“No, I’m alive because I took off. Death passed close by me but by a miracle I escaped.”
He’d wanted to tell her he hadn’t returned to Lebanon because of the hospital but to look for Sinalcol, and for what remained of what he’d lived through in Tripoli during the war. It had been his greatest experience of life and of death and in that city he’d discovered that life has no meaning: that people invent meanings to be able to accept the idea of their death.
Still, he’d said nothing to this woman who’d come to him from he knew not where, and with whom he’d started a relationship designed to make him forget the wound through which the story of his fling with Ghazala had bled away. Now, sitting with Muna, he could feel the tingle of blood flowing through his veins once more but he was just distracting himself with a relationship, which Muna had given him to understand could never be anything but ephemeral, from a love story that had inspired in him embarrassingly simpleminded emotions. In transitory relationships you have to lie: they’re like a story that you have to write and whose features you have to draw, not one in which you can play the hero. Heroes are stupid or, let’s say, they believe, and when you believe you take a beating. He was a hero with Ghazala. He’d believed the passion, only to discover that he’d been taken for the biggest ride of his life. With Muna, though, things were clear and didn’t need thinking about. He had to talk to fill the gaps in the imagination created by desire. This didn’t mean he was against love. On the contrary, ever since he’d begun to feel that his marriage was slipping away from him and taking on a form that had room only for repetition, he’d been living in hope of a new great love. That was how he’d lived his ephemeral relationships in the distant French city. But when Ghazala’s story ended he’d realized that love was the victim of contradictory expectations, or a misunderstanding based on two different points of view.
He’d left Hend because he hadn’t been able to tell her about the fear that had unstrung his joints after the killing of Khaled Nabulsi, and because he’d become aware that their love, which he’d thought would last forever, had been wiped out in a single instant. It was only during his coughing fit, as he listened to his brother telling him over the phone that he’d married Hend, that he’d rediscovered the choking feeling that used to fill his throat whenever she left him to go back home.
“You told me Sinalcol was from Tripoli, right?”
“…”
“I must tell Ahmad. It’s got to be lingua franca.”
“What?”
“Lingua franca.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the language of the last remaining crusaders. Someday Ahmad can tell you about his grandfather and father. I can’t tell stories.”
“Forget about lingua franca and all that crap. When we were young there was a fizzy drink called ‘Sinalco,’ a patriotic imitation of Coke, and I remember it was good. It tasted a bit like tamarind, but I don’t know why it disappeared. Probably the company went broke.”
“And the factory was in Tripoli, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“The company doesn’t matter,” said Muna. “I’m talking about the man. If he was from Tripoli he must have taken the word from there and not had the soda pop company in mind. Soon you’ll hear the true story and you’ll see I’m right.”
Muna put on her glasses and looked at him as a teacher might at her students. She asked him to stop talking about the subject because it wasn’t his field of specialization. Her voice had the condescension and arrogance of women teachers’ voices, so he could find nothing to say except that she treated him like a schoolteacher, that she was incapable of forgetting her profession, and “God help your husband!”
Later Karim would go to Tripoli, hear the story from Ahmad, drink lemonade with ice cream in front of the Dakiz Mosque, meet Mr. Abd el-Malek, Ahmad’s father, and hear from him the strangest tale imaginable. He’d discover through the man’s secret language that war, which he’d believed from Danny’s teaching to be “the engine of history,” used people so that it could grind them up and treated them as means to an end. For history was just a wild beast with an unquenchable thirst for the blood of its victims.
What he didn’t know was what was happening to him now and why he felt this incurable fragility, and why he found himself stuck once more in that old feeling that he was part of another man, or formed, along with that other, a single individual with two heads.
At primary school his favorite game with his brother had been what they called “the four eyes game.” They’d stand back to back and watch the school playground from in front and behind. They didn’t need to exchange information because what one of them saw would be transmitted wordlessly to the other’s consciousness. Nasim had invented the game and it was his means of defending his brother, who, because of his weak build, was constantly getting beaten up. This way the younger brother could put a stop to the attacks to which his brother was subject. Karim’s continual persecution by a boy called Michel Aql had to do with the lady teacher, whom Michel accused him of being in love with, saying that that was why Karim did better than him in French. This Michel was the leader of a gang of boys and challenged Karim for first place in the class and always failed. The charge against Karim was that he was soft on his teacher, Madam Olga Naddaf, who did indeed return his affection with tenderness and concern. She was a woman in her early thirties, white and full without being fat, with wide black eyes, a small tip-tilted nose, lips as thin as if drawn with a pen, a brow that radiated light, always dressed in white. The students called her Madam Bride because she wore white to school every day, as though she owned white dresses for every season.
For a whole year the French teacher dwelled in Karim’s eyes. The boy wished she would take off her glasses so he could see himself in the mirrors of her eyes. When Muna told him her husband used the word “mirrors” to refer to glasses, he burst out laughing. She said this term, and many like it, were part of the secret lexicon of the Dakiz family. “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” he told her. “You’re distorting the language. The Tunisians also call glasses mirrors.” He told her he’d found this out in Paris when by coincidence he met the Watermelon, as he used to call her after he forgot her name.
Why did memories rain down on him in Beirut, and what did it mean when things which forgetfulness had secreted away kept popping up again from some hidden place of whose very existence he had been unaware?
Now it was the Watermelon, reappearing like a ghost. Karim found himself incapable of understanding the relationship between past and present. It was as though memory gave everything a ghostlike cast; as though, rather than remembering himself, he was seeing another person who resembled him.
When he ran into her in Paris she’d asked after his father, who, she recounted, had turned up the day after they’d all had lunch together. She said his father had been waiting for her in the foyer of the hotel, had caught sight of her, and walked with her to the dining room, where they’d had breakfast together. She’d said she was in a hurry because she had to catch a flight. He offered to drive her to the airport. He’d gone upstairs with her to her room on the excuse of helping her to pack her bags, and slept with her.
This had been at the beginning of Karim’s relationship with politics. He’d entered the American University in Beirut to study medicine and the storm in his head had begun. There he met young members of the Fatah movement and his relationship with the organizations of the Lebanese Left that called for armed struggle started.
The Tunisian woman was thirty. Brown and full, with shining eyes and a laughing, radiant face. He’d met her at a conference in support of the Palestinian cause organized by the student council at AUB. She was working for a Tunisian underground paper put out by the Trotskyites called Perspectif.