Broken Mirrors (44 page)

He reached the entrance to the building, remembered his refrigerator was empty, and instead of climbing the stairs to the second floor, where he lived, walked about fifty meters to Emile the greengrocer’s. He bought a kilo of large mountain-grown tomatoes and a kilo of cucumbers. He looked at his watch. It was one. He hurried back to the building, took the stairs at a run, and on reaching his door gave a start, as though he’d received an electric shock. A man was standing there, waiting for him. He retreated a little, apologizing for being late; this tall brown-skinned man had to be her husband. He opened the door to the apartment and asked him to go ahead, but the man hesitated and said, “That won’t do – after you, doctor.” They entered more or less abreast, their shoulders bumping as they entered. The man pulled back and Karim turned slightly. “Sorry, sorry,” the man said, smiling. His white teeth showed. Karim patted him on the shoulder and asked how he was, and how Ghazala was.

The man went into the living room while Karim went to the kitchen, washed the tomatoes and cucumbers, prepared two glasses of arak, took the chicken out of the bag, and put two plates, two knives, and two forks on the Formica table. Then he invited the visitor to join him for lunch.

“You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, doctor. There’s no need for lunch. I just need a couple of words with you.”

“It’s no trouble, you’re most welcome,” said Karim. “I was passing Abu Esam’s, fancied a chicken, and thought we could have lunch and drink a glass of arak together.”

The man thanked him, then breathed the smell in deeply, relaxing his thick lower lip and closing his small eyes, which looked as though they’d
been gouged into his face. He said garlic called for arak: “I only have to smell garlic to think of arak.” He said he’d learned a lot about garlic from Madam Salma, Khawaja Nasim’s mother-in-law, and was always seeing her sitting in her daughter’s apartment peeling garlic and eating the cloves because garlic was good for blood pressure. “She eats raw garlic, with nothing else, and she told me about its health benefits. Madam Salma says that a clove of garlic in the morning opens the heart just like the sun opens the day, even with fried eggs. There’s nothing better than fried eggs with garlic. That’s how we eat eggs in the Jabal. We fry them with garlic and that’s it. I don’t know where Ghazala learned to do them with sumac, I like just garlic. It reminds me of the way my mother used to smell.”

When Matrouk started talking about eggs and sumac, Karim felt the fellow had come to the point and put him in the dock from the outset. Matrouk drank a little from the glass of arak in front of him. He picked up the grilled chicken and started breaking it apart with his hands. He looked at the doctor and said he was sorry but he could only eat using his hands. “Ghazala always laughs at me. She says I was born a peasant and I’ll die a peasant, but I can’t taste the food properly unless I eat with my hands.” He took a chicken thigh and put it on the doctor’s plate.

“I prefer the breast,” said Karim.

“ ‘Breast for the bereft,’ as they say,” answered Matrouk.

“The breast’s healthier because it doesn’t have fat.”

“Whatever you say, doctor,” said Matrouk. He took away the thigh and put a piece of breast in its place, saying food without fat had no taste.

They drank and ate in silence. Suddenly, Matrouk stood up, tugged at something at his waist with an irritated expression, pulled out a revolver, laid it on the table, and went on eating.

The doctor choked and found himself unable to swallow a morsel of food that had lodged in his throat. He picked up his glass of arak with a
trembling hand and took a large gulp, feeling the blood drain from his face. Matrouk’s expression changed when he placed the revolver on the table next to the chicken breast, which the doctor hadn’t yet eaten. The anger that had creased his brow dissolved; it sagged down into his facial features, which lengthened with sadness. He stopped eating and looked at the doctor with eyes so dimmed with grief that he failed to notice the panic that had transformed his host into a wet rag. There was silence, through which they could hear each other breathing, and then Matrouk suddenly broke the silence, cleared his throat, drank a sip of water, and told the doctor that he’d come to consult him about Ghazala. And he started to talk.

He said that at first he’d decided to kill her. “I found out she was being unfaithful to me with another man and when a woman’s unfaithful to her husband, only blood will wash out the stain.” Matrouk lit a cigarette and said later he’d changed his mind. “How can I kill her? She’s the mother of my children and I love her.” He said he’d changed his mind, picked up the revolver and started fiddling with it, turning it over in his hands. He looked at the doctor and saw the terror that had seized him. “It looks like you’re afraid of guns.”

