Broken Mirrors (30 page)

Shaking the water of Rawsheh Rock off herself and lying on a deck chair at the Sporting Club, Hend said that three days before she’d had a terrifying dream which she hadn’t wanted to speak of in case it came true, but then she’d changed her mind and decided to tell him about it because, that day, for the first time, she’d felt afraid of the darkness of the cave.

Hend said it had been a long dream. It had lasted all night, she hadn’t forgotten any of it, and she was scared.

“Dreams are our repressed desires,” said Karim. “Out with it, so we can see what your desires are.”

Karim sat on the edge of the chair, lit an unfiltered Gauloise, took the first drag deep into his lungs, and waited for the story.

“What kind of a cigarette is that that smells so bad?” she asked.

He said the roasted black tobacco was less harmful and gave you a buzz. He didn’t attribute it to Danny’s influence, or mention that French tobacco had become fashionable among the Lebanese leftists following the May ’68 Revolution in France.

“You and I were swimming beneath Rawsheh Rock and as usual I left you and went into the cave. It was dark. I swam. The water was very cold. Then I began to feel it was sticking to my body. I felt cold and was afraid. I tried to get out of the cave. I turned toward the entrance but instead of seeing light it just got darker. Usually when I turn around to go back I see the most beautiful view in the world. The sun looks as though it’s sleeping on the water in the middle of the cave and the light is coming from under the water. ‘Come on,’ I thought, ‘where’s the entrance to the cave?’ I turned
again and I couldn’t work out the directions anymore. I kept turning around and around and screaming. I screamed but no one heard my voice. It was as though my voice had disappeared. I knew no one could save me.”

“Where was I?” asked Karim.

“You’d disappeared,” said Hend.

“I was alone and there was no one with me and I screamed, ‘Father!’ I don’t know why it occurred to me to scream for someone I only know from pictures, and instead of my father coming to save me I saw him at home. He was sitting in the living room drinking a glass of whiskey and my mother was coming and going to the kitchen because she was getting lunch. The doorbell rang. My mother told me, ‘Get up, Hend, and open the door.’ I ran toward the door to open it and found it was open and there was a tall man standing in the doorway holding a pistol. As soon as he saw me he shot me and I saw blood coming out of my shoulder but I didn’t fall. I heard my mother screaming that her husband had killed her daughter, and hitting herself on the head screaming that her daughter was dead. I stretched out my hands toward my father and said to him in a low voice, ‘Help me, Father.’ I looked out the window and saw him stretched out on the ground, and the tall man who my mother said was her husband was standing over him. I fell down … and was swimming in the sea and the sky was blue and clear and the sea was as smooth as oil. My father was swimming beside me and when I got to the rock I saw it was sinking. It was listing like a ship and instead of the big rock supporting itself on the small, it knocked it over and the two of them sank together. I saw the rock sinking further and further under the water and started to cry. ‘How are people going to know this is Beirut?’ I said. ‘If the rock’s gone, so is Beirut, and me too, who’s going to want to know me now that I have no name?’ And I felt myself sinking and screamed for my father and everything was dark and I was stuck inside the cave.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then I woke up trembling. I went to the kitchen to drink some water. My mother was sitting on her own in the dark smoking a cigarette. I went up to her to kiss her and noticed her face was wet with tears. She was weeping soundless tears. I wanted to tell her that Rawsheh Rock had sunk but when I saw her in that state I didn’t know what to do. I drank a glass of water and went back to bed.”

Hend said that that day, for the first time in her life, she’d felt frightened of the sea and the cave. They were swimming at the beginning of April ’75; the Beirut spring sun had not yet taken the chill out of the sea air but Hend swam all year round, saying she loved the shock of the cold water, it refreshed and revitalized the heart and stimulated the circulation. Karim didn’t like the cold. He’d tried on innumerable occasions to put Hend off swimming out of season but it was no use.

He’d sat down in the chair and covered himself with the towel, seeking shelter from the cold air that infiltrated via his pores, and listened to the dream that Hend, stretched out on her back in her bikini with her eyes closed, had told.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“What do I know? Really, it’s a strange dream. It doesn’t make sense at all. All I know is that when you dream of the sea it means repressed sexual desire but your dream’s very complicated.”

