Authors: Elias Khoury
Following this experience, Yahya put on a display of political strength in the city, exploiting a festival held in honor of the anniversary of the death of Egyptian president Abdel Nasser. He brought in tractor-loads of his peasant supporters from Akkar chanting slogans against capitalism and feudalism and threatening a workers’ and peasants’ revolution.
In the wake of these two experiences, Yahya had become convinced that the time was ripe to proclaim the revolution. He wrote in his memoirs of “the necessity of depending on the principal of the Guevarist nucleus and of linking it to the factory workers’ struggle” via the Socialist Popular Rally. Yahya’s understanding was that the strike against the Qadisha Electrical Company would make it possible for the revolutionary nucleus to work in the city, and so he decided to proclaim the popular uprising.
In the event, however, things went in the opposite direction. “Authority can be overturned only through the building of a parallel authority, so Lenin taught us, and that was the reason for the failure of the uprising,” said Danny.
Khaled didn’t ask how a parallel authority was to be built or who would build it, or whether this new authority would be less repressive than its predecessor. Khaled was content to listen to Danny theorizing and drawing up plans, while vehemently refusing organizational interference by anyone.
“Khaled is like his uncle,” Danny wrote in a report he submitted to Dr. Othman, “but more aware and disciplined, and will probably meet with the same end.”
When Yahya went to prison with a bullet in his stomach he believed his time there would be an opportunity to take some rest. He was therefore overjoyed to meet Dr. Sadeq Jalal Azm, a Syrian Marxist intellectual living in Lebanon who’d been put in prison because of his book
A Critique of Religious Thought
.
In a letter to his wife, Hayat, Yahya wrote, “Yesterday, after being transferred to Ramal Prison in Beirut, I met Dr. Sadeq Azm in the dispensary and we had the following dialogue:
“ ‘You’re Dr. Sadeq Azm, author of
Self-Criticism after the Defeat
, aren’t you?’
“ ‘Yes, I’m Sadeq Azm. How did you know who I was?’
“ ‘I read your book.’
“ ‘You read my book? What’s your name?’
“ ‘I’m Yahya Nabulsi from Tripoli, leader of the Qubbeh uprising.’
“I was astonished to find that he knew a lot about me and was sympathetic to our movement but said we had to join a revolutionary party that could lead our struggle.
“I told him there weren’t any revolutionary parties in Lebanon or the region. He nodded and then asked me to read about the experiences of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets that had been founded by the Democratic Front in the city of Irbid in Jordan in 1970.
“I said the experiment had been a failure. He agreed with me and then asked if I’d read his book and when I told him I’d read it three times because it was the most important book to come out after the June defeat, I felt it made him happy. Then he asked me what had got me into prison and said he was charged with attacking religion and exciting sectarian tensions because of his book on the critique of religious thought.
“Meeting him, Hayat, was incredible. What a great man! An intellectual who’s gone to prison for his ideas. I told him when I got out of prison I’d
like to invite him to visit us in Qubbeh. He asked how long my sentence was and I told him ten years, but I’d be getting out sooner than that. I asked how long his was and he said he hadn’t been referred for trial yet but was expecting a sentence no shorter than mine.
“I kept thinking to myself, what is this world? What is the value of thought in this society? Nothing. What does it mean that Sadeq Azm is sent to prison for publishing his book
A Critique of Religious Thought
? They talk of blasphemy? Of atheism? The coming revolution will not forgive the reactionaries who exploit innocent souls in the name of religion.”
Sadeq Azm’s book had caused a major fuss in Beirut at the time. The attack had focused on the Syrian writer for his authorship of an essay included in the book and entitled “The Devil’s Tragedy.” In this he had supposed, as a way of buttressing his deconstruction of religious texts, that the Devil, in refusing to obey God’s command to bow down to Adam, was carrying out God’s hidden purpose and that he had agreed to be the rebel and take the consequences out of extreme obedience. The Muslim men of religion had considered this mockery and sarcasm, while their Christian counterparts had joined the campaign against him because of another study in the same book in which he mocked the Virgin’s appearances in Egypt, describing them as a naïve compensation mechanism for the June 1967 defeat.
