Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim spent the whole night up, reading and rereading. He didn’t tell Danny what had happened at his meeting with Abu Jihad and Danny didn’t ask. Karim lived with Jamal’s diaries for three days. He was stunned, reading words that were next to one another without arriving at their meaning: the meaning fled the text before it could enter Karim’s consciousness. He read and reread and discovered he’d never be able to write anything. How could he rewrite a text that had been taken apart by death and then reassembled? How was he to interpret a voice coming to him from the other world? What could the dead say to the living? Jamal had written poetry. He read the poetry and reread it. He would see the poem, or something like the poem, disintegrate and then reassemble itself, its rhythms dissolving in his eyes. He read the poem ten times. He read it in a low voice and in a loud voice. He read it with his eyes closed and he read it with his eyes open.

When he read the news of Abu Jihad’s assassination in Tunis, Jamal had awoken once more in his memory. He’d run into Talal at the café in Place de la Comédie. The Lebanese student was carrying al-Safir and started reading an article describing Abu Jihad’s funeral at Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. All he could remember of the description was the scene of the bier flying over upraised hands. “The whole camp came out and all the villages of Galilee congregated to bid farewell to the leader of the intifada of the ‘children of the stones’ in Palestine. And then the bier flew. The bier hovered over the throng and moved over the tips of the fingers of the hands raised to bear it. So thick were the crowds that it was beyond the power of those carrying the bier to move forward. They were stuck fast but the bier knew how to complete its journey to the grave. Wrapped in the Palestinian flag, it flew over the fingertips, the hands of all those gathered to see him off rising to receive it. The bier appeared to be flying, the raised hands seemingly making for it a pathway in the air.”

Talal put the paper aside and asked Karim what he thought of the beautiful description and at the same instant Karim saw himself sitting in front of Abu Jihad, who was telling him he wanted him to draw a map of hope over the map of death that was open on his desk. At that same instant Jamal’s words also returned to ring in his ears. Only a few lines of her poem had stayed in his memory but there, in the Café Comédie, he could hear her voice as clearly as though time had evaporated, as though he was with her on the Mazraa Corniche and they were sipping coffee at the Café Jandoul. With head bowed and a lock of her hair covering her right eye she’d gazed ahead and recited.

I shall walk and walk

And read out the communiqué of the stone

And read out the communiqué of the tree

And embrace my love

And build for my heart

Houses of sadness and of memories

And I shall sit alone

With death alone

And my voice there

Like my voice here

Shall be a call to my land

That traces the face of the rain .

“That’s Romantic poetry,” said Karim.

“I’m not interested in the terms. Soon you’ll see that I’ve written the most beautiful poem of all.”

“What?”

“I’m not talking about this poem because poetry must take the poet by surprise before it can take the readers by surprise. I’m talking about a poem written in a different way. Tomorrow you’ll read it and think of me and say, ‘Thus spoke Jamal.’ ”

Memory tossed him this way and that, her voice wrapped itself around him, and he regretted not having written the pamphlet he’d been commissioned to write. He’d read the text dozens of times, read the details of the suicide operation, and looked at all the available pictures. Brother Nabil had even got hold for him of a photograph of a place in Israel they call the Cemetery of the Numbers, where the Fedayeen are buried by number and not name. Nabil said that he didn’t know Jamal’s number at the cemetery but it wasn’t important; the important thing was to draw the lesson, which was that even their dead had become numbers, and that he might want to focus on this point to make a comparison between the numbers tattooed on the arms of Jews in the Nazi death camps and the numbers given to dead Fedayeen.

The idea didn’t appeal to Karim. He told Nabil such comparisons weren’t useful: the Palestinians were victims in their own right and didn’t need to be compared to other victims to prove the reality of their tragedy.

It had all come to nothing. The text hadn’t been written, Nabil had been killed in an explosion in the Fakhani district, and the connection to Abu Jihad had been lost.

The strange thing was that no one ever asked him about the text Jamal had written. The likeliest explanation was that her story, like other stories, had been forgotten. The martyrs were a surging throng, the newly dead obliterating the dead who had gone before. In this way, Jamal’s story was lost, and all that remained of it was the image of heroism represented by her body lying on the road at Herzliya.

Karim remembered that the one precious thing he’d taken with him to Montpellier was Jamal’s text. On the eve of his departure, when he’d thrown all his papers into the wastepaper basket, he’d found himself incapable of tossing Jamal onto the garbage dump of his memories.

He’d left Talal going on about the plot of the first-ever film shot in Lebanon about muscles and bodybuilding and set off home at a run. He’d gone into his bedroom and opened the drawer in the bedside table where he’d put the brown envelope, but failed to find it. He opened the doors of the wardrobe and had begun going through it when Bernadette came into the room.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s okay. I’m looking for something I brought with me from Lebanon.”

She said nothing got lost in her house and that she could look for it but was busy at the moment with Lara. She said they’d summoned her to the school, where the teacher had told her Lara had wet herself, which wasn’t normal for a girl of seven; and that the psycho​therapist at the school would have to see her because these sorts of things pointed to a disturbance in her relationship with her parents. She’d been obliged to take the girl back home to change her clothes, and when she’d returned her to the school she’d met the psycho​therapist, Monsieur Charles, who had deduced from his interview with the girl that she was suffering from a disturbance in her relations with her father, and said he’d like to meet the father.

“Monsieur Charles has given you an appointment for a week from now and says you have to go.”

“Fuck him.”

She asked him not to swear and said the only Arabic she’d learned was the swear words, as though they were all the language had, and that it was his duty, instead of getting upset, to think about how he could improve his relationship with his children because the girls hardly ever saw him. Even when he took them to the public gardens or the Place de la Comédie he didn’t talk to or show any interest in them.

“How silly can you get? When I was seven I shat myself at school. Father didn’t make a fuss. He just told me to forget about it and I did. Maybe the girl was scared of the teacher because she didn’t know how to write some sentence — no more, no less. And now they’re trying to tell me the girl’s messed up psycholo​gically. Nonsense! You want to tell me that when I shat myself at school I had a psychological problem?”

“Definitely,” answered Bernadette.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“No, madam. The messed-up one with psychological problems is you, not me.”