Authors: Elias Khoury
“Being up a tiger’s ass means no one can ride you. Who’d want to get that close to the tiger? That’s my answer.”
“Okay, so don’t answer. Just tell me what it feels like when a man sleeps with you.”
“You think I’m stupid? But I’ll tell you all the same. It feels as though your heart has leapt from its place and something inside you is opening up the closed doors of your soul.”
“So he stuck it in you. I knew, I swear, that that was your first betrayal of our relationship.”
“You were an idiot and always will be. If you can believe that trite poetic stuff you can believe anything.”
“You mean you’re having me on?” said Nasim.
“As usual, chéri. Nothing’s changed between us. I say, and you believe like a fool. That’s how we were and how we always will be.”
“You’re the fool, chéri. I’m the one who played you and your father and made you think you were seeing stars at noon. I took you to the sea and brought you back thirsty, as they say. And Suzanne? Is it true you went to see her after I’d gone home and she threw you out saying, ‘Go away, dear, and leave me alone, you, your father, and your brother. You think I’m running a charity?’ ”
“Me? It looks like you’re the one who’s drunk, not me.”
“She told me. You know I’m not one to forget a favor. When the war started I went to the souk and got her out of there and put her up in a small apartment in Ashrafieh and supported her till she died. She’d grown very old and her eyes, poor thing, seemed to have got smaller. The rheuminess had eaten away at them. She told me, ‘You’re the only real man in Lebanon
because you’re authentic’ – and then she told me. Unbelievable! Who goes to his brother’s girlfriend? Aren’t you my brother? I swear I don’t know.”
“I didn’t go to her,” said Karim. “She must have said that because she was demented. Maybe she got us mixed up and she meant you when she said me.”
“No way!” said Nasim. “Everyone got us mixed up except women. Women have a strong sense of smell. They never make a mistake.”
“I can’t be sure,” said Karim.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, I’m just talking about the principle of the thing.”
“If you mean something else, forget it right now because there isn’t anything.”
Silence and night, and a sea stretching to infinity. Two rocks, one squatting over the sea and opening its heart to the water and the wind, the other like a piece of the first rock that the waves have separated and that stands there, waiting. And two men standing in silence.
Karim felt he’d fallen into the trap. His younger brother had prepared his revenge with care. He’d lured him with the hospital project knowing that Nasri’s older son wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of returning to Lebanon. He’d lured him with the hospital so he could show him that inheriting everything from their father wasn’t enough. He’d inherited from his brother too, and married a cultured woman who loved the sea, a woman whom in the past he couldn’t have dreamed of approaching.
“You win,” said Karim.
“Win what?” said Nasim.
“Everything, even though I didn’t go to Suzanne and you must know I had nothing to do with it. But it looks as though it’s what you say that’s going to be taken as the truth. In fact it doesn’t matter. What matters is what stays in our memory and your memory is stronger because you are stronger.”
They parted in peace. Nasim took his brother to their father’s apartment, where he was going to live during his stay in Beirut, and went home.
When Nasim got home at two in the morning, Hend was asleep. He lay beside her in bed and felt the urge to have sex. He started to awaken her gently, kissing her here and there on her lips and closed eyes. Half asleep, she asked why he was so late and said she was tired. “Tomorrow, dear. It’s very late now and I’m dog tired.” Nasim kept on at her. He told her he couldn’t stop halfway, he wanted her. “But, dear …” He silenced her with a long kiss on the lips, moved closer, and began to make his way in. Hend closed her eyes again and surrendered to the flood of her husband’s desire. It reminded her of the days of their first love, when he’d always made love to her after they had eaten white grapes that gave off a smell of incense.
Hend couldn’t resist and, despite the conflicting emotions caused by Karim’s return, found herself swept away by that rush of love her husband was capable of giving, and which changed him in bed into another man. The nighttime man seemed to be different from the daytime man, and the man when he was present wasn’t the same as the man when he was absent. By day she felt alienated from his mysterious secret world, and during his nightly absences, from which he’d return exhausted, the smell of alcohol wafting from him, she hated him and felt the need to explode in his face and tell him that marrying him had been a mistake. And when she listened to him as he conducted the rituals of breakfast with his children she felt she was in the presence of Nasri, and that this man, who made no secret of his hatred and contempt for his father, was in fact his double.
