Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“ ‘Please turn the light off, madam,’ Abbas said in a low voice.

“And instead of screaming to bring a crowd and save my husband from the claws of that Abbas, it was like I’d been hypnotized. In his voice I felt an irresistible power, and I turned off the light and saw my husband standing like a ghost waiting for a signal from the strange man.

“I went toward him to embrace him and felt he was far away, as though he wasn’t my husband, as though he’d become a small shadow of that other man, who took the copy of Ibn Khaldoun’s Introduction in his hand and left, my husband in his wake. He opened the door and they vanished into the darkness of the stairway.

“What puzzles me is why my husband didn’t turn round to say goodbye to me. Why didn’t he go to see his sleeping children? Why did they make him go back? What kind of wild dogs were they to let him come back to his home for just a few minutes? And why Ibn Khaldoun? What use to him would Ibn Khaldoun be in the dark cell they’d thrown him into?

“I believe he caught hepatitis after he visited us. I’m sure of it. The darkness makes things look yellow. No, he wasn’t really yellow. I think of him that way now because after his death I found out that he’d caught hepatitis and suffered a lot of pain and they’d done nothing to save him. They left him to die like a dog because he believed in the same things they did. I told him not to write about the Islamist tendencies but he was convinced they were the future. It’s got nothing to do with us. He was French and I’m Greek Orthodox from Damascus, and we’re secularists.”

She said she thought her husband had been killed as part of a complex game among intelligence services. “I’m not certain it was the Islamists who killed him. Sure, they were the instrument that killed him but it was really the traditional stupidity of French Intelligence in their game with Iranian or Syrian Intelligence.”

There in Beirut, after telling Muna about the famous text that had been transformed into the theoretical manual of Khaled Nabulsi’s group, which had decided to maintain its political action because it had no choice — there Karim had tried to remember where he had hidden those papers of Abu Rabia’s which he hadn’t given Jean-Pierre. It was strange how his memory of the papers had been erased and only come to mind again when he was getting ready to go back to Beirut. He’d decided that the first thing he’d do would be visit Khaled’s grave and that of Hayat and her daughter, Nabila, to apologize to them, but he’d frittered away his time in Beirut among family memories, frivolous love affairs, and a hospital construction project. And all he’d seen of the hospital project had been optical illusions on the computer of an architect whose only interest was in demolishing buildings and pulling them up by their roots.

When he went to his room to sleep after that first night’s dinner that Salma had made, he’d noticed the room remained exactly as he’d left it on his departure for France. But he’d paid no attention to the brown bedside table, or hadn’t seen in it a window onto memories he’d left behind and decided to bury in oblivion. Nasri had told him once on the phone that nothing had changed. “Your room will still be your room even if you don’t use it, and the same goes for your brother’s. The maid cleans both once a month and she’s been told not to move anything. They’re your rooms, son, and anytime the two of you decide to come back to the house you’ll find the house waiting for you.”

“But I’m married, Father, and I’ve got two daughters. What do I want with the room? Use it any way you want.”

“And your brother’s married too and it doesn’t change anything as far as I’m concerned. I just pray God lets me live long enough to see the members of the Trinity back together again.”

When Karim hurried to the room where he slept, the bedside table and its two drawers took him by surprise. Why hadn’t he noticed it before, why hadn’t he seen something the eye couldn’t miss? He was sleeping on the same sheets, laying his head on the same ostrich-feather pillow his father had given him as a reward for passing his final exams. The see-through curtains were the same and so was the small brass ceiling lamp with four bulbs, the brown bedside table with two drawers, and on top of it the small transistor radio on which he used to listen to the midnight news from Radio Monte Carlo. He turned on the radio, which made a crackling sound, which then suddenly stopped. The batteries would have to be changed, thought Karim. He bent toward the bedside table, opened the first drawer, and was struck by the lightning bolt of memory. The first drawer was dedicated to Hend: pictures of her in her bathing suit, a picture of her next to him as they stood in front of the Saint George’s beach swimming pool, letters from Hend to him, and his letters — a flood of emotions flowing over the pages in dry ink.

Why had Hend loved to write letters?

It came back to him how Hend, at the end of their daily meeting, would give him a letter in a closed envelope and ask him not to open it till he’d reached home, and to reply to her the next day in writing. Karim hadn’t seen the point of it. He would read in her letters what he’d already heard from her the same day and was supposed to answer her with what he was going to say the next day. This epistolary relationship exhausted him. “It’s tiring studying medicine,” he’d tell her, “and it doesn’t leave me time for writing.” But Hend had refused his excuses and he was obliged to write her a few lines each night as he struggled to overcome his drowsiness. In this way their love became an enactment of what was in the letters and reading her letters became for him a form of memory exercise. But remembering is tiring. Karim stopped reading the letters. He’d open them, glance at them before throwing them in the drawer, and begin his suffering before the blank piece of paper. His surprise when he found letters he hadn’t opened was enormous. He picked one of them up and tore open the envelope. His lips curled into a stupid smile. He read about his hands: Hend had celebrated the tips of his long fingers and his finely formed thumb, saying she didn’t like round bulgy thumbs because they were a sign that their owners were disloyal. He went on reading and discovered that she wanted to kiss his hands. “Please, when you put cologne on your chin after shaving, wash your hands very well with soap and water because those are what I want to smell when I kiss your hands tomorrow, not cologne.” He tried to remember what had happened the following day, to discover what Hend had said when she kissed his hands and found out that he hadn’t carried out her orders, but he couldn’t.

The atmosphere created by the letters took him back to the evening when Hend gave him her last letter and said she was sad: she was going to stop writing letters because he no longer answered them. He tried to explain that he loved her without needing to write a daily letter and that they met every day anyway.

“I don’t know what you think,” she’d said, “but in my opinion love without words isn’t love.”

“But we meet every day and talk about everything,” he’d answered.

“No, no. Talking is like air. The only thing that lasts is what’s written down,” she’d said. “But whatever you wish.”

Karim didn’t try to hide his joy at the ending of the torment of the letters and put Hend’s last letter into the back pocket of his trousers. He ordered two glasses of beer so they could drink a toast to love.

“I’m sure you’ve thrown all my letters away,” she said.

“Certainly not. I have them all, in a drawer in my room.”

“Mind you don’t let anyone read them.”