Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Sheikh Radwan told Karim that Fan-it had emigrated to West Germany along with innumerable waves of Lebanese and Palestinian youths seeking political asylum there. He said he thought Fan-it had had dealings with Syrian Intelligence to protect himself, but hadn’t informed on or plotted against the boys.

In the end Fan-it did find a way to work with Khaled’s boys, after they’d found Islam, by joining an Islamist group at the port whose emir was Sheikh Salim Muadhen. This sheikh also had contacts with Intelligence but claimed to be an Islamic fundamentalist, partnering Khaled and his comrades in leading the Islamist political action in Tripoli.

Khaled rid the group of the unemployed and of thieves. He embarked on his personal path as defender of the poor of the Qubbeh and surrounding quarters, and as a Marxist activist within the leftist current of the Fatah movement.

But fate turned everything upside down. The Syrian army entered Lebanon in 1976, taking particularly tight control of Tripoli. At the same time the Palestinians pulled back, understanding, especially after the assassination of Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Lebanese National Movement, and the collapse of the Lebanese Left, that the goal of the Syrian presence in Lebanon was to force it into submission and make it their tool.

A new Palestinian strategy now evolved whose watchword was withdrawal from the Lebanese Civil War, regrouping in the south, and ignition of the front with Israel. This strategy reached its climax with the suicide mission led by Jamal and eventually brought about the occupation of southern Lebanon.

Khaled wasn’t convinced by the new strategy. He understood from Danny’s gradual withdrawal that Danny didn’t agree either. But when he went to visit Danny in Beirut he found the Fatah official had no answers to Khaled’s questions, had given up political work, and decided to take a job as archivist at al-Nahar .

Khaled tried to adapt to the new situation. With a group of his comrades from Tripoli he joined the Jerusalem Martyrs’ Brigade, which had taken Shaqif Castle in the south as its base. But he felt a terrible homesickness. He couldn’t bear to be far from Qubbeh and the smell of lemon blossom in Tripoli, and he didn’t see how the revolution could live in military bases far from its natural environment of the masses. What Khaled didn’t say, Radwan did. Radwan said he felt like a stranger there, announcing as he did so his call for a withdrawal from Shaqif Castle and a return to the Fragrant City. Khaled was surprised to find every comrade — forty young men in all — agreeing with Radwan and telling Khaled they felt the same but would leave the decision to him.

Khaled was tired. True, he missed his city, but in establishing a base at Shaqif he’d found a way to escape from the house. His heart had been broken every night as he watched Hayat cover herself in pajamas and flee into her body — two years lived in thirst and in the pain of love. Khaled didn’t think he could love like the Udhris and be content with the simultaneous presence and absence of the beloved and her never-fulfilled promises. Many times, when he leapt from the bed moist with the dream that had spread itself beneath his eyelids, he would decide to take a second wife; he’d tell Hayat he couldn’t go on any longer and was prepared to continue supporting her if she preferred that to facing her family, but that he had to get another wife. When he got back in the evenings, though, exhausted from working at the bakery, even the glimmer of a smile of tenderness from her, bearing what seemed an obscure promise, would suffice to make him forget his decision and feel that even just to sit at the dinner table with her was to own the world.

When he told her he was going with the boys to the south because political conditions so demanded, she lowered her eyes with obvious sadness and said, “As you wish, but please take care of yourself and don’t die, for my sake don’t die.” She smiled and said she’d miss him, “but don’t you worry, I’ll go to the bakery and help out Imm Yahya.”

He said he preferred to close the bakery while he was away.

“And how will we live?” she asked.

“I’ll send you money from the south.”

“No, Nabil. We don’t get paid by the revolution. We give to the revolution.”

She bit her lower lip and said she was sorry she’d said his name wrong.

He said she was right and the bakery must keep on working and he’d never take a penny from anyone.

“I depend on you,” he said.

On his journey to the south Khaled took with him Hayat’s smile, the tremor in her voice as she used the name she’d given his uncle, and her decision to keep an eye on the bakery while he was away.

At Shaqif Castle, before the rocky, plunging canyon, where the wind buffeted the bodies of men scattered through its stone-hewn passageways and vestibules — there, where one felt oneself alone before the gods of war and death and as though one were just one more block of stone left behind by the succession of wars that the castle had witnessed since it was first built, Khaled felt a mysterious freedom, mixed with an ache in his heart. He felt he had been liberated from Hayat, her blue nights filled with the sleeplessness of longing and the strain of a desire buried deep in the soul.

His restless dreams, with Hayat at their center, came to an end. Khaled had never dreamed of his wife naked, even though her upward thrusting breasts gleamed under her nightdress, spreading the colors of distant clouds through his eyes. His sleep was blue and his sleeplessness was blue and all he ever dreamed was that he had moved closer to her and looked into her face, which he would see either as covered by her hair, which spread over the pillow, or in profile, her lips touching the edges of the coverlet. He’d move closer to her, but the moment he felt her breath lightly fan his face he’d find himself jerking about on the far side of the bed, rise like one stung by the lust spurting from him and leap out. He never got close to her in his dreams. He never touched her body with its armor of pajama bottoms and socks which covered her lower legs, and which she always wore, winter or summer.

There, before the wind that ululated through the valleys and battered the walls of a castle resembling the vault of heaven, Hayat disappeared from his sleeping dreams to reappear in his waking dreams. He would sit behind the barricade, guard the stars, and see her. He’d cup her face in his hands and kiss her. Khaled had never kissed Hayat in the past, or at least he’d hugged her and kissed her on each cheek when his uncle had died, but then she hadn’t been his Hayat; she’d been, rather, the widow of the martyr. He didn’t recall the feel of her cheeks on his lips but did remember the wetness of her tears. He told himself he’d kissed not her but her tears. Then, when it was time to say goodbye, when she’d smiled as she wiped away a tear suspended in the corner of her eyelid, she’d moved closer to him and kissed him on the cheek, but the surprise had so overwhelmed him that he’d felt the kiss only after he left the house.

Here, though, on his own, before the gods of night that spread their shadows over Mount Amel, Golan, and the Sea of Tiberias, he discovered the kiss, and the nuances of its diverse flavors. Hayat would take possession of him with her lips that opened to reveal white teeth, saliva, and the sweet taste of her tongue. He would kiss her on her closed lips, on her upper lip, her lower lip. He would kiss her quickly, or with tender slowness, or with a lust that made him reach for all the flavors of her tongue. He would kiss her on her eyes and on her smile. He kissed her neck and moved down to her shoulders with quick little kisses and deep lingering kisses. He bit her lips and felt her teeth biting into his lower lip, heard the moan of the kiss and became drunk on her lips. He was alone with the blue of the night, a mouth that held the secrets of the world, and lips burning with talk of love that evolved into a sensation fashioned by the miniatures of the night.