Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

This was the first time Karim had met Hayat. She was indeed “the woman of light,” as Danny had called her — an inner beauty manifested itself in honey-colored, almond-shaped eyes, slightly raised cheeks, eyebrows that seemed to have been drawn with a fine pen to overarch the eyes and contain the light that radiated from them.

Karim said he didn’t know where Danny was.

“I’m under your protection, Brother Karim. I spent an hour looking for your house. Khaled, God rest his soul, described to me where it was and I didn’t like to ask anyone so as not to raise suspicions. I have to find Danny today.”

Karim’s assessment was that Danny hadn’t opened the door because he didn’t want to see anyone. The man had gone into seclusion and even stopped answering the phone since hearing of his wife’s decision not to go back to him. But he thought it a strange paradox: Hayat said her life was threatened and she’d decided to leave Tripoli, and Danny knew that. Why then hadn’t he opened the door?

Karim felt embarrassed with the woman standing there hesitating. He told her he knew nothing about Danny but he could leave the apartment to her and go somewhere. That was the only solution.

Hayat noticed the terror that had overtaken Karim. His hands were trembling and the words came out jerkily from between his lips, as though he was stuttering. She realized his invitation wasn’t heartfelt and was made worse by the fact that she was looking not for refuge but for psychological and moral support.

“You mean we won’t be able to find Danny today?”

“I think you should give me a moment and I’ll leave the apartment, if you want.”

“What am I do to now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Karim answered.

The woman turned and left without a word.

Khaled’s second visit to Karim’s home took place six months after the earlier one. News of the doings of the Islamists in Tripoli was filling columns in the Lebanese press and Khaled’s name was much mentioned as one of the leaders of the city. As usual he came without an appointment. He was exhausted, his hair a mess, his face marked with gloom and anxiety.

Khaled said he was on his way back from a visit to Damascus, to which he’d gone in the company of Sheikh Salim and a group of leaders of the Islamist movement with the objective of reaching an agreement to reduce the tensions in the city resulting from the armed clashes that broke out there nightly.

Khaled said he’d met the General. “I won’t tell you his name because it would put your life in danger.” He spoke of the discussions that had taken place between the two sides and of the General’s low voice that you had to lean forward to hear. “But the discussions don’t matter,” said Khaled. “What matters is that I saw my death in his eyes.”

He spoke of the death he’d seen in the man’s eyes and fell silent.

Karim didn’t ask him exactly what he’d seen when he saw his death, or how death could take shape in the killer’s eyes as he gazed on his victim.

Khaled asked for a glass of cold water. “Death dries your mouth, you know. That’s why everyone dies thirsty.”

The man drank the glass of water in one go and said he didn’t know what had happened to him there. He said he’d felt an unquenchable thirst, as though he had diabetes, then had noticed the General focusing his gaze on him, and that when he himself, the dead man, had raised his eyes to meet those staring at him he had felt his death. “It was like sparks of fire coming out of his eyes and then the whites of his eyes began to disappear. I don’t know how to describe it — it was as though they had no whites left and I felt death and understood why I was thirsty.”

The first time Khaled said the whites of the eyes had disappeared and the second time that they had filled the man’s eyes. He stuttered as he told his story but said he wasn’t afraid of death. “When all’s said and done I knew the life I’d chosen would bring me to this point. I just hadn’t realized I’d get here so fast.”

Karim suggested that he not go back to the Fragrant City. “Stay in Beirut.”

“It makes no difference,” answered Khaled. “Anyone who can kill you in Tripoli can kill you in Beirut.”

“Why don’t you go abroad? Lots of young men get themselves smuggled into West Berlin and are given political asylum.”

“You want me to become a political refugee in the ice camps of Germany? Out of the question!”

Khaled said he’d send him Abu Rabia’s papers the next day with Radwan. “They’re for you to keep safe. I don’t have anywhere to hide them except with you. At first I thought of Danny but Danny’s very confused. Please, once this all dies down I’ll get them back from you, if I’m alive. If not, give them to Hayat, no one else.”

The papers were with him now but Karim, instead of reading them, sank into memories of the crime. He saw Khaled as they shot at him. He was driving his car and about twenty meters after he passed the checkpoint there was a hail of bullets. Sixty bullets ripped through his body and left him dead and alone. No one dared approach the popular leader’s body, and when Hayat picked up his shredded remains in her arms she looked like a mother cradling her child as she walked through a desert of faces and silence.

Hayat came to Beirut two weeks after Khaled’s killing and returned to her house the same day. She decided to go back to her work at the bakery. She would leave the baby with her grandmother and go to work alone in a bakery that was now empty of all the boys, some of whom had fled to the Ain Helweh Camp in the south and the rest of whom had been arrested. Radwan led the flight to Ain Helweh, disappeared there for nine years, and when he returned to Tripoli did so in the shape of a beturbaned sheikh.

On the night of June 9, 1980, six months after Khaled’s murder, Hayat and her daughter, Nabila, were found with their throats slit in their home in Tripoli’s Qubbeh district.

Ever since Karim had heard Radwan’s voice on the phone inviting him to Tripoli he’d felt the tingling of fear, like a sudden resurgence of the same emotion that had made him tremble before Hayat when she came to him wearing the chador. Fear can’t be remembered; it’s like a smell we’re able to recall only when we smell it again.

Karim recalled that it was Radwan who had brought him Yahya’s papers. Danny aside, Radwan was the only living person who knew of their existence.

Karim decided not to accept the invitation and to forget about going to Tripoli to meet Sheikh Radwan.

He undressed, bathed, got into bed, and closed his eyes.

HE’D NEVER SEEN Salma as sad as she was that day. He’d gone to his brother’s apartment for Nasim’s thirty-ninth birthday, only to discover that Nasim had revived and incorporated into the celebration all their father’s old rituals. To the original Sunday rites, however, he had added going to the Church of the Lady in Ghazaliyeh Street in the Siyoufi district, where he’d take his three children to attend nine a.m. mass. After this they’d go to Jull el-Dib to buy a platter of kenafeh-with-cheese before returning to the apartment.

Hend refused to go to church with her husband. Salma was a neutral party in the struggle over religion between husband and wife because she felt that it didn’t matter what she said as she had no right to speak. She was from a Muslim family, and despite the fact that she’d married the second time in church and accepted the sacrament of baptism she continued to belong, in the eyes of her son-in-law, to “our Muslim brethren” and anything she said on the subject was likely to be unwelcome to Nasim’s ears; he’d decided to make no concessions to his wife in the matter of his newfound religious beliefs or of the necessity of raising his children in the religion of their fathers and grandfathers.