Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  The guard and the driver stopped him and made him get out of the car. They could see he was wearing a short dishdasha robe, the kind fundamentalists wear. They searched his car and didn’t find anything suspicious. The guard asked him why he kept driving back and forth down a road that only people who knew the neighborhood used, which was only a few people. He said he was looking for the house of someone who was expecting him, and he gave the man’s name. When the guard recognized the name, he explained how to find the house and followed him in his car to make sure he arrived at the big house nearby that was owned by a well-known food industry merchant. He waited to make sure the owner of the house actually received the bearded man into his house.

  When the Basha told me about the incident, he wasn’t angry or frightened. Rather he told me the story with an air of lightheartedness and with pity for the man.

  But I understood what that air of lightheartedness was hiding in terms of questions directed to me. And so I contacted that wretch named Shaher al-Zarman, or Darrar al-Ghoury, to make sure he was getting prepared for travel and was committed to carrying out the mission I had hired him to do.

  I forgave the Basha for treating that man that way, for I recalled the warning Mrs Muntaha al-Rayyeh gave me when I met with her, and which I hadn’t relayed to the Basha.

  Darrar al-Ghoury

  That Sari fellow was a blue jinn, God damn him. The type who wouldn’t let anything stop him from getting what he wanted.

  He managed to arrange my exit via the Jordanian-Iraqi border, in a pick-up driven by a silent man wearing black glasses that covered nearly half his face. He dropped me off in the city of Ar Rutba and got back in his car without my seeing his face or knowing who he was.

  I got to Baghdad and headed to a café on Al-Rashid Street. It was a blistering hot day and the smell of tobacco mingled with the smell of grilled meat and the foul odor of raw chicken from the neighboring shops.

  I looked around at the people sitting on the wooden chairs and noticed a man sitting behind a round worktable. He had a brown file placed in front of him and a set of brown prayer beads in his right hand. He was fanning his face with a piece of yellow cardboard.

  He’s the one I’m looking for, I said to myself. He fit the description Sheikh Al-Abbas gave me when he sent me.

  Then I pulled my set of brown prayer beads with the yellow thread out from my pocket and started fiddling with the beads with both hands as I approached him, saying, “‘God suffices me, and He is the best Guardian.’”

  He looked at my prayer beads and then at my face. He signaled with his eyes for me to sit down next to him.

  He poured me some black tea and then escorted me to a house below street level near Zawra Park, where I stayed for two nights. Then I took a plane to Pakistan. I was greeted in the Hyderabad Airport by two young Pakistani brothers who were waiting inside the gate area. One of them carried out the tasks of stamping the passport and other entry requirements with surprising ease and speed. He moved about the airport as if it was his own house. Then he escorted me and his friend to a house in the basement of a mosque where I spent the night.

  The next morning they sent me to Kandahar in a truck transporting provisions and medical supplies. I got out near a warehouse associated with the city hospital they called the Shafa Khana. Then the driver turned me over to an Afghan man who took me to a mujahideen hideout I’d never seen before.

  Samah Shahadeh

  I was in the habit of strolling through the garden every morning, to breathe in the fresh air and inspect the trees and the bird cages and the flower beds.

  From time to time I would water them with the sprayer attached to the hose.

  I found that kind of work gratifying.

  After the incident with the bearded man who was driving his car outside our house, I started to feel fearful.

  The peace of mind that had permeated our home ever since we built it two decades earlier started to wither away from my life.

  The security measures I started noticing didn’t come from nowhere.

  Fawaz himself had grown more cautious than before. He perked his ears whenever he heard the sound of a car engine approaching our house. Sometimes he would call the guard or the driver, and speak with him in his office. Even his posture when standing out on the balcony lacked the usual confidence.

  His eye gestures and body movements started showing signs of something unusual going on.

  “This isn’t fair,” I said to him. “You have to tell me what’s going on.”

  He answered me with little patience, “I already told you. Have you forgotten?”

  “Told me what, Fawaz?” I asked.

  “What the fortune-teller Uroub said. Have you forgotten?”

  “So this means you believe what she told you about a thirty-year-old man wanting to kill you?”

  “I don’t believe it, but caution is warranted.”

  I let out a sigh. “If this type of caution is warranted, then I should take precautions as well.”

  “Precautions against what?”

  “The cat that came back to life.”

  “What cat, Samah?”

  “Uroub interpreted a dream I had the night before your birthday. I saw a cat coming out of the wall. It shook the dust off its head and came back to life. Uroub told me I was going to discover a secret that had been kept from me. Are you hiding something from me, Fawaz?”

  He was silent at first and then said, “After we got married – if you remember – I suggested that you get a house cat, and you refused because you could not live in the same place with a cat. When it became clear to me and to you that we would not be able to have children, I suggested getting a cat again, but you refused. And the night of my sixtieth birthday, I noticed that the wife of one of my friends brought her cat with her, so I asked myself once again, ‘Why does Samah hate cats so much? Why don’t I revive the idea of getting a pet cat?’”

