Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He didn’t tell her that a person cannot live without his mirrors. He’d exchanged Nasim, Hend, Jamal, Danny, and Malak for French mirrors but had come to feel he could no longer see himself in his new environment, as though Karim had evaporated and become shapeless. All he wanted to do was recover his image before deciding what he should do with the years that remained to him.

Karim was close to forty when he decided to agree to his brother’s proposal. He’d told Nasim on the phone that he wasn’t promising anything: “Let me see and then I’ll decide.” The strange thing was that the conversation between the two brothers had sounded as though it was taking place between two businessmen, without emotion or yearning or jokes — just dry words devoid of feeling, as though the twins were using words to cover words. The only emotional words spoken were uttered by Nasim: “Come now and we’ll see. We’ll soon be forty and life is passing us by without our noticing.”

The idea struck him with terror. The image occurred to him of Nasri gripping his glass of wine with trembling hand, bringing it close to his lips, and saying life was like a dream; then his eyes would fill with tears before he burst out laughing. “It’s a lie. Life’s a lie and the only certain truth is that we’re all going to die.”

“What are you saying, Father? You’re still a young man,” Nasim would say.

Now Karim was discovering that the only truth was one’s later years. At forty a person discovers that what’s passed hasn’t passed; it’s more as though it’s slipped through one’s fingers, with what lies behind having become greater than what lies ahead.

The Lord of Literature was an eccentric teacher. Age had inscribed its wrinkles on his face, his eyes had grown smaller and his nose larger, and he’d become thin as a piece of string. He would shake with ecstasy as he recited the lines of al-Mutanabbi in which the poet mourns the passing of the years:

And how shall I take pleasure now in the evenings and the forenoons

When that breeze that used to blow is nowhere to be found?

There I recalled a union as tho’ ’twere one that ne’er had happened ,

A life like one traversed in a single bound .

Karim felt that life had carried him off and stripped him of everything, leaving him a stranger in a strange land. Only those who’d died had been able to cheat the game by refusing to drink the cup of the slow slide into the abyss of the years.

He’d read Jamal’s texts and understood. The young Palestinian woman had never loved him and had probably been quite unaware that he’d harbored the emotion that now, as he sat in the dining room of his apartment in France, he claimed to feel. Maybe she’d wanted to meet him to escape the fearful look in the eyes of her true beloved, who’d found a way to elude death at the last moment. Jamal had taken a firm grip on the only two moments at which a person can challenge life and vanquish time — those of love and death. Her first lover had wanted to strip her of death as the price of love but she’d refused. Karim on the other hand had been just a little story by means of which to prove to herself that she could hold both embers in her hands at once.

The sound of the waves at the Sporting Club swimming pool restaurant grew louder and Danny was drinking arak like there was no tomorrow. He looked strange, as though he weren’t the old Danny but a replica. It occurred to Karim that this Danny who kept telling him the same stories like an old man looked so much like Danny he could have been his twin. There was a relationship of resemblance, mingling, and contrast which resembled his own with his brother.

When they’d met after all those years, Karim had felt as though the roof of the sky had come closer and that the sea, instead of being an extension of the city, had come to resemble a valley threatening to swallow it. Memory had taken him back to a friend of Danny’s who’d called himself Camille. This Camille was an odd man. He’d come from his distant village in the Beqaa to be a “revolutionary writer,” as he styled himself. He spent most of his time in his small room in the Watwat district drinking vodka, eating meat, and writing. No one had read any of the novels he claimed to have written. He maintained that he refused to publish because he was writing for a time that had yet to arrive. He used to visit the military positions in Danny’s company, his little pointed beard giving off a smell of alcohol.

He asked him about Camille and Danny smiled, his eyes clouding over vacantly. He took a sip from his glass of arak. “We’re all criminals,” he said.

“No, that’s not true. Me, for instance — I never killed anyone,” said Karim.

“You never killed anyone because you’re a coward. Your cowardice stopped you from killing but you’re still a criminal.”

“I … I wanted to …”

“You wanted to kill but you couldn’t. I could, but what difference does it make? Even Khaled was part of the same story, the one whose heroes aren’t heroes. You’re going to reproach me because when Khaled was killed I vanished and when his wife came to visit me at home and knocked on the door I didn’t open it?”

“She told me. She came to my place and asked me about you.”

“And what did you do? You gathered up your things and took off for France and now you’ve come to see me so you can ask me why I betrayed Khaled? You’re a traitor too, my dear.”

“So what? I was afraid.”

“And I too could say I was afraid but I’d be lying to you the way you’re lying to me. The truth is I was tired and lonely and sad. When my wife left I felt I was finished. I knew she wanted to run away and not come back. I told her to do that because it would put an end to the story, but when she did it I went crazy, as though I’d forgotten what I’d known. Failure is when someone forgets the things he knows and ends up as though he knows nothing. Then it’s as if he died. I really did feel as though I were dead. You want me to have opened the door and saved the woman from death? Why didn’t you open your door?”

“I did but I told her I couldn’t hide her at my place as it wasn’t safe.”

“Meaning you lied to her and left her to die.”

“You’re telling me she died?”

“They killed her and her daughter. They went by their house and cut their throats with knives. They cut the mother’s throat and they cut the daughter’s throat and they wiped their blood-covered hands on the walls.”

“They cut their throats?”

“You’re telling me you didn’t know?”

“I’d left the country.”

“No — they cut their throats before you left.”

“And what about Sinalcol? Did they kill him or is he still alive?”

Karim’s voice, as he asked about Sinalcol, sounded like that of a comedian in an empty theater. He’d listened to how the woman and her daughter had ended up with their throats slit. It was the completion of vengeance, a way of making Khaled pay the full price. But instead of feeling ashamed and staying silent, all he could think to do was ask about a ghost of whose existence nobody was even sure.

Danny looked at him with half-closed eyes and said he had to go. He asked for the bill, paid, refusing Karim’s attempt to do so, put his weight on his stick, and limped off without looking back.

HEND COULDN’T put life with her husband into any sort of context. The man who’d taken possession of her heart while she’d been momentarily distracted was so full of inconsis​tencies she’d come to feel she wasn’t living with just one man. There were many men within the man who had given up dealing in drugs and gone into timber and petrol imports. He’d be tender when the boys needed tenderness, amorous when he felt the need for love, lewd and foulmouthed with her in bed if he’d had to much to drink, sweet when sleeping next to her like a child, frantic when he failed to find her at his side, hilarious when facing difficulties — a mass of inconsis​tencies gathered together in one man. She didn’t know whether he loved her or whether marrying her was simply his way of taking revenge on fate, an attempt to prove he deserved better than his brother because he was braver and more truthful with himself and with others.