Broken Mirrors (20 page)

He asked her why and she said she’d waited for the honey a long time at the chalet and wanted it nowhere else.

And when he slept with her for the first time he was overcome with amazement.

“So you’re still a virgin!” he said wonderingly as he kissed her on her small brown breasts. He asked her about “him” but she didn’t reply. He tried to speak but she placed her hand over his mouth.

Once they were married Karim’s name had disappeared from circulation. Nasim started referring to his brother in the third person as “him.” Hend understood that this “him” referred to her former lover. She didn’t notice that things had changed fundamentally because she was busy with her pregnancy and the psychological and biological trans​formations that swept over her during the first three months. It was only after the birth of her first son, Nadim, that she discovered the man she was living with was a mere shadow of the man who had loved her at the chalet in Jounieh. She told him he’d changed. He said it was she who had changed. He didn’t like to be asked where he was going or where he was traveling to or whom he spent his evenings with in Beirut. He said it was work and that they’d
agreed she would have nothing to do with the subject. And when she asked him about the source of his growing wealth, he told her it would be better if she just spent the money and didn’t ask how it was obtained. She asked him why he betrayed her with other women and he was furious. The savage look she feared came into his eyes and he told her never to ask him that question again.

Nasim had never told his wife, whom he loved, the secret reason for his refusing to make love to her during the year of passion in the chalet. She’d supposed he was avoiding it because he thought she’d slept with his brother and didn’t want to open up a distance in their relationship. That was true, but only in part. The truth was that he was bidding farewell to his old world with all its prostitutes, and in his innocent sex with Hend he’d found a way to cleanse himself. Then when he discovered Hend was still a virgin he was overcome by a kind of reverence toward her: he got up, went down on his knees before the bed on which she lay naked, and made the sign of the cross. Hend burst out laughing. “Do you think you’re in church?” she asked. “You’re a saint,” he said. “Forget the saints and the fancy talk, he was a coward, that’s all.” He closed her mouth with his hand and asked her not to speak because her words were spoiling the aesthetic quality of the moment.

Nasim had decided to abandon the world of prostitutes and its depravity. He had severed his ties to the past and steeped himself in a love the like of which he hadn’t tasted since his few days with Suzanne.

But without his knowing how or why, he found life leading him by the nose. He justified things to himself at the beginning by saying it was part of his work. Work as a smuggler couldn’t go right without the accessories. He told himself these were the necessities of his work and that no one living in the night of the city and the alleyways of its wars could keep such a life at a distance.

This is not what he told Hend, because he was certain she’d think he
was lying, and in fact he was. Or perhaps “lying” isn’t quite accurate, but Nasim didn’t know how the title “liar” had attached itself to him. When your father, your teachers, and everyone else around you decides you’re a liar, you become one even when you’re trying to tell the truth, because you don’t believe yourself.

In one of her fits of anger she told him he’d never loved her and just wanted to take over his brother’s inheritance so he could prove to himself he was better than him and make his revenge proportionate to his childhood torments. Nasim had felt then that the woman wanted to break his heart. He couldn’t answer because the words had stuck in his throat. He remembered that he was supposed to spit the words, the way Suzanne had taught him, but refused to do so because he didn’t want to give up on the woman.

He looked at her with defeated eyes and asked if she’d married him for love.

“Of course,” she replied.

He felt she wasn’t telling the truth but contented himself with her assertion. “If that’s so then let’s just love one another and don’t ask about what I do at work or outside the house.”

“But I want to understand what I mean to you.”

“You’re my wife, the mother of my children, and my life. Please don’t let’s get philosophical. I haven’t changed. This is how I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“You’re unfaithful to me and you love me? I don’t understand.”

“I’m not unfaithful.”

“Why are you like that?”

“Why is there a war?” he replied.

