Broken Mirrors (33 page)

Abu Jihad said he’d chosen him for three reasons. The first was that
he’d known the martyr and it had come to his knowledge that an innocent friendship had developed between the two of them at the Baissour Camp two years before. The second reason was that he’d read his article on Shaqif Castle and been impressed by his ability to recount and summarize history and put it at the service of the cause; his attention had been caught particularly by Karim’s citing of a story by an Israeli author called Yusha about a Palestinian with a severed tongue and his ruined village.

“Yehoshua,” said Karim.

“Right, Yehoshua. You read Hebrew?”

“No, I read it in English.”

“You’re from the Shammas family of the Galilee – Fasouta, I think.”

“I’m not Palestinian,” said Karim. “I’m from Beirut.”

“Anyway, we’re all one people.”

“Thank you,” said Karim.

“Where were we? The third reason is that I don’t want professional writers. I want what’s written about Jamal to be full of life, which is why it has to be a writer like you, meaning a writer who isn’t a writer.”

Abu Jihad started explaining to Karim the map in front of him and how the young people had infiltrated via a commercial ship; then, when they reached a point opposite Haifa beach they’d thrown their rubber boats into the sea and themselves into the midst of the waves to get to them; and that two of the youths had become martyrs by drowning; and had it not been for the intensive training they all would have drowned before getting to the boats. Then he spoke of the two buses and how the Israeli army was responsible for the massacre that took place. “The orders to Jamal and the boys were not to kill any Israeli hostages. They were to get to Jaffa and negotiate there the release of a hundred Fedayeen captives and their safe exit from occupied territory. But the Israeli army closed the road at Herzliya and bombed the bus from the helicopters and the massacre happened.”

“But I know from Jamal, Brother Abu Jihad, that the chances of not dying were zero.”

“Not true. We prepare the young people psy​chologi​cally for martyrdom but that doesn’t mean that the chances of returning safely are zero. That’s not true.”

Karim asked what it meant to say that “the chances weren’t zero.” Abu Jihad smiled bitterly and said, “They’re like my own children and in any case the road we’ve chosen can lead only to martyrdom. I’m certain that the moment when I shall meet them again is near. It will be the happiest of my life.”

Abu Jihad explained to Karim that he expected a short text from him – enough to fill a five-page pamphlet – that would tell the story of Jamal and turn her into a symbol of Palestinian womanhood.

“But to write, I have to have all the facts,” said Karim.

Abu Jihad opened his desk drawer and took from it a spiral-bound book that had been placed in a closed brown envelope. “I made you a copy of the diaries kept by the martyr. I’m sure they’ll be a very useful source. There are only two copies of these diaries. The original is with me and the photocopy with you. Absolutely no one must see this text. Take your time and write at your leisure and if you have questions phone Brother Nabil directly. He’s the one who’s going to take you home. I’m ready to answer all your questions any time you call. It’s a big responsibility that the revolution is placing in your hands. Please don’t spend a lot of time on some of the personal issues, they’re not useful, but you have to know about them so you can write.”

Karim took the brown envelope with trembling hands and, seeing the leader stand, stood up too. Abu Jihad put out his hand and shook Karim’s, and Karim heard the voice of Brother Nabil, who had suddenly appeared in the room. They went out into the darkness of the stairs and climbed in silence. He got into a small Volkswagen next to Nabil. Nabil drove the car
carefully through the empty streets and didn’t ask where he was supposed to be taking him. The car stopped in front of Karim’s building on Abd el-Aziz Street. Nabil gave him his number and said he’d be waiting for him to phone. Karim opened the door of the car and made to get out but Nabil’s hand reached out for his knee to stop him. “Forget where you met Brother Abu Jihad. No one must know where Center Thirty-Eight is.”

Karim nodded and quickly got out of the car. Because there was an outage he climbed the steps to the third floor where he lived, lit the paraffin lantern, and sat down on the only sofa in his room, where Jamal’s words started marching toward his eyes. He felt as though he were choking; he felt thirsty and the words danced over the shards of light from the lantern, which, seen through his tears, appeared upside down.