  When he finished that last sentence, he peered into my face with eyes open wide beneath a pair of raised eyebrows. “That is the meaning of the dream you had in your sleep,” he said.

  Then he stood up and said, “I think I am entitled to revive my old wish of having a cat in my house.”

  I immediately said, “In that case, you and your cat can go live somewhere else, anywhere but here in this house.”

  This made him burst out in laughter.

  What did he find so funny?

  Abu Hudhayfah

  Sharhabil was very quiet, a man of action who stayed out of the fray. I felt this calmness of his contained a storehouse of formidable jihadi powers.

  That was not all, either. He was also an avid reader of books on Shari’a, in addition to the Holy Quran, whenever he got the chance.

  Indeed God guided Sharhabil’s steps and enabled him to fire his rockets right into the hearts of the unbelievers, right through their armor, on numerous occasions. He fought ferociously in more than twenty-three battles, and rescued seven wounded mujahideen before they could be taken prisoner. In one of the battles he was hit in his right thigh by shrapnel and was treated by an Afghan doctor who operated on him without giving him anesthesia or anything to numb him.

  I suppose with that Sharhabil paid the price of the houri that would be waiting for him in eternal Paradise.

  But there was one matter about Sharhabil I was not able to understand or to ask him about, which was that he never talked about his family like the rest of us. I felt that this aspect of his life was not open to discussion or deliberation. If he hadn’t been required to write the name of his mother in the mujahideen registration form our commander entrusted me with, I never would have found out that the name of this great mother was Muntaha Rasim Salah al-Rayyeh.

  When we carried out a reconnaissance mission near the NATO base in Kandahar, Sharhabil asked our commander, Abu al-Zubayr, for permission to carry out a
suicide attack at the checkpoint leading to that base which was impeding our progress and causing many martyrs to be felled from our ranks, but Abu al-Zubayr refused.

  “Say God is one, Sharhabil,” he said to him. “We are in desperate need of your rocket launching ability, Sharhabil, not your body.”

  And when the fighting intensified between us and the war machines and soldiers at that checkpoint, a number of mujahideen were wounded, among them Sharhabil, who took a dastardly bullet to the lower part of his shoulder. The next day we asked for aid and reinforcements, so they sent us medical supplies and a Jordanian mujahid medic called Darrar al-Ghoury. He was olive-complexioned and slim and had a very noticeable large scar on his forehead. He had a yellow tint to his eyes as though from a liver infection.

  He came up from the southern hideout to Kandahar to treat our eleven wounded mujahideen.

  Darrar treated Sharhabil, and extracted the bullet from below his shoulder. Then he moved on to the other wounded men and treated them as best he could, using medical supplies he brought with him.

  After he finished taking care of the rest of the mujahideen, he remained vigilant over Sharhabil, who kept falling in and out of consciousness. I felt as though that mujahid had come to us by the grace of God, the Most High, the All-Powerful, in order to bring Sharhabil back to life.

  But then after a while I started feeling that Darrar al-Ghoury was going too far with his care for Sharhabil, insisting on staying with him in the medical care trench. I also noticed that he was overly cautious and suspicious of everything. When I asked him about it he answered that his experience getting arrested at the Jordanian borders taught him not to give his trust so easily and to be skeptical before putting faith in people. Then he asked me, “Abu Hudhayfah, how do you explain the Jordanian security forces knowing all about our arrival and arresting us before we could get our passports stamped at the borders?”

  I asked for God’s forgiveness and cursed the spies and traitors in all times and all places. And I recited the holy verse from Surat al-Anfal (The Spoils of War):

  “O ye that believe! betray not the trust of Allah and the Messenger, nor misappropriate knowingly things entrusted to you.”x

  Darrar al-Ghoury

  God eased the way for me, and right away I was able to locate Walid, who was known by the name Sharhabil. I was called to his hideout to treat the wounded there, because the doctor in that area was busy treating the wounded in other places. I tended to Sharhabil’s wound and removed a bullet from him the size of a thumb.

  He was in and out of consciousness. His face and long hair and beard were all soaked with sweat, as though he had a high fever, and I could see his lips reciting the shahada whenever he came to.

  I took several pictures of him with the cell phone I got from Sari.

  After taking the pictures, I went outside the treatment room made from adobe and sat on a nearby rock.

  It was pitch dark outside and I didn’t know what happened to me. I had thought I would send the photos I took of Sharhabil to Sari. But how could I do that to a mujahid who had been entrusted to me? How could I stand before my God on Judgment Day with the face of a traitor?

  I said to myself: Sari is not to be taken lightly. He told me it was within his power to send information to the mujahideen informing them I was collaborating with suspicious entities if I didn’t stick to our agreement.

  He said that it was also within his power to supply them – by way of his connections – with proof, and that was what made me lose my mind. Where did he get proof?

  Then I suddenly wondered: Could he have been recording my voice during our meetings?

  By God, I didn’t rule anything out when it came to that wretch Sari, despite all the money he gave me, a portion of which I gave to my brothers and parents before leaving Jordan. When they asked me about it I told them that is was an allowance from the mujahideen to cover my travel and other expenses.

