Danny didn’t know literary Arabic well but insisted on speaking it, employing classical turns of phrase to assert the depth of his attachment to his country. He’d been born in Abidjan to a family that had migrated from the village of Beit Shabab in Mount Lebanon. His father had worked as a cloth merchant there and died, poor and sick, of fever. Danny had spoken of his father and mother only once, when he recounted how he’d returned with his two sisters from Paris, where they were students, to attend their father’s funeral. There they discovered that their mother had decided to return to Lebanon and was asking Danny to cut short his education in order to dispose of his father’s possessions. Danny had interrupted his study of philosophy, only to discover that his father had been penniless and that he would have to flee his creditors or find himself in prison.
“Lebanese capitalism is a decadent phenomenon and the living proof is my father. In Africa, if you don’t work in smuggling and fraud, you die a pauper. The rich in Africa are naught but a handful of thieves, the lot of them! Verily, they are like the comprador class in Lebanon.”
This was the first time Karim had heard the word comprador. He was too embarrassed to ask what it meant and look stupid, and in the end he got used to using it without knowing what it meant, after which he understood, or imagined he did. It ceased to matter: once in France, he swallowed dozens of words whose meanings he imagined he understood because he used them in his daily life.
Danny never spoke of his mother, so Karim sketched a scenario in his own mind according to which the woman had returned to Beit Shabab to live in her house there. When he asked Danny about the political situation in the village, though, the tall man looked at him in surprise; he said he’d only visited the place once and didn’t care for the countryside.
Danny had at one time disappeared for a whole week without anyone knowing where he was, and when he reappeared there was something broken about his eyes, which his wife, Sahar, interpreted to Karim as being due to depression: his mother had died alone in an old persons’ home, where she had suffered from dementia.
Danny seemed to Karim more like the hero of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger than the revolutionary leader he was trying to be.
He was, though, a man of extraordinary charisma. Was the charisma a consequence of his height, his fair hair, and his eyes, which were always red as a result of his frequent late nights? Or of the long white scarf he used to wrap around his neck, winter and summer? Or of his detailed knowledge of the texts of Marx and Lenin? Or of his being the first Lebanese intellectual to join the Fedayeen and fight in southern Lebanon? Or of his beautiful wife, Sahar, who worked as an architect with the Alami Company in Beirut, supported the household and their only daughter, and asked nothing of Danny except that he never stop loving her?
Karim fell under the man’s spell when he attended the first political meeting at Danny’s apartment in Tall el-Khayyat. In response to Danny’s call for the foundation of a Marxist organization within the Fatah movement he could think of nothing to say but “Yes.” He was, however, hesitant when it came to taking part in military activities.
He said he’d never killed a sparrow so how could he kill a human being?
He said he agreed that violence was the way of the revolution but he was a doctor and the revolution needed his knowledge, not his blood.
“You’re just talking so you don’t have to talk,” said Danny, and he persuaded Karim to join a weeklong military training course at the Nahr el-Bared Camp close to Tripoli. It was there that Karim’s life began to shape itself into elusive shadows.
This way of putting it isn’t quite accurate, because the idea of shadows occurred to Karim only after his return to Beirut, when the darkness of the city blended with the darkness of his soul on the last night of waiting. At that moment he discovered that all that remained of him, and to him, was a collection of obscure images derived from a life that traced itself like black shadows on the demolished walls of the city.
When Hend asked him why he’d come back to Beirut he said he had no idea.
“Do you believe this story about the hospital?”
He answered that the architect had finished working on the walls and things were moving along fast.
“But your brother’s changed a lot. It’s as though you know nothing, or you know and don’t want to know.”
He said he’d come back because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with his life, and that back there things seemed to have lost all taste and meaning.
“You mean you’ve come looking for meaning in a city where everything’s meaningless?”
She told him that the meaning of things was within, and she felt that what lay within her was coming apart. “You didn’t have to come. What do you want with us and our tangled stories? Go back to your house and your wife and daughters! There’s nothing here. Even the memories no longer exist. People here grind their memories underfoot.”
Had he phoned Danny so that he could grind his memories underfoot?
When he called him, Danny’s voice had sounded unsure, as though he didn’t recognize him. Then the voice had regained its composure, suggesting lunch at the Sporting Club swimming pool.
They’d drunk arak but the words had failed to take shape and had scattered in scraps over the table. Danny had spoken at length about his illnesses and the two difficult surgical procedures he’d had performed on his spine. When Karim asked him about Sahar he was overwhelmed with gloom and said he knew nothing about her except that she was living in Brussels.
“And your daughter, Suha?”
“Suha got married,” he said, “and is living in Montreal.”
“Who’s the groom?”
He lifted his hand in a way that indicated he neither knew nor cared.
“Did she marry a Lebanese?” asked Karim.
“No,” replied Danny without a further word.
Silence and sea and waves. The words melted and vanished. Danny was like a sheet of copper. The daily swim that the doctor had imposed on him had had its effect on his face and skin color. All that was left of him was his fair hair, some of which had fallen out, outlining a sort of bald patch covered with tufts, and his front teeth, stained black with French tobacco; a man who had decided to bury his memories and live without a memory.
He asked him about the boys and Danny said he didn’t see any of them.
He asked him about Radwan.
He asked and he asked but Danny’s silence rose like a thick pall that could be dispelled only by the chewing of food and the drinking of arak.
When he asked him about Sinalcol, Danny burst out laughing. “Aren’t you Sinalcol? Have you forgotten what the boys used to call you? Comrade Doctor Sinalcol! And behind your back they’d say, ‘Look at those intellectuals! They come just so they can play the Sinalcol over us!’ ”
“That’s something you came up with,” said Karim. “You’re the one that took to calling me Sinalcol in front of the boys and so the name stuck and all because I refused your order to kill the guy.”
“Now you’re Sinalcol again, like in the old days,” said Danny.
Karim hated this name they’d stuck on him, erasing the political name he had chosen for himself. “I’m Salem!” he used to say. “Please, brothers! No one is to call me Sinalcol!”
The name Sinalcol had stuck to Karim against his will. He’d done everything in his power to expunge it but names are like eye colors: they’re difficult to change. During his first years in Montpellier he was much disturbed by a recurrent dream in which he saw himself walking down a long deserted street, a mask covering his face, then standing in front of a shop door and writing the name Sinalcol on it in chalk and running away, as though being chased.