Broken Mirrors (4 page)

Salma was born nine years after her mother had stopped having children. When his wife got pregnant, Salim Mokhtar was sure God had decided to have mercy on him and give him a son who would keep his name alive; he named the boy Salah and sat down in front of his wife’s belly to wait for him.

The midwife didn’t dare come out of the room, which was swallowed up by the steam that rose from the basins of hot water. Even the child cloaked itself in the surrounding silence. The man heard the first sign of life in the form of a weak crying, quickly stifled. “No!” he cried. “It’s a girl? Salah has turned out a girl?” He left the house and only came back three months later, having slept in the fields and eaten green plants and earth. In the end, though, he did return and he fell captive to the beautiful child who gleamed with a whiteness the like of which none had seen, and once her three sisters had married their cousins, he took to speaking of her as his only daughter. Abu Salah was never seen now without his daughter Salma, whom he addressed as though she were a boy called Salah, and he never tired of playing with her or supervising her schoolwork, so much so that people thought he must have gone slightly mad.

Having completed her studies at the village school, Salma decided to go to the proper school in the town of Halba, which amounted to breaking every tradition of the village – traditions that forbade the education of girls or, when they allowed it, required that the girl not advance beyond the school under the village oak.

Salim Mokhtar put all these social usages behind him with a single leap and took to walking five kilometers every morning to take his daughter to school, then doing the same in the afternoon to bring her back home.

People said the man was in love with his daughter and had fallen victim
to her gray eyes, the purity of her white skin, and the magic of her smile. His wife said it was madness: the girl ought to stay at home, help her mother, and wait for a groom. “You’re crazy, Abu Salah. Who lets his daughter go to school like a boy? What are people going to say about you and me?”

But the man paid no attention and told everyone who asked that the world had changed and women weren’t part of the furniture, that he’d made up his mind and no one had the right to object.

Salma went to school for two years. Then along came the groom and the groom was the son of the owner of the land on which all the inhabitants of the village worked as laborers, so her father couldn’t refuse. When he told her, she wept and he wept at her weeping and said to her, “As you wish, my daughter. I am prepared to leave the village and go and work as a porter in the port of Tripoli for your sake, but please don’t cry.” But Salma wouldn’t stop weeping. Her father said he’d go to Sheikh Deyab and make his excuses but she shouted at him, “No!” and said she consented to the marriage.

Hend had never seen her mother’s village, which lay far away in the middle of a valley next to the Great Southern River, which ran, exhaling its perfume, along the edge of Kherbet el-Raheb, so she couldn’t situate her story. She told Karim she’d forgotten the details because memory needs a place, time erases memories, and people only stumble over their memories in the crevices of places.

The story, however, took an unexpected turn and ended in a series of tragedies that engraved themselves deeply in the memory of the people of the village.

Salma had suddenly choked back her tears, told her father she would marry the man, and gone to her wedding as if to a funeral. Her mother couldn’t understand Salma’s hesitation over an offer of marriage that had fallen upon her from the sky. The groom was a young man of twenty-five
and she was fifteen. He was the only son of a man who owned the lands of seven villages. The daughter of a poor laborer, she would be transformed into a lady whom all the women in the village would fall over one another to serve. She would live in a big stone house and leave their house of mud.

The story goes that the man was patient with Salma till patience itself could be patient no more. The first night he cut his hand to allow those waiting to cheer at the sight of a sheet spotted with virgin blood. On the second he approached her and she covered her face with her hands so that her tears wouldn’t fall on the ground, and he slept next to her and didn’t touch her. The third he took her hand and felt such a killing coldness that he pulled back. The fourth he said it wouldn’t do and she said, “Leave it till tomorrow.” The fifth she said she was sick and the sixth he asked her what she wanted and she said she wanted to go to school. He said she was asking the impossible and promised to bring Shaykh Hafez to teach her at home, but she said she wanted to study mathematics and science, so he laughed and said, “We’ll see.” The seventh night he took her by force. She wept and pleaded with him but he ripped off her clothes and flung her to the ground and opened her. That night a lot of blood flowed because Qasem Abd el-Karim couldn’t stop. Two days later, sitting next to her on the bed, he told her he’d tasted the sweetest honey in the world and that though a man didn’t usually apologize to a wife, he was going to. He said this and more and she bowed her head and covered herself in her tears. He said he wanted to weep because he loved her but that that would be unbecoming, and he left the room.

