Broken Mirrors (40 page)

She said she’d agreed to her husband’s request that she work at the doctor’s apartment because he was Khawaja Nasim’s partner in the hospital project and she considered her work a service to a friend. “Don’t get me wrong, doctor. All I want is for the hospital to do well and then we’ll all get a break. Matrouk can stop working as a laborer and a driver and take over the supervision of cleaning operations at the hospital and that way we’ll all get a break.”

Karim asked her what she wanted most and she said she wanted to buy an apartment in Beirut “and be a lady like the other ladies, like having a Sri Lankan maid and taking a break.”

“A maid!”

“That’s my dream. I know it’s not a dream likely to come true but that’s what I think about. I see myself as a proper lady.”

He told her Hend had refused to have a Sri Lankan maid.

“I know. She told me the story. Hend’s a gem. I told you she’s different from other women. She will never agree to have a maid and I love her and I love her point of view but you asked me about my hopes and dreams and I gave you a frank answer.”

Their first meeting was strange. At seven a.m. Karim heard the sound of the doorbell, seemingly coming from somewhere far away. Then he heard the key turn in the lock and the door open. He leapt out of bed, rushed to the door, and found a woman standing on the doorstep. She was bending
forward a little as though about to come in but not coming in. She was holding the key in her right hand and smiling.

“I’m Ghazala,” she said.

“Who?”

“Khawaja Nasim gave me the key and told me you might not be home. I thought I’d come early, sorry to disturb. I thought that way I’d finish my work and get home before the children come back from school.”

“Who are you?” asked Karim, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“You go back to bed. You look tired and I won’t get to your room for a couple of hours.”

Karim focused, sleep now banished, and asked her who she was and what had brought her there so early.

She said she was Ghazala and Khawaja Nasim had sent her to clean the apartment. He’d given her the key and asked her to leave it with the doctor if she found him at home, or if not he would get the key the next day from her husband, Matrouk.

She held the key out to the doctor, who took it from her hand. “Would you like coffee?” she asked.

“No, that won’t be necessary, I’ll make the coffee. But Nasim didn’t say anything to me.”

“The khawaja’s like that,” she said. “He’s always making surprises for people he likes.”

Karim went into the kitchen to make his morning Turkish coffee and Ghazala caught up with him and started cleaning up the sink, in which dirty dishes were piled high.

“How do you like your coffee?” Karim asked her.

“What an idea, doctor!” she said, and went over to the stove to make the coffee. Her brown arm bumped his. She pulled her arm away quickly and looked at him with eyes that she lowered in a coquettish display of false
modesty, making Karim feel he was watching a third-rate Egyptian movie. He withdrew from the kitchen to his room and heard Ghazala’s voice asking him how he liked his coffee. There was a sort of seductiveness in her voice, but it was that of a black-and-white melodrama where the maid seduces the hero, or the hero exploits his position and authority to drag the maid to his bed.

He said he liked it Ottoman-style and she asked him what “Ottoman-style” meant, so he answered, “It means medium sweet with just a little extra sugar.” He thought the melodrama was like the coffee that the Lebanese attribute to the Ottomans: there was something in it of the coquetry of the sugar which permeated the gravitas of the coffee, leaving nothing at the bottom of the cup but the residue, which resembled the tears that girls wept over “Ustaz Wahid” as played by the Egyptianized Syrian singer Farid el-Atrash. Karim had never dared proclaim his love of Farid el-Atrash and his passion for his song “Torment,” which went so well with his husky voice. The feelings of torment emerged broken from the singer’s throat, leaving love as a question mark suspended in the space of the
hujazkar
mode with its repetitive rhythms and Kurdish melancholy. The embarrassment he felt at his affection for the songs of Farid el-Atrash was equaled only by that which he felt at his passion for melodramatic movies, such as that in which Ustaz Wahid weeps over a lost love in
Letter from a Woman Unknown
. In his youth and during the days of leftist tumult he hadn’t dared reveal this side of his personality to anyone; the fashion was for Sheikh Imam and his revolutionary songs, and Karim loved those songs and learned them by heart, especially “Guevara’s Dead.” But nothing could reach into his innermost soul like the husky voice of Farid el-Atrash, with its mixture of repressed desire and pain.

What had happened with Ghazala? How had things developed? Why had he felt as though his heart was being almost ripped from its place every
time he heard the two successive rings of the bell that announced her arrival? And how did it come about that he’d sit in his room waiting for her to finish cleaning the apartment so that she could come to him and lead him to the bathtub, where her hands would be waiting for him?

Everything had started when his arm bumped into hers. He’d gone to his room, as she’d told him to, sat on his bed reading a paper, lit a cigarette, and closed his eyes. Suddenly the smell of coffee erupted and spread like pins and needles through his joints. Ghazala came in, her hair up, and the smell was everywhere; and the two ebony hands reached out holding a tray bearing a coffeepot and a cup from which wafted the fragrance of orange blossom water. Karim was intoxicated by the aroma and asked about it. She said she’d put a little orange blossom water in before boiling the water: “There’s nothing better than the smell of orange blossom spirit.” She said she’d only found out about orange blossom water here in Beirut. “In the village we didn’t have orange blossom or anything of that sort. We plant olives, wheat, and barley. If you could only see the black soil of the Houran plain, doctor! It breaks your heart. The land is cracked with thirst, its skin is broken, and no one can do a thing.”

She asked him why the Lebanese called orange blossom spirit “orange blossom water.” “It’s a spirit, doctor. When you get a whiff of it you feel your spirit expand.”

“Where are you off to?” he asked her. “Sit down and drink a cup of coffee with me.”

“My coffee’s in the kitchen,” she said, “and I don’t like sugar in coffee. The sugar destroys the dignity of the coffee and I don’t know why you people in Lebanon drink your coffee like that, as though you were afraid of the taste and smell of the coffee itself.”

He decided to pick up his cup of coffee and go after her into the kitchen. He noticed the heels of her cracked, naked feet and felt the flames of desire
but stayed where he was and couldn’t summon up the courage to do anything about it – throw her to the kitchen floor and take her like that without preliminaries or talk, raise her legs and enter her. The doctor’s right hand shook and the thought of rape flashed through his mind.

Sitting there in Beirut, Karim suddenly was intoxicated by the thought of rape, which blended with the spirit of the orange blossom water and the flavor of roasted coffee. He thought Ghazala was right and he should drink Turkish coffee without sugar. She’d told him that the coffee spread on the tongue and coated it with taste, and that sugar spoiled its flavor.

Everything had started when she left his room barefoot after putting the coffeepot on the bedside table and he’d noticed her cracked heels. He’d felt the desire to grab them, pull her down to the floor and throw himself on top of her. He pictured the scene as vividly as if it were happening in front of him and discovered that every cell of his body wanted the woman. But he didn’t dare. Once again Karim discovered that his nobility, or what he claimed as nobility, was just a cover for his fear.

He sat down on his bed, drank a little of the coffee, and a tingling ran through his body; he thought many times about getting up off the bed but didn’t.

He found himself in the kitchen. He didn’t know how he had got out of bed, or where he’d found the courage to stand in front of Ghazala and tell her he’d decided to try her bitter coffee.

He drank the coffee standing in the kitchen while Ghazala came and went, looking at him out of the corner of her eye and behaving as though she didn’t see him. He felt the bitter taste invade his tongue, grew intoxicated on the coffee’s smell and burning taste, and decided that from then on he’d drink only sugarless coffee.

The rape episode had ended with a cup of coffee. He’d stood there waiting for Ghazala to look at him and had only awoken from this state of
expectancy when he heard her asking him to leave the kitchen so she could wash it down. This first encounter bore no relation to what would take place later. The short stormy relationship that ended two months after it began, only to take on a bizarre aspect thereafter, had left the Frenchified doctor with the taste of confusion on his tongue.

