Authors: Elias Khoury
“No thanks,” said Karim, “and give my greetings to Sheikh Radwan.”
“We’ll be waiting for you on Friday, God willing,” the young man said as he left.
Karim got into the front seat next to the driver. His eyes were heavy with sleep and he’d begun to surrender to its dominion when he started, as though stung. He was overcome by the strange idea that the sheikh’s companion was following him, that he’d fallen into the trap.
Every time he caught sight of a black car traveling behind the taxi he’d slide lower in his seat as though trying to hide.
This hellish thought accompanied Karim throughout the last week of his Beirut sojourn; throughout, he found himself prisoner to a mysterious fear, always turning right and left, looking behind him panic stricken, then continuing on his way as fast as he could.
The last week Karim spent in Beirut was a kind of maelstrom. He’d
returned from Tripoli on December 30, 1989, in a state of exhaustion, to find that his brother had invited him to spend New Year’s Eve with him at his place. Karim got out of it by saying he was invited to a party at the home of one of his old university friends.
He was lying and regretted having to spend the night alone at home. He’d tried to phone his wife in Montpellier, as he had done on Christmas Eve, but the lines were impossible. The ghosts of Tripoli, which had brought his old fears back, haunted him. He had to find a way out of his predicament with Sheikh Radwan. At the same time, he had to come to a final decision regarding his family. He had to persuade Bernadette of the viability of the hospital project and he had to find a way to be absent from his job in France for six months a year.
On the morning of Monday, January 1, 1990, to the intermittent sound of shells whistling through the city’s skies, his brother and his wife came bearing the traditional New Year’s breakfast of kenafeh-with-cheese and manaqish with thyme. It had been the only religious festival that Nasri had celebrated. His celebration had been limited to an early morning breakfast consisting entirely of kenafeh-with-cheese so that the year would be as white as the Akkawi cheese that oozed from beneath the pale golden kenafeh.
Nasim reported that the boys preferred to celebrate the New Year’s breakfast with their grandmother Salma and so hadn’t come. He said the situation was deteriorating fast, he felt the winds of war had begun to blow once more. He gave a protracted explanation of the situation in the Christian areas after the failure of parliament to elect a new president of the republic following the end of Amin Gemayel’s term and the formation of a military government under the presidency of General Michel Aoun.
Nasim said the general was going to proclaim a war of liberation against
Syria and the Ta’if Agreement sponsored by Saudi Arabia, America, and Syria, because the agreement had stripped the Maronite president of the republic of his prerogatives, and only the general could change the formula.
Nasim spoke of the general, who occupied a special position in Lebanese politics, as though he was the heir to Bashir and said he expected him to restore confidence among the Christians.
“More war? That’s insane!” said Karim. “No, please. I don’t want to get stuck in Lebanon.”
Nasim reassured his brother that he didn’t think the war would be serious. “A little maneuvering as usual and then they’ll go back to the negotiating table.”
Their breakfast was interrupted halfway through, however, by that mysterious phone call and Nasim left in a hurry, leaving his wife with his brother. From that moment Karim’s time in Beirut was a whirlwind.
Hend told him the truth about his father’s death, leaving him with the overwhelming sense that a crime had been committed. At the same time, relations between Hend and her husband grew tense enough to drive her to leave home and live at her mother’s. The next day Karim tried to mediate to solve the disagreement. He phoned his brother, who told him he’d been coming to see him anyway to give him some news of extreme importance. Instead of talking about the need for a reconciliation between husband and wife, Karim heard from his brother of the catastrophe that had befallen the family. The Cypriot cargo ship
Acropol
, carrying a shipment of oil paid for by Nasim, had gone up in flames at the Port of Beirut’s Dock Five as a result of being hit by a 155mm cannon shell, before unloading its cargo. Nasim said he’d found himself obliged to review his accounts as he’d taken on huge debts and placed all his hopes on the deal. He’d wagered his shirt on it and now found himself obliged to change all his plans.
