Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“This is insane!” said Karim. “What kind of person demolishes his own memory?”

“Hang on a second,” said Dakiz, “Cinema Rivoli’s going to come down. Why is the computer doing that, even though I put in enough explosives to bring down a city? That cinema’s like a streetwalker, it blocks the sea. For some reason it doesn’t want to come down.”

“Enough!” said Karim.

“Wadi Abu Jamil.”

“You’re going to knock the Wadi down too?”

“To the ground.”

“And the Tawileh market?”

“The Tawileh market?! What are those silly little markets good for? They’re all in ruins and full of trash. It’s all going. We want to build a modern city — malls, like in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and America.”

“And the memories?”

“Memories! This is a country without a memory. What use is memory? Memories of crap and shit, c’est fini . The architect Adnan said this is the age of architecture by explosion and demolition and I was put in charge, and when Adnan took a look at the plan he almost fainted. He said we ought to have shown it to Rashed, God rest his soul, he would have gone wild with joy.”

Karim gathered from Ahmad Dakiz that the architects Adnan and Rashed had been military functionaries during the war. Adnan had gone on to become a contractor and Solidere had managed to persuade him to work with them, and Rashed had died in the Battle of the Hotels in 1976. Dakiz had fought when he was nineteen with the Communist Action Organization, then left it to join a Maoist organization that viewed the civil war as an opportunity to bring about radical change in Lebanon and the region. And today he oversaw the demolition of whatever the war had failed to demolish.

“This is insanity,” said Karim.

“No, doctor. What you just watched was what’s called an illusion d’optique . Everything’s like that now, everything today is an optical illusion. The whole of Lebanon is no more than an optical illusion! And what do you think we’re doing? We’re doing now what we couldn’t do in the war.”

“But you’re a communist, right?”

“Sure I’m a communist.”

“And you’re working on a capitalist project?”

“Please, none of that tricky talk. I want to make a little money, emigrate to Canada, and forget.”

He said he wanted to forget and Karim couldn’t think of how to answer him. He was right to forget, we all want to forget. Karim, however, was convinced that the protection of memory was a condition of forgetting. Memory had to be preserved somewhere so we could forget it and turn a new page. When we demolished memory in that barbaric way, though, it meant we wanted memory to make its home in our unconscious. That way the war would renew itself every time we thought it had ended.

Karim said nothing. He too had fled Beirut in order to forget. He’d left his memory hanging from the demolished walls of his soul and left. And now he pretended to be taken aback by the architect, who was continuing the war in his own way, demolishing whatever it hadn’t been possible to demolish, so that things might be built in their place that could then be exposed once more to destruction?

Why though had he come back? When Muna asked him why he’d returned and whether anyone in their right mind would return to a country plagued by wars, he hadn’t known what to say.

Muna said he’d convinced her of the truth of his idea about the war that would never end and asked him, as she sipped the last drops of coffee from her cup and then dipped her finger in it to pick up the residue at the bottom and lick it off, why he didn’t write about the idea. She said she thought his return was just a whim, an expression of what she called the midlife crisis, and launched into a psychological analysis of the latter, and Karim could feel the drowsiness creeping into his eyes. He told her she spoke like a schoolmistress and that that kind of talk turned into a sort of pillow of drowsiness.

He spoke of drowsiness and felt he was imitating Nasim. Nasim had told him that the teachers’ voices tickled his eyes. “I don’t know why but as soon as I hear the teacher talking my eyes begin to close, like their words were covering me in a gray cloud, and I can’t understand a word anymore and my mind wanders off.”

Karim had tried to get out of Nasri’s decision that he should take the high school exam in his brother’s place. He decided to study with his brother in the hope that it would encourage him to take things seriously and save him the risk. Nasim just couldn’t, though. Probably he switched off because he was certain the high school certificate was in his pocket, and all his brother had to do was go to the exam and bring it back home.

Nasri couldn’t believe that on the day Karim was afraid he might fail. The young man’s fear was real all the same. Three days before the exam he started feeling mildly dizzy and nauseous. He lost his appetite and his mouth felt dry as tinder. He told his father he felt ill but the pharmacist, who wanted his second son to get into university at any cost, told Karim it was just nerves: “What are you afraid of, boy?” Karim said he hadn’t prepared enough and had forgotten Arabic Philosophy and didn’t know what he was to do in the exam.

“What will it take? Just leaf through the book and you’ll remember everything.”

He didn’t dare tell his father that whenever he picked up the book he felt drowsy, and no sooner had he decided to pretend to be Nasim than his brother’s personality would possess him.

He said he’d try.

He tried and succeeded.

But he didn’t tell his father that the nausea had got much worse in the early morning in the exam hall. He’d been obliged to ask the proctor for permission to go to the bathroom because he felt he was going to be sick, and the teacher had taken pity on him: she had a cup of tea brought to him and told him to pull himself together because she couldn’t give him permission to leave the exam hall.

He told Muna that his crisis wasn’t midlife, it was a weird mixture of his love for and hatred of the city, and that what he’d told her about his theory of the war that never ends was a précis of a cheaply produced book put out by an Islamist group in Tripoli.

“The Islamists talk like that? Strange. Anyhow I have to go home now and eat something. You know, Ahmad has started getting on my nerves. He barely gets home and has something to eat before he jumps up and goes to the computer and starts playing at demolition. I feel he revels in it, as though … I don’t know how to put it, but it’s as though I don’t know him.”

Karim hadn’t been lying to Muna when he told her he’d read the text in a cheaply produced book put out by a small organization calling itself the Organization for Righteousness and Prosely​tization set up by Khaled Nabulsi in the last phase of his life to replace the Resistance and Fury organization. Nor had he told the whole truth. Danny had begun writing the text in French, then asked Karim to help him translate it into Arabic. In the end the two friends rewrote it as a full-length text under the title Arms and the Lebanese Balance of Power and published it under a pseudonym in the magazine New Culture . This was a monthly that came out intermittently, edited by a poet who’d left the Communist Party under the influence of the ideas of the New Left before holing up in his village in Blad Jbeil; the magazine had closed when he had a revelation: to write during a time of war was absurd.

The story of the transformation of this Marxist text, which stressed the role of the working class in the civil war and the impossibility of the Lebanese conflagration coming to an end without a solution to the Palestinian problem, deserved to be “written with needles on the eyeballs of insight,” as Scheherazade has taught us.