Broken Mirrors (27 page)

Why had Karim’s life been turned upside down when he met Danny at the American University in Beirut?

In Beirut, Karim phoned Danny and they went together to the Sporting Club restaurant, where they drank arak and ate fried fish. Danny seemed to have aged. He walked with a limp as a result of an injury to a spinal disc that had forced him to undergo two unsuccessful operations, and now he walked bent to the right.

Karim could sum up the Lebanese Civil War in two names: Sinalcol and Khaled Nabulsi. He had no idea exactly how the fates had led him to Tripoli, but the proximate cause was Danny, the tall philosophy teacher who was the leader of a Fatah student cell.

Danny deserved a novel to himself. He remained lodged in Karim’s imagination as a character of fantasy. He told Bernadette that people who become a part of ourselves lose their reality and become like the heroes of novels, of whom we remember only the shining image.

Had Karim returned to Lebanon to put a red rose on Khaled’s grave or to search for Sinalcol, as he claimed? Or had he concocted the story to justify a return that had no cause other than a mysterious nostalgia for a past which Karim knew in his depths had gone, and which would never come back?

Karim had phoned Danny because he was the last friend he had left in Beirut. He wanted to ask him about Khaled and Radwan and the rest of their friends.

Karim had no idea why he’d fashioned a story for himself when there was no story to fashion. His relationship to the war didn’t call for any such implacable sense of belonging. But when he found himself alone in France
he’d made a mirror of the war to superimpose upon the mirror of the story of his family, which invoked in him nothing but feelings of loneliness and humiliation.

Karim had smiled on seeing the panic that traced itself on Bernadette’s face as he described to her the business of “the mirror of war.”

She said she could no longer understand why he’d placed that thick wall between himself and his father and brother. She said that at first she’d believed it had to do with the trauma of war, and she hadn’t asked for details because she respected his sorrow and his silence.

He’d only told her of his mother and her eyes, opened onto death, a few fragments about his confusing relationship with his twin brother, and his story with the Greek prostitute who’d taught him the meaning of sex. He’d said she should read him as a blank page bearing a few nearly meaningless scrawls, and that he was starting his life anew, as though he hadn’t had one before meeting her.

But that day he came to her, stifling his cough, to tell her he was going to Beirut not just to build a hospital but because he wanted to see what had happened to the mirror of the Lebanese war that he had superimposed upon the mirror of his own life.

He’d been unable to explain to his wife the meaning of the expression, which seemed just a hollow metaphor, like those repeated by the heroes who dominate the screen in French films about the Second World War.

Karim was convinced that his metaphor was as hollow as his life, for he was sure of nothing. His memory presented itself in the form of black spots out of which emerged the phantom of a man who looked like him and in whom truth was mixed up with its look-alikes, so that he resembled a man stumbling over his own shadow.

After two months’ residence in Beirut, though, he’d decided to reopen
his old accounts and recover the shadows of that past. It was Muna and her husband, Ahmad Dakiz, who led him back to the ledgers of his time in Tripoli, where, in the middle of the crusader castle of Saint-Gilles, all the ghosts of the past had emerged, and Danny had reappeared.

Danny didn’t know literary Arabic well but insisted on speaking it, employing classical turns of phrase to assert the depth of his attachment to his country. He’d been born in Abidjan to a family that had migrated from the village of Beit Shabab in Mount Lebanon. His father had worked as a cloth merchant there and died, poor and sick, of fever. Danny had spoken of his father and mother only once, when he recounted how he’d returned with his two sisters from Paris, where they were students, to attend their father’s funeral. There they discovered that their mother had decided to return to Lebanon and was asking Danny to cut short his education in order to dispose of his father’s possessions. Danny had interrupted his study of philosophy, only to discover that his father had been penniless and that he would have to flee his creditors or find himself in prison.

“Lebanese capitalism is a decadent phenomenon and the living proof is my father. In Africa, if you don’t work in smuggling and fraud, you die a pauper. The rich in Africa are naught but a handful of thieves, the lot of them! Verily, they are like the comprador class in Lebanon.”

