Had his disappearance following the entry of the Syrian army into Tripoli been an announcement of his death? Does disappearance equal death?
Karim knew that more than seventeen thousand Lebanese had disappeared during the war as a result of abductions carried out by militias at the flying sectarian checkpoints, and he knew that, most of the time, to be abducted in Lebanon meant to die.
Still, Sinalcol’s disappearance did not necessarily mean that he was dead. He could have emigrated to America or Brazil and disappeared there, as many Lebanese war criminals who are now businessmen all over the world had done.
Karim didn’t know the man’s real name, but Sinalcol had become the phantom that exemplified the Lebanese Civil War in the country’s northern capital in the years 1975 and 1976; after the Syrian army’s invasion of the city, no one had seen him and no one knew what had happened to him. He was described as keeping his face covered with a red checkered scarf, moving through the darkness of the night and picking out a small number of commercial establishments on whose metal doors he would write the word “Sinalcol” in red chalk. The next night he’d go past the same shops and collect the protection money that their owners had put into the small cardboard boxes that he’d left the night before. Defaulters would find the doors to their shops dynamited.
Sinalcol never once stole. He’d blow off the metal door and go his way. The owner would arrive to find his goods untouched and realize he had better pay up at once … and so on and so forth.
Sinalcol became the talk of the city and stories were made up about him. Khaled tried to kill him but failed, and that was yet another story …
When Bernadette asked him to describe Sinalcol to her, he found himself at a loss for words. He could find no French word for shabbeeh, a term the common language of the people of Lebanon had come up with and which attributed to the phantoms of the civil war certain acts, such as robbery, extortion, and murder at checkpoints based on the religion specified on a person’s identity card; so he said something Bernadette couldn’t understand — he said he was a fantômiseur.
He’d wanted to make an adjective from the word fantôme and all he could come up with was a term that made things even more obscure. Never having seen him, he didn’t know how to describe the man. In response to her insistence, however, he’d begun describing him, only to discover that he was describing his brother.
“Amazing! Did Sinalcol really look so much like you?” she asked.
It was Danny’s fault. The tall blond man, who had studied philosophy in Paris and returned to Lebanon to make the revolution he’d tasted on the streets of the Quartier Latin, had been his window onto the world of the civil war.
Karim had cared nothing about the civil war. He was the opposite of his brother. How could one care about a war among religious sects when one felt no allegiance to any sect or religion?
He’d told Nasri he hated this country for committing suicide every hundred years and felt no allegiance to it. The man nodded in agreement but said war wouldn’t break out again. “A bit of faking around like in 1958 and then the Americans will come and sort it out.”
After the Americans had come and gone and not sorted it out, Nasri had uttered his famous aphorism: “This war has come to drag all wars into the mud. After the Lebanese war there won’t be any respectable wars anywhere.”
Karim found he’d become a part of the war involuntarily, even though he never actually fought. He claimed to have taken part in the fighting but he hadn’t. His war had been limited to two training courses, the first at the Nahr el-Bared Camp close to Tripoli, where he’d found himself involved, without realizing it, in clashes that broke out between the Lebanese army and the Fedayeen, and the second in a village near Tyre where he met Jamal. In both instances Danny had been behind it.
Danny should have died, the way heroes are supposed to, but he stayed alive and returned to his job teaching philosophy at the French Lycée in Beirut, and after his divorce he disappeared from the scene.
Why had Karim’s life been turned upside down when he met Danny at the American University in Beirut?
In Beirut, Karim phoned Danny and they went together to the Sporting Club restaurant, where they drank arak and ate fried fish. Danny seemed to have aged. He walked with a limp as a result of an injury to a spinal disc that had forced him to undergo two unsuccessful operations, and now he walked bent to the right.
Karim could sum up the Lebanese Civil War in two names: Sinalcol and Khaled Nabulsi. He had no idea exactly how the fates had led him to Tripoli, but the proximate cause was Danny, the tall philosophy teacher who was the leader of a Fatah student cell.
Danny deserved a novel to himself. He remained lodged in Karim’s imagination as a character of fantasy. He told Bernadette that people who become a part of ourselves lose their reality and become like the heroes of novels, of whom we remember only the shining image.
Had Karim returned to Lebanon to put a red rose on Khaled’s grave or to search for Sinalcol, as he claimed? Or had he concocted the story to justify a return that had no cause other than a mysterious nostalgia for a past which Karim knew in his depths had gone, and which would never come back?
Karim had phoned Danny because he was the last friend he had left in Beirut. He wanted to ask him about Khaled and Radwan and the rest of their friends.
Karim had no idea why he’d fashioned a story for himself when there was no story to fashion. His relationship to the war didn’t call for any such implacable sense of belonging. But when he found himself alone in France he’d made a mirror of the war to superimpose upon the mirror of the story of his family, which invoked in him nothing but feelings of loneliness and humiliation.
Karim had smiled on seeing the panic that traced itself on Bernadette’s face as he described to her the business of “the mirror of war.”
She said she could no longer understand why he’d placed that thick wall between himself and his father and brother. She said that at first she’d believed it had to do with the trauma of war, and she hadn’t asked for details because she respected his sorrow and his silence.
He’d only told her of his mother and her eyes, opened onto death, a few fragments about his confusing relationship with his twin brother, and his story with the Greek prostitute who’d taught him the meaning of sex. He’d said she should read him as a blank page bearing a few nearly meaningless scrawls, and that he was starting his life anew, as though he hadn’t had one before meeting her.
But that day he came to her, stifling his cough, to tell her he was going to Beirut not just to build a hospital but because he wanted to see what had happened to the mirror of the Lebanese war that he had superimposed upon the mirror of his own life.
He’d been unable to explain to his wife the meaning of the expression, which seemed just a hollow metaphor, like those repeated by the heroes who dominate the screen in French films about the Second World War.
Karim was convinced that his metaphor was as hollow as his life, for he was sure of nothing. His memory presented itself in the form of black spots out of which emerged the phantom of a man who looked like him and in whom truth was mixed up with its look-alikes, so that he resembled a man stumbling over his own shadow.
After two months’ residence in Beirut, though, he’d decided to reopen his old accounts and recover the shadows of that past. It was Muna and her husband, Ahmad Dakiz, who led him back to the ledgers of his time in Tripoli, where, in the middle of the crusader castle of Saint-Gilles, all the ghosts of the past had emerged, and Danny had reappeared.