Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

The ghost of the Lebanese director filled his imagination once more when he read fragments of the story of his horrible death following his fall into the stairwell of the building in which he was living in Beirut, close to the Tabaris roundabout, as he prepared to shoot his new movie.

Karim told his wife that his friend Maroun’s death had transformed him into a hero because, basically, Maroun was confused about whether to be a hero or a director. The hero’s role had selected him for killing, and the story he’d written had devoured him.

He was taken aback to hear Bernadette asking him about the blond woman.

“What woman?” Karim asked.

“I was told a mysterious woman was with him the night he died and I wouldn’t rule out foul play.”

“Where do you get all this information?”

She said she’d become more Lebanese than he and knew the Lebanese news in detail while all he cared about was eating tabbouleh.

He told her such thoughts came from her reading of crime novels and that Lebanon wasn’t right for crime novels.

She said that was precisely Lebanon’s problem, because when crime novels become a possibility it means the country has succeeded in separating crime from its social environment, but “you people live crime without realizing.”

She asked him why he’d used the word “friend” when talking of Maroun Baghdadi. “Was he really your friend?”

Karim said he’d met Maroun twice in Beirut at the apartment of a man called Danny, where they used to discuss Marxism, and that Maroun hadn’t been interested in such discussions. He’d kept joking around and flirting with the girls. Then he met him in Montpellier and had been sure that Maroun wouldn’t recognize him, which was in fact what happened because the director was preoccupied with a beautiful black girl who’d come with Talal, the Lebanese student who’d invited him to the restaurant.

“So he wasn’t your friend,” said Bernadette.

“He was sort of a friend,” he replied.

“Everything’s ‘sort of’ with you. I can’t make you out anymore. You say you love Lebanon but you won’t let us visit it, tremble when you talk about your brother, and don’t want us to get to know your family. Your father died and you didn’t go to Beirut. I don’t know you.”

He told her no one knew anyone. “You think I know myself to start with, that I should open for you the gateways to knowledge? No one knows himself because an individual is a forest covered with a tent and the tent is all secrets and the secrets are attached to one’s skin.”

“But you’re a skin doctor,” she said.

He told her the secret of the medical profession was the patients. It was up to the patient to be convinced that the doctor knows; only then could the doctor practice his profession. “In other words the doctor is an assumption not an absolute truth. If you believe him, you’ll be cured. If you don’t, there’s nothing he can do.”

Bernadette said he was talking about magic, not medicine: “But you’re a failed magician, the proof being that your magic hasn’t worked on me for a long time.”

He tried to tell her about Nasri, who’d played around with chemistry till it killed him. The old man must certainly have taken his own Green Potion and sat waiting at the shop, but his newest victim — let’s call her Najat — never came, or never took the potion. He waited a long time and when he got sick of waiting he went to Salma’s apartment, but Salma wasn’t at home, or didn’t open the door, so he found himself making his way to his son’s apartment to die.

Did Nasri try to rape Hend, or did he appear so strange that he scared the woman into kicking him to the ground, with the result that seven days later he died?

Karim had thought the story of the search for his father’s killers didn’t concern him and wasn’t what had brought him to Lebanon, and that he ought to forget the whole thing. The hospital project had been an appropriate occasion for him to return to the scene of that crime of his of which no one knew anything, and in which he’d participated unknowingly — or at least unaware of the devastating impact of his indecisiveness, which had compelled Khaled Nabulsi to leave him to go to meet his end in Tripoli. But Khaled would have gone in any case. The man had seen his death as inescapable and gone to it and the whole thing had nothing to do with Karim.

Khaled was authentic and the authentic have no choice but to die. He, on the other hand, was the imaginary Sinalcol, just a ghost who didn’t exist and who left no footprints on the ground. That was why he’d decided to be a brother to the real Sinalcol.

He’d said he was looking for Sinalcol and had convinced himself he was. The name pleased Muna, who laughed a lot as she drank white wine with him and listened to the story of what he called his “spiritual twin” who had passed through the ancient quarters of Tripoli like a ghost, then disappeared leaving neither track nor sign.

“Are you serious, his name was Sinalcol?” Muna asked.

“That’s what they say but how should I know? Danny told me about him when we went to work with the Qubbeh neighborhood group in Tripoli, and then Khaled Nabulsi, God have mercy on his remains, tried to kill him because he’d earned himself a bad reputation, which reflected poorly on the Revolution. But he failed. Then Khaled died and I went to France and took Sinalcol with me.”

“Who were Danny and Khaled?”

“They were my comrades in arms.”

“Where are they now?”

“One’s dead and the other’s living as though he were dead,” said Karim.

“And Sinalcol?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead too but I haven’t heard anything about him. I’m going to Tripoli soon to ask about him.”

“So you’re the only one left. It’s the scallywags who make old bones!” she said.

“No, I’m alive because I took off. Death passed close by me but by a miracle I escaped.”

He’d wanted to tell her he hadn’t returned to Lebanon because of the hospital but to look for Sinalcol, and for what remained of what he’d lived through in Tripoli during the war. It had been his greatest experience of life and of death and in that city he’d discovered that life has no meaning: that people invent meanings to be able to accept the idea of their death.

Still, he’d said nothing to this woman who’d come to him from he knew not where, and with whom he’d started a relationship designed to make him forget the wound through which the story of his fling with Ghazala had bled away. Now, sitting with Muna, he could feel the tingle of blood flowing through his veins once more but he was just distracting himself with a relationship, which Muna had given him to understand could never be anything but ephemeral, from a love story that had inspired in him embarrassingly simpleminded emotions. In transitory relationships you have to lie: they’re like a story that you have to write and whose features you have to draw, not one in which you can play the hero. Heroes are stupid or, let’s say, they believe, and when you believe you take a beating. He was a hero with Ghazala. He’d believed the passion, only to discover that he’d been taken for the biggest ride of his life. With Muna, though, things were clear and didn’t need thinking about. He had to talk to fill the gaps in the imagination created by desire. This didn’t mean he was against love. On the contrary, ever since he’d begun to feel that his marriage was slipping away from him and taking on a form that had room only for repetition, he’d been living in hope of a new great love. That was how he’d lived his ephemeral relationships in the distant French city. But when Ghazala’s story ended he’d realized that love was the victim of contradictory expectations, or a misunder​standing based on two different points of view.