Broken Mirrors (42 page)

“But you don’t allow people to become citizens of your country.”

“And we must not, or we shall disintegrate and all trace of us will be lost,” answered the sheikh as he invited the miracle-working doctor to reside in his small emirate.

He said his wife had become ethereal with beauty through use of the magical medicine the doctor had given her and he didn’t know how to thank him; that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful but he hoped the doctor would convert to Islam and take up residence there, “thus making God’s favors to us complete.”

The magical relationship between oil and Islam had never before occurred to Karim. Poor Khaled Nabulsi! He’d joined a fundamentalist Islam that had no oil so as to complete the revolution, and his body had been ripped to pieces – after which the revolution had continued on its course without him and his like! The revolutions of the day were in need of oil wells. Money oils everything and is “the adornment of this present life,” as it says in the Koran.

For his part, Karim had no idea how to respond to the sheikh’s offer. The man was kind and didn’t insist, telling the doctor that he was one of the People of the Book, “and the People of the Book are under our protection.” He said he’d only wanted to honor him with the best possible offer; however, there was “no compulsion in religion.”

Nasim thought medicine was Lebanon’s oil and that through the hospital that he’d decided to build he would be able finally to put his relationship to the war behind him and start a new life as a respectable businessman.

In no way then would he resemble the thug who’d risked his life for every penny he harvested from the fruits of war. But the hospital needed a certain deal to go through before it could be completed. And when Karim tried to inquire about the nature of that deal his brother said it was nothing to do with him; his job now was to wait, draw up the plans, and supervise the preparations. The wait was long. Six months of nothing, of wasted time, of abortive affairs that left only a bitter taste on his tongue.

When Ghazala appeared, in all her glory, Karim’s body was filled with tremors of desire such as he had never realized lay concealed in the darkness of his soul. He started with the lust to rape and ended a total captive to this terrifyingly beautiful woman; he told her her beauty was “terrifying” because he could find no more suitable word to describe it.

She came the first time on a Tuesday morning and said she would come twice a week, in accordance with the instructions she had received from Khawaja Nasim. She didn’t specify which days, and Karim had to wait since he didn’t dare to ask.

She came on Thursday, but not early, as he’d expected. It was about eleven thirty a.m. and Karim had grown fed up with waiting. He’d agreed to have lunch with Ahmad Dakiz so that they could discuss things to do with the building. She came, resplendent, her dark face shining above her long neck, her black hair tied behind in a ponytail, wearing a dress that reached just below her knees. She rang the bell and waited, and when she saw Karim she smiled and said she’d meant to come early but was late because she’d had to visit a sick friend. She entered and a musky perfume erupted from her rustling dress. She left him holding the door and went into the kitchen.

He didn’t know what to do. Should he go after her or go to the living room, open a book, and pretend to read? He went to the living room and phoned Ahmad Dakiz to apologize for not being able to accept his invitation to lunch, saying he was involved in an emergency. He sensed she was listening to the call but didn’t care. He sat on the couch, opened the first book he found in front of him, and pretended to read.

The smell of coffee wafted in. Ghazala brought the coffee tray and poured two cups. He took his cup with trembling hand, drank a drop, and felt the catch of the bitter coffee as it spread over his tongue and through his mouth. She took her cup and bent forward, as though about to set off for the kitchen.

“Sit down and drink your coffee with me.”

He shifted to make room for her next to him on the couch but she knelt, sat cross-legged on the floor, took a sip from her cup, and made a motion with her fingers, as though she were holding a cigarette.

Karim took a cigarette, placed it between his lips, lit it, and gave it to her. Then he took a second cigarette to light for himself.

“No, you don’t have to light another. I don’t usually smoke but I just happened to think of a cigarette now, I don’t know why.”

They smoked the same cigarette in silence. She put her hand on the couch to get up and he took hold of it. Instead of helping her rise he fell to the floor and found himself rolling over her body. When Karim thought back to how things started he’d tell himself she’d pulled him down and he’d found himself lying on the floor without having decided to before the fact. But the point isn’t who started it: the beginning had been already sketched out to the rhythm of the smell of musk that wafted from the edges of the wine-colored dress that covered her body.

