of my empire!’ I still ask myself if the look I must have given him did not sting him. His look, the tip of a laser, scorched my forehead. He slapped me across my bare cheek. Just as he was drawing back his hand, I removed the weapon from inside his black robe and killed him.”

“I am turning up the radio, Farid. This is no moment for rambling. Listen! We are at war. They just said that the Egyptian troops have crossed the canal. Do you think it’s true? That they’ll stay put?”

“The Syrians are also advancing …”

“Do you think they will continue advancing?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How does it not matter anymore? It’s only just started. Everything is going to change. Shut up. Listen. They have been fighting for a while it’s a ferocious battle. Listen! The Egyptian army is going to reconquer the Sinai.” •

After a while, we grew exhausted, having absorbed so much news, so much noise, the thundering reports, the military processions. Wide-eyed with longing, with doubt Hours passed without our knowing it, as if we were in a world that wasn’t our own. Suddenly, in a flash, the sky fell. The radio blared the news. It said: “Dayan has just made a declaration. The Israelis have stopped the advance of the Egyptian army, on the Sinai border, and are now on the offensive.”

War, always war. Defeat, always defeat. The radio, always the voice of misfortune. Farid on the balcony. I call him:

“Listen, Farid, listen, this will sober you up, this last piece of news. Dayan just announced that Sharon is advancing towards the Suez Canal. This is going to end badly, this story.”

“What will end badly? These are just words. You are dreaming, all of you, all of you are hallucinating. It’s not Moshe Dayan you just heard speak. They have hidden the news of his disappearance for a year now. He’s an alias, the one you heard speaking on the radio. The real Moshe Dayan me, Farid, the Palestinian I killed him and buried him gently in a garden of hemp.”

Hervé Guibert

Prague, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris