Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Jean-Pierre said he wasn’t an Orientalist. “I was born in Tunisia and decided to become an Arab the day the French army shelled Bizerte. That day I saw injustice with my own eyes and decided to become an Arab. Do you understand?”

Jean-Pierre spoke with a clear Damascene accent. He must have studied Arabic at the French Institute in Damascus, thought Karim, feeling sympathy for this man who’d actually chosen to become an Arab. Karim didn’t agree either that the dominant tendency would be Islamist in the future, seeing Khaled’s Islam as the expression of a crisis that had struck the Left and was bound to end soon, allowing things to get back to normal. All the same, he felt some sympathy for the Frenchman, who spoke lovingly of Khaled and said he considered him to be a major landmark on the path of his own personal development, both intellectually and psycholo​gically. He said he’d learned from Khaled the meaning of “the people.” “Before I met him and his comrades in the Qubbeh district I didn’t know the meaning of poverty, misery, and pain. With them, I learned, and I want to write an academic text in which I can give the phenomenon represented by Khaled its proper status, as a marker pointing toward the future.”

When the man heard no response his voice rose in anger. “You complain about the Syrian regime?” said Jean-Pierre. “Who, in your opinion, is going to change things there? You? Honestly, that’s out of the question. There’s only one power there and I’m going to be the first to write about it.”

Karim was surprised to hear Danny telling his French friend that he could understand Karim’s refusal to give him Abu Rabia’s texts. “They are a sacred trust. Let’s put it aside for the moment,” he said as he took the Frenchman’s arm and they left. Karim had been on the verge of agreeing to photocopy the papers to give to the Frenchman but Danny’s behavior took him by surprise and he said nothing.

Karim followed the French media as they spoke of the French sociologist Jean-Pierre Giroux, kidnapped by Islamists in Beirut. His name was added to the list of hostages whose tragedies were acted out on Beirut’s stage following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There, in France, Karim realized that the destruction of the Palestinian presence and the smashing of the Lebanese leftist forces had opened up the field for Islamists to take control of the revolution, as Jean-Pierre had predicted in an article published in Le Monde four months before he was kidnapped. When the news of Jean-Pierre’s death was announced following the discovery of his remains in an area called Harj el-Qatil in the Beirut suburbs, Karim was overcome with depression and told his French wife that he didn’t understand. “They killed him because he was French,” Bernadette said. “They’re savages and have no mercy. You know that better than me.”

He was astonished that she could utter the word “savages” and look him in the eye, as though accusing him of killing a person who had only become French against his will and because of his death. He tried to tell her the story but discovered he couldn’t, not because he was obliged to speak French with his wife but because there were no words that could explain the tragedy.

Karim only met Jean-Pierre on that one occasion when he’d visited him to ask for Abu Rabia’s papers, but he got to know the man after his death because of the French media interest in him. Then he came across a piece Jean-Pierre had written on the Islamist movements: it was the piece that was the true reason for his death, sick with hepatitis, in an underground cell in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

This man, who had decided to abandon his French identity and who lived in Damascus, who had married a Syrian woman with whom he had had three children, and who had then moved to Beirut to work for CERMOC, had found himself simultaneously a prisoner and a victim of the ideas he had embraced.

Karim told his wife, who seemed annoyed by the conversation and listened as though forced to, that the tragedy of Jean-Pierre was a part of the tragedy of Beirut, and he wasn’t sure it was the Islamists who’d killed him. In those days, after the Israeli occupation had smashed Beirut and ripped it to pieces, darkness had wrapped the city in silence and fear. That was when Islamist groups started popping up like mushrooms and everyone got mixed up with everyone else — leftists became Islamists, leftists collapsed, Islamists moved from one place to another, and an entire people lost hope as it watched the harvest of its dreams turn into nightmare. That was when Jean-Pierre was seized at a flying checkpoint set up on the Beirut airport road and kidnapping groups passed him on from one to the other, until he ended up in the hands of one of the security organizations.

Karim said he didn’t know who had killed Jean-Pierre or left him to die in that cruel way, writhing with sickness and despair. But he had read the story of his visit to his home in Ras el-Nabaa, as recounted by his Syrian wife, who had come with her children to live in Paris after despairing of any possibility of his release.

He told Bernadette that the words had been like needles stabbing at his eyes. He said his tears hadn’t fallen out of pity or empathy but from the pain in his eyes. He said what he couldn’t understand was why they’d allowed him that one visit to his home.

In an interview with the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur his wife said that, about two months after her husband had been kidnapped, she’d heard a gentle knocking on the door, followed by the turning of the key in the lock. It was about eleven at night, the city was swimming in a gelatinous darkness, and the July heat stuck to her body. “I felt afraid. I got out of bed half naked and instead of running to see where the sound was coming from, I ran to the children’s room, switched on a flashlight, and stood by the door of the room to protect them with my body. Then suddenly I knew it was him. I smelled the smell of his sweat and heard his labored breathing. I yelled, ‘Jean-Pierre!’ and heard his voice, which sounded somewhat hoarse. He told me to lower my voice or I’d wake the children. I went to the living room and saw him. He was standing next to this tall man, who smiled at me. I ran toward him and hugged him but instead of taking me in his arms he pushed me back a little. I couldn’t understand what the strange man was doing with my husband who had returned after being away for two long months.

“Jean-Pierre told me in a whisper that he’d come home to get Ibn Khaldoun’s Introduction and go back.

“ ‘Go back? Where?’

“ ‘I’m going back there.’

“I said, ‘I don’t understand.’ The man accompanying him explained that they’d allowed Jean-Pierre a quick visit to his home to get some books before taking him back.

“ ‘Back where?’ she asked.

“The man smiled and told me not to worry and to stop making such a fuss about my husband’s kidnapping.

“ ‘Your husband is in friendly hands,’ he said, ‘and soon he’ll be home, fit as a fiddle, don’t you worry, madam.’

“ ‘And why can’t he be at home now?’

“I took hold of Jean-Pierre and shook him. That was when I noticed how thin he was and saw the yellow spread over his face.

“He was bent over the books, looking for Ibn Khaldoun in the dark. It was then that I realized I hadn’t turned on the gas lamp, which had come to substitute for the city’s missing electricity. I lit the lamp and the room filled with light. Jean-Pierre closed his eyes, as though he had become used to darkness. I heard him ask the other man to help because he couldn’t find the book. That was how I found out that the other man’s name was Abbas.

“Abbas bent down, picked out the book, and gave it to my husband.