Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Hend said that that day, for the first time in her life, she’d felt frightened of the sea and the cave. They were swimming at the beginning of April ’75; the Beirut spring sun had not yet taken the chill out of the sea air but Hend swam all year round, saying she loved the shock of the cold water, it refreshed and revitalized the heart and stimulated the circulation. Karim didn’t like the cold. He’d tried on innumerable occasions to put Hend off swimming out of season but it was no use.

He’d sat down in the chair and covered himself with the towel, seeking shelter from the cold air that infiltrated via his pores, and listened to the dream that Hend, stretched out on her back in her bikini with her eyes closed, had told.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“What do I know? Really, it’s a strange dream. It doesn’t make sense at all. All I know is that when you dream of the sea it means repressed sexual desire but your dream’s very complicated.”

“Like Meelya’s dreams,” she said. “Dear God, I’m afraid I’ll end up like she did at the end!”

“Who’s Meelya?” asked Karim.

“Her nephews were our neighbors and my mother told me strange stories about her. It’s said her dreams used to come true and everyone was afraid of her.”

“Then what?”

“Then how should I know?”

He said the best way to deal with dreams was to forget them and he was cold and wanted to get dressed.

When the war started he told Danny his girlfriend had prophesied it because she’d dreamed that Rawsheh Rock had sunk, and that that symbol of Beirut created by the French — which they’d put on all the postage stamps as an embodiment of Beirut under their Mandate — had to sink now that the old Lebanon had come to an end.

Danny just smiled the superior smile, which was one of the hallmarks of his mastery over others. He’d listen without interrupting, then pronounce in a single sentence his dismissal of Freudian doctrines that made man the slave of those dark irrational regions that they call the unconscious. It was only in France that Karim discovered that the French had nothing to do with Rawsheh. He’d been in Montpellier with Talal discussing the idea of Maroun Baghdadi’s film when Hend’s dream had flashed through his mind. He told Talal that the film ought to end with the vanishing of Rawsheh Rock and recounted to him the story of the symbol of the Mandate that had to disappear.

“What have the French got to do with it?” asked Talal.

“The French took the name they gave to the area from the rock. “Rock” in French is rocher , from which we got the word Rawsheh and from then on we started saying ‘Rawsheh Rock.’ ”

Talal didn’t smile Danny’s superior smile but he did explain to the Lebanese doctor that this was a common misunder​standing. “The French had nothing to do with it. ‘Rawsheh’ was originally the Syriac word rawsh , meaning ‘head.’ The rock was, according to our ancestors, who spoke Syriac, ‘the head of Beirut,’ but in our ignorance we believed it was a French invention.” The French had called the area La Grotte aux Pigeons, referring to the cave close to the rock. The rock itself was 100 percent Syriac. Talal said his mother had told him the tale because she was an eccentric woman: “You know, she phones from Beirut, with the shells falling around her like rain, and tells me about her linguistic discoveries. She told me the dictionary and the books of Anis Freiha were the best way to forget the war.”

Talal took the story back to its beginning. Karim wasn’t a friend of the young man. He’d run into him at the bar, they’d drink a beer and chat a little. Then Talal had invited him to meet Maroun Baghdadi and now he’d come along and provided, without realizing, a different interpretation for Hend’s dream!

When he’d first arrived in Beirut, and after the glass of arak at his brother’s apartment — where Hend had contented herself with talking to him with, as it were, the tips of her lips — she’d asked after Bernadette, Nadine, and Lara and about life in France but shown no interest in hearing the answers. She’d sat at the table for only a few moments and spent the rest of her time coming and going between the kitchen and the dining room.

“Tell us about the girls. Did you bring pictures?” asked Salma.

Karim’s attention was attracted to the thick black nylon stockings pulled over Salma’s legs. The white that once had erupted at the edges of her black skirt was gone, its place taken by black spots that seemed to bespatter her calves and thighs. Karim hadn’t been aware that Salma had reverted to wearing stockings of this kind after his father’s death. Hend had told him that at the deathbed in the hospital her mother had cried out that the man had lost his sight and that afterward she’d reverted to her old mourning dress.

“And what does Nasim think?” he asked her.

“Nasim didn’t say anything. When we got back to the apartment, he was silent. He only spoke to me when he had to. He didn’t even talk to the children. You’ve seen for yourself how he never says anything when we’re sitting together.”

Karim hadn’t noticed his brother’s silence during his stay in Beirut. Quite the contrary, Nasim had talked a lot and in talking rearranged the whole story. In his version, things were completely the other way round. The older brother, who believed he’d preserved his purity both before and during the war, discovered that in his brother’s version things were totally different and that he’d lost — amongst all his other losses — the ability to repair the holes that had opened up, all at one go, in his life.

The first night, after the welcome dinner, a rush of emotions had overwhelmed Karim as he became aware of the oppressive absence of his father. He’d discovered how powerless he was to fashion words of love for a man whom, with his overbearing ways, he’d believed he’d always hated. He had risen, wanting to go home.

“I’ll drive you,” Nasim had said.

“No, don’t bother. Stay. We’ve drunk a lot of arak. I’d prefer to take a taxi.”

Nasim got up, paying no attention.

“But you’ve drunk a lot.”

“So what? When I drink I see things better.”

They got into the car in silence. Karim felt as though he were being choked. The humidity, the heat, his inability to talk.

“How about a coffee on the Corniche?” said Nasim.

“I miss the Beirut sea. In Montpellier the sea’s all one color, a kind of gray, and the beach is depressing, I don’t know why. Every time I go to Palavas with my wife and the girls, I tell them about the Corniche and Rawsheh Rock.”

They’d stopped in front of Rawsheh Rock and were drinking espresso from one of the small vans serving coffee that were parked here and there along the Corniche. The rock sparkled in the lights that refracted off the edges of the smooth waves breaking against it.

“This is Beirut,” said Karim. “You know, I don’t know what came over me in France. Every time I heard news of the shelling in Lebanon I’d be frightened that the rock would be hit and would sink. In fact I used to dream that the rock had sunk and feel that Beirut had become shapeless and all its houses and buildings were falling down.”

“You dreamed that the rock sank? Strange!”

“What’s strange?”

“You know, it’s like we were young again. Remember how Father would make us finish off each other’s dreams? Now it’s like you were telling me my own dreams.”

“Your dreams!”

“Don’t tell me you’ve come so we can go back to playing that game again! I thought you’d have grown up after being away so long. We’re here to work. We’ve got a project that’s better than a gold mine. In Lebanon today medicine is gold. But it looks like you don’t appreciate the importance of the project and you’ve come to open doors onto memories that we’d closed once and for all.”