Broken Mirrors (34 page)

“Definitely,” answered Bernadette.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“No, madam. The messed-up one with psychological problems is you, not me.”

She said she couldn’t talk to him anymore because he lost his temper so quickly and refused to face up to problems, large or small, and that instead
of thinking about how he could take care of his daughter – which he ought to, given he was the reason for the problem – he just shrugged the charge off and pinned it on her. She asked him, the shaky calm of her voice concealing her anger, to stop behaving that way. If he believed she was responsible for the girl’s psychological disturbances, she was ready to listen to him.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the girl and you should stop talking about ‘disturbances.’ If there’s anyone creating tensions in this house it’s you.”

Bernadette left the room in a fury but returned a few minutes later with a brown envelope in her hand. She said she’d hidden it because she’d found it discarded among his socks. “I was sure you’d look for it one day so I hid it in the drawer where I keep the deeds to the apartment. Here you are, and please stop making a mess of the wardrobe.”

He apologized to her, said he hadn’t meant anything, and that it was “just the way the words came out.” He was on edge and would pay more attention to the girls, but right now he had to read that file.

He took the envelope from her and sat at the dining table. His hands trembled as he saw the letters leap out of the darkness of death and heard the voice of Abu Jihad saying he wanted to turn Jamal into a symbol of the Palestinian woman. He emptied out the envelope and found three photocopied files taken from the diary in which Jamal had written her text. The date was printed at the top of the pages. Jamal had started writing on Tuesday, December 26, and finished on Monday, September 18. On the last page she had written a single sentence in big letters that filled the entire space: “The Revolution will be true to my blood. Your Sister Jamal Salim Jazayri (Jihad), 2-9-1978” – which meant that the dates at the tops of the pages bore no relation to the real dates. The diary had been manufactured to fit writing in French or English, in other words from left to right, but Jamal had used it to write in Arabic and had written from right to left, so
the dates at the top of the pages went backward instead of going forward and had lost their meaning. That didn’t matter, Karim thought. He read the diaries from beginning to end and discovered that the parts of Jamal’s poem which had stuck in his memory were not in fact the poem, because his memory had added to and subtracted from that. That’s what memory does. Jamal too had been betrayed by her memory, and the first lines of her only poem weren’t in fact by her but part of a poem entitled “The Land” by Mu’in Bseiso that he’d recited at UNESCO Hall in Beirut on Land Day in 1974. Her memory, however, had betrayed her and rewritten it.

Now that it was clear that Jamal had been Karim’s biggest delusion, why did he still want to read? In Beirut, when he got to that part, he’d closed his eyes. He hadn’t thrown the exercise books aside or risen from the only couch in the small apartment but had closed his eyes and fallen into a doze. What would he do now? Would he close them again and doze? Or would he read and focus on the deception?

Jamal had written about everything. She’d put her finger on all the different manifestations of corruption in the Revolution and their underlying causes, and yet she’d gone to her death despite this, for the sake of a revolution in whose children she no longer believed. That was the paradox of her death and the magic of her heroism. She wasn’t so naïve as to believe but she was such a believer that she ignored what she’d seen. That day, in the distant French city, Karim could speak of naïveté and belief, but in Beirut, when revolutionary words had had the power to ignite within him the volcano of possibility, he hadn’t realized his naïveté. Even the fear that had controlled him and paralyzed his every movement had become consciously felt by him only after he left Beirut. He’d spoken, during his last days in Beirut, of his disgust with the war and the transformation of politics into an endlessly repeated exercise in futility. But it was only there, in “the land of the French” as his father used to call France, that he’d acknowledged that
the whole thing had had nothing to do with his political convictions but was, rather, an embodiment of that destructive feeling whose name is fear.

He’d been incapable of explaining to Hend that his desire for her hadn’t evaporated because of some other woman – even though he had himself been convinced at the time that Jamal was that other woman – but had done so out of fear. One who is afraid neither eats nor wants to. One who is afraid simply fears.

