Broken Mirrors (43 page)

The affair with Muna came about by coincidence and was innocent compared to the one with Ghazala. The love he practiced with Muna was full of concealment and shyness. The woman, who had come to him to have her skin treated, said nothing in bed. He would feel her interior quiverings, though not even a sigh escaped her, as though her thin body was the opposite of Ghazala’s in every way.

Why then had he initiated an affair with this woman in the midst of the waves of desire that wooed him? Was it because he wanted to extinguish his desire for Ghazala’s body, that storehouse of inexhaustible convolutions of lust, in that of another woman who seemed soaked in drowsiness and governed by shyness?

Karim didn’t know the answer, or at least he did but didn’t dare confess that he was being an out-and-out bastard. That was what Sawsan had told his brother when he gave her a respectable old age and saved her from abuse
and death. For him to say he was a bastard, though, was meaningless. He hadn’t come to Beirut for the sake of Ghazala or Muna, he’d come for the sake of another woman. He’d discovered, however, the moment he entered his brother’s apartment, that that woman no longer existed because the man she’d loved many years before had disappeared.

“The issue, my dear,” he’d said to Hend, “is that exile forces us to recompose ourselves; one has to reinvent oneself each day or lose oneself. But someone who remains in his own country and among his family doesn’t have to do anything. He stays who he is without effort and without having to try to fabricate himself.”

Hend smiled wryly and said exile had made him forget how people lived in Lebanon. “You’ve really got things the wrong way round. Beirut may be the only place in the world where a person has to reinvent himself every day.”

She spoke of Beirut as a city that was sliding. She said Beirut had decided to die ages ago but its inhabitants refused to acknowledge the fact; each time the city died its population raised it from the dead against its will. The hardest thing was not dying but coming back from the dead, because then one was obliged to reinvent oneself once more. That, she said, was why she didn’t like the story of Lazarus in the Bible. “Your brother doesn’t understand why I don’t like to take the children to church on Palm Sunday.”

“Who doesn’t like Palm Sunday?” said Karim.

“I don’t,” answered Hend.

“What about the candles and the olive branches and the palm leaves? You must be joking. The way I see it, those kinds of celebrations are the only nice thing about religion.”

She said she hated Palm Sunday because instead of singing hymns to Christ the King who had entered Jerusalem on the foal of an ass to be
crucified, they sang hymns of the resurrection of Lazarus. Had anyone asked Lazarus his opinion? The poor man hadn’t uttered a word after his rebirth. Only Khalil Hawi had understood and written his poem “Lazarus ’62,” in which the protagonist calls on the gravedigger to deepen his grave because he doesn’t want resurrection. “Have you read the poem?”

“Deepen the hole, gravedigger! Deepen it till it has no bottom!” intoned Karim.

“My, my! You like poetry now? When we were together you used to say poetry and Umm Kulthoum were the reason for the Arabs’ defeat.”

“And now I like Umm Kulthoum too but that’s not the point. The point is I don’t like symbols. Khalil Hawi did to Lazarus what the Bible did: he turned him from a person into a symbol. No doubt the poet was right, the man wanted to go back into his grave, but his reasons had nothing to do with the poet’s. He wanted to go back into the grave because he was afraid of life and the poet wanted to turn him into a symbol for the failure of Arab nationalism and the failure of the project of rebirth. I hate symbols in literature, politics, and life because in the end the symbolist poet or writer is obliged to die symbolically, meaning he never savors the flavor of death. That’s what happened to Ghassan Kanafani and that’s what Khalil Hawi did when he committed suicide,” said Karim.

Hend nodded but didn’t reply. She felt that this man who had come back from faraway France no longer meant anything to her. He’d become a mere form emptied of its content, a body without a soul.

Nasri had spoken to her once about the soul. Hend had been impatient with the spiritual transformation that had overtaken her husband, with how he had so suddenly donned the garb of faith and taken to insisting on going to church to attend mass on Sundays. He never forced her to go with him. He said he respected her opinion on religion, but had discovered faith and would be taking the boys to church every Sunday. Hend made no comment.
Religious mania had seized the Lebanese during the civil war and there was no reason her husband should be immune. Devotion to religion was better than working for a Fascist party or taking or dealing in drugs. She told him he was free but had to leave the boys their freedom of choice and he shouldn’t put any pressure on them. He said children had to follow the religion of their fathers and that her view that he’d given up one opium in favor of another was naïve and not of their age, which was religious at all levels.

