I shall walk and walk
And read out the communiqué of the stone
And read out the communiqué of the tree
And embrace my love
And build for my heart
Houses of sadness and of memories
And I shall sit alone
With death alone
And my voice there
Like my voice here
Shall be a call to my land
That traces the face of the rain.
“That’s Romantic poetry,” said Karim.
“I’m not interested in the terms. Soon you’ll see that I’ve written the most beautiful poem of all.”
“What?”
“I’m not talking about this poem because poetry must take the poet by surprise before it can take the readers by surprise. I’m talking about a poem written in a different way. Tomorrow you’ll read it and think of me and say, ‘Thus spoke Jamal.’ ”
Memory tossed him this way and that, her voice wrapped itself around him, and he regretted not having written the pamphlet he’d been commissioned to write. He’d read the text dozens of times, read the details of the suicide operation, and looked at all the available pictures. Brother Nabil had even got hold for him of a photograph of a place in Israel they call the Cemetery of the Numbers, where the Fedayeen are buried by number and not name. Nabil said that he didn’t know Jamal’s number at the cemetery but it wasn’t important; the important thing was to draw the lesson, which was that even their dead had become numbers, and that he might want to focus on this point to make a comparison between the numbers tattooed on the arms of Jews in the Nazi death camps and the numbers given to dead Fedayeen.
The idea didn’t appeal to Karim. He told Nabil such comparisons weren’t usefuclass="underline" the Palestinians were victims in their own right and didn’t need to be compared to other victims to prove the reality of their tragedy.
It had all come to nothing. The text hadn’t been written, Nabil had been killed in an explosion in the Fakhani district, and the connection to Abu Jihad had been lost.
The strange thing was that no one ever asked him about the text Jamal had written. The likeliest explanation was that her story, like other stories, had been forgotten. The martyrs were a surging throng, the newly dead obliterating the dead who had gone before. In this way, Jamal’s story was lost, and all that remained of it was the image of heroism represented by her body lying on the road at Herzliya.
Karim remembered that the one precious thing he’d taken with him to Montpellier was Jamal’s text. On the eve of his departure, when he’d thrown all his papers into the wastepaper basket, he’d found himself incapable of tossing Jamal onto the garbage dump of his memories.
He’d left Talal going on about the plot of the first-ever film shot in Lebanon about muscles and bodybuilding and set off home at a run. He’d gone into his bedroom and opened the drawer in the bedside table where he’d put the brown envelope, but failed to find it. He opened the doors of the wardrobe and had begun going through it when Bernadette came into the room.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“It’s okay. I’m looking for something I brought with me from Lebanon.”
She said nothing got lost in her house and that she could look for it but was busy at the moment with Lara. She said they’d summoned her to the school, where the teacher had told her Lara had wet herself, which wasn’t normal for a girl of seven; and that the psychotherapist at the school would have to see her because these sorts of things pointed to a disturbance in her relationship with her parents. She’d been obliged to take the girl back home to change her clothes, and when she’d returned her to the school she’d met the psychotherapist, Monsieur Charles, who had deduced from his interview with the girl that she was suffering from a disturbance in her relations with her father, and said he’d like to meet the father.
“Monsieur Charles has given you an appointment for a week from now and says you have to go.”
“Fuck him.”
She asked him not to swear and said the only Arabic she’d learned was the swear words, as though they were all the language had, and that it was his duty, instead of getting upset, to think about how he could improve his relationship with his children because the girls hardly ever saw him. Even when he took them to the public gardens or the Place de la Comédie he didn’t talk to or show any interest in them.
“How silly can you get? When I was seven I shat myself at school. Father didn’t make a fuss. He just told me to forget about it and I did. Maybe the girl was scared of the teacher because she didn’t know how to write some sentence — no more, no less. And now they’re trying to tell me the girl’s messed up psychologically. Nonsense! You want to tell me that when I shat myself at school I had a psychological problem?”
“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.