Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

No one had had any idea that Nasri was nearly blind. Nasim had assumed his father’s personal dirtiness was a result of old age. Only Salma knew but she told no one.

“Oh my God!” screamed Hend. “You mean I killed him without realizing what I was doing?”

“I’m the one who killed him,” said Salma, weeping.

“No one killed him,” said Nasim. “His oil ran out so he died. Weird you’d believe his stories after everything he did to you. God have mercy on his soul and ours, full stop. I don’t want to hear about this business again from anyone!”

KARIM HAD HAD to explain matters to Hend and make her understand why he’d turned his back on their four-year relationship. He’d said love had ended when he was left with no alternative but to emigrate to France. But he’d lied; or, let us say, he’d tried to tell her the truth without actually telling it, meaning he’d tried to be kind so as not to hurt her feelings.

Stories don’t end, they go to sleep, and what sleeps may wake at any moment, or never wake at all.

By adding new stories Beirut had awakened all stories. Karim would lose his new gamble because in fact he hadn’t gambled. He’d found himself on his way back to Beirut, so he’d gone back.

Karim had thought Hend’s story had ended when he met Jamal at the Baissour Camp in Tyre in 1976, but it hadn’t. It had taken another course and become a sort of safe haven for the young man who felt the civil war was shaking the foundations of everything meaningful to his existence. Jamal wasn’t a love story, she was an attempt to climb the ropes of the impossible, to catch the flashes of lightning that fell from her eyes as she looked upon things Karim was incapable of seeing.

He’d never dared tell anyone the truth of his feelings for Jamal. How could he, when he was so unsure of everything? Had he loved her? Or had he believed he’d loved her only when he read fragments from her diaries?

Reading Jamal’s diaries after her death, Karim discovered that words bear many meanings. As he gathered up his sorrows and tried to write the story of the Palestinian girl who had led a suicide mission on the coastal road between Haifa and Tel Aviv, he fashioned himself a love story out of a rubble of words in which Jamal entered his memory as phrases strewn over tattered pages.

Strange are the dead! They occupy the gaps in our imagination and become like ghosts playing with our memories. Karim told himself the reason was that moment of loss which he’d continued to relive since the phone call from his brother inviting him back to Beirut for a hospital construction project.

He’d agreed and beheld before him the dead.

He’d seen Nasri falling to the floor, his eyes opening onto the death that had petrified within them.

He’d seen Khaled, his eyes rubbed out by death, falling like a mighty boulder under the hail of bullets that ripped his body to pieces.

He’d seen Jamal’s eyes like two points of light on the ship of death. She’d left before him the fragments of words which he designated “diaries”; she had departed without turning to look back.

He’d seen and not seen; he’d felt unable to resist the lure of a city which had turned into a mysterious smell that emanated from time to time from his memory, making him dizzy.

He told Bernadette that the smell of memory made him dizzy.

Bernadette hadn’t been able to understand why the man had decided to return to Beirut for the sake of a project that would never be realized.

She’d told him his project was impossible: “The hospital will never be built and the girls and I will never go to Beirut.”

Bernadette said she should have realized from the time of their wedding night that he was a man who lived in the imagination and fashioned truths from his illusions.

She spoke of his coughing, which never stopped when he was in bed, and the noises he made while asleep as though he were speaking classical Arabic.

Why did the doors of hell open at the end, and what did “the end” mean?

Things had started to take a different turn when Nasim had phoned his brother to inform him he was marrying Hend. Before Karim could come out with the word “Congratula​tions!” he heard the name and the words turned to lumps in his throat and he started to cough. Later he’d discover that words die when a person chokes on them. The cough that would never stop had begun that day. The Lebanese doctor went to a French throat specialist, only to discover that what he had wasn’t an ailment but what they call “psychosomatic.” He didn’t know how to tell Bernadette about this psychological disease that had come to an end only when he’d returned to Beirut. In fact, the problem was only manifest at home, where he became incapable of talking with his wife and daughters. The moment he opened his mouth to speak, the cough would begin, the words would turn to stone, and he’d feel he was choking.

He had no idea what had happened. Bernadette and the little girls, Nadine and Lara, filled his life. He’d decided to forget that other country. He’d buried his body in the Frenchwoman’s white body and had forgotten everything. He’d even begun dreaming in French. During the first days of their love he told her she was his homeland. Bernadette couldn’t understand the obsession of this Arab, whose appetite for her body never waned, with homelands. He’d make love to her as though clinging to her for safety, feeling her body with his fingertips and not closing his eyes the way men do when making love to a woman, and when he was done he’d sit naked on the bed, listen to the songs of Fairuz, and grow melancholy.

In Beirut, Bernadette disappeared from the screen of his consciousness as though she’d been erased. There, amid the ruins of the city, he felt as though his French life had been just a dream and that by returning to his city he was rediscovering the young man he’d left behind to wander, lost, through Beirut’s corridors of fear.

Grudgingly, Bernadette had agreed. She said she knew him well and that the six months he was going to spend in Beirut would only add new disappointment to his life.

She said she understood him and knew his heart would burn with longing for Nadine and Lara; he’d discover again how much he loved them and wouldn’t be able to live without them.

Bernadette was right, for this woman with the blue eyes wreathed in love and tenderness knew how to read his feelings.

She loved him when love came and treated him like a child when she sensed he was lost in his new land. She was harsh with him when he went too far in derision of his former life. She had extended toward him a bridge that would allow him to make peace with himself.

She told him that that was love.

Love isn’t desire, that comes and goes. Love is the warmth of safety, the enjoyment of secret understandings, the pleasure of discovering life through the eyes of children.

She left her job at the hospital to devote her time to the house and her two daughters, and decided to be nothing but the wife of this man who excited her with his contradictions. She loved in him his vacillation between an illusory manliness which he pretended and a shy femininity that overwhelmed him whenever he came face to face with life’s difficulties and upsets.

In Beirut, Bernadette was erased but the longing for his little ones grew in his guts. He would get up from sleep to the sound of their crying and, on finding himself in Beirut, go sadly back to sleep, resolving to call them early the following morning before they went to school.

But in that accursed city the telephones did not work.

And when the project had fallen apart altogether, to the rhythm of Radwan’s voice and his threats, he’d felt that all he wanted was to return to Montpellier to embrace his white-skinned wife and breathe in the smell of their first love.