Season of Martyrdom ENG

Sari Abu Amineh

Sari Abu Amineh

I must bear the fallout of the surprise I prepared for the Basha, who became a completely different person overnight. The image of him in my mind turned into a double-image after that. I would recall how he was after his meeting with Uroub, but then, with pain, remember his other image whenever I discussed with him some topic or project that had preceded his meeting with Uroub.

The Basha believed in the tangible things in life. That’s how I’ve known him to be since starting to work for him. He had an analytical mind. (Uroub said that, too!) But sometimes he would ask me to read his horoscope in the newspapers. A few times I accompanied him on trips to Europe and Asia and occasionally he would seek out fortune-tellers to have them do readings for him. He told me he picked up an interest in them from his wife, Mrs Samah, the daughter of the Grand Basha Nayef Shahadeh, whose daily cigar, I discovered, cost 100 dinars.

There was an obscure space between Samah’s father and Fawaz Basha. A space I was never able to decipher, despite all the faith and good graces bestowed on me by both men.

But the Basha’s interest in fortune-tellers had begun only ten years earlier, during a visit to the Acropolis Museum in Athens where he met a fortune-teller with flowing hair and sagging breasts who spoke to him in her weary voice. “Luck will be in your favor in a competition between you and a high-ranking man, because he will be the one to take the seat, not you.”

“How can luck be in my favor if he is the one who takes the seat and not me?” he asked her.

“It’s a different seat than the one you have in mind,” she answered.

Some of what she said ended up coming true. A currency trader and importer of Swiss gold who was competing with one of the Basha’s companies got in a car crash with a truck while driving between Zurich and Basel on a business trip. He was sent back to Amman and he’s been in a wheelchair ever since.

When the Basha heard what happened to that man he said to me in amazement, “That is the seat the Acropolis fortune-teller predicted!”

After that he had his fortune read a lot, but none of the predictions came true, so his interest in them waned.

But after meeting Uroub, he changed. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and hadn’t been personally involved in it, I would never have believed that Basha Fawaz, after all the lies and nonsense he’d heard before, would believe a fortune-teller who’d breezed into town to tell him that his birthday and astrological sign were wrong, that he had a son, and that that son was going to bring about his demise.

The following week, after finishing one of those closed-door meetings of his – the kind he only allows people who are directly involved in to attend while their drivers and attendants wait for them outside – he called me and asked me to come to his office right away.

I felt that the Basha’s life was brimming with secrets. Maybe I needed to peruse all the pages of his past and his present; I needed to gather up all the keys that could open the locked rooms of his life.

But that was precisely what could not happen.

For he was – as far as I knew – much too smart to allow all the keys giving access to his world to be gathered in one place.

Fifteen minutes after his call, I arrived at his office. He sat me down beside him.

He told me to find a woman by the name of Muntaha al-Rayyeh. He recalled that she used to live in the Swayleh area north of Amman. She had worked for one of his companies thirty years earlier, and he’d slept with her at the time.

“Give me a few days,” I said. “I’ll have a full report on her for you.”

He looked directly into my eyes and said, “You do not seem surprised. Did you know about my relationship with this woman?”

“Of course not, Basha, sir, but these things happen with men all the time.”

He finally broke his stare. Then he instructed me to establish whether that woman, Muntaha al-Rayyeh, had gotten pregnant from him or not, and if I happened to run into her and it appeared he did indeed have an illegitimate child from her, then I should find out where this son was, what his name was, and try to meet him, get a picture of him, and probe him, probe his thoughts, find out if he knew who his real father was.

But before all that, I was to make preparations for a trip I would be accompanying him on to India to meet the sage Harsha al-Hakim, who dwelled in the Maharashtra mountains, near the Arabian Sea.