Broken Mirrors (35 page)

He tried to translate the line for her but couldn’t. He said it was attributed to a pre-Islamic poet who’d lived in the Arab desert, singing the praises of the beauty of a white-skinned woman by saying that her whiteness was a skin to her skin. She asked him where the Arab poet had seen a white-skinned woman. He explained to her that white skin was widespread in the Arabian Peninsula.

“But you told me the opposite,” she said.

He tried to say that what he was interested in at that moment was
her
whiteness and
her
beauty.

When Karim had woken up after his night of drunkenness and found Bernadette in his bed, he’d been struck by “the shock of beauty,” as he would later refer to the instant at which he’d become immersed in her eyes. She recounted to him how she’d come across him beneath the breasts of that whore, and how they’d walked aimlessly through the streets of Montpellier; when she’d told him she was tired and had to go home he’d put his arm around her neck and refused to let go.

“Then I discovered you were drunk and I couldn’t leave you alone, so I decided to walk you to your apartment, and there you tricked me and took me to bed, and in the morning you asked me my name and what I did and when I said I was a nurse you said you loved me, and I couldn’t help laughing.”

“Me?”

She said his cough was nervous. “I’m sure you don’t cough or yawn at the hospital but the moment you reach the apartment and have to talk to me or to the girls you start coughing. I don’t know you anymore and I don’t know what made me agree to resign from the hospital so I could stay at home and devote myself to looking after the children; I wasted my life. The girls are at school and you’re at work and I’m waiting. You turned me into an Oriental woman and now you want to leave me and go to Beirut? We’re not going to ruin our lives to go with you just because we’re supposed to put up with the sudden whims of the Arab beast sleeping in your depths. You hid the beast from me and from yourself but today it’s woken up to take revenge on me and on you and on all of us.”

He didn’t tell her that a person cannot live without his mirrors. He’d exchanged Nasim, Hend, Jamal, Danny, and Malak for French mirrors but had come to feel he could no longer see himself in his new environment, as though Karim had evaporated and become shapeless. All he wanted to do was recover his image before deciding what he should do with the years that remained to him.

Karim was close to forty when he decided to agree to his brother’s proposal. He’d told Nasim on the phone that he wasn’t promising anything: “Let me see and then I’ll decide.” The strange thing was that the conversation between the two brothers had sounded as though it was taking place between two businessmen, without emotion or yearning or jokes – just dry words devoid of feeling, as though the twins were using words to cover words. The only emotional words spoken were uttered by Nasim: “Come now and we’ll see. We’ll soon be forty and life is passing us by without our noticing.”

The idea struck him with terror. The image occurred to him of Nasri
gripping his glass of wine with trembling hand, bringing it close to his lips, and saying life was like a dream; then his eyes would fill with tears before he burst out laughing. “It’s a lie. Life’s a lie and the only certain truth is that we’re all going to die.”

“What are you saying, Father? You’re still a young man,” Nasim would say.

Now Karim was discovering that the only truth was one’s later years. At forty a person discovers that what’s passed hasn’t passed; it’s more as though it’s slipped through one’s fingers, with what lies behind having become greater than what lies ahead.

The Lord of Literature was an eccentric teacher. Age had inscribed its wrinkles on his face, his eyes had grown smaller and his nose larger, and he’d become thin as a piece of string. He would shake with ecstasy as he recited the lines of al-Mutanabbi in which the poet mourns the passing of the years:

Karim felt that life had carried him off and stripped him of everything, leaving him a stranger in a strange land. Only those who’d died had been able to cheat the game by refusing to drink the cup of the slow slide into the abyss of the years.

He’d read Jamal’s texts and understood. The young Palestinian woman had never loved him and had probably been quite unaware that he’d harbored the emotion that now, as he sat in the dining room of his apartment in France, he claimed to feel. Maybe she’d wanted to meet him to escape
the fearful look in the eyes of her true beloved, who’d found a way to elude death at the last moment. Jamal had taken a firm grip on the only two moments at which a person can challenge life and vanquish time – those of love and death. Her first lover had wanted to strip her of death as the price of love but she’d refused. Karim on the other hand had been just a little story by means of which to prove to herself that she could hold both embers in her hands at once.

