Karim tried to explain to her that insults shouldn’t be taken at face value and told her about his friend the Iraqi poet whom he’d met in Montpellier and who, whenever he got drunk, would delight in Lebanese insults because they were the most refined form of metaphor.
“What does metaphor mean?”
“It means making comparisons. How can I put it? It means saying one thing and meaning another. You package the words in images and the image becomes the point and the words lose their meanings.”
Karim didn’t tell Hend what had taken place during his meeting with his brother and the direct approach, devoid of any of the rules of metaphor, that Nasim had used to describe his father. He limited himself to offering advice, because a woman has no place if not next to her husband and her children.
6
KARIM HADN’T GONE back to Beirut to search for his father’s killers or to take revenge on them. Such a story wasn’t right for him and wasn’t like him. Karim had read something similar about a man who went back from France in search of his father’s killers that was written by Maroun Baghdadi and published in the al-Nahar Supplement after the young Lebanese director’s death. Maroun was a beautiful man and could seduce any woman; that was how Karim had seen him when he met him in Montpellier. He recalled that he’d watched his film Little Wars at a private showing at the university, after which the Lebanese student who’d talked to him about his ox-cheek feast in Paris had invited him to a restaurant in the Place de la Comédie. There the students hovered around the director, who told them of his project for a new film he was making about mutual forgiveness and said he was looking for a writer to help him with the screenplay. At the time, the idea of becoming the writer of the screenplay had occurred to Karim but he’d been afraid of looking ridiculous so gave it no more thought.
The ghost of the Lebanese director filled his imagination once more when he read fragments of the story of his horrible death following his fall into the stairwell of the building in which he was living in Beirut, close to the Tabaris roundabout, as he prepared to shoot his new movie.
Karim told his wife that his friend Maroun’s death had transformed him into a hero because, basically, Maroun was confused about whether to be a hero or a director. The hero’s role had selected him for killing, and the story he’d written had devoured him.
He was taken aback to hear Bernadette asking him about the blond woman.
“What woman?” Karim asked.
“I was told a mysterious woman was with him the night he died and I wouldn’t rule out foul play.”
“Where do you get all this information?”
She said she’d become more Lebanese than he and knew the Lebanese news in detail while all he cared about was eating tabbouleh.
He told her such thoughts came from her reading of crime novels and that Lebanon wasn’t right for crime novels.
She said that was precisely Lebanon’s problem, because when crime novels become a possibility it means the country has succeeded in separating crime from its social environment, but “you people live crime without realizing.”
She asked him why he’d used the word “friend” when talking of Maroun Baghdadi. “Was he really your friend?”
Karim said he’d met Maroun twice in Beirut at the apartment of a man called Danny, where they used to discuss Marxism, and that Maroun hadn’t been interested in such discussions. He’d kept joking around and flirting with the girls. Then he met him in Montpellier and had been sure that Maroun wouldn’t recognize him, which was in fact what happened because the director was preoccupied with a beautiful black girl who’d come with Talal, the Lebanese student who’d invited him to the restaurant.
“So he wasn’t your friend,” said Bernadette.
“He was sort of a friend,” he replied.
“Everything’s ‘sort of’ with you. I can’t make you out anymore. You say you love Lebanon but you won’t let us visit it, tremble when you talk about your brother, and don’t want us to get to know your family. Your father died and you didn’t go to Beirut. I don’t know you.”
He told her no one knew anyone. “You think I know myself to start with, that I should open for you the gateways to knowledge? No one knows himself because an individual is a forest covered with a tent and the tent is all secrets and the secrets are attached to one’s skin.”
“But you’re a skin doctor,” she said.
He told her the secret of the medical profession was the patients. It was up to the patient to be convinced that the doctor knows; only then could the doctor practice his profession. “In other words the doctor is an assumption not an absolute truth. If you believe him, you’ll be cured. If you don’t, there’s nothing he can do.”
Bernadette said he was talking about magic, not medicine: “But you’re a failed magician, the proof being that your magic hasn’t worked on me for a long time.”
He tried to tell her about Nasri, who’d played around with chemistry till it killed him. The old man must certainly have taken his own Green Potion and sat waiting at the shop, but his newest victim — let’s call her Najat — never came, or never took the potion. He waited a long time and when he got sick of waiting he went to Salma’s apartment, but Salma wasn’t at home, or didn’t open the door, so he found himself making his way to his son’s apartment to die.
Did Nasri try to rape Hend, or did he appear so strange that he scared the woman into kicking him to the ground, with the result that seven days later he died?
Karim had thought the story of the search for his father’s killers didn’t concern him and wasn’t what had brought him to Lebanon, and that he ought to forget the whole thing. The hospital project had been an appropriate occasion for him to return to the scene of that crime of his of which no one knew anything, and in which he’d participated unknowingly — or at least unaware of the devastating impact of his indecisiveness, which had compelled Khaled Nabulsi to leave him to go to meet his end in Tripoli. But Khaled would have gone in any case. The man had seen his death as inescapable and gone to it and the whole thing had nothing to do with Karim.
Khaled was authentic and the authentic have no choice but to die. He, on the other hand, was the imaginary Sinalcol, just a ghost who didn’t exist and who left no footprints on the ground. That was why he’d decided to be a brother to the real Sinalcol.
He’d said he was looking for Sinalcol and had convinced himself he was. The name pleased Muna, who laughed a lot as she drank white wine with him and listened to the story of what he called his “spiritual twin” who had passed through the ancient quarters of Tripoli like a ghost, then disappeared leaving neither track nor sign.
“Are you serious, his name was Sinalcol?” Muna asked.
“That’s what they say but how should I know? Danny told me about him when we went to work with the Qubbeh neighborhood group in Tripoli, and then Khaled Nabulsi, God have mercy on his remains, tried to kill him because he’d earned himself a bad reputation, which reflected poorly on the Revolution. But he failed. Then Khaled died and I went to France and took Sinalcol with me.”
“Who were Danny and Khaled?”
“They were my comrades in arms.”
“Where are they now?”
“One’s dead and the other’s living as though he were dead,” said Karim.
“And Sinalcol?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead too but I haven’t heard anything about him. I’m going to Tripoli soon to ask about him.”
“So you’re the only one left. It’s the scallywags who make old bones!” she said.