THE TESTAMENT OF AL-HARIQA
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
Before the two officers could escort Elias al-Nabulsi out of the hall, he suddenly stopped and, with a gesture of his shackled hands, asked permission to speak one last time. His voice had lost all of its customary confidence. His hands were bound in light cuffs, and the elegant bearing with which he had entered the hall that morning had vanished. He looked like another man—older in some ways, yet somehow younger, more fragile.
“Wait… please. Just a moment.” He looked toward the chair of the committee, his eyes carrying a depth of despair. “I want to say something before you take me away. I know it won’t change your decision. But I need to say it—for myself, perhaps, more than for any of you.”
The chair agreed, after consulting the two officers with a glance, and allowed him a few minutes. A tense silence settled over the hall. Even the journalists in the back rows stopped moving, aware that they were witnessing a rare moment of truth.
2
Elias sat down again, heavily. He looked at his trembling hands, then raised his eyes—not toward the committee, but directly at Adnan.
“You don’t know, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, how I grew up. You don’t know what it was like to grow up in a house where my grandfather, until the very end of his life, spoke of ‘the stolen right,’ of the ‘betrayal’ committed against him by his elder brother, Tawfiq.” His voice trembled even more. “I grew up in real poverty, the kind you never knew in your comfortable European life. I watched my father work long hours at modest jobs, always dreaming of that ‘lost inheritance’ that would one day change everything—a dream he, too, had inherited from his father, Samir, a dream that grew heavier and more bitter with every generation.”
3
“I studied law with enormous difficulty, on a partial scholarship and with exhausting extra work in a small restaurant, convinced all along that once I became a lawyer, I would reclaim that ‘right’ my family had been denied, just as I had been raised to believe since childhood.” He lowered his head, tears gathering in his eyes. “When I heard, a few months ago, about the discovery of that old testament in the court archives, I felt as though my family’s dream—the dream of three generations shaped by poverty and bitterness—had finally come within reach. I did not think for a moment. I swear to you, I was chasing an illusion built on a lie, because I did not know the whole truth about my grandfather Samir—the truth Kamal has only just revealed.”
He looked toward Kamal, ashamed and bewildered. “I swear to you, I didn’t know my grandfather was the one who blackmailed and threatened, not the other way around. I was raised on an entirely different story, one that portrayed my grandfather as the victim and Tawfiq as the traitor. I don’t know how to reconcile myself now to the fact that my whole life was built on a lie my family passed down without knowing—or perhaps without wanting to know.”
4
The chair spoke firmly, though not without human understanding: “That does not justify your actions, Mr. Elias. Forging documents and attempting to issue threats are crimes, and the person who commits them bears responsibility regardless of the reasons behind them.”
“I know that very well, Mr. Chairman,” Elias replied, completely resigned. “I am not asking for forgiveness, or even for understanding. I only ask that it be recorded somewhere that all of this began with a small lie told by a desperate man to a little grandson he loved—a lie that grew across generations until it became this nightmare.”
Then he looked at Adnan one last time. “Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I am truly sorry for everything I have caused you, Reem, and Lina. I was only… drowning in an illusion I had inherited, unable to see the truth until it was too late.”
5
At last, Elias was led out of the hall, shattered, while those present began whispering about the human drama that had unfolded before them. Adnan approached Kamal and Reem, and they exchanged silent words of gratitude. But Lina, with her ever-alert journalistic instinct, noticed that one of Elias’s young legal assistants had quietly slipped out of the hall before the session ended, in a way that struck her as suspicious.
6
An hour later, Adnan, Ziad, Lina, Kamal, and Reem were sitting in Ziad’s office, discussing the legal steps required to carry out the testament. The sun was sinking toward the horizon when Adnan’s phone rang. The number was unfamiliar.
“Hello?”
“Mr. al-Rafi‘i?” A tense voice came through, almost shouting above a roar of noise in the background. “This is Faris, from al-Hariqa Market. You need to come immediately. There’s a fire, Mr. al-Rafi‘i—a major fire. It started a few minutes ago in the old section of the market, very close to my shop and Hassan’s.”
Adnan’s heart froze for a moment, and the phone nearly slipped from his hand. Everyone stopped talking at once. “A fire? How?”
“I don’t know the details yet, but one of the neighbors saw a strange man hurrying out of the area a few minutes before the fire broke out. He was carrying a small bag, and he disappeared into the alleys.” Adnan could hear warning sirens in the background. “Honestly, I’m afraid this wasn’t an accident.”
7
A rising panic seized Adnan. “The ledger! The original ledger I gave Lina to photograph—is it still at your shop?”
“Part of it, yes, along with some old papers belonging to my father and his connection to Haj Tawfiq—perhaps the only remaining evidence of other trusts.” Faris’s voice trembled. “The flames are spreading at an alarming speed through the old shops, packed tightly together. The fire crews are on their way, but the market’s alleys are far too narrow for their vehicles.”
8
Lina asked, “Do you think Elias, or someone working for him, did this?”
Ziad answered as he stood, gathering his car keys. “I don’t know for certain, but the timing is far too suspicious to be a coincidence. Perhaps this was the ‘last thing’ Elias wanted to do before his arrest—an attempt to destroy whatever evidence remained.”
Adnan rose quickly. “We have to go now. Hassan and Faris may be in danger, and those documents are the last thing left of Haj Tawfiq’s legacy.”
Lina tried to reason with him. “Adnan, this is dangerous. Perhaps we should wait.” He looked at her for a long moment, then said, “No, Lina. Haj Tawfiq never ran from his responsibility toward the people he loved, and I won’t run today. I wasn’t there for him the day he disappeared from the hospital forty-five years ago. I won’t miss being there today.”
9
Everyone hurried out. News of the fire had already begun to spread, along with images of columns of smoke rising above historic al-Hariqa Market. Adnan and Lina got into Ziad’s car, while Kamal and Reem followed in a taxi. Together they headed toward the place where this story had begun forty-five years earlier.
Adnan sat in the car, his heart pounding violently, thinking about the road he had traveled: from a poor boy standing before the door of a small shop to a sixty-three-year-old man rushing toward that same place, afraid of losing the last thread connecting him to the man who had shaped his life. With a strange bitterness, he thought of the irony of the day: it had begun with a legal victory and was ending in a race against the flames. Nothing in this story had come without a price.
He looked at Lina beside him. Her face was pale with worry, but her eyes still carried the same determination he had recognized in her from the very first call they had shared. He felt a deep gratitude for having her beside him at that moment.
As Adnan drew closer to al-Hariqa Market, surrounded by the red lights of the fire engines and the wail of warning sirens, he did not yet know that the real battle would not be fought in the quiet chamber of a courtroom, but amid real tongues of fire consuming, letter by letter and memory by memory, the last remnants of a past everyone had finally believed was settled.