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.