by Jamal Naji
“I asked you something, but you didn’t answer.”
Never in my life had I been made to feel so weak and feeble. I reached for the Holy Quran in the drawer, placed my hand on it and swore, crying, “God bears witness that al-Walid is not here. And that I do not have a phone number for him. And that he sent someone to me on his behalf who called himself Omar. He assured me al-Walid was fine and left. I don’t know his address or his phone number. Is that enough, or do you want more?”
He looked me in the face with those eyes of his, which at that moment looked like two dark holes. Then he handed me a slip of paper with Fawaz’s wife’s phone number on it.
“This is the phone number of Mrs Samah, the wife of Fawaz Basha. You must call her and tell her what transpired between you and her husband thirty years ago. Tell her about your son al-Walid, who is her husband’s son. Don’t take long. I am waiting.”
I tried to find out what his intentions were. “I will call her if that is all I’m being asked to do, as long as you stay away from me and al-Walid in return.”
He turned to face me and ordered, “Just call her and never mind trying to bargain.”
“But . . .”
“Without any ‘but,’” he interrupted. “Do what I tell you to do.”
The Porcupine had defeated me. The documents and the dates were all in his possession, according to him. He would send them to al-Walid. He could do it.
Even still, I had decided I would do what he wanted. Maybe he would take pity on my situation, and maybe I would reduce the damages he might inflict on me.
“I will call her. The rest is up to you and your conscience,” I said.
He left, laughing, as if he was playing a game. But his laugh was sluggish this time around, and his voice was creaky.
After he left, it occurred to me that all I had to do was make a simple phone call to Mrs Samah. Then I tried to sweeten things for myself and thought: calling her was essentially my way of taking revenge on Fawaz.
My throat was dry. I drank a glass of water.
What was the Porcupine’s connection to Fawaz’s wife? Why did he want me to call her? What did he stand to gain? And why would he want to tell al-Walid about his mother? Why had he appeared now?
I closed up the shop and went home. I felt unable to focus my eyes on the sidewalk anymore. My back hurt and when I reached the house I went inside, locked the door behind me, and cried. I took two of the tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed for me the year before, fell asleep, and slept through to the next morning.
When I woke up the air in my room smelled stale. I opened the window and didn’t know what I should do.
I thought about the Porcupine again. He wanted to harm me and harm al-Walid. But why after all these years? Was it because I slapped him when he made a pass at me in his office?
That seemed like a silly reason, too trivial to warrant what he wanted to do. The Porcupine wanted to send all the documents to al-Walid. He wanted to use him to kill me and use me to kill him. But why?
Did he hope to punish me for what I did in Paris, now that he had become devout?
But what would he gain?
I went to the shop. I opened the door and sat down inside. I propped my chin on my palm. Was time really so persistent?
What happened to me was God’s judgment and divine decree. But why did this fate keep chasing after me wherever I went? Hadn’t it finished with me yet?
As I was thinking, Sari entered the shop. He offered to help me, in accordance with Fawaz’s instructions. I answered him sharply and sternly. But when I asked him if he knew the Porcupine he denied it in a manner that made me believe him.
When Sari left, I got the feeling he was afraid or angry. Most likely afraid.
He stood at the doorway after going outside the shop. I saw him get into a black Jeep with wide tires. When he started it, I felt the rumble of the motor was different from the small cars and buses that usually passed down the street. Then I caught a glimpse of Omar, al-Walid’s comrade, just as Sari’s car started to take off. He was on a motorcycle trailing behind Sari’s car.
A new piece of the puzzle, I said to myself. O God, help and preserve us!
Samah Shahadeh
A woman called me who said her name was Muntaha, Umm al-Walid.
She had a deep, gentle voice. At first I thought she had dialed the wrong number, so I said, “You have the wrong number, Mrs Umm al-Walid.”
“Is this Mrs Samah, the wife of Fawaz al-Shardah?”
Fawaz al-Shardah? It had been many long years since anyone had dared refer to Fawaz that way!
“Fawaz Basha,” I corrected.
“Doesn’t matter, just as long as you are his wife. Did he ever tell you he has a son named al-Walid?”
At first I thought she was some woman trying to get money out of us and that some new conspiracy was being hatched against Fawaz.
“Mrs Umm al-Walid,” I said to her. “I don’t have time for nonsense.”
I was about to hang up but then I heard her say, “I will tell you something to make you believe what I’m saying.”
It took a lot of effort to gain control of my nerves, but my curiosity gave me pause. Then I asked her, “How can I be sure of what you claim?”
She answered confidently, “Fawaz has only one testicle, you and I know that, but he is able to have children. At any rate, his son’s name is Walid. He’s my son, too.”
I had no idea what to say to this woman who had shocked and stunned me with what she said. Fawaz did have only one testicle, not two, it was true. And the woman spoke with such certainty.
I couldn’t bear to hear any more, so I hung up the phone, but didn’t forget to save the number that woman called me from.
