Authors: Elias Khoury
“I believe he caught hepatitis after he visited us. I’m sure of it. The darkness makes things look yellow. No, he wasn’t really yellow. I think of him
that way now because after his death I found out that he’d caught hepatitis and suffered a lot of pain and they’d done nothing to save him. They left him to die like a dog because he believed in the same things they did. I told him not to write about the Islamist tendencies but he was convinced they were the future. It’s got nothing to do with us. He was French and I’m Greek Orthodox from Damascus, and we’re secularists.”
She said she thought her husband had been killed as part of a complex game among intelligence services. “I’m not certain it was the Islamists who killed him. Sure, they were the instrument that killed him but it was really the traditional stupidity of French Intelligence in their game with Iranian or Syrian Intelligence.”
There in Beirut, after telling Muna about the famous text that had been transformed into the theoretical manual of Khaled Nabulsi’s group, which had decided to maintain its political action because it had no choice – there Karim had tried to remember where he had hidden those papers of Abu Rabia’s which he hadn’t given Jean-Pierre. It was strange how his memory of the papers had been erased and only come to mind again when he was getting ready to go back to Beirut. He’d decided that the first thing he’d do would be visit Khaled’s grave and that of Hayat and her daughter, Nabila, to apologize to them, but he’d frittered away his time in Beirut among family memories, frivolous love affairs, and a hospital construction project. And all he’d seen of the hospital project had been optical illusions on the computer of an architect whose only interest was in demolishing buildings and pulling them up by their roots.
When he went to his room to sleep after that first night’s dinner that Salma had made, he’d noticed the room remained exactly as he’d left it on his departure for France. But he’d paid no attention to the brown bedside table, or hadn’t seen in it a window onto memories he’d left behind and
decided to bury in oblivion. Nasri had told him once on the phone that nothing had changed. “Your room will still be your room even if you don’t use it, and the same goes for your brother’s. The maid cleans both once a month and she’s been told not to move anything. They’re your rooms, son, and anytime the two of you decide to come back to the house you’ll find the house waiting for you.”
“But I’m married, Father, and I’ve got two daughters. What do I want with the room? Use it any way you want.”
“And your brother’s married too and it doesn’t change anything as far as I’m concerned. I just pray God lets me live long enough to see the members of the Trinity back together again.”
When Karim hurried to the room where he slept, the bedside table and its two drawers took him by surprise. Why hadn’t he noticed it before, why hadn’t he seen something the eye couldn’t miss? He was sleeping on the same sheets, laying his head on the same ostrich-feather pillow his father had given him as a reward for passing his final exams. The see-through curtains were the same and so was the small brass ceiling lamp with four bulbs, the brown bedside table with two drawers, and on top of it the small transistor radio on which he used to listen to the midnight news from Radio Monte Carlo. He turned on the radio, which made a crackling sound, which then suddenly stopped. The batteries would have to be changed, thought Karim. He bent toward the bedside table, opened the first drawer, and was struck by the lightning bolt of memory. The first drawer was dedicated to Hend: pictures of her in her bathing suit, a picture of her next to him as they stood in front of the Saint George’s beach swimming pool, letters from Hend to him, and his letters – a flood of emotions flowing over the pages in dry ink.
Why had Hend loved to write letters?
It came back to him how Hend, at the end of their daily meeting, would
give him a letter in a closed envelope and ask him not to open it till he’d reached home, and to reply to her the next day in writing. Karim hadn’t seen the point of it. He would read in her letters what he’d already heard from her the same day and was supposed to answer her with what he was going to say the next day. This epistolary relationship exhausted him. “It’s tiring studying medicine,” he’d tell her, “and it doesn’t leave me time for writing.” But Hend had refused his excuses and he was obliged to write her a few lines each night as he struggled to overcome his drowsiness. In this way their love became an enactment of what was in the letters and reading her letters became for him a form of memory exercise. But remembering is tiring. Karim stopped reading the letters. He’d open them, glance at them before throwing them in the drawer, and begin his suffering before the blank piece of paper. His surprise when he found letters he hadn’t opened was enormous. He picked one of them up and tore open the envelope. His lips curled into a stupid smile. He read about his hands: Hend had celebrated the tips of his long fingers and his finely formed thumb, saying she didn’t like round bulgy thumbs because they were a sign that their owners were disloyal. He went on reading and discovered that she wanted to kiss his hands. “Please, when you put cologne on your chin after shaving, wash your hands very well with soap and water because those are what I want to smell when I kiss your hands tomorrow, not cologne.” He tried to remember what had happened the following day, to discover what Hend had said when she kissed his hands and found out that he hadn’t carried out her orders, but he couldn’t.