Why hadn’t he dared tell Abu Jihad that he would never write the pamphlet? Was it cowardice, admiration for the man, or a mixture of the two?

He wanted to tell him that suicide operations were a sin, they did no good, and that he was against them because the killing of civilians wasn’t a revolutionary act. At the same time, though, he admired and was enchanted by this girl who had fashioned heroism through her death. Things were mixed up in his mind because he wasn’t against the heroic operation that Jamal had led: he’d wanted it to happen and to succeed and in so doing to shake Israeli society to its roots and make it feel the significance of the catastrophe that had befallen the Palestinians and of their expulsion from their homeland. But he’d also wanted Jamal to emerge alive. The problem of the revolution is that the men and women who die for it and are transformed into posters and images don’t see their posters. They die imagining the poster. Truth becomes an illusion in their lifetimes, and their lives vanish into the darkness of death. He lost himself amongst Jamal’s words. He felt they’d become traps and that he’d fallen in and would never get out.

Why had Abu Jihad chosen him for this impossible task? Did the man know of his silent love for the martyr and had he chosen him to make him
pay the price of his cowardice? Jamal would never have been able to invite him to die with her without first consulting her commander. Maybe they thought they needed a doctor, but a doctor can’t treat suicide if he commits suicide along with the rest. What a bind! How was he to write of his disappointment? How was he to write after reading what Jamal had written about him? Was it true that he used to weep at Baissour, and if not, why had she pictured him so? Had she wanted to castrate him to justify to herself her failure to respond to him? But she had responded. True, she’d been reserved at the camp, but at the Café Jandoul she was different – distant and close, her eyes wandering as though she wanted to say and not say. And then there was the meeting at the clinic in Burj el-Barajneh, which had happened by chance. Karim was certain it hadn’t been a coincidence at all, and that Jamal had dropped by the clinic deliberately so that she could run into him because she’d wanted to convey to him a precise message. That was why she’d agreed to his invitation to coffee at Café Jandoul, though there she’d hesitated and hadn’t said what she’d meant to.

Karim spent the whole night up, reading and rereading. He didn’t tell Danny what had happened at his meeting with Abu Jihad and Danny didn’t ask. Karim lived with Jamal’s diaries for three days. He was stunned, reading words that were next to one another without arriving at their meaning: the meaning fled the text before it could enter Karim’s consciousness. He read and reread and discovered he’d never be able to write anything. How could he rewrite a text that had been taken apart by death and then reassembled? How was he to interpret a voice coming to him from the other world? What could the dead say to the living? Jamal had written poetry. He read the poetry and reread it. He would see the poem, or something like the poem, disintegrate and then reassemble itself, its rhythms dissolving in his eyes. He read the poem ten times. He read it in a low voice and in a loud voice. He read it with his eyes closed and he read it with his eyes open.

When he read the news of Abu Jihad’s assassination in Tunis, Jamal had awoken once more in his memory. He’d run into Talal at the café in Place de la Comédie. The Lebanese student was carrying
al-Safir
and started reading an article describing Abu Jihad’s funeral at Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. All he could remember of the description was the scene of the bier flying over upraised hands. “The whole camp came out and all the villages of Galilee congregated to bid farewell to the leader of the intifada of the ‘children of the stones’ in Palestine. And then the bier flew. The bier hovered over the throng and moved over the tips of the fingers of the hands raised to bear it. So thick were the crowds that it was beyond the power of those carrying the bier to move forward. They were stuck fast but the bier knew how to complete its journey to the grave. Wrapped in the Palestinian flag, it flew over the fingertips, the hands of all those gathered to see him off rising to receive it. The bier appeared to be flying, the raised hands seemingly making for it a pathway in the air.”