The story began on the living room floor, on the red carpet put there in place of the Persian rug Nasri had so angrily stamped on, swearing the damned thing would outlast him by many years. On that pale red carpet Karim Shammas discovered he was still a novice when it came to the art of love. There he learned to sip the woman drop by drop and melt before her. With his eyes and all his senses he saw how the dew covered Ghazala’s body and how she entered his insides as he entered her and how desire renewed itself at the moment of its quenching.

Ghazala’s nakedness glittered on the floor, and instead of him taking and entering her, she took him. When they took off their clothes, he asked that they move to the bed. She said no with her eyebrows raised and pulled him to herself. He tried to lift her legs so that he could enter and she pushed him away, then with a motion of her finger ordered him to lie on his back and
close his eyes. The man closed them in surrender as a sensual thrill spread to every part of his body. She swept his whole body with her long hair, kissed him, kneaded him, panted above him, inundated him with the water that sprang from her, whispered and sang, and, when she let him enter, he was released inside her like a slow musical refrain.

She was hot and tender, aflame and glowing, knowing when and how and what. The smoothness of her skin enveloped him and the strength of her desire melted into a diaphanous film of sorrow that covered her eyes. Her soft moaning entered his pores and her groans of pleasure mingled with the evaporation of his will.

Karim was incapable of describing the feelings that possessed him on the living room floor, or what exactly happened or how. On reaching one peak of pleasure he would find another waiting for him, but he didn’t have to climb the peak in order to arrive, for it spread from the ends of the hair on his head to his fingertips.

Karim found himself in the bathroom. Ghazala filled the tub with hot water, slipped into the water, and held out her hands; he slid toward her and found himself immersed in water and soap. In the bathtub he closed his eyes and began learning to read the woman lying before him with his fingertips. He caressed the smooth skin that made of her chest a mirror covered with the warm exhalation that arose from her pear-shaped breasts, which hung down in a slight curve before being lifted once more by the eruption of pomegranate blossom. He discovered the neck and shoulders, then descended to the buttocks and caressed what lay between her thighs, which gleamed with soap, and when he reached the cracked heels he caught fire again. He tried to slip inside her but Ghazala stood up, turned on the shower, and began roaring with laughter.

Karim, enchanted by what he believed was a rare moment of genuine encounter between two bodies, still had his eyes closed, and Ghazala’s guffaws
as she swayed naked beneath the shower took him by surprise. He held out his hand, calling her to him again, and heard her tell him to get out of the tub because she was hungry.

“What do you feel like eating?” she asked.

He told her he wasn’t hungry and wanted to stay where he was. She jumped out of the tub, dried herself, and ran into the living room, where she put on her clothes, and he heard her summon him to the table.

Karim fidgeted in the tepid water and began piecing together the different parts of him that had been dissipated so he could stand. He felt a sting of cold, then leapt out of the tub, dried himself, got dressed in a hurry, lit a cigarette, and sat in the living room waiting for her. He heard the sound of plates being put on the small Formica table in the kitchen and smelled the smell of fried eggs, mixed with garlic and sumac.

“Come and get it, doctor.”

Suddenly he felt hungry. He went into the kitchen and found Ghazala seated in front of the frying pan, and on the table a bowl of tomato salad and a loaf of bread.

“There’s nothing in the house, doctor. It’s good I brought a few eggs and some tomatoes with me.”

She talked about the types of food she made well, laughed as she picked up small mouthfuls of bread which she filled with egg, then dipped in a garlic and sumac broth, and swallowed with gusto. Karim needed silence. He wanted to enjoy the aroma of garlic and sumac, but Ghazala’s inner self seemed to have opened up entirely. She ate and laughed and talked. She told him about her husband, Matrouk, who loved lentil soup after sex, and said she knew that whenever he asked her to make it she had to get ready and wash herself with musk.

She said “musk” and then fell silent, as though she felt she’d made a mistake she couldn’t retract.