When Salma disappeared, Qasem couldn’t believe she’d gone off with another man. She’d lived with him six years and had had three boys by him, and then suddenly she’d vanished as though she’d never been. She disappeared, and so did all her belongings. She took everything: the clothes and the small mirror and the face towel that she perfumed with rosewater. And
when the report arrived that she was living with the agricultural engineer, the unsuccessful crime was committed.

Abu Salah wept and wailed before his feudal master, saying he’d kill the woman himself because she had sullied his honor, but his master looked at him with contempt and said, “No, it’s nothing to do with you. She’s ours. She was ours alive and she’ll be ours dead.”

The husband came, carrying a gun. He knocked on the door and the engineer opened it. The man fired, then went into the bedroom where Salma lay trembling, shot her and left.

“But he didn’t kill anyone,” said Hend. “Father was hit in the leg and my mother wasn’t hurt. The victim was my grandmother, Father’s mother, who was visiting her son to beg him to send the woman back to her husband, because she could smell blood.”

“It seems the blood my grandmother smelled was her own,” said Hend. The story ended with reconciliation, the dropping of the court case, and Salma’s marriage to her beloved.

The engineer died four years later of a clot in the brain and the first husband died too, killed during the peasant uprising in Akkar, and Salma had to swallow all these bitter pills at one go.

“I don’t know how to say this, but I never forgave her,” said Hend. “I lived all on my own. She put me in the Zahret el-Ehsan school as a half-boarder. I lived with the orphans who walk in funeral processions to collect donations and only went home at night. I’d come home with my eyes half closed and when I opened them again I’d find my mother had taken me back to school.”

“Childhood memories aren’t the story,” said Karim. “Childhoods are just scraps of memories that we patch together later to make up our story when we’re grown.”

The first time Hend told him the story and said how her mother had put
her in the boarding school so she could live her life the way she wanted and work in the office of Samir Yunes, the lawyer, he assumed that the woman, who was still a girl, had abandoned her daughter to be free to pursue her romantic involvement with “Uncle Samir,” as Hend called the lawyer. But the second time Hend told the story, she told it differently. She said her mother had gone to the lawyer to recover her rights to her three children and that she, Hend, had been jealous of her three brothers, whose pictures she’d never seen; that her mother had spent all her time finding people to intervene with Sheikh Deyab Abd el-Karim to allow her to see the boys; and that she’d tried to get in touch with her father to help him. The latter had told the young lawyer from Tripoli, whom Maître Samir had sent to see him, that his daughter was dead, that he was condemned to live in shame, and that he hadn’t seen his grandchildren since the day she’d run off with the engineer, because he no longer dared leave his house.

Hend said her mother had suffered greatly. She’d gone to everyone, had behaved like a mother bereaved, and had refused for the rest of her life to stop wearing her mourning clothes. When Uncle Samir asked her once, as he ate lunch at their apartment, why she didn’t stop wearing mourning clothes – seeing the man had died five years earlier – she said she wore black for herself, because she couldn’t see her children.

Hend said her mother had spent her life chasing a mirage, while she had spent her childhood jealous of her three brothers.

“My mother never stopped talking about them. The tears would run down her cheeks even though she wasn’t crying, and she’d talk of the three white moons, so beautiful that their light dazzled people, and she’d give me strange looks as though I was the one keeping her from them. I’d feel, I don’t know … I’d feel as though the night had stuck to my skin and I’d hate myself because I wasn’t white like my mother or the three moons.”