This was the first time Karim had heard the word
comprador
. He was too embarrassed to ask what it meant and look stupid, and in the end he got used to using it without knowing what it meant, after which he understood, or imagined he did. It ceased to matter: once in France, he swallowed dozens of words whose meanings he imagined he understood because he used them in his daily life.

Danny never spoke of his mother, so Karim sketched a scenario in his
own mind according to which the woman had returned to Beit Shabab to live in her house there. When he asked Danny about the political situation in the village, though, the tall man looked at him in surprise; he said he’d only visited the place once and didn’t care for the countryside.

Danny had at one time disappeared for a whole week without anyone knowing where he was, and when he reappeared there was something broken about his eyes, which his wife, Sahar, interpreted to Karim as being due to depression: his mother had died alone in an old persons’ home, where she had suffered from dementia.

Danny seemed to Karim more like the hero of Albert Camus’s novel
L’Étranger
than the revolutionary leader he was trying to be.

He was, though, a man of extraordinary charisma. Was the charisma a consequence of his height, his fair hair, and his eyes, which were always red as a result of his frequent late nights? Or of the long white scarf he used to wrap around his neck, winter and summer? Or of his detailed knowledge of the texts of Marx and Lenin? Or of his being the first Lebanese intellectual to join the Fedayeen and fight in southern Lebanon? Or of his beautiful wife, Sahar, who worked as an architect with the Alami Company in Beirut, supported the household and their only daughter, and asked nothing of Danny except that he never stop loving her?

Karim fell under the man’s spell when he attended the first political meeting at Danny’s apartment in Tall el-Khayyat. In response to Danny’s call for the foundation of a Marxist organization within the Fatah movement he could think of nothing to say but “Yes.” He was, however, hesitant when it came to taking part in military activities.

He said he’d never killed a sparrow so how could he kill a human being?

He said he agreed that violence was the way of the revolution but he was a doctor and the revolution needed his knowledge, not his blood.

“You’re just talking so you don’t have to talk,” said Danny, and he persuaded Karim to join a weeklong military training course at the Nahr el-Bared Camp close to Tripoli. It was there that Karim’s life began to shape itself into elusive shadows.

This way of putting it isn’t quite accurate, because the idea of shadows occurred to Karim only after his return to Beirut, when the darkness of the city blended with the darkness of his soul on the last night of waiting. At that moment he discovered that all that remained of him, and to him, was a collection of obscure images derived from a life that traced itself like black shadows on the demolished walls of the city.

When Hend asked him why he’d come back to Beirut he said he had no idea.

“Do you believe this story about the hospital?”

He answered that the architect had finished working on the walls and things were moving along fast.

“But your brother’s changed a lot. It’s as though you know nothing, or you know and don’t want to know.”

He said he’d come back because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with his life, and that back there things seemed to have lost all taste and meaning.

“You mean you’ve come looking for meaning in a city where everything’s meaningless?”

She told him that the meaning of things was within, and she felt that what lay within her was coming apart. “You didn’t have to come. What do you want with us and our tangled stories? Go back to your house and your wife and daughters! There’s nothing here. Even the memories no longer exist. People here grind their memories underfoot.”

Had he phoned Danny so that he could grind his memories underfoot?

When he called him, Danny’s voice had sounded unsure, as though he didn’t recognize him. Then the voice had regained its composure, suggesting lunch at the Sporting Club swimming pool.

They’d drunk arak but the words had failed to take shape and had scattered in scraps over the table. Danny had spoken at length about his illnesses and the two difficult surgical procedures he’d had performed on his spine. When Karim asked him about Sahar he was overwhelmed with gloom and said he knew nothing about her except that she was living in Brussels.

“And your daughter, Suha?”

“Suha got married,” he said, “and is living in Montreal.”

“Who’s the groom?”

He lifted his hand in a way that indicated he neither knew nor cared.

“Did she marry a Lebanese?” asked Karim.

“No,” replied Danny without a further word.

Silence and sea and waves. The words melted and vanished. Danny was like a sheet of copper. The daily swim that the doctor had imposed on him had had its effect on his face and skin color. All that was left of him was his fair hair, some of which had fallen out, outlining a sort of bald patch covered with tufts, and his front teeth, stained black with French tobacco; a man who had decided to bury his memories and live without a memory.

