Broken Mirrors (29 page)

“But Nevsky Prospekt’s in Leningrad, not Beirut,” answered Karim.

“True,” said Danny, “but revolution here is the same as revolution there.”

“But here there are only sects, and sects are scary,” said Karim.

“True and not true,” said Danny. “Don’t forget the classes and the class struggle. But you’re right, the sects are a big danger and the only thing that can deal with and neutralize that danger is a cohesive revolutionary vanguard.”

“But where’s the vanguard?” asked Karim.

“We’re the vanguard,” said Danny. “You saw Malak’s heroic action and how he forced the university to reinstate all the expelled students. That was vanguard stuff.”

“But you just said we were against assassinations!”

“Against them in principle, that’s true, but on occasion they are necessary. We’re against military coups, but the October Revolution obliged Lenin to carry out a kind of military coup. Revolution, my friend, doesn’t go in a straight line like Nevsky Prospekt …”

Karim had nodded as though he understood and agreed but he didn’t. Before Danny, he found his will paralyzed. The philosophy professor possessed an irresistible logic – he was a man full of ideas and ambitions who led a student cell at AUB, as well as the Qubbeh district group in Tripoli which was made up of thugs, the unemployed, and agricultural workers, and who went home to drink vodka martinis while listening to classical music.

Danny said he’d wanted to be a musician and that when he was young he’d learned to play the piano; he’d stopped when he began taking an interest in maths and philosophy. “Then came the struggle, comrades, and the struggle taught me that the true philosophy and the greater music are praxis.”

When Karim had asked Danny about Malak he’d said he knew nothing about him. He said he’d arranged his escape from Roumieh Prison, “where
Malak had made his blankets into a rope and descended from the prison window to find our comrades waiting for him. He was not alone. It doesn’t matter that Mustafa Qaddour, one of Tripoli’s Republic of the Wanted, was with him, what matters is that the boys showed him the way to Tall el-Zaatar, which I know they got to after major difficulties and after being fired on by the besieged camp’s defenders. Malak shouted, ‘Don’t fire, I’m Malak!’ It seems one of the boys had heard his story, and from that moment he disappeared. The fact is I don’t know. Atef, Abu Iyad’s assistant, advised him to go abroad because he was on the wanted list and the revolution couldn’t protect him. I think he went to East Germany and there the Stasi enlisted him and we heard unbelievable stories and that they did an operation and changed the way his face looked. Honestly I don’t know. Maybe he’s in Beirut right now but we wouldn’t recognize him if we saw him.”

“And Hala?” asked Karim.

“Who’s Hala?”

“His girlfriend.”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “Or yes, my wife, Sahar, said she was teaching philosophy at the Good Shepherd School and lives like an old maid.”

“I’d like to see her,” said Karim.

“Don’t waste your time. She has only one story to tell and it’s not believable. I think she made it up to give some meaning to her life. Malak supposedly phoned her after a long time and made a date with her at the Express. She went and looked around but couldn’t see him. She went to sit in the corner where they used to sit when they were in love. After a bit a man came and stood in front of her. He looked at her and said, ‘You don’t recognize me of course.’ The voice was Malak’s. It was the voice but not the man. ‘You’re not him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know you.’ He said he’d changed his face in Germany and later changed his name. He said his name was Munir now and he loved her. The girl was petrified. ‘You’re not him,’ she said. ‘And anyway I
was afraid he might kill me, after the crime he’d done.’ She said she ran out of the café scared the ghost would run after her. ‘I don’t know why they sent me this man who was pretending to be Malak. I’m certain Malak died in Tall el-Zaatar. He died and never called me once, died not loving me. How could someone who’d committed all those crimes love anyone?’ ”

What did today’s Danny have in common with yesterday’s?

It wasn’t true that this Danny was the hero of an unwritten story, as Karim had thought in the past. Danny wasn’t like heroes because heroes are frozen in our imaginations in the act of heroism. When they lose their balance and life preys on them, they lose their magic and are transformed into mere shadows that break up in the light of ordinary life. The secret of Danny’s allure lay in Sahar – a beautiful woman who worked so as to leave her husband free for political action. He’d disappear and she would wait for him, and when he returned she wouldn’t ask where he’d been. With radiant face she’d lead him to the bathroom, remove his dirty underwear, and fill the bathtub with hot water covered with soapy, jasmine-scented foam. Then she’d leave him to go to the kitchen to fetch a glass of mint tea, sit on the edge of the tub, hold his wet hand, and sink with him into the silence of the steam that rose from the hot water.