That night, when he sat up in bed and lit his cigarette and coughed, she was overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Emerging from the furnace of love and sex she’d felt she was a stranger to herself and to her desire, which had escaped her control.
He told her he hadn’t been able to talk to his brother. “I took him to the Corniche to have a coffee and talk, and instead of talking about the hospital project and how he wanted to run it and whether he was prepared to leave France and come and live in Lebanon or if he wanted something in between, like six months there and six months here, the idiot started telling me his dreams. I don’t know what’s happened to him. Things seem to be mixed up in his head. Maybe he thinks I know how to interpret dreams. And we couldn’t talk, and in the end I had to explain his dream to him.”
“And what was your explanation?” asked Hend.
“Why? Did he tell you the dream? Or maybe you dreamed the same dream. God, what a bind I’ve got myself into!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Hend.
“And you pretend you don’t know either!”
“For God’s sake, stop talking in riddles, or you’ll spoil everything. If you don’t want to talk sensibly, let’s go to sleep.”
Since their first night, when they were at the chalet, Nasim had been smitten with astonishment when Hend’s eyes shone after making love, and even though he’d insisted on not touching his girlfriend’s virginity, the kisses on their own had been enough to turn her eyes into mirrors with shining depths.
He looked into her eyes and said, “For my sake, get up and look at your eyes in the mirror so you can see how they shine. God, it’s beautiful!”
“It’s all right, dear. Tomorrow the two of you can meet and talk. Let’s sleep now.”
“Don’t you want to know the dream?” he asked her.
“You already told me I know it.”
“So you do know it?”
“Please, get these ideas out of your head and let’s sleep.”
She covered herself with the blanket and asked her husband to turn off
the light in the bedroom but he sat up straight, lit another cigarette, and told her that his brother had told him her dream about Rawsheh Rock sinking and claimed it as his own.
“Your brother’s crazy,” she said, and turned off the light.
“Don’t you want to know how I answered him?”
“I want to sleep.”
She heard her husband breathing deeply at her side and saw herself in the wakeful darkness. As she went over again in her memory the story of her disappointment with Karim she found herself unable to sleep. Why had he run away like that? Why had he left her feeling undesired? Had he left after the Khaled Nabulsi affair, as he’d said, or after he was asked, supposedly, to write a book about the death of Jamal? On the eve of his departure, sitting in Uncle Sam’s, she’d told him she didn’t believe him and that she’d never have gone with him anyway, not because of her mother but because for a while now she’d begun to smell another woman on him.
“That’s not true,” he’d said.
“True or not, what matters is that that’s how I feel.”
He’d asked the waiter for the bill and left.
Karim had left because he’d had to leave: after Khaled’s death, the Jamal incident, and Danny’s terrible breakdown, the man had been incapable of regaining control of his life. His life had seemed like a rubble of events and memories that it was beyond him by then to reorganize.
“Life is context,” he’d said to Bernadette as he tried to convince her of the merits of the project in Beirut. His French wife had looked at him with her blue eyes and said she didn’t know what he meant. What context did Karim have in mind? Hadn’t he told her in the first days after they met that he wanted to begin again from scratch, that he’d left his life among the bombs that had made gaps in his soul and his memory behind precisely
so that he could begin a new one? He’d told her he would never look back because what lay behind was a darkness where the ghosts of the dead held sway. Even the living whom he’d left behind in Beirut now seemed like ghosts. He’d told her he was running from the blackness to the blue of her radiant eyes, that he had become a new man.
When drinking French wine and carried on the clouds of inebriation into his memories, all he’d talk about was Sinalcol. Sinalcol, whom Karim had never once met and whose real name he didn’t even know, was the story behind which Karim had hidden.
“Why do you talk to me about no one but Sinalcol?” she asked him.
“Because he’s my spiritual twin and my Lebanese mirror. Sinalcol’s is the only story that’s stayed with me from there, maybe because it isn’t like other stories. Usually we tell stories we know but with him I know nothing. All I know is a few rumors that no one can confirm and yet I feel him here, before the glass of wine and before your blue eyes.”
