Broken Mirrors (37 page)

“Things are their smell,” Nasri used to say, “and when the smell goes everything’s over.”

Karim had returned to a city that had lost its smell. Even the apartment no longer smelled of itself. Nasim had painted the walls, changed the curtains, and bought new furniture to replace the old, which had worn out. He’d put a large oblong mirror in the bedroom to replace the convex mirror that Nasri had stood in front of every morning before leaving the apartment, enjoying his rounded image.

“Why did you change all the furniture?” asked Karim, who was convinced his brother had used the family home to meet women.

“I changed it because it was worn out and so I wouldn’t have to hear Father’s voice ringing in my ears as he stamped over the carpet, spat on it, and said, ‘This damned carpet’s going to last longer than me. Screw life!’ I changed everything so that the things wouldn’t outlive the man.”

“But that’s wrong,” said Karim, and he asked where his brother had put the Persian carpet Nasri had inherited from his grandmother.

“Remember what Abu Sultan did?” said Nasim. “I did the same. Everything went to the rubbish tip, so that I wouldn’t see anything that reminded me of death.”

“I just hope you found the money in the pillow too!”

Nasim smiled and told his brother he’d never understood Nasri, and how the approach to death’s threshold had changed him. “After he died, I found out things and felt sorry, but what’s the use of feeling sorry? Salma’s the one to thank for everything. She’s the one who made me open my eyes, but what’s done is done.”

Hend too had wasted the opportunity to discover what had happened to her husband and how his life had changed. At first she couldn’t believe him. Then, when Karim came back to Beirut, she felt a sense of loss. The past
came back to her with all its bitter memories but a strange feeling took possession of her: what she’d thought was hatred for that “monkey of a doctor,” as his brother used to call him, and contempt for that cowardice of his that had driven him to run away, had turned into a crushing sense of loss and an awareness of the need to recover her dignity.

When grief consumed her daughter upon Karim’s departure for France, Salma had told her that the feeling, which seemed so natural, was simply an illusion. “I know, my girl. Just ask me! A woman can’t accept that she’s not desired or loved. All she has to do to get men is to make her desire obvious. That’s why when she’s rejected she can’t take it in and is willing to do anything to recover her status. But it’s an illusion, my girl. It’s over, forget about him. He’s a dog and the son of a dog. It’s over!”

“But I love him! I’m not talking about desire, I’m talking about love!”

“To hell with love. Men don’t know what love means. It’s over.”

“And my father, who was ready to die for love for your sake?”

“Your father was different. God rest his soul, he put me through hell.”

“Put you through hell?”

“He put me through hell because he died. I left everything for him and for love and ended up with the dead. Don’t bother me with talk of love! Go see what you can get out of life! You’re a pretty girl and educated and a hundred men will want you.”

At the time Hend was convinced. She’d ripped Karim out of her heart and said, “It’s over!” But the moment she saw him on the night of his return to Beirut, when her husband brought him to their home, the feeling that a deep valley was being gouged out in her chest had returned, and she found she couldn’t breathe. She saw how Karim had preserved his slender figure, as though he were still twenty, while her husband’s belly sagged over his belt, and his face, on which black spots caused by overindulgence in alcohol had begun to appear, had gone flabby.

No one believed him, but Nasim believed himself. He’d taken his decision calmly, had phoned his brother, and had put to him the idea of building a hospital. He’d decided it would be called Shefa Hospital after his father’s pharmacy and would have attached to it the largest pharmacy in the Middle East. He’d started to reduce his trading activities, put an end to the import of timber and iron, and kept only the trade in petrol, which he would bring to a close with a huge import operation using the Cypriot tanker
Acropol
.

He had withdrawn quietly and without fuss, having decided to maintain his relationship with the Phalangist militias in order to guarantee protection for the hospital. This was despite his conviction that the days of the militias were over and that the Christian militia was on the verge of collapse following the failure of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He reckoned that the war would end soon, as Nasri had predicted, with a fatal blow to all those who had put their money on the alliance with Israel.