He asked him about the boys and Danny said he didn’t see any of them.

He asked him about Radwan.

He asked and he asked but Danny’s silence rose like a thick pall that could be dispelled only by the chewing of food and the drinking of arak.

When he asked him about Sinalcol, Danny burst out laughing. “Aren’t you Sinalcol? Have you forgotten what the boys used to call you? Comrade Doctor Sinalcol! And behind your back they’d say, ‘Look at those intellectuals! They come just so they can play the Sinalcol over us!’ ”

“That’s something you came up with,” said Karim. “You’re the one that took to calling me Sinalcol in front of the boys and so the name stuck and all because I refused your order to kill the guy.”

“Now you’re Sinalcol again, like in the old days,” said Danny.

Karim hated this name they’d stuck on him, erasing the political name he had chosen for himself. “I’m Salem!” he used to say. “Please, brothers! No one is to call me Sinalcol!”

The name Sinalcol had stuck to Karim against his will. He’d done everything in his power to expunge it but names are like eye colors: they’re difficult to change. During his first years in Montpellier he was much disturbed by a recurrent dream in which he saw himself walking down a long deserted street, a mask covering his face, then standing in front of a shop door and writing the name Sinalcol on it in chalk and running away, as though being chased.

And then, when Bernadette asked him his name, he’d answered in his moment of drunkenness that it was Sinalcol!

“Do you still remember, Karim, what I always used to say though nobody believed me? Now all of you can see with your own eyes how right I was.”

“You’re always right, Danny.”

“My name’s Faris, not Danny. Danny was the political name I used in the days of the Fedayeen. Now it’s over. Danny’s dead and it’s Faris sitting in front of you. Really though, I don’t know what to call myself. When I hear the students calling me Mr. Faris, I split my sides laughing. Imagine the insult to one’s dignity when one doesn’t know what one’s name is any longer! As I used to say, ‘The bastards ride boats and the heroes have to swim back.’ ”

“Is it true what they say about Maroun, that he had a tall blond girl with him and she disappeared?” asked Karim.

“It’s not important,” answered Danny. “Maroun came to see me before
he started shooting the film and told me the storyline. I told him, ‘That’s stupid. We can’t make a film about forgiveness because the war isn’t over. First the war has to end and then we can write about it.’ But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that everything was wrong. Poor fellow, he embodied the Lebanese lie in his name and then paid for it with his life. His name was all wrong. He was called Maroun but he wasn’t a Maronite, and he was from the Baghdadi family but he wasn’t an Iraqi. That’s the philosophy of the Lebanese war – the names are borrowed but the deaths of those who bear them are all too real.”

Karim said Maroun’s death was a symbolic expression of the extinction of the revolutionary generation in Lebanon. “I met him in France and he told me about the film and I could see death in his eyes,” said Karim.

“Don’t say that!” said Danny. “You know very well that anyone who sees death dies because his death is traced in the eyes of the murderer, and you know who I’m talking about.”

What a bizarre lunch! Karim had wanted his meeting with Danny to put together what had been broken and had found himself faced with a man who hunched over his terrible back pains as he walked, broke instead of joined, and painted what was present in the colors of absence.

“The war would have broken out with or without us and it kept going without us, so I regret nothing. Or at least I’m sorry about one thing, which is that instead of devoting myself to writing a book of philosophy I became a fighter, and once you’ve written with bullets it’s hard to write with a pen. I’m working now on a study that proves that none of the literary types who wrote about war did any serious fighting. They were basically adventurers who stayed on the margins. Neither Hemingway nor Malraux fought in the Spanish Civil War. Malraux fought with the French resistance to Nazi occupation, it’s true, but after that he stopped writing so he could become a minister. My study will deconstruct the myth of the writer fighting or
being committed to the struggle. That’s nonsense. Lorca wasn’t a hero and Neruda wasn’t a resistance fighter. As for Nazim Hikmet, who reduced his readers to tears with his poems about his Munevver when he was in prison, as soon as he was released he got rid of her and married a Russian nurse.”