He said, “Why is there a war?” and felt as though the voice was not his own, as though it was the voice of the man who had murdered his dreams and those of his comrades. Nasim had never had a chance to experience
the intoxication of victory. The leader of the Phalangist militias had been elected president of the republic to the whine of the Israeli bombs that had set Beirut on fire, but then Bashir Gemayel had been killed in a huge explosion on September 14, 1982. It was the Feast of the Cross. It had rained water and dust and Nasim remembered being afflicted with a kind of blindness. The dust had covered his face and eyes and he’d felt as though the world had come to an end.

But it had not. The killer had been detained and had stood before the interrogator, but instead of answering the question “Why did you kill Bashir,” he’d asked, “Why is there a war?”

From this Nasim had learned to answer one question with another. When you live in Beirut, or any other city in the Arab world, you have to adapt to the absence of answers and the discovery that every question leads to another question.

He’d said to Hend, “Why is there a war?” not because he didn’t know the answer to her question but because that was the correct answer.

“What has the war got to do with our private lives?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer; she jumped directly to the conclusion and decided he’d deceived her.

She never said she was shocked when she discovered Nasim wasn’t the twin she’d been waiting for, that he only resembled Karim superficially, and that she was going to have to live her whole life with her vanished illusion.

But Nasim heard what she hadn’t said – or so she imagined when she saw the lopsided smile that sketched itself on his lower lip. He’d never claimed he was a copy. In fact, when his brother was mentioned in his presence, he’d say only one word: “Coward.” When his father complained that there was no news from his son and wondered how it could be that he never asked how he was doing in the midst of the hell of war in Beirut, Nasim had said, “Your son’s a dog and a coward. He ran away and he’s making himself out to be a big shot because he married a blonde and speaks French.”

“Anything but a Sri Lankan maid!” said Hend.

Nasim tried to persuade her, and Salma tried, but it was no use.

It was Salma who’d suggested the idea of the maid to Nasim. She’d said she was getting old and couldn’t manage any longer.

“You persuade your daughter! The woman’s driving me insane with those ideas of hers that she gets from God knows where.”

This was how Ghazala made her entrance into the family’s story. It was Imm Fu’ad who suggested Ghazala, but Hend decided to treat Ghazala as a friend and refused to allow her to work in the house like a maid. Imm Fu’ad had worked in Nasri’s apartment after Majda disappeared. To the boys she was just an elderly woman. She came three times a week, cleaned the house, did the wash, made the food, and disappeared. She was rarely seen. She came in the morning after everyone had left the apartment and departed at one p.m., before they got back. She was the ghostly guardian who took care of everything without becoming part of their life. Nasri wanted to keep her outside the family: the Trinity, as he called himself plus the boys, had to remain independent and without external ties. “I didn’t marry to have some strange woman come and share my children with me.” He told his sons no one must be allowed to break their circle. “One day you’ll get married but don’t ever let women come between us. You and your wife are your household but here it’s us three till God sees fit to take us.”

Nasri was unaware of what would in fact befall the Trinity. Time doesn’t teach; it just kills and destroys. When Nasim came to tell him of his decision to marry Hend, Nasri started to shake with rage. The only words he could find to say to his second son were “Beware and again beware!” In Nasim’s decision to marry Hend he saw something approaching a violation of taboos. “Even Cain and Abel weren’t like that. Beware, my son!” But his rage was mixed with sorrow and he mumbled words his son couldn’t make out.

When Karim had gone abroad, his father had felt relief, for the business with Hend and her mother had to be excised from the family; carnal passions had to be kept outside the home. Salma was a carnal passion, and she had left. Nasri had suffered greatly at the ending of the relationship that had connected him to this white-skinned woman, and the bitterness would continue to dog him; and when, one day, he tried to go back to her, he would discover he’d run headlong into a wall of illusion.

When Hend conceived her second child, Nasim decided it was time to bring a maid into the house. He made all the arrangements without consulting his wife. He went to an office that imported Sri Lankan maids, where he discovered that such offices were a gold mine and the trade was a profit-maker on all fronts. He thought of expanding his own operations and opening an office of the same sort alongside his other commercial activities.

