Broken Mirrors (2 page)

Then, without warning, Muna had entered his life. He’d met her and her husband, the architect Ahmad Dakiz, at his brother, Nasim’s, apartment, where he’d seen the plans for the hospital for the first time, heard of the plans for the reconstruction of Beirut, and listened to a fantastical story about the Frankish origins of the family from Tripoli to which the architect belonged. He’d told Muna she’d bewitched him and she burst into laughter, saying she didn’t want to hear words of love because they were all the same, and they bored her. Karim didn’t stop talking of love with Muna even though he knew he was in love with Ghazala – as though he were using Muna to cure himself of Ghazala, and Ghazala’s clamor to cure himself of Hend’s silence.

Karim wasn’t able to say how this triangular relationship had taken shape in the midst of the dust of Beirut, or how his heart had been able to bear
that emotional maelstrom in the midst of the storms of the renewed civil war. But now he was sitting on his own with no one to keep him company but his glass of whiskey, waiting for a phone call that would never come.

Why had he come back to Beirut? He could admit now that he’d been hit by homesickness the moment his brother had called him about the hospital project. How, though, had he been able to mend, in an instant, the thing in his heart that had been severed ten years earlier? Bernadette was astounded as she listened to him. “Do you think the children and I are going to go and live in the hell of Lebanon? Are you out of your mind? Or do you want to leave us and marry a Lebanese woman so you can treat her like a slave and have a boy by her? For me,
c’est fini
. No more children. My body’s gone slack. Look at the stretch marks on my belly. And you, like all Oriental men, feel jealous because your brother has fathered three boys and you are still waiting for your crown prince.”

Bernadette was wrong. Karim hadn’t returned to Lebanon with any particular purpose in mind. He’d gone because his homesickness for Beirut had left him incapable of thought, of taking the rational decision his wife was expecting.

“What do you mean, ‘a rational decision’?” he’d asked her. “There’s no such thing as a rational decision where one’s soul is involved.” He’d told her that his soul hurt and that there was no pain worse than that of the soul, but she said she didn’t understand him anymore and wept.

He’d told Bernadette once that he couldn’t stand tears. He said her tears reminded him of his mother, who’d died when he was five. He said the only thing he could remember about his mother was the tears that fell from her eyes and spread over her small white face, and that when they’d taken him and his brother from the apartment to sleep at the neighbors’ and told him his mother was dead, he’d dreamed that same night of tears. He’d seen his mother weep and drown in her tears and her tears had turned into a flood
that rose higher and higher till it swallowed the bed and the room and everything.

This nightmare had returned to his dreams only in France, when he went with his wife to visit her family in Lyon, where he’d felt alone, and a stranger. He’d told his wife her family treated him as though he had the mange and that they were racists. She’d laughed and said, “That’s the way they are,” meaning what he took for racism was a distance that her parents maintained even with their own children; he had to let go of his febrile Oriental imagination if he wanted to become acclimatized to his new country and his new life.

That night the nightmare of the tears had returned and he’d felt a murderous loneliness. He’d edged up against his wife, who was sleeping by his side, intending to take her in his arms, but she had shifted away with an involuntary movement. He’d tried to get out of bed to go to the kitchen for a drink of water but hadn’t been able to find his way in the dark. He’d closed his eyes to sleep and seen his mother’s eyes shocked into tears. The next morning he’d told Bernadette he wanted to go home to Montpellier. He’d returned, carrying with him the dream of tears, not knowing why his mother had suddenly awoken in his dream. What does it mean when the dead quicken in the living? And what does it mean for us to carry the dead in our hearts, so that they become part of a life we haven’t yet lived?

He hadn’t told his wife what had occurred. He didn’t know what had gone wrong after they married. In the beginning, in other words during the stage poets refer to as “first love,” his tongue had run wild over everything. He would translate the phrase ‘
ala rasi
and say to her submissively “
sur ma tête
” just to hear the ringing laugh that would emerge from between Bernadette’s lips. Then, suddenly, the reign of silence had begun. Or, to be more accurate, it hadn’t come all at once, it had crept in bit by bit and taken over the entire terrain of his relationship with the white-skinned woman with
whom he’d fallen in love at first sight when they met at the Tex-Mex bar. He’d started to feel that words were betraying him, that he couldn’t relax in the French language. Words, as his father used to say, are the land in which one feels at home. Sitting with his two sons at the dinner table, he’d ask them to talk. “Entertain me!” he’d say, and the brothers had to tell stories about school while their father sat back and savored the telling.