Jamal was, but also wasn’t, the “other woman.” He’d run into her more than once at Fatah’s Western Sector office in Fakhani but those had all been brief encounters. They had drunk tea several times at the Café Shumoua but being in a café so crowded with Fedayeen had made of their time together a mere shadow of the relationship he’d built up with her at the camp at Baissour, and whenever he’d asked her for a real date she’d say she’d call him.

Why had she resolved to see him a few days before her death, accepted his invitation, and specified the place? She hadn’t refused to go to Café Modeca on Hamra Street only to impose on him some sad and insipid meeting at Café Shumoua. Instead, she’d specified the Jandoul. Had she been hesitating, or was she, in her own fashion, saying goodbye to the world? He remembered she hadn’t asked him to stop when he’d spoken poetically of the beauty of her eyes; when he’d stretched out his hand toward her, she’d stretched out her own small, shy hand, and when she’d bent her head to listen to his words of love she’d radiated shyness and desire. Why then had she spoken of him as she had in her diaries?

He’d returned to the diaries because when listening to Talal reading about Abu Jihad’s funeral procession in Damascus, the mix of passion and sorrow he thought he’d left behind in Beirut had filled him once more. He’d felt the same paroxysm he had the day he heard the news of Jamal’s operation and her tragic death in Herzliya.

He reread the spiral-bound books line by line, read Jamal’s criticism of the corruption and of her belief that women, if they were to win their right to equality, must fight exactly like men. He read her concerns about the company commander who had ordered her to leave the Baissour Camp because she was the only young woman in an eighty-strong group of men. He saw her admiration for the leaders Majid, Abu Azzam, and Saad Jradat, and paused at her description of the harsh training in the use of rubber boats – the means used by the group to reach the beach at Haifa.

“Picture to yourselves how I used to sleep! I used to sleep together with four young men and not feel shy, because each rubber boat carried only five. Even so, we all worked together as one and took all our decisions together, united by our determination, our will, and our devotion. We sang and trained and waited for the moment when the operation would be launched.”

She’d gone through a lot and had had to put up with the ship, which had no proper latrine. “You may not believe it but during the four days that we spent on the ship I never relieved myself, but waited until we’d reached the beach. At sea I endured sickness, hardship, and exhaustion but I would raise the boys’ morale, sitting with them, singing with them, and making food and tea for them.”

Jamal had gone through a lot before reaching the moment of her radiant apparition in the poster. Karim read as though listening to her speak. He heard the sound of her voice through the written words and understood why he hadn’t been the one she spoke of. He hadn’t lived with her the moments of tension, fear, and endurance during the training on rubber boats. So what had happened to him when he read the section about the youth whom Jamal had loved? Why had he been afflicted with sorrow and a sense of loss as he read her description of him and her account of her relationship with him in the diaries? It was because he’d thought at first that
he was the man to whom she alluded and had felt his heart burn, but then discovered it had nothing to do with him for she was speaking of another. He felt his soul disintegrate and his body evaporate and was struck by the sorrow of one who feels he has been deceived.

“During the time we were in the camp I treated one of the brothers differently because this brother was in need of someone to stand beside him and help him and feel with him. He’d consult me about everything he did and if I didn’t respond and talk to him and laugh with him and sit next to him, he’d get upset – he was always crying. If I pointed out to him some mistake he’d made, he’d feel shaken, take it personally, sit on his own and not eat, drink, or sleep. His crying cut me to the heart and I’d tell myself he was crying because of me … and then the camp commander would shout at me for going with him and being late and I’d have to lie so that the brother in question wouldn’t get upset.”

“Why does she write about me like that? I’m not like that!” shouted Karim, flinging the book from his hand.