“Like Meelya’s dreams,” she said. “Dear God, I’m afraid I’ll end up like she did at the end!”

“Who’s Meelya?” asked Karim.

“Her nephews were our neighbors and my mother told me strange stories about her. It’s said her dreams used to come true and everyone was afraid of her.”

“Then what?”

“Then how should I know?”

He said the best way to deal with dreams was to forget them and he was cold and wanted to get dressed.

When the war started he told Danny his girlfriend had prophesied it because she’d dreamed that Rawsheh Rock had sunk, and that that symbol of Beirut created by the French – which they’d put on all the postage stamps as an embodiment of Beirut under their Mandate – had to sink now that the old Lebanon had come to an end.

Danny just smiled the superior smile, which was one of the hallmarks of his mastery over others. He’d listen without interrupting, then pronounce in a single sentence his dismissal of Freudian doctrines that made man the slave of those dark irrational regions that they call the unconscious. It was only in France that Karim discovered that the French had nothing to do with Rawsheh. He’d been in Montpellier with Talal discussing the idea of Maroun Baghdadi’s film when Hend’s dream had flashed through his mind. He told Talal that the film ought to end with the vanishing of Rawsheh Rock and recounted to him the story of the symbol of the Mandate that had to disappear.

“What have the French got to do with it?” asked Talal.

“The French took the name they gave to the area from the rock. “Rock” in French is
rocher
, from which we got the word Rawsheh and from then on we started saying ‘Rawsheh Rock.’ ”

Talal didn’t smile Danny’s superior smile but he did explain to the Lebanese doctor that this was a common misunder​standing. “The French had nothing to do with it. ‘Rawsheh’ was originally the Syriac word
rawsh
, meaning ‘head.’ The rock was, according to our ancestors, who spoke Syriac, ‘the head of Beirut,’ but in our ignorance we believed it was a French invention.” The French had called the area La Grotte aux Pigeons, referring to the cave close to the rock. The rock itself was 100 percent Syriac. Talal said his
mother had told him the tale because she was an eccentric woman: “You know, she phones from Beirut, with the shells falling around her like rain, and tells me about her linguistic discoveries. She told me the dictionary and the books of Anis Freiha were the best way to forget the war.”

Talal took the story back to its beginning. Karim wasn’t a friend of the young man. He’d run into him at the bar, they’d drink a beer and chat a little. Then Talal had invited him to meet Maroun Baghdadi and now he’d come along and provided, without realizing, a different interpretation for Hend’s dream!

When he’d first arrived in Beirut, and after the glass of arak at his brother’s apartment – where Hend had contented herself with talking to him with, as it were, the tips of her lips – she’d asked after Bernadette, Nadine, and Lara and about life in France but shown no interest in hearing the answers. She’d sat at the table for only a few moments and spent the rest of her time coming and going between the kitchen and the dining room.

“Tell us about the girls. Did you bring pictures?” asked Salma.

Karim’s attention was attracted to the thick black nylon stockings pulled over Salma’s legs. The white that once had erupted at the edges of her black skirt was gone, its place taken by black spots that seemed to bespatter her calves and thighs. Karim hadn’t been aware that Salma had reverted to wearing stockings of this kind after his father’s death. Hend had told him that at the deathbed in the hospital her mother had cried out that the man had lost his sight and that afterward she’d reverted to her old mourning dress.

“And what does Nasim think?” he asked her.

“Nasim didn’t say anything. When we got back to the apartment, he was silent. He only spoke to me when he had to. He didn’t even talk to the children. You’ve seen for yourself how he never says anything when we’re sitting together.”

Karim hadn’t noticed his brother’s silence during his stay in Beirut.
Quite the contrary, Nasim had talked a lot and in talking rearranged the whole story. In his version, things were completely the other way round. The older brother, who believed he’d preserved his purity both before and during the war, discovered that in his brother’s version things were totally different and that he’d lost – amongst all his other losses – the ability to repair the holes that had opened up, all at one go, in his life.

