Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim didn’t know why he’d thought of the verb “to be” in the past tense as he was sitting in the Boeing 707 from Paris’s Orly Airport to Beirut. He’d pictured the city, seeing it as it had been ten years ago, as though it was something from the past that couldn’t be brought back but to which he was nevertheless going back. He hadn’t said he was “going back” when he told his wife of his decision; he’d said he was going to the city to build a hospital. But he’d known he was returning to a place that no longer existed. He’d closed his eyes and seen the sentence written out before him: “Beirut was.”

When he opened his eyes inside the plane, he thought it was his wife in front of him, shaking him by the shoulder to wake him. With her extreme whiteness and small eyes, the flight attendant resembled Bernadette. She’d said the airplane was starting its descent and asked him to put his seat back in the upright position and fasten his seat belt.

When Nasim embraced him at the airport, he smelled zaatar and a shudder of nostalgia seized him. Looking at his brother he recovered the mirror image that had trailed him for so long. He had been used to seeing in his twin a likeness of himself he didn’t want to see, but never before had he smelled on him the scent of zaatar. Bernadette had told him, the morning after they met, that she could smell zaatar. He’d told her he hadn’t eaten zaatar for ages and she replied, laughing, “You’re from Lebanon. You told me you were Lebanese. That’s what the Lebanese smell like.” He’d said to her that the true smell of Lebanon was apples. “What apples?” she answered. “It’s zaatar, thym — you know the word? — and I love zaatar.”

Two men on the threshold of their forties smelling zaatar and not crying. They’d searched for things to say but had found only ready-made words, the ones said to plug the silence. They got into the black Volvo. Nasim turned on the engine and the voice of Fairuz rang out, singing, “I loved you in summer, I loved you in winter.” Nasim turned to his brother, who had returned; he’d bought the cassette for him, he said. “Do you still like her?” he asked, and before he could hear the reply said he didn’t like her anymore. “She’s become like Lebanon,” said Nasim. “Everyone says they love it, and when everyone says they love you, it means no one loves you. That’s how Lebanon is. Everyone loves it but no one loves it. Like the war, none of us likes it but we all fight, and like your father, God rest his soul …”

“Don’t talk about Father like that,” said Karim.

“Why? What do you know?”

“What is it I don’t know? I don’t understand.”

“All in good time.”

What strange reception was this? Had his brother asked him to come to Lebanon so he could humiliate him and settle old scores? Karim thought the whole thing had been laid to rest once and for all when Nasim married Hend. On the phone he’d wanted to tell his brother that he’d won in the end, but he’d choked on the words.

Karim didn’t want to reopen old accounts, but why then had he returned to Beirut?

How would Hend take his return? “In the end the dog won and bought us both,” he would tell her later.

“He only bought because you sold,” she answered.

The July sun burned the city’s asphalt. Karim felt he too was burning. But he didn’t ask his brother where he was taking him. He’d been certain he was going to his father’s apartment, but the car passed the pharmacist’s shop at the bottom of the building and kept going.

“Hend’s waiting for us. She’s got a glass of arak and some mezze ready for you.”

“I’m tired. Let me go to the apartment, and we can have dinner together tomorrow.”

“Your mother-in-law has made kibbeh nayyeh just for you and she’s waiting for you at home.”

“My mother-in-law!”

“She was your mother-in-law, now she’s mine. What’s the problem?”

The conversation had got off to a bad start. Karim hadn’t come to settle old scores or to see the pleasure of revenge on his younger brother’s face. He didn’t know why he’d come, but he did want to open a new page in his life, or so at least he’d persuaded himself. While practicing on the camera he’d bought by taking pictures of his two daughters, he’d told his wife he wanted to devour Beirut with his eyes, to photograph it and apologize to it, to love it all over again. In his wife’s eyes he’d read the words she’d kept repeating to him since their first encounter: “You’re romantic and sentimental.” Now the words had taken on a new meaning. In that distant past, which seemed to Karim to belong to another time, she’d laugh and say “romantic” with lust fluttering in her eyes. Now the word came out dry and bitter.

They’d drunk the arak and eaten the kibbeh in a silence from which they were rescued only by the racket and naughtiness of the children.

Hend said nothing. Her mother, Salma, swathed in black, seemed a different woman. When Karim entered the apartment and she embraced him, he noted the black that covered her legs, mounting from there to cover everything else. She was wearing thick nylon stockings and the black enveloped her knees and thighs, and she looked like the widow she was.

Salma hadn’t stopped wearing black since her husband had died prematurely from a clot in the brain, leaving her with a single daughter and a small sum of money that he’d put together from his work on an afforestation project in Abu Dhabi. All the same, this beautiful white-skinned woman had succeeded in making her dresses signposts to the shining whiteness that radiated from her thighs and wrists. A year after her husband’s death, she’d removed the black stockings but she had never stopped wearing black. When Karim met her for the first time, at his father’s pharmacy, he’d been astonished by her beauty and had seen the smile of triumph that was Nasri Shammas’s way of proclaiming a new female conquest. When he met her later at her apartment on his first visit to Hend, he felt a secret frisson run through his body and compared the frankness of her gaze, backed by desire, with the meekness in Hend’s small eyes, her dainty body, and her brownness that glowed as though it had imbibed the sun.

The powdered sugar that seemed to glisten on Salma’s thighs where they burst out from beneath her short dress, split above the knee, had quickly vanished, however: the woman put an end to the young man’s doubts by speaking, somewhat contemptuously, of his father’s magic herbal remedies that made plants burst with life. Karim had been convinced that his father was making up his love stories to fill his solitude and stave off old age — until the day when his brother had opened a drawer where Nasri had kept the pictures hidden. Upon seeing them, Karim had been overwhelmed by a mixture of disgust and sadness.

Why do we laugh at lovers’ tales when we do the same sorts of things ourselves? Love should never be disclosed to other people because others can accept it only when they are themselves its heroes. He felt revulsion toward his father but pity for himself. How and to whom was he to tell his own story with Ghazala, which had ended in something worse than a scandal? How was he to speak of his conflicting feelings, of his heart that kept changing course and taking him off to he knew not where?

He thought of an ancient verse and smiled. Suddenly, with the return of the electricity, the apartment burst into light. He heard the hum of the refrigerator, saw himself sitting on the couch holding an empty glass of whiskey, and realized he was ridiculous. He refilled his glass and said out loud,

M-a-n is so called for his a-m-n-esia ,

The heart for its constant inconstancy .