He was astonished that she could utter the word “savages” and look him in the eye, as though accusing him of killing a person who had only become French against his will and because of his death. He tried to tell her the story but discovered he couldn’t, not because he was obliged to speak French with his wife but because there were no words that could explain the tragedy.
Karim only met Jean-Pierre on that one occasion when he’d visited him to ask for Abu Rabia’s papers, but he got to know the man after his death because of the French media interest in him. Then he came across a piece Jean-Pierre had written on the Islamist movements: it was the piece that was the true reason for his death, sick with hepatitis, in an underground cell in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
This man, who had decided to abandon his French identity and who lived in Damascus, who had married a Syrian woman with whom he had had three children, and who had then moved to Beirut to work for CERMOC, had found himself simultaneously a prisoner and a victim of the ideas he had embraced.
Karim told his wife, who seemed annoyed by the conversation and listened as though forced to, that the tragedy of Jean-Pierre was a part of the tragedy of Beirut, and he wasn’t sure it was the Islamists who’d killed him. In those days, after the Israeli occupation had smashed Beirut and ripped it to pieces, darkness had wrapped the city in silence and fear. That was when Islamist groups started popping up like mushrooms and everyone got mixed up with everyone else — leftists became Islamists, leftists collapsed, Islamists moved from one place to another, and an entire people lost hope as it watched the harvest of its dreams turn into nightmare. That was when Jean-Pierre was seized at a flying checkpoint set up on the Beirut airport road and kidnapping groups passed him on from one to the other, until he ended up in the hands of one of the security organizations.
Karim said he didn’t know who had killed Jean-Pierre or left him to die in that cruel way, writhing with sickness and despair. But he had read the story of his visit to his home in Ras el-Nabaa, as recounted by his Syrian wife, who had come with her children to live in Paris after despairing of any possibility of his release.
He told Bernadette that the words had been like needles stabbing at his eyes. He said his tears hadn’t fallen out of pity or empathy but from the pain in his eyes. He said what he couldn’t understand was why they’d allowed him that one visit to his home.
In an interview with the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur his wife said that, about two months after her husband had been kidnapped, she’d heard a gentle knocking on the door, followed by the turning of the key in the lock. It was about eleven at night, the city was swimming in a gelatinous darkness, and the July heat stuck to her body. “I felt afraid. I got out of bed half naked and instead of running to see where the sound was coming from, I ran to the children’s room, switched on a flashlight, and stood by the door of the room to protect them with my body. Then suddenly I knew it was him. I smelled the smell of his sweat and heard his labored breathing. I yelled, ‘Jean-Pierre!’ and heard his voice, which sounded somewhat hoarse. He told me to lower my voice or I’d wake the children. I went to the living room and saw him. He was standing next to this tall man, who smiled at me. I ran toward him and hugged him but instead of taking me in his arms he pushed me back a little. I couldn’t understand what the strange man was doing with my husband who had returned after being away for two long months.
“Jean-Pierre told me in a whisper that he’d come home to get Ibn Khaldoun’s Introduction and go back.
“ ‘Go back? Where?’
“ ‘I’m going back there.’
“I said, ‘I don’t understand.’ The man accompanying him explained that they’d allowed Jean-Pierre a quick visit to his home to get some books before taking him back.
“ ‘Back where?’ she asked.
“The man smiled and told me not to worry and to stop making such a fuss about my husband’s kidnapping.
“ ‘Your husband is in friendly hands,’ he said, ‘and soon he’ll be home, fit as a fiddle, don’t you worry, madam.’
“ ‘And why can’t he be at home now?’
“I took hold of Jean-Pierre and shook him. That was when I noticed how thin he was and saw the yellow spread over his face.
“He was bent over the books, looking for Ibn Khaldoun in the dark. It was then that I realized I hadn’t turned on the gas lamp, which had come to substitute for the city’s missing electricity. I lit the lamp and the room filled with light. Jean-Pierre closed his eyes, as though he had become used to darkness. I heard him ask the other man to help because he couldn’t find the book. That was how I found out that the other man’s name was Abbas.
“Abbas bent down, picked out the book, and gave it to my husband.
“ ‘Please turn the light off, madam,’ Abbas said in a low voice.
“And instead of screaming to bring a crowd and save my husband from the claws of that Abbas, it was like I’d been hypnotized. In his voice I felt an irresistible power, and I turned off the light and saw my husband standing like a ghost waiting for a signal from the strange man.
“I went toward him to embrace him and felt he was far away, as though he wasn’t my husband, as though he’d become a small shadow of that other man, who took the copy of Ibn Khaldoun’s Introduction in his hand and left, my husband in his wake. He opened the door and they vanished into the darkness of the stairway.
“What puzzles me is why my husband didn’t turn round to say goodbye to me. Why didn’t he go to see his sleeping children? Why did they make him go back? What kind of wild dogs were they to let him come back to his home for just a few minutes? And why Ibn Khaldoun? What use to him would Ibn Khaldoun be in the dark cell they’d thrown him into?
“I believe he caught hepatitis after he visited us. I’m sure of it. The darkness makes things look yellow. No, he wasn’t really yellow. I think of him that way now because after his death I found out that he’d caught hepatitis and suffered a lot of pain and they’d done nothing to save him. They left him to die like a dog because he believed in the same things they did. I told him not to write about the Islamist tendencies but he was convinced they were the future. It’s got nothing to do with us. He was French and I’m Greek Orthodox from Damascus, and we’re secularists.”
She said she thought her husband had been killed as part of a complex game among intelligence services. “I’m not certain it was the Islamists who killed him. Sure, they were the instrument that killed him but it was really the traditional stupidity of French Intelligence in their game with Iranian or Syrian Intelligence.”
There in Beirut, after telling Muna about the famous text that had been transformed into the theoretical manual of Khaled Nabulsi’s group, which had decided to maintain its political action because it had no choice — there Karim had tried to remember where he had hidden those papers of Abu Rabia’s which he hadn’t given Jean-Pierre. It was strange how his memory of the papers had been erased and only come to mind again when he was getting ready to go back to Beirut. He’d decided that the first thing he’d do would be visit Khaled’s grave and that of Hayat and her daughter, Nabila, to apologize to them, but he’d frittered away his time in Beirut among family memories, frivolous love affairs, and a hospital construction project. And all he’d seen of the hospital project had been optical illusions on the computer of an architect whose only interest was in demolishing buildings and pulling them up by their roots.