He couldn’t tell Bernadette, “Entertain me!” He couldn’t fashion his phrases into proper sentences that would make allowances for his wife’s ears, those ears that couldn’t stand to hear cursing in French or Arabic. So he slid into silence, and the stirrings of infidelity began to make themselves felt in his life.

It never occurred to him that Bernadette could be unfaithful to him. He didn’t know where he got this certainty, which quickly evaporated, but he didn’t care. When you stop feeling jealous, love is dead, and Karim felt no jealousy when Bernadette told him she’d gone out with a Swiss doctor who was visiting Montpellier. He just smiled. She flew into a fury and said that she was lying because she knew he was being unfaithful to her and that she had wanted to make him jealous, and that he didn’t love her anymore, and she wept. Unable to abide her tears, he sat on the floor next to her and said he loved her and almost told her about the dream of tears. But he stopped himself. He felt impotence crawling all around him and heard the voice of silence.

With Ghazala, though, he would talk a lot, and with Muna, he savored their banter. He had no idea why, in Beirut, the words poured out of him, as though a well had been opened and everything was lit up. From the moment of his arrival in Beirut, he could see. He’d told Muna that he could see things, because back there the world was enveloped in mist. The magic of Beirut, though, lay in the smoothness of Ghazala’s skin. Who would have believed that a maid from a remote village living in the Mar Elias Camp, in
the midst of poverty, beggary, and madness, could radiate with an astounding smoothness the like of which he had never seen in the women whom he treated for skin diseases? Then he’d discovered the secret. It was love. He’d told her about the love that lends delicacy to the body, purifies the skin, and takes the soul up into the waves of the sky. She’d laughed. And when he’d discovered the trick that had been played on him he hadn’t felt thorns in the throat the way men ordinarily do when deceived. On the contrary, he’d felt that the stone of fear had been lifted from his chest. Fear is a humiliation, and once it receded and the story had reached its appointed end, he became as one who dwells on the verge of tears.

Karim didn’t know why he’d thought of the verb “to be” in the past tense as he was sitting in the Boeing 707 from Paris’s Orly Airport to Beirut. He’d pictured the city, seeing it as it had been ten years ago, as though it was something from the past that couldn’t be brought back but to which he was nevertheless going back. He hadn’t said he was “going back” when he told his wife of his decision; he’d said he was going to the city to build a hospital. But he’d known he was returning to a place that no longer existed. He’d closed his eyes and seen the sentence written out before him: “Beirut was.”

When he opened his eyes inside the plane, he thought it was his wife in front of him, shaking him by the shoulder to wake him. With her extreme whiteness and small eyes, the flight attendant resembled Bernadette. She’d said the airplane was starting its descent and asked him to put his seat back in the upright position and fasten his seat belt.

When Nasim embraced him at the airport, he smelled zaatar and a shudder of nostalgia seized him. Looking at his brother he recovered the mirror image that had trailed him for so long. He had been used to seeing in his twin a likeness of himself he didn’t want to see, but never before had he smelled on him the scent of zaatar. Bernadette had told him, the morning
after they met, that she could smell zaatar. He’d told her he hadn’t eaten zaatar for ages and she replied, laughing, “You’re from Lebanon. You told me you were Lebanese. That’s what the Lebanese smell like.” He’d said to her that the true smell of Lebanon was apples. “What apples?” she answered. “It’s zaatar,
thym
– you know the word? – and I love zaatar.”

Two men on the threshold of their forties smelling zaatar and not crying. They’d searched for things to say but had found only ready-made words, the ones said to plug the silence. They got into the black Volvo. Nasim turned on the engine and the voice of Fairuz rang out, singing, “I loved you in summer, I loved you in winter.” Nasim turned to his brother, who had returned; he’d bought the cassette for him, he said. “Do you still like her?” he asked, and before he could hear the reply said he didn’t like her anymore. “She’s become like Lebanon,” said Nasim. “Everyone says they love it, and when everyone says they love you, it means no one loves you. That’s how Lebanon is. Everyone loves it but no one loves it. Like the war, none of us likes it but we all fight, and like your father, God rest his soul …”

“Don’t talk about Father like that,” said Karim.