One day Nasri was taking his afternoon nap, while Nasim was talking with his friends from the Phalangist BG Squad. Said was in a state of excitement over the trip he was going to make with a select group of his comrades to receive training in Israel – the same Said who would be afflicted with hemiplegia after being wounded at Bhamdoun in 1983 in what would be known as the Mountain War which broke out between the Christians and the Druze following the Israeli withdrawal from southern Mount Lebanon. This would result in the total defeat of the Christian militias and the destruction of about eighty villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. Said talked about the preparations and told Nasim he hoped he too would be lucky enough to make a similar trip someday.

“Real training, by God! Tzahal is amazing, it may be the best training in the world!”

“What does Tzahal mean?” asked Nasim.

“It’s Hebrew. It means ‘defense force.’ ”

“You know Hebrew?”

“No. The training there will all be in Arabic, but one has to learn Hebrew, it’s the language of the future,” said Said, launching into a lengthy paean in praise of the Jews. “A minority like us, but they knew how to walk all over the Arabs and bust their heads.”

At that moment Nasri appeared in the living room. He was shivering in gray pajamas that hung loosely on his thin body.

“Do you need anything, Father?” Nasim asked.

“How do you do, sir?” enquired Said.

“Fine, but it seems to me I heard something about you boys going to train in Israel? Be careful, fellows! It’s silly tricks like that which will end up sending us all to hell.”

“The boys are just gabbing,” said Nasim. “Go finish your nap. If you don’t have your siesta you’ll get a headache.”

Nasim told his comrades that ever since reaching forty his father had routinely taken an hour’s siesta, sleep in the afternoon being the best way to rest the brain via descent of blood to the stomach. “Tell them about your siesta, Father, before you go back to sleep.”

“A siesta is a necessity for the preservation of the health of both body and soul. As the proverb has it, ‘Eat lunch and stretch out. Eat dinner and go out.’ But Israel? No way! Be careful!” said Nasri.

At this point Said, whose smile had never left his visage as he watched the elderly man in pajamas saying strange things dredged up from the world of the ghosts of the past, wiped it off his face, knit his brows, and told the man he’d do better not to interfere in things that didn’t concern him. “We’re discussing very important matters, old fellow, that have to do with the destiny of the Christians throughout the East and not just Lebanon. You’d do better not to worry your head over it.”

“I told the bastards,” said Nasri, pointing to his son Nasim. “One calls himself a communist and wants to save the Palestinians and the other calls himself a Fascist. They’ve become like Cain and Abel, brother is going to kill brother and then die himself. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I explained to them we’re a minority in the East and minorities have to mind their p’s and q’s and not behave like assholes with the majority, because in the future they’ll have to pay the price on their own and the price will be very high.”

“What kind of a zimmi mentality is that? We aren’t zimmis anymore and we won’t put up with being treated that way.”

Said turned to Nasim and said, “It seems your father’s still living in Ottoman times. The Ottomans have gone, old man, they’re over and done with.”

“Gone, yes,” said Nasri, “but it’s not clear they’re over and done with. What goes comes back and what sleeps awakes. Where do you think you’re living? We’re a minority in this East and we have to maintain our existence in a rational fashion. Watch out for Israel! Allying ourselves with the enemy of the Arabs will mean the end of us, forever. Be careful!”

“Stop talking that shit, Father! You’re making me look a fool in front of my friends. Us a minority!? The Ottomans coming back!? That’s drivel, Nasri. Did you hear what Bashir Gemayel said: ‘We’re the devils of the East, and its saints!’?”

“Devils, maybe, saints would be better, but devils and saints together doesn’t work. You’re crazy. Your leader will be the ruin of us all.”

“Okay, so take the Jews – a minority like us, and look at all the stuff they’ve pulled off and how they’ve won victories over all the Arabs.”

“A minority, true, and they’ve won victories, true as well. But no one can be victorious all the time. Fortune is a wheel, which is why they have to learn to be polite and get off the Palestinians’ backs. Wasn’t it enough for
them to steal their country? Explain to me why they still occupy the West Bank and Gaza.”

“The Palestinians are the enemies of Lebanon!” screamed Said. “You’re defending the enemies of the Christians!”

