Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“Right,” said Karim, “but you’re a hero. I don’t understand why you want to become a writer.”

Danny explained to Karim that the problem of heroes was called retirement. Withdrawal from the struggle was equivalent to death, “which is why you may consider me dead, my friend.”

Karim had wanted to ask his friend about the mystery of his disappearance immediately after the killing of Khaled, but did not. What use were questions after all these years? Danny was the reason, Karim had told himself when he decided to flee Lebanon. Danny was the guide who’d led Karim to Nahr el-Bared, introduced him to Khaled and the boys of the Qubbeh district, and placed him in the midst of the maelstrom of terror that had led to his decision to go to France.

In Karim’s memory those days appeared as black patches. The medical student at the American University of Beirut had fallen under the spell of the appearance of Malak Malak at Tall el-Zaatar Camp following his arrest immediately after killing two deans at AUB. It was claimed that Danny had masterminded Malak’s escape from Roumieh Prison and was waiting for him at Hammana when he withdrew with fighters fleeing the camp following its fall in 1976, in one of the Lebanese Civil War’s biggest massacres.

Karim hadn’t been particularly interested in politics. The famous AUB students’ strike of 1974 had meant little to him. He’d taken part in the strike, which had erupted because of an increase in tuition fees, just as he’d participated in the sit-in at the Assembly Hall when students occupied the AUB buildings, but he hadn’t felt involved and had remained on the margins of the movement. That was why Karim wasn’t one of the 103 students expelled from the university when the strike ended.

The strike was a proclamation that the Palestinian resistance and its left-wing Lebanese allies had become an axis of political life in Lebanon. “He who holds the university holds Beirut,” said Danny to the circle of students he directed. It never crossed anyone’s mind that the university administration would call in the Lebanese police to break into the buildings and put an end to the strike, and then expel all the strike leaders.

The strike had to be defeated so that it could achieve victory through blood. Malak Malak, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Engineering — from a Christian Palestinian family from the area of Haifa which had joined the flood of refugees in 1948 — was the hero of the story.

After trying to complete his studies in Iraq, where he was subjected to arrest and torture at the hands of the Iraqi intelligence services who attempted to force him into collaborating with them, Malak succeeded in escaping and returning to Lebanon, becoming the killer of the two deans Najemy and Ghosn, and saving by this insane act the future of all his fellows.

Malak’s crime, the blood that flowed, the collapse of the university’s administration, and its consent to the return of the expelled students all formed the final chapter of symbolic violence that paved the way for the transformation of Beirut into an arena of blood.

Danny didn’t hide his pride in having helped Malak to escape from Roumieh Prison and in advising him to take refuge in Tall el-Zaatar Camp. To Danny the incident was a declaration that revolutionary violence had become the sole language through which change could be achieved.

“You’ve changed a lot,” said Karim.

“We’ve grown old,” answered Danny.

“Any news of Malak?” asked Karim.

“What Malak?” asked Danny.

It was obvious that Danny had forgotten Malak and his story. Everyone had forgotten the tall dark-skinned young man who had escaped from Roumieh Prison to become a fighter in Tall el-Zaatar before disappearing. Even the story of the killing of the deans of Engineering and of Students at AUB had died and became part of the unsaid.

And Malak had said nothing.

His girlfriend, Hala, said he’d changed a lot in Iraq. She said he told her only scraps of his bitter experience there, contenting himself with saying that death was preferable to prison. When she asked him to tell her what had happened he gave her a copy of Abd el-Rahman Munif’s novel East of the Mediterranean .

“Read this novel if you want to get to know the Arab world,” he said.

“A man who had entered the darkness of silence,” said Hala. “I didn’t know him anymore, it was as though he’d become another man. Does that other person live inside us, only to emerge suddenly from we know not where and perform acts that would never have occurred to us?”

The Lebanese interrogator who had detained Hala as part of his attempt to uncover Malak’s partners in crime was impressed by the young woman’s ability to avoid answering his questions.

“I’m not avoiding them,” she said. “It’s the truth. The night of the crime we drank a cappuccino at the Café Express on Hamra and he told me he didn’t love me anymore because love was over and that he was going to Johnny’s to play cards. He said playing tarneeb was better than wasting his time with a girl like me who didn’t understand anything he said anymore, and he turned and left.”

“…”

“No, he didn’t say anything about killing the professors at the university and he was in a good mood. He may have been talking to me and telling me things from a place I couldn’t reach. Maybe he was right. After his expulsion from the university and his travel to Iraq and imprisonment and torture there, maybe he’d found a solution in a language I don’t know, the language that’s inside one’s soul and that we can’t measure in words because it’s fashioned without words.”

“What are you studying at the university, mademoiselle?”

“Philosophy,” she said.

“I must say I’ve never come across a case like you. Just between you and me, I didn’t understand a word you said except what everyone knows about him being arrested in Iraq. That must have been something all right! What imaginations they have! I used to hear stuff about imprisonment in Iraq and couldn’t believe it. Perhaps we should learn a thing or two from them. But that’s not what matters now. What matters is that I didn’t understand a word you said, perhaps because you were talking to me in philosophical language.”

“No, officer, that wasn’t the language of philosophy, that was the language of crime,” she said.

“You’re talking about the philosophy of crime, right? The new generation, God help us! You’ve been no use to us. Get out of here and good riddance.”

Hala hadn’t been talking about the philosophy of crime. She’d been talking about the war that had made her feel she’d lost her balance. She’d fallen in love with her fellow student, a Palestinian, only to find herself covered in blood. She’d rebelled against her conservative Beirut Sunni environment and told her father, Hajj Yahya Fakhani, that she was going to marry Malak in spite of everything. She said he’d graduate in a year and they’d go to Cyprus and have a civil wedding like everyone else.

Her father threatened to kill her.

She paid no attention. The strike took place and everything went to hell. Malak was expelled along with the others. He left to continue his civil engineering studies in Iraq, then cut them short and returned to Beirut. But the man who returned wasn’t the Malak she knew. It was as though he’d left his laughter and endless jokes in Baghdad and come back wearing a new face.

He’d become laconic, dissatisfied with everything. In response to her insistence, he’d told her what happened, how they’d asked him to work with Iraqi intelligence, how he’d been detained a number of times for short periods, and the kinds of torture to which he’d been subjected.