Karim recalled a comrade who, with the coming of the Islamist phase that had taken over everything following the victory of the Iranian revolution, had become so obsessively religious that he’d prayed regularly five times a day. He’d been called Abd el-Messih but had changed his name to Belal. This Belal was a faculty member at AUB’s Faculty of Medicine, a model of modesty and silent dedication. There was no one who didn’t love Dr. Belal. For a time he’d moved about among the Fedayeen camps of South Lebanon and had, with the outbreak of the civil war, devoted all his time to opening clinics in the poor neighborhoods of the Beirut suburbs, never failing the while to keep up his work as a teacher and a surgeon.
When Karim asked about Belal, Danny answered that Abd el-Messih had emigrated to America.
“America? That’s incredible! What did he do with his new convictions?”
“It seems he took them with him,” said Danny.
When Belal announced his conversion to Islam, all his comrades were astounded. True, conversion to Islam was the sole means available to Catholic Christians to divorce their wives, but Belal had taken it really seriously. In the beginning his friends had thought he wanted to get rid of his wife in preparation for marrying Fatma, a student in the mathematics department at the Lebanese University fifteen years his junior. When Belal took a bullet in the stomach during a visit to the fighters’ positions in the area of Aley, he’d found himself alone. His wife had refused to leave Jull el-Dib in East Beirut, and the only one there for him had been Fatma Shoeib, who’d joined Fatah and found herself nursing Dr. Belal.
Belal had made his conversion at the hands of Sayed Hadi Taher, who, since the outbreak of the Islamic revolution in Iran, had been one of the theorists of the concept of the Guardianship of the Jurist to which Khomeini’s revolution had given rise. Fatma took him to see the sheikh, who wore a black turban as a sign that he was a Sayed, or one of the People of the House. From that meeting a special relationship had developed between the university professor and the Shiite sheikh who had studied at the feet of Imam Muhammad Baqir el-Sadr in Noble Najaf, then returned to Lebanon to work within the Iraqi-originated el-Daawa el-Islami Party before adopting Khomeini’s ideas and becoming a founder of what would later become known as Hezbollah.
Belal had a strange attitude toward Khaled and his comrades. He said he didn’t recognize their Islamism because they followed Sunni law. He spoke a jurist’s language that Karim found hard to understand — as though Belal had been born a Muslim, rather than being a Christian — or a Marxist — who had adopted Islam only a few months earlier.
Abd el-Messih had emigrated to America to work in a hospital in Houston. Karim told Danny that Khaled was right: even Belal, or Abd el-Messih, had found himself a way out of the endless Lebanese impasse, and for one reason only, which was that he was an intellectual and bourgeois, while Khaled had been left to face death alone.
Danny said Abd el-Messih had divorced Fatma, abandoned his son Hasan, and gone back to his first wife so he could go with their children to Texas.
Karim opened the folder lying in front of him with its yellow pages and its words, some of which had been erased or become difficult to read, and beheld the destinies of the Lebanese taking shape in the form of stories that intersected and divided at death’s portal. Khaled’s assumption about the ability of intellectuals to escape their fates wasn’t entirely correct, or what are we to make of the stories of the dozens of students killed fighting in the ranks of the National Movement and the Palestinian resistance? And what more wretched fate could there be than that of Malak Malak, who had disappeared behind the mask of death without dying, so that he’d died while still alive?
His girlfriend had never told anyone what Malak did after she fled from him and his new look following the cosmetic, or disfiguring, surgery that had been performed on him in East Germany. She’d spoken of how she’d left him standing on Hamra Street and run off, but the more important part of the story, the part that Malak hadn’t been able to tell anyone, remained unknown and would stay so forever. The man had sentenced himself to silence. Did Malak Malak now live in Italy, as the Lebanese student Talal claimed? Or had he disappeared and had all trace of him been erased, which is what the story ought to say? Talal said his brother had known Malak well because they were fellow students at AUB, and he knew Malak was married to a Sardinian woman and worked in the Italian olive oil trade.
Talal had suggested to Maroun Baghdadi that his film begin with the return of Malak Malak to Beirut, with his feeling of being a stranger in his own city and among his old friends. “The film starts at the moment of his return, then shifts to flashback for a confused memory of the crime at AUB and of a war whose story cannot be narrated within any clear context.” Maroun had given the idea some thought before saying no, on the grounds that the story was real and he didn’t like reality in the cinema. It would also bring Lebanese violence back into the equation, endorsing it as heroic, while he was looking for a straightforward story that glorified tolerance and portrayed violence as despicable.
Karim had failed to mention on that occasion that he knew Malak. He’d felt he couldn’t speak, that he too had been struck by a form of dumbness, and that his dumbness might well be more painful than Malak’s since he’d assumed another personality without changing either his appearance or his name.
“It wasn’t even me who returned when I returned,” Karim had said to himself as he read the papers relating to the beginnings of the story of the death of Khaled Nabulsi as a tragic hero in a war that bore all the marks of melodrama.
His name was Yahya, aka Abu Rabia. Married to Hayat Saleh, no children. Died aged twenty-eight in the prison where he had spent three years. His body was returned to his family at five thirty a.m., June 16, 1974, twenty-four hours after the announcement of his death at Maqased Hospital in Beirut. The security men got the body, wrapped in a white cloth like a shroud, from the ambulance and knocked on the door. Hayat opened it and began weeping and wailing and the security men put the body down in the house. They said the burial had to take place that morning without delay, and that they didn’t want a lot of noise and demonstrations. They told the wife they would hold her responsible for any reckless acts committed in Qubbeh, Darb el-Tabbana, or anywhere else in Tripoli and the port. Then they got into the ambulance and left in a hurry. The neighbors rushed in and saw.
Khaled said it had been a day of tears.
“We have to wash him,” said the mother.
“Yahya’s a martyr,” said Khaled.
“We have washed him in our tears,” said Hayat, choking.
When, however, they stripped him preparatory to washing him, the truth drove them insane. The mother saw a long cut in the lower stomach. Khaled reached out to touch it only to find that the stitches were still clearly defined. He took hold of the thread and the belly opened and they discovered a terrible fact. All of Yahya’s internal organs had been removed. They couldn’t find a thing — no stomach, no lungs, no intestines.
“There is no god but God,” said the mother.
Khaled ran to the phone and called Dr. Belal in Beirut. Belal said it was strange: a postmortem to ascertain cause of death required only that samples of the organs be taken. He concluded that the removal of the internal organs was a deliberate act performed to prevent the family from carrying out a postmortem. That meant that Yahya had been murdered rather than having died as a result of blockage of the air passages subsequent to the bursting of his appendix, as claimed in the report issued by Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.