Broken Mirrors (15 page)

K
ARIM HADN
’
T GONE
back to Beirut to search for his father’s killers or to take revenge on them. Such a story wasn’t right for him and wasn’t like him. Karim had read something similar about a man who went back from France in search of his father’s killers that was written by Maroun Baghdadi and published in the
al-Nahar
Supplement after the young Lebanese director’s death. Maroun was a beautiful man and could seduce any woman; that was how Karim had seen him when he met him in Montpellier. He recalled that he’d watched his film
Little Wars
at a private showing at the university, after which the Lebanese student who’d talked to him about his ox-cheek feast in Paris had invited him to a restaurant in the Place de la Comédie. There the students hovered around the director, who told them of his project for a new film he was making about mutual forgiveness and said he was looking for a writer to help him with the screenplay. At the time, the idea of becoming the writer of the screenplay had occurred to Karim but he’d been afraid of looking ridiculous so gave it no more thought.

The ghost of the Lebanese director filled his imagination once more when he read fragments of the story of his horrible death following his fall
into the stairwell of the building in which he was living in Beirut, close to the Tabaris roundabout, as he prepared to shoot his new movie.

Karim told his wife that his friend Maroun’s death had transformed him into a hero because, basically, Maroun was confused about whether to be a hero or a director. The hero’s role had selected him for killing, and the story he’d written had devoured him.

He was taken aback to hear Bernadette asking him about the blond woman.

“What woman?” Karim asked.

“I was told a mysterious woman was with him the night he died and I wouldn’t rule out foul play.”

“Where do you get all this information?”

She said she’d become more Lebanese than he and knew the Lebanese news in detail while all he cared about was eating tabbouleh.

He told her such thoughts came from her reading of crime novels and that Lebanon wasn’t right for crime novels.

She said that was precisely Lebanon’s problem, because when crime novels become a possibility it means the country has succeeded in separating crime from its social environment, but “you people live crime without realizing.”

She asked him why he’d used the word “friend” when talking of Maroun Baghdadi. “Was he really your friend?”

Karim said he’d met Maroun twice in Beirut at the apartment of a man called Danny, where they used to discuss Marxism, and that Maroun hadn’t been interested in such discussions. He’d kept joking around and flirting with the girls. Then he met him in Montpellier and had been sure that Maroun wouldn’t recognize him, which was in fact what happened because the director was preoccupied with a beautiful black girl who’d come with Talal, the Lebanese student who’d invited him to the restaurant.

“So he wasn’t your friend,” said Bernadette.

“He was sort of a friend,” he replied.

“Everything’s ‘sort of’ with you. I can’t make you out anymore. You say you love Lebanon but you won’t let us visit it, tremble when you talk about your brother, and don’t want us to get to know your family. Your father died and you didn’t go to Beirut. I don’t know you.”

He told her no one knew anyone. “You think I know myself to start with, that I should open for you the gateways to knowledge? No one knows himself because an individual is a forest covered with a tent and the tent is all secrets and the secrets are attached to one’s skin.”

“But you’re a skin doctor,” she said.

He told her the secret of the medical profession was the patients. It was up to the patient to be convinced that the doctor knows; only then could the doctor practice his profession. “In other words the doctor is an assumption not an absolute truth. If you believe him, you’ll be cured. If you don’t, there’s nothing he can do.”

Bernadette said he was talking about magic, not medicine: “But you’re a failed magician, the proof being that your magic hasn’t worked on me for a long time.”

He tried to tell her about Nasri, who’d played around with chemistry till it killed him. The old man must certainly have taken his own Green Potion and sat waiting at the shop, but his newest victim – let’s call her Najat – never came, or never took the potion. He waited a long time and when he got sick of waiting he went to Salma’s apartment, but Salma wasn’t at home, or didn’t open the door, so he found himself making his way to his son’s apartment to die.

Did Nasri try to rape Hend, or did he appear so strange that he scared the woman into kicking him to the ground, with the result that seven days later he died?

