No one had provided protection for the funeral. George had no need of it, for those days were different from these, as he would later tell Khaled, who used to talk to him about Islam and the necessity of joining the fundamentalist tendency as it was the future, now that the defeat and collapse of the Left had become an established fact. The day Khaled said that, Karim had asked him, “What shall we do then with George and the cross we put up at his mother’s request in the middle of an Islamic cemetery?” and Khaled had hung his head and found nothing to say.
If Karim had spoken while reading Jamal’s memoirs, he would have said he’d never cried and that Jamal had disfigured his image. The lover commits suicide only if the beloved dies; perhaps that was why Jamal had talked of their dying together.
He’d gone on reading, only to discover that he wasn’t the hero of the story. Jamal spoke of another youth, giving his initials as “N. A.” Karim couldn’t remember if he’d noticed those letters when he’d read the text the first time, in Beirut. N. A. had trained with the suicide group, injured his foot, and gone into the hospital three weeks before the operation, thus being rendered unfit to go through with the mission. He’d visited her at home, limping, and begged her not to go to her death. When she refused he’d threatened to tell her mother the facts of the suicide operation but had been too much of a coward to do so.
Now, in France, these lines jumped out and struck him in the eye. Had the story of his love for Jamal been nothing but an illusion? Had he invented the tale of Jamal to make it easier for him to abandon Hend? And why had he abandoned Hend?
True, she’d said she couldn’t leave her mother. He could have gone abroad to finish his studies, then returned and married her, but he’d decided not to return and to run away from Salma and his father, and from Danny’s descent into the abyss following the death of Khaled and the phantom of death that Khaled had seen in the eyes of the Syrian general. He had, therefore, concocted for himself a fictitious love story.
Jamal was alone in the Cemetery of the Numbers there, somewhere in Galilee, and he was sitting in his apartment in Montpellier chewing the cud of his memories. He’d come to France to erase his memories and manufacture new ones in a new country and with a new woman who had nothing to do with his past.
He remembered saying, “I’ve found her,” when he awoke the next morning with Bernadette beside him in bed and discovered she was a nurse. A white-skinned woman, her skin so clear that it allowed a whiteness that dwelled deeper down to show through — as though the whiteness weren’t a color but an incandescence that shone through from the depths and rose through her body, illuminating it, before continuing in an infinite outpouring.
During one of his drinking bouts, while listening to the songs of Édith Piaf, a line of pre-Islamic poetry had come to him. He’d tried to ignore it and travel with the voice of the French singer but could not. He’d declaimed the verse, then sung it in a low voice, the way his teacher — the one whom the students called “the Lord of Literature” — had done in the baccalaureate class, and finally the poetry had exploded on his tongue and he’d felt the voice of Muallem Butrus Bustani emerging from his throat, quivering with the rhythm.
Bernadette turned down the volume of the tape recorder and asked him what he was saying. Instead of answering her he repeated the line again, and again the voice of the Lord of Literature emerged from his throat.
He tried to translate the line for her but couldn’t. He said it was attributed to a pre-Islamic poet who’d lived in the Arab desert, singing the praises of the beauty of a white-skinned woman by saying that her whiteness was a skin to her skin. She asked him where the Arab poet had seen a white-skinned woman. He explained to her that white skin was widespread in the Arabian Peninsula.
“But you told me the opposite,” she said.
He tried to say that what he was interested in at that moment was her whiteness and her beauty.
When Karim had woken up after his night of drunkenness and found Bernadette in his bed, he’d been struck by “the shock of beauty,” as he would later refer to the instant at which he’d become immersed in her eyes. She recounted to him how she’d come across him beneath the breasts of that whore, and how they’d walked aimlessly through the streets of Montpellier; when she’d told him she was tired and had to go home he’d put his arm around her neck and refused to let go.
“Then I discovered you were drunk and I couldn’t leave you alone, so I decided to walk you to your apartment, and there you tricked me and took me to bed, and in the morning you asked me my name and what I did and when I said I was a nurse you said you loved me, and I couldn’t help laughing.”
“Me?”
She said his cough was nervous. “I’m sure you don’t cough or yawn at the hospital but the moment you reach the apartment and have to talk to me or to the girls you start coughing. I don’t know you anymore and I don’t know what made me agree to resign from the hospital so I could stay at home and devote myself to looking after the children; I wasted my life. The girls are at school and you’re at work and I’m waiting. You turned me into an Oriental woman and now you want to leave me and go to Beirut? We’re not going to ruin our lives to go with you just because we’re supposed to put up with the sudden whims of the Arab beast sleeping in your depths. You hid the beast from me and from yourself but today it’s woken up to take revenge on me and on you and on all of us.”
He didn’t tell her that a person cannot live without his mirrors. He’d exchanged Nasim, Hend, Jamal, Danny, and Malak for French mirrors but had come to feel he could no longer see himself in his new environment, as though Karim had evaporated and become shapeless. All he wanted to do was recover his image before deciding what he should do with the years that remained to him.
Karim was close to forty when he decided to agree to his brother’s proposal. He’d told Nasim on the phone that he wasn’t promising anything: “Let me see and then I’ll decide.” The strange thing was that the conversation between the two brothers had sounded as though it was taking place between two businessmen, without emotion or yearning or jokes — just dry words devoid of feeling, as though the twins were using words to cover words. The only emotional words spoken were uttered by Nasim: “Come now and we’ll see. We’ll soon be forty and life is passing us by without our noticing.”
The idea struck him with terror. The image occurred to him of Nasri gripping his glass of wine with trembling hand, bringing it close to his lips, and saying life was like a dream; then his eyes would fill with tears before he burst out laughing. “It’s a lie. Life’s a lie and the only certain truth is that we’re all going to die.”
“What are you saying, Father? You’re still a young man,” Nasim would say.
Now Karim was discovering that the only truth was one’s later years. At forty a person discovers that what’s passed hasn’t passed; it’s more as though it’s slipped through one’s fingers, with what lies behind having become greater than what lies ahead.
The Lord of Literature was an eccentric teacher. Age had inscribed its wrinkles on his face, his eyes had grown smaller and his nose larger, and he’d become thin as a piece of string. He would shake with ecstasy as he recited the lines of al-Mutanabbi in which the poet mourns the passing of the years: