Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Hend smiled wryly and said exile had made him forget how people lived in Lebanon. “You’ve really got things the wrong way round. Beirut may be the only place in the world where a person has to reinvent himself every day.”

She spoke of Beirut as a city that was sliding. She said Beirut had decided to die ages ago but its inhabitants refused to acknowledge the fact; each time the city died its population raised it from the dead against its will. The hardest thing was not dying but coming back from the dead, because then one was obliged to reinvent oneself once more. That, she said, was why she didn’t like the story of Lazarus in the Bible. “Your brother doesn’t understand why I don’t like to take the children to church on Palm Sunday.”

“Who doesn’t like Palm Sunday?” said Karim.

“I don’t,” answered Hend.

“What about the candles and the olive branches and the palm leaves? You must be joking. The way I see it, those kinds of celebrations are the only nice thing about religion.”

She said she hated Palm Sunday because instead of singing hymns to Christ the King who had entered Jerusalem on the foal of an ass to be crucified, they sang hymns of the resurrection of Lazarus. Had anyone asked Lazarus his opinion? The poor man hadn’t uttered a word after his rebirth. Only Khalil Hawi had understood and written his poem “Lazarus ’62,” in which the protagonist calls on the gravedigger to deepen his grave because he doesn’t want resurrection. “Have you read the poem?”

“Deepen the hole, gravedigger! Deepen it till it has no bottom!” intoned Karim.

“My, my! You like poetry now? When we were together you used to say poetry and Umm Kulthoum were the reason for the Arabs’ defeat.”

“And now I like Umm Kulthoum too but that’s not the point. The point is I don’t like symbols. Khalil Hawi did to Lazarus what the Bible did: he turned him from a person into a symbol. No doubt the poet was right, the man wanted to go back into his grave, but his reasons had nothing to do with the poet’s. He wanted to go back into the grave because he was afraid of life and the poet wanted to turn him into a symbol for the failure of Arab nationalism and the failure of the project of rebirth. I hate symbols in literature, politics, and life because in the end the symbolist poet or writer is obliged to die symbolically, meaning he never savors the flavor of death. That’s what happened to Ghassan Kanafani and that’s what Khalil Hawi did when he committed suicide,” said Karim.

Hend nodded but didn’t reply. She felt that this man who had come back from faraway France no longer meant anything to her. He’d become a mere form emptied of its content, a body without a soul.

Nasri had spoken to her once about the soul. Hend had been impatient with the spiritual transformation that had overtaken her husband, with how he had so suddenly donned the garb of faith and taken to insisting on going to church to attend mass on Sundays. He never forced her to go with him. He said he respected her opinion on religion, but had discovered faith and would be taking the boys to church every Sunday. Hend made no comment. Religious mania had seized the Lebanese during the civil war and there was no reason her husband should be immune. Devotion to religion was better than working for a Fascist party or taking or dealing in drugs. She told him he was free but had to leave the boys their freedom of choice and he shouldn’t put any pressure on them. He said children had to follow the religion of their fathers and that her view that he’d given up one opium in favor of another was naïve and not of their age, which was religious at all levels.

Nasri had come on a Sunday morning bearing manaqish with thyme and found Hend alone in the apartment. When he asked her where Nasim and the boys were a wry smile traced itself on her lips.

“No, my dear,” said Nasri, “you mustn’t make fun of your husband because he’s rediscovered his relationship with his Lord.”

“If that’s what you think why don’t you go to church too?” she asked.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you,” said Nasri.

What he said scared Hend. At first his words seemed pitiable but soon fear filled her eyes and the mockery in them died. The aging man spoke from the depths of his soul. His voice sounded rough and warm and tinged with sorrow.

He said he’d lived his whole life without faith in anything. “I had faith neither in religion nor in the beliefs of the secularists. The only thing I had faith in was life. I believe in life in spite of everything because life is magnanimous. Even when it takes, it takes so it can give. All my life I was certain my body was my soul and that I was an indivisible unity. Religion, my dear, rests on the division of the human self into two parts, body and soul, and some say it’s three parts, meaning body, spirit, and soul. All my life I could never understand the meaning of the spirit as something that is attached to the body and is extinguished with it but I’ve come to realize the meaning of the soul remaining alive after we die. I thought it was an illusion — how could the life of a beautiful woman continue without her body, and what could that mean? These were myths, or so I thought, and I believed, and still do, that death is the end of everything. We go back to where we came from, and we came from nowhere. All the same … That ‘all the same’ did me in because it says everything while saying nothing. What matters, my daughter, is that I began to discover my mistake. I discovered it gradually as I aged. People liken old age to childhood but that’s wrong. Absolutely not. In childhood your body and soul grow together. In old age the body ages while the soul stays the same. I swear the only way I know I’m an old man is from the eyes of others or the pains in this incon​sequential body. Am I as incon​sequential as my body? It’s not possible. I can’t believe this is my body. It disgusts me now. But my soul is still as it was. That’s why I’ve begun to be convinced that a person is two, a body and a soul, which means in all probability that the soul has a life independent of the body.”

“Why don’t you do the same as your son and go to church?”

“That’s another subject. Belief in the existence of the soul and the issue of the existence of God have nothing to do with one another. Even if God exists I can’t bring myself to make peace with Him. I couldn’t accept such a thing for myself and He wouldn’t accept it either. No, it’s out of the question. But what I was trying to do was to ask you to be patient with Nasim. He may be right and we may be wrong.”

Hend told Karim that from the first time she’d seen him again at her house she’d called him Lazarus. “I began calling you Lazarus to myself and began seeing you as one who’d risen from the grave and didn’t know anything, like a sleepwalker: he walks and talks like a sleepwalker without understanding anyone, and without anyone understanding him. Why did you come back? Wouldn’t it have been better if you’d remained dead to us? We’d have been able to share our memories of you, sweet and sour. Now everything about you is sour.”

She said she hated him and hated herself and hated her emotions. “It’s as though I’ve been sentenced to life with this family. Plus you’ve reopened the story of Nasri’s death, which we’d all decided to forget. You came back and brought all the horrible memories back with you. From the first day, my mother said you hadn’t come to set up a hospital, you’d come to open graves, and I didn’t believe her. But then I discovered she was right and I shouldn’t have let my husband go ahead with the hospital project.”

“Your mother must know because of her extensive experience of life.”