The
al-Nahar
Supplement had set the match to the tinder when it published a picture of Azm on its cover over the caption, “The Infidel from Damascus.” Azm was in Ramal Prison for only a few days, after which he was tried and found innocent. It was said that pressure brought to bear on the authorities by Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, lay behind the judgment.
Yahya never had the chance to meet the Syrian thinker again. He was transferred from one prison to another and treated brutally, despite his
wounds never having healed. He spent most of his time in solitary confinement and took to eating only the almonds and honey that were brought him once a week by Hayat, who was obliged to bribe the officer in charge to be sure they reached her husband, who suffered agonizing pains in his stomach.
Things got to the point that in the end his jailers put a viper in his cell. The prisoners at Roumieh Prison would never forget the shouting that erupted from Yahya’s cell that early morning. The man woke to a strange movement and found a snake at the edge of his bedding. Yahya knew, from his experience in the villages of Akkar, that you must not provoke a snake, so he got up stealthily from the mat that he slept on and stood at the iron bars, calling in a loud voice, “They’ve put a snake in my bed because they want to kill me!” At this, shouting arose from all the cells, the jailers heard the cry, “Shake the bars!” the bars of the cells started to shake violently, and pandemonium broke out. The duty officer ran to see what was going on. Yahya told him to open the door to his cell or he’d hold him responsible for his death by snakebite.
The confrontation ended when Yahya’s cell was opened and two of the security personnel riddled the snake with bullets. Yahya was convinced they’d wanted to kill him. He wrote to his wife that he could feel his time drawing near and said he regretted not having had a son (whom they’d decided to call Nabil) with her.
At the funeral, while the bier was borne aloft on people’s hands, the cry went up, “Shake the bars!” People forgot all the political slogans and five thousand men and women walked behind the bier like prisoners shaking the bars of their plundered freedom.
The funeral ended with Khaled inheriting a story in which he had previously participated only from a distance. Khaled had certainly admired his uncle and the aura that Yahya had succeeded in creating around himself, but
his admiration was diluted by his rejection of the path the man had taken to his death, seemingly fashioning his end of his own free will. Khaled, who had got as far as the graduating class at Qubbeh’s government secondary school for boys before deciding that the time had come for him to join the Palestinian Fedayeen, couldn’t blame his uncle for anything he’d done. Yahya had been the son of a poor baker who’d been obliged to leave school during fifth primary, when his father had died, to work at the bakery. He was the offspring of the phase of populist leftist ferment that had followed the June 5 defeat. Khaled couldn’t understand how his uncle had had dealings with Ahmad Qaddour and his men, who were just a group of murderers and thieves interested in nothing but thuggery and pillage. The greatest paradox that Khaled had faced, however, was embodied in the person of a young man to whom the name “Fan-it” had become so firmly attached that people had forgotten his real one. Fan-it was twenty-four years old, carefully brilliantined his hair, and took on all sorts of dirty jobs that no one else would think of doing. Most likely the name Fan-it came from the youth’s work at Abu Riyad’s butcher’s shop, where it was his task to grill skewers of meat; in other words, it was his role to keep the burning charcoal glowing, using a feather fan.
But Fan-it’s real skills began to manifest themselves when he worked with Sinalcol on the gambling tables Qaddour used to run in Tripoli. The three-card trick and games of put-five-take-twenty-five, thimble, and seven-eleven were organized on small tables scattered around the inner quarters. These called for both adroitness and strong-arm tactics – adroitness to cheat customers and strong-arm tactics to keep winners from stopping playing: they had to go on till they’d lost everything they’d won or else Fan-it would beat them till the blood flowed down their faces and they put everything they possessed on the table. Fan-it was able to make such a go of running these games that he rebelled against Qaddour, split off from him,
and ended up with his own tables and boys. At the same time, he never left his original job at Abu Riyad’s butcher’s shop, where he loved to breathe in the smell of the grilled meat and enjoyed watching the customers’ lips drooling in anticipation of the hot skewers with which he’d present them.
