Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“The drawer’s locked and I have the key on me,” he replied.

He hadn’t been telling the truth: the drawer wasn’t locked and it didn’t have a key. He had no idea whether Nasri had read the letters and laughed at the naïveté of his son’s love affairs, but Nasim had probably discovered them and read some of them. It was Nasim who’d discovered his father’s secrets and then put everything back the way it was, so it was difficult to believe inqui​sitiveness hadn’t led him to the drawer.

Why, though, had he not torn them up? Had his heart not burned with jealousy of his brother? Or had the jealousy had a different effect, the one Karim had felt when listening to Matrouk: the instant his fear of the revolver that the deceived husband had placed on the dining table close to the glass of arak vanished, his heart had ignited with jealousy and desire. He’d felt jealous of Azab and an animal desire for Ghazala, and he’d realized that Matrouk’s love for his wife had caught fire precisely when he’d seen her bend to pass under Azab’s rifle and enter his house.

Strange are the ways of the heart, for they resist understanding. Even a former lover cannot recall the idiocies of his heart without feeling embarrassed or confused, which is why people erase the stories of their loves that have ended: they don’t dare remember them, and especially not the jealousy which not only wounds the heart but makes it captive twice over.

Only once had Nasri spoken on the subject with his sons. Karim was gathering up his things to return to his home on Abd el-Aziz Street near AUB, where he was studying medicine, while Nasim was struggling to understand why he’d failed the first year College of Pharmacy exams a second time — meaning that he would now have to vacate the halls of academe and start work with his father as assistant pharmacist. That day, which Nasri considered his farewell to the Trinity, the aged pharmacist had drunk an incalculable amount of wine and seemed sad and tired. He looked at Karim and said, “Never fall in love with a whore.”

“What?”

“I know Hamra and Zeitouna are full of bars and you’re young and it’s what life owes you, and I don’t mind, but never fall in love with a whore because it’s a love that has no bottom. She’ll betray you and you’ll become more fiercely in love. She can’t not sleep with other men because it’s her job and there’s no way not to be tormented because you love her.”

Then he looked at Nasim and asked him for his thoughts on the subject.

“You know best,” said Nasim, laughing.

“And your experience isn’t all that negligible either,” his father answered.

Nasim got up from the dining table and left. A silence reigned that Nasri broke when he stood up and said he had a headache and was going to get some sleep.

When Karim heard what had happened with Ghazala he realized what it means to burn with jealousy for a lover. Earlier, when he saw the revolver and Matrouk’s flushed face, he’d felt love recede, starting from the tips of his fingers, and that his relationship with Ghazala had always been meaningless. But when Matrouk had begun speaking of the militia boy whom Ghazala loved and on whom she’d lavished all the presents Karim had given her, jealousy flared up in his heart and he experienced the fire of which Nasri had spoken. Karim would never forget the sleepless nights he then spent — as though he’d fallen in love with Ghazala precisely at the moment he’d discovered her unfaithfulness. He’d wanted her to come to him one last time so he could quench the thirst that burned within him, but when she came the woman had changed and all she inspired in him was regret.

Nasim must have experienced similar feelings when he read Hend’s letters to his brother, so why hadn’t he destroyed the photos and the letters?

While Karim was drowning in the memories of his love for Hend that rose up before him in a flood of images, the phone rang.

Karim picked up and found someone who claimed to be a Sheikh Radwan, speaking from Tripoli.

“Who?” asked Karim.

“Radwan! I’m Radwan! Danny told me you’d come back to Beirut and I want to see you. What do you say you come and spend a couple of days with me in the Fragrant City? I’ve got a surprise for you too.”

“Radwan, Khaled’s friend?” asked Karim, recalling a round, stout young man with white face, bulging eyes, and almost nonexistent eyebrows who had followed Khaled around like a shadow.

“Is that really you, Radwan?” asked Karim.

“Sure, sure,” answered the voice, which said that he’d become a sheikh after the killing of Khaled. He taught religious law at the Islamic University in the city and wanted to see Karim because he had a surprise.

Karim said he couldn’t because he had to go back to France.

“But he wants to see you.”

“Who does?” Karim asked, feeling a shiver run through his body because in the old days “he” had meant only one person — Khaled.

“Sinalcol. Sinalcol wants to see you,” said Sheikh Radwan, laughing.

“Sinalcol? Does he know me?”

“Come and see. It’s a big surprise.”

Karim was certain Sinalcol was dead, so where was Sheikh Radwan coming from with this story? Khaled had decided to kill him, Danny was enthusiastic, and Karim had shaken his head in disagreement even though he was “neither in the caravan nor on the raiding party,” as they say. He had, however, been present at the meeting that had taken place in Tripoli in May 1976 at which sentence of death had been passed on the thief who was bringing the revolution into disrepute in the city.

But Sinalcol had disappeared. He seemed to have found his way, once again, to the ancient Mamluke quarters of the city, which in 1973 had proclaimed themselves the Republic of the Wanted. Subsequently the army had invaded them, destroying the bizarre republic which had brought together thieves, criminals, and the unemployed under the leadership of a man called Ahmad Qaddour.

When the army invaded the city the only ones to escape had been Sinalcol, Ahmad Qaddour, the leader of the republic, and an odd type who had attached himself to the republic called Albert Helou. The three had crept along a tunnel under the markets and emerged at the bed of the Abu Ali River, from where they had gone up to Akkar, reaching Wadi Jehannam. There, where the security forces never set foot because of its rockiness and the impossibility of maintaining control over its innumerable tracks, they’d starved and hunger had forced the three back to Tripoli, where Qaddour and Albert had been arrested. Sinalcol though had managed to go into hiding.

During the first two years of the civil war Sinalcol had reappeared. No one had seen him, though, because he had proclaimed himself “a ghost of the city” and had come to exemplify a new form of thievery based on nonappearance and invisibility. Sinalcol was an invisible man. Even his real name was erased. Khaled had been sure that Ibrahim Tartousi, a member of the Republic of the Wanted, had assumed the name Sinalcol so that he could practice thievery — but how could that be true when everyone knew Tartousi had been given a funeral in Tripoli on Saturday, November 17, 1973, and then interred in the Strangers’ Cemetery to the sound of his mother’s loud keening, on a cold and rainy day?

Radwan said he’d be waiting for Karim at the Hallab pastry shop the following Friday. “I’ll meet you after the prayer, we’ll eat shmeisa, visit Khaled’s grave, and then, if you like, meet Sinalcol. Anyway, we have lots to talk about and I think I need you here for me to be able to arrange things clearly in my memory. I need to ask you a few questions related to the memoirs I’m writing.”

“You’re writing your memoirs?” Karim asked, amazed.