He said he was obliged to sell the land for the hospital and asked Karim to sign a general power of attorney that would allow him to sell their father’s apartment and the pharmacy and a plot of land in Brumanna on which Nasri had hoped to build a summer house.
He said he’d booked him a ticket back to France but hadn’t been able to find a seat before the morning of Friday, January 5. “I hope the airport will be open and the road safe.” He’d said this didn’t mean he was abandoning the hospital project, “but we have to wait till things are clearer.”
When Karim broached the subject of Hend and the need for a reconciliation, his brother shot him an incendiary look, gritted his teeth, and didn’t say a word.
“It won’t do, brother. She’s your wife and the mother of your children.”
Nasim denied there was a problem. “I brought her home this morning, and instead of her apologizing to me I was forced to apologize to her. Salma took her by the hand and she came home with us. I have this catastrophe to deal with and she’s upset because in a moment of rage I called her names! If you could just see her now, making faces and scowling!”
Karim signed the papers, took his plane ticket, and suddenly felt as though a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders. He felt lighter than he had throughout the six months he’d spent in Beirut, as though he’d been saved from a predicament whose significance he was only now comprehending. He didn’t ask his brother what would happen to his shares in the apartment, the pharmacy, and the land because he realized Nasim would take them and there was nothing he could do about it.
His brother left. He felt returning to France was the only means he had to escape Radwan. He decided he wouldn’t leave Yahya’s papers at home in Beirut but take them with him to his new country, hide them, and never part with them.
He decided to visit Salma to say goodbye and thought of phoning Hend
but felt the time for talking to her was over. What would he say and what would talking mean after everything that had happened?
Karim didn’t leave home that day. He had only a little time left to pack his bags, and besides, the smell of war had spread through the city, forcing him like everyone else to stay indoors.
At nine at night Karim heard a loud knock on the door. He opened the door hesitantly and saw by the flickering light of the candle the face of Ahmad Dakiz.
“You scared me, old man. What brings you out on such a night?”
Ahmad said he apologized for dropping in at that late hour of the evening without phoning. He’d brought the complete plans for the hospital because he’d be leaving the following morning with his wife and two children for Canada.
“They called us from the Canadian Embassy in Damascus. We leave tomorrow morning early, pick up the visa, and fly from there to Canada.”
He said Nasim had asked him to give the plans to the doctor.
Ahmad opened a folder he was carrying and began explaining the plans he’d drawn up. “I think it’s going to be the best hospital in the Middle East as far as architectural design goes. I wish you success and hope this round ends without mishap so you can start work.”
“What’s it got to do with me?” asked Karim. “You have to give them to Nasim.”
“What do you mean, what’s it got to do with you? You’re the director of the hospital! Nasim doesn’t understand these things. All he understands is how to siphon off the money. Your brother’s smart. I have no idea how he managed to make all that money and become a millionaire.”
Ahmad asked about his night in Tripoli and Karim said it had been excellent. “For the first time I saw how beautiful Tripoli is, and I learned a new language too.”
“You mean you believed my father’s ravings?”
“I believed and I didn’t, it doesn’t matter, but there’s something I forgot to ask him about. I forgot to ask him if ‘Sinalcol’ comes from the lingua franca of the crusaders.”
Ahmad laughed and said it was the name of a fizzy drink once made in Lebanon. Its name was Sinalco, not Sinalcol, and it had been manufactured by a German company; the company still owned a factory in Hasaka, in Syria’s Jezira region.
“German! Damn, what a bind! I don’t want a German name sticking to me,” said Karim.
“Why? You don’t like Germans?”
“…”
“And what have you got to do with Sinalco?”
“I am Sinalcol,” said Karim, though when he saw the frown on Ahmad’s face he corrected himself and said he was joking.
Ahmad left Karim’s apartment convinced by his wife’s theory that the war had driven the Lebanese mad, and that they had to get out of Beirut or the children would end up paying the price for the collective hysteria.
Karim put the plans back in the brown binder, which he placed carefully in the drawer next to Hend’s letters. He closed the drawer and shut his eyes, waiting for time, which had become sticky and slow, to pass before he found himself on the road to the airplane that would carry him back to Montpellier.
