Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He left wishing he hadn’t made the visit. He’d been ready for anything, but it had never crossed his mind that Salma would bring an end to the story of his return to Beirut with such a dismal scene — a woman of sixty-five out at night on her balcony, throwing her flowerpots onto the street; the falling flowerpots sounding like shells exploding, but not one of the neighbors daring to stick his head out the window to find out what’s going on. The city, having donned the raiment of fear, had curled up on itself, retreating into a shell of stupor resembling death. Everything in it had been transformed into a silence interspersed with hoarse voices, the symptoms of an endless death agony.

Like one sinking toward his death — such now was Karim Shammas as he bent to lift his suitcase out of the trunk of the black Mercedes taxi that had been taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. His watch said five thirty a.m., and the Beirut dawn was tinted with darkness and dust. It had rained the day before. Beirut’s spring had arrived, carried upon the sound of thunder, the thunder blending in turn with the sound of the intermittent shelling that roamed aimlessly around the city.

The man, who had just entered his forty-first year, had found it impossible to sleep. He had sat on the couch in the living room, yawned, and waited for dawn to the rhythm of the thunder and the rain.

He sat there alone in the darkness of his soul and decided to rewrite his story. He poured a glass of whiskey, placed a plate of roasted salted almonds before him, and darkness enveloped him. The electricity was cut, the light of the candle shuddered, turning objects into ghosts, and Karim drank the whiskey without ice, feeling his stomach burn.

“It’s like the end of the world,” Karim said out loud, addressing the dark.

Ghazala had told him that her grandmother, Ghazala, had once described to her the Last Day. The end of the world wouldn’t take the form of volcanoes and earthquakes, it would be calm and full of mirrors.

Ghazala the grandmother lived in constant awareness of the Ghazalas who had been and would be her, but her sorrow at not having been reincarnated in her beautiful granddaughter, in whom she had seen her own longed-for mirror, was great.

The grandmother had lived in that distant village to the rhythm of the meaning of death and the infinite possibilities of recurrence. She’d said that she remembered nothing of her previous life, and that she hadn’t spoken of it because she’d died a natural death. “For the soul to remember a person, that person must die violently.” She’d told her granddaughter Ghazala that she hoped she would die a violent death, for those who die that way, when reborn, speak during childhood of their former life. Then they become absorbed into their new lives, take on new roles, and their memories are erased.

“People forget all the time, which is why they’re able to start over again and become someone else. Inside each of us, my daughter, there is another person. That’s why we are ourselves and not ourselves. The person we are we forget, and the person we aren’t becomes us. Woe to us, though, on the Last Day! On that day, my daughter, on that day, a person discovers his true self.”

The grandmother said Sheikh Rateb had told her a secret that his grandfather had told him. She said the sheikh had chosen her: “He told me he’d chosen me and I didn’t understand what he was saying, he was talking proper Arabic, the way he did. When he was talking about religion he’d talk in that special tongue. He said proper Arabic was the language of the soul and when we want to talk about the soul we should speak the chaste language. I can’t repeat what I heard the way I heard it but what I can say, my daughter, is God save us from that hour, because everyone will see before them all the human forms that they have taken and remember everything. Each will have a thousand and one memories that exist in the body that the soul wears on its way to that terrible day, and each person will become a thousand persons and no longer know who they are.”

The grandmother said that after hearing this story from Sheikh Rateb she’d no longer set much store by life. “He was sitting in front of me the way you’re sitting in front of me now and suddenly I felt he was drowning. The water started flowing around and about him. ‘What’s happening to you, man?’ I said. And he said to me, ‘You still have much to see.’ I told him it wasn’t right, ‘You’re sweating too much.’ He told me, ‘That’s the sign. When you come close to the secret, the secret swallows you up and you melt into it. This is what I’ve been waiting for for a long time,’ and he started, my dear, I can’t say how, to melt. He seemed to get smaller and then he closed his eyes. I moved closer to him. He was pale and cold and the sweat that had covered him had dried, or disappeared.”

The grandmother said that from that day on she had trembled in panic at the thought of the resurrection. “Reincarnation is a fact, my daughter. It’s the way life is. A person takes off one garment to put on another in its place. The body is the garment and the soul forgets and only at that instant remembers, and then the person becomes all the people through whom his soul has passed. Imagine yourself, daughter: you’re young and old, highborn lady and peasant woman, pretty and ugly, brown and white, sighted and blind, in good health and sick, sound and lame, decent and debauched, lover and beloved, coddled child and orphan, sad and happy, mother and daughter. Imagine yourself at that instant. You’ll see yourself and discover you are all these, and that the one has been divided and must now be united once more, and then suddenly that one sees before him a thousand individuals and each individual is he and he can no longer tell who he is and where the truth lies. At that instant the one truth is made manifest, the one that doesn’t change and is never exchanged, and the person discovers that all of him is false. That’s how the resurrection comes, and that’s how a person’s story with his own story comes to an end.”

Ghazala said her grandmother was sweating as she spoke, the sweat pouring from her face, eyes, neck, and head. Her white hair, tied in a bun at the back, was dripping water, as though she had bathed in herself without water. She said she couldn’t distinguish between her grandmother’s sweat and her tears. “I told her, ‘It’s not right, Grandmother. You’re sweating too much.’ ‘Me?’ she asked. I felt her face, hands, and hair and she began to tremble. ‘It’s the Hour,’ she said; she said she was afraid and didn’t want to die. And she started, I can’t say how, to melt. She seemed to get smaller and then she closed her eyes. I moved closer to her. She was pale and cold and the sweat that had covered her had dried, or disappeared.”

Ghazala said her grandmother had died in front of her, and whenever she thought of her death her saliva dried up and she developed a fever.

They were sitting naked in bed when she told him her grandmother’s story. She’d looked at him with sad eyes and said she felt she’d begun to sweat, the water was covering her, and she was going to die. Karim burst out laughing and said she was as lively as a monkey and nothing was going to happen to her.

“I shouldn’t have told you all that. I know you don’t believe in these things and you’re going to laugh at me. I don’t know what came over me to make me tell you. It’s the secret of life. You’ve made me betray myself and my secrets. Damn me, what a fool I am!”

She got dressed and left, then disappeared behind the story of her love for Azab, and all that followed …

On his last Beirut night, in the middle of the darkness and fear, Karim believed that semi-illiterate woman who had told him her secret.