Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

When Hend asked him why he’d come back to Beirut he said he had no idea.

“Do you believe this story about the hospital?”

He answered that the architect had finished working on the walls and things were moving along fast.

“But your brother’s changed a lot. It’s as though you know nothing, or you know and don’t want to know.”

He said he’d come back because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with his life, and that back there things seemed to have lost all taste and meaning.

“You mean you’ve come looking for meaning in a city where everything’s meaningless?”

She told him that the meaning of things was within, and she felt that what lay within her was coming apart. “You didn’t have to come. What do you want with us and our tangled stories? Go back to your house and your wife and daughters! There’s nothing here. Even the memories no longer exist. People here grind their memories underfoot.”

Had he phoned Danny so that he could grind his memories underfoot?

When he called him, Danny’s voice had sounded unsure, as though he didn’t recognize him. Then the voice had regained its composure, suggesting lunch at the Sporting Club swimming pool.

They’d drunk arak but the words had failed to take shape and had scattered in scraps over the table. Danny had spoken at length about his illnesses and the two difficult surgical procedures he’d had performed on his spine. When Karim asked him about Sahar he was overwhelmed with gloom and said he knew nothing about her except that she was living in Brussels.

“And your daughter, Suha?”

“Suha got married,” he said, “and is living in Montreal.”

“Who’s the groom?”

He lifted his hand in a way that indicated he neither knew nor cared.

“Did she marry a Lebanese?” asked Karim.

“No,” replied Danny without a further word.

Silence and sea and waves. The words melted and vanished. Danny was like a sheet of copper. The daily swim that the doctor had imposed on him had had its effect on his face and skin color. All that was left of him was his fair hair, some of which had fallen out, outlining a sort of bald patch covered with tufts, and his front teeth, stained black with French tobacco; a man who had decided to bury his memories and live without a memory.

He asked him about the boys and Danny said he didn’t see any of them.

He asked him about Radwan.

He asked and he asked but Danny’s silence rose like a thick pall that could be dispelled only by the chewing of food and the drinking of arak.

When he asked him about Sinalcol, Danny burst out laughing. “Aren’t you Sinalcol? Have you forgotten what the boys used to call you? Comrade Doctor Sinalcol! And behind your back they’d say, ‘Look at those intellectuals! They come just so they can play the Sinalcol over us!’ ”

“That’s something you came up with,” said Karim. “You’re the one that took to calling me Sinalcol in front of the boys and so the name stuck and all because I refused your order to kill the guy.”

“Now you’re Sinalcol again, like in the old days,” said Danny.

Karim hated this name they’d stuck on him, erasing the political name he had chosen for himself. “I’m Salem!” he used to say. “Please, brothers! No one is to call me Sinalcol!”

The name Sinalcol had stuck to Karim against his will. He’d done everything in his power to expunge it but names are like eye colors: they’re difficult to change. During his first years in Montpellier he was much disturbed by a recurrent dream in which he saw himself walking down a long deserted street, a mask covering his face, then standing in front of a shop door and writing the name Sinalcol on it in chalk and running away, as though being chased.

And then, when Bernadette asked him his name, he’d answered in his moment of drunkenness that it was Sinalcol!

“Do you still remember, Karim, what I always used to say though nobody believed me? Now all of you can see with your own eyes how right I was.”

“You’re always right, Danny.”

“My name’s Faris, not Danny. Danny was the political name I used in the days of the Fedayeen. Now it’s over. Danny’s dead and it’s Faris sitting in front of you. Really though, I don’t know what to call myself. When I hear the students calling me Mr. Faris, I split my sides laughing. Imagine the insult to one’s dignity when one doesn’t know what one’s name is any longer! As I used to say, ‘The bastards ride boats and the heroes have to swim back.’ ”

“Is it true what they say about Maroun, that he had a tall blond girl with him and she disappeared?” asked Karim.

“It’s not important,” answered Danny. “Maroun came to see me before he started shooting the film and told me the storyline. I told him, ‘That’s stupid. We can’t make a film about forgiveness because the war isn’t over. First the war has to end and then we can write about it.’ But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that everything was wrong. Poor fellow, he embodied the Lebanese lie in his name and then paid for it with his life. His name was all wrong. He was called Maroun but he wasn’t a Maronite, and he was from the Baghdadi family but he wasn’t an Iraqi. That’s the philosophy of the Lebanese war — the names are borrowed but the deaths of those who bear them are all too real.”

Karim said Maroun’s death was a symbolic expression of the extinction of the revolutionary generation in Lebanon. “I met him in France and he told me about the film and I could see death in his eyes,” said Karim.

“Don’t say that!” said Danny. “You know very well that anyone who sees death dies because his death is traced in the eyes of the murderer, and you know who I’m talking about.”

What a bizarre lunch! Karim had wanted his meeting with Danny to put together what had been broken and had found himself faced with a man who hunched over his terrible back pains as he walked, broke instead of joined, and painted what was present in the colors of absence.

“The war would have broken out with or without us and it kept going without us, so I regret nothing. Or at least I’m sorry about one thing, which is that instead of devoting myself to writing a book of philosophy I became a fighter, and once you’ve written with bullets it’s hard to write with a pen. I’m working now on a study that proves that none of the literary types who wrote about war did any serious fighting. They were basically adventurers who stayed on the margins. Neither Hemingway nor Malraux fought in the Spanish Civil War. Malraux fought with the French resistance to Nazi occupation, it’s true, but after that he stopped writing so he could become a minister. My study will deconstruct the myth of the writer fighting or being committed to the struggle. That’s nonsense. Lorca wasn’t a hero and Neruda wasn’t a resistance fighter. As for Nazim Hikmet, who reduced his readers to tears with his poems about his Munevver when he was in prison, as soon as he was released he got rid of her and married a Russian nurse.”

“But!” said Karim.

“No buts! Am I right or am I wrong?” Danny responded.

He reverted to the celebrated expression he used to use to put an end to any discussion at cell meetings, when he’d ask, “Am I right or am I wrong?” so his listeners had no choice but to say “right” because the tone of “or am I wrong?” left no room for “wrong.”

“But Saint-Exupéry,” said Karim.

“You’re right, but Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince and didn’t write about war. Plus I’m not talking about that kind of writer, I’m talking about the revolutionary writers.”

“Right,” said Karim.

“The problem,” said Danny, “is that heroes don’t collapse in the face of death, they collapse in the face of writing. This is the great illusion. They want to become writers, or find someone to write about them, which is what I shall refer to in my study as ‘the folly of immortality.’ They believe that writing is a way to stay alive after death, which is nonsense.”