The atmosphere created by the letters took him back to the evening when Hend gave him her last letter and said she was sad: she was going to stop writing letters because he no longer answered them. He tried to explain that he loved her without needing to write a daily letter and that they met every day anyway.
“I don’t know what you think,” she’d said, “but in my opinion love without words isn’t love.”
“But we meet every day and talk about everything,” he’d answered.
“No, no. Talking is like air. The only thing that lasts is what’s written down,” she’d said. “But whatever you wish.”
Karim didn’t try to hide his joy at the ending of the torment of the letters and put Hend’s last letter into the back pocket of his trousers. He ordered two glasses of beer so they could drink a toast to love.
“I’m sure you’ve thrown all my letters away,” she said.
“Certainly not. I have them all, in a drawer in my room.”
“Mind you don’t let anyone read them.”
“The drawer’s locked and I have the key on me,” he replied.
He hadn’t been telling the truth: the drawer wasn’t locked and it didn’t have a key. He had no idea whether Nasri had read the letters and laughed at the naïveté of his son’s love affairs, but Nasim had probably discovered them and read some of them. It was Nasim who’d discovered his father’s secrets and then put everything back the way it was, so it was difficult to believe inquisitiveness hadn’t led him to the drawer.
Why, though, had he not torn them up? Had his heart not burned with jealousy of his brother? Or had the jealousy had a different effect, the one Karim had felt when listening to Matrouk: the instant his fear of the revolver that the deceived husband had placed on the dining table close to the glass of arak vanished, his heart had ignited with jealousy and desire. He’d felt jealous of Azab and an animal desire for Ghazala, and he’d realized that Matrouk’s love for his wife had caught fire precisely when he’d seen her bend to pass under Azab’s rifle and enter his house.
Strange are the ways of the heart, for they resist understanding. Even a former lover cannot recall the idiocies of his heart without feeling embarrassed or confused, which is why people erase the stories of their loves that
have ended: they don’t dare remember them, and especially not the jealousy which not only wounds the heart but makes it captive twice over.
Only once had Nasri spoken on the subject with his sons. Karim was gathering up his things to return to his home on Abd el-Aziz Street near AUB, where he was studying medicine, while Nasim was struggling to understand why he’d failed the first year College of Pharmacy exams a second time – meaning that he would now have to vacate the halls of academe and start work with his father as assistant pharmacist. That day, which Nasri considered his farewell to the Trinity, the aged pharmacist had drunk an incalculable amount of wine and seemed sad and tired. He looked at Karim and said, “Never fall in love with a whore.”
“What?”
“I know Hamra and Zeitouna are full of bars and you’re young and it’s what life owes you, and I don’t mind, but never fall in love with a whore because it’s a love that has no bottom. She’ll betray you and you’ll become more fiercely in love. She can’t not sleep with other men because it’s her job and there’s no way not to be tormented because you love her.”
Then he looked at Nasim and asked him for his thoughts on the subject.
“You know best,” said Nasim, laughing.
“And your experience isn’t all that negligible either,” his father answered.
Nasim got up from the dining table and left. A silence reigned that Nasri broke when he stood up and said he had a headache and was going to get some sleep.