If she was lying to me, then that was a problem, and if what she said was true, then it was a bigger problem!
Either way, that woman, who said her name was Muntaha, meaning “utmost,” was indeed a woman of utmost evil.
I thought about hurting her somehow, since I had her cell phone number, but then I regretted even thinking such a thing. She was not worthy of my hurting her. If I did that, I’d end up hurting myself.
I decided to wait until nighttime to talk to Fawaz about it.
He was in his office, engrossed in a phone call. I got the feeling he changed the subject when I entered the room. Then he hung up.
I said very calmly, “I received a strange phone call today. A woman who said her name was Muntaha, Umm al-Walid.”
I watched his face and eyes in case I caught him in a moment of hesitation or confusion. But he didn’t show concern or act as though it meant anything to him.
“What did she want, this woman called . . . What was her name?” he said.
“Muntaha, Umm al-Walid,” I said.
He shrugged it off, saying, “OK, that’s nice. How old is she? What’s her story?”
“Her son is around thirty years old,” I said.
“Oh, so she’s elderly. Maybe she is one of those social cases they’re trying to get us to give money to.”
My voice took on a sharp tone. “Fawaz, this woman knows you only have one testicle, not two!”
He was quiet for a moment and then he said without any confusion, “Has the situation with beggars trying to cheat people out of their money reached the point where they’ve starting delving into people’s medical records?” Then he continued. “Didn’t she tell you what she wanted?”
“I hung up on her before I could find out. But I saved her phone number. Do you want her phone number?”
He looked at me in disbelief. “What’s wrong with you, Samah? What would I do with the phone number of some woman I don’t know? I suggest you give her some money so she’ll leave you alone.”
“She told me that her son is also your son. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“Yes. It means beggars have developed their methods to an astonishing level.”
The next day I felt a longing to see my father. A sudden longing.
Sari Abu Amineh
Umm al-Walid talked to me in a manner I didn’t like at all when I went to see her two days ago. She was angry and agitated. I was almost certain her son had been smuggled across the borders and was now in Amman.
She asked me about someone called “the Porcupine.” That was his name. When I denied knowing him she seemed surprised. And she didn’t tell me who this Porcupine was when I asked her.
Could luck really be so set against me? Could heaven just fold its arms and step in to insure the fate that was in store for the Basha during his year of sorrow?
I didn’t believe in fate in the past, but I was afraid of it.
Now I believe in fate and fear it at the same time. And I believe that fate is cruel and mocking and hatches out plans . . . Fate is greater than me and greater than everyone. And I am nothing but a tiny creature caught up in its mighty, legendary expanse.
I told the Basha everything, for the situation had gotten way beyond keeping such dangerous information to myself. I made it clear I was ready to take full responsibility for my own failure, even if it meant being fired from my job. And that was a mistake that only made things worse. He interpreted the situation not as a matter of my taking responsibility for failure, but rather of shirking responsibility when the circumstances got difficult.
Actually, I thought a lot about the mess I had gotten myself into, not against the Basha or to denounce him in any way, but because my life was in danger.
The Basha seemed perplexed to me as he walked beside me in his garden. As usual he had his hands clasped behind his back. The guard was patrolling the western wall.
This time he was looking around at things and up at the sky with eyes that seemed laden with questions. Even when he looked at me I felt there was a kind of cryptic doubtfulness in his eyes.
He spoke to me in a tone that gave the impression his words were drifting on a floating surface; it was more philosophical than curious. “If Uroub hadn’t said those things to me the night of my sixtieth birthday, would it have been possible for everything that happened to happen? Would it have been possible for us to travel to Mumbai, and to send someone to kill Walid – that fellow called Darrar? And would I have surrounded my house with all those security guards? And avoided my wife’s looks and questions? Would it have been possible for us to be standing here, on this very spot, having this conversation?”
“No, definitely not,” I said.
He came to a stop. “That means that by making her predictions Uroub stirred up the fates.”
I thought about this conclusion, which seemed plausible to me. “Logically, it’s true.”
He lifted his head and looked up at the blue skies. “How long has it been since you looked up at the heavens?”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “But even if I have looked, I am like everyone else – I look without meaning to and without thinking, and then I forget I looked.”
Then I added, philosophizing a bit myself, “But when I hear the word ‘heavens’ I know what it means without looking up.”
He went back to asking, “Have you ever imagined what the heavens look like when they’re ‘brimming with activity’?”
I put my hand over my mouth and squinted my eyes, thinking.
He didn’t wait for my answer. “I think the best way to see it, when it is brimming with activity, is to look down at the earth below us and all around us.”
That was something Harsha al-Hakim had not said.
Darrar al-Ghoury
If my suspicions were correct, then Sari still thought I was dead.
I didn’t kill Sharhabil as I had been sent to do. Not because I didn’t have a good opportunity. On the contrary, numerous opportunities to kill him had presented themselves to me. But I didn’t do it. Something deep inside me diverted me from fulfilling that dreadful mission.