“Why? What do you know?”

“What is it I don’t know? I don’t understand.”

“All in good time.”

What strange reception was this? Had his brother asked him to come to Lebanon so he could humiliate him and settle old scores? Karim thought the whole thing had been laid to rest once and for all when Nasim married Hend. On the phone he’d wanted to tell his brother that he’d won in the end, but he’d choked on the words.

Karim didn’t want to reopen old accounts, but why then had he returned to Beirut?

How would Hend take his return? “In the end the dog won and bought us both,” he would tell her later.

“He only bought because you sold,” she answered.

The July sun burned the city’s asphalt. Karim felt he too was burning. But he didn’t ask his brother where he was taking him. He’d been certain he was going to his father’s apartment, but the car passed the pharmacist’s shop at the bottom of the building and kept going.

“Hend’s waiting for us. She’s got a glass of arak and some mezze ready for you.”

“I’m tired. Let me go to the apartment, and we can have dinner together tomorrow.”

“Your mother-in-law has made kibbeh nayyeh just for you and she’s waiting for you at home.”

“My mother-in-law!”

“She was your mother-in-law, now she’s mine. What’s the problem?”

The conversation had got off to a bad start. Karim hadn’t come to settle old scores or to see the pleasure of revenge on his younger brother’s face. He didn’t know why he’d come, but he did want to open a new page in his life, or so at least he’d persuaded himself. While practicing on the camera he’d bought by taking pictures of his two daughters, he’d told his wife he wanted to devour Beirut with his eyes, to photograph it and apologize to it, to love it all over again. In his wife’s eyes he’d read the words she’d kept repeating to him since their first encounter: “You’re romantic and sentimental.” Now the words had taken on a new meaning. In that distant past, which seemed to Karim to belong to another time, she’d laugh and say “romantic” with lust fluttering in her eyes. Now the word came out dry and bitter.

They’d drunk the arak and eaten the kibbeh in a silence from which they were rescued only by the racket and naughtiness of the children.

Hend said nothing. Her mother, Salma, swathed in black, seemed a different
woman. When Karim entered the apartment and she embraced him, he noted the black that covered her legs, mounting from there to cover everything else. She was wearing thick nylon stockings and the black enveloped her knees and thighs, and she looked like the widow she was.

Salma hadn’t stopped wearing black since her husband had died prematurely from a clot in the brain, leaving her with a single daughter and a small sum of money that he’d put together from his work on an afforestation project in Abu Dhabi. All the same, this beautiful white-skinned woman had succeeded in making her dresses signposts to the shining whiteness that radiated from her thighs and wrists. A year after her husband’s death, she’d removed the black stockings but she had never stopped wearing black. When Karim met her for the first time, at his father’s pharmacy, he’d been astonished by her beauty and had seen the smile of triumph that was Nasri Shammas’s way of proclaiming a new female conquest. When he met her later at her apartment on his first visit to Hend, he felt a secret frisson run through his body and compared the frankness of her gaze, backed by desire, with the meekness in Hend’s small eyes, her dainty body, and her brownness that glowed as though it had imbibed the sun.

The powdered sugar that seemed to glisten on Salma’s thighs where they burst out from beneath her short dress, split above the knee, had quickly vanished, however: the woman put an end to the young man’s doubts by speaking, somewhat contemptuously, of his father’s magic herbal remedies that made plants burst with life. Karim had been convinced that his father was making up his love stories to fill his solitude and stave off old age – until the day when his brother had opened a drawer where Nasri had kept the pictures hidden. Upon seeing them, Karim had been overwhelmed by a mixture of disgust and sadness.

Why do we laugh at lovers’ tales when we do the same sorts of things ourselves? Love should never be disclosed to other people because others
can accept it only when they are themselves its heroes. He felt revulsion toward his father but pity for himself. How and to whom was he to tell his own story with Ghazala, which had ended in something worse than a scandal? How was he to speak of his conflicting feelings, of his heart that kept changing course and taking him off to he knew not where?