Broken Mirrors (50 page)

“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?”

She nodded and a lock of hair fell over her eyes. She wiped her eyes and raised her head.

“I don’t know what kind of person your father is but I’ll take care of it. The main thing is you mustn’t kill yourself. Now get out of here.”

The girl left and Yahya was left with an image of her, which refused to go away. That evening Yahya told his mother he wanted the girl as his wife.

“Let’s find out who she is and about her morals and her family first,” said his mother.

“My heart tells me it’s her. I want you to ask for her hand tomorrow, before they marry her to someone else.”

The mother hesitated and looked at her son in surprise. Then he said he’d fallen in love with the girl.

“You must have met her before and been holding out on us.”

Yahya didn’t tell his mother he’d met her only a few hours earlier. In fact, he let them think he’d been in a secret romance with her.

Once Hayat had gone back to wherever she’d come from he felt her eyes had buried themselves in his heart and that he couldn’t not marry her. After they were married, when they were drinking arak at the Mar Sergius Spring restaurant in Ehden, he’d tell her that when she left his office he’d felt his heart plunge. “I suddenly understood Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab’s song, the one that says, ‘I plunged and was done for.’ ‘I plunged’ means both ‘I fell in love’ and ‘I fell down.’ Me too, I fell in love and down and you had to be mine.”

“You’re gallant and noble,” said Hayat. “From now on I’m going to call you Nabil instead of Yahya.”

“The only reason I married you was that I’d fallen in love with you,” he said.

“Fallen in love with me!”

“I fell in love with you the moment I saw you.”

“Impossible. Well, you know best why you fell in love with me. Perhaps you fell in love with me because you loved my love for you.”

“You mean you were in love with me?”

“I came to see you because I was in love with you. I thought it’s either him, or I’ll kill myself.”

When Yahya’s mother went to call on Hayat’s family the next day, her
father was astonished by the unexpected visit. Naturally, Nouri Salah – such was the father’s name – knew Yahya’s mother from the bakery and had known her late husband. But he’d never dreamed she would ask for his daughter.

“Give us time to think it over.”

“Think all you like, Abu Tareq, but you know Yahya. Yahya loves the girl and if he doesn’t get her, God alone knows what he’ll do.”

“Our daughters don’t know anything about love and or any such nonsense,” he answered.

“May God be my witness that I warned you. We await your answer,” she said as she rose to go.

“Are you threatening me, neighbor? We don’t give our daughters to layabouts and prison graduates.”

“I’ll inform Yahya of your answer, and God protect us,” she said, and left without looking back.

Before the mother could find an opportunity to tell her son he’d been refused, Imm Tareq, Hayat’s mother, came to Yahya’s house. She didn’t enter but stood at the door, panting. She said they’d set the date for Hayat’s betrothal to Yahya for three days later.

Yahya’s mother had no idea what had happened to make them change their minds in less than two hours, but the woman went to the offices of
Sada al-Shamal
to tell her son the good news.

“Yes, I know.” he said. “Get yourself ready, mother of the groom!”

Khaled’s story was different in every way. He was an orphan, his father having died when he was three. He’d been raised in his grandmother’s house and had become like a younger brother to his uncle Yahya. All the same, he never joined the organization that his uncle founded. He went to the south and joined the Popular Front and there read Marxist thought and learned
the importance of building a vanguard party, and took a serious military course in the forest of Qammoua on the heights of Akkar. Khaled only worked at the bakery after his uncle’s death, when he told his grandmother, “You’ve worked enough. I’ll take care of things.” It was with the bakery, which they renamed the People’s Bakery, that the story of a new death, more tragic yet than the first, would begin.

Had Khaled known that with his decision to marry Hayat he had sentenced himself to the fate that he would meet? His grandmother said it wouldn’t do. “It’s not as though your uncle has children and you have to feel obliged to marry his wife. Forget it, son. The woman’s older than you and it’s not how things are done.” However, Khaled insisted, and was obliged to use force to make her family agree to him becoming her husband.

The torment began once they took up residence under one roof. Hayat told him she respected his decision and his noble intentions but she couldn’t belong to another man.

“I still love Nabil,” she said, “and I can’t.”

“Who’s Nabil?” he asked her.

So she told him her whole story and said she’d loved his uncle Yahya, whom she called Nabil because he was noble.

“You mean that story about getting married to the sheikh was something you made up, and had no basis in truth?”

Hayat smiled and said nothing.

“So you lied to my uncle?”

“No, I didn’t lie. My sister’s story was true and I felt my turn was coming and I’d meet the same fate. Plus I was in love with Nabil.”

“Don’t call him Nabil! His name’s Yahya.”

“You can call him what you like but as far as I’m concerned he’s ‘the noble one.’ ”

She said she released him from any obligation toward her but was sure
that if he divorced her, her family would sell her, as then she’d be both a widow and a divorcée; still, he could divorce her and she wouldn’t hold it against him.

At first Khaled had believed that by marrying his uncle’s widow he was fulfilling his moral duty to the memory of his uncle, whom he’d only really got to know after his death, when he found himself gradually changing into a shadow of the dead man. Yahya’s mother was the first to notice what was going on but said nothing. She could see her young grandson gradually turning into another person. Even his voice began to take on a new rhythm. She told him once, as she was leaving the kitchen, that she’d heard Yahya’s voice. “God protect us, it was just like his. Pull yourself together, son. We don’t need another martyr in this house.”