Karim might say that Ghazala was a symbol of the confusions of Beirut and thus absolve himself – after the moments of terror he lived through as he drank arak and chewed grilled chicken – of the naïveté of the look that had described itself on his features when Matrouk told him the story. When we resort to turning things into symbols it liberates us from responsibility and makes of human experience an arena of random happenings, so that life becomes no more than a story. Karim had come to Beirut to repair his mirror and find his own image again, only to find himself in a reality susceptible to neither symbol nor explanation. Civil war is superior to all other kinds of war in that it resists any explanation. It is total stasis, naked exposure to word and caprice. Ideas can last only if they are put in a vessel that imposes form on them, adding to and subtracting from them. But a civil war has no vessel. It is an assemblage of broken mirrors that run parallel to one another, making of the fragments images that reproduce each other but refuse to form a coherent whole.

The difference between Karim and his twin was that when the doctor found himself incapable of imposing form on things he fled to France and there set about erasing his memory. All that was left of the days of war was the vague image of a ghost which his memory, awakened by extreme drunkenness, had decided to preserve, making of it a vessel for the first stirrings of his love for the Frenchwoman. His brother, Nasim, on the other hand had set about adding, not subtracting, for he wasn’t content with his personal memory. Rather, he had mixed his brother’s into it by taking possession of
Hend, who had experienced something resembling a nervous breakdown following Meena’s arrest and expulsion from Lebanon.

Ghazala and Sinalcol overlapped in Karim’s memory even though she took up residence there only briefly before withdrawing and turning into an elusive shadow, while he was never fully present. He was a ghost woven out of people’s words, a shadowy thug whose presence could be detected through the submission of others to his commands because of their fear that his explosive charges would blow away the doors of their shops and spill their guts onto the street. This ghost had turned into a real person whose identity Karim was able to assume, and of whom he told tales that mixed truth and fiction, piquing both the curiosity and astonishment of his French wife.

Karim never dared tell the Ghazala story to anyone, and it would have remained wrapped in oblivion if Ghazala hadn’t come to see him three days before his departure from Beirut, wreathed in smiles, to say that Matrouk had made up with her following Khawaja Nasim’s intervention.

“As you know, doctor, I could never say no to Khawaja Nasim.”

At that moment Karim had understood that his brother had decided to announce, in the midst of the collapse, that he could keep score, and that Nasim had known what was going on all along – and had managed, perhaps, to possess this woman’s body too.

The Ghazala who returned to tidy the apartment and help Karim gather his things for his final departure was not, however, the same woman. The brown-skinned woman of medium height with the well-turned calves and full thighs pulled back at the moment of orgasm, her naked feet cracked with pleasure and water; the Ghazala of the long black hair whose regularly spaced waves formed shadows on the pear-shaped, slightly pendulous breasts that perked up at the ends rising toward rosy nipples; the Ghazala
of the large mouth and bee-stung lips, black eyes, and long neck – this was not the Ghazala who returned when the maid came back to help him gather up what he wanted from the apartment.

The woman who came back was different in every way. She had cut her hair and wore a wide dress that erased the contours of her body. Her eyes were without fire and there was a slight stoop to her shoulders. She said she had to apologize to him for getting him mixed up in something that had nothing to do with him. She said she felt it was her duty to tell him the truth and he answered that he didn’t want to know. But he drank her bitter coffee and listened to her story, feeling the knives cutting up his heart.

“You don’t have any right to be angry with me, doctor,” she said. “You were with Madam Muna too.”

“Don’t you dare say a word about Muna!”

Nasim had told him he could take what he wanted from the apartment: he’d decided to sell it along with the unfinished hospital building and the pharmacy and the plot of land in the village of Brumanna where Nasri had dreamed of building a three-story summer house for his two children and theirs. He’d asked him to sign a general power of attorney that would allow him to make the sale so that he could pay off a part of his debts. Karim had signed without discussion. He’d agreed because there was nothing else he could do. He’d left his city stripped of everything, realizing as he signed that he would never be able to go back there.

Ghazala had appeared from he knew not where. On the first day of his encounter with her, the seduction had revolved around coffee and naked feet. Karim hadn’t raped the beautiful maid who had come to his apartment, bringing with her an aura of seduction. The idea of rape had lingered in his mind and become a source of drowsy fantasies that filled that night and the four other nights he spent waiting for her.