“Enemies of Lebanon? It’s not so clear, but let us suppose hypothetically you’re right on that point. You shouldn’t go where you’re going. It means ruin.”

“The Jews are a minority and they’ve won and it follows naturally that they should make alliances with other minorities,” said Nasim. “Please, Father, go and sleep! What are my friends going to say about you?”

The gray ghost turned his back and returned to his room, muttering incompreh​ensibly. That evening he told his son they were crazy and that the destiny of the Jews of Israel would be no better than that of the Christians of Lebanon. “Soon, after I’m dead, you’ll think of me and say, ‘Nasri was right.’ The Israelis’ problem is that they’re drunk on their military power. They’ll discover soon enough that power doesn’t last. If they want to stay in the East, they’re going to have to behave better. There’s a thought for you and a nice one too – that you’ve got to behave better, which means being humble and knowing who you are and where you live.”

Unlike many of his comrades, Nasim didn’t go to the training camp set up by the Israeli army on the lands of the Palestinian village of Saffouriyyeh, whose inhabitants had been chased out in 1948 and which had been converted into a settlement under the name of Tzippori. During the Hundred Days’ War he was hit in the foot by a piece of shrapnel, which kept him limping for about three months and prevented him from going on the main course, in which three hundred Phalangist fighters participated. At the same time the death of Michel Hajji and the sight of his corpse, rigid in the morgue at the Greek Orthodox hospital, made him distance himself from the fighting and follow his own course in life, far from the trenches.

Was Nasri right? Nasim had wanted to tell his twin that these truths, which Nasri had uttered before anyone else, in no way meant that Karim had been correct in the political choices he’d made and that had led him to exile. “We’re wrong and you’re wrong, which is why we both got shafted. The Palestinians and the leftists you belonged to lost and the Phalanges and the forces I belonged to were defeated, and Syria came and swept the board.”

“The Syrian regime, not Syria,” said Karim. “They swept the board with the brush you gave them, but what do I know? Maybe it was all wrong from beginning to end. God have mercy on those who lost their lives.”

Karim hadn’t come to East Beirut in a mood of penitence or regret. He didn’t believe the history of the war could be summed up in the expression “It was all wrong from beginning to end”; it might apply to him personally – because, despite not being a member of the Communist Party, as his father had believed, he hadn’t been able to take the consequences of the defeat of the Lebanese Left after the Syrian army entered Lebanon – but it didn’t apply to the war. He’d wanted to tell his brother that the Lebanese had to acknowledge their mistakes in the war. Everyone had made mistakes, but there was a difference between a mistake and a sin. Likewise there was a difference between those who had fought for a secular republic and those who had fought in defense of the sectarian system. What could he say though, now that he’d lost the power of speech? Khaled Nabulsi had turned him into something not unlike a mute; since the day of the man’s killing he’d felt he no longer had the right to speak of anything. Anyone who’d been afraid to provide refuge to a widow and her daughter upon the assassination of the woman’s husband and who later found out that both the woman and her daughter had had their throats slit would do better to keep his mouth shut.

Why then had Karim returned to Beirut? He hadn’t returned to revoke his history and erase it, nor to resume where he’d left off. Bernadette was
right: the man had returned because, as they say in detective novels, a criminal always returns to the scene of his crime.

When Hend told him how his father had died he was afflicted by a headache that stayed with him throughout his remaining days in Beirut and that later he’d refer to as “the criminal’s headache.” He thought that, of all directors, only Maroun Baghdadi could make a film with that title: it would tell how the criminal returns to the scene of his crime because he has a killing headache that starts at the eyes and spreads till it comes to settle in the center of the brain. Karim, though, had had nothing to do with his father’s murder. He’d wanted to tell his brother that it was he, Nasim, who was responsible: had it not been for his hatred of his father the crime would never have taken place. But then he remembered no one had suggested that Nasri’s death was a crime. The film he might propose to Maroun Baghdadi would have to be about another crime, one called “the Killing of Hayat and Her Daughter Following the Assassination of Khaled Nabulsi.” At this point the headache would acquire its moral correlative and Karim would find himself facing a court of justice.