This woman of waiting, who filled the life of Danny and his friends with joy, suddenly disappeared. No one had any idea what had happened to her. She went on a trip to Italy to attend an architectural conference in Venice and that was the last anyone heard of her. One rainy night Danny had come to Karim’s apartment and said he was tired. He was sad and confused and couldn’t hold his tongue. It seemed he’d smoked and eaten a lot of hashish before deciding he couldn’t stay alone in the apartment any longer. He said his wife’s sister had taken his daughter to sleep at her place and he was feeling lonely. Then he told the story. He said Sahar had phoned him the day before. He said she’d disappeared three weeks earlier, when she’d been
supposed to return after four days but hadn’t and he’d had no means of contacting her. He’d told her sister about it two days ago. Her sister didn’t seem worried or surprised by the news. She said she knew nothing about the matter and promised to come that day and take Suha. Half an hour after she left, Sahar phoned and said she was in Brussels, had found work there, and was never coming back to Beirut. She’d said strange things, that she hated Beirut, hated Lebanon, hated him, and wanted a divorce. She’d said she’d told her sister to get Suha’s things ready because she’d decided to bring her daughter to live with her there in Brussels and she expected him not to object because he was busy with other things anyway, didn’t know his daughter, and had no relationship with her. She’d said she’d give him free rein with their joint bank account once she’d withdrawn half.

Danny had talked like a parrot repeating things it doesn’t understand. He’d spoken in a husky voice and the words had faltered in his mouth as though refusing to emerge. He’d said he was tired and wanted to sleep. Then his heart had begun beating violently and continuously. Karim had told him he ought to take him to the AUB Hospital’s emergency clinic because his heartbeat was racing, “and I’m not a cardiologist. I don’t know what to do. Come on, get up, and let’s go to the hospital.”

“There’s no need,” said Danny. “This always happens to me when I overdo it with the hashish.”

Karim ordered him to lie on his back. He put three cushions under Danny’s head, gave him a glass of cold water to drink, got a piece of ice from the refrigerator and ordered him to suck it. The heartbeat slowed but Danny didn’t cease his raving.

“Better not talk now. We can talk later.”

Danny never stopped talking. He was like someone speaking to himself. He went on for more than two hours while Karim sat next to him and tried unsuccessfully to break the accumulating sentences down into words. He
heard the name Rana often repeated but what did Rana have to do with it? Rana was a member of the AUB cell and was preparing to marry her boyfriend, with whom she’d been living for three years. Karim worked out that Danny had had an affair with Rana and that Sahar had seen them at the Mandarin Café on rue de Verdun when she’d thought he was fighting in the south. He said Sahar had come into the café where he was sitting holding hands with Rana. She’d been to the supermarket with her daughter, and they’d stopped by the café because Suha loved the
forêt noire
. “She saw me and I didn’t see her. Suha ran to me and I didn’t notice. It was all the effect of the hashish. I was on my way back from Baalbek. You know how the boys are there. It’s cold, they light a charcoal brazier, sit round it, scatter hashish on the charcoal, and the smell rises – the sweetest smell and the best hashish and we’d get stoned without smoking. I left Baalbek stoned and instead of going home I made a date with Rana. I wanted to see her at her apartment. She said it wouldn’t work at home because her boyfriend might come at any moment and she suggested the Mandarin and I don’t know why I agreed and we were screwed.”

“So you love Rana?”

“God forbid! I love Sahar but Rana was, you know, a side dish.”

“And she thinks you’re a side dish?”

“Please, don’t start getting philosophical! Marital infidelity is a necessity for the continuation of a marriage. That’s how people are.”

“So you’ve always betrayed Sahar?”

“What? You don’t betray Hend?”

“Of course I don’t betray her, what do you mean? I love her.”

“If you don’t betray her, it means you don’t love her.”

“So Sahar knew you were betraying her?”

“I don’t know. I think she knew but she turned a blind eye.”

