Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

To fill the silence Karim asked Abu Ahmad whether what Radwan had told him about his cleaning the tombs at the Castle of Saint-Gilles and placing flowers on them was true.

“It’s both true and untrue,” answered Abu Ahmad. He recounted that it had started with curiosity. He’d visited the tombs looking for the names of the slain and to confirm the hypothesis that his was a real crusader family. But he hadn’t found what he was looking for: the names were almost completely erased and the tombs themselves had been nearly effaced. After three days of searching Abu Ahmad had seen what seemed to him to be something like letters forming the name of his family. He said he couldn’t be sure but he “had his suspicions” and was very excited. On the morning of Eid el-Fitr, after he’d visited the tombs of his grandfather, father, and mother, he’d climbed up to the castle. “I didn’t wash down all the tombs, just the tomb of my grandsire, and I asked the Lord of the Worlds for mercy on his soul and forgiveness for his sins and those of his descendants.”

“But they’re Christians, Abu Ahmad, and Islamic law doesn’t allow that!” said Karim, borrowing Radwan’s logic.

“So what if they’re Christians? I’m a Christian too.”

“You’re a Christian? A little while ago you told me you were a Muslim, not to mention that Christians believe Christ is the son of God.”

“And so do I.”

“What?!”

“Jesus is from God’s spirit. It says so in the Koran.”

“But Christians say he was crucified, while you Muslims say, ‘They did not slay him, neither did they crucify him, only a likeness of that was shown to them.’ ”

“Correct.”

“What’s correct? You’ve lost me.”

“ ‘A likeness of that was shown to them,’ meaning they did mean to crucify him and the one they actually crucified looked so like him that his mother, Our Lady Mary, thought the crucified man was her son. Do you really think there’s a mother in the world who wouldn’t know her son? Do you get it now?”

“I get it and I don’t get it,” said Karim. “Anyway, what difference does it make to know if one’s forebears were crusaders or Arabs or Turkmen? In the end they’re all the same.”

“Right!” said Abu Ahmad. “But for one to be a descendant of the crusader hordes who occupied this land for two hundred years, and who left behind them only a few castles and a few descendants, most of whom have become Muslims — now that’s a lesson to learn from. I, my boy, am the last witness. The meaning​lessness of history is engraved on my forehead. Everyone should read my forehead to understand what a criminal history is, and how trivial.”

With this, Abu Ahmad raised his glass and started declaiming something that sounded like poetry:

O la Zerbitana retica!

Il parlar ch’ella mi dicia!

Per tutto lo mondo fendoto

e barra fuor casa mia .

O i Zerbitana retica

come ti volare parlare?

Se per li capelli prendoto

come ti voler conciare!

Cadalzi e pugne moscoto

quanti ti voler donare!

e cosi voler conciare

tutte le votre ginoie .

“What’s that?” asked Karim.

“ Tareez! Tareez! ” responded Abu Ahmad. “Silence! It’s poetry. Don’t ask me what the poem means because I don’t know. My father, God rest his soul, used to declaim it when he was drinking and made me learn the whole thing by heart.”

Abu Ahmad said he usually got up early and wanted to take Karim on a morning tour of the Castle of Saint-Gilles, “so you can smell your country’s history.”

Karim’s sleep was close to sleeplessness — a restless night in which dreams intersected with the black visions of wakefulness. The pain in his stomach was worse but he didn’t get out of bed to make a cup of “white coffee,” as Abu Ahmad had suggested to him before going to his room — Karim had refused for fear of finding himself caught up once more in a web of words. He dreamed of the orange blossom essence mixed with hot water that the Lebanese call “white coffee” and whose heartbreaking smell they love to inhale. He spent the rest of the night stretched out on this bed of drowsiness and sleeplessness, listening throughout to Abu Ahmad’s footsteps thumping in his head.

The image of Imm Yahya, covered in darkness, blended with the ghostly lights that had made shadows on Gloria’s face as she received them at her apartment. Two women living in darkness, the first blind, the second afraid of the light, each embodying the memory of oblivion. The two women occupied his night. He dreamed as though awake and lay awake as though dreaming.

The pain in his stomach mixed with the pain in his soul and Hayat was there. He saw her, her head covered with a headscarf, carrying her daughter and standing at his door while the phantom of death formed halos above her. And he saw her unveiled, love spreading out from around her, her long black hair flying in the wind. He saw Hayat’s hair covering Jamal’s eyes while Hend tugged at his hand to make him go with her.

He would open his eyes and hear the man’s footfalls, then close them again and see two small sharp eyes staring into Khaled’s face — eyes with something yellow in their whites that cut through the darkness of death. He saw death coming out of the small eyes like a pale thread of vanishing light and heard shooting and saw Khaled shaken by the spasms of the soul as it left his lacerated body.

Karim had no idea what had been dream and what apparition; he woke at six in the morning to the smell of coffee spreading through his room. He opened his eyes and felt skewers of light piercing his drowsiness and saw Abu Ahmad standing in front of him holding a coffeepot.

He closed his eyes again but Abu Ahmad’s voice called him to get up because it was already six and they had to go to the castle before he set off for Beirut.

He had begun to get out of bed when he found Abu Ahmad sitting on the edge of it, pouring two cups of coffee, and saying, “There’s nothing nicer than to drink your coffee in bed in the morning!”

Karim said he’d visited the castle many times before and there was no need to climb up again this morning as he had to go back to Beirut; but Abu Ahmad insisted. “It won’t take more than two hours. I’ll show you the tombs and then we can go down together to the Mahatra quarter and I’ll show you Mamluke Tripoli, an architectural gem, though people call it Old Tripoli, which is wrong. Old Tripoli is the port — that was the city of the Banu Ammar and the crusader city — and then we can have beans for breakfast at Akar’s and I’ll take you to el-Tall.”

“Please, don’t talk to me about food!” said Karim, rubbing his stomach, which still hurt.

Abu Ahmad was as good as his word. The visit to the Castle of Saint-Gilles took no more than two hours. They’d climbed up to it by seven a.m. and at nine fifteen were shaking hands in farewell at el-Tall in front of the long-distance taxis to Beirut. The man talked the whole time; even when they were eating their breakfast beans, Abu Ahmad found a way to talk and chew simultaneously. His words were filled with the clangor of history. He spoke of the genius of Raymond de Saint-Gilles, who had built the castle to prepare the way for the taking of the city; in this he was unique in his day because castles were usually built for defense; this, however, had been built for attack. He spoke of the effaced graves and the prisons that the Ottomans had built. He pointed out the church, which had been converted in Mamluke times into a mosque. He knew the castle inch by inch, as though he’d been born there, and he knew how the crusaders had built the only residential quarter that surrounded it. He said Tripoli had been the port and the soldiers in the castle had built the Mahatra quarter to serve their needs. “Don’t believe anyone who says they’re of crusader origin and live here. They were Arab and Turkmen servants and if they have crusader blood it’s because of droit du seigneur . The Dakiz clan is the only crusader family in Tripoli because after the massacre we fled into the surrounding fields and lived in Bahsas before returning to the port. We refused to live in the Mamluke city, which was just an extension of the servants’ quarter.”