Why then had Karim returned to Beirut? He hadn’t returned to revoke his history and erase it, nor to resume where he’d left off. Bernadette was right: the man had returned because, as they say in detective novels, a criminal always returns to the scene of his crime.
When Hend told him how his father had died he was afflicted by a headache that stayed with him throughout his remaining days in Beirut and that later he’d refer to as “the criminal’s headache.” He thought that, of all directors, only Maroun Baghdadi could make a film with that title: it would tell how the criminal returns to the scene of his crime because he has a killing headache that starts at the eyes and spreads till it comes to settle in the center of the brain. Karim, though, had had nothing to do with his father’s murder. He’d wanted to tell his brother that it was he, Nasim, who was responsible: had it not been for his hatred of his father the crime would never have taken place. But then he remembered no one had suggested that Nasri’s death was a crime. The film he might propose to Maroun Baghdadi would have to be about another crime, one called “the Killing of Hayat and Her Daughter Following the Assassination of Khaled Nabulsi.” At this point the headache would acquire its moral correlative and Karim would find himself facing a court of justice.
Karim hadn’t returned to look for justice. The issue of justice had assailed him only once he was in Beirut, where it took the form of a throbbing pain in his head, and all because of Hend and her ambiguous tale of his father’s end. He decided to check the details of the story with Salma, but where was he to find the courage to confront a woman who’d told him that the war would never end? On his first night in Beirut, while eating the kibbeh nayyeh that Salma had prepared, the black-clad woman had looked closely at him and asked about his situation in France, about his wife and daughters. Before he could answer she said everyone received their apportioned lot in life, “and more has fallen to our lot, praise God, than we deserve. Hate nothing — it may be better for you.”
Nasim looked at her with furious eyes to make her shut up.
“I’m talking about the war, son. Who would have thought the war would go on so long? It’s amazing — we’ll be finished before the war is, as though it came out of our insides. Plus, who would have thought that a person could live through war and have children and make money. Praise God! Hate nothing — it may be better for you!”
With these words Salma closed the door, on the first night of his return, to any possibility of discussion.
When Salma had heard the news of Karim’s return she was terrified. She told her daughter it was her duty to convince her husband that the hospital project was a mistake from the outset. “It’s all wrong from beginning to end, my girl. Thank God your husband has repented and become domesticated and God-fearing. But it still won’t work out right. It’s bound to lead to ruin. The project has to stop or your life and your family’s will be destroyed.”
Salma was convinced that the idea of opening a branch for treating drug addicts had been the doctor’s. She saw in the project as a whole an attempt by Karim to exploit his brother’s turning over of a new leaf: he thought he could return to Beirut and luxuriate in the wealth his brother had collected through the sweat of his brow and get a free ride.
“I’m sure that monkey of a doctor came up with the idea so he could get a free ride out of his brother the way he’s done all his life. Anyway what’s it all about? Tell your husband that that’s not how you turn over a new leaf. First they sell poisons and drugs to make money and then they treat the addicts, and that way they make even more money. His brother must have exploited his desire to repent and sweet-talked him with some story about treating addicts. What does that monkey, who makes out he’s such a saint and so humane, know about treating addicts? He’s a doctor for syphilis and skin and venereal diseases! What’s he got to do with all that?”
He’d gone to Salma because he knew she was the only person who understood the story from every angle. But what does it mean for us to know exactly what happened, how Nasri died or was killed?
Nasri had died before he died. He’d died the day the civil war started, when he turned into a ghost lost in the foggy maze of his memory. Suddenly his world had collapsed and he hadn’t been able to salvage anything from it. He hadn’t been able to understand where his sons and their comrades got their passion for war and destruction. Nasri belonged to another world. His memory didn’t go back before the Second World War, when people in Beirut heard of the woes of war but paid none of its costs. Even the Palestine Catastrophe of 1948 had seemed to him more like a movie; he’d been convinced that the early Hebrew state would be no more than a place of refuge for the Jewish minorities and that it was destined to blend into the region. War never crossed his mind. He believed it was the duty of the inhabitants of this country of theirs to take everything in their stride. True, he remembered some of his father’s stories about the terrible famine that had struck Lebanon and wiped out a third of its population during World War I. However, he’d never troubled himself to think about the destiny of this small nation which had been put together from the rubble of an empire — the Ottoman Empire — which had collapsed and of a kingdom — the Arab Kingdom founded by Feisal I in Damascus — which had been intended to gather together all the parts of “the Land of Shem,” namely Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, but which had existed only as a mirage. He was certain what had happened and would happen were no concern of the Lebanese, that life was more powerful than politics and conflict. He’d ended up, though, a stranger in a land he didn’t know, as though the sleeping devils of war had suddenly awoken, emerging from he knew not where, and carried off his sons and most of that accursed generation; as though the calm that Lebanon had known for a hundred years, since the end of its first civil war in the nineteenth century, had been just a break or a truce.
If Nasri had spoken he would have said that his blindness was a part of his decision to not see, for when you don’t understand you don’t see even when you do, and Nasri didn’t understand. He was sure his sons were in the wrong but didn’t know what the right was. He’d become like Jeha in the story he used to tell his sons when they were little, to prove to them there was no justice in this world. He’d shout and argue; then, when asked for his opinion and how to save Lebanon from its wars, he’d fall silent because he didn’t have the answers.
But this is not an accurate picture of Nasri after the outbreak of the war. Nasim’s memory had refashioned the image starting from the end, as memory usually does when it reduces persons and events to a summary and fossilizes them within a closed moment. The problem with memory is that it cannot stand inconsistencies, so it draws an immutable picture of things. Thus, in Nasim’s memory, the image of Nasri was transformed after his tragic death from that of a monster into that of a saint. It wasn’t true that Nasri died the instant war broke out, or that his appetite for life had suddenly disappeared and he’d lost his way in the milky whiteness that traced itself over his eyes. Nasim had decided he would remember of his father only the final image of him that Salma had drawn as he lay on his deathbed, as though a new man had been born in his memory after the death of the old. Who can say if Salma was telling the truth? Or, supposing Salma reported accurately what Nasri had told her, what reason is there to believe a man who had lied to everyone throughout his life?