Karim had thought the story of the search for his father’s killers didn’t concern him and wasn’t what had brought him to Lebanon, and that he ought to forget the whole thing. The hospital project had been an appropriate occasion for him to return to the scene of that crime of his of which no one knew anything, and in which he’d participated unknowingly – or at least unaware of the devastating impact of his indecisiveness, which had compelled Khaled Nabulsi to leave him to go to meet his end in Tripoli. But Khaled would have gone in any case. The man had seen his death as inescapable and gone to it and the whole thing had nothing to do with Karim.

Khaled was authentic and the authentic have no choice but to die. He, on the other hand, was the imaginary Sinalcol, just a ghost who didn’t exist and who left no footprints on the ground. That was why he’d decided to be a brother to the real Sinalcol.

He’d said he was looking for Sinalcol and had convinced himself he was. The name pleased Muna, who laughed a lot as she drank white wine with him and listened to the story of what he called his “spiritual twin” who had passed through the ancient quarters of Tripoli like a ghost, then disappeared leaving neither track nor sign.

“Are you serious, his name was Sinalcol?” Muna asked.

“That’s what they say but how should I know? Danny told me about him when we went to work with the Qubbeh neighborhood group in Tripoli, and then Khaled Nabulsi, God have mercy on his remains, tried to kill him because he’d earned himself a bad reputation, which reflected poorly on the Revolution. But he failed. Then Khaled died and I went to France and took Sinalcol with me.”

“Who were Danny and Khaled?”

“They were my comrades in arms.”

“Where are they now?”

“One’s dead and the other’s living as though he were dead,” said Karim.

“And Sinalcol?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead too but I haven’t heard anything about him. I’m going to Tripoli soon to ask about him.”

“So you’re the only one left. It’s the scallywags who make old bones!” she said.

“No, I’m alive because I took off. Death passed close by me but by a miracle I escaped.”

He’d wanted to tell her he hadn’t returned to Lebanon because of the hospital but to look for Sinalcol, and for what remained of what he’d lived through in Tripoli during the war. It had been his greatest experience of life and of death and in that city he’d discovered that life has no meaning: that people invent meanings to be able to accept the idea of their death.

Still, he’d said nothing to this woman who’d come to him from he knew not where, and with whom he’d started a relationship designed to make him forget the wound through which the story of his fling with Ghazala had bled away. Now, sitting with Muna, he could feel the tingle of blood flowing through his veins once more but he was just distracting himself with a relationship, which Muna had given him to understand could never be anything but ephemeral, from a love story that had inspired in him embarrassingly simpleminded emotions. In transitory relationships you have to lie: they’re like a story that you have to write and whose features you have to draw, not one in which you can play the hero. Heroes are stupid or, let’s say, they believe, and when you believe you take a beating. He was a hero with Ghazala. He’d believed the passion, only to discover that he’d been taken for the biggest ride of his life. With Muna, though, things were clear and didn’t need thinking about. He had to talk to fill the gaps in the imagination created by desire. This didn’t mean he was against love. On the contrary, ever since he’d begun to feel that his marriage was slipping away from him and taking on a form that had room only for repetition, he’d been
living in hope of a new great love. That was how he’d lived his ephemeral relationships in the distant French city. But when Ghazala’s story ended he’d realized that love was the victim of contradictory expectations, or a misunder​standing based on two different points of view.

He’d left Hend because he hadn’t been able to tell her about the fear that had unstrung his joints after the killing of Khaled Nabulsi, and because he’d become aware that their love, which he’d thought would last forever, had been wiped out in a single instant. It was only during his coughing fit, as he listened to his brother telling him over the phone that he’d married Hend, that he’d rediscovered the choking feeling that used to fill his throat whenever she left him to go back home.

“You told me Sinalcol was from Tripoli, right?”

“…”

“I must tell Ahmad. It’s got to be lingua franca.”

“What?”

“Lingua franca.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the language of the last remaining crusaders. Someday Ahmad can tell you about his grandfather and father. I can’t tell stories.”

