Imm Yahya didn’t ask what had happened. In the past, when she’d asked Khaled about his wife or hinted she was tired of waiting for the child that didn’t come, she’d see Khaled’s thick eyebrows knit and his face darken, and understand that he would never answer her questions. After he came back from the crusader castle in south Lebanon, though, Hayat’s name was forever on his lips and it was he who had given her the good news that his wife was pregnant. She noticed though that the name Abu Rabia no longer crossed his lips or those of his comrades: they would come to the bakery to confer and meet while all the burden of work fell on his wife’s shoulders.
“Your wife’s pregnant and she should rest at home and not tire herself with the bakery. If you like I can go and take her place at work.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. I used to run the whole bakery in your father’s day and your grandfather’s! You think the work started when Nouri Salah’s daughter came along?”
“Your word is my command, but she doesn’t want to stop working.”
“Doesn’t want to? Since when did women have anything to say about it? A woman obeys her husband. ‘Men are the managers of the affairs of women.’ ”
“Managers, true, but not of Hayat. Hayat, Grandmother, is different.”
“Different?! Didn’t you say you’d become a proper Muslim, God guide you? And now your wife’s expecting any day. In Islam there’s no one who’s ‘different.’ ”
“So when are you going to start covering your hair, Grandmother, and get me a heavenly reward for guiding you to the straight path?”
“All I need is lessons in Islam from an atheistical communist like you! I was a Muslim before they came up with all that nonsense.”
“But the veil is the path of the Prophet, Imm Yahya.”
“The veil is the light of the Beloved Prophet that covers the soul, not a bit of cloth we put on our heads. Get out of here, boy, God guide you and that wife of yours and your son whose new name I keep forgetting. Really! Who goes around giving their children names and then changing them before they’re born?”
On his return to Tripoli, Khaled rebuilt the organization single-handed. He knew that the Palestinian Fedayeen, whose hold over the Nahr el-Bared and Baddawi Camps had been shaken, would be no help to him in a tough face-off in his city, which was now under the absolute control of the Syrian military. He lived in an atmosphere in which overt and covert action blended and which rendered movement through Tripoli’s inner quarters extremely difficult for him as he was vulnerable to arrest at any moment. His relationship with Danny had been severed because Danny had stopped visiting the north, having retreated into his new work. He’d informed Dr. Othman that he wanted to take a long holiday from organizational work to be free to write a long study on the Lebanese Civil War. The objective was going to be to demonstrate the erroneousness of the sect/class discourse that had prevailed in some leftist circles as a justification for the sectarian language that dominated the civil war (the Shia being the deprived sect/class in question).
“This kind of Marxism has become the opium of the Lebanese Left,” declared Danny.
Dr. Othman, who was the main promoter of this discourse, was taken aback. “How can you say that? That theory’s one we came up with ourselves and you agreed with it. Heavens above! Did you think we were joking?”
Danny said he was in the process of writing a self-criticism that would pave the way for the refutation of the idea; he believed there was “a fundamental error in our orientation.”
Dr. Othman never reached an understanding of what the fundamental error might be. He was preoccupied with the intensification of work in the south and saw the class/sect discourse as a point of entry for the construction of a relationship with men of the Shia militia. The militia was starting to gain strength in the south thanks to intervention by the Syrians, who were preparing it to act as a substitute for an armed Palestinian presence.
Danny cut himself off from the world and Karim broke contact with the Fatah student cells in order to avoid the sharp ideological divisions that shook them. The only link that continued to tie him to political action was Jamal’s diaries, which he’d been supposed to turn into a literary-political pamphlet but which had overwhelmed him with questions about the meaning of life and love and changed the taste of his relationship with Hend.
In his loneliness, and with the horizon closing in, Khaled thought of giving up political action, of devoting himself full-time to matters of the heart and paying more attention to the bakery. However, following the assassination of four of his comrades close to a security checkpoint and the spread of an atmosphere of pursuit and siege — the objective of which was to break up and dissolve the group — he found himself in a tight spot.
Khaled had discovered he couldn’t go back. The blood of his comrades had been spilled, the destiny of the boys of the Qubbeh quarter was unknown, and he was on his own. His only support was Radwan, in whose life and behavior signs of change had begun to appear.
First, Radwan stopped drinking alcohoclass="underline" he said it hurt his stomach. Then he started making use in conversation of verses from the Koran and the Prophetic Traditions, ascribing this to his study of Arab literature with Sheikh Subhi Saleh, an outstanding scholar of Arab philology and letters later assassinated in Beirut under mysterious circumstances.
New winds were blowing and the walls of the cities became covered with the slogan “Islam is the solution!” Under the influence of groups of young Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken refuge in the city to escape repression, a new Islamist language of struggle was spreading and had begun to dominate the minds of young men in the various quarters. Then suddenly Sheikh Ramadan Esawi proclaimed himself emir of the city and appointed Sheikh Salim Muadhen emir of the port. At the same time, he announced that the process of appointing emirs for each of the quarters of Tripoli had begun and requested Muslims to declare their allegiance to them.
Khaled had no idea how things had come to take on the form of armed confrontation in the Qubbeh quarter. It was twelve noon and he was working as usual in the bakery when the boys began pouring in with their weapons, announcing that they’d never let the army enter the area. Khaled picked up his machine gun, tucked his revolver into his waistband, and left the bakery followed by a group of more than sixty young men. In front of the Qubbeh roundabout he saw tracked vehicles entering the district’s winding lanes, so he fired into the air in warning and they shot at him in retaliation. Radwan was injured immediately in the thigh. Khaled gave orders for him to be taken to the hospital and distributed his groups around the crossroads, and the clashes, which ended with the withdrawal of the military vehicles from the area, began.
Khaled saw how the cry “God is great!” had issued spontaneously from the boys firing the B7 grenade launchers and found himself shouting along with them, intoxicated by the first real victory in his own city among his own people.
The clashes had been preceded by heated discussions at the bakery on the subject of Islam and the emirs who had begun sprouting up everywhere in the quarters of the city. The discussions took on a more serious tone following the battle, when Khaled announced he had no choice but to ally himself with the Islamists.
“But we’re all Muslims,” said Radwan.
“True. All the same …” said Khaled.