Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Abd el-Malek Dakiz was a philosopher — that was how the man introduced himself. He’d completed a huge work in three parts on the crusades but hadn’t been able to find a publisher. People told him Amin Maalouf had beaten him to it with his story of those wars, and that after his book The Crusades through Arab Eyes , no one was going to be interested in Abd el-Malek’s work. Abd el-Malek was convinced there was a conspiracy to prevent him from publishing his book. When he asked his son Ahmad to get him an appointment with Rafiq Hariri so he could try to get a subsidy to help him publish it, his son had wormed his way out of it using various excuses. “The worst thing is feeling that your own son is embarrassed by you,” said Abu Ahmad as he explained to Karim that his book was different from all the others because it dealt with history only as a point of entry to a discussion of life; he’d discovered from studying the history of his family that there was a mismatch between history and life. Daily life was full of noble qualities but history was frivolous, repetitious, bloody, and mad.

Karim had arrived at the Ash’ash Café to find the elderly man sitting there waiting for him, smoking a narghile. It had occurred to Karim that his prevarications with Sheikh Radwan had been a mistake. He would have done better to agree to what he wanted from the start and avoid the visit to Imm Yahya and the pain that he’d felt when he saw the woman in such a state. Karim felt his every limb was hurting and found the torment of memory unendurable. Why was he going to spend the night here in the home of this madman whom he didn’t even know? And could his soul find room for yet more stories?

At the same time, but from a different perspective, he felt, with a vehemence he found difficult to explain, that he should refuse to give the papers to Sheikh Radwan. The papers were just like Jamal’s. They had become his personal memory and no longer had any general significance, so why should he let Sheikh Radwan distort them? Jamal’s papers were still with him. True, because of the chaos that had overwhelmed Fatah following Abu Jihad’s assassination, no one had asked him for them. But what if someone were to ask him for them today so they could be published — and supposing they were modified and their contents played around with and her picture put on the cover with her hair — which, the last time he’d seen it, in her posters, had been flying in the wind — hidden from sight by an Islamic headscarf and with a frown in place of her laughing eyes, would he then hand over her papers?

What should he do with the papers? Should he leave them to turn yellow and disintegrate in the drawer? Did the Islamists, now the rising power, not have as much right to take control of their past as the leftists had had in their day when they’d made a turbaned sheikh and warrior like Izz el-Din Qassam an icon of the class struggle?

Though he had stolen nothing, Karim felt as frightened as a thief. Khaled had placed his trust in one who didn’t deserve it, true, but that was Khaled’s fault not Karim’s and he wasn’t about to give the papers to Radwan now, whatever the cost, even if they killed him. He would give them nothing. He would preserve them and let them disintegrate and disappear in silence into the frivolousness and meaning​lessness of history of which Ahmad’s father had spoken.

Karim came to his decision as he sat in the café drinking lemonade and smoking a narghile next to the elderly man, who kept up an unstoppable flow of stories, none of which Karim heard.

He decided he’d pretend he hadn’t been able to find the papers. He’d phone Sheikh Radwan on Thursday morning and postpone the appointment because he hadn’t been able to locate them — and then let whatever happened happen. The decision was made.

Karim became aware that Abd el-Malek Dakiz was shaking him by the shoulder as though waking him from a coma, and saying that Gloria was waiting for them.

“Who’s Gloria?” asked Karim.

“I’ve been telling you about her for the past hour. What? Were you asleep? She’s the daughter of my father’s paternal uncle who knows the crusader language. We’ll go and see her for quarter of an hour and then we can go to my place. I’ve ordered a little grilled meat to go with the drink.”

“I’m stuffed. I couldn’t eat more.”

“Up with you, man. ‘The key to the belly is a morsel of food,’ as they say. The woman is waiting for us.”

Karim had never imagined that his night in Tripoli would be spent between two women, the first senile, or pretending to be so to escape Sheikh Radwan and his demands, the second insane and believing herself to be the last guardian of a language that had never existed.

“I’m tired, uncle. Let’s put Gloria off till tomorrow.”

Abd el-Malek explained that the woman was waiting for them, had phoned the café a few minutes before to say the tea was hot, and that he’d promised.

Karim rose sluggishly and went to the apartment, which exuded the smell of all closed apartments. The woman never opened the windows or the thick green curtains because she hated the sun. She told Karim her body had never been able to stand the sun and that even though all her life she’d worn long dresses closed at the neck with sleeves that covered her arms, the sun still burned her and left red spots on her skin, “and now the allergy has spread to my eyes. I can’t see at all in the daylight and I use only nightlights in the apartment.”

Abd el-Malek explained to her that his guest was a specialist in the crusader period and was interested in finding out about the language of the crusaders.

Gloria, who attached much importance to the title “Mademoiselle,” poured the tea, saying her memory wasn’t of much use to her now. She looked at Abu Ahmad and said he was responsible for the loss of the language because he’d promised her lots of times he’d come and record the words she knew and publish them as a special appendix to his book on the crusaders. “You, Abu Ahmad, are afflicted with the family disease, whose name is sloth!”

Abu Ahmad looked at her and said, “ Cando mi intrate fi beit abusch, falso .”

Mademoiselle Gloria answered him, laughing, “ I barra fuor casa mio .”

Then he said, “ Gramerze cater ala cairech .”

“Did you understand what we were saying?” asked Abu Ahmad.

“I understood a few words. It sounds like Latin with Spanish and Italian,” said Karim.

“And Arabic. The most important part is the Arabic. This is the language of our ancestors. I know a few words but Gloria speaks it like a songbird. What a waste of the woman! She has a talent for languages. I have to get back to my work on the book because without me she’s mamamouchi . I swear, my boy, I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve made me feel alive again with your interest in culture. You should have been my son instead of Ahmad. Ahmad doesn’t have time for anything. All he wants to do is emigrate so he can make money.”

At his apartment Abu Ahmad prepared two glasses of local arak, saying it was much better than the commercial arak they’d drunk at the restaurant. “This is triple-distilled homemade arak.”

Karim didn’t eat any of the food — he felt a slight pain in his stomach — but he couldn’t not join Abu Ahmad in drinking the arak because he didn’t want to upset him.

Silence reigned, as though the elderly man had emptied his quiver with the effort he’d expended in trying to speak a strange language. Karim guessed it wasn’t a proper language but the remnants of spoken dialects that had formed a primitive means of communication among the hordes of Frankish warriors arriving from various parts of the world on the one hand, and the original Arab inhabitants of the land on the other.