Broken Mirrors (3 page)

He thought of an ancient verse and smiled. Suddenly, with the return of the electricity, the apartment burst into light. He heard the hum of the refrigerator, saw himself sitting on the couch holding an empty glass of whiskey, and realized he was ridiculous. He refilled his glass and said out loud,

The electricity! It was enough for the electricity to come back for his black thoughts to be swept aside. Karim decided to view his life as comedy. Nothing was worth tormenting oneself over because the true nature of things was unclear. With a sudden pang of affection for his father, he had a vision of him lying dead in the middle of the living room and laughed at the meaning​lessness of it all.

He’d told Muna that the sorrows of separation were meaningless. He’d kissed her lips, which were wet with water, and laughed as he slept with her for the last time. He’d said they had to make their last time more beautiful than the first. He reminded her how shy and afraid she’d been and that the language of the body was wordless. He told her that their affair must not end in the dumbness with which it had started and made love to her before her body had time to dry, pulling the towel from her and laughing as he took her.

Muna had arrived without warning. It was seven a.m. when Karim
opened the door and saw her standing there hesitantly, wearing her morning exercise clothes, which were stained with sweat. “I came to say goodbye. We’re leaving for Canada in a week.”

She went into the living room. Karim left her and went into the kitchen, put the coffeepot on the flame, and heard the shower being turned on in the bathroom.

She stood there, wearing the white towel that covered her body and left only her thin white legs visible, and said she was sad. He hadn’t asked why she was sad but had laughed and approached her and said that her wet body was the best way to say goodbye.

He turned on all the lights in the apartment and went to the kitchen, where he took a handful of zaatar, scattered it over a piece of dry bread, and devoured it.

“It’s all because I drank a lot without eating anything. It’s over. That story is finished and tomorrow, in France, there won’t be a story, there mustn’t be a story,” he thought to himself.

He’d stretched out on the couch, started to feel the creeping numbness that comes before sleep, shaken himself awake in a panic, set the alarm for four thirty a.m., and sunk into a deep sleep.

Karim Shammas was sitting impatiently in the black Mercedes taxi that was taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. All at once the sky lit up and the whistling started. The driver ducked to protect himself from the mortar shells that had begun to fall on the airport road. Suddenly the car veered off. Karim heard the screeching of the tires and felt everything shake. He closed his eyes and prepared for death. He heard the driver shout that he was going back to Beirut. He opened his eyes and asked him to keep going and get him to the airport. Then the car stopped and he heard the driver’s voice say through the screeching of the tires that he couldn’t.
“If you want to go on, sir, find yourself another car. I’ve got children and I want to go home.”

Karim had a vision of himself as another person. He got out of the car, bent over the trunk, lifted out his suitcase, set off down the middle of the dusty, garbage-strewn road, and thought that he’d reached the end of the world.

This was how his Beirut adventure ended, with a ringing in his ears and a feeling that he was supporting himself with his shadow. When he caught sight of the Beirut airport building, with its ruined façade, he looked back and wept.

W
HEN
K
ARIM
S
HAMMAS
agreed to return to Beirut for the hospital construction project, he didn’t know that the civil war, which had come to an end in Lebanon, would begin anew within him.

“The war will never end,” Mrs. Salma had said to him when she saw him in front of his father’s pharmacy on Zahret el-Ehsan Street in Beirut. When he’d seen the woman, who covered her head with a black silk scarf, coming out of the pharmacy, he had wanted to run but instead remained rooted to the spot.

The woman, who was in her fifties, approached him, gave him a contemptuous look, and asked him why he was going to France and leaving his fiancée behind.

He said he’d never been officially engaged to Hend, was tired of the war, and couldn’t take it anymore. “I’ll come back when the war’s over,” he said.

“The war will never end because it’s inside us,” said the woman. She folded her arms over her chest, bowed her head, and went her way.

And Salma was right.

The Pretty Widow, as his father called her, had said the war would never
end and had entreated him to remain in Beirut. He didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. Had she asked why he was leaving his fiancée, or why he wasn’t taking her with him?