Karim had no idea what happened next. Did he just imagine that the man cried? Or had Matrouk’s tears really fallen onto his cheeks, so that he had to wipe them off with a napkin on the table and then blow his nose at length before saying he’d decided to kill her lover?

“What do you say, doctor? I thought I’d kill the man and get some relief. I oiled the gun, loaded it, and said to myself, ‘The second I see his face, I’ll empty six bullets into his head and get some relief.’ ”

Had the man come to torture him psycholo​gically before killing him? Karim didn’t know where he found the courage, but he picked up his glass and decided to drink it all in one go before telling Matrouk, “Get it over with then and kill me. You don’t have to cry for me before shooting me.
Shoot me and leave me alone.” But he didn’t say it. And at the instant that he began drinking, Matrouk brought his fist down on the table and started to shake. He stood up, picked up the revolver, tucked it once more into his belt, and started walking about in the kitchen, talking. It came to Karim that he wasn’t the person accused. The man whom Ghazala loved, and on whose account she’d threatened to kill herself should her husband do him any harm, was some other man – a young man of twenty-five, a member of the Amal Movement militia. “Some runt of a kid five years younger than her. I don’t know what she sees in him, he’s an ugly little shit not worth a damn.”

He said he’d discovered her unfaithfulness because he’d sensed it. “It makes me embarrassed to tell you, doctor. I could see she was all rosy and happy and getting more beautiful all the time. I just had to get near her and I could feel she was hot as fire. She’d come back from seeing him all warmed up and rosy. Then, you know what I found out? Really, it makes me embarrassed, doctor. I found out she was giving him money and gold. I work like a donkey and the money just disappears, and when I found the gold ring wrapped up in a bit of cloth and stuffed at the bottom of the drawer I started to get it. I decided to follow her. I followed her. She got on the bus and set off for a shack in Shayyah, and before she could knock on the door of his house I grabbed her by the shoulder and told her, ‘I know you’re going to see someone. Give me the handkerchief you’ve wrapped the ring in.’ I pulled the handkerchief out of her hand and heard the sound of the ring as it fell on the ground. She knelt down, picked it up, and said, ‘I got this with my money. It’s none of your business.’ ”

Matrouk said at that very moment the door of the shack opened and a short, thin young man appeared. His black beard covered his face and he was carrying a Kalashnikov. “He looked at me, the fury flashing in his eyes, gestured with his machine gun, and I released her shoulders. She slipped
from my hands and bent her head to pass beneath his gun and enter the house.”

Matrouk had found himself returning the way he’d come. He reached his apartment and smashed the plates and glasses. “In the evening she came home. I’d thought she wasn’t coming back but she came back like nothing had happened, like she’d been to see my mother. Her face was rosy and her eyes drowsy. She entered the house like normal and ran to the kitchen to make dinner. When she saw the plates broken and thrown on the floor, instead of behaving like someone who’s done something wrong she began screaming at me for breaking the plates. She’s the one who did something wrong, doctor, isn’t that right? What had I done? I should have cut her throat at the door to the house like a real man. She started wailing and the neighbors came. You know how Mar Elias Hollow has people from all over – Sri Lankans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Syrians like us. The woman whose shame had been exposed exposed me to shame and everyone started telling me, ‘Shame on you, Matrouk! What kind of person beats his wife these days?’ Even the children stood in front of her legs and started cursing me.”

Matrouk said she’d cried and made her children cry and the neighbors had tried to make peace between the couple. “The metropolitan came. You must have heard of the metropolitan, his real name is Ramzi, and people in the Hollow would do anything for him. He’s Druze like us, from a village called Maasir el-Shouf. They call him the metropolitan because after the massacre in the village he went to the church and put on priest’s clothes and started walking around the village square singing in Syriac. He said he’d learned Syriac at the nuns’ school. He talked about things that happened in the war that no one should talk about, doctor, but I don’t know why, everybody loves him. The point is the metropolitan honored us with a visit
and when he arrived everyone shut up. He looked at Ghazala and told her, ‘Clean the house quick!’ and she ran into the kitchen and set to work and then he looked at me and said, ‘Go and kiss your wife’s head, your wife’s an excellent woman.’ ”

Matrouk said that once all was quiet again and the children asleep, Ghazala had told him she wanted him to know she hadn’t stolen money to buy the gold ring for Azab. “The ring was a present from Dr. Karim and you can ask him if you don’t believe me.” When Matrouk answered her by saying he was going to kill the short ugly fellow called Azab she replied that she’d kill herself. “If you kill him I’ll pour paraffin over myself and set myself on fire.”