When Karim heard what had happened with Ghazala he realized what it means to burn with jealousy for a lover. Earlier, when he saw the revolver and Matrouk’s flushed face, he’d felt love recede, starting from the tips of his fingers, and that his relationship with Ghazala had always been meaningless. But when Matrouk had begun speaking of the militia boy whom Ghazala loved and on whom she’d lavished all the presents Karim had given
her, jealousy flared up in his heart and he experienced the fire of which Nasri had spoken. Karim would never forget the sleepless nights he then spent – as though he’d fallen in love with Ghazala precisely at the moment he’d discovered her unfaithfulness. He’d wanted her to come to him one last time so he could quench the thirst that burned within him, but when she came the woman had changed and all she inspired in him was regret.
Nasim must have experienced similar feelings when he read Hend’s letters to his brother, so why hadn’t he destroyed the photos and the letters?
While Karim was drowning in the memories of his love for Hend that rose up before him in a flood of images, the phone rang.
Karim picked up and found someone who claimed to be a Sheikh Radwan, speaking from Tripoli.
“Who?” asked Karim.
“Radwan! I’m Radwan! Danny told me you’d come back to Beirut and I want to see you. What do you say you come and spend a couple of days with me in the Fragrant City? I’ve got a surprise for you too.”
“Radwan, Khaled’s friend?” asked Karim, recalling a round, stout young man with white face, bulging eyes, and almost nonexistent eyebrows who had followed Khaled around like a shadow.
“Is that really you, Radwan?” asked Karim.
“Sure, sure,” answered the voice, which said that he’d become a sheikh after the killing of Khaled. He taught religious law at the Islamic University in the city and wanted to see Karim because he had a surprise.
Karim said he couldn’t because he had to go back to France.
“But he wants to see you.”
“Who does?” Karim asked, feeling a shiver run through his body because in the old days “he” had meant only one person – Khaled.
“Sinalcol. Sinalcol wants to see you,” said Sheikh Radwan, laughing.
“Sinalcol? Does he know me?”
“Come and see. It’s a big surprise.”
Karim was certain Sinalcol was dead, so where was Sheikh Radwan coming from with this story? Khaled had decided to kill him, Danny was enthusiastic, and Karim had shaken his head in disagreement even though he was “neither in the caravan nor on the raiding party,” as they say. He had, however, been present at the meeting that had taken place in Tripoli in May 1976 at which sentence of death had been passed on the thief who was bringing the revolution into disrepute in the city.
But Sinalcol had disappeared. He seemed to have found his way, once again, to the ancient Mamluke quarters of the city, which in 1973 had proclaimed themselves the Republic of the Wanted. Subsequently the army had invaded them, destroying the bizarre republic which had brought together thieves, criminals, and the unemployed under the leadership of a man called Ahmad Qaddour.
When the army invaded the city the only ones to escape had been Sinalcol, Ahmad Qaddour, the leader of the republic, and an odd type who had attached himself to the republic called Albert Helou. The three had crept along a tunnel under the markets and emerged at the bed of the Abu Ali River, from where they had gone up to Akkar, reaching Wadi Jehannam. There, where the security forces never set foot because of its rockiness and the impossibility of maintaining control over its innumerable tracks, they’d starved and hunger had forced the three back to Tripoli, where Qaddour and Albert had been arrested. Sinalcol though had managed to go into hiding.
During the first two years of the civil war Sinalcol had reappeared. No one had seen him, though, because he had proclaimed himself “a ghost of the city” and had come to exemplify a new form of thievery based on nonappearance and invisibility. Sinalcol was an invisible man. Even his real
name was erased. Khaled had been sure that Ibrahim Tartousi, a member of the Republic of the Wanted, had assumed the name Sinalcol so that he could practice thievery – but how could that be true when everyone knew Tartousi had been given a funeral in Tripoli on Saturday, November 17, 1973, and then interred in the Strangers’ Cemetery to the sound of his mother’s loud keening, on a cold and rainy day?
Radwan said he’d be waiting for Karim at the Hallab pastry shop the following Friday. “I’ll meet you after the prayer, we’ll eat shmeisa, visit Khaled’s grave, and then, if you like, meet Sinalcol. Anyway, we have lots to talk about and I think I need you here for me to be able to arrange things clearly in my memory. I need to ask you a few questions related to the memoirs I’m writing.”
“You’re writing your memoirs?” Karim asked, amazed.
“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.”