by Jamal Naji
That hadn’t occurred to me before.
Could Nael have been so deeply secretive, and spiteful to such an extent?
I recalled numerous situations I thought would help me arrive at the truth. I remembered that he said to me – when al-Walid was just a few months old – that he didn’t look like him.
Then Nael had his doubts from the very beginning!
Why hadn’t all that occurred to me before? Where was my mind?
And when al-Walid turned six, he told me he didn’t look like him at all.
And then the Porcupine told me he knew Nael. They used to pray together, and talk after prayers. And the Porcupine had known my whole story ever since those sinful days.
I changed my clothes and thanked God that al-Walid had not come back.
Then I remembered what my mother had said, “You don’t love al-Walid.”
Could there be something to what my mother said?
O God! This puzzle was way beyond what my mind could grasp.
My phone rang. It was al-Walid on the line.
Without thinking, I said, “My good boy, I was just thinking about you a minute ago.”
Then I filled his ears with lots of expressions about longing and waiting and wishing.
“I miss you, Mother,” he said. “May God guide your path.”
His voice sounded hurt and carried a kind of sternness, though I didn’t understand why.
“When will you come home, al-Walid?”
He was quiet for a little while. Maybe he hadn’t heard anyone call him by that name for many years.
“Here they call me Sharhabil,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I just want to know when you’re coming.”
A few seconds later he said, “The weather is hot these days.”
“It’s autumn, and you’re in Syria, not the north pole. What’s with you, al-Walid?”
I said that and then his voice trailed off again. I felt like he was speaking in brief phrases, without clarifications. Again I asked him, “You didn’t answer me. When are you coming?”
He cleared his throat and begged God’s forgiveness. Then he said, “I don’t know. Our jihad is ongoing. Only God knows when or where we will be tomorrow or the next day.”
“Haven’t you gotten tired and fed-up with that by now?” I asked.
The sound of his voice grew even sterner. “Say God is one, Mother. May God set you on the path of righteousness. Does a believer ever grow tired of jihad for the sake of God?”
It occurred to me that he had intentionally chosen to call me on that particular day, possibly to tell whoever was tapping my phone that he wasn’t coming to Amman, and that he was calling from Syria, not Jordan. So he wanted to protect me, even if he was far away from me.
I said to him, trying to let him know I understood the reason for his call, “I know why you made a point to call today in particular.”
His voice sounded more at ease. “You’ve relieved me from the burden of asking.”
Avoiding getting into details, I said, “Your health is all that matters. Take care of your body. Eat well and sleep well.”
He cleared his throat. “You didn’t answer me, Mother.”
“Answer you about what?”
“About the hidden thing, the secret.”
I felt he said it flippantly. “The secret? What secret?!”
He continued with a kind of determination, “The secret my father told me to ask about after he died!”
“What secret, al-Walid?!” I asked.
“The day he saw me off around ten years ago, he told me to tell you that he knew what you were hiding from him, but he didn’t tell me what it was. He made me swear not to ask you about it until after he died, if God Almighty chose him ahead of me. Are you hiding something, Mother?”
Now I remembered that when al-Walid first called me after Nael’s death he tried to ask me about something, but he hesitated and didn’t insist. This time he asked, and he wanted an answer.
Before hanging up, I said, “It seems jihad has changed you. Do you really believe your mother was hiding something from your father before his death, and from you, al-Walid?”
I had to admit that I did not know the Nael I had lived with all those years. What had he been thinking? What had been going through his head?
Most importantly, what was it that the Porcupine was planning to do? Why had he appeared to me during my tribulation, like some kind of rash judgment?
It seemed I needed another lifetime to understand life.
Abu Hudhayfah
Nothing happens in this world except by the divine decree of God Almighty, and all the destinies of all the world’s creatures were written before God created the heavens and the earth.
The last battle Sharhabil decided to embark on was at one of the food storage warehouses belonging to the government forces.
The mujahideen were preparing their weapons and ammunition, and had them propped up on their shoulders in the vehicles. The door to Sharhabil’s tent was lowered, which I found strange, because it was his practice to oversee battle preparations himself.
I stood at the door, cleared my throat, and called, “May I have permission to enter, Commander?”
I didn’t hear any response. I noticed a faint cloud of smoke seeping out of one of the seams in the tent, and dissipating as soon as it hit the open air.
I didn’t wait. I raised the door panel, poked my head inside, and saw the most astonishing thing.
Commander Sharhabil was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the palms of his hands over his eyes. He had a vest of explosives strapped on, a machine gun by his side, and in front of him was a pile of burnt papers that were still smoldering. His expression was so tense I thought the smoke from the burning papers had mingled with the smoke I imagined emanating from his fuming head.
I went closer to him. I saw on the floor behind him an envelope that read: To the honorable Mr Walid Nael Dughaybil (Sharhabil).
I don’t know where that envelope came from or how it reached him. I guessed the burnt papers were what had been inside the envelope.