When Khaled began reconstructing his uncle’s by then disintegrated group he was surprised by Fan-it’s arrival at the bakery with the announcement that he’d been Yahya’s right-hand man and wanted to continue the struggle. It was Radwan’s opinion that Khaled shouldn’t antagonize Fan-it and his type but come up with a way of integrating him. However, Khaled couldn’t contain himself and informed Fan-it that he couldn’t include gamblers in the ranks of his organization.
“We have to provide a good example to the masses and you’re a gambler. What will people think of us? Drop the gambling and come back.”
Fan-it refused to give up his little gambling empire but kept in regular touch with the boys and joined them at the roadblocks they set up during the civil war. When Khaled was killed Fan-it knelt before the blood-spattered body, dipped his finger in the martyr’s blood, and traced a circle of blood around his neck. Then he disappeared.
Sheikh Radwan told Karim that Fan-it had emigrated to West Germany along with innumerable waves of Lebanese and Palestinian youths seeking political asylum there. He said he thought Fan-it had had dealings with Syrian Intelligence to protect himself, but hadn’t informed on or plotted against the boys.
In the end Fan-it did find a way to work with Khaled’s boys, after they’d found Islam, by joining an Islamist group at the port whose emir was Sheikh Salim Muadhen. This sheikh also had contacts with Intelligence but claimed to be an Islamic fundamentalist, partnering Khaled and his comrades in leading the Islamist political action in Tripoli.
Khaled rid the group of the unemployed and of thieves. He embarked on his personal path as defender of the poor of the Qubbeh and surrounding quarters, and as a Marxist activist within the leftist current of the Fatah movement.
But fate turned everything upside down. The Syrian army entered Lebanon in 1976, taking particularly tight control of Tripoli. At the same time the Palestinians pulled back, understanding, especially after the assassination of Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Lebanese National Movement, and the collapse of the Lebanese Left, that the goal of the Syrian presence in Lebanon was to force it into submission and make it their tool.
A new Palestinian strategy now evolved whose watchword was withdrawal from the Lebanese Civil War, regrouping in the south, and ignition of the front with Israel. This strategy reached its climax with the suicide mission led by Jamal and eventually brought about the occupation of southern Lebanon.
Khaled wasn’t convinced by the new strategy. He understood from Danny’s gradual withdrawal that Danny didn’t agree either. But when he went to visit Danny in Beirut he found the Fatah official had no answers to Khaled’s questions, had given up political work, and decided to take a job as archivist at
al-Nahar
.
Khaled tried to adapt to the new situation. With a group of his comrades from Tripoli he joined the Jerusalem Martyrs’ Brigade, which had taken Shaqif Castle in the south as its base. But he felt a terrible homesickness. He couldn’t bear to be far from Qubbeh and the smell of lemon blossom in Tripoli, and he didn’t see how the revolution could live in military bases far from its natural environment of the masses. What Khaled didn’t say, Radwan did. Radwan said he felt like a stranger there, announcing as he did so his call for a withdrawal from Shaqif Castle and a return to the Fragrant
City. Khaled was surprised to find every comrade – forty young men in all – agreeing with Radwan and telling Khaled they felt the same but would leave the decision to him.
Khaled was tired. True, he missed his city, but in establishing a base at Shaqif he’d found a way to escape from the house. His heart had been broken every night as he watched Hayat cover herself in pajamas and flee into her body – two years lived in thirst and in the pain of love. Khaled didn’t think he could love like the Udhris and be content with the simultaneous presence and absence of the beloved and her never-fulfilled promises. Many times, when he leapt from the bed moist with the dream that had spread itself beneath his eyelids, he would decide to take a second wife; he’d tell Hayat he couldn’t go on any longer and was prepared to continue supporting her if she preferred that to facing her family, but that he had to get another wife. When he got back in the evenings, though, exhausted from working at the bakery, even the glimmer of a smile of tenderness from her, bearing what seemed an obscure promise, would suffice to make him forget his decision and feel that even just to sit at the dinner table with her was to own the world.
When he told her he was going with the boys to the south because political conditions so demanded, she lowered her eyes with obvious sadness and said, “As you wish, but please take care of yourself and don’t die, for my sake don’t die.” She smiled and said she’d miss him, “but don’t you worry, I’ll go to the bakery and help out Imm Yahya.”