Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He’d left the apartment for a meeting with the agent of a medical instruments company, then returned at five in the evening to find everything in his apartment shining — but no Ghazala. His meeting had been with Ayoub Tayan, a distant relative of his mother’s whom he hadn’t seen for thirty-five years; in any case the man and the child had nothing in common. He said he was the agent for a medical equipment company and had reequipped the Greek Orthodox hospital, and that he attended mass every Sunday morning because he was a lay leader at the Church of Mar Niqoula. Karim failed to grasp the connection between work and church services and he had a strange feeling about this short, fat fifty-year-old, the contours of whose face were consumed by flesh and the hair of whose eyebrows covered his small eyes so thickly you couldn’t see them. Then he learned from his brother that “the Yoyo,” as the man’s mother, Tante Rose, had called him, was a member of the BG Squad, the special strike force set up by the Phalangists during the war and the instrument with which they had forced Beirut’s Ashrafieh district into submission.

“The Bash brought the world to its knees with the BG Squad,” said Nasim.

“Who’s the Bash?” asked Karim.

“The Bash was Sheikh Bashir, God rest his soul. After all this time you still don’t know who the Bash was!”

“And what’s the Yoyo got to do with it?”

“He was one of the Bash’s right-hand men, but it was his mother’s fault. His mother went to the metropolitan and said to him, ‘Help me, my lord. Your son is going to be lost to us. Bashir is about to send him to his death, along with all the other young boys.’ ”

Everyone had their doubts about the Yoyo’s parentage. Ayoub was the only son of Qustantin Tayan, who died in mysterious circumstances at the start of the war. It’s said he was sitting in his living room when he was struck by a stray bullet in the upper thigh. The bullet struck an artery, causing him to bleed to death within minutes, and it is thought that he died before the ambulance men could get him to the hospital.

At the time, many accused the metropolitan of having killed his rival, but nothing is sure, for dying in war is like living in it — the product of mere chance. There was however a consensus that the Yoyo looked too much like the metropolitan, and that if you were to hear his voice without seeing him you’d think you were listening to His Reverence Samu’il.

Nasim made a lot of his opinion that the Yoyo was the son of the metropolitan and asked his brother whether he’d met His Reverence Samu’il in Paris.

After the meeting with the Yoyo, in which Nasim had also participated, was over, Nasim insisted on taking his brother to the Chez Sami restaurant in Maameltein. Despite the doctor’s refusal and insistence on returning to the apartment, he found himself in his brother’s car, heading for the restaurant. Thus the possibility of Karim finding Ghazala at home, which was something he’d promised himself, was lost.

Karim wasn’t interested in hearing the story of the metropolitan’s affair with Tante Rose, or how the Yoyo’s relationship to the Bash had continued after Bashir informed him that he had to move from military to economic activities — which resulted in his becoming the biggest commission agent at the Port of Beirut’s Dock Five. The Yoyo was no different from many contractors who had clambered over corpses to garner vast wealth, creating in the process a class of war profiteers. The story of how Metropolitan Samu’il had bequeathed the Yoyo extensive lands in the hinterland of Jbeil was equally meaningless. Even the tales about the disintegration and crumbling of the metropolitan’s bones during his final days, to the point that his body shrank and turned into a ball, and how Tante Rose abandoned him and refused to visit him in the hospital because she couldn’t stand to see him in that condition — all these were just banal everyday stories such as one might find in the television soap operas of those days. What did interest Karim was the man’s nervous collapse when he found out that the Frenchwoman whom he loved was being unfaithful to him. Nasim said that all the man’s friends had come together to help him regain his psychological balance, and that confiding to him the task of equipping the hospital was part of the treatment.

Once, when his words, being larded with something of the desire that gives them their taste, were still able to reach her, Karim had told Bernadette that what he feared most was his feeling that Beirut had become merely a mirror. He’d told her of the torment of the mirrors — that when he could no longer distinguish between his image and the mirror, he’d decided to flee. “A mirror, my dear, feels pain, because it exchanges itself for what it reflects, so that it forgets who it is. Then, when it tries to recover itself, it discovers it is no longer capable of distinguishing between its own identity and that of others and is forced to forget itself and melt into those reflected images.”

Bernadette had knit her brows, as she usually did when facing something difficult to understand, and said she understood. A moment later, though, she burst out laughing and said she hadn’t understood a word. She told him the nicest thing about her relationship with him was that she had never once understood what he meant, and that that was what attracted her to him.

“A mysterious love brought about by your mysterious words.”

She laughed and he laughed and he stopped trying to explain because he was unable to put his feelings about mirrors into clear speech.

Why was his mysteriousness no longer capable of revealing the shadows of love in his wife’s eyes? Worse, his inability to express himself, which Bernadette called mysteriousness, had begun at some point to change into a reason for her to turn on him and criticize his behavior.

When Karim got back to the apartment and entered it in the dark of the power outage, he didn’t find Ghazala. He’d lost Ghazala in the restaurant listening to a trivial story about a trivial man who had made up a trivial love story for his trivial brother to tell him. He had wasted his day in an excellent restaurant that would have served better as a place for lovers’ trysts than for making fun of a love story, however stupid.

Ultimately, the Yoyo proved his story wasn’t stupid by finding a tragic ending for it appropriate to a lover’s tale. Karim though, at the very time he believed he was living a story of physical passion with Ghazala, found himself descending into the depths of melodrama. The Yoyo committed suicide. He put an end to his feeling of humiliation at the mockery of others by shooting himself in the side of the head. Not so Karim. Karim had thought that Ghazala could fill the empty spaces of Beirut with a love that wasn’t like love because it was stripped of all feelings — love without talk of love, desire without the soul being consumed in flames.

Ghazala was pure sex without pointless extras. With her the Frenchified doctor threw himself into a sea of those traditional delights according to which the woman is pawn to the will of the man. The man plays the role of the undisputed master, amuses himself with the woman, and takes her wet with the water of desire. Then, upon rising from the bed of pleasure, he washes her off his body as though she had never been and goes back to life.

Karim’s problem was that, in spite of his attempts to convince himself otherwise, he’d found nothing in Beirut to keep him busy. He came and found that the architectural plans for the hospital building had been made. He’d met with Ayoub so that they could study together equipment purchasing options, but Nasim had decided that the equipment and doctors’ contracts would have to wait awhile because he was expecting a large sum of money to arrive. At the same time, Ayoub’s suicide came as an early indication that the project was faltering. Karim’s job was reduced to waiting and going to the construction site, where he would listen to the building contractor’s explanation of the progress of the preparations for the start of the work. When he got back to the apartment he’d sit at the table in the office and draw up plans that he knew in his heart would never materialize, despite which he decided to continue the game.