Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Why had Karim’s life been turned upside down when he met Danny at the American University in Beirut?

In Beirut, Karim phoned Danny and they went together to the Sporting Club restaurant, where they drank arak and ate fried fish. Danny seemed to have aged. He walked with a limp as a result of an injury to a spinal disc that had forced him to undergo two unsuccessful operations, and now he walked bent to the right.

Karim could sum up the Lebanese Civil War in two names: Sinalcol and Khaled Nabulsi. He had no idea exactly how the fates had led him to Tripoli, but the proximate cause was Danny, the tall philosophy teacher who was the leader of a Fatah student cell.

Danny deserved a novel to himself. He remained lodged in Karim’s imagination as a character of fantasy. He told Bernadette that people who become a part of ourselves lose their reality and become like the heroes of novels, of whom we remember only the shining image.

Had Karim returned to Lebanon to put a red rose on Khaled’s grave or to search for Sinalcol, as he claimed? Or had he concocted the story to justify a return that had no cause other than a mysterious nostalgia for a past which Karim knew in his depths had gone, and which would never come back?

Karim had phoned Danny because he was the last friend he had left in Beirut. He wanted to ask him about Khaled and Radwan and the rest of their friends.

Karim had no idea why he’d fashioned a story for himself when there was no story to fashion. His relationship to the war didn’t call for any such implacable sense of belonging. But when he found himself alone in France he’d made a mirror of the war to superimpose upon the mirror of the story of his family, which invoked in him nothing but feelings of loneliness and humiliation.

Karim had smiled on seeing the panic that traced itself on Bernadette’s face as he described to her the business of “the mirror of war.”

She said she could no longer understand why he’d placed that thick wall between himself and his father and brother. She said that at first she’d believed it had to do with the trauma of war, and she hadn’t asked for details because she respected his sorrow and his silence.

He’d only told her of his mother and her eyes, opened onto death, a few fragments about his confusing relationship with his twin brother, and his story with the Greek prostitute who’d taught him the meaning of sex. He’d said she should read him as a blank page bearing a few nearly meaningless scrawls, and that he was starting his life anew, as though he hadn’t had one before meeting her.

But that day he came to her, stifling his cough, to tell her he was going to Beirut not just to build a hospital but because he wanted to see what had happened to the mirror of the Lebanese war that he had superimposed upon the mirror of his own life.

He’d been unable to explain to his wife the meaning of the expression, which seemed just a hollow metaphor, like those repeated by the heroes who dominate the screen in French films about the Second World War.

Karim was convinced that his metaphor was as hollow as his life, for he was sure of nothing. His memory presented itself in the form of black spots out of which emerged the phantom of a man who looked like him and in whom truth was mixed up with its look-alikes, so that he resembled a man stumbling over his own shadow.

After two months’ residence in Beirut, though, he’d decided to reopen his old accounts and recover the shadows of that past. It was Muna and her husband, Ahmad Dakiz, who led him back to the ledgers of his time in Tripoli, where, in the middle of the crusader castle of Saint-Gilles, all the ghosts of the past had emerged, and Danny had reappeared.

Danny didn’t know literary Arabic well but insisted on speaking it, employing classical turns of phrase to assert the depth of his attachment to his country. He’d been born in Abidjan to a family that had migrated from the village of Beit Shabab in Mount Lebanon. His father had worked as a cloth merchant there and died, poor and sick, of fever. Danny had spoken of his father and mother only once, when he recounted how he’d returned with his two sisters from Paris, where they were students, to attend their father’s funeral. There they discovered that their mother had decided to return to Lebanon and was asking Danny to cut short his education in order to dispose of his father’s possessions. Danny had interrupted his study of philosophy, only to discover that his father had been penniless and that he would have to flee his creditors or find himself in prison.

“Lebanese capitalism is a decadent phenomenon and the living proof is my father. In Africa, if you don’t work in smuggling and fraud, you die a pauper. The rich in Africa are naught but a handful of thieves, the lot of them! Verily, they are like the comprador class in Lebanon.”

This was the first time Karim had heard the word comprador . He was too embarrassed to ask what it meant and look stupid, and in the end he got used to using it without knowing what it meant, after which he understood, or imagined he did. It ceased to matter: once in France, he swallowed dozens of words whose meanings he imagined he understood because he used them in his daily life.

Danny never spoke of his mother, so Karim sketched a scenario in his own mind according to which the woman had returned to Beit Shabab to live in her house there. When he asked Danny about the political situation in the village, though, the tall man looked at him in surprise; he said he’d only visited the place once and didn’t care for the countryside.

Danny had at one time disappeared for a whole week without anyone knowing where he was, and when he reappeared there was something broken about his eyes, which his wife, Sahar, interpreted to Karim as being due to depression: his mother had died alone in an old persons’ home, where she had suffered from dementia.

Danny seemed to Karim more like the hero of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger than the revolutionary leader he was trying to be.

He was, though, a man of extraordinary charisma. Was the charisma a consequence of his height, his fair hair, and his eyes, which were always red as a result of his frequent late nights? Or of the long white scarf he used to wrap around his neck, winter and summer? Or of his detailed knowledge of the texts of Marx and Lenin? Or of his being the first Lebanese intellectual to join the Fedayeen and fight in southern Lebanon? Or of his beautiful wife, Sahar, who worked as an architect with the Alami Company in Beirut, supported the household and their only daughter, and asked nothing of Danny except that he never stop loving her?

Karim fell under the man’s spell when he attended the first political meeting at Danny’s apartment in Tall el-Khayyat. In response to Danny’s call for the foundation of a Marxist organization within the Fatah movement he could think of nothing to say but “Yes.” He was, however, hesitant when it came to taking part in military activities.

He said he’d never killed a sparrow so how could he kill a human being?

He said he agreed that violence was the way of the revolution but he was a doctor and the revolution needed his knowledge, not his blood.

“You’re just talking so you don’t have to talk,” said Danny, and he persuaded Karim to join a weeklong military training course at the Nahr el-Bared Camp close to Tripoli. It was there that Karim’s life began to shape itself into elusive shadows.

This way of putting it isn’t quite accurate, because the idea of shadows occurred to Karim only after his return to Beirut, when the darkness of the city blended with the darkness of his soul on the last night of waiting. At that moment he discovered that all that remained of him, and to him, was a collection of obscure images derived from a life that traced itself like black shadows on the demolished walls of the city.