Broken Mirrors (25 page)

“But how does the mask become a god?” he asked her.

“The moment you believe in it, the spirit of one of your ancestors occupies it and it becomes a god.”

Seroufim said he’d bought the mask for Nasri.

The idea of a personal god pleased Nasri immensely, especially over the period when he became aware of the danger to Karim from Brother Eugène, for Karim was outstanding not only academically but in religion classes too. This scared Nasri, who knew that nothing is more conducive to illicit sexual relations than a religious atmosphere, in which the smell of incense blends with that of desire and prayers become whispers that lead people into the darkness of the soul.

Nasri announced the birth of his personal god at the lunch table. He raised his glass, poured a little of the wine on the ground, drank a toast to the ancestors, held the black mask in front of him, lifted it up, and looked at Karim, declaring as he did so that this god was better than all the other gods because it only became real when you believed in it: “We can pray to it and we can insult it. We can worship it when we want and we can hit it when we want and it will stay with us and never leave us the way the other gods do with their followers.” He kissed the forehead of the god, to whom he had given the name Hubal-bubble, and told his sons that the African tradition from which this black god hailed required that sons worship the god of their
fathers; when the father died they had to bury the god with him, at which point each son had to find his own personal god before whom to bow.

“If Brother Eugène asks you about God, tell him we worship our own special god and have nothing to do with his god that died on the cross. Our god doesn’t die and he belongs to nobody but us. We love him and we hate him and we entreat him and when he doesn’t answer our prayers we ignore him. There is no sin in our religion and no regret. Our god makes mistakes like us and we don’t punish him because he doesn’t punish us, but we can do with him as we please.”

Nasim roared with laughter, took the black face from his father’s hands, kissed it, then spat on it. Then he turned to his brother and told him to kiss the god’s forehead. “What did you say his name is?”

“This is farcical,” said Karim, and got up to leave. His father grabbed him by the wrist and forced him to sit down.

Hubal-bubble was thenceforth a guest at the dining table, where Nasri and Nasim found him a source of material for jokes at the expense of the Jesuit priests and of Karim’s faith in the god whom the Jesuits worshipped at the school, and in whose name they compelled pupils to recite prayers each morning.

Then, all of a sudden, Hubal-bubble disappeared.

Nasri was certain Karim had thrown Hubal-bubble in the trash but he was wrong. Hubal-bubble was the gift Nasim had wanted to give Suzanne when he went to see her. He’d worked out a whole scenario of worship and even made up a prayer to be recited before they had sex. He imagined Suzanne taking off her clothes in the room and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. He saw her creamy white breasts bursting out and felt dizzy. But instead of jumping up and taking her in his arms he’d take Hubal-bubble in his hand and place him on her head. He would ask her to kneel,
he’d kneel beside her himself, and he’d recite the prayer, then ask her to repeat after him the words, in which he spoke of the human body as incense for the gods.

But Suzanne had mocked him and thrown him out.

She’d left him standing on the sidewalk and spoken words that had made wounds in his heart that healed only when he married Hend.

And when Hend had shut the door to herself in his face, he’d felt the need for Hubal-bubble and regretted having thrown the wooden god onto the rubbish tip in Mutanabbi Street.

Nasri hadn’t asked his sons about the black mask. Hubal-bubble disappeared and his story along with him. Instead, the elderly man, now partially blind, had closed the pharmacy because he could no longer work and had overcome his loneliness with music. He’d discovered his god through the songs of Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab, and dispelled the gloom with the ecstasy of rhythm.

He was sitting in Nasim’s apartment trying to tell Hend about the comfort that music spreads and poetry fashions. He told her she must teach the children to play instruments. He said God was the rhythm of the world and that the world fashioned its rhythms through music. He recited lines of verse that Abd el-Wahhab had set to music and said that a single line of verse summed up all the prayers that mankind had composed to glorify their gods.

