Broken Mirrors (19 page)

“But you swore to me and said we were twins and twins don’t betray each other!”

“I swear I couldn’t help it.”

“Now I understand why Suzanne did to me what she did. You’re a traitor, a Jesuit, and an ape! You’re the one I should have killed.”

Nasim had never mentioned what Suzanne had done. He’d decided long
before to wipe the insult from his memory. He’d gone to Suzanne a month after his return home. She’d told him to keep away for a whole month, she didn’t want to see him till he’d spat out all the words in his heart. “Come back and see me in a month, on Sunday the tenth of January, and we’ll go to church together and take communion and then you can come back here.”

“Sunday! But you don’t work on Sunday and I’ll be wanting to …”

“You’re an idiot. With you it’s not called work, it’s called affection.”

On Sunday, January 10, Nasim left the apartment. Nasri was getting dressed so he could go and buy kenafeh-with-cheese when he heard his son say he was invited to breakfast at a friend’s and would be late getting back.

His father went on getting dressed as though he’d heard nothing and Nasim left the apartment without objection from his father.

Suzanne was walking to church with her women friends. When she saw him standing waiting for her at the entrance to the souk she turned her eyes away and kept going. He caught up with her. She turned round and said, “What have you come here for? Go back to your father.”

“But I came because we had a date.”

“Go back to your father and leave me alone. Who makes a date with a prostitute? I’m a prostitute, sonny, and you’re from a respectable family. Leave me alone, please!”

“But I love you!”

“Don’t use that word with me. I’ve heard it a lot already and when I believed it I turned into a cum rag. Ask your father and he’ll tell you. And you too, you’re hardly out of the egg and already up to no good. Leave me alone! You’re all liars.”

“Us?”

“Right, you. All of you. All men are liars. You and your father and all your kind. You’re the real prostitutes. For us it’s work. We have to prostitute ourselves to live, but who’s forcing you? Money, respect, dignity, and you
whore yourselves like streetwalkers. Leave me alone and go say hi to your father for me. If I see you here again I’ll break your leg.”

Laughter rose around Suzanne, who continued on her way to church.

Nasim’s heart broke that day. He felt a