“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.
14
ON JANUARY 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.
It wasn’t necessary, now that Hend had gone back home, but he hadn’t known what to do with his day, so a visit to Salma suggested itself. He felt everything was wrong and the woman deserved at least a condolence visit. Nasri had died, or been killed, and no one had paid her any attention. Nasim and Hend had been preoccupied with covering up the story. They’d failed to notice the melancholy into which the white-skinned woman had sunk, and which had made her revert to wearing black nylon stockings as a sign of mourning for a man who through his stupidities had lost any possibility of love.
He walked alone along the deserted street. In the twinkling of an eye, the city had emptied itself of people. It was enough for people to sense the stirrings of war for the city to be transformed into a wasteland, the few who ventured out to turn into mere phantoms, and for all sound to disappear.
He reached the entrance to the small two-story building, distinguished by its semi-circular balcony, where he’d sat with Hend for long hours watching the stars that in those days could still find room for themselves in the Beirut sky.
He walked, seeing Hend ahead of him, feeling himself clinging to her fine-boned little body, bending over her long brown neck, and breathing her in with the air. No, it wasn’t love — when love goes it doesn’t return — but a longing to inhale the woman from her neck and bury himself in the folds of her long hair.