“Listen!” he said:

He stood up and asked for the tape recorder so he could play her the ballad called “The One You Have Made to Suffer.” His foot tripped on the
edge of the carpet and he tipped forward, hands outstretched. Hend recoiled but the man could not stop his forward trajectory, and it looked as though he was going to fall on top of her. She tried to free herself from his hands by pushing them away and he fell to the floor.

No one had had any idea that Nasri was nearly blind. Nasim had assumed his father’s personal dirtiness was a result of old age. Only Salma knew but she told no one.

“Oh my God!” screamed Hend. “You mean I killed him without realizing what I was doing?”

“I’m the one who killed him,” said Salma, weeping.

“No one killed him,” said Nasim. “His oil ran out so he died. Weird you’d believe his stories after everything he did to you. God have mercy on his soul and ours, full stop. I don’t want to hear about this business again from anyone!”

K
ARIM HAD HAD
to explain matters to Hend and make her understand why he’d turned his back on their four-year relationship. He’d said love had ended when he was left with no alternative but to emigrate to France. But he’d lied; or, let us say, he’d tried to tell her the truth without actually telling it, meaning he’d tried to be kind so as not to hurt her feelings.

Stories don’t end, they go to sleep, and what sleeps may wake at any moment, or never wake at all.

By adding new stories Beirut had awakened all stories. Karim would lose his new gamble because in fact he hadn’t gambled. He’d found himself on his way back to Beirut, so he’d gone back.

Karim had thought Hend’s story had ended when he met Jamal at the Baissour Camp in Tyre in 1976, but it hadn’t. It had taken another course and become a sort of safe haven for the young man who felt the civil war was shaking the foundations of everything meaningful to his existence. Jamal wasn’t a love story, she was an attempt to climb the ropes of the impossible, to catch the flashes of lightning that fell from her eyes as she looked upon things Karim was incapable of seeing.

He’d never dared tell anyone the truth of his feelings for Jamal. How could he, when he was so unsure of everything? Had he loved her? Or had he believed he’d loved her only when he read fragments from her diaries?

Reading Jamal’s diaries after her death, Karim discovered that words bear many meanings. As he gathered up his sorrows and tried to write the story of the Palestinian girl who had led a suicide mission on the coastal road between Haifa and Tel Aviv, he fashioned himself a love story out of a rubble of words in which Jamal entered his memory as phrases strewn over tattered pages.

Strange are the dead! They occupy the gaps in our imagination and become like ghosts playing with our memories. Karim told himself the reason was that moment of loss which he’d continued to relive since the phone call from his brother inviting him back to Beirut for a hospital construction project.

He’d agreed and beheld before him the dead.

He’d seen Nasri falling to the floor, his eyes opening onto the death that had petrified within them.

He’d seen Khaled, his eyes rubbed out by death, falling like a mighty boulder under the hail of bullets that ripped his body to pieces.

He’d seen Jamal’s eyes like two points of light on the ship of death. She’d left before him the fragments of words which he designated “diaries”; she had departed without turning to look back.

He’d seen and not seen; he’d felt unable to resist the lure of a city which had turned into a mysterious smell that emanated from time to time from his memory, making him dizzy.

He told Bernadette that the smell of memory made him dizzy.

Bernadette hadn’t been able to understand why the man had decided to return to Beirut for the sake of a project that would never be realized.

She’d told him his project was impossible: “The hospital will never be built and the girls and I will never go to Beirut.”

Bernadette said she should have realized from the time of their wedding night that he was a man who lived in the imagination and fashioned truths from his illusions.

She spoke of his coughing, which never stopped when he was in bed, and the noises he made while asleep as though he were speaking classical Arabic.

Why did the doors of hell open at the end, and what did “the end” mean?

