Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

A girl of twenty, she’d led ten Fedayeen, including two Lebanese and two Yemenis, and taken them by night in two rubber boats to the beach at Haifa. There they hijacked a bus carrying fifteen passengers and two hours later they hijacked another. Then they set off for Jaffa, firing into the air to clear the road.

The first bus was taken over at two thirty p.m. on Sunday, March 11, and at four forty p.m. the Fedayeen moved with their hostages, who at this point numbered more than sixty, to a new bus. At five thirty p.m. the bus found its way blocked by a barrier set up at the used car market in Herzliya, close to the County Club. Helicopters and tracked vehicles barred the way and the battle began. The bus was set on fire. The Fedayeen jumped down onto the road and engaged with the Israeli forces. Eight died, two were taken captive, and thirty Israelis were killed.

The moment he heard of her death, Karim felt he’d lost the woman he’d loved. It was as though Jamal had been hiding beneath Hend’s skin; as though the two young women were one, or had become so.

“Why did they send her to her death?”

When Danny came to him with the strange proposal, he’d felt panic.

“Why me?”

“Brother Abu Jihad wants to meet you. He read your article on the history of Shaqif Castle in the magazine Occupied Palestine and he wants you to write a pamphlet on Jamal.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” said Danny.

“But how did he know I wrote the article when I published it under a pseudonym? I don’t want anyone to know I wrote for Occupied Palestine . You know how my family’s placed, living in East Beirut. I don’t want them coming to any harm because of me.”

“Abu Jihad isn’t just anyone. He’s the real leader of the revolution and he knows everything, including that your brother, Nasim, works with the Phalanges.”

“What’s my brother got to do with anything? I beg you, don’t mention that to anyone!”

“The important thing, my friend, is that Abu Jihad was much taken with your storytelling skills and asked which of the boys who knew the Martyr Jamal wrote well, and he chose you. He said your article on the crusaders was excellent because it was made up of stories and he wants you to go and see him at ten o’clock tomorrow night at Center Thirty-Eight so he can talk to you about it.”

“Where’s this Center Thirty-Eight?”

“I’ll go with you,” said Danny. “Do you have any idea what it means that Brother Abu Jihad chose you to write about Jamal? Do you know what she meant to him? He’s the one who chose her nom de guerre ‘Jihad,’ because she was like one of his children to him.”

“If he loved her so much why did he send her off to commit suicide? Anyway, I’m not a writer. For me writing’s a hobby; I prefer to read. I wrote the article about the history of Shaqif Castle to say that while it’s true the Franks occupied our country for two hundred years, in the end they went away and all they left behind was castles and shankaleesh and that’s the way it’s going to be with the Zionists in Palestine.”

“That’s what Abu Jihad liked about it. He said your article was ‘an expression of historical optimism: no matter how long the Jews stay and impose their rule, in the end they are destined to abandon the country to its inhabitants.’ ”

“I didn’t say the Jews, I said the Zionists, and that’s the heart of the matter. We’re for a secular democratic state in Palestine and we mustn’t use the word Jews to describe the Israeli occupiers. If Abu Jihad said Jews, I don’t want to work with him.”

Danny explained that all members of the generation that lived through the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948 used the word Jews for the Israelis, for the simple reason that the Israelis, before and after the founding of their state, insisted on calling themselves by that name. Saying “the Jews’ army” in 1948 didn’t carry any intrinsically racist connotation. It was just a name that the peasants gave to the members of the Haganah forces.

“But we do distinguish between Jews and Zionists,” said Karim.

“Absolutely,” answered Danny, “and Brother Abu Jihad does so too, but when you’re dealing with people of that generation there’s no call to be stubborn over words. We’ll meet tomorrow at nine at Café Jandoul and I’ll go with you to Thirty-Eight.”

“I like being stubborn over words because I’ve been split in two. Here in Lebanon, where we’re fighting a civil war against the Fascists, all I hear you talking about is ‘the Christians.’ I’ve turned a deaf ear a hundred times but I’ve had enough. I don’t want to go on being a fool because that way the sects will swallow us up, the Left will die, the Palestinian cause will become a religious cause, and we’ll lose everything. Tomorrow, if Abu Jihad says ‘the Jews,’ I’m going to turn around and leave.”

They met at nine in the evening of the following day at Café Jandoul. Danny had chosen the café because it was close to Burj Abu Haydar, where Abu Jihad had one of his clandestine offices, known as “Center 38.” Karim took it differently, though. He believed the choice was a secret message addressed to him by Jamal. It was there that they’d met for the last time and there that he’d discovered the beauty of her short black hair, a single small lock of which hung down over her right eye, and there that she’d admitted — by inviting him to die with her — that she loved him.

Danny came in all his elegance, an elegance over which this professional revolutionary — for whom it was a matter of pride that his wife was the most beautiful woman in Beirut — took as much care as a cockerel. He would wrap a long scarf around his neck and choose shirts ranging from sky blue to indigo, which had to be ironed to perfection. His shoes shone like his hair, which was fairish. The image would have been impeccable were it not for the smile, which revealed small teeth stained black by the French cigarettes he smoked. Danny ordered a chocolate sablé and a glass of Rémy Martin. The waiter turned to Karim, who ordered the same, but Danny told the waiter, “Two sablés , one cognac, and a tea.”

“You don’t like cognac anymore?” asked Karim.

Danny smiled and said in faux classical Arabic, “Nay, brother! The tea’s for thee, not me,” explaining that it would be inappropriate for him to go to a meeting with Abu Jihad with the smell of alcohol on his breath.

“Why? It’s forbidden to drink alcohol?”

Danny shook his head. “You’re totally unworldly, Brother Karim. It’s about what Chairman Mao taught us: respect the masses and their traditions.”

“I swear I don’t understand you people. What? Is Abu Jihad the masses?”

“Brother Abu Jihad doesn’t drink and doesn’t like those who do, end of story. If you want to be part of the struggle, you have to know where it is you’re living. Come on, drink up your tea and stop pestering me. We mustn’t be late.”

Karim swallowed the hot tea while he watched Danny sniff the cognac, take the glass in the palm of his hand to warm it, and then sip the cognac drop by drop as carefully as if he were distilling each one in his mouth.

Did Karim’s problem lie in the fact that, contrary to what he now claimed, he hadn’t spoken his mind? Or was it that he was so dazzled by the Fedayeen that his criticisms evaporated when he found himself face to face with their heroism? He told Abu Jihad timidly that he didn’t support suicide operations — he didn’t say that exactly but he did say, “It’s a sin to send young people to their death that way! A sin, Brother Abu Jihad!”

“Where’s the sin?” asked the leader as he gazed at the map for the Martyr Kamal Adwan Operation that lay on his desk.