Hend had told him she didn’t want him. She hadn’t said exactly that, but she’d said she’d never go abroad and leave her mother alone in Beirut.

The problem had begun a long time before, as the love that had lasted four years began to evaporate.

“To be honest, I have no idea who you are. How can I live with a man I know nothing about?”

“But you know everything!”

“Everything means nothing,” she said.

And Hend was right: everything had turned into nothing. He’d reached Montpellier, joined the university and its associated hospital, and the picture of her that he’d placed on the table next to his bed had become a burden. He decided to put it in a drawer, where it stayed. When he finished his studies and moved from the dormitory to his new apartment, he’d left the picture in the drawer by mistake. On remembering it a week later he felt an obscure nostalgia that was swallowed up in a roar of laughter.

Bernadette had told him he used his loud laugh to hide his shyness and weakness, but he hadn’t understood. He’d thought his resounding laugh was an expression of his strong personality. That was what he’d felt during the only battle he’d fought in, at Nahr el-Bared Camp near Tripoli, when he was nineteen. He’d been in a trench opposite the mound occupied by the Lebanese army, holding a Kalashnikov, with Nabil Abu el-Halaqa lying on his stomach next to him, holding one of those big belt-fed machine guns that they call a Degtyaryov, to cover his comrade. Suddenly the bullets flew. This was nothing like the training course that Karim had taken, which had lasted fewer than ten days and hadn’t taught him how to identify the source of fire or draw up a plan to confront a possible attack on his
position. Instead, he’d found himself firing wildly and laughing out loud and not noticing that his colleague’s gun had fallen silent. When the firing stopped as suddenly as it had started, he’d turned to his comrade and found him sitting bent over, moaning with pain. When Nabil announced to him that he could hold on no longer and that he had to empty his bowels, Karim burst out laughing again. “You mean you’ve shat yourself, you coward? Get up, get up! I can smell it.” But Nabil, shaking with fear, said he didn’t dare leave the trench and was so afraid of the snipers he’d had to shit right where he was.

“The smell’s everywhere!” yelled Karim. “At least cover it over, you asshole. Cats are better than you.” He burst out laughing.

Nabil would die years later in the battles for the commercial souks, his comrades recounting that he’d died because of his reckless courage – while Karim, after the experience at Nahr el-Bared, hadn’t dared to take any but a symbolic part in the fighting. That, though, is another story.

Instead of replying to his French wife that he was laughing because he didn’t care and if you don’t care, nothing can frighten you, he burst out laughing and said nothing. Everything had turned into nothing. Hend had entered a hidden space called “forgetting” and had only been reawoken the day his brother, Nasim, phoned to tell him he’d married her but hadn’t invited Karim to the wedding because Hend had refused to allow any celebrations. “She wouldn’t even agree to invite her mother and your father.” He hadn’t roared with laughter that day. That day, he’d felt choked, and a strange feeling had come over him: it was as if Nasim had stolen his life from him; as though, by staying there in Beirut, he’d taken the city from him.

On top of that, the political choices of the two brothers had intervened: the younger became sole inheritor of the house and pharmacy, while it had become impossible for Karim to return to the east side of Beirut where the Phalangists ruled. Then, after the savage assassination of Khaled Nabulsi,
he’d found he couldn’t breathe. The air had been cut off in Beirut and he’d felt he was breathing not air but thorns, so he’d decided to leave and never come back. Everything inside him had died and he no longer cared.

He’d phoned Hend, who had come and sat before him in silence at Uncle Sam’s, close to the American University in Beirut, listening to his sudden decision and saying she wouldn’t go with him because she couldn’t leave her mother.

Her mother, Salma, however, had a different perspective. She’d looked at him with contempt and said the war would never end because it came from inside of them. Where did she get such eloquence? And who was this woman who had so nearly been his mother-in-law?

Hend had said her mother wanted her and her son-in-law to live at home with her because she couldn’t bear to live alone.

“But it’s still too soon,” Karim had said.

“I know, I know. My mother’s a bit childish. She abandoned me when I was young and now she wants to cling to me for the rest of her life. Obviously I don’t want that, but I haven’t the heart.”

