Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

After Muna left, the memory of the blue exercise book that he’d put in the file that Khaled sent him and asked him to look after flashed through his mind. Khaled had said it included the texts Yahya had written before he was killed, and that they were very precious. He was afraid the Syrian army would seize them, which was why he wanted the book kept in a safe place.

Karim couldn’t remember what he’d done with those particular texts. He’d taken one text only — Jamal’s diaries — with him to France, unable to bring himself to burn the notebooks of the heroine of the suicide operation as he had the rest of his papers before leaving for Montpellier. But what had he done with Khaled’s papers? Had he burned them? Impossible — Khaled held a special place in his memory and it was inconceivable that he would have burned valuable papers given him by the man for safekeeping. He remembered reading the papers quickly. They consisted of texts written by Yahya, Khaled’s uncle, who’d died in prison in 1974, six months after his arrest. The charge against Yahya, which he in no way denied, was that he had led an armed uprising of peasants against the feudal landlords in Akkar.

When Karim read the papers, written in a poor hand, he thought of Salma. He told Hend that the Abd el-Karim family had been forced, under pressure from the peasant insurgents, to quit the village of Kherbet el-Raheb and flee to Homs in Syria.

He said Yahya had written of Abd el-Karim’s three sons that they were distinguished by the savagery with which they’d treated the peasants, by the inventiveness they’d shown in oppressing them. The spark that had ignited the revolution had been struck on their lands and the peasants had torched and plundered their houses, forcing the three brothers to quit the village forever.

“Strange,” said Karim, “when your brothers’ mother was a peasant. Strange how, when one denies one’s origins, one turns into a monster.” He asked her what she thought and she said the matter didn’t concern her.

“They aren’t my brothers, just children of my mother. In any case, I don’t give a damn about them.”

“Tell your mother she can see her boys now. Your mother’s husband was killed and his lands were burned, and she can get her children back now.”

Rather than being happy, Hend was struck with gloom, and instead of hurrying to her mother to give her the good news, she told Karim not to tell Salma. “If you tell her you’ll reopen her old wounds and she’ll remember something she’s decided to forget.”

“But they’re her children. Who can live without their children?”

The strange thing is that years later Hend would ask Nasim to help find her three half-brothers. Nasim found them in Homs, where they ran an Arab pastry shop.

Karim recalled that, of all he remembered from the war, he’d preserved only two texts — Jamal’s diaries, which had accompanied him to France, and the texts Khaled had inherited from his uncle Yahya, who called himself Abu Rabia and died in prison of torture, though the official statement claimed he’d died of a burst appendix.

Abu Rabia was a true legend. Danny had met him in the hinterlands of Akkar when the man was gathering young men in preparation for the launch of an armed uprising against the feudalists of the Abd el-Karim, Meraabe, and el-Ali clans.

“Akkar is the reservoir of the revolution,” Abu Rabia told Danny as he explained to him his Guevarist theory of the revolutionary nucleus and the need to create a revolution within the revolution. The man had worked all his life in his father’s bakery in the Qubbeh quarter of Tripoli. On inheriting it he turned it into a cell where the young semi-unemployed men of the quarter would meet and plan the building of the revolutionary nucleus that would initiate the armed struggle. In all probability the baker was influenced by the Guevarist experience and was striving to apply it in Lebanon.

In Abu Rabia, Danny saw revolutionary material in need of polishing. The man was no intellectual, his reading being limited to The Communist Manifesto and Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? Danny didn’t like Debray’s book or his theorizing, which sprang from a petit bourgeois mentality and a voluntarism in which he saw an antithesis of the need for a vanguardist revolutionary organization, without which the struggle could never be victorious. All the same, he dealt with Yahya in a positive fashion, seeing in his project for the launching of a peasant revolution in Akkar the spark that might set the whole Lebanese plain ablaze.

When the revolution got under way, Danny wasn’t a player. Abu Rabia was convinced that no one who didn’t know how to work with his hands could be a true revolutionary. Khaled related that his uncle had said he despised intellectuals, likening them, in the way they lived off others, to the clergy. The best comment on an intellectual, he said, was a saying he’d read in a book about the clergy: “Listen to what they say, don’t do as they do.”

Abu Rabia had enjoyed listening to Danny and his analyses of the international situation, and to reading the texts by Mao that Danny brought to the Tripoli cell. But when things got serious he made his decision and didn’t bother to inform his supposed leader in the revolution. Danny was taken aback by the uprising and made his annoyance at Abu Rabia’s stupidity and haste plain. This didn’t stop him from writing an article glorifying it, following its collapse under the blows of the Lebanese army, in the magazine al-Hurriya .

Today no one remembers the Akkar peasant uprising, thought Karim. This is a country of oblivion and lost memory. Perhaps Ahmad Dakiz is right: the demolitions are an extension of the culture of oblivion on which rests a nation whose deficiencies even the long civil war could not make good — as though this is a nation that can be made complete only through death.

Danny was free now to take credit for this forgotten revolution, or forget it. When Karim met him they hadn’t spoken of Abu Rabia, nor revisited the story of Jean-Pierre and how Danny had refused, indirectly, to give the French scholar Abu Rabia’s papers.

Danny had turned up suddenly at the door, accompanied by a Frenchman. He said he’d brought a French comrade and sociologist who was working on an academic study of fundamentalist movements in northern Lebanon and the cities of the Syrian interior, and that the sociologist, Jean-Pierre, was a friend of Khaled’s; it was he who’d told him his uncle’s papers were in the keeping of Dr. Karim Shammas.

“Khaled told you? How strange!” said Karim.

Danny asked Karim to give the papers to the French comrade.

“But Khaled told me to keep the papers safe and that I shouldn’t give them to anyone but his wife,” said Karim.

“Khaled’s dead now,” said Danny. “It would be preferable if we were to give them to Comrade Jean-Pierre so that he may make use of them in his study of fundamentalist movements.”

“But Abu Rabia wasn’t an Islamist! Abu Rabia died a Marxist!”

“Khaled was an Islamist leader, as you well know,” replied Danny, “and he was the heir to the organization founded by his uncle.”

At that moment Jean-Pierre intervened, saying he knew Abu Rabia was a Marxist and that made him all the more interested in the topic. “Khaled wasn’t an Islamist either but he embraced Islam later on,” said the Frenchman, “and I believe this is the coming evolutionary line in the revolutionary movement. Islam is the future of the revolution.”

Karim had no idea what came over Danny when he heard Jean-Pierre’s words. He said, “ Merde! ” looking at the Frenchman. He said he didn’t like that kind of Orientalist talk, it reminded him of the obsession of some Westerners with the East and Islam. “Anyway, that obsession was a cover for colonialism. Look at what Lawrence did. When it comes down to it the leader of the Arab revolution was an English spy.”