Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  The car went off into the distance, their voices faded, and silence was restored.

  I thought about what I would do once I’d accomplished my task. I said to myself that I would become an anonymous fieldworker in one of the farms in the Valley, until things changed. Maybe I would run into Sharhabil or Abu Hudhayfah or one of the other mujahideen right here in our hometown. Maybe God would shelter me with His grace and guide my life according to His will. The important thing was that Sari would not be able to get to me, because he would die in the very near future, God willing.

  The sound of a car motor came within my earshot. I had heard that muffled rumble before from Sari’s car. It was the same sound. I prepared the detonator. All I had to do to ignite the explosives was press the send button.

  The Jeep appeared, with the target Sari inside. I saw him and recognized him through my binoculars when the light from the street reflected onto his face. But he was not alone in the car. There was another man sitting beside him. He could be innocent. But the time to act had come, and the target Sari was only seconds away from the bomb, and I simply had to carry out the plan.

  As the target came within just a few meters of the spot, I said “Allahu akbar” and “Bismallah” and pressed the detonator switch. The bomb exploded at exactly the moment the target was passing over it.

  The sound of the explosion was loud and resounded through the quiet of the night. A fire was sparked and the blaze shot up like lightning carrying the car with it up into the sky before it dropped back down, flipped over, and rolled to a stop.

  I praised God and took off immediately on the motorcycle and headed down an unpaved road that led to the Valley, which I had scouted out previously. I was overcome with the excitement of my victorious accomplishment, and of getting rid of that deceitful Sari who deserved much worse than what I’d done to him.

  As for the passenger who was riding with him, his fate had led him to his end at that moment. Maybe he was of the likes of Sari, and maybe God had sent him with him, to find his death.

  Samah Shahadeh

  There was a sudden flash of light near the cypress trees that broke the darkness of the night. A fire broke out that was accompanied by a loud explosion that shook our house so hard a vase fell off the shelf and smashed onto the floor tiles. And the plants hanging from the ceiling of the balcony, where I was standing and talking on my cell phone with a friend of mine, were set into motion and started swinging back and forth.

  I saw the driver and the guards run frantically towards the Mercedes, get inside, and take off. Only one guard stayed behind who readied his weapon and stood on alert.

  I quickly wrapped my robe around me, headed to my car, and followed after them.

  Sari’s car was flipped upside down. The car body was mangled and the doors had been ripped off and two of the tires had landed several meters away.

  I saw the guards – in the car headlights they were shining onto the remnants of the Jeep – pulling Fawaz and Sari out from inside the car, drowning in blood. I started screaming and yelling, slapping my face and pulling my hair, and then I passed out and fell to the ground.

  I came to in the hospital. My father was standing over my head. He told me that Fawaz had survived the assassination attempt but would need to undergo surgery.

  He told me that Sari had also survived and that they had sewn his abdomen back up after putting his intestines back inside, and that one of his legs had been severed or they were going to have to amputate it.

  My father was completely unemotional as he spoke. He was gray.

  I felt like I’d aged twenty years. My body no longer had the strength it used to have.

  For me to witness an explosion and wreckage of that magnitude was not simply an event I experienced. Rather it was a scene that forced me to take a new look at life itself, and at love and hate, and the gifts of sleeping and waking and laughing, and everything I had taken for granted. It meant that there was more to life than just having fun, and going to evening parties, and reading, and swimming, and traveling, and being happy.

  In life there was a quiet hell I had never thought about before.

  My father said something very strange. He asked me, “Have you looked in the mirror?”

  “No,” I answered.

  So I got out of bed and he walked beside me. I went into the bathroom and looked at my face in the mirror. I had left the house with messy hair and no make-up, hoping no one I knew would see me. I was in a horrible state.

  I went back to my bed and he said something even stranger. “You should have put on some decent clothes, and fixed your hair, and looked after your appearance before leaving the house.”

  I peered into his face, trying to tell if he was serious. “It seems you’ve forgotten I rushed out of the house in my robe immediately following the explosion.”

  Without hesitation, he said, “No, I didn’t forget. But you could have taken a little more time.”

  “And Fawaz?!” I said.

  He winked with his right eye. Then he got up to leave, saying, “I’ll ask them to get your hospital release papers ready. You’ll be going back home today.”

  “And Fawaz?” I asked urgently.

  He left the room without answering.

  Sari’s wife came to see me. She seemed surprised by my appearance.

  “There are police everywhere,” she said. “Outside the hospital and up and down the corridors. They’re questioning Sari despite his having lost his leg. They want to know who’s behind the crime. How could he know when he was the one driving the car? Why didn’t they go after the criminals?”

  I felt that Rasha was really angry about what happened, and that she wanted to place the blame for what had happened to Sari on us.

  Sari Abu Amineh

  The sound of the explosion was still ringing in my ears. And the smell of gunpowder still lingered in my nostrils despite all the medications, hygienic cleansing, and sterilization of my wounds and my whole body.