Talal put the paper aside and asked Karim what he thought of the beautiful description and at the same instant Karim saw himself sitting in front of Abu Jihad, who was telling him he wanted him to draw a map of hope over the map of death that was open on his desk. At that same instant Jamal’s words also returned to ring in his ears. Only a few lines of her poem had stayed in his memory but there, in the Café Comédie, he could hear her voice as clearly as though time had evaporated, as though he was with her on the Mazraa Corniche and they were sipping coffee at the Café Jandoul. With head bowed and a lock of her hair covering her right eye she’d gazed ahead and recited.

“That’s Romantic poetry,” said Karim.

“I’m not interested in the terms. Soon you’ll see that I’ve written the most beautiful poem of all.”

“What?”

“I’m not talking about this poem because poetry must take the poet by surprise before it can take the readers by surprise. I’m talking about a poem written in a different way. Tomorrow you’ll read it and think of me and say, ‘Thus spoke Jamal.’ ”

Memory tossed him this way and that, her voice wrapped itself around him, and he regretted not having written the pamphlet he’d been commissioned to write. He’d read the text dozens of times, read the details of the suicide operation, and looked at all the available pictures. Brother Nabil had even got hold for him of a photograph of a place in Israel they call the Cemetery of the Numbers, where the Fedayeen are buried by number and not name. Nabil said that he didn’t know Jamal’s number at the cemetery but it wasn’t important; the important thing was to draw the lesson, which was that even their dead had become numbers, and that he might want to focus on this point to make a comparison between the numbers tattooed
on the arms of Jews in the Nazi death camps and the numbers given to dead Fedayeen.

The idea didn’t appeal to Karim. He told Nabil such comparisons weren’t useful: the Palestinians were victims in their own right and didn’t need to be compared to other victims to prove the reality of their tragedy.

It had all come to nothing. The text hadn’t been written, Nabil had been killed in an explosion in the Fakhani district, and the connection to Abu Jihad had been lost.

The strange thing was that no one ever asked him about the text Jamal had written. The likeliest explanation was that her story, like other stories, had been forgotten. The martyrs were a surging throng, the newly dead obliterating the dead who had gone before. In this way, Jamal’s story was lost, and all that remained of it was the image of heroism represented by her body lying on the road at Herzliya.

Karim remembered that the one precious thing he’d taken with him to Montpellier was Jamal’s text. On the eve of his departure, when he’d thrown all his papers into the wastepaper basket, he’d found himself incapable of tossing Jamal onto the garbage dump of his memories.

He’d left Talal going on about the plot of the first-ever film shot in Lebanon about muscles and bodybuilding and set off home at a run. He’d gone into his bedroom and opened the drawer in the bedside table where he’d put the brown envelope, but failed to find it. He opened the doors of the wardrobe and had begun going through it when Bernadette came into the room.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s okay. I’m looking for something I brought with me from Lebanon.”

She said nothing got lost in her house and that she could look for it but was busy at the moment with Lara. She said they’d summoned her to the school, where the teacher had told her Lara had wet herself, which wasn’t
normal for a girl of seven; and that the psycho​therapist at the school would have to see her because these sorts of things pointed to a disturbance in her relationship with her parents. She’d been obliged to take the girl back home to change her clothes, and when she’d returned her to the school she’d met the psycho​therapist, Monsieur Charles, who had deduced from his interview with the girl that she was suffering from a disturbance in her relations with her father, and said he’d like to meet the father.

“Monsieur Charles has given you an appointment for a week from now and says you have to go.”

“Fuck him.”

She asked him not to swear and said the only Arabic she’d learned was the swear words, as though they were all the language had, and that it was his duty, instead of getting upset, to think about how he could improve his relationship with his children because the girls hardly ever saw him. Even when he took them to the public gardens or the Place de la Comédie he didn’t talk to or show any interest in them.

“How silly can you get? When I was seven I shat myself at school. Father didn’t make a fuss. He just told me to forget about it and I did. Maybe the girl was scared of the teacher because she didn’t know how to write some sentence – no more, no less. And now they’re trying to tell me the girl’s messed up psycholo​gically. Nonsense! You want to tell me that when I shat myself at school I had a psychological problem?”