O
N
J
ANUARY
4, 1990, Karim reached the age he had feared ever since learning the meaning of the words “fear” and “age.” The man entered his fortieth year to the sound of his father’s voice whispering that a man’s body is his coffin.
All Karim could remember of his dream on his second-to-last Beirut night was his father’s whispery voice muttering indistinguishable words, as though the sounds of the city had vanished, to be transformed into mysterious raspings that conveyed no meaning.
“A man’s body is his coffin.” From where had Nasri got that terrifying metaphor? Why had his tongue wagged on before his sons with this talk of forty being the beginning of the end, even as he boasted of his sexual prowess to colleagues in the Qazzaz Café in Gemmeizeh, saying he had no fear of age?
“What life remains cannot be more than what has passed,” Nasri would say, grinding his teeth, which he regarded as a true miracle – “Forty years old, and not a rotten tooth in my head!” The pharmacist would repeat into his young sons’ ears the story of the slope down which one slips when one
reaches forty. “Suddenly, time starts to pass quickly and we discover that what’s behind us is more than what’s ahead and we begin to make a mess of everything.”
Nasri stayed forty for many long years. He refused to quit the age and with each new year his forty years became more firmly established; the boys grew older and he still insisted he hadn’t passed forty, for he knew that one additional day would mean the beginning of the slide into the abyss.
Nasri turned gray and his forty years turned gray but then suddenly he declined to sixty. He jumped twenty years all at once and no one knew why. Salma alone knew but refused to explain.
“Poor thing, he was still young. He died at sixty,” said Salma.
Nasim looked at her in amazement and said his father was seventy-six when he died. “Where do you get this story about him being sixty, mother?” – but then he exploded with laughter before saying, “He was stuck all his life at forty. He turned gray and grew old and we grew up but his age never changed. Then we stopped knowing how his relationship to his age had evolved. We got sick of him and his age.”
“But the last time he came to see me and told me about his eyes, he said he was sixty-five,” she said.
“And you believed him?” he asked her.
“I’m the only one in the world who used to believe, but the pity of it is that I didn’t when he needed me to. That’s life – a big trap we all fall into.”
Forty was too far away for the two boys to grasp. When they were told someone was forty they would see a coffin suspended in the sky, and the image of their father, with the slight stoop that curved his back a little, would describe itself over their eyes.
In Beirut, Karim would discover that what had been so far was now close. Instead of celebrating his birthday at home with his wife and daughters, he’d found himself stuck, hoping the next twenty-four hours would pass
without incident so he could leave the following morning for Montpellier via Paris.
His fortieth year arrived without fanfare. He didn’t feel he’d entered the age of fear or that turning point at which the course of his life would be determined. He didn’t feel he had only to look back to discover that the “to come” he’d been looking forward to had become a part of the “once” that had gone, as Nasri used to say.
Karim decided not to look back because all he’d find would be a vacuum. His life had passed in a state of indecision. He’d gone to France ten years before out of an instinct for survival. When he’d decided to decide and had agreed to the hospital project, he’d discovered he’d decided nothing because he’d cast himself into an illusion.
Karim had awoken at six in the morning. He’d slept badly because of the sound of shells bursting all around. His brother phoned at eight to reassure him that a ceasefire had been announced half an hour earlier; Beirut airport was still open and there was no need to be anxious. Nasim apologized for not being able to come and say goodbye to his brother properly; he was very busy because of the oil tanker catastrophe; he would have liked to invite his brother to dinner, “but, you know, the atmosphere’s very tense. It’s true, Hend’s come home, but she’s not herself so I’d rather forget about the dinner.”
Karim told him the architect had come the night before and left the plans for the hospital with him, and that he’d put them in the drawer.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Nasim.
He drank a whole pot of unsugared coffee, heated water on the paraffin stove because the electricity was cut, bathed, shaved, phoned Hend, said he apologized for everything, and decided to visit Salma.