Nasri had come on a Sunday morning bearing manaqish with thyme and found Hend alone in the apartment. When he asked her where Nasim and the boys were a wry smile traced itself on her lips.

“No, my dear,” said Nasri, “you mustn’t make fun of your husband because he’s rediscovered his relationship with his Lord.”

“If that’s what you think why don’t you go to church too?” she asked.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you,” said Nasri.

What he said scared Hend. At first his words seemed pitiable but soon fear filled her eyes and the mockery in them died. The aging man spoke from the depths of his soul. His voice sounded rough and warm and tinged with sorrow.

He said he’d lived his whole life without faith in anything. “I had faith neither in religion nor in the beliefs of the secularists. The only thing I had faith in was life. I believe in life in spite of everything because life is magnanimous. Even when it takes, it takes so it can give. All my life I was certain my body was my soul and that I was an indivisible unity. Religion, my dear, rests on the division of the human self into two parts, body and soul, and some say it’s three parts, meaning body, spirit, and soul. All my life I could never understand the meaning of the spirit as something that is attached to the body and is extinguished with it but I’ve come to realize the meaning of the soul remaining alive after we die. I thought it was an illusion – how could the life of a beautiful woman continue without her body, and what
could that mean? These were myths, or so I thought, and I believed, and still do, that death is the end of everything. We go back to where we came from, and we came from nowhere. All the same … That ‘all the same’ did me in because it says everything while saying nothing. What matters, my daughter, is that I began to discover my mistake. I discovered it gradually as I aged. People liken old age to childhood but that’s wrong. Absolutely not. In childhood your body and soul grow together. In old age the body ages while the soul stays the same. I swear the only way I know I’m an old man is from the eyes of others or the pains in this incon​sequential body. Am I as incon​sequential as my body? It’s not possible. I can’t believe this is my body. It disgusts me now. But my soul is still as it was. That’s why I’ve begun to be convinced that a person is two, a body and a soul, which means in all probability that the soul has a life independent of the body.”

“Why don’t you do the same as your son and go to church?”

“That’s another subject. Belief in the existence of the soul and the issue of the existence of God have nothing to do with one another. Even if God exists I can’t bring myself to make peace with Him. I couldn’t accept such a thing for myself and He wouldn’t accept it either. No, it’s out of the question. But what I was trying to do was to ask you to be patient with Nasim. He may be right and we may be wrong.”

Hend told Karim that from the first time she’d seen him again at her house she’d called him Lazarus. “I began calling you Lazarus to myself and began seeing you as one who’d risen from the grave and didn’t know anything, like a sleepwalker: he walks and talks like a sleepwalker without understanding anyone, and without anyone understanding him. Why did you come back? Wouldn’t it have been better if you’d remained dead to us? We’d have been able to share our memories of you, sweet and sour. Now everything about you is sour.”

She said she hated him and hated herself and hated her emotions. “It’s as though I’ve been sentenced to life with this family. Plus you’ve reopened the story of Nasri’s death, which we’d all decided to forget. You came back and brought all the horrible memories back with you. From the first day, my mother said you hadn’t come to set up a hospital, you’d come to open graves, and I didn’t believe her. But then I discovered she was right and I shouldn’t have let my husband go ahead with the hospital project.”

“Your mother must know because of her extensive experience of life.”

“My mother’s the most honorable woman in the world. Careful now – don’t start being offensive and making insinuations about Salma!”

“I’m not talking about honor,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I’m talking about talking, but it doesn’t matter. You may be right, you probably are, but I’m here and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Ghazala disappeared. She melted away as though she’d never been, and when he badgered his brother for the reason he got a mysterious answer about a major problem between Ghazala and her husband. When he sought greater clarity his brother said he only knew what Matrouk had told him. Nasim said Matrouk had told him he’d been on the point of killing her but hadn’t done so out of pity for the children.

“Why did he want to kill her?”

