“That’s not true,” he’d said.
“True or not, what matters is that that’s how I feel.”
He’d asked the waiter for the bill and left.
Karim had left because he’d had to leave: after Khaled’s death, the Jamal incident, and Danny’s terrible breakdown, the man had been incapable of regaining control of his life. His life had seemed like a rubble of events and memories that it was beyond him by then to reorganize.
“Life is context,” he’d said to Bernadette as he tried to convince her of the merits of the project in Beirut. His French wife had looked at him with her blue eyes and said she didn’t know what he meant. What context did Karim have in mind? Hadn’t he told her in the first days after they met that he wanted to begin again from scratch, that he’d left his life among the bombs that had made gaps in his soul and his memory behind precisely so that he could begin a new one? He’d told her he would never look back because what lay behind was a darkness where the ghosts of the dead held sway. Even the living whom he’d left behind in Beirut now seemed like ghosts. He’d told her he was running from the blackness to the blue of her radiant eyes, that he had become a new man.
When drinking French wine and carried on the clouds of inebriation into his memories, all he’d talk about was Sinalcol. Sinalcol, whom Karim had never once met and whose real name he didn’t even know, was the story behind which Karim had hidden.
“Why do you talk to me about no one but Sinalcol?” she asked him.
“Because he’s my spiritual twin and my Lebanese mirror. Sinalcol’s is the only story that’s stayed with me from there, maybe because it isn’t like other stories. Usually we tell stories we know but with him I know nothing. All I know is a few rumors that no one can confirm and yet I feel him here, before the glass of wine and before your blue eyes.”
When Karim recalled his obsession with Sinalcol in Montpellier and compared it with his aversion and indifference to him here in Beirut, he couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Perhaps it was because his extreme drunkenness in the bar the day he met Bernadette for the first time had made him claim his name was Sinalcol and the name had stuck to him without his meaning it to. In Beirut he hadn’t thought of Sinalcol until Bernadette had mentioned him. He was talking to her on the phone and telling her about the hospital project and his proposal that he split his time in two — half in Beirut and the other half in Montpellier, which would allow him to take a break from his exhausting job in France and devote himself to his hobby of reading novels — when she asked him for news of Sinalcol.
“Have you found out anything about Sinalcol?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t been to Tripoli yet.”
“But you told me the first thing you were going to do was visit Tripoli.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not coming back to France without a photo of Sinalcol, but I’m really busy now.”
Karim hadn’t been telling the truth, for he was planning to go to Tripoli to meet Radwan. Even Khaled Nabulsi, whose grave he was never to find, he’d decided to forget about. But throughout his Beirut stay he was gripped by a feeling of responsibility toward Hayat, Khaled’s wife, his aloofness and hesitance toward whom, when she visited him at his home seeking help after Khaled’s assassination, he’d never been able to justify to himself. He hadn’t known how to get rid of her. The fear had traced itself on his jaw, which had started to tremble, and the woman had understood and left without waiting for an answer.
The other woman, the one whom Hend had smelled on him, was none other than Jamal, though she wasn’t. Or she was. He didn’t know and didn’t discover why until he read her diaries.
After the killing of Jamal on March 11, 1978, a poster had appeared showing her with a scarf around her neck, crouching with a Kalashnikov. She was surrounded by photos of the other Deir Yassin Group martyrs. Underneath it said, “Leader of Operation Kamal Adwan.” He’d understood then why the girl had looked at him in surprise when he’d met her at the Café Jandoul.
Jamal hadn’t asked him, “What do you want with me?” She’d let him flirt with her while apparently not listening to what he was saying. In her eyes he’d seen an abyss of white emptiness. When he recalled her eyes all he could see was a white vastness, as though she didn’t see him, or saw nothing, as though she was in some other world.
He’d met her at a military training camp in Baissour in 1976. Danny had taken him there after telling him that the great battle was about to begin and every member of the organization had to take intensive training courses: everyone was expecting an incursion by the Syrian army to prevent the Lebanese Left and the Palestinian resistance from deciding the struggle for power in Lebanon.
Karim hadn’t understood what all that meant or how it would be possible to stop the Syrian army, which had occupied the heights of Sannine and decided the battle before it began. But he went, and there he met the martyrs. Later, dozens of young people on the training course were killed at the Battle of Bhamdoun but Karim didn’t go to Bhamdoun with the others. They attached him to the Red Crescent station at Baissour, as though he were a doctor, which was how he escaped death. Jamal had been to Bhamdoun and not died. She disappeared from his life, and when he asked about her Danny told him she’d left the Student Brigade when the brigade leader had told her to leave the camp because she was the only girl among dozens of male fighters. Danny said Jamal had joined one of the groups attached to the Western Sector, meaning the Occupied Lands sector, which was under the command of Khalil el-Wazir — Abu Jihad — and he knew nothing more about her.
Two years later, in early March 1978, Karim met her by chance at the clinic in Burj el-Barajneh Camp and invited her to have coffee at the Modeca Café on Hamra Street. She agreed but asked if they could change the place: she said she preferred the Café Jandoul on the Corniche at Mazraa because it was close to her parents’ home.
At Baissour, Jamal had been a different girl, brown-skinned with large honey-colored eyes, a delicate nose, full lips, short black hair, and a scarf tied around her neck. During the evenings at Baissour, which lasted for two weeks, Karim would make a point of sitting next to her and talking to her. He had no idea where he’d found the words after the boring lectures on the People’s War, the theories of General Giap — hero of Dien Bien Phu — and the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung on “the principal contradiction and the secondary contradictions.” When the political discussions finished he’d find himself sitting next to her, talking about everything and nothing. Nothing that was said then had stuck on memory’s tape, but the curve of the girl’s shoulders, her dissatisfaction with everything, and her insistence on talking constantly about the martyrs had stirred in his soul waves of desire that did not dare show themselves. He contented himself with short walks with her in the forest, where their talk began to take on the form of love. She told him stories about her father, who had fled on foot from Jaffa to Lebanon under the bombardment to which the city had been subjected.
Karim left the training camp and those who died at Bhamdoun died, but the Palestinian girl’s shining eyes continued to keep him company, though he had no idea what to do with the mysterious emotion he felt.
At the Café Jandoul he told her he loved her. Jamal’s look, however, remained filled with white spaces. She sipped a little from her coffee cup and asked him if he was ready to die for the woman he loved.
“If I love her, I have to live for her sake.”
She smiled, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke into the air before asking him again.