  My ears were still ringing, and I still felt that fear of the end that overcame me the moment of the explosion.

  I remembered now, after seeing death with my own eyes, that I killed a man named Shaher al-Zarman, or Darrar al-Ghoury as they called him before his death. True I didn’t kill him with my own hands, but I was the one who sent Yasin to kill him!

  If I hadn’t done that, then Darrar would still be alive and well today.

  How did I turn into a killer from afar?

  Was this a part of fate’s plan that never wanted to end? Or was it part of its mockery that people talked about all the time?

  Even Yasin, the Syrian fellow whose family lived in Zaatary refugee camp hadn’t come back from the mission I sent him to do. And he didn’t collect the rest of the money I promised him.

  How heavy-handed fate is!

  A simple change in daily routine nearly cost me my life and lost me my leg.

  If the Basha hadn’t taken a ride with me in my car to go to his appointment at the Four Seasons Hotel at the Fifth Circle in Amman, then I wouldn’t have fallen into Walid’s trap, and my stomach and chest and arms wouldn’t have been torn apart, and the hot, twisted metal wouldn’t have severed my right leg, which I have no idea what they did with.

  I bled a lot of hot blood. A chunk of my intestines spilled out and I held onto it with my hands until the guards came and took us to Isra’ Hospital, the nearest one available.

  The Basha bled a lot too. His whole body and clothes were soaked in blood. He fell unconscious and didn’t come to for several hours, as I found out.

  The doctors extracted more than seven chunks of metal from my body, and little pieces of shrapnel that looked like bullets from a BB gun, and placed them all in a vial. I saw them myself.

  I can still feel some force lifting me up into the air and then throwing me down onto the hard ground, then flipping me
over and tossing me around. My head hits the car metal and the steering wheel presses down on my hand, and my leg is severed, and my guts spill out, and the hot blood flows over my face and my chest and between my thighs.

  I still remember the look of terror in the Basha’s eyes the moment of the explosion, the look of someone going to the land of no return.

  And so the prediction of Uroub the fortune-teller had come true. Here was fate roaming around in its own backyard. Here were heaven’s activities teeming in our country, exactly as Harsha al-Hakim had said.

  Walid was in Amman; that was certain. He was the one who wanted to kill the Basha. I was merely an unfortunate companion, one of the ordinary people fate pays little attention to. My name might not even have made its list, for I was merely a tiny cog among millions and billions of wheels by which the mighty machine called fate rolled along its path. Removing me made no difference at all.

  Surely Walid found out we didn’t die. The details were all over the news and made the front page of the newspapers, so I was told.

  So then fate would have to turn itself around, after having gone on its way believing it had completed its task. It would come back for the Basha to finish what it started, and it would use Walid once again to finish off his father. And heaven, which had disregarded the Basha all the years of his life, would ensure fate’s success. It would step in, in order to help fate dole out what had been planned for him.

  That was what Uroub the fortune-teller said, and that was what was happening.

  I was simply an individual who happened to be in the place and time that fate chose to carry out its plan for the Basha. Maybe for this reason I didn’t die.

  Who knows? Maybe it would seek me out when it came back for the Basha!

  If Uroub hadn’t turned up in our lives, would things have transpired in this dreadful way? Would it have been possible for my body to be shattered and for me to lose my leg?

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  I learned that Fawaz al-Shardah had been the target of an assassination attempt. I saw a picture of him on TV that was shown during the news broadcast. I saw the black Jeep flipped upside down, and all the destruction around where it happened. I think it was the car Sari drove to come see me at the shop. And the anchorwoman mentioned that Fawaz’s public relations director had been with him when the explosion occurred. I knew it was Sari.

  However, despite everything I’d seen, they both escaped death. That was what the anchorwoman said when she described the incident as “a failed assassination attempt.”

  The next morning, at six a.m., I heard someone knocking at my door. I was getting ready to go to work at the shop. I opened the door and found an officer and three armed policemen, their weapons aimed at me and at the door, their eyes looking left and right.

  “Is your son Walid still asleep?” the officer asked.

  Before I could answer him, he signaled for the three policemen to enter the house. They searched it thoroughly: the bed, the closet, the kitchen cabinets, the washer, the refrigerator, the oven, the boxes, everything. They even slashed the pillows open and pulled out the stuffing. When they didn’t find anything, the officer looked at me menacingly and said, “Don’t you want to confess and tell us where he’s hiding?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” I answered. “And don’t waste your time. I haven’t seen al-Walid for more than ten years.”

  “Give me the keys to the shop where you sell clothes,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, handing him the keys. “I open the doors in an hour.”

  “God is the one who opens all doors,” he said sarcastically. “You’ll go with us to the police station. Who knows? You might make it back in time to open the doors to your shop once he turns himself in. That is if we don’t find him at the shop.”

  They took me away in the police car after confiscating my cell phone. A number of men and women looked out the windows of their neighboring houses with curiosity. God knows what they were thinking and saying.

  We reached the shop and they got out of the car in a rush. The three policemen took position at each side of the door with their weapons, and when the officer opened the door, they plunged inside as if there were some kind of monster or ghoul in there.

  When they didn’t find anything, they locked up the shop, gave me the key, and took me with them.

  They shoved me through the door of the police station with contempt. They showed no concern for my age or that I was a woman. One of them pushed me into the police chief’s office.

  But the chief stood up the moment he saw me. He reprimanded the officer and apologized, politely greeting me with respect. He went on to explain it was all just a misunderstanding and he would return me to my home, in an honorable and respectful manner, in a private car, as soon as I finished my tea.

  The officer who had supervised the search of my house and my shop entered the office a few minutes later, greeted his chief, and then came over to me and handed me my cell phone.

  “Here you are, madame,” he said politely. “We treated you unfairly. There was a misunderstanding. It was all a mistake. Very sorry.”

  I no longer considered anything out of line. After everything that had happened to me, I’d begun to feel that life was just one long series of explosions and astonishing events and I was used to it.

  “But you asked about my son!”

  “By mistake. Believe me.”

  When I got back home I started thinking, how could they ask me about al-Walid, search my house and my shop, threaten me with going to jail, then apologize to me and say, “It was all a mistake,” and let me go?

  I called Mrs Samah, Fawaz’s wife, and congratulated her for Fawaz’s well-being, not because I was happy about it, but because I wanted to know if he was going to live or die and whether she or one of her acquaintances had stepped in on my behalf to get me out of the police station.

  But it was clear she hadn’t done anything. She had no idea what had happened to me.

  “If I were in your place,” she said, “I’d tell my son to flee the country.”

  “Al-Walid did not come to Amman, Mrs Samah,” I said.

  Words came out of her mouth like a firecracker. “Then who tried to kill the Basha and Sari, if it wasn’t your son?”

  “Why would a son want to kill his father?” I asked.

  She was silent, and then she hung up.

  Most likely, that fellow who came to see me who said his name was Omar was the one who did it.

  My phone rang. It was the Porcupine.

  He congratulated me for getting released from the police station, and then he praised me for calling Mrs Samah as he had told me to do.

  I wasn’t surprised; the Porcupine was just one more in the series of life’s strange departures around me, which I had gotten used to and didn’t surprise me anymore.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  He started laughing that childish way of his, but in a voice that sounded like the rattling of a sieve being shaken back and forth. “Didn’t you realize I was the one who stepped in to get you released?”

  “And why did you step in?” I asked.

  “You’d ask this rather than thanking me for doing what I did on your behalf?”

  I felt that I had the ability to get back at him for having defeated me. It was a feeling that overcame me at that moment.

  “You didn’t do it for my sake. You did it for Fawaz, your big boss and everyone else’s. You’re worried about his position and his reputation if the scandal of me and of al-Walid gets out. Didn’t this Fawaz of yours die?”

  His laughter disappeared. “Fawaz? I haven’t seen Fawaz, and I haven’t heard his voice since I left the company. I never liked him, actually, even when I worked for him. He deserves what happened to him and more.”

  “So why did you get me released, then?” I aske
d.

  “Because I’m not done yet. I might need you. But I have to be honest with you. What you said was correct. Al-Walid didn’t come here.”

  Then he went back to that loathsome laughing of his.

  Every day I discovered that life – despite the easiness it showed to me – was extremely complicated in its depths.

  When my husband died – may God have mercy on his soul – I was at odds with him. I told him he had caused us to lose al-Walid, and I accused him of pushing him to go to Afghanistan.

  He confirmed my accusation, saying, “Would I regret doing something for the sake of God? I told you that if I were his age I would have gone to do jihad before him.”

  At least he didn’t lie about it, or disown what he said.

  But there was something that kept nagging at me whenever I remembered that Nael had stood in support of al-Walid going to Afghanistan, and that he was the one who planted those ideas in his head that led him onto that path.

  That something that kept nagging at me had something to do with blood. Al-Walid was not Nael’s son, was not his flesh and not his blood, as they say. Then a not-so-innocent question came to my mind: Wasn’t it possible that was why he never really had a strong feeling of responsibility towards him?

  True he believed al-Walid was his son. That topic never came up between us, and I felt that was one of the basic assumptions of his life. But when I saw the Porcupine, after all that time, everything got disrupted. The basic assumptions weren’t what they had been.

  Wasn’t it possible that the lack of a blood tie between Nael and al-Walid played a role in encouraging him to ruin himself with the mujahideen?

  That question found some resonance within me, and created a new possibility that terrified me. I felt like my heart dropped from its location in my chest, and went on beating somewhere else. Was it possible Nael had known al-Walid was not his son? So he kept it inside, and then wanted to punish me by sending him to die in Afghanistan and cause me to be distraught by it?