Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

After two years of waiting he had found her and after two years of sorrow and guilt she had found him, and they were as though they’d discovered a secret they could divulge to no one — the secret people call love but which resists all names.

In their new relationship, which lasted eighteen months, they would only rarely speak. They communicated with one another through a minimum of words and experienced every potential that life has to offer. Even the strange transformation that led Hayat to don the Islamist headscarf passed quietly and without any of the long discussions with which Lebanese and Palestinian leftist circles resounded following the stunning success achieved by the Iranian revolution.

When her belly grew round and butterflies of joy spread their wings around her eyes, they disagreed over the name of the child. They were sure it was going to be a boy, though Khaled secretly wanted a daughter who looked like her mother. He didn’t dare announce his hopes or his expectations in the face of the insistence of his wife and grandmother that the child would be a boy.

She told him her mother-in-law had no doubt that the boy’s name would be Yahya. “She didn’t discuss it with me. She looked at my round belly and called him Yahya. What do you think?” It was the first time since his marriage to Hayat that the martyr’s name had been pronounced in their house. He told her his grandmother’s suggestion made sense and he had to share it.

“But I want to call him Nabil,” she said. “Nabil is the name and the boy has to be noble. What do you think?”

“Whatever you want goes, Imm Nabil.”

She smiled and asked him to tell his grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to break her heart. You tell her please.”

Hayat had no idea what Khaled told his grandmother but she noticed a change in the woman’s behavior: suddenly she aged. Imm Yahya no longer bent over the belly that was rounding out with new life to croon to the baby and call out to it, “Yahya! Yahya, Granny’s darling!” A hidden sorrow possessed her and limned itself in the creases of old age that had formed around her eyes following her son’s death. But she didn’t object, for she was a woman and knew how powerful a woman’s authority can be, and she could see how Khaled had become two mutually contradictory men. At work and with the young men of the quarter he was a leader whose requests could not be refused, while at home he was a lover at the beck and call of the wife who had bewitched his heart.

Imm Yahya didn’t ask what had happened. In the past, when she’d asked Khaled about his wife or hinted she was tired of waiting for the child that didn’t come, she’d see Khaled’s thick eyebrows knit and his face darken, and understand that he would never answer her questions. After he came back from the crusader castle in south Lebanon, though, Hayat’s name was forever on his lips and it was he who had given her the good news that his wife was pregnant. She noticed though that the name Abu Rabia no longer crossed his lips or those of his comrades: they would come to the bakery to confer and meet while all the burden of work fell on his wife’s shoulders.

“Your wife’s pregnant and she should rest at home and not tire herself with the bakery. If you like I can go and take her place at work.”

“You?”

“Yes, me. I used to run the whole bakery in your father’s day and your grandfather’s! You think the work started when Nouri Salah’s daughter came along?”

“Your word is my command, but she doesn’t want to stop working.”

“Doesn’t want to? Since when did women have anything to say about it? A woman obeys her husband. ‘Men are the managers of the affairs of women.’ ”

“Managers, true, but not of Hayat. Hayat, Grandmother, is different.”

“Different?! Didn’t you say you’d become a proper Muslim, God guide you? And now your wife’s expecting any day. In Islam there’s no one who’s ‘different.’ ”

“So when are you going to start covering your hair, Grandmother, and get me a heavenly reward for guiding you to the straight path?”

“All I need is lessons in Islam from an atheistical communist like you! I was a Muslim before they came up with all that nonsense.”

“But the veil is the path of the Prophet, Imm Yahya.”

“The veil is the light of the Beloved Prophet that covers the soul, not a bit of cloth we put on our heads. Get out of here, boy, God guide you and that wife of yours and your son whose new name I keep forgetting. Really! Who goes around giving their children names and then changing them before they’re born?”

On his return to Tripoli, Khaled rebuilt the organization single-handed. He knew that the Palestinian Fedayeen, whose hold over the Nahr el-Bared and Baddawi Camps had been shaken, would be no help to him in a tough face-off in his city, which was now under the absolute control of the Syrian military. He lived in an atmosphere in which overt and covert action blended and which rendered movement through Tripoli’s inner quarters extremely difficult for him as he was vulnerable to arrest at any moment. His relationship with Danny had been severed because Danny had stopped visiting the north, having retreated into his new work. He’d informed Dr. Othman that he wanted to take a long holiday from organizational work to be free to write a long study on the Lebanese Civil War. The objective was going to be to demonstrate the erroneousness of the sect/class discourse that had prevailed in some leftist circles as a justification for the sectarian language that dominated the civil war (the Shia being the deprived sect/class in question).

“This kind of Marxism has become the opium of the Lebanese Left,” declared Danny.

Dr. Othman, who was the main promoter of this discourse, was taken aback. “How can you say that? That theory’s one we came up with ourselves and you agreed with it. Heavens above! Did you think we were joking?”

Danny said he was in the process of writing a self-criticism that would pave the way for the refutation of the idea; he believed there was “a fundamental error in our orientation.”

Dr. Othman never reached an understanding of what the fundamental error might be. He was preoccupied with the inten​sification of work in the south and saw the class/sect discourse as a point of entry for the construction of a relationship with men of the Shia militia. The militia was starting to gain strength in the south thanks to intervention by the Syrians, who were preparing it to act as a substitute for an armed Palestinian presence.

Danny cut himself off from the world and Karim broke contact with the Fatah student cells in order to avoid the sharp ideological divisions that shook them. The only link that continued to tie him to political action was Jamal’s diaries, which he’d been supposed to turn into a literary-political pamphlet but which had overwhelmed him with questions about the meaning of life and love and changed the taste of his relationship with Hend.

In his loneliness, and with the horizon closing in, Khaled thought of giving up political action, of devoting himself full-time to matters of the heart and paying more attention to the bakery. However, following the assassination of four of his comrades close to a security checkpoint and the spread of an atmosphere of pursuit and siege — the objective of which was to break up and dissolve the group — he found himself in a tight spot.

Khaled had discovered he couldn’t go back. The blood of his comrades had been spilled, the destiny of the boys of the Qubbeh quarter was unknown, and he was on his own. His only support was Radwan, in whose life and behavior signs of change had begun to appear.

First, Radwan stopped drinking alcohol: he said it hurt his stomach. Then he started making use in conversation of verses from the Koran and the Prophetic Traditions, ascribing this to his study of Arab literature with Sheikh Subhi Saleh, an outstanding scholar of Arab philology and letters later assassinated in Beirut under mysterious circumstances.