Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim was at a loss as to how to reply. He felt he ought to hand over the papers to no one, especially not to Radwan. He was sure Radwan would omit sections and insert words, which was what Khaled and Radwan had done previously with the text that they’d turned into their blue book.

“Do you still use the blue book?” Karim asked.

The sheikh replied in decisive tones: the book was no longer of any value since its secularist ideas were no longer valid and their Islamic approach could not be grafted onto it. “We derive our culture now from the works of the religious jurists, and above all those of Ibn Taimiya.”

Karim got up to leave but the sheikh grasped him by the arm, forcing him to sit again. The sheikh said his request for the papers reflected the wishes of Khaled’s grandmother. “Imm Yahya has expressed a desire for the papers and I am of the view that that is her right as the sole legal heir to both martyrs. She wishes me to publish them so that the memory of the two men be not consigned to oblivion.”

Karim stood up, twisting his lower lip, as though not accepting what had been said.

“Where are you rushing off to? What, you don’t want to see Sinalcol?” said the sheikh.

“As far as I am aware Sinalcol is dead,” said Karim.

“True, but who says we can’t see the dead?” responded Radwan. “Nothing could be easier, dear, than to arrange for you to meet your namesake there in Hell. Do not imagine you can refuse me the papers. If I want them, I’ll damn well get them, whether thou likest it or not.”

Sheikh Radwan raised his finger threateningly, but Karim, who sensed danger, began to prevaricate. He sat down again and told Radwan that he ought not to use threatening language with him. “You threaten to kill me when you know that ‘who so slays a soul … shall be as though he had slain mankind altogether’?”

“God be praised, you have committed the Noble Koran to memory!” said Sheikh Radwan.

“If it’s Imm Yahya who’s asking for them, I’m willing to give her the papers but I have to hear the words from her, not because I don’t believe you, God forbid, but because they are a sacred trust and I care about these things, if you understand what I mean.”

The meeting ended with Karim in a fix. Sheikh Radwan said that that was Karim’s right and he’d send a car at five thirty to the Silver Shore so they could visit Imm Yahya together at her house in Qubbeh, and there Karim could hear her request with his own ears.

Karim arrived at the restaurant at three to find a fish banquet spread out and waiting for him, at its center a sea bream grilled in the Tripoli style, which they call “hot fish.” Ahmad got up to welcome him saying they’d forgotten all about him because he was late and he should excuse them for having started eating.

And at the restaurant Karim heard the strangest of stories. At the start he was sullen and incapable of responding to the jolly atmosphere imposed by Ahmad’s father, with his overbearing presence, his way of drinking arak straight without water, and his theory of how water spoiled the arak’s purity. Abd el-Malek Dakiz reminded him of his own father in his movements, his domination of the table, and his theories about food. He was a man of seventy-five with snow-white hair unblemished by a single strand of black. His bearing was erect with no sign of a stoop, he had a smile that never left his thin lips, a lean brown face, and a long nose. Abu Ahmad’s hands and the black liver spots that dotted them were everywhere at the table, whether pouring arak or distributing morsels to those seated around. The dilemma of having to meet Yahya’s mother at five thirty prevented Karim from joining in, but Muna deftly seized the thread of the elderly man’s conversation to tell him Dr. Karim had written a study on the crusaders and was interested in tracing the destinies of their descendants in Lebanon. “Tell us, uncle, about your family’s crusader roots.”

“Our family, Muna? It’s your family too!” he responded.

“How come? Are you a Christian, Abu Ahmad?” asked Karim.

“I’m a Muslim, and praise be to God,” he replied. Then he pointed to the minaret of the mosque that could be seen through the restaurant’s rain-spotted window. “That’s the Dakiz Mosque. When my father returned from the pilgrimage, he sold a lot of the family’s property to build this mosque, and you ask me if we’re Christians!”

“Tell us the story of the French passport,” said Muna.

The man sat up straight, took a sip from his glass, and said he hated the French colonialist mentality. “Can you imagine, the French consul’s only concern was whether I was Francophone? I told him, ‘I know French but je suis arabophone ,’ and I pronounced the a with a guttural consonant before it the way we say it. He didn’t like that, though. Maybe he believed in the myth of bilingualism that some Jesuit came up with but it doesn’t matter. What matters, Dr. Karim, is that we are originally from the house of De Guise — we say Dakiz in Arabic to make things easier — and I have correspondence with members of our family in France, particularly Count Bernard de Guise, who wrote to me that it would be an honor for them to become acquainted with their cousins of the line of the knights who had occupied the East and liberated Jerusalem, but what can one say?”

Abd el-Malek Dakiz spoke of how, at the beginning of the war and at the insistence of Muna, whose only dream was to emigrate, he’d gone to the French consulate in Tripoli, where he’d met the consul, Monsieur Gérard, told him about his family origins, and sought to reclaim his French nationality. The French consul had looked at him as though he didn’t believe him, so Abd el-Malek Dakiz had shown him his correspondence with the French side of the family, stressing the fact that his was the sole family with scientifically proven Crusader-Frankish roots, though the Bardawil family might perhaps share that status since the Arabic historical sources did refer to King Baudouin as Bardawil.

The French consul had thought he was in the presence of a madman. However, faced with Abd el-Malek’s insistence on his right to French nationality, he said the matter was not in his hands and the decision had to come from the French foreign ministry; he gave the crusader a nationality claim form to fill out.

“It was murder. Endless forms to fill out,” said Abd el-Malek, “and documents and financial instruments and birth certificates for me and my father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother. The important thing, my dear sir, and so as not to bore you is we went back to the consulate and submitted them all to the consul. This time, though, I didn’t like the way he behaved. He treated me as though I were a madman who’d escaped from the lunatic asylum. It made no difference to me. The truth was clear as daylight and I felt sure that French citizenship was in my pocket.”

He said he’d waited three long months before getting back in touch and they’d given him an appointment for three weeks from that day.

“He asked me why I wanted French citizenship. I answered ‘because of the war.’ He said he sympathized with my motives but was sorry to inform me that my application had been rejected.”

“Why?”

“At that point, gentlemen, the man said something no mind can fathom or logic accept. He said my family might have had Frankish origins but that the Franks weren’t French: they were des francs, pas des français . Heavens above, what kind of rubbish is that? He said that the French state had not existed at the time of the crusades, which meant that the crusaders were Franks and not French. I roared with laughter and asked him if he could fix me up with a crusader passport.”