“Really I don’t know,” answered Nasim. “Anyway, why are you so interested? I hope you haven’t fallen in love with the maid too.”

“God forbid! What a thing to say! I just wanted to know.”

Karim didn’t know what his brother meant by “too.” Had Nasim had an affair with her as well, or did he mean the deceived husband?

“Why didn’t he kill her?” asked Karim.

Nasim didn’t hear, or perhaps ignored, the question. He told him he’d be
sending him a Sri Lankan maid. She’d come to him once a week and “that way your problem will be solved.”

Three days later he got an unexpected phone call from Matrouk, Ghazala’s husband. The man’s voice was hoarse and hesitant. He introduced himself as “Ghazala’s husband – you don’t know me, doctor, but I’d like to come and see you tomorrow and have a cup of coffee.” The man said he’d come at one p.m., during the lunch break at the hospital site, and though he didn’t want to take a lot of the doctor’s time it couldn’t wait.

Karim didn’t sleep well that night. He felt he was in a trap and facing possible disaster all on his own. Why should the husband want to meet him? Had she told him? Had something made him suspicious? Also, he didn’t know what to say. Should he admit the truth or deny it? And what if she’d confessed? Wouldn’t his denial just be a confirmation of his bad faith?

Before going to bed he found himself phoning his wife. He didn’t know what impelled him. Was it loneliness or was he looking for a refuge now that he felt everything was closing in on him, as though he were in a darkened cell? He asked about the girls and said he missed them and heard Bernadette’s voice asking him tenderly to “come back to Montpellier because we’ve missed you and Nadine and Lara ask about you every day.” Why didn’t he come back, she asked, and what had he been thinking of to endanger his job and his position at the hospital in Montpellier? He said he’d be back soon but couldn’t abandon the project just then. He heard her kiss on the phone as she told him, before hanging up, that they’d be waiting for him.

He slept intermittently. In fact he didn’t sleep properly until dawn, so didn’t open his eyes until ten thirty in the morning. He phoned the architect to reassure himself that the work was progressing but couldn’t get hold of him. He dressed and walked the streets aimlessly. He walked to kill time. He didn’t like just waiting about.

He reached Sassine Square, took a seat at the sidewalk café, ordered a cup of coffee without sugar, swallowed down the bitter catch in the throat à la Ghazala, and contemplated the memorial to Bashir Gemayel and his comrades killed in Ashrafieh on the Feast of the Cross in 1982. The Phalangist militia leader was portrayed as a young man bursting with vitality, which was etched on his face in lines of shadow. He thought about the absurdity of the moment that had brought him – a former fighter in the leftist Palestinian Joint Forces – to sit opposite the image of the man who had once been the embodiment of the merciless enemy. He smiled when it occurred to him that only the dead can embody the vitality of life, for had Bashir lived to be sixty and died of an illness he would probably have committed additional horrors that no intercession could have erased.

He smoked three cigarettes, then began to feel hungry. His watch showed twelve thirty. He thought he’d better go home because the hour of his appointment with Matrouk was near. He decided to buy a grilled chicken sandwich from Abu Esam’s, next to his building. He walked in the direction of Sofiel, reached the Tabaris roundabout, turned right, entered Haramiyyeh Lane, and started the descent toward Gemmeizeh.

Thick dust in the air? Where had it come from? Borne on hot winds the dust formed a cover over the city, but Karim felt a shiver of cold. Since receiving that phone call from Matrouk he hadn’t known whether he was cold or hot. Everything had got mixed up with everything else. He felt he was about to faint; he leaned against the wall, rubbed his eyes, and continued on his way like a blind man. He reached Abu Esam’s place, saw grilled chickens turning on spits in front of the shop, fire surrounding them on all sides, and, instead of asking for a sandwich, as he’d decided to do at the café, he ordered a whole chicken. He could smell the arak Abu Esam was drinking to go with his salted chickpeas and decided he’d drink a glass of arak with the chicken. He took the grilled chicken, which Abu Esam had wrapped in
a flat loaf of white bread before putting the whole in a plastic bag alongside two small tubs of finely mashed garlic in olive oil. The smell of the garlic wafted everywhere and the man began salivating as he took the bag in his hand and set off for the apartment.