Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

The woman pulled her head back and looked at the young man sitting next to her. “You’re Nasim, that’s for sure. What do you want with me, son? Go back to your family.”

Nasim sat down on the floor, took Suzanne in his arms, clasped her to his chest, and said in a whisper that she had to go with him and that if she refused he would stay and die with her.

The woman got up, went into her bedroom, and began gathering together her things. “Leave everything where it is, there’s no time. Can’t you hear the shelling? They’re coming now. Let’s get out of here.”

She stopped, hesitated, went to her bed, took a small icon of the Virgin Mary from beneath her pillow, placed it in her bosom, and left, leaning on Nasim.

Thus did Nasim win back the woman who had thrown him out. He took her to the small apartment in which he’d lived before marrying Hend and after leaving his father’s, and Suzanne lived with him there for about a week. Then he found an apartment in the Badawi district whose Muslim owners had been chased out and she lived in it for ten years until she died. During this period Nasim visited her once a week, at five p.m. every Friday, and every Sunday morning he sent her a platter of kenafeh-with-cheese.

He told Ronny that what had happened at the souk wouldn’t do — “What fault is it of the women’s?” — but his words fell on deaf ears, so he went deaf himself. Michel Hajji advised him not to get caught up in such things: “It’s a bigger issue than just that. We’re defending the Christian presence in the East and a few excesses here or there mustn’t put us off.”

Nasim understood that he would have to turn a blind eye and that the true fighter is one who closes his eyes and throws himself into the war and asks no questions, letting things take him where they will. This was why he asked Suzanne to stop telling him the same story every time he visited her, saying she had to forget and should spend the days that were left to her remembering the beautiful things she’d lived through rather than repeating to him the story of Faten the Egyptian.

Suzanne refused to forget. She told him that a vision of Faten, her belly slit, came to her every night. “Why? Can you tell me why your people did that to the women? Why did they take the Egyptian and the Turkish girls and the ones from Aleppo and kill them that way?”

What did happen at the souk on January 14, 1976? The stories had vanished along with their heroes, all of whom had died, as Nasim had said to Ahmad Dakiz, who was telling him about the plans to demolish the old parts of Beirut and build a new Beirut in its place, claiming that, “Beirut is going to be like Paris or even lovelier.”

“But the war isn’t over yet,” said Nasim.

“And it mustn’t end now,” said the engineer. “War is the best architect. It demolishes so that we can clear and rebuild.”

The souk, or Mutanabbi Street, with its Ottoman arcades and illuminated neon signs adorning the balconies and announcing the names of the prostitutes, was still standing, a witness to the massacre, the memory of which would be erased only ten years later when Suzanne died.

Was Suzanne’s account true? Was it true that the boys had separated the prostitutes according to ethnicity after raping them horribly, and had then killed the Egyptians, the Turks, and the ones from Aleppo, ordered the Lebanese Muslims to leave immediately, and given the Christians a stay of execution until the evening of the following day?

Nasim asked Ronny what had happened but the boy’s memory was so messed up he couldn’t sort out the events. He recounted only bits and pieces, full of inconsis​tencies, laughing hysterically as he did so.

Why did Nasim wait all those years to find out from his brother the reason why Suzanne had thrown him out when he went back to her that Sunday morning as agreed? Why hadn’t he asked her, and broken the wall of silence that had risen between them over those ten years? Nasim had felt remorse that day. He’d poured insults on his brother and threatened to kill him, but he’d hated himself, and his inability to speak, more.

Suzanne said almost nothing during his weekly visits to her. All she could think to do was call blessings down upon him. When he spoke of his memories with her, silence enveloped her; and when he asked what was wrong with her she said she was cold. Suzanne always felt cold and Nasim failed to understand why. Like an idiot, he believed she felt cold even at the height of summer because she was a whore and a whore couldn’t sleep alone without a man in her bed. Nasim didn’t understand that the true cold, which penetrates bones, results from the inability to speak. He felt the need to visit her grave and stand in front of it and say he hadn’t been unfaithful to her, that he hadn’t broken his undertaking to her, that the one who’d been unfaithful to her and to him was his other half. He’d told his brother what had happened because it was like telling himself: he’d never expected his twin to betray him by telling the story to his father. Nasim could see Suzanne, humiliated beneath Nasri’s pitiless gaze, his viciousness, his lack of compassion. Now he understood why Suzanne hadn’t been able to forgive him. When he’d brought her to his apartment he’d felt gallant and heroic; he’d risked his life and forgiven. He’d never once asked her why she’d thrown him out because he hadn’t wanted to embarrass or demean her or look as though he was now doing her a favor. He tried to talk to her and behave as a friend who was like one of her children. But she wrapped herself in silence and he respected her sorrow and her loneliness.

Nasim hadn’t gone to the grave and covered Suzanne with words. He knew well that people cover themselves with words for warmth but he didn’t know where to find Suzanne’s grave. The woman had been buried in the common graveyard because she was not of a family that owned a grave plot, so he had no way now of finding her. Suzanne would stay cold forever and Nasim would never be able to find the words.

He tried to tell Hend that he wanted to speak, but the words tripped over each over in his mouth, for words, like seeds, need ground to receive them and Hend’s ears weren’t ready to listen. Or, at least, the fault wasn’t Hend’s, for Nasim hadn’t dared speak because he didn’t know how to, or what to say. Should he repeat what his father had said, to the effect that wrong had become right because of the war? But that wasn’t true. His father had said that the Lebanese had made a Wailing Wall out of the war to justify men’s villainy, their cowardice, their inability to understand the inner jungle with its tangled branches in which dwelled their minds and souls, rendering them incapable of understanding their actions. “Tomorrow,” he’d say, “when the war ends, what shall we say? Shall we yearn for it because it filled the emptiness of our lives with another emptiness? Or shall we chew the cud of our memories till the end of our days?”

“I swear to God, I thought of killing you! You made me feel like shit and made the one noble deed I’d done in my life seem pathetic. You know what Suzanne did when she saw me in her place, when I went to get her in the middle of the shelling? She covered her face with her hands and said to me, ‘Not you. I don’t want to.’ I thought she was embarrassed to see me but later I realized she despised me and did so till the day she died, and all because of you. You can’t imagine the thoughts that came to me: I felt I could kill you. Damn the Devil and all his works, you’re a traitor, my brother, my dear friend, and I forgive you. Let’s take a look at what we can do with the hospital.”

Sitting alone with his brother while they waited for Ahmad Dakiz to arrive bearing the plans for the building, Nasim had spoken of the hospital. Hend wasn’t at that particular meeting: she was sitting in the dining room helping the children with their homework. She’d told Nasim that she despised the architect, whose sole interest was in making money and who was working for a property company while preparing to emigrate to Canada. He spoke of the beauty of the old city in Montreal while contributing to the demolition of old Beirut! She didn’t like his wife either, because she never for an instant stopped playing the seductress, as though she couldn’t forget she was female, as though her center of gravity was located between her thighs — “and you, my dear, like that type of woman. I regret I can’t be of service to you, or be a friend to your friends.”