  An ordeal, by God it was an ordeal and a horrible trial.

  A Saudi mujahid brother called Abu Hudhayfah approached me. He was around thirty-three years old, olive complexion, shaved head, black beard, and shaved mustache. His two front teeth had a space between them that cut his smile in half. He asked me what was wrong and I said, “I’m sad for Sharhabil, actually. He wakes from unconsciousness to say the shahada and then slips back under.”

  “And what do you think of his wound?” he asked.

  “He will live, God willing,” I said. “But he will need two to three weeks.”

  After Sharhabil got better I returned to my camp in south Kandahar, treating the wounded and assisting the doctor with his surgeries. I would withdraw into myself from time to time, thinking and reflecting about what I had gotten myself into.

  I no longer had any doubt that Sari wanted to get rid of Sharhabil because he posed a huge danger to the Americans in Afghanistan and that Sari was connected with the intelligence apparatus. That apparatus was bent on doing something to help the NATO forces in concerted effort with the CIA, who it seemed had sought their help to get rid of Sharhabil.

  Otherwise, what could explain Sari’s excessive concern for Sharhabil? Why did he want to get rid of him? What did he stand to gain?

  Sari Abu Amineh

  Anxiety had taken hold of the Basha.

  He was intent on preempting events by getting rid of his illegitimate son before the reverse could happen. He started asking me from time to time if my plan had worked and how it was progressing. I would tell him everything was fine, and when I said to him, “But the plan is going to be costly,” he answered in a tone not lacking in expertise, “Does a fishing rod catch a fish without some bait attached?”

  Whenever the Basha clasped his hands behind his back and started pacing back and forth it became difficult to look him in the eye while listening to him.

  He told me once that pacing gave rise to new ideas and facilitated conversation. I had no choice but to agree with what he said. He stopped pacing and faced me, saying, “Are you just trying to humor me, Sari?”

  “Actually,” I said, “you’ve made me aware of something new, and I like it.”

  It was true that the Basha had changed since hearing from Uroub and Harsha al-Hakim. He now did a lot more listening than he did talking. Sometimes he would take refuge in his office. He would tend to the plants in there and listen to flute music. But at times he seemed nervous, which was also unusual for him.

  One time I said to him, “Will you be able to live with the notion that a young man, who is your own flesh and blood, will die?”

  “My own flesh and blood?” he said mockingly. “What does that mean? I live my life without such silly notions. Anyone who wants to destroy me must die before he can execute his plan, even if the chances of it happening are only one in a thousand. The important thing is that the chance is out there.”

  “As you wish, Basha,” I said. “Walid will die before he can touch a single hair on your head.”

  Then he added, as if there was something he had forgotten, “This whole question of fathers and sons is nothing but the splitting of a cell. Each new cell becomes a world of its own, unconnected to the other except by heredity. It’s possible for one to attack the other and finish it off.”

  I remembered my son, Suhayl, and my daughter, Suhayla, both of whom I would not trade for all the treasures in the world and for whom I would sacrifice my very soul. Then I asked myself whether it was possible for a father to kill his own flesh and blood even if the son was illegitimate. Was it possible for people to think of their progeny as the mere division of cells like the Basha talked about?

  I shook my head and asked him again, “If Walid is indeed killed, what will we do with Darrar?”

  “We will see when the time comes,” he said.

  That was what made me recall the image of that desperate fellow, Darrar al-Ghoury, the one who could rescue the B
asha from his fate. Or, rather, the one who could force fate to change its course.

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  I hadn’t really planned on saying what I said to Sari when he came to see me; it just came out spontaneously, in response to his arrogance.

  But after he left, those words transformed into an idea worthy of consideration. If Fawaz al-Shardah was sending someone to ask me about al-Walid and to warn me, then that meant he had bad intentions towards me or al-Walid.

  It was possible Sari interpreted what I said as a threat to him and his boss.

  I hoped that was the case, for I feared no one in this world. I spent my old age alone in my house with no husband or son or daughter to occupy me in my loneliness, or care for me if something were to happen to me. I would sit for hours in front of the television, stricken with boredom. I busied myself with sweeping and mopping the floor twice a day despite my aching back. I cooked enough food to feed a whole family and shared it with the neighbors sometimes. I bathed and changed my clothes every day, and looked in the mirror at my face, which had changed a lot. I observed the lower parts of my cheeks as they sagged below the corners of my mouth. I looked at my neck and saw the effects time was having on it. Occasionally my mother came to visit and stayed over a night or two, but she quickly grew bored and went back home, leaving me all alone once again. My father didn’t visit anymore; he was debilitated by diabetes and could hardly see.

  Sometimes I wished the sun would hurry up and rise so I could go to the shop. There was some semblance of life there at least. I interacted with people and there were people all around, talking and working. There were cars and bicycles and vendor carts out on the street, and people. I even started opening the shop at seven every morning, long before the owners of the nearby shops up and down the long avenue even woke up, except for the baker who didn’t close his doors all night long.