Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

She said her grandmother had experienced a very strange marriage, because she’d married her own grandfather. “Can you imagine, doctor? When my grandmother found out, she refused to sleep with her husband!”

He said he didn’t believe in such superstitions but wanted to hear the rest of the story.

The story went that the grandmother found out about her husband when she gave birth to her son, Anwar. The same day her husband told her they must leave their tumbledown village, and without delay. He said that at the very moment Anwar had seen the light, Arif Bey Elwan had been found shot dead. “I don’t know who killed him, but I do know the Elwan clan will attack us and kidnap the child. They will never accept that the sheikh’s soul passed into a poor peasant family like ours.”

The woman was confined to bed and couldn’t be moved. Next to her sat her mother, who pleaded with the man to delay the departure by two days so the woman could regain her health. This forced the husband to come up with an amazing stratagem. He announced that his wife had given birth to a girl, and he refused to receive well-wishers, wreathing his face in a genuine scowl born of fear. And after a week he escaped with his son to the village of Shuhba.

The story is not, however, about Anwar, who remembered his former life only intermittently. His parents suppressed his memories and he lived his early childhood under the terror of both that trauma and of finding himself in the poor household where he had been reincarnated. The story is that of the grandmother, who’d been skeptical about transmigration until the day her husband told her that, when he was three years old, he had spoken and recalled his former life, only for his mother to discover, twenty years later, that he wanted to marry his own granddaughter.

“I didn’t recognize you because you were reborn five years after I died, but you’re my daughter’s daughter.”

“You mean you went and asked for my hand from your daughter?”

“When I saw you I lost my heart and there was nothing to do but marry you.”

“And you knew I was your daughter’s daughter?”

“Certainly not. You speak when you’re two or three and then you forget what you said and remember it only if your parents remind you. I’d forgotten, and by the time my mother told me my heart had been lost and there was nothing I could do. We had to get married or I would have gone mad. Love makes people mad and my love for you made me mad.”

Ghazala said her grandmother’s body shriveled up at the horror of what she heard. She had fever for a whole week, and when she got better she couldn’t sleep with her husband anymore. Whenever he went near her she felt sharp pains in her belly and her body would tremble, as though the shock that had caused the fever still lurked within it — “and that, my girl, is why your father stayed an only child. Everyone told your grandfather to divorce me because I refused to have any more children, but your grandfather, God rest his soul, kept on loving me. He just used to beg me to let him come to me at night and sleep next to me without touching me. He said he liked listening to my breathing because my breath was sweet.”

Karim had no idea why Ghazala had told him this story, but he knew that a bed that brings two bodies together calls for talk, for sex matures only with talk. Perhaps Ghazala, finding the doctor dazzled by the arts of love she’d taught him, had wanted to dazzle him with words as well.

Karim wasn’t dazzled at the time; he gave the impression of one listening to naïve superstitions. But after the terror with Matrouk’s gun he became convinced that Ghazala was indeed inhabited by two souls, her own and her grandmother’s, and as he recalled her description of the end of the world he was seized with panic.

KARIM HAD DECIDED there was no point staying any longer in Beirut. The work on the hospital was going slowly and the architect, Ahmad Dakiz, was only interested in following up on his Canadian immigration application even as he persisted in raving about “the new Beirut.”

Karim felt lonely in the dust-covered city. Beirut seemed gray and naked. The numerous pockmarks that had formed on the reinforced concrete made its forest of piled stone seem diseased. “Everything here is sick,” the doctor had thought on his return from his French expatriation — “and I too am sick and must escape before the city’s smallpox spreads to my skin and my soul and I become stuck in the place, unable to leave, unwilling to stay.”

He’d had a good laugh on reading an article by a Lebanese novelist in the newspaper al-Nahar in which the author said, “The only moment of joy felt by the Lebanese is on the plane. In Beirut you feel you are choking, so you decide to go to Paris, and the moment you get on the plane you feel as happy as if you had been let out of prison. After a few days, though, you are overwhelmed by nostalgia for Beirut and feel you cannot bear to be away from it, so you get depressed and your depression only lifts on the plane that is taking you back to Lebanon. The Lebanese is a flying creature, happy only in the air.”

Karim had laughed because he’d felt he was on the verge of falling into the Lebanese trap which makes one a stranger everywhere. He realized too that his amorous adventures with Ghazala and Muna, and his dumb passion for Hend, were symptoms of the same sickness that rendered him incapable of giving his emotions a fixed direction, just as they rendered him incapable of speech.

And in the end the eccentric architect — who phoned him daily claiming it was about work and who behaved like a bully, browbeating his listeners with incessant talk of how Beirut’s old city would be redeveloped once it had been demolished — had finally come.

The thirty-something, who had told his wife he was of mysterious Frankish origins, was passionate about the Solidere project. Solidere is a property company founded by the billionaire Rafiq Hariri created to redevelop central Beirut, which was smashed to pieces in the war. This was of course before Hariri became first prime minister and then, thanks to his barbaric assassination on February 14, 2005, history.

Dakiz was head of Solidere’s demolition unit. In other words, he was the engineer who drew up the plans for the demolition of all the buildings surrounding the Place des Martyrs. The destruction was preparatory to the driving through there of a street the breadth of Paris’s Champs-Élysées. This was intended to link the city center with two skyscrapers occupying the seafront and called, in the city’s master plan, the World Trade Towers — an optimistic salute to New York’s famous twin towers that collapsed on September 11, 2001, as the result of a suicide operation executed by al-Qaeda using commercial aircraft, one of which was flown by an Egyptian engineer named Mohamed Atta.

Karim would never forget how the architect’s face had quivered with the joy of victory as he described the plan for the demolition of the Cinema Rivoli building, which blocked the view of the sea from the city center. It had crossed his mind that day to phone Muna and tell her her husband was a criminal.

Muna — the woman who had lodged in Karim’s memory as she emerged from the bathroom, the drops of water glistening on her shoulders as she wrapped her body in a white towel that covered her breasts and upper thighs — had told him that in Canada she would disappear and no one would be able to find her. “Even my family will give up, because I want to disappear, like a photo that’s been permanently deleted.

“I don’t like memories and dragging up the past. My problem with Eduardo was that when I became convinced of his point of view and stopped feeling anything after his wife discovered what was happening, he went to pieces and started going on about love and trying to keep the whole thing alive.