Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim hadn’t understood what all that meant or how it would be possible to stop the Syrian army, which had occupied the heights of Sannine and decided the battle before it began. But he went, and there he met the martyrs. Later, dozens of young people on the training course were killed at the Battle of Bhamdoun but Karim didn’t go to Bhamdoun with the others. They attached him to the Red Crescent station at Baissour, as though he were a doctor, which was how he escaped death. Jamal had been to Bhamdoun and not died. She disappeared from his life, and when he asked about her Danny told him she’d left the Student Brigade when the brigade leader had told her to leave the camp because she was the only girl among dozens of male fighters. Danny said Jamal had joined one of the groups attached to the Western Sector, meaning the Occupied Lands sector, which was under the command of Khalil el-Wazir — Abu Jihad — and he knew nothing more about her.

Two years later, in early March 1978, Karim met her by chance at the clinic in Burj el-Barajneh Camp and invited her to have coffee at the Modeca Café on Hamra Street. She agreed but asked if they could change the place: she said she preferred the Café Jandoul on the Corniche at Mazraa because it was close to her parents’ home.

At Baissour, Jamal had been a different girl, brown-skinned with large honey-colored eyes, a delicate nose, full lips, short black hair, and a scarf tied around her neck. During the evenings at Baissour, which lasted for two weeks, Karim would make a point of sitting next to her and talking to her. He had no idea where he’d found the words after the boring lectures on the People’s War, the theories of General Giap — hero of Dien Bien Phu — and the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung on “the principal contradiction and the secondary contradictions.” When the political discussions finished he’d find himself sitting next to her, talking about everything and nothing. Nothing that was said then had stuck on memory’s tape, but the curve of the girl’s shoulders, her dissatis​faction with everything, and her insistence on talking constantly about the martyrs had stirred in his soul waves of desire that did not dare show themselves. He contented himself with short walks with her in the forest, where their talk began to take on the form of love. She told him stories about her father, who had fled on foot from Jaffa to Lebanon under the bombardment to which the city had been subjected.

Karim left the training camp and those who died at Bhamdoun died, but the Palestinian girl’s shining eyes continued to keep him company, though he had no idea what to do with the mysterious emotion he felt.

At the Café Jandoul he told her he loved her. Jamal’s look, however, remained filled with white spaces. She sipped a little from her coffee cup and asked him if he was ready to die for the woman he loved.

“If I love her, I have to live for her sake.”

She smiled, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke into the air before asking him again.

“That’s not what I meant. I was asking you if you’d be ready to die with her.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

The girl seemed to hesitate, as though she wanted to say something, but she didn’t say it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“But I feel a strange attachment to you,” he said.

“You’ll forget soon enough,” she said.

“Why should I have to forget when we haven’t yet begun?” he said.

“You know, doctor, I think all intellectuals are cowards. A large intelligence turns one into a coward. I listened to your comments during the course on what you called the naïveté of the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung and especially his theory of paradox and you may be right, but without naïveté we wouldn’t be able to fight. Without a simple, clear idea that can take over your heart like a religious idea, you can’t do battle.”

“But we’re secularists and Marxists and have to liberate ourselves from religion.”

“True, but there’s no other solution,” she said.

“If we turn into a religion, we’ll lose everything,” he said.

“You know you’re more intelligent than I am and are going to win the argument but that’s not the point. The point has something to do with cowardice and courage and not being afraid of death.”

“Is there anyone who isn’t afraid of death?”

“Me,” she said, and prepared to get up.

He asked her if he’d see her again and she said, “That would be nice.” He said they could make “that would be nice” into a reality now. “I could see you in two days. Let’s go out and have dinner together.”

“That would be nice,” she said, and left.

Karim only understood the meaning of her hints two days later, when pictures of Jamal filled the front pages of the Beirut newspapers. She was lying on the ground on the coast road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. An Israeli officer was crouched over her bullet-riddled body, as though searching the corpse.

Had she wanted him to go with her to their death? Had she meant by her hints at the Café Jandoul to invite him to join her group, which had made its way by stealth in rubber boats to the beach at Haifa and hijacked two Israeli buses before clashing with the Israeli army and dying?

Was suicide the other name of love? Or was it that Jamal, on the eve of her decision to lead a suicide operation inside Israel, was unable to love? What it came down to was that her heart had needed words, for at the moment of death, just as the lips feel a thirst for water, the heart thirsts for words.

Jamal Salim Jazayri was born on January 12, 1958, in Beirut. She was the eldest daughter of a Palestinian family from Jaffa. Her father, Salim Jamal Jazayri, had left Jaffa on foot the day the city fell, at which time he was twenty. His entire family had already left the city in boats but the young man, who had fought in the ranks of the Jihad Muqaddas Brigades, had refused to go with them and fought on in the city until the end. The city’s fall and the invasion of its quarters by men from the Haganah forced him to bury his rifle in the garden of the house and flee on foot to Lebanon. In Lebanon he never met up with the other members of his family, whom the winds of fate had tossed to Damascus, where they took up residence in Yarmouk Camp. He made it to Beirut, where he refused to live in one of the camps set up for Palestinian refugees. Instead, he rented a room in the Mazraa district and worked as a mechanic in the garage of Hajj Feisal Mughrabi before becoming the owner of his own garage and turning himself into the best car mechanic on the Mazraa Corniche. In 1957 he married Dalal el-Batal, a Palestinian from the village of Tiret Haifa, eighteen years of age, with whom he had four children, Jamal being the oldest; and though he had three boys — Salim, Amin, and Nasir — he continued to be known for the rest of his life as Abu Jamal.

At the Baissour Camp Jamal had told Karim her family’s story, and also how her father had encouraged her to take part in training courses organized specially for young girls. He hadn’t objected when she decided to join the Fedayeen after she got her secondary school certificate. She said she preferred the university of the revolution to a regular university. She couldn’t understand why all young Palestinian men and women didn’t join the Fedayeen: she wanted to be a model of the Palestinian woman in the resistance, just as Djamila Bouhired had become a symbol of the Algerian.

When Karim read the details of the operation led by a woman and saw Jamal’s corpse on the ground being messed around with by an Israeli officer, he was stupefied. She’d become a symbol, as she’d wanted. There she was, the girl from the Baissour Camp, at whose presence in a camp alongside the men some of the youths had grumbled, proving to them all that she was the bravest, the most beautiful, and the most capable of sacrifice.