Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

The electricity! It was enough for the electricity to come back for his black thoughts to be swept aside. Karim decided to view his life as comedy. Nothing was worth tormenting oneself over because the true nature of things was unclear. With a sudden pang of affection for his father, he had a vision of him lying dead in the middle of the living room and laughed at the meaning​lessness of it all.

He’d told Muna that the sorrows of separation were meaningless. He’d kissed her lips, which were wet with water, and laughed as he slept with her for the last time. He’d said they had to make their last time more beautiful than the first. He reminded her how shy and afraid she’d been and that the language of the body was wordless. He told her that their affair must not end in the dumbness with which it had started and made love to her before her body had time to dry, pulling the towel from her and laughing as he took her.

Muna had arrived without warning. It was seven a.m. when Karim opened the door and saw her standing there hesitantly, wearing her morning exercise clothes, which were stained with sweat. “I came to say goodbye. We’re leaving for Canada in a week.”

She went into the living room. Karim left her and went into the kitchen, put the coffeepot on the flame, and heard the shower being turned on in the bathroom.

She stood there, wearing the white towel that covered her body and left only her thin white legs visible, and said she was sad. He hadn’t asked why she was sad but had laughed and approached her and said that her wet body was the best way to say goodbye.

He turned on all the lights in the apartment and went to the kitchen, where he took a handful of zaatar, scattered it over a piece of dry bread, and devoured it.

“It’s all because I drank a lot without eating anything. It’s over. That story is finished and tomorrow, in France, there won’t be a story, there mustn’t be a story,” he thought to himself.

He’d stretched out on the couch, started to feel the creeping numbness that comes before sleep, shaken himself awake in a panic, set the alarm for four thirty a.m., and sunk into a deep sleep.

Karim Shammas was sitting impatiently in the black Mercedes taxi that was taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. All at once the sky lit up and the whistling started. The driver ducked to protect himself from the mortar shells that had begun to fall on the airport road. Suddenly the car veered off. Karim heard the screeching of the tires and felt everything shake. He closed his eyes and prepared for death. He heard the driver shout that he was going back to Beirut. He opened his eyes and asked him to keep going and get him to the airport. Then the car stopped and he heard the driver’s voice say through the screeching of the tires that he couldn’t. “If you want to go on, sir, find yourself another car. I’ve got children and I want to go home.”

Karim had a vision of himself as another person. He got out of the car, bent over the trunk, lifted out his suitcase, set off down the middle of the dusty, garbage-strewn road, and thought that he’d reached the end of the world.

This was how his Beirut adventure ended, with a ringing in his ears and a feeling that he was supporting himself with his shadow. When he caught sight of the Beirut airport building, with its ruined façade, he looked back and wept.

WHEN KARIM SHAMMAS agreed to return to Beirut for the hospital construction project, he didn’t know that the civil war, which had come to an end in Lebanon, would begin anew within him.

“The war will never end,” Mrs. Salma had said to him when she saw him in front of his father’s pharmacy on Zahret el-Ehsan Street in Beirut. When he’d seen the woman, who covered her head with a black silk scarf, coming out of the pharmacy, he had wanted to run but instead remained rooted to the spot.

The woman, who was in her fifties, approached him, gave him a contemptuous look, and asked him why he was going to France and leaving his fiancée behind.

He said he’d never been officially engaged to Hend, was tired of the war, and couldn’t take it anymore. “I’ll come back when the war’s over,” he said.

“The war will never end because it’s inside us,” said the woman. She folded her arms over her chest, bowed her head, and went her way.

And Salma was right.

The Pretty Widow, as his father called her, had said the war would never end and had entreated him to remain in Beirut. He didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. Had she asked why he was leaving his fiancée, or why he wasn’t taking her with him?

Hend had told him she didn’t want him. She hadn’t said exactly that, but she’d said she’d never go abroad and leave her mother alone in Beirut.

The problem had begun a long time before, as the love that had lasted four years began to evaporate.

“To be honest, I have no idea who you are. How can I live with a man I know nothing about?”

“But you know everything!”

“Everything means nothing,” she said.

And Hend was right: everything had turned into nothing. He’d reached Montpellier, joined the university and its associated hospital, and the picture of her that he’d placed on the table next to his bed had become a burden. He decided to put it in a drawer, where it stayed. When he finished his studies and moved from the dormitory to his new apartment, he’d left the picture in the drawer by mistake. On remembering it a week later he felt an obscure nostalgia that was swallowed up in a roar of laughter.

Bernadette had told him he used his loud laugh to hide his shyness and weakness, but he hadn’t understood. He’d thought his resounding laugh was an expression of his strong personality. That was what he’d felt during the only battle he’d fought in, at Nahr el-Bared Camp near Tripoli, when he was nineteen. He’d been in a trench opposite the mound occupied by the Lebanese army, holding a Kalashnikov, with Nabil Abu el-Halaqa lying on his stomach next to him, holding one of those big belt-fed machine guns that they call a Degtyaryov, to cover his comrade. Suddenly the bullets flew. This was nothing like the training course that Karim had taken, which had lasted fewer than ten days and hadn’t taught him how to identify the source of fire or draw up a plan to confront a possible attack on his position. Instead, he’d found himself firing wildly and laughing out loud and not noticing that his colleague’s gun had fallen silent. When the firing stopped as suddenly as it had started, he’d turned to his comrade and found him sitting bent over, moaning with pain. When Nabil announced to him that he could hold on no longer and that he had to empty his bowels, Karim burst out laughing again. “You mean you’ve shat yourself, you coward? Get up, get up! I can smell it.” But Nabil, shaking with fear, said he didn’t dare leave the trench and was so afraid of the snipers he’d had to shit right where he was.

“The smell’s everywhere!” yelled Karim. “At least cover it over, you asshole. Cats are better than you.” He burst out laughing.

Nabil would die years later in the battles for the commercial souks, his comrades recounting that he’d died because of his reckless courage — while Karim, after the experience at Nahr el-Bared, hadn’t dared to take any but a symbolic part in the fighting. That, though, is another story.

Instead of replying to his French wife that he was laughing because he didn’t care and if you don’t care, nothing can frighten you, he burst out laughing and said nothing. Everything had turned into nothing. Hend had entered a hidden space called “forgetting” and had only been reawoken the day his brother, Nasim, phoned to tell him he’d married her but hadn’t invited Karim to the wedding because Hend had refused to allow any celebrations. “She wouldn’t even agree to invite her mother and your father.” He hadn’t roared with laughter that day. That day, he’d felt choked, and a strange feeling had come over him: it was as if Nasim had stolen his life from him; as though, by staying there in Beirut, he’d taken the city from him.