The sound of the waves at the Sporting Club swimming pool restaurant grew louder and Danny was drinking arak like there was no tomorrow. He looked strange, as though he weren’t the old Danny but a replica. It occurred to Karim that this Danny who kept telling him the same stories like an old man looked so much like Danny he could have been his twin. There was a relationship of resemblance, mingling, and contrast which resembled his own with his brother.

When they’d met after all those years, Karim had felt as though the roof of the sky had come closer and that the sea, instead of being an extension of the city, had come to resemble a valley threatening to swallow it. Memory had taken him back to a friend of Danny’s who’d called himself Camille. This Camille was an odd man. He’d come from his distant village in the Beqaa to be a “revolutionary writer,” as he styled himself. He spent most of his time in his small room in the Watwat district drinking vodka, eating meat, and writing. No one had read any of the novels he claimed to have written. He maintained that he refused to publish because he was writing for a time that had yet to arrive. He used to visit the military positions in Danny’s company, his little pointed beard giving off a smell of alcohol.

He asked him about Camille and Danny smiled, his eyes clouding over vacantly. He took a sip from his glass of arak. “We’re all criminals,” he said.

“No, that’s not true. Me, for instance – I never killed anyone,” said Karim.

“You never killed anyone because you’re a coward. Your cowardice stopped you from killing but you’re still a criminal.”

“I … I wanted to …”

“You wanted to kill but you couldn’t. I could, but what difference does it make? Even Khaled was part of the same story, the one whose heroes aren’t heroes. You’re going to reproach me because when Khaled was killed I vanished and when his wife came to visit me at home and knocked on the door I didn’t open it?”

“She told me. She came to my place and asked me about you.”

“And what did you do? You gathered up your things and took off for France and now you’ve come to see me so you can ask me why I betrayed Khaled? You’re a traitor too, my dear.”

“So what? I was afraid.”

“And I too could say I was afraid but I’d be lying to you the way you’re lying to me. The truth is I was tired and lonely and sad. When my wife left I felt I was finished. I knew she wanted to run away and not come back. I told her to do that because it would put an end to the story, but when she did it I went crazy, as though I’d forgotten what I’d known. Failure is when someone forgets the things he knows and ends up as though he knows nothing. Then it’s as if he died. I really did feel as though I were dead. You want me to have opened the door and saved the woman from death? Why didn’t you open your door?”

“I did but I told her I couldn’t hide her at my place as it wasn’t safe.”

“Meaning you lied to her and left her to die.”

“You’re telling me she died?”

“They killed her and her daughter. They went by their house and cut their throats with knives. They cut the mother’s throat and they cut the daughter’s throat and they wiped their blood-covered hands on the walls.”

“They cut their throats?”

“You’re telling me you didn’t know?”

“I’d left the country.”

“No – they cut their throats before you left.”

“And what about Sinalcol? Did they kill him or is he still alive?”

Karim’s voice, as he asked about Sinalcol, sounded like that of a comedian in an empty theater. He’d listened to how the woman and her daughter had ended up with their throats slit. It was the completion of vengeance, a way of making Khaled pay the full price. But instead of feeling ashamed and staying silent, all he could think to do was ask about a ghost of whose existence nobody was even sure.

Danny looked at him with half-closed eyes and said he had to go. He asked for the bill, paid, refusing Karim’s attempt to do so, put his weight on his stick, and limped off without looking back.

H
END COULDN
’
T
put life with her husband into any sort of context. The man who’d taken possession of her heart while she’d been momentarily distracted was so full of inconsis​tencies she’d come to feel she wasn’t living with just one man. There were many men within the man who had given up dealing in drugs and gone into timber and petrol imports. He’d be tender when the boys needed tenderness, amorous when he felt the need for love, lewd and foulmouthed with her in bed if he’d had to much to drink, sweet when sleeping next to her like a child, frantic when he failed to find her at his side, hilarious when facing difficulties – a mass of inconsis​tencies gathered together in one man. She didn’t know whether he loved her or whether marrying her was simply his way of taking revenge on fate, an attempt to prove he deserved better than his brother because he was braver and more truthful with himself and with others.

