Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He’d left Hend because he hadn’t been able to tell her about the fear that had unstrung his joints after the killing of Khaled Nabulsi, and because he’d become aware that their love, which he’d thought would last forever, had been wiped out in a single instant. It was only during his coughing fit, as he listened to his brother telling him over the phone that he’d married Hend, that he’d rediscovered the choking feeling that used to fill his throat whenever she left him to go back home.

“You told me Sinalcol was from Tripoli, right?”

“…”

“I must tell Ahmad. It’s got to be lingua franca.”

“What?”

“Lingua franca.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the language of the last remaining crusaders. Someday Ahmad can tell you about his grandfather and father. I can’t tell stories.”

“Forget about lingua franca and all that crap. When we were young there was a fizzy drink called ‘Sinalco,’ a patriotic imitation of Coke, and I remember it was good. It tasted a bit like tamarind, but I don’t know why it disappeared. Probably the company went broke.”

“And the factory was in Tripoli, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“The company doesn’t matter,” said Muna. “I’m talking about the man. If he was from Tripoli he must have taken the word from there and not had the soda pop company in mind. Soon you’ll hear the true story and you’ll see I’m right.”

Muna put on her glasses and looked at him as a teacher might at her students. She asked him to stop talking about the subject because it wasn’t his field of specialization. Her voice had the condescension and arrogance of women teachers’ voices, so he could find nothing to say except that she treated him like a schoolteacher, that she was incapable of forgetting her profession, and “God help your husband!”

Later Karim would go to Tripoli, hear the story from Ahmad, drink lemonade with ice cream in front of the Dakiz Mosque, meet Mr. Abd el-Malek, Ahmad’s father, and hear from him the strangest tale imaginable. He’d discover through the man’s secret language that war, which he’d believed from Danny’s teaching to be “the engine of history,” used people so that it could grind them up and treated them as means to an end. For history was just a wild beast with an unquenchable thirst for the blood of its victims.

What he didn’t know was what was happening to him now and why he felt this incurable fragility, and why he found himself stuck once more in that old feeling that he was part of another man, or formed, along with that other, a single individual with two heads.

At primary school his favorite game with his brother had been what they called “the four eyes game.” They’d stand back to back and watch the school playground from in front and behind. They didn’t need to exchange information because what one of them saw would be transmitted wordlessly to the other’s consciousness. Nasim had invented the game and it was his means of defending his brother, who, because of his weak build, was constantly getting beaten up. This way the younger brother could put a stop to the attacks to which his brother was subject. Karim’s continual persecution by a boy called Michel Aql had to do with the lady teacher, whom Michel accused him of being in love with, saying that that was why Karim did better than him in French. This Michel was the leader of a gang of boys and challenged Karim for first place in the class and always failed. The charge against Karim was that he was soft on his teacher, Madam Olga Naddaf, who did indeed return his affection with tenderness and concern. She was a woman in her early thirties, white and full without being fat, with wide black eyes, a small tip-tilted nose, lips as thin as if drawn with a pen, a brow that radiated light, always dressed in white. The students called her Madam Bride because she wore white to school every day, as though she owned white dresses for every season.

For a whole year the French teacher dwelled in Karim’s eyes. The boy wished she would take off her glasses so he could see himself in the mirrors of her eyes. When Muna told him her husband used the word “mirrors” to refer to glasses, he burst out laughing. She said this term, and many like it, were part of the secret lexicon of the Dakiz family. “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” he told her. “You’re distorting the language. The Tunisians also call glasses mirrors.” He told her he’d found this out in Paris when by coincidence he met the Watermelon, as he used to call her after he forgot her name.

Why did memories rain down on him in Beirut, and what did it mean when things which forgetfulness had secreted away kept popping up again from some hidden place of whose very existence he had been unaware?

Now it was the Watermelon, reappearing like a ghost. Karim found himself incapable of understanding the relationship between past and present. It was as though memory gave everything a ghostlike cast; as though, rather than remembering himself, he was seeing another person who resembled him.

When he ran into her in Paris she’d asked after his father, who, she recounted, had turned up the day after they’d all had lunch together. She said his father had been waiting for her in the foyer of the hotel, had caught sight of her, and walked with her to the dining room, where they’d had breakfast together. She’d said she was in a hurry because she had to catch a flight. He offered to drive her to the airport. He’d gone upstairs with her to her room on the excuse of helping her to pack her bags, and slept with her.

This had been at the beginning of Karim’s relationship with politics. He’d entered the American University in Beirut to study medicine and the storm in his head had begun. There he met young members of the Fatah movement and his relationship with the organizations of the Lebanese Left that called for armed struggle started.

The Tunisian woman was thirty. Brown and full, with shining eyes and a laughing, radiant face. He’d met her at a conference in support of the Palestinian cause organized by the student council at AUB. She was working for a Tunisian underground paper put out by the Trotskyites called Perspectif .

She gave a lecture on the Tunisian fighters during the 1948 war and mentioned a man from Sfax whose oral witness she said she had recorded and was going to publish in a book. She said he’d gone from Tunisia to Palestine on foot via Libya and the Sinai Desert. She said the Egyptian army had arrested him in Falouja and the man had spent four years in Egyptian prisons before being released and making his way back to his country. The Tunisian woman had held the audience spellbound. Karim didn’t know how he found himself next to her. It was eight p.m. and the darkness of the humid June evening was advancing down Bliss Street. She asked him to show her to a restaurant and they walked for innumerable hours on the Corniche after buying falafel sandwiches. He told her she was a free woman and she laughed. “What does free mean?” she asked. He said it meant being emancipated like the women of Europe. She said it was the Revolution that had emancipated her. By the time they got to the Inter​continental Hotel in the Rawsheh district he’d taken her hand. When they reached the hotel entrance and it seemed that Karim was determined to go up with her to her room she said she was tired and he was still too young for such things.

He invited her to lunch the next day. She said she would accept his invitation on condition that he took her to his family home because she wanted to eat home-cooked Lebanese food, and, “Don’t forget, we’re cousins: we’re both descendants of Elissa the Phoenician.” He didn’t dare tell her no one cooked in his house because his mother was dead. He decided not to tell his father, who didn’t eat at home in the middle of the day anyway, and to get his brother out of the way so he could be alone with the woman, who was ten years older than him.