“Turned a blind eye?”

“Sahar is an intelligent woman. She knows that a man’s imagination has no bounds, and imagination is the beginning of betrayal.”

“Why didn’t she turn a blind eye this time?”

“Because we were being defeated. Ever since the Syrian army came in and Kamal Jumblatt, the leader of the Lebanese National Movement, was killed, we’d been in defeat and were being dragged through the mud. And Sahar understood that maybe it was over, maybe she’d only loved me because I inspired thoughts of heroism. Maybe she loved the hero and the hero was being defeated, the hero was going to die. I didn’t die, I became unemployed and unheroic. The revolution had failed and all that was left of it was the civil war and the civil war drags you through the mud, especially when it’s in your home. When she saw me with Rana she couldn’t take it anymore and I was like an imbecile, not seeing what was in front of me, with no idea what was going on till I found the girl hugging me and Sahar screaming at her so that she could leave and go home.”

Karim didn’t see Danny after that night. The man disappeared behind a veil of hashish smoke. Even when Khaled Nabulsi was killed and his wife came and sought refuge at Danny’s apartment, no one could find him. He didn’t answer the phone or open the door. This put Karim in an awkward position and he’d felt like a traitor and a coward telling Khaled’s wife he didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

The woman disappeared behind her veil and Karim experienced his last moments of indecision in Beirut before deciding to go to France.

L
ATER, WHEN HE
returned to Lebanon, Hend had looked to Karim exactly as she always had. It was amazing how the woman hadn’t changed, as though she were his Hend and age had added only more of the bloom of youth. He’d expected to see a woman with a body sagging from having given birth to three boys, one who exuded the smell of house and dust and never stopped clucking, like a hen. In the event, her brown skin, tanned and endowed with a new color that seemed to clothe her in a second skin of beauty, gave her complexion the look of sun-ripened fruit and took him by surprise.

As soon as he’d cast off this girl whom he’d worn so long, Karim had turned his back on Beirut. He hadn’t lied to Danny: he had never betrayed her, not because he was uncommonly chaste or faithful, but because he couldn’t. Her aroma, which was like that of shellfish, clung to all his five senses.

Once, they’d gone swimming in front of Rawsheh Rock in Beirut, Hend moving between the two formations, swimming on her back and using her arms as oars and he tried to catch up with her. He’d circled around her and
dived beneath her while she surrendered herself to the sound of the sea and to its undulations. Dazzled by sun, water, and salt, she swam alone, heedless of his cries of love and water.

“That’s enough. I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

She turned over and said he could go back if he wanted but she was going to swim to the cave.

It was her perpetual swimming rite. She would start by making a circuit of the two rocks that rise opposite the Corniche at the lighthouse, then go to the large rock and swim on her back into the middle of the hole that time has created, forming from the lower part of the rock an arch that continues beneath the water. There she’d close her eyes and surrender to the spray from the waves that crashed off the rock covering her body with droplets of salt water in which burned threads of sunlight. Then she’d turn over and swim toward what the French called “the Pigeon Pool,” where she’d enter the water’s darkness and disappear. Karim had only once been into the cave. He’d swum at her side and they’d entered the vanishing light. He told her he needed air and could hardly breathe and heard her laugh. He pulled back and swam to the entrance of the cave to wait for her and when, after a quarter of an hour, she emerged, he told her he’d been frightened for her because of the creatures of the sea.

“So why didn’t you come back and save me?” she said, laughing.

“I was afraid,” he said.

“Afraid for me or for yourself?”

He’d wait for her at the entrance to the cave and then they’d return in one of those canoes that the Lebanese call a “fishbone” and go to the swimming pool at the nearby Sporting Club, where they’d drink orange juice.

Karim wouldn’t speak much. He’d tell her about Danny and his Fedayeen comrades. It was the eve of the war but Hend had no interest in the subject. She thought politics was a way of killing time.

“You’re like men playing cards. You know what they say when they play
cards? They say, ‘Come on. Let’s kill some time! You aren’t just going to kill time, you’ll probably end up killing yourselves and everyone around you too.”

Karim hadn’t surrendered in the face of this kind of talk. He believed time would change her mind and that this Hend, salted with sun and sea, would be his life’s companion.