Nasim was incapable of hiding his feelings. Things traced themselves on his face as though it were a blank page waiting to be inscribed with the truth. It followed that he couldn’t lie to or hide anything from his wife or invent excuses with which to cover for himself, as most people do.

“Don’t lie, I can read everything in your face,” Hend had told him after she’d stayed up for him one night till three in the morning. It was raining and there was shelling. She’d felt in her heart that there was bad news and she believed her heart because it never lied to her. She’d had an intuition that her husband had been killed and his body thrown under a bridge, as was the custom in those days, so she’d sat vacantly in the living room. The idea of her husband’s death had struck her hard but she hadn’t wept. Even sorrow had evaporated before her feeling of emptiness.

When he returned she was surprised he wasn’t dead. She looked at him sideways with her closed eyes and said nothing.

“I’m sorry, love, you must have been worried but you know the phone isn’t working.”

“…”

“Come on, let’s go to bed.”

“…”

She got up sluggishly and said she’d been surprised by his return. She’d been sure he was dead and was shocked at not being glad to see him. She said all she’d wanted while waiting was that he’d come back, “and then I gave in to the idea of death. I was sure you’d died and it’s odd but I relaxed. Instead of getting upset, I got sleepy. Death makes one sleepy.”

She watched his face while he got undressed and said she didn’t want him to talk because she knew everything and was amazed that he’d risk his life in the dead of the Beirut night with all its dangers for the sake of a woman of that sort.

“I told you, I had work and I want to go to sleep. Please, I don’t have the energy left to file a police report with you.”

She said she wanted to remind him that she could read everything in his face, that she didn’t need to listen to his lies and knew everything because her life with him had taught her how to smell other women. “You know
something? You’ve made me forget what a man smells like. Whenever you come near me I smell women and right now I smell women and women are written all over your face. You know the worst thing about you now? The worst thing is that because of you I can’t get to sleep. Your supposed death made me sleepy and your infidelities have woken me up again. Keep away from me. I don’t want to hear a word.”

How was he to explain to her that he hadn’t been unfaithful to her, had never been unfaithful to her in his life, and that all this had nothing to do with him? It was as though the person who went out with women wasn’t him but another man. He’d wanted to say this, but he knew that words turned into wounds for this woman whom he loved.

He hadn’t told her that since marrying her he hadn’t been out with another woman. All the women he’d been out with were whores and a whore, though a woman, isn’t like other women: she has the shape of a woman but she doesn’t remain on the body or leave her traces on the soul.

Nasim knew this wasn’t true but “the war makes wrong right,” as Nasri used to say. Nasim’s double disappointment had been with Suzanne, whom he’d never abandoned even though she’d abandoned him as a result of his father’s stupidity and fear for his son – despite which he still dared to maintain that whores didn’t remain on the body or leave their fingerprints on the soul. Nasim hadn’t put his relationship with Suzanne in the same category as his relationships with prostitutes; she’d been a different story. He’d gone to her in the midst of the shelling to pluck her from the souk after it turned into a battleground and the Phalangist militia started raping women preliminary to issuing them with a warning that they had to get out.

Nasim had been sitting with several youths from the SKS, the Phalangist police, in the barracks in the Three Moons School in Ashrafieh, drinking arak with them, smoking hashish, and counting the shells when he’d had a vision of Suzanne. The boys were talking big and saying Boss Dib had
begun to put his threat into operation. Ronny, who was nineteen, spoke about how the day before he’d been at the Ashrafieh roundabout and the scene had been like something from a horror film, and Boss Dib had put an end to it. He’d pulled the boys out by sheer force because it was a revolting sight and told the women they had to leave the place by six p.m. that day. “And he said, ‘Tomorrow at six p.m. I’m going to shell before launching a new attack and anyone who’s here and doesn’t die in the shelling will be killed by the boys. My orders are clear. Got it?’ ”