Such a story wasn’t right for him and wasn’t like him. Karim had read something similar about a man who went back from France in search of his father’s killers that was written by Maroun Baghdadi and published in the al-Nahar Supplement after the young Lebanese director’s death. Maroun was a beautiful man and could seduce any woman; that was how Karim had seen him when he met him in Montpellier. He recalled that he’d watched his film Little Wars at a private showing at the university, after which the Lebanese student who’d talked to him about his ox-cheek feast in Paris had invited him to a restaurant in the Place de la Comédie. There the students hovered around the director, who told them of his project for a new film he was making about mutual forgiveness and said he was looking for a writer to help him with the screenplay. At the time, the idea of becoming the writer of the screenplay had occurred to Karim but he’d been afraid of looking ridiculous so gave it no more thought.