Matrouk sat back down on his chair. He looked into the doctor’s astonished eyes and asked him if what Ghazala had said was true. “Tell me you gave her the ring, doctor, and set my mind at rest.” Karim didn’t know how to answer. He felt sympathy for Matrouk, as they had in common the fact that they’d both been made fools of. He felt like raising his glass and drinking a toast to betrayal, but the man’s confused glances and wandering eyes decided him against it and he contented himself with nodding yes.

The man looked as though a load had been taken off his mind, said he hadn’t told anyone else what had happened, and asked him to keep it a secret.

“So are you going to kill Azab?” asked Karim.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” answered Matrouk. “I love her and she told me she’d given it up once and for all and that it had been like she was possessed by some demon but now she was free of it and that Azab hadn’t done anything bad. He’d fallen in love with her and then when he saw you with me and lifted the Kalashnikov to protect me from you, he told me, ‘Go back, woman, to your house and children!’ Thank you, doctor. You’ve
reassured me but I don’t know what to do. Whenever I try to sleep with her it feels like knives in my heart and bits of glass in my throat. What do you think I should do?”

“Ask the metropolitan,” said Karim. He stood up and began carrying the dishes to the sink.

“No, no, please, doctor – leave it to me,” said Matrouk as he began washing the dishes.

After Matrouk left, Karim sat alone in the living room. He closed his eyes in the hope of summoning up the drowsiness of a siesta. He felt he was the real dupe in the affair. “I was like the goose that laid the golden eggs for Azab and Ghazala’s passion for him. I’m just like the Yoyo. The Yoyo killed himself because the woman he loved was unfaithful to him but what am I supposed to do?”

Karim hadn’t been in love with Ghazala. Even if he had been and had told her some of his stories, all the love had flown away when he came face to face with Matrouk’s revolver and felt the terror it sent through his limbs.

How though could the husband have swallowed her infidelity? Karim believed males couldn’t take infidelity, and that the least Matrouk should have done was divorce his wife. Naturally, a man such as Karim could not in any way support people killing their wives, or what were technically known as “honor killings.” All the same, he secretly wished someone would kill Ghazala. Jealousy cries out for murder. When the woman you love betrays you, you both obsess over her more and hate her more. Only death can extinguish the flames burning in your breast. Death extinguishes everything, because death is the moment that lays the foundation for a space where everything is clear.

Karim was amazed at the attitude of the deceived husband and never questioned himself or his own views. He contented himself with supposing
he’d never loved Ghazala, that his relationship with her had been purely sexual, and that Matrouk’s visit had been enough to erase the story from his emotional world.

This wasn’t, however, the truth. The truth was that Karim’s affair with Muna had been an attempt to escape the impact Ghazala had had on him; he’d found himself getting more and more immersed in his relationship with that woman, who wanted no attachments, and who had, indeed, wanted her affair with Karim to be like one between passing travelers. “You’re leaving now and I’m leaving in a little while so let’s keep it light. Please, I don’t like things to get heavy,” Muna had told him when he found himself raving about “the love that grants one the capacity to hover in the heavens of the soul.” At such moments he was recalling Ghazala as she jumped up and ran into the kitchen, as though flying. He spoke to Muna of hovering and before his eyes he saw Ghazala, but it was Muna who, unawares, would later cast him into the inferno of Sinalcol in the alleyways of Tripoli, and who, by recounting the stories of her husband’s father, made him remember the pain.

Ghazala remained a question mark and Muna couldn’t hover. It fell to Karim to find a solution that would allow him to come to terms with his sense of humiliation. This was not due to Ghazala’s betrayal. Her betrayal of him was logical, for she’d found in him a lover willing to accept anything because of his lust for her, an accessory to her great passion for the militia boy who’d stolen her heart with his gallantry, courage, and sad eyes. Karim’s humiliation was the consequence of his having deceived himself.