Khaled was patient with Hayat as no other man could have been. She slept next to him in bed for two whole years without him touching her. His love for her burned in his heart. He’d tried but she’d put him off, inventing all kinds of pretexts. But from the night she told him she couldn’t give herself to another man, he decided not to touch her. She cooked, cleaned, and behaved in front of other people like any ordinary wife, but when night came she’d put pajamas on under her nightdress and curl up on one side of the bed, covering her whole body and putting the pillow over her head and falling asleep. For sex with this eccentric woman Khaled substituted dreams. His nights were hot and moist with the water of life. He’d wake from his dreams, rush to the bathroom to wash himself off, then go back to bed. He had no idea whether Hayat was aware of what was happening to him because she wouldn’t move. He’d get up from the bed, look toward her, and see her slumbering on her right side, her long hair spread over the pillow that had fallen off her face. He’d come back from the bathroom and find the same scene, as though the woman had neither felt him leap from the bed nor heard the water running in the bathroom.

Khaled spent two years between nights full of dreams and days in the bakery. His day began at three a.m., when he’d rise to the sound of the alarm clock, take a cold shower, make a cup of coffee into which he put a little orange blossom water, and smoke his first cigarette in front of the open living room window because Hayat disliked the smell of tobacco. Then he’d leave and not get back until six p.m., when he had dinner with his wife and told her stories about the customers. After that he sat in his corner in the living room and read a little before leaving the house again to go to his meetings with the boys, and when he came back at ten at night Hayat would have put on her pajamas and nightdress and be waiting for him. She’d make two glasses of aniseed infusion and they’d drink them in silence, then go to bed.

Over those two years, during which Khaled traversed the desert of the heart, he reorganized the ranks of the young men who had hovered around his uncle, forced them to attend the weekly meetings regularly, and discovered in Radwan Ali, a student at the Arabic Literature department of the Lebanese University, an intellectual on whom he could rely.

It was Radwan who suggested to Khaled that he meet Dr. Othman. The Egyptian communist doctor, who had joined Fatah in Jordan and taken part in the battles of September 1970 that came to be known by the name of Black September, had come to Lebanon and begun working with young men of the Lebanese Left eager to take part in the armed Palestinian struggle.

Khaled met Dr. Othman three times at the bakery and the man in his forties, who wore spectacles and smoked Egyptian Cleopatra cigarettes, aroused his curiosity and admiration. Dr. Othman spoke as one with full command of the language, clear ideas, a simplicity derived from deep culture, and a
vision indicating he had profound human and political experience stored within him.

It was Dr. Othman who brought Danny back into the picture. At their third meeting he told Khaled and Radwan that he would organize a meeting for them with Fatah’s representative in Tripoli and that Brother Danny, who had been a close confidant of the martyr Abu Rabia, would handle the follow-up with them.

This was how, under Danny’s direct and daily supervision, the Socialist Popular Rally was reorganized, to become later a coherent political organization with a military wing whose influence extended not only to Qubbeh but to the districts of Bab el-Tabbana, the old city, and the port. The group would also play a major role in the civil war that broke out in 1975, while Khaled would be transformed into a political leader of the entire northern region.

Khaled and Radwan were preoccupied with the idea that the mistakes that had accompanied Yahya’s experiment with the Challenge Organization should not be repeated. They worked hard to educate the semi-employed youth who had joined the organization in scientific socialist thought and helped many to find permanent jobs. “We’re the organization of the working class,” Khaled told them, “not of the layabouts.”

The work took up all of Khaled’s time but he refused Danny’s offer of a full-time position with Fatah and decided to keep on working at the bakery. Like his uncle, he disliked the chaos of Fatah with its blocs linked to the founding fathers. In fact he went even further in his position on this because he’d been raised in the Popular Front and had learned the necessity of iron discipline from the pupils of Dr. George Habash. Still, he found something irresistibly attractive in Dr. Othman’s eloquence and Danny’s culture and therefore decided to amalgamate his organization with their Fatah-affiliated
group, unaware that it was closely linked to Abu Jihad – was, in fact, his leftist arm within that forest of diverse ideological arms that this leader knew how to exploit for a variety of functions, creating a breathtaking concord out of their ideological contradictions.

Khaled made no attempt to destroy the legend of his uncle the martyr. He had his reservations about the chaotic, off-the-cuff methods used by the hero of the Qubbeh district in leading his boys and was critical, especially, of the October 15 uprising against the increase in electricity charges, which had led to his uncle’s imprisonment and death. The rebellion indicated a naïve faith in the spontaneity of the masses, for while Yahya had been directing, from his hiding place in an apartment in Qubbeh, the groups of young men who threw explosive devices in the streets and in front of the Qadisha power station, he was also waiting for the people to rise and assume power in the city. But the people, instead of going out onto the streets, were terrified by the explosions and hid in their houses, so that in the end Yahya found himself besieged in his hideout. He tried to shoot his way out but was wounded in the stomach, taken captive, and condemned to death, the sentence being reduced subsequently to ten years. He died in prison three years after his arrest.

Abu Rabia had wanted to make October 15, 1971, a turning point in the history of the city. The Akkar peasants’ revolution had evaporated following the intervention of the Syrian-controlled Sa’iqa organization at the point when the peasants’ anti-feudalist struggle had appeared to be in danger of taking on a sectarian dimension, as though it were between Sunnis and Alawites. This had forced Yahya to withdraw from the area in which he’d believed he could establish the nucleus for a Guevarist revolution. He’d returned to Qubbeh, where he succeeded in restoring his image as a popular hero when a cholera epidemic broke out in the city. The Ministry of Health, whose duty it was to vaccinate all inhabitants free of charge, started
distributing the vaccine to clients and supporters of the minister, who sold it on the black market. Faced with a worsening situation, Abu Rabia and a group of his boys took to making armed break-ins into pharmacies and the Ministry of Health headquarters and distributing the vaccine free to clinics. And Abu Rabia turned the bakery he’d inherited from his father into a vaccination center, to which people came in droves.