Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He said he’d discovered in the prisons of Iraq that a person can become separated from his body and had been astonished to find himself praying to the Virgin and asking her help.

“I’m telling you, people are dogs. They forget themselves and their masks when faced with disaster and go back to being like Grandma and Grandpa, sunk in superstition.”

He said he’d sunk into superstition, and if he hadn’t believed that his grandmother was praying for him, he would have fallen apart and become one of their intelligence agents.

“Do you still love me?” Hala asked.

“How should I know what love means? For God’s sake, stop asking questions like that!”

The man disappeared, it became difficult to get in touch with him, and Hala had to go to Johnny’s apartment to look for him. There she found him hunched over a game of cards, the cigarette never leaving his lips. He saw her, threw the cards down, and they left together to sit in the Café Express, where Malak could find nothing to say to the girl whom he’d promised he would one day marry and, on the liberation of Haifa, take to the Abbas Effendi Garden on Carmel.

Their love was over, Malak said. It was over because after his experience in Iraq he could no longer talk. He said he’d discovered that a person has inside him words that have no language, and she wouldn’t be able to grasp the meanings of those words because she hadn’t lived the experience with him.

She said she loved him and understood his pain but “this isn’t right, my darling. Let’s get married and then we can see what to do.”

He looked at her with empty eyes, as though her words had slipped past his ears.

Hala decided not to contact him again but wait until the psychological crisis through which he was stumbling had passed. Then she was taken aback to see pictures of him in handcuffs filling the front pages of the newspapers and to hear of his double crime.

She went to the home of his friend Johnny, a Jordanian-Palestinian student who’d also been expelled from the university, to find out what had happened. She knocked for a long time on the door of the apartment on the third floor of the Fleihan Building on Abd el-Aziz Street, but it stayed closed. She descended the stairway of the dark building and found policemen waiting for her and spent the night at the Hbeish police station before the officer released her as immaterial to the investigation.

Hala wasn’t committed to the struggle like the other members of their university coterie. She was a student of philosophy at the Lebanese University and didn’t feel she could associate herself with the political atmosphere that prevailed in the Beirut universities. But she was in love and willing to do anything for the Palestinian who had occupied her heart and hurt it. She told him that her love for him made her feel a pain in the heart and that she would stay with him and put up with his way of life even though she didn’t believe that this struggle would lead anywhere. All the same, she hadn’t expected the byways of that struggle to lead her beloved to madness.

She told Johnny when she met him that Malak was different from them all because he’d taken his convictions to their conclusion, whereas they spent their time elaborating statements condemning the crime, this being part of the deal that allowed them to return to the university.

Johnny said, hiding a scowl, that Malak was insane. “It was an insane act. The organization had nothing to do with it and we condemned it because assassination is an act to be condemned.”

“If you’re against assassination, can you explain to me why you used the crime so you could all return to the university while Malak is in prison and they’re going to sentence him to death?”

Johnny tried to explain to her that politics was like that; she wasn’t committed to political action and couldn’t be expected to understand its complexities and shouldn’t worry “because there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Hala disappeared from the scene. Danny, who told the boys of Hala’s detention and release, said the girl had nothing to do with anything. “I don’t know how Malak could have been her boyfriend and promised to marry her. A conservative girl in the full sense of the word who had nothing to do with the political struggle. I don’t know what he saw in her. It’s not enough for a girl to have brown skin and green eyes for one to take her as one’s life companion.”

“Politics is like that,” Danny had said, stressing the difference between mass struggle and assassination. Karim couldn’t think what to say. He didn’t say that the statement was tendentious nonsense, though that was what had occurred to him. He felt lost because sometimes he fought with the boys and was a part of the civil war, but he didn’t know how to tell his comrades that playing with the fire of wars like this could lead only to the abyss. In fact, he did say this to Danny once when they were drinking vodka. Sahar was there, filling the apartment with her vivacity and beauty — a svelte woman with penciled eyebrows, honey-colored eyes, and a loving smile that never left her lips. With her was her daughter, Suha, who was seven, and whom everyone who saw her thought was a miniature of her mother. They were like two sisters competing for the heart of one man, and Danny relished this double love.

Karim said that playing with the sectarian fires of Lebanon and reviving the bloody scores of the civil war of 1860 would mean an end to all revolutionary thinking and a return to the dark ages.

Danny smiled contemptuously as he tried to explain to his hesitant comrade that, unlike Nevsky Prospekt, revolution doesn’t go in a straight line and that Lenin had known, as he led the world’s first socialist revolution, that it would have to get its feet dirty in the mud of history.

“But Nevsky Prospekt’s in Leningrad, not Beirut,” answered Karim.

“True,” said Danny, “but revolution here is the same as revolution there.”

“But here there are only sects, and sects are scary,” said Karim.

“True and not true,” said Danny. “Don’t forget the classes and the class struggle. But you’re right, the sects are a big danger and the only thing that can deal with and neutralize that danger is a cohesive revolutionary vanguard.”

“But where’s the vanguard?” asked Karim.

“We’re the vanguard,” said Danny. “You saw Malak’s heroic action and how he forced the university to reinstate all the expelled students. That was vanguard stuff.”

“But you just said we were against assassinations!”

“Against them in principle, that’s true, but on occasion they are necessary. We’re against military coups, but the October Revolution obliged Lenin to carry out a kind of military coup. Revolution, my friend, doesn’t go in a straight line like Nevsky Prospekt …”

Karim had nodded as though he understood and agreed but he didn’t. Before Danny, he found his will paralyzed. The philosophy professor possessed an irresistible logic — he was a man full of ideas and ambitions who led a student cell at AUB, as well as the Qubbeh district group in Tripoli which was made up of thugs, the unemployed, and agricultural workers, and who went home to drink vodka martinis while listening to classical music.

Danny said he’d wanted to be a musician and that when he was young he’d learned to play the piano; he’d stopped when he began taking an interest in maths and philosophy. “Then came the struggle, comrades, and the struggle taught me that the true philosophy and the greater music are praxis.”

When Karim had asked Danny about Malak he’d said he knew nothing about him. He said he’d arranged his escape from Roumieh Prison, “where Malak had made his blankets into a rope and descended from the prison window to find our comrades waiting for him. He was not alone. It doesn’t matter that Mustafa Qaddour, one of Tripoli’s Republic of the Wanted, was with him, what matters is that the boys showed him the way to Tall el-Zaatar, which I know they got to after major difficulties and after being fired on by the besieged camp’s defenders. Malak shouted, ‘Don’t fire, I’m Malak!’ It seems one of the boys had heard his story, and from that moment he disappeared. The fact is I don’t know. Atef, Abu Iyad’s assistant, advised him to go abroad because he was on the wanted list and the revolution couldn’t protect him. I think he went to East Germany and there the Stasi enlisted him and we heard unbelievable stories and that they did an operation and changed the way his face looked. Honestly I don’t know. Maybe he’s in Beirut right now but we wouldn’t recognize him if we saw him.”