Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“During the time we were in the camp I treated one of the brothers differently because this brother was in need of someone to stand beside him and help him and feel with him. He’d consult me about everything he did and if I didn’t respond and talk to him and laugh with him and sit next to him, he’d get upset — he was always crying. If I pointed out to him some mistake he’d made, he’d feel shaken, take it personally, sit on his own and not eat, drink, or sleep. His crying cut me to the heart and I’d tell myself he was crying because of me … and then the camp commander would shout at me for going with him and being late and I’d have to lie so that the brother in question wouldn’t get upset.”

“Why does she write about me like that? I’m not like that!” shouted Karim, flinging the book from his hand.

That was how he remembered himself in his apartment in Beirut: alone and reading and shaking with sorrow and anger. But he hadn’t cried. He remembered he’d cried once during the night at Baissour — he’d been walking with Jamal when she asked him about George. And he hadn’t cried because Jamal had reprimanded him over some mistake he’d made; he’d cried because George had been his friend. George, a Palestinian student at the American University of Beirut, had died. He’d returned on a stretcher, crowned with the white snow of Sannine, and when his mother had asked that a cross be set up over the grave of her only son, who had been buried in the Islamically themed Palestine Martyrs cemetery, everyone was struck dumb. Marwan, who would be assassinated ten years later in Cyprus, had declared, however, that the cross would be there: he brought a large black cross with the name of the martyr on it and planted it over the grave. The wooden cross was a meter and a half tall and didn’t look at all like the discreet little cross that had been inscribed on the tiling of the tomb of Kamal Nasir.

The AUB student group had received an order from Danny to protect the cemetery, and ten of the boys, Karim among them, had gone there, fully armed, to provide a guard for the ceremony. Danny had arrived glowering and said that the priest of the Orthodox Church of Our Lady had refused to come to the cemetery; he’d fled, so Danny had been forced to bring in a Palestinian Protestant minister who’d come to attend the funeral prayers at the church. The moment the bier appeared, though, the armed members of the protection detail fell to pieces at the sight of their comrade lying on a wooden plank and wept. The stern orders that Danny had given them to form a cordon around the cemetery lost all meaning.

No one had provided protection for the funeral. George had no need of it, for those days were different from these, as he would later tell Khaled, who used to talk to him about Islam and the necessity of joining the fundamentalist tendency as it was the future, now that the defeat and collapse of the Left had become an established fact. The day Khaled said that, Karim had asked him, “What shall we do then with George and the cross we put up at his mother’s request in the middle of an Islamic cemetery?” and Khaled had hung his head and found nothing to say.

If Karim had spoken while reading Jamal’s memoirs, he would have said he’d never cried and that Jamal had disfigured his image. The lover commits suicide only if the beloved dies; perhaps that was why Jamal had talked of their dying together.

He’d gone on reading, only to discover that he wasn’t the hero of the story. Jamal spoke of another youth, giving his initials as “N. A.” Karim couldn’t remember if he’d noticed those letters when he’d read the text the first time, in Beirut. N. A. had trained with the suicide group, injured his foot, and gone into the hospital three weeks before the operation, thus being rendered unfit to go through with the mission. He’d visited her at home, limping, and begged her not to go to her death. When she refused he’d threatened to tell her mother the facts of the suicide operation but had been too much of a coward to do so.

Now, in France, these lines jumped out and struck him in the eye. Had the story of his love for Jamal been nothing but an illusion? Had he invented the tale of Jamal to make it easier for him to abandon Hend? And why had he abandoned Hend?

True, she’d said she couldn’t leave her mother. He could have gone abroad to finish his studies, then returned and married her, but he’d decided not to return and to run away from Salma and his father, and from Danny’s descent into the abyss following the death of Khaled and the phantom of death that Khaled had seen in the eyes of the Syrian general. He had, therefore, concocted for himself a fictitious love story.

Jamal was alone in the Cemetery of the Numbers there, somewhere in Galilee, and he was sitting in his apartment in Montpellier chewing the cud of his memories. He’d come to France to erase his memories and manufacture new ones in a new country and with a new woman who had nothing to do with his past.

He remembered saying, “I’ve found her,” when he awoke the next morning with Bernadette beside him in bed and discovered she was a nurse. A white-skinned woman, her skin so clear that it allowed a whiteness that dwelled deeper down to show through — as though the whiteness weren’t a color but an incandescence that shone through from the depths and rose through her body, illuminating it, before continuing in an infinite outpouring.

During one of his drinking bouts, while listening to the songs of Édith Piaf, a line of pre-Islamic poetry had come to him. He’d tried to ignore it and travel with the voice of the French singer but could not. He’d declaimed the verse, then sung it in a low voice, the way his teacher — the one whom the students called “the Lord of Literature” — had done in the baccalaureate class, and finally the poetry had exploded on his tongue and he’d felt the voice of Muallem Butrus Bustani emerging from his throat, quivering with the rhythm.

Bernadette turned down the volume of the tape recorder and asked him what he was saying. Instead of answering her he repeated the line again, and again the voice of the Lord of Literature emerged from his throat.

He tried to translate the line for her but couldn’t. He said it was attributed to a pre-Islamic poet who’d lived in the Arab desert, singing the praises of the beauty of a white-skinned woman by saying that her whiteness was a skin to her skin. She asked him where the Arab poet had seen a white-skinned woman. He explained to her that white skin was widespread in the Arabian Peninsula.

“But you told me the opposite,” she said.

He tried to say that what he was interested in at that moment was her whiteness and her beauty.

When Karim had woken up after his night of drunkenness and found Bernadette in his bed, he’d been struck by “the shock of beauty,” as he would later refer to the instant at which he’d become immersed in her eyes. She recounted to him how she’d come across him beneath the breasts of that whore, and how they’d walked aimlessly through the streets of Montpellier; when she’d told him she was tired and had to go home he’d put his arm around her neck and refused to let go.

“Then I discovered you were drunk and I couldn’t leave you alone, so I decided to walk you to your apartment, and there you tricked me and took me to bed, and in the morning you asked me my name and what I did and when I said I was a nurse you said you loved me, and I couldn’t help laughing.”

“Me?”

She said his cough was nervous. “I’m sure you don’t cough or yawn at the hospital but the moment you reach the apartment and have to talk to me or to the girls you start coughing. I don’t know you anymore and I don’t know what made me agree to resign from the hospital so I could stay at home and devote myself to looking after the children; I wasted my life. The girls are at school and you’re at work and I’m waiting. You turned me into an Oriental woman and now you want to leave me and go to Beirut? We’re not going to ruin our lives to go with you just because we’re supposed to put up with the sudden whims of the Arab beast sleeping in your depths. You hid the beast from me and from yourself but today it’s woken up to take revenge on me and on you and on all of us.”