Between this world and the hereafter there is a mandatory strait we all must pass through, and Sari and his money would not be of any benefit to me when my time came. And Sharhabil said, “O Sariyah! The mountain, the mountain!”xiii
It was divine inspiration from God Almighty.
And who was I to be the wolf that catches the lamb?xiv How would I stand before the face of my Lord?
And more than all of this, I never expected Sari to be behind the contemptible attempt to murder me. He had to pay the price of his wickedness and the corruption of his soul.
When I visited that great lady Umm al-Walid, I took the name Omar as a precaution.
My wound was nearly healed, and I had removed the bandages.
Umm al-Walid told me Sari had come to see her. I thought to myself that he was going to bring about his death all by himself; he was in fact my whole reason for returning.
Umm al-Walid is an upright woman. She clearly loves her son and is anxiously awaiting his return. But he never once expressed any desire to go back home.
I rented a motorcycle and parked it a few meters away from Umm al-Walid’s shop on the main street in Swayleh. I began watching the area without drawing attention to myself. I’d buy little things from this or that shop, and I’d go back and put my purchases into the storage compartment of the motorcycle. Other times I would shop around and look at the clothes in the nearby shops, giving myself an opportunity to observe who was going in or out of Umm al-Walid’s shop.
I watched for two days, and on the third day – it was a Saturday – I saw the target Sari park his black Jeep right out in front of the shop, get out of the car, and enter the shop. It was late in the afternoon, and I thought to myself that relief was on the way, God willing.
I waited twenty-two minutes for him, and when he came out of the shop and took off in his Jeep, I followed him on my motorcycle, leaving enough space between him and myself to dispel any suspicions.
He continued along the wide street towards Kamaliyya and then headed north along a narrow road. His car climbed up a hill leading to a big house that looked quite luxurious from a distance. Then the car disappeared into a garage with a heavy iron gate. So I turned around on my motorcycle and parked it among the cypress trees where it wouldn’t raise suspicion.
I watched the road and waited. Three hours passed before I saw the Jeep coming down from the direction of the house towards the main road, with the target driving.
The following two days I kept surveillance and noted at what times he came and left. The times weren’t regular, but still gave me the opportunity to carry out what I was determined to do.
In Afghanistan I had been trained in how to set explosives with timers and ignite them from a distance using wireless pulses, fuses and electric charges.
I prepared the receiver and connected it to an explosive weighing five kilograms. I ran the orange and red light test to make sure it was working. Then I went to the side road leading to the big house, the one the target Sari had driven up in his car previously.
I found a pothole in the asphalt, large enough for the bomb. I buried it and covered it with some little tender pine tree branches – they looked like they had fallen from their mother tree onto the road – and went and hid with my motorcycle a couple hundred meters from the bomb. This way I could use binoculars to see the target approaching and then send the explosive impulses the moment he got to the bomb.
I waited from late afternoon until the evening maghrib prayer. I saw the streetlights on the side road come on and was relieved to know I would be able to discern Sari’s car from other cars that might come down the road.
An hour passed. Two hours. No cars came down the road except for a few that were not the target I was looking for.
I said to myself that patience was the key to relief.
The place was complet
ely empty of houses and people, and was quiet except for the whooshing of the wind as it brushed the tops of the cypress and pine trees. I looked up through the trees at the dark sky.
I asked for God’s forgiveness and recited three of the short suras. And I waited.
Samah Shahadeh
I went to my father’s house. I found him in the living room with a man sitting beside him wearing a white kufiyyeh with black igal cord wrapped around it. He had a tiny face and wore a short dishdasha robe and had a set of brown prayer beads in his hand. He stood up to greet me, placing the palm of his hand over his chest indicating his abstention from shaking hands with women.
He was very short and skinny. His general appearance did not put one at ease. Despite that, there he was sitting with my father in his home.
He looked towards my father with conniving eyes and told him he should be going, so my father walked him to the door.
Something about the way the man looked at my father gave me the impression they were in collusion.
I said to him in protest, “I know our lives these days are full of surprises, but from where do you know that wicked-looking man? Since when do you bring this type of person into your home?”
“Bravo, Samah,” he said in a congratulatory tone.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s the occasion for this ‘bravo’?”
“The occasion is that what you said is true. The Porcupine is wicked. And life these days is full of surprises. And I suspect you will witness many more of them.”
Then he explained, “The name of that man who was here is ‘the Porcupine.’”
Darrar al-Ghoury
It got to be nearly nine o’clock at night and I continued to wait beneath those trees that exuded the smell of cypress and pine.
I saw the lights of a car coming down the paved road I had booby-trapped. I got ready. The car came closer, and I could hear the sounds of young men and women singing. When the car and everyone in it came within view of my binoculars, I could see that it was an open convertible and that there were two young men and two unveiled women riding inside – may God curse all four of them! It was the epitome of sacrilege.