When the civil war broke out in April 1975, Karim was a student at AUB, living in West Beirut. His relationship with the Left was taking root. He was in the process of becoming an activist in a small Lebanese organization set up by Fatah called the Socialist Revolution Movement. Nasim was living in East Beirut and had begun to have dealings with youths who referred to themselves as “the Organization” before this was incorporated into the Phalanges.
The civil war wasn’t the main reason for the split between the two brothers. That had happened the day Nasim disappeared and then returned to the apartment a week later a different person. Everything changed. True, they went on with their game, which reached its climax when Nasim married Hend, but they knew it had ended and that the “four eyes” were now only shadows fashioned by memory.
Nasim turned to sports and became a champion swimmer. His muscles bulged and he spent a lot of his time at the sports club. Karim, on the other hand, grew thinner and more introverted, finding his tongue only at the university, where he discovered that ideas could be transformed into material force, and where he embraced the belief that men could make history.
Nasim became a make-believe pharmacist and only stopped working with his father when Nasri discovered his son wasn’t merely selling the narcotic pills from the shop but taking them himself. He would vanish for days, then return in a filthy state, seemingly drunk, throw his rifle down in the corner of his room and sleep as though in a deep coma.
Nasri fired his son, telling him he was destroying his father’s reputation. “I, boy, invent real medicines and you want to turn the shop into a hashish den?”
That day Nasim raised his hand against his father. He was on the verge of striking him but held back at the last moment. He gathered up his things and left, and only went home again when he was wounded in the war. When this happened Nasim gritted his teeth and told Nasri he ought to kill him but wasn’t going to. “Do you know why I’m not going to kill you? Because you aren’t worth the loss of a bullet. God protect you though, because I may kill you at any moment.”
Listening to Maroun Baghdadi telling the plot of the film for which he was seeking a writer, Karim thought his own story with his brother would make a good basis for it. He said he’d like to suggest a different plotline: the man returns from France not to look for his father’s killers but to get back the woman his brother stole from him. He said the story of the search for the killer and of getting caught up in the maze of the sectarian conflict would result in just another traditional film. It would be better to stay away from the trap of a sectarian reading as the war had divided the individual into two halves, with the first half killing the second, and the father would end up being the victim. In his version, fathers and sons would equally be victims.
The director smiled and said he didn’t like didactic films, he wanted the truth the way it was. “Sectarianism? Why not? It’s how we are, after all. The father has died and the son is coming not to take revenge but to find out.”
“Where’s the justice?” someone asked him.
“I’m not looking for justice. Let’s forget justice and reality and look for the crime. I’m trying to say we’re all criminals.”
“Criminals and victims,” said Karim.
“No, not victims,” said Maroun. “No one in this war deserves to be called a victim, just a criminal. That’s why justice doesn’t concern me: it makes it look as though there’s an oppressor and an oppressed. I want to say that all Lebanese are oppressors.”
“But we were defending the Palestinians and the Palestinians are oppressed,” said Talal.
“Palestine’s another story,” answered the director. “That bit I can understand.”
The director said he understood. But Karim was convinced this beautiful slim young man was like the victims, and that Danny was right when he told Maroun he wouldn’t live to see the end of the war because he could see death inscribed on his forehead.
Maroun had laughed and said they’d all be dead by the time the war ended because it was going to be a war without end.
7
KARIM HADN’T KNOWN that the fates would make his brother the last witness to his own relationship with Beirut. Relations between the brothers had ended with the outbreak of the war. From April 13, 1975, which became the official date of the start of the Lebanese Civil War, the brothers found themselves in opposing camps. Karim left the Gemmeizeh district — which had become part of what would come to be known as East Beirut — the following morning and only went back once, a year after the Hundred Days’ War of 1978, during which it had been shelled continuously by the Syrian army, which had entered Lebanon in 1976 on the pretext of imposing peace in that small nation torn apart and divided among its different sects. Karim went back then to make sure his father and brother were all right and to consult them on the possibility of his going abroad to complete his specialist studies in Montpellier.
His father had understood that he would never return.
And Hend had understood that he would never return.
Only Nasim had said he’d be waiting for him.
“Wherever you go, you can’t go anywhere. You’ll come back here because this is where the whole thing is.”
“I lost. I don’t have anywhere anymore,” said Karim.
“And we lost too. This is where the losers meet,” said Nasim.
“You lost? You’ve risen to the heights, God protect you from envy. You’ve gone from being a hoodlum to a businessman!”
Nasim said he didn’t want to get into a sterile discussion with his brother. “Everyone made his masks. I just can’t believe you became a fighter. You’re an intellectual and a doctor and intellectuals are cowards and you’re going abroad now because you’re a coward, no more no less, and I’m not with you to protect you. Admit you’re a coward and forget the philosophy and then I’ll respect you. You know you’ve been my ideal all my life and I’m like everyone else, I hate my ideal as much as I love it. Don’t let the hatred win. Go where you like but please, no philosophy and no sermons!”
When Karim went back to the apartment in Gemmeizeh, everything had changed. Even the smell had changed. The smell of the quarter, a mixture of jasmine and the incandescence of burnt coffee, had disappeared, its place taken by a smell like the burning of rotten garbage.
“That smell comes from the Normandie tip. They keep filling the sea with landfill made from rubbish. It extends the surface area of Beirut and the rubbish of the past gets mixed up with the rubbish of the present. A city that uses rubbish to devour the sea and grow, that’s Beirut,” said Nasim.
Three years was all it had taken to destroy his memories. Karim saw how his father had changed from a man into an old man. Nasri was sixty-four. He had known how to fine-tune his health to the rhythm of his desires, so where had this old age come from all of a sudden? He would eat fatty meats and then flush them out with two days of a milk diet. He would smoke a narghile and not inhale. He’d enjoyed sex in a disciplined way and without excess. He’d walked a full hour every day to burn off his fat and cholesterol.
Karim had no idea what had happened to the man. Was it the war? Fear of the unknown that life might bring? Nasri hadn’t been afraid of the war because he had no respect for it. He’d told Karim on the phone that he wasn’t afraid. “Come whenever you like, boy. You’re afraid of the barricades? Fuck the barricades and those that man them! They don’t scare anyone because they’re just kids playing around. Wait for me at the Museum Crossing and I’ll come and get you.”