“Forget about lingua franca and all that crap. When we were young there was a fizzy drink called ‘Sinalco,’ a patriotic imitation of Coke, and I remember it was good. It tasted a bit like tamarind, but I don’t know why it disappeared. Probably the company went broke.”

“And the factory was in Tripoli, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“The company doesn’t matter,” said Muna. “I’m talking about the man. If he was from Tripoli he must have taken the word from there and not had the soda pop company in mind. Soon you’ll hear the true story and you’ll see I’m right.”

Muna put on her glasses and looked at him as a teacher might at her
students. She asked him to stop talking about the subject because it wasn’t his field of specialization. Her voice had the condescension and arrogance of women teachers’ voices, so he could find nothing to say except that she treated him like a schoolteacher, that she was incapable of forgetting her profession, and “God help your husband!”

Later Karim would go to Tripoli, hear the story from Ahmad, drink lemonade with ice cream in front of the Dakiz Mosque, meet Mr. Abd el-Malek, Ahmad’s father, and hear from him the strangest tale imaginable. He’d discover through the man’s secret language that war, which he’d believed from Danny’s teaching to be “the engine of history,” used people so that it could grind them up and treated them as means to an end. For history was just a wild beast with an unquenchable thirst for the blood of its victims.

What he didn’t know was what was happening to him now and why he felt this incurable fragility, and why he found himself stuck once more in that old feeling that he was part of another man, or formed, along with that other, a single individual with two heads.

At primary school his favorite game with his brother had been what they called “the four eyes game.” They’d stand back to back and watch the school playground from in front and behind. They didn’t need to exchange information because what one of them saw would be transmitted wordlessly to the other’s consciousness. Nasim had invented the game and it was his means of defending his brother, who, because of his weak build, was constantly getting beaten up. This way the younger brother could put a stop to the attacks to which his brother was subject. Karim’s continual persecution by a boy called Michel Aql had to do with the lady teacher, whom Michel accused him of being in love with, saying that that was why Karim did better than him in French. This Michel was the leader of a gang of boys and challenged Karim for first place in the class and always failed. The charge
against Karim was that he was soft on his teacher, Madam Olga Naddaf, who did indeed return his affection with tenderness and concern. She was a woman in her early thirties, white and full without being fat, with wide black eyes, a small tip-tilted nose, lips as thin as if drawn with a pen, a brow that radiated light, always dressed in white. The students called her Madam Bride because she wore white to school every day, as though she owned white dresses for every season.

For a whole year the French teacher dwelled in Karim’s eyes. The boy wished she would take off her glasses so he could see himself in the mirrors of her eyes. When Muna told him her husband used the word “mirrors” to refer to glasses, he burst out laughing. She said this term, and many like it, were part of the secret lexicon of the Dakiz family. “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” he told her. “You’re distorting the language. The Tunisians also call glasses mirrors.” He told her he’d found this out in Paris when by coincidence he met the Watermelon, as he used to call her after he forgot her name.

Why did memories rain down on him in Beirut, and what did it mean when things which forgetfulness had secreted away kept popping up again from some hidden place of whose very existence he had been unaware?

Now it was the Watermelon, reappearing like a ghost. Karim found himself incapable of understanding the relationship between past and present. It was as though memory gave everything a ghostlike cast; as though, rather than remembering himself, he was seeing another person who resembled him.

When he ran into her in Paris she’d asked after his father, who, she recounted, had turned up the day after they’d all had lunch together. She said his father had been waiting for her in the foyer of the hotel, had caught sight of her, and walked with her to the dining room, where they’d had breakfast together. She’d said she was in a hurry because she had to catch a
flight. He offered to drive her to the airport. He’d gone upstairs with her to her room on the excuse of helping her to pack her bags, and slept with her.

This had been at the beginning of Karim’s relationship with politics. He’d entered the American University in Beirut to study medicine and the storm in his head had begun. There he met young members of the Fatah movement and his relationship with the organizations of the Lebanese Left that called for armed struggle started.