That was how he remembered himself in his apartment in Beirut: alone and reading and shaking with sorrow and anger. But he hadn’t cried. He remembered he’d cried
once
during the night at Baissour – he’d been walking with Jamal when she asked him about George. And he hadn’t cried because Jamal had reprimanded him over some mistake he’d made; he’d cried because George had been his friend. George, a Palestinian student at the American University of Beirut, had died. He’d returned on a stretcher, crowned with the white snow of Sannine, and when his mother had asked that a cross be set up over the grave of her only son, who had been buried in the Islamically themed Palestine Martyrs cemetery, everyone was struck dumb. Marwan, who would be assassinated ten years later in Cyprus, had declared, however, that the cross would be there: he brought a large black cross with the name of the martyr on it and planted it over the grave. The
wooden cross was a meter and a half tall and didn’t look at all like the discreet little cross that had been inscribed on the tiling of the tomb of Kamal Nasir.

The AUB student group had received an order from Danny to protect the cemetery, and ten of the boys, Karim among them, had gone there, fully armed, to provide a guard for the ceremony. Danny had arrived glowering and said that the priest of the Orthodox Church of Our Lady had refused to come to the cemetery; he’d fled, so Danny had been forced to bring in a Palestinian Protestant minister who’d come to attend the funeral prayers at the church. The moment the bier appeared, though, the armed members of the protection detail fell to pieces at the sight of their comrade lying on a wooden plank and wept. The stern orders that Danny had given them to form a cordon around the cemetery lost all meaning.

No one had provided protection for the funeral. George had no need of it, for those days were different from these, as he would later tell Khaled, who used to talk to him about Islam and the necessity of joining the fundamentalist tendency as it was the future, now that the defeat and collapse of the Left had become an established fact. The day Khaled said that, Karim had asked him, “What shall we do then with George and the cross we put up at his mother’s request in the middle of an Islamic cemetery?” and Khaled had hung his head and found nothing to say.

If Karim had spoken while reading Jamal’s memoirs, he would have said he’d never cried and that Jamal had disfigured his image. The lover commits suicide only if the beloved dies; perhaps that was why Jamal had talked of their dying together.

He’d gone on reading, only to discover that he wasn’t the hero of the story. Jamal spoke of another youth, giving his initials as “N. A.” Karim couldn’t remember if he’d noticed those letters when he’d read the text the first time, in Beirut. N. A. had trained with the suicide group, injured his foot, and gone into the hospital three weeks before the operation, thus
being rendered unfit to go through with the mission. He’d visited her at home, limping, and begged her not to go to her death. When she refused he’d threatened to tell her mother the facts of the suicide operation but had been too much of a coward to do so.

Now, in France, these lines jumped out and struck him in the eye. Had the story of his love for Jamal been nothing but an illusion? Had he invented the tale of Jamal to make it easier for him to abandon Hend? And why had he abandoned Hend?

True, she’d said she couldn’t leave her mother. He could have gone abroad to finish his studies, then returned and married her, but he’d decided not to return and to run away from Salma and his father, and from Danny’s descent into the abyss following the death of Khaled and the phantom of death that Khaled had seen in the eyes of the Syrian general. He had, therefore, concocted for himself a fictitious love story.

Jamal was alone in the Cemetery of the Numbers there, somewhere in Galilee, and he was sitting in his apartment in Montpellier chewing the cud of his memories. He’d come to France to erase his memories and manufacture new ones in a new country and with a new woman who had nothing to do with his past.

He remembered saying, “I’ve found her,” when he awoke the next morning with Bernadette beside him in bed and discovered she was a nurse. A white-skinned woman, her skin so clear that it allowed a whiteness that dwelled deeper down to show through – as though the whiteness weren’t a color but an incandescence that shone through from the depths and rose through her body, illuminating it, before continuing in an infinite outpouring.

During one of his drinking bouts, while listening to the songs of Édith Piaf, a line of pre-Islamic poetry had come to him. He’d tried to ignore it and travel with the voice of the French singer but could not. He’d declaimed the verse, then sung it in a low voice, the way his teacher – the one whom
the students called “the Lord of Literature” – had done in the baccalaureate class, and finally the poetry had exploded on his tongue and he’d felt the voice of Muallem Butrus Bustani emerging from his throat, quivering with the rhythm.

Bernadette turned down the volume of the tape recorder and asked him what he was saying. Instead of answering her he repeated the line again, and again the voice of the Lord of Literature emerged from his throat.