The first night, after the welcome dinner, a rush of emotions had overwhelmed Karim as he became aware of the oppressive absence of his father. He’d discovered how powerless he was to fashion words of love for a man whom, with his overbearing ways, he’d believed he’d always hated. He had risen, wanting to go home.

“I’ll drive you,” Nasim had said.

“No, don’t bother. Stay. We’ve drunk a lot of arak. I’d prefer to take a taxi.”

Nasim got up, paying no attention.

“But you’ve drunk a lot.”

“So what? When I drink I see things better.”

They got into the car in silence. Karim felt as though he were being choked. The humidity, the heat, his inability to talk.

“How about a coffee on the Corniche?” said Nasim.

“I miss the Beirut sea. In Montpellier the sea’s all one color, a kind of gray, and the beach is depressing, I don’t know why. Every time I go to Palavas with my wife and the girls, I tell them about the Corniche and Rawsheh Rock.”

They’d stopped in front of Rawsheh Rock and were drinking espresso from one of the small vans serving coffee that were parked here and there along the Corniche. The rock sparkled in the lights that refracted off the edges of the smooth waves breaking against it.

“This is Beirut,” said Karim. “You know, I don’t know what came over
me in France. Every time I heard news of the shelling in Lebanon I’d be frightened that the rock would be hit and would sink. In fact I used to dream that the rock had sunk and feel that Beirut had become shapeless and all its houses and buildings were falling down.”

“You dreamed that the rock sank? Strange!”

“What’s strange?”

“You know, it’s like we were young again. Remember how Father would make us finish off each other’s dreams? Now it’s like you were telling me my own dreams.”

“Your dreams!”

“Don’t tell me you’ve come so we can go back to playing that game again! I thought you’d have grown up after being away so long. We’re here to work. We’ve got a project that’s better than a gold mine. In Lebanon today medicine is gold. But it looks like you don’t appreciate the importance of the project and you’ve come to open doors onto memories that we’d closed once and for all.”

Karim hadn’t understood what memories his brother was talking about. He’d come back without giving his decision a moment’s thought. He’d taken unpaid leave and arrived without thinking through the implications of his decision. He’d known Bernadette would never come to Beirut and he had no reason to destroy his little French family, which was his refuge from himself and his sense of loss. Despite this, and because he’d drunk a lot of arak while eating the kibbeh nayyeh, he’d slipped up and told a dream he hadn’t seen.

“Strange,” said Nasim, “I thought that was Hend’s dream. Now you’ve got me confused and I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Give me a cigarette!” said Karim.

“What? Seems as soon as you’ve arrived you’ve started smoking again. Didn’t you tell us you’d stopped in France?”

Karim blew the cigarette smoke into the air and stood gazing at Rawsheh Rock, feeling pins and needles all over his body.

“You told me you dreamed Rawsheh Rock had sunk,” said Nasim, and he burst into laughter.

Suddenly Karim began laughing too. Their laughter fluttered over the place. It was as though the brothers had gone back to being twins, tricking the world with their complemen​tarity and finding themselves some room for independence from the overbearing presence of their father, who used to force himself between them on the excuse that he was the third side of their unbreakable triangle.

The triangle had come apart long ago. The duality, which the brothers had maintained despite the outbreak of the civil war and the fact that they were in two warring camps, had begun to come apart the moment Karim decided to leave for France. It had disintegrated once and for all with the phone call during which Nasim had informed his brother of his marriage to Hend and Karim had choked on his cough and lost the ability to speak.

That Beirut night, in front of Rawsheh Rock, their duality was resurrected. They became two children once more, playing with words, tossing jokes at one another, making fun of everything.

“Tell me,” said Nasim. “There’s something I never understood. Father would hint at it and Suzanne drew the conclusion that it had happened. On your honor now, tell the truth. Did Brother Eugène really fuck you?”

“Of course not. Don’t you remember what your father used to say about him and his sons being ‘up a tiger’s ass’?”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you forgotten everything? Whenever he drank he’d finish the session by saying, ‘Thank God, I’m still up a tiger’s ass.’ ”

“I don’t remember but it doesn’t matter. Tell me what a tiger’s ass is first and then answer my question.”