Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim had failed to mention on that occasion that he knew Malak. He’d felt he couldn’t speak, that he too had been struck by a form of dumbness, and that his dumbness might well be more painful than Malak’s since he’d assumed another personality without changing either his appearance or his name.

“It wasn’t even me who returned when I returned,” Karim had said to himself as he read the papers relating to the beginnings of the story of the death of Khaled Nabulsi as a tragic hero in a war that bore all the marks of melodrama.

His name was Yahya, aka Abu Rabia. Married to Hayat Saleh, no children. Died aged twenty-eight in the prison where he had spent three years. His body was returned to his family at five thirty a.m., June 16, 1974, twenty-four hours after the announcement of his death at Maqased Hospital in Beirut. The security men got the body, wrapped in a white cloth like a shroud, from the ambulance and knocked on the door. Hayat opened it and began weeping and wailing and the security men put the body down in the house. They said the burial had to take place that morning without delay, and that they didn’t want a lot of noise and demonstrations. They told the wife they would hold her responsible for any reckless acts committed in Qubbeh, Darb el-Tabbana, or anywhere else in Tripoli and the port. Then they got into the ambulance and left in a hurry. The neighbors rushed in and saw.

Khaled said it had been a day of tears.

“We have to wash him,” said the mother.

“Yahya’s a martyr,” said Khaled.

“We have washed him in our tears,” said Hayat, choking.

When, however, they stripped him preparatory to washing him, the truth drove them insane. The mother saw a long cut in the lower stomach. Khaled reached out to touch it only to find that the stitches were still clearly defined. He took hold of the thread and the belly opened and they discovered a terrible fact. All of Yahya’s internal organs had been removed. They couldn’t find a thing — no stomach, no lungs, no intestines.

“There is no god but God,” said the mother.

Khaled ran to the phone and called Dr. Belal in Beirut. Belal said it was strange: a postmortem to ascertain cause of death required only that samples of the organs be taken. He concluded that the removal of the internal organs was a deliberate act performed to prevent the family from carrying out a postmortem. That meant that Yahya had been murdered rather than having died as a result of blockage of the air passages subsequent to the bursting of his appendix, as claimed in the report issued by Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

They carried Yahya to his grave without his organs, and five thousand men and women walked in his funeral procession, and there was sorrow and dismay.

“The first thing I did after he died was marry Hayat,” said Khaled. “I was tired. A week before Abu Rabia’s death, I’d taken part in my first Fedayeen operation. I was in the south with a group from the Popular Front. We assembled in the Adisa orchards and infiltrated Misgav Am and for me it was a baptism of fire and blood.” Khaled said he’d sensed that the aura surrounding the Israeli army had all of a sudden evaporated. He’d heard the soldiers shouting in panic when the Fedayeen opened fire, and had it not been for the intervention of the Israeli helicopter corps all the members of the group would have returned safely. “I got back on my own without injury, carrying over my shoulder a youth called Abu el-Feda, who’d been hit in both legs. Not one of the six other members of the group made it back. Presumably they were martyred. I returned from death to find death in my own home and it was appalling to see an empty corpse, with no life and no internal organs, as though Yahya had died twice over.”

After the funeral Khaled sat next to Hayat. He said he’d seen the spite in the eyes of her father and her brothers and sisters. He said he had at that moment taken the decision not to let his uncle’s widow’s family sell their daughter off yet again, and had married her after the required waiting period. Khaled’s marriage to Hayat was the major turning point in his life. He got into a battle with her family similar to the one Yahya had had to fight with them, but he didn’t have his uncle’s standing, so he married her secretly. Then went to them with a Kalashnikov and forced her father and four brothers to submit to the fait accompli.

Yahya’s marriage to Hayat was the stuff of legends. It was in 1969, three months after the year Yahya had spent in prison. Just before his arrest, as he was returning from Akkar, he’d started reading reading Régis Debray, The Communist Manifesto , and Ho Chi Minh and had embraced Marxism.

When released he began writing articles, which he sent to al-Safir in Beirut, on the situation of the peasants in Akkar, and even though the Lebanese leftist paper published only three of them it was enough to change Yahya’s position in Tripoli. It made him, in others’ eyes and his own, no longer the baker who’d stirred up trouble and led a gang of unemployed men but an intellectual and a journalist whose name people might read at the bottom of long articles full of analysis, someone who used mysterious expressions such as “dialectic” and “class struggle.” His new position enabled Yahya to rethink the group of young men he led and transform it into a clandestine organization, which he named the Socialist Popular Rally. At the same time it qualified him to work for a short period as a journalist on Sada al-Shamal , a regional newspaper published in Tripoli.

The story goes that one morning, as Yahya was about to enter the newspaper’s offices, a girl he didn’t know stopped him and said she needed his help with a problem. The girl was holding a baguette with cheese, which she put into a paper bag, and followed Yahya.

He ordered two glasses of tea, sat down behind his metal desk, and watched the golden-skinned girl with the long black hair, who was wearing jeans and an orange blouse that revealed her long neck. The girl drank her tea, stealing glances at the man sitting opposite her.

“I want to tell you my story,” she said.

“Finish your sandwich and then we can talk.”

He occupied himself looking through the papers on his desk, picked up his pen, began crossing out certain phrases and writing notes in the margins. Then suddenly the girl stood up in front of him and gave him a piece of the sandwich. He smiled as he ate the Akkawi cheese and tomato.

“That’s a nice sandwich you’ve got there,” he said. “Tell me the story.”

“I need your help,” said the girl, and she recounted what was going on between her and her father, who was determined to marry her off. “We’re two girls and four boys. Somehow or other they came up with a husband for my older sister, a Saudi man of about sixty. Father came and said he was going with her to Saudi Arabia to perform the betrothal ceremony. My poor sister said nothing and when they got there they were taken aback to find that the intended groom was older than Father. They’d sold her. I can’t tell you, Mr. Yahya, what her life is like. She’s had to drink olive juice, and now Father wants to sell me off too. I don’t know how much he’ll get for me but he says he’s come to an agreement with Sheikh Mazyoud and I have to get ready to travel to Ras el-Kheima. Please, save me. I have no one. My brothers all agree with Father and I’m thinking of killing myself but I thought before I did I’d come to you.”

“Really, please don’t call me ‘mister.’ I’m just plain Yahya. If you like you can call me Abu Rabia.”

“You’re married?” she asked.

“No,” he answered, “that’s my name in the movement.”

He told her he was ordering her not to commit suicide. “Anyone who comes to Abu Rabia has to be ready to do what they’re told,” he said. “Are you ready?”