Two days before the woman reached Beirut he told his wife to get ready to welcome the maid. He was proud of himself because he’d managed an arrangement with the director of the employment office that was a good deal by any standards: he’d hired a forty-year-old woman who spoke Arabic well, having worked previously in Dubai, and who was the mother of four children.

Nasim was taken aback by Hend’s categorical refusal.

“No way,” said Hend. “It’s a slave trade.” Nasim tried to calm her down and Nasri intervened to say that the story of the Sri Lankan maids was very similar to that of the Lebanese at the beginning of their migration to America. It had begun, he said, at the end of the nineteenth century, with women. His mother’s aunt was a case in point: she’d left her husband and three children in their village in Amioun, migrated to Boston, “and then she got the whole family out and was within an inch of getting my mother out. What sort of work do you think these Lebanese women did in America? Were they university teachers? Obviously not. They were maids. They
went and they worked and they slaved and they made it and now the maids’ grandsons and granddaughters bring over servants and are all stuck up. One day, in about a hundred years, Sri Lankan women will start bringing over servants from other countries, and so it goes, it’s the way of the world. Don’t fret over it, my dear.”

Hend refused to stop fretting and said no. How could she tell them that she couldn’t forget Meena’s face and her round belly?

“Meena messed up your mind,” said Salma. “Who leaves a job over some Sri Lankan woman? And, anyway, who can prove George is the boy’s father? They’re all prostitutes, my girl. I’m not saying anything but you know that migration and poverty break families down and they’re women without countries or families. Prostitution becomes normal. It’s always the same with the first generation of immigrants.”

“So the Lebanese are all prostitutes?”

“What kind of talk is that, my girl? Is that how we talk now?”

“Well, all the Lebanese are immigrants. The ones who didn’t migrate overseas migrated from their villages to Beirut.”

“I didn’t say it was so,” said Salma. “I said it was possible.”

“Take yourself, my dear Madam Salma. You ran away from the village with a man who wasn’t your husband, so you can be sure that everyone says about you what you’re saying about others.”

“What sort of person talks to their mother like this?”

“And that’s not all. I know and everyone else knows, so we’d better not say anything and let sleeping dogs lie.”

Hend hadn’t told her husband how her view of the world had changed because of Meena. She’d joined the Association for the Defense of Human Rights, which brought together activists, male and female, in defense of female foreign domestic workers in Lebanon. They’d put together an
amazing amount of information on the ill treatment of Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, and Filipino women in Lebanon.

Still, Hend felt that she’d been at fault and it was too late because she’d been unable to do anything about it.

“It’s idiocy,” said Nasim as he looked at the picture of a child with a white complexion that Hend had taken out of her pocketbook.

Hend was ready to admit that she’d been an idiot but she could never forgive George or his father, Dr. Said Haddad.

The friendship between Hend and Meena had developed in the normal way. The Sri Lankan girl came each day carrying the doctor’s meal, and when he finished she’d pick up the empty tiffin box and go back. The friendship grew in waiting and silence. The girl spoke little and when she did, tried to pronounce the English and Arabic words properly, not the way people here in Lebanon think Sri Lankans speak.

Hend asked her which city she was from and she said Colombo.

She asked why she was working as a maid in Lebanon and the girl smiled and didn’t know how to reply.

With Meena’s daily visits to the clinic, though, Hend came to understand that the girl had been unable to complete her studies at teachers’ college because of her father, who suffered from partial paralysis. This had forced him to stop working in his small fabric shop and she’d had to come to Lebanon because her mother, brothers, and sisters had found themselves with no one to provide for them.

“I decided to study Arabic, madam.”

“My name is Hend. Don’t call me madam.”

“
Yes-madam
,” said Meena, and burst out laughing.

In Meena, Hend discovered the mystery of the east. Listening to her story of the mountain on whose summit Adam had left his footprints, she’d said to her, “The real East is there. We’re not in the East, we’re in the
middle, which is why we live in a state of confusion over our identity. You’re the real east.” And she said she’d like to visit India and Ceylon.