Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“I am indeed, doctor. The time has come for the poor to write their memoirs, through the bounty of the Lord of the Worlds who has guided us. Not like in your day, when we used to feel dumb in front of you and all those books that you read in French. Islam is light, doctor, may God guide you to the light of Islam! I’ll be waiting for you in Tripoli.”

Sheikh Radwan hung up before he could hear Karim’s answer, as though the call were more a military order than a request for an appointment.

Karim had decided to postpone his decision about going to Tripoli, but Radwan’s call brought him back from memories of his love for Hend to the real reason for his opening the bedside table drawer.

After replacing the photos and letters he closed the first drawer and opened the second. Here he met with a surprise. In the drawer he saw a brown folder, and memory returned. In this folder, which he’d fastened with blue ribbon, Karim had placed Yahya Nabulsi’s papers that had been sent him by his nephew Khaled. Karim recalled that he’d leafed through the papers and read a part of them but for some reason hadn’t found it in himself to read them carefully. No one had asked Karim thereafter why he’d neglected the papers and forgotten about them, and he hadn’t even put himself to the trouble of reading them. The only people who knew of the existence of these texts were the Frenchman Jean-Pierre, who was dead, and Danny, who wanted to forget.

Karim was convinced he’d made a mistake in not giving the texts to Jean-Pierre; the French Arabist would have translated them into French and published them, and they would, in the end, have been preserved. Now, though, they were merely papers of no interest to anyone in Lebanon. Who was going to care about a betrayed revolution whose hero was just a semi-literate baker — even if the baker had taught himself to read and write, discovered Marxism and Che Guevara, and decided he was going to be Lebanon’s Che?

Danny was severe in his evaluation of Yahya Nabulsi’s experiment and of his Challenge Organization, which had folded with the tragic death of the hero on a bed at Maqased Hospital in Beirut. “These are lumpen ideas held by the lumpen classes,” he used to say. “It’s leftist childishness, without any culture or faith in organization.” Naturally it never occurred to anyone, even Khaled, to retort that Yahya and his comrades were workers, and that the whole idea of Marxism was that the workers should be the vanguard of change.

Why hadn’t it occurred to Karim to answer him on that occasion? Why hadn’t he pointed out that Guevara was no worker, that Lenin and all the other revolutionary leaders were intellectuals who thought they were bringing consciousness to the workers? Why hadn’t he pointed out that the result of the class consciousness that Khaled had adopted with such resolve and discipline had been a turning to Islam — in other words the opposite of what we’d trained him in?

Karim recalled a comrade who, with the coming of the Islamist phase that had taken over everything following the victory of the Iranian revolution, had become so obsessively religious that he’d prayed regularly five times a day. He’d been called Abd el-Messih but had changed his name to Belal. This Belal was a faculty member at AUB’s Faculty of Medicine, a model of modesty and silent dedication. There was no one who didn’t love Dr. Belal. For a time he’d moved about among the Fedayeen camps of South Lebanon and had, with the outbreak of the civil war, devoted all his time to opening clinics in the poor neighborhoods of the Beirut suburbs, never failing the while to keep up his work as a teacher and a surgeon.

When Karim asked about Belal, Danny answered that Abd el-Messih had emigrated to America.

“America? That’s incredible! What did he do with his new convictions?”

“It seems he took them with him,” said Danny.

When Belal announced his conversion to Islam, all his comrades were astounded. True, conversion to Islam was the sole means available to Catholic Christians to divorce their wives, but Belal had taken it really seriously. In the beginning his friends had thought he wanted to get rid of his wife in preparation for marrying Fatma, a student in the mathematics department at the Lebanese University fifteen years his junior. When Belal took a bullet in the stomach during a visit to the fighters’ positions in the area of Aley, he’d found himself alone. His wife had refused to leave Jull el-Dib in East Beirut, and the only one there for him had been Fatma Shoeib, who’d joined Fatah and found herself nursing Dr. Belal.

Belal had made his conversion at the hands of Sayed Hadi Taher, who, since the outbreak of the Islamic revolution in Iran, had been one of the theorists of the concept of the Guardianship of the Jurist to which Khomeini’s revolution had given rise. Fatma took him to see the sheikh, who wore a black turban as a sign that he was a Sayed, or one of the People of the House. From that meeting a special relationship had developed between the university professor and the Shiite sheikh who had studied at the feet of Imam Muhammad Baqir el-Sadr in Noble Najaf, then returned to Lebanon to work within the Iraqi-originated el-Daawa el-Islami Party before adopting Khomeini’s ideas and becoming a founder of what would later become known as Hezbollah.

Belal had a strange attitude toward Khaled and his comrades. He said he didn’t recognize their Islamism because they followed Sunni law. He spoke a jurist’s language that Karim found hard to understand — as though Belal had been born a Muslim, rather than being a Christian — or a Marxist — who had adopted Islam only a few months earlier.

Abd el-Messih had emigrated to America to work in a hospital in Houston. Karim told Danny that Khaled was right: even Belal, or Abd el-Messih, had found himself a way out of the endless Lebanese impasse, and for one reason only, which was that he was an intellectual and bourgeois, while Khaled had been left to face death alone.

Danny said Abd el-Messih had divorced Fatma, abandoned his son Hasan, and gone back to his first wife so he could go with their children to Texas.

Karim opened the folder lying in front of him with its yellow pages and its words, some of which had been erased or become difficult to read, and beheld the destinies of the Lebanese taking shape in the form of stories that intersected and divided at death’s portal. Khaled’s assumption about the ability of intellectuals to escape their fates wasn’t entirely correct, or what are we to make of the stories of the dozens of students killed fighting in the ranks of the National Movement and the Palestinian resistance? And what more wretched fate could there be than that of Malak Malak, who had disappeared behind the mask of death without dying, so that he’d died while still alive?

His girlfriend had never told anyone what Malak did after she fled from him and his new look following the cosmetic, or disfiguring, surgery that had been performed on him in East Germany. She’d spoken of how she’d left him standing on Hamra Street and run off, but the more important part of the story, the part that Malak hadn’t been able to tell anyone, remained unknown and would stay so forever. The man had sentenced himself to silence. Did Malak Malak now live in Italy, as the Lebanese student Talal claimed? Or had he disappeared and had all trace of him been erased, which is what the story ought to say? Talal said his brother had known Malak well because they were fellow students at AUB, and he knew Malak was married to a Sardinian woman and worked in the Italian olive oil trade.

Talal had suggested to Maroun Baghdadi that his film begin with the return of Malak Malak to Beirut, with his feeling of being a stranger in his own city and among his old friends. “The film starts at the moment of his return, then shifts to flashback for a confused memory of the crime at AUB and of a war whose story cannot be narrated within any clear context.” Maroun had given the idea some thought before saying no, on the grounds that the story was real and he didn’t like reality in the cinema. It would also bring Lebanese violence back into the equation, endorsing it as heroic, while he was looking for a straight​forward story that glorified tolerance and portrayed violence as despicable.