The third time, she told him how her mother was forced to work in the
lawyer’s office from dawn till dusk to make an honest living. “The money she inherited from my father ran out and she had no choice. My mother had learned how to type and went to the lawyer who’d been kind to her from the beginning and had tried to help her get her boys back. She worked for him for the rest of his life and became more than a secretary. If it hadn’t been for him, God rest his soul, we would have died of hunger.”

“He died too? Your mother must have salt on her thighs, as they say.”

“Don’t talk like that. My mother was a respectable woman.”

“But you told me he bought you the apartment – just like that, for charity’s sake?”

“I don’t know, but I do know that Uncle Samir left us something too, and my mother used to say that his wife was mad and kept having nervous breakdowns. The man lived an awful life even though he had the golden touch when it came to money.”

The fourth time she told him how much her mother loved her. “I know I’m her whole life. That’s why I don’t have the heart to leave her and why I agreed when she told me she wanted me and my husband to live with her.”

The fifth time Hend showed her exasperation. “I don’t know what she does at that old pharmacist’s place. I can’t understand her. She clings to me as though she loves me but I know she never has.”

“ ‘That pharmacist’ is my father,” said Karim.

“I know he’s your father. You’ve never told me anything about him. I’ve told you everything about my mother.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he answered.

Salma was everywhere. Karim met her for the first time when she was forty-five. He saw her coming out of the pharmacy with her short black dress that revealed the whiteness of her thighs and gave an indication of the possibilities of her firmly projecting breasts. He went into the pharmacy
smiling and Nasri said to him, “See the red plums? At forty a woman’s like a ripe plum and I love plums.”

Karim Shammas found the woman everywhere he looked. When he discovered she was Hend’s mother, he felt afraid, but it was too late to go back and he came to think there was a gap of silence that could not be bridged. He kept the secret to himself and avoided visiting Hend in her home so that he wouldn’t be reminded of that savage flash he’d once seen in her mother’s eyes.

He hadn’t talked about it even to his twin brother, so how could he speak of it with Hend? Mothers are off limits. “Thank God my mother died when I was little,” he’d said once to Hend.

“Doesn’t everyone love their mother?” Hend had asked in disbelief.

“No, not that. I meant something else,” he replied.

“What did you mean?” she asked.

“No, well, how can I put it? Maybe it was better that way because she didn’t have to put up with Father any longer.”

“Why? Did Uncle Nasri give her a hard time?”

“No, but his eye was very ‘white.’ ”

“What does that mean, ‘His eye was white’?”

The discussion ended in silence. He took her hand, kissed it, and said nothing. How was he supposed to tell a daughter about her mother when mothers were wrapped in the cotton wool of sanctity? How was he to tell her about the amazing potion his father had concocted from wild plants to make women his victims?

When Karim joined the medical school at the American University of Beirut, the secrets of the Shefa Pharmacy started to reveal themselves to him. Contempt for his father and hatred for his insatiable sexual appetite
grew within him. His father said he’d understand things when he grew older, and refused to let him enter the laboratory. “It’s the secrets of the profession, my son, and you refused to do pharmacy. Your brother, who was no good at school, knows more about pharmacy than you. One day, when you’re older, you’ll understand.”

Nasri Shammas was fifty when the incom​prehen​sible obsession struck him. His sex life had more or less settled down after his wife’s death. He’d refused to remarry “for the boys’ sake,” he used to say, and he believed that one marriage was enough for him and there was no need for a second round of sexual dissatis​faction. He took care of his needs with prostitutes. Once a week he’d go to a brothel in that celebrated street of prostitutes named after the greatest of Arab poets, al-Mutanabbi. Once, he told Nasim the hardest thing one could do was love a prostitute. “When that happens everything turns into a mirage. You’re thirsty and you drink thirst. You drink to quench your thirst and you find yourself thirsty again.” Nasim didn’t ask what the story, which everyone knew about, was because the man had become such an idiot he’d invited Sawsan to the apartment. The smell of scandal had spread through the neighborhood and the twins had felt ashamed.

As Karim had listened to his brother haltingly recount Hend’s version of his father’s death, he’d said he could see the woman in their apartment in front of him and remember how nauseous he’d felt.