“If Brother Eugène asks you about God, tell him we worship our own special god and have nothing to do with his god that died on the cross. Our god doesn’t die and he belongs to nobody but us. We love him and we hate him and we entreat him and when he doesn’t answer our prayers we ignore him. There is no sin in our religion and no regret. Our god makes mistakes like us and we don’t punish him because he doesn’t punish us, but we can do with him as we please.”
Nasim roared with laughter, took the black face from his father’s hands, kissed it, then spat on it. Then he turned to his brother and told him to kiss the god’s forehead. “What did you say his name is?”
“This is farcical,” said Karim, and got up to leave. His father grabbed him by the wrist and forced him to sit down.
Hubal-bubble was thenceforth a guest at the dining table, where Nasri and Nasim found him a source of material for jokes at the expense of the Jesuit priests and of Karim’s faith in the god whom the Jesuits worshipped at the school, and in whose name they compelled pupils to recite prayers each morning.
Then, all of a sudden, Hubal-bubble disappeared.
Nasri was certain Karim had thrown Hubal-bubble in the trash but he was wrong. Hubal-bubble was the gift Nasim had wanted to give Suzanne when he went to see her. He’d worked out a whole scenario of worship and even made up a prayer to be recited before they had sex. He imagined Suzanne taking off her clothes in the room and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. He saw her creamy white breasts bursting out and felt dizzy. But instead of jumping up and taking her in his arms he’d take Hubal-bubble in his hand and place him on her head. He would ask her to kneel, he’d kneel beside her himself, and he’d recite the prayer, then ask her to repeat after him the words, in which he spoke of the human body as incense for the gods.
But Suzanne had mocked him and thrown him out.
She’d left him standing on the sidewalk and spoken words that had made wounds in his heart that healed only when he married Hend.
And when Hend had shut the door to herself in his face, he’d felt the need for Hubal-bubble and regretted having thrown the wooden god onto the rubbish tip in Mutanabbi Street.
Nasri hadn’t asked his sons about the black mask. Hubal-bubble disappeared and his story along with him. Instead, the elderly man, now partially blind, had closed the pharmacy because he could no longer work and had overcome his loneliness with music. He’d discovered his god through the songs of Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab, and dispelled the gloom with the ecstasy of rhythm.
He was sitting in Nasim’s apartment trying to tell Hend about the comfort that music spreads and poetry fashions. He told her she must teach the children to play instruments. He said God was the rhythm of the world and that the world fashioned its rhythms through music. He recited lines of verse that Abd el-Wahhab had set to music and said that a single line of verse summed up all the prayers that mankind had composed to glorify their gods.
“Listen!” he said:
My lord, when my soul was in his hand,
Destroyed it, may his hand forever rest unharmed!
He stood up and asked for the tape recorder so he could play her the ballad called “The One You Have Made to Suffer.” His foot tripped on the edge of the carpet and he tipped forward, hands outstretched. Hend recoiled but the man could not stop his forward trajectory, and it looked as though he was going to fall on top of her. She tried to free herself from his hands by pushing them away and he fell to the floor.
No one had had any idea that Nasri was nearly blind. Nasim had assumed his father’s personal dirtiness was a result of old age. Only Salma knew but she told no one.
“Oh my God!” screamed Hend. “You mean I killed him without realizing what I was doing?”
“I’m the one who killed him,” said Salma, weeping.
“No one killed him,” said Nasim. “His oil ran out so he died. Weird you’d believe his stories after everything he did to you. God have mercy on his soul and ours, full stop. I don’t want to hear about this business again from anyone!”
8
KARIM HAD HAD to explain matters to Hend and make her understand why he’d turned his back on their four-year relationship. He’d said love had ended when he was left with no alternative but to emigrate to France. But he’d lied; or, let us say, he’d tried to tell her the truth without actually telling it, meaning he’d tried to be kind so as not to hurt her feelings.
Stories don’t end, they go to sleep, and what sleeps may wake at any moment, or never wake at all.
By adding new stories Beirut had awakened all stories. Karim would lose his new gamble because in fact he hadn’t gambled. He’d found himself on his way back to Beirut, so he’d gone back.
Karim had thought Hend’s story had ended when he met Jamal at the Baissour Camp in Tyre in 1976, but it hadn’t. It had taken another course and become a sort of safe haven for the young man who felt the civil war was shaking the foundations of everything meaningful to his existence. Jamal wasn’t a love story, she was an attempt to climb the ropes of the impossible, to catch the flashes of lightning that fell from her eyes as she looked upon things Karim was incapable of seeing.
He’d never dared tell anyone the truth of his feelings for Jamal. How could he, when he was so unsure of everything? Had he loved her? Or had he believed he’d loved her only when he read fragments from her diaries?
Reading Jamal’s diaries after her death, Karim discovered that words bear many meanings. As he gathered up his sorrows and tried to write the story of the Palestinian girl who had led a suicide mission on the coastal road between Haifa and Tel Aviv, he fashioned himself a love story out of a rubble of words in which Jamal entered his memory as phrases strewn over tattered pages.
Strange are the dead! They occupy the gaps in our imagination and become like ghosts playing with our memories. Karim told himself the reason was that moment of loss which he’d continued to relive since the phone call from his brother inviting him back to Beirut for a hospital construction project.
He’d agreed and beheld before him the dead.
He’d seen Nasri falling to the floor, his eyes opening onto the death that had petrified within them.
He’d seen Khaled, his eyes rubbed out by death, falling like a mighty boulder under the hail of bullets that ripped his body to pieces.
He’d seen Jamal’s eyes like two points of light on the ship of death. She’d left before him the fragments of words which he designated “diaries”; she had departed without turning to look back.
He’d seen and not seen; he’d felt unable to resist the lure of a city which had turned into a mysterious smell that emanated from time to time from his memory, making him dizzy.
He told Bernadette that the smell of memory made him dizzy.
Bernadette hadn’t been able to understand why the man had decided to return to Beirut for the sake of a project that would never be realized.
She’d told him his project was impossible: “The hospital will never be built and the girls and I will never go to Beirut.”
Bernadette said she should have realized from the time of their wedding night that he was a man who lived in the imagination and fashioned truths from his illusions.