Things had started to take a different turn when Nasim had phoned his brother to inform him he was marrying Hend. Before Karim could come out with the word “Congratula​tions!” he heard the name and the words turned to lumps in his throat and he started to cough. Later he’d discover that words die when a person chokes on them. The cough that would never stop had begun that day. The Lebanese doctor went to a French throat specialist, only to discover that what he had wasn’t an ailment but what they call “psychosomatic.” He didn’t know how to tell Bernadette about this psychological disease that had come to an end only when he’d returned to Beirut. In fact, the problem was only manifest at home, where he became incapable of talking with his wife and daughters. The moment he opened his mouth to speak, the cough would begin, the words would turn to stone, and he’d feel he was choking.

He had no idea what had happened. Bernadette and the little girls, Nadine and Lara, filled his life. He’d decided to forget that other country. He’d buried his body in the Frenchwoman’s white body and had forgotten everything. He’d even begun dreaming in French. During the first days of their love he told her she was his homeland. Bernadette couldn’t understand the obsession of this Arab, whose appetite for her body never waned, with homelands. He’d make love to her as though clinging to her for safety, feeling her body with his fingertips and not closing his eyes the way men
do when making love to a woman, and when he was done he’d sit naked on the bed, listen to the songs of Fairuz, and grow melancholy.

In Beirut, Bernadette disappeared from the screen of his consciousness as though she’d been erased. There, amid the ruins of the city, he felt as though his French life had been just a dream and that by returning to his city he was rediscovering the young man he’d left behind to wander, lost, through Beirut’s corridors of fear.

Grudgingly, Bernadette had agreed. She said she knew him well and that the six months he was going to spend in Beirut would only add new disappointment to his life.

She said she understood him and knew his heart would burn with longing for Nadine and Lara; he’d discover again how much he loved them and wouldn’t be able to live without them.

Bernadette was right, for this woman with the blue eyes wreathed in love and tenderness knew how to read his feelings.

She loved him when love came and treated him like a child when she sensed he was lost in his new land. She was harsh with him when he went too far in derision of his former life. She had extended toward him a bridge that would allow him to make peace with himself.

She told him that that was love.

Love isn’t desire, that comes and goes. Love is the warmth of safety, the enjoyment of secret understandings, the pleasure of discovering life through the eyes of children.

She left her job at the hospital to devote her time to the house and her two daughters, and decided to be nothing but the wife of this man who excited her with his contradictions. She loved in him his vacillation between an illusory manliness which he pretended and a shy femininity that overwhelmed him whenever he came face to face with life’s difficulties and upsets.

In Beirut, Bernadette was erased but the longing for his little ones grew
in his guts. He would get up from sleep to the sound of their crying and, on finding himself in Beirut, go sadly back to sleep, resolving to call them early the following morning before they went to school.

But in that accursed city the telephones did not work.

And when the project had fallen apart altogether, to the rhythm of Radwan’s voice and his threats, he’d felt that all he wanted was to return to Montpellier to embrace his white-skinned wife and breathe in the smell of their first love.

On their wedding night Bernadette was overcome with astonishment as she listened to a strange request from her husband.

They’d signed the marriage contract in the town hall, in the presence of a coterie of French friends, and then they’d all gone on to Palavas-les-Flots, where a banquet of that royal fish, the sea bream, grilled inside a mountain of salt, had been laid out, bottles of champagne had been opened, and white wine had sparkled to the rhythm of the waves.

Karim drank a lot that night, as bridegrooms always do. He danced and ate and said he wanted to become one with the “White Sea,” which from the restaurant balcony looked gray. He took Bernadette’s hand and led her to the beach.

They ran and laughed and rolled on the firm sand of Palavas and he pulled her by the hand and told her that he wanted to swim.

She told him he was crazy and she loved his craziness because it made her laugh. Bernadette’s chortling grew louder as she watched Karim approach the cold water, take off his shoes, and enter the sea in his clothes. She watched him shiver with cold and told him to come back, but he continued. Then she saw a high wave that rolled forward, bringing with it a cold spray that reached the beach, and she screamed with fear and sat down on the sand. He, though, instead of disappearing into the wave, started running so as to beat it to the shore, his clothes soaked.