“So you’ll be making soup tonight,” he said.

She didn’t answer and ate in silence, then got up, while the doctor looked out the window.

When Karim went into his room and lay on his bed, and the drowsiness began hovering around his eyes, it occurred to him that the siesta was the best thing ever invented. In France, where it didn’t exist and the working day lasted till evening – as though food at lunchtime were not the dividing line between two distinct parts of the day – he despised the siestas of the Lebanese. He thought of them as the product of laziness, remembering how his father would close the shop at noon, eat lunch, and sleep for an hour on the couch in the room at the back so that he could begin life over again. Here though, after two weeks of living in Beirut, he’d realized there was no doing without the siesta. The smell of the city was different after lunch, its sounds died away, and drowsiness spread to all its nooks and crannies.

Karim began his siesta feeling a bitterness that he would later discover to be unjustified. Instead of dying away with the ghosts of sleepiness, his bitterness started to increase. He felt the woman was a devil: instead of his tricking her or exercising power over her, as was supposed to happen in an affair between a man and his maid, she’d taken charge of everything, aroused desire, and then deftly and mockingly withdrawn. The magic had melted in the frying pan with the eggs, and the desire had uncovered the musk with which the woman washed herself for her husband’s sake, not his.

There was no jealousy – not only because Karim knew that jealousy of a mistress’s husband incurs laughter and has no place in the expression of love, but because he’d decided at that instant, as sleep benumbed his limbs, that his relationship with this woman must never be more than purely physical. True, the role of rapist that he’d decided to assume had come to an end on the living room carpet and evaporated entirely in the bathtub, but
he was capable of imagining another relationship similar to rape without actually being rape, a relationship of body on body that ended immediately once orgasm was reached and was erased the instant the desire to make love had been satisfied.

Karim nodded off, or it appeared he had done so without realizing, because when he opened his eyes all he could see was darkness. It seemed he’d slept many hours without feeling the tingling of sleep that accompanies dreams. He got out of bed. The apartment was swimming in darkness. He turned on the light and went into the kitchen. On the kitchen table he found a pot of cold coffee covered with a small plate and placed on a tray with a folded piece of paper next to it. He poured the coffee into a cup, drank a little, discovering that it had been flavored with orange blossom water, opened the folded sheet, and read a single word written in an oddly childish hand. He read, “Thanks,” and smiled, feeling his manhood restored to him.

This sexual rite would be repeated twice a week, with the addition of a cooked meal that Ghazala would prepare to make the session “cozy,” as she put it. Over the table she told him many stories of her village, her childhood, her grandmother, her husband, Matrouk, and her love for and fear of Beirut. She filled the place with random talk that blended with the taste of the arak that Karim drank at the table on his own because Ghazala said she was afraid of what might come over her if she drank arak. She’d drunk it a few times, and each time had felt another woman come awake inside her. It had made her afraid and she’d decided never to drink it. When Karim insisted she drink a little from his glass, she took it and sucked at the white liquid. Her eyes glazed, as though she could get drunk on a single drop.

Two months of heedless pleasure uninterrupted by a single moment of unpleasantness. From the second week, Karim would put what he called “the weekly gift” on a plate in the kitchen and she’d take it without saying
anything. She’d take it as though she weren’t taking it, in exactly the same way as, in bed, she took as though she were giving. Karim felt no regret about the gift: it was her due as maid and mistress.

Her sudden disappearance, however, caused him anxiety. Suddenly she’d disappeared and she didn’t phone. Karim waited a week before asking his brother about her and the answer only made things more mysterious: “Forget Ghazala. Tomorrow I’ll send you a better maid. Don’t worry about it.”

“Why? What happened?” asked Karim.

“What happened happened,” answered his brother. “Why would you want to get involved? Tomorrow I’ll send you another woman to clean the apartment.”

At first Karim was afraid Ghazala had discovered he was having an affair with Muna. She must have known. She must surely have made herself a copy of the key: this woman who was such a strange combination of cunning and naïveté knew her own interests very well.