He moved his hands away from his eyes and stared at the blackened papers.
That man I saw in the tent was not the Commander Sharhabil I knew, not at all. His face was dark and his eyes protruded.
I said to him apprehensively, “With your permission, is there some weighty matter I don’t know about?”
He let out a heavy sigh. “There are many matters, but they aren’t related to jihad this time. They pertain to me personally, at home.”
“Can I hope to assist you with these matters? Would the fact of all these years we’ve spent together allow me to ask about these things?”
He shook his head and with a look filled with so much tension I could hardly recognize his face, he said, “What is torturing me and tearing me apart about this secret is that I cannot tell anyone about it, not even you, Abu Hudhayfah!”
Then he sighed and with a slight show of relief he added, “I thank God that every problem has a solution, and every crisis has a way out. It doesn’t matter whether the way out is above ground or below.”
What Commander Sharhabil said was substantial, for he was a man of very few words. But this time he seemed to have a need to talk, and to say something.
I looked again at the twisted, burned up papers in front of him, and at the envelope tossed onto the ground behind him. I tried to understand something of it, but what he had said locked all the doors.
He got up, holding his weapon in his hands. He strapped it to his shoulder. Then he took the anti-tank rocket launcher from the tent post and hung its belt behind his neck so it dangled over his chest.
As he started for the door he said, “Let’s go, Abu Hudhayfah. Let’s pledge ourselves to either victory or martyrdom fo
r the sake of God. I have a feeling that this pledge will be our last!”
We pledged, and I could see that envelope flip over in the wind that blew in from under the bottom of the tent.
We went out and headed towards the mujahideen waiting for us in their vehicles, with the artillery and ammunition. Sharhabil walked beside me and began to pick up his pace. He got ahead of me and I noticed that his shoulders were much broader than I remembered and his back was thicker and wider.
We started moving in our vehicles that were packed with mujahideen, heavy artillery, ammunition, and rocket launchers. Ten vehicles moved in unison towards the target, led by the vehicle carrying Commander Sharhabil who insisted on sitting on the metal bar behind the heavy artillery on top of the black pickup.
We stopped a few kilometers short of the target: the food warehouse. We waited until the maghrib prayers were concluded and then we set out again in our vehicles with our headlights turned off.
We moved toward the warehouse which extended for almost half a kilometer. The gunfire did not come in our direction. A few rounds were fired towards the gate from the heavy machine gun mounted on Commander Sharhabil’s vehicle, and other machine guns were fired from our side, but we didn’t see anyone at the thick iron gate to the warehouse.
Commander Sharhabil’s vehicle circled round the warehouse at high speed, and Sharhabil was clinging to the heavy machine gun mounted on the top of the truck. He started firing at the warehouse’s windows; that was the method he always followed for testing out a place before purging and storming into it. But then suddenly his vehicle rushed headlong through the gate – a very hazardous undertaking that broke the protocol of how we battled with our enemies. The place should have been purged with rockets and machine gun fire before entering in.
That foolhardy action caused us to be confused, especially when the rockets started coming, and the sounds of the explosions blasted our ears, and bullets from machine guns poured out from numerous positions inside the warehouse. And so four of our vehicles headed towards the gate and stormed through it while a number of mujahideen and I stayed back in the remaining five vehicles in the surroundings outside the warehouse.
Darkness was slowly settling over the place. In a matter of seconds, the area around the warehouse was transformed into an inferno. Bullets and rockets came towards us from every direction – from the rooftop of the warehouse, from holes in the walls, from windows, and doors. And we were surprised by numerous tanks approaching very close to us that came from a slope on the south side of the warehouse. They were approaching rapidly, and crazily, so we battled them all at once without a clear plan.
I looked for Commander Sharhabil when I saw those armored vehicles, for he was the “slayer of armor.” But the battle going on inside the warehouse was much harsher than the one outside. It was at its worst.
We sustained much heavier damages than we expected. They destroyed our vehicles and most everyone inside them was martyred. They took a number of mujahideen prisoners after they ran out of ammunition. Only very few of us remained. The darkness aided us to withdraw and hide in the nearby brush until the reinforcement vehicles we requested arrived to take us back to the camp.
I don’t know why I kept feeling that Commander Sharhabil was making a move in some concealed place and would surprise all the mujahideen by changing the course of the battle.
I never considered the possibility of him being martyred or taken prisoner.
We got back to the camp broken and wounded. We looked each other over, one by one. But Commander Sharhabil hadn’t made it back with us.
Sari Abu Amineh
It would have been possible for my stay in the hospital to amount to a kind of forced vacation, during which I could take a break from all the running around and thinking and constant panting, despite my miserable condition.
But how could I relax when I felt that fate was roaming about the hallways and rooms, angrily stomping its feet and breathing its heavy breaths, sucking up all other sounds?
Might it be searching for the Basha?
It was as though my brain didn’t believe I’d lost my right leg. It still felt as if it were right there. Both of my knees still trembled, and even though the doctors had managed to stop them from knocking together, they couldn’t stop the tremors that had begun right after the explosion.
From time to time, I found my hand reaching over to scratch the toes of that foot that was amputated, as if it hadn’t been cut off.
A few hours ago I woke up in intense pain. It felt like my heel was on fire. And despite everything the doctor told me and all of his persuasive proof that my heel was no longer there – because the entire leg had been amputated – it still did not stop my sensation of it being there and of the incredible pain that lasted two full hours.
The Basha survived, but his chest and shoulder and arm and all his ribs were hurt. They sent him to Paris to put his body back together, because the lives and deaths of the rich do not belong to them, but rather to fate’s master plan.
That was what Harsha al-Hakim had said.
The thing that frightened me most of all when the explosion happened, apart from the feeling of time suddenly coming to a stop, and the terrifying look in the Basha’s eyes – which I had never seen before in the eyes of any creature on the face of the earth – was the hot feeling that spread through every part of my body with lightning speed, the feeling that everything was coming to an end and a powerful desire to see myself in a mirror, to know what had happened to my body.
I didn’t think of my son or my daughter or my wife! The only thing I thought of was my body and whether it was still in one piece or whether the explosion had blown it to pieces.
Mrs Samah came to visit me and see how I was doing. I found out that she hadn’t gone along with the Basha to Paris while he underwent treatment. That was a first.
I divulged to her everything Uroub had told the Basha, and what the Indian sage had said, as part of an attempt to settle some accounts with myself and others, with life itself, which was something I felt I needed to do, because I couldn’t be certain if I was going to stay alive after what had happened.
She listened with great interest. In her eyes I saw indescribable anger and terror. Her face changed colors and reacted distinctively. When I finished talking, she got up, and haughtily turned her face away from me. Maybe deep down she despised me.
Rasha came and put four newspapers on the little table beside my bed.
“What’s strange about the Basha’s secret is that he was able to keep it from his wife for more than thirty years. Even stranger is that you were able to keep it from me, even though you knew everything. And you men say, ‘Mighty is the snare of women’?!”xv
Then she shook her head and sighed.
“Listen to me. You don’t need to be working with the Basha,” she said.
What she said was strange, as if she didn’t know I was no longer capable of working and that her advice was coming a bit too late, like giving medicine to a dead man.
I looked at her. Glancing at the newspaper headlines, she said, “You haven’t read what the papers are saying about what happened. I brought all of them here for you so you can read them.”
I flipped through the pages and found that it was all just the same bit of news repeated in more than one paper under the headline Terrorist Attack Targets the Basha Fawaz al-Shardah.
I expected there to be lots of repercussions in the news later on, but I didn’t read anything else about it in the days that followed. I sensed that they shelved the topic out of concern for the Basha’s safety and his reputation.
I remember now that the Grand Basha, Nayef Shahadeh, was the person originally behind Uroub’s surprise visit. When I phoned him ten days prior to Fawaz Basha’s sixtieth birthday to invite him to the party, he told me he was aware of the date, but that he was going to be out of the country the
night of the party. Then he said, “Too bad! I was going to prepare a surprise of the highest caliber for him on his birthday!”
I politely asked, “Might I ask what that is, sir?”
“I heard about an inspired Moroccan fortune-teller named Uroub,” he had said. “She is going to be in Amman the day before the big occasion. I thought about bringing her to Fawaz’s house to tell his fortune for him. But what’s the use? I won’t be able to attend that night.”
I asked his permission, saying, “May I have the honor of setting up this surprise myself, sir?”
After a brief pause, he answered me. “OK, Sari. You deserve all the best. But don’t ruin the surprise and tell Fawaz Basha. Promise?”
If you only knew, Grand Basha, what your surprise brought down on us in ruin and destruction that were greater than all your riches combined!
Al-Walid didn’t die. It doesn’t matter that Uroub’s prediction was not fulfilled and he didn’t kill his father. What matters is that I became one of the people being targeted, and it was quite possible that my demise might come at his hands or the hands of any of his comrades.
It was possible that whoever was carrying out the investigation didn’t know anything about Walid or Darrar al-Ghoury or the Syrian Yasin.
Most likely they didn’t know anything about Uroub.
Perhaps they didn’t think about heaven’s activities teeming in our region, making it impossible to impede fate, or change its plan, or make it stray from its path.
Samah Shahadeh
So that’s how it was.
Fawaz was a Don Juan who wasn’t satisfied with chasing after women and screwing them, but got one of them pregnant with his illegitimate son!
He might have lots of illegitimate sons, God knows!
If Mrs Muntaha hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known that her son is Fawaz’s son. I confirmed that when I called her back and she gave me two new pieces of evidence. She told me that she left deep scratch marks on his back when he slept with her in Paris.