“We haven’t agreed to get married yet,” said Karim.

“We haven’t agreed! You’re right, we haven’t talked about it but, you know, I love you and you love me.”

She had told him she loved him and wanted him just when what he called “the oil of desire” had started to run out. Beirut had disappeared under the shelling and this girl had taken the thread of chastity in her hand, as though something had awoken inside her and turned her into something like a wife. Which was the real Hend? When he’d held her in his arms for the first time, she’d trembled like a small bird. They were at her apartment, and her mother wasn’t there. It was the eve of Good Friday, the voice of Fairuz was warbling from the radio: “Let Your son’s death be life for those who seek it,” and Hend was listening, on the verge of tears. He sat down next to her
saying nothing but listening to the requiem for Christ. He lit a cigarette, felt the singer’s voice covering him in blue velvet, and had a vision of himself bending over Hend and taking her. She flowed like water, and Fairuz’s velvet blended with Hend’s face, which was covered in dew. He held her to him and everything inside him shuddered.

They were sitting now in the same café, drinking orange juice while she talked to him about her mother and he couldn’t understand how she could say, “I haven’t the heart to leave her,” after all the stories that she’d told him about her childhood at the half-time boarding school, and her unshakeable feeling that her mother was living somewhere else.

He took hold of her hand and she looked around as she withdrew it. “You mustn’t! Any moment someone will see us.” Why hadn’t she said they mustn’t earlier, when, uncaring, she’d looked for opportunities to be alone with him, even discovering dark side streets where he found himself clasped, as he walked with her, by her dainty body, which embraced him and pulled on him and only released him after the final shudder?

He’d told her he was leaving and had taken her hand, which she withdrew without speaking, so he understood that she understood that their love was gone. But he was wrong. He’d discovered his mistake here, in Beirut, when he heard her say her husband had never forgiven her “even though I was a virgin, as you know. Every time he sleeps with me, I feel as though there’s something in his eyes he wants to say but doesn’t.”

“But he knows,” said Karim.

“Did you tell him?” she asked.

“Kind of, but it’s not important.”

That day, he’d taken her hand and she hadn’t withdrawn it or said, “You mustn’t.” She’d let her hand flow and he’d listened to the voice of Fairuz and thought memories were like tears. Why had she spoken of her mother?
Who was this woman whom he had to meet at his brother’s apartment the moment he arrived in Beirut?

Hend had told him her mother’s story many times, but each time he was amazed. He found it difficult to believe this story of a woman in the village of Kherbet el-Raheb in the Akkar district who’d left her husband and three children and run away to Beirut to marry the agricultural engineer Sami Naqqash. Salma’s story was full of mystery. She’d met the engineer when he came to work on land reclamation in Akkar and had lost her head: this was what she had told her daughter. “He spoke to me and I lost my head. I, poor thing, was just a child. I was twenty-one and he was forty. Tall, his head shining with white hair. Dark-skinned with a bewitching smile and laughing eyes. He saw me walking on the road. I was carrying Mokhtar, my baby son, may God make his life easy, and he stopped and looked at me and smiled. I felt as though I’d been paralyzed. Then I understood that that’s what love is. No, I didn’t sleep with him or let him kiss me but he used to hold my hand and I could feel his heart beating against my fingers and my heart felt as though it was going to fly away. I fell in love with him and was like a madwoman and I followed him to Beirut and we got married.”

Salma didn’t tell her only daughter the details of this adventure, which had caught the imagination of the people of Kherbet el-Raheb and been transformed into a rustic legend called “Salma and Sami.” Nor had she spoken of how it had ended with her husband – who’d sworn he’d kill her – sitting with the agricultural engineer in the Gemmeizeh Café in Beirut, drawing up with him the contract of settlement which eventually made Salma’s divorce, and marriage to her lover, possible.

The story went that Salma was the most beautiful young woman in the village. She was the fourth and last daughter of Salim Mokhtar, who worked as a hired hand in the wheat fields of Sheikh Deyab Abd el-Karim. Her
beauty manifested itself in the milky whiteness of her complexion, which caused the young men of the village to swarm like hornets around her father’s house.