Broken Mirrors by Elias Khoury

Author:Elias Khoury [Khoury, Elias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-914671-30-5
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

When Danny came to him with the strange proposal, he’d felt panic.

“Why me?”

“Brother Abu Jihad wants to meet you. He read your article on the history of Shaqif Castle in the magazine Occupied Palestine and he wants you to write a pamphlet on Jamal.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” said Danny.

“But how did he know I wrote the article when I published it under a pseudonym? I don’t want anyone to know I wrote for Occupied Palestine. You know how my family’s placed, living in East Beirut. I don’t want them coming to any harm because of me.”

“Abu Jihad isn’t just anyone. He’s the real leader of the revolution and he knows everything, including that your brother, Nasim, works with the Phalanges.”

“What’s my brother got to do with anything? I beg you, don’t mention that to anyone!”

“The important thing, my friend, is that Abu Jihad was much taken with your storytelling skills and asked which of the boys who knew the Martyr Jamal wrote well, and he chose you. He said your article on the crusaders was excellent because it was made up of stories and he wants you to go and see him at ten o’clock tomorrow night at Center Thirty-Eight so he can talk to you about it.”

“Where’s this Center Thirty-Eight?”

“I’ll go with you,” said Danny. “Do you have any idea what it means that Brother Abu Jihad chose you to write about Jamal? Do you know what she meant to him? He’s the one who chose her nom de guerre ‘Jihad,’ because she was like one of his children to him.”

“If he loved her so much why did he send her off to commit suicide? Anyway, I’m not a writer. For me writing’s a hobby; I prefer to read. I wrote the article about the history of Shaqif Castle to say that while it’s true the Franks occupied our country for two hundred years, in the end they went away and all they left behind was castles and shankaleesh and that’s the way it’s going to be with the Zionists in Palestine.”

“That’s what Abu Jihad liked about it. He said your article was ‘an expression of historical optimism: no matter how long the Jews stay and impose their rule, in the end they are destined to abandon the country to its inhabitants.’ ”

“I didn’t say the Jews, I said the Zionists, and that’s the heart of the matter. We’re for a secular democratic state in Palestine and we mustn’t use the word Jews to describe the Israeli occupiers. If Abu Jihad said Jews, I don’t want to work with him.”

Danny explained that all members of the generation that lived through the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948 used the word Jews for the Israelis, for the simple reason that the Israelis, before and after the founding of their state, insisted on calling themselves by that name. Saying “the Jews’ army” in 1948 didn’t carry any intrinsically racist connotation. It was just a name that the peasants gave to the members of the Haganah forces.

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