When Karim recalled his obsession with Sinalcol in Montpellier and compared it with his aversion and indifference to him here in Beirut, he couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Perhaps it was because his extreme drunkenness in the bar the day he met Bernadette for the first time had made him claim his name was Sinalcol and the name had stuck to him without his meaning it to. In Beirut he hadn’t thought of Sinalcol until Bernadette had mentioned him. He was talking to her on the phone and telling her about the hospital project and his proposal that he split his time in two – half in Beirut and the other half in Montpellier, which would allow him to take a break from his exhausting job in France and devote himself to his hobby of reading novels – when she asked him for news of Sinalcol.
“Have you found out anything about Sinalcol?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t been to Tripoli yet.”
“But you told me the first thing you were going to do was visit Tripoli.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not coming back to France without a photo of Sinalcol, but I’m really busy now.”
Karim hadn’t been telling the truth, for he was planning to go to Tripoli to meet Radwan. Even Khaled Nabulsi, whose grave he was never to find, he’d decided to forget about. But throughout his Beirut stay he was gripped by a feeling of responsibility toward Hayat, Khaled’s wife, his aloofness and hesitance toward whom, when she visited him at his home seeking help after Khaled’s assassination, he’d never been able to justify to himself. He hadn’t known how to get rid of her. The fear had traced itself on his jaw, which had started to tremble, and the woman had understood and left without waiting for an answer.
The other woman, the one whom Hend had smelled on him, was none other than Jamal, though she wasn’t. Or she was. He didn’t know and didn’t discover why until he read her diaries.
After the killing of Jamal on March 11, 1978, a poster had appeared showing her with a scarf around her neck, crouching with a Kalashnikov. She was surrounded by photos of the other Deir Yassin Group martyrs. Underneath it said, “Leader of Operation Kamal Adwan.” He’d understood then why the girl had looked at him in surprise when he’d met her at the Café Jandoul.
Jamal hadn’t asked him, “What do you want with me?” She’d let him flirt with her while apparently not listening to what he was saying. In her eyes he’d seen an abyss of white emptiness. When he recalled her eyes all he could see was a white vastness, as though she didn’t see him, or saw nothing, as though she was in some other world.
He’d met her at a military training camp in Baissour in 1976. Danny had taken him there after telling him that the great battle was about to begin and every member of the organization had to take intensive training
courses: everyone was expecting an incursion by the Syrian army to prevent the Lebanese Left and the Palestinian resistance from deciding the struggle for power in Lebanon.
Karim hadn’t understood what all that meant or how it would be possible to stop the Syrian army, which had occupied the heights of Sannine and decided the battle before it began. But he went, and there he met the martyrs. Later, dozens of young people on the training course were killed at the Battle of Bhamdoun but Karim didn’t go to Bhamdoun with the others. They attached him to the Red Crescent station at Baissour, as though he were a doctor, which was how he escaped death. Jamal had been to Bhamdoun and not died. She disappeared from his life, and when he asked about her Danny told him she’d left the Student Brigade when the brigade leader had told her to leave the camp because she was the only girl among dozens of male fighters. Danny said Jamal had joined one of the groups attached to the Western Sector, meaning the Occupied Lands sector, which was under the command of Khalil el-Wazir – Abu Jihad – and he knew nothing more about her.
Two years later, in early March 1978, Karim met her by chance at the clinic in Burj el-Barajneh Camp and invited her to have coffee at the Modeca Café on Hamra Street. She agreed but asked if they could change the place: she said she preferred the Café Jandoul on the Corniche at Mazraa because it was close to her parents’ home.
At Baissour, Jamal had been a different girl, brown-skinned with large honey-colored eyes, a delicate nose, full lips, short black hair, and a scarf tied around her neck. During the evenings at Baissour, which lasted for two weeks, Karim would make a point of sitting next to her and talking to her. He had no idea where he’d found the words after the boring lectures on the People’s War, the theories of General Giap – hero of Dien Bien Phu – and the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung on “the principal contradiction and the secondary contradictions.” When the political discussions finished he’d find
himself sitting next to her, talking about everything and nothing. Nothing that was said then had stuck on memory’s tape, but the curve of the girl’s shoulders, her dissatisfaction with everything, and her insistence on talking constantly about the martyrs had stirred in his soul waves of desire that did not dare show themselves. He contented himself with short walks with her in the forest, where their talk began to take on the form of love. She told him stories about her father, who had fled on foot from Jaffa to Lebanon under the bombardment to which the city had been subjected.