“And your experience isn’t all that negligible either,” his father answered.
Nasim got up from the dining table and left. A silence reigned that Nasri broke when he stood up and said he had a headache and was going to get some sleep.
When Karim heard what had happened with Ghazala he realized what it means to burn with jealousy for a lover. Earlier, when he saw the revolver and Matrouk’s flushed face, he’d felt love recede, starting from the tips of his fingers, and that his relationship with Ghazala had always been meaningless. But when Matrouk had begun speaking of the militia boy whom Ghazala loved and on whom she’d lavished all the presents Karim had given her, jealousy flared up in his heart and he experienced the fire of which Nasri had spoken. Karim would never forget the sleepless nights he then spent — as though he’d fallen in love with Ghazala precisely at the moment he’d discovered her unfaithfulness. He’d wanted her to come to him one last time so he could quench the thirst that burned within him, but when she came the woman had changed and all she inspired in him was regret.
Nasim must have experienced similar feelings when he read Hend’s letters to his brother, so why hadn’t he destroyed the photos and the letters?
While Karim was drowning in the memories of his love for Hend that rose up before him in a flood of images, the phone rang.
Karim picked up and found someone who claimed to be a Sheikh Radwan, speaking from Tripoli.
“Who?” asked Karim.
“Radwan! I’m Radwan! Danny told me you’d come back to Beirut and I want to see you. What do you say you come and spend a couple of days with me in the Fragrant City? I’ve got a surprise for you too.”
“Radwan, Khaled’s friend?” asked Karim, recalling a round, stout young man with white face, bulging eyes, and almost nonexistent eyebrows who had followed Khaled around like a shadow.
“Is that really you, Radwan?” asked Karim.
“Sure, sure,” answered the voice, which said that he’d become a sheikh after the killing of Khaled. He taught religious law at the Islamic University in the city and wanted to see Karim because he had a surprise.
Karim said he couldn’t because he had to go back to France.
“But he wants to see you.”
“Who does?” Karim asked, feeling a shiver run through his body because in the old days “he” had meant only one person — Khaled.
“Sinalcol. Sinalcol wants to see you,” said Sheikh Radwan, laughing.
“Sinalcol? Does he know me?”
“Come and see. It’s a big surprise.”
Karim was certain Sinalcol was dead, so where was Sheikh Radwan coming from with this story? Khaled had decided to kill him, Danny was enthusiastic, and Karim had shaken his head in disagreement even though he was “neither in the caravan nor on the raiding party,” as they say. He had, however, been present at the meeting that had taken place in Tripoli in May 1976 at which sentence of death had been passed on the thief who was bringing the revolution into disrepute in the city.
But Sinalcol had disappeared. He seemed to have found his way, once again, to the ancient Mamluke quarters of the city, which in 1973 had proclaimed themselves the Republic of the Wanted. Subsequently the army had invaded them, destroying the bizarre republic which had brought together thieves, criminals, and the unemployed under the leadership of a man called Ahmad Qaddour.
When the army invaded the city the only ones to escape had been Sinalcol, Ahmad Qaddour, the leader of the republic, and an odd type who had attached himself to the republic called Albert Helou. The three had crept along a tunnel under the markets and emerged at the bed of the Abu Ali River, from where they had gone up to Akkar, reaching Wadi Jehannam. There, where the security forces never set foot because of its rockiness and the impossibility of maintaining control over its innumerable tracks, they’d starved and hunger had forced the three back to Tripoli, where Qaddour and Albert had been arrested. Sinalcol though had managed to go into hiding.
During the first two years of the civil war Sinalcol had reappeared. No one had seen him, though, because he had proclaimed himself “a ghost of the city” and had come to exemplify a new form of thievery based on nonappearance and invisibility. Sinalcol was an invisible man. Even his real name was erased. Khaled had been sure that Ibrahim Tartousi, a member of the Republic of the Wanted, had assumed the name Sinalcol so that he could practice thievery — but how could that be true when everyone knew Tartousi had been given a funeral in Tripoli on Saturday, November 17, 1973, and then interred in the Strangers’ Cemetery to the sound of his mother’s loud keening, on a cold and rainy day?
Radwan said he’d be waiting for Karim at the Hallab pastry shop the following Friday. “I’ll meet you after the prayer, we’ll eat shmeisa, visit Khaled’s grave, and then, if you like, meet Sinalcol. Anyway, we have lots to talk about and I think I need you here for me to be able to arrange things clearly in my memory. I need to ask you a few questions related to the memoirs I’m writing.”
“You’re writing your memoirs?” Karim asked, amazed.
“I am indeed, doctor. The time has come for the poor to write their memoirs, through the bounty of the Lord of the Worlds who has guided us. Not like in your day, when we used to feel dumb in front of you and all those books that you read in French. Islam is light, doctor, may God guide you to the light of Islam! I’ll be waiting for you in Tripoli.”
Sheikh Radwan hung up before he could hear Karim’s answer, as though the call were more a military order than a request for an appointment.
Karim had decided to postpone his decision about going to Tripoli, but Radwan’s call brought him back from memories of his love for Hend to the real reason for his opening the bedside table drawer.
After replacing the photos and letters he closed the first drawer and opened the second. Here he met with a surprise. In the drawer he saw a brown folder, and memory returned. In this folder, which he’d fastened with blue ribbon, Karim had placed Yahya Nabulsi’s papers that had been sent him by his nephew Khaled. Karim recalled that he’d leafed through the papers and read a part of them but for some reason hadn’t found it in himself to read them carefully. No one had asked Karim thereafter why he’d neglected the papers and forgotten about them, and he hadn’t even put himself to the trouble of reading them. The only people who knew of the existence of these texts were the Frenchman Jean-Pierre, who was dead, and Danny, who wanted to forget.
Karim was convinced he’d made a mistake in not giving the texts to Jean-Pierre; the French Arabist would have translated them into French and published them, and they would, in the end, have been preserved. Now, though, they were merely papers of no interest to anyone in Lebanon. Who was going to care about a betrayed revolution whose hero was just a semi-literate baker — even if the baker had taught himself to read and write, discovered Marxism and Che Guevara, and decided he was going to be Lebanon’s Che?
Danny was severe in his evaluation of Yahya Nabulsi’s experiment and of his Challenge Organization, which had folded with the tragic death of the hero on a bed at Maqased Hospital in Beirut. “These are lumpen ideas held by the lumpen classes,” he used to say. “It’s leftist childishness, without any culture or faith in organization.” Naturally it never occurred to anyone, even Khaled, to retort that Yahya and his comrades were workers, and that the whole idea of Marxism was that the workers should be the vanguard of change.
Why hadn’t it occurred to Karim to answer him on that occasion? Why hadn’t he pointed out that Guevara was no worker, that Lenin and all the other revolutionary leaders were intellectuals who thought they were bringing consciousness to the workers? Why hadn’t he pointed out that the result of the class consciousness that Khaled had adopted with such resolve and discipline had been a turning to Islam — in other words the opposite of what we’d trained him in?