Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim didn’t see Danny after that night. The man disappeared behind a veil of hashish smoke. Even when Khaled Nabulsi was killed and his wife came and sought refuge at Danny’s apartment, no one could find him. He didn’t answer the phone or open the door. This put Karim in an awkward position and he’d felt like a traitor and a coward telling Khaled’s wife he didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

The woman disappeared behind her veil and Karim experienced his last moments of indecision in Beirut before deciding to go to France.

LATER, WHEN HE returned to Lebanon, Hend had looked to Karim exactly as she always had. It was amazing how the woman hadn’t changed, as though she were his Hend and age had added only more of the bloom of youth. He’d expected to see a woman with a body sagging from having given birth to three boys, one who exuded the smell of house and dust and never stopped clucking, like a hen. In the event, her brown skin, tanned and endowed with a new color that seemed to clothe her in a second skin of beauty, gave her complexion the look of sun-ripened fruit and took him by surprise.

As soon as he’d cast off this girl whom he’d worn so long, Karim had turned his back on Beirut. He hadn’t lied to Danny: he had never betrayed her, not because he was uncommonly chaste or faithful, but because he couldn’t. Her aroma, which was like that of shellfish, clung to all his five senses.

Once, they’d gone swimming in front of Rawsheh Rock in Beirut, Hend moving between the two formations, swimming on her back and using her arms as oars and he tried to catch up with her. He’d circled around her and dived beneath her while she surrendered herself to the sound of the sea and to its undulations. Dazzled by sun, water, and salt, she swam alone, heedless of his cries of love and water.

“That’s enough. I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

She turned over and said he could go back if he wanted but she was going to swim to the cave.

It was her perpetual swimming rite. She would start by making a circuit of the two rocks that rise opposite the Corniche at the lighthouse, then go to the large rock and swim on her back into the middle of the hole that time has created, forming from the lower part of the rock an arch that continues beneath the water. There she’d close her eyes and surrender to the spray from the waves that crashed off the rock covering her body with droplets of salt water in which burned threads of sunlight. Then she’d turn over and swim toward what the French called “the Pigeon Pool,” where she’d enter the water’s darkness and disappear. Karim had only once been into the cave. He’d swum at her side and they’d entered the vanishing light. He told her he needed air and could hardly breathe and heard her laugh. He pulled back and swam to the entrance of the cave to wait for her and when, after a quarter of an hour, she emerged, he told her he’d been frightened for her because of the creatures of the sea.

“So why didn’t you come back and save me?” she said, laughing.

“I was afraid,” he said.

“Afraid for me or for yourself?”

He’d wait for her at the entrance to the cave and then they’d return in one of those canoes that the Lebanese call a “fishbone” and go to the swimming pool at the nearby Sporting Club, where they’d drink orange juice.

Karim wouldn’t speak much. He’d tell her about Danny and his Fedayeen comrades. It was the eve of the war but Hend had no interest in the subject. She thought politics was a way of killing time.

“You’re like men playing cards. You know what they say when they play cards? They say, ‘Come on. Let’s kill some time! You aren’t just going to kill time, you’ll probably end up killing yourselves and everyone around you too.”

Karim hadn’t surrendered in the face of this kind of talk. He believed time would change her mind and that this Hend, salted with sun and sea, would be his life’s companion.

Shaking the water of Rawsheh Rock off herself and lying on a deck chair at the Sporting Club, Hend said that three days before she’d had a terrifying dream which she hadn’t wanted to speak of in case it came true, but then she’d changed her mind and decided to tell him about it because, that day, for the first time, she’d felt afraid of the darkness of the cave.

Hend said it had been a long dream. It had lasted all night, she hadn’t forgotten any of it, and she was scared.

“Dreams are our repressed desires,” said Karim. “Out with it, so we can see what your desires are.”

Karim sat on the edge of the chair, lit an unfiltered Gauloise, took the first drag deep into his lungs, and waited for the story.

“What kind of a cigarette is that that smells so bad?” she asked.

He said the roasted black tobacco was less harmful and gave you a buzz. He didn’t attribute it to Danny’s influence, or mention that French tobacco had become fashionable among the Lebanese leftists following the May ’68 Revolution in France.

“You and I were swimming beneath Rawsheh Rock and as usual I left you and went into the cave. It was dark. I swam. The water was very cold. Then I began to feel it was sticking to my body. I felt cold and was afraid. I tried to get out of the cave. I turned toward the entrance but instead of seeing light it just got darker. Usually when I turn around to go back I see the most beautiful view in the world. The sun looks as though it’s sleeping on the water in the middle of the cave and the light is coming from under the water. ‘Come on,’ I thought, ‘where’s the entrance to the cave?’ I turned again and I couldn’t work out the directions anymore. I kept turning around and around and screaming. I screamed but no one heard my voice. It was as though my voice had disappeared. I knew no one could save me.”

“Where was I?” asked Karim.

“You’d disappeared,” said Hend.

“I was alone and there was no one with me and I screamed, ‘Father!’ I don’t know why it occurred to me to scream for someone I only know from pictures, and instead of my father coming to save me I saw him at home. He was sitting in the living room drinking a glass of whiskey and my mother was coming and going to the kitchen because she was getting lunch. The doorbell rang. My mother told me, ‘Get up, Hend, and open the door.’ I ran toward the door to open it and found it was open and there was a tall man standing in the doorway holding a pistol. As soon as he saw me he shot me and I saw blood coming out of my shoulder but I didn’t fall. I heard my mother screaming that her husband had killed her daughter, and hitting herself on the head screaming that her daughter was dead. I stretched out my hands toward my father and said to him in a low voice, ‘Help me, Father.’ I looked out the window and saw him stretched out on the ground, and the tall man who my mother said was her husband was standing over him. I fell down … and was swimming in the sea and the sky was blue and clear and the sea was as smooth as oil. My father was swimming beside me and when I got to the rock I saw it was sinking. It was listing like a ship and instead of the big rock supporting itself on the small, it knocked it over and the two of them sank together. I saw the rock sinking further and further under the water and started to cry. ‘How are people going to know this is Beirut?’ I said. ‘If the rock’s gone, so is Beirut, and me too, who’s going to want to know me now that I have no name?’ And I felt myself sinking and screamed for my father and everything was dark and I was stuck inside the cave.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then I woke up trembling. I went to the kitchen to drink some water. My mother was sitting on her own in the dark smoking a cigarette. I went up to her to kiss her and noticed her face was wet with tears. She was weeping soundless tears. I wanted to tell her that Rawsheh Rock had sunk but when I saw her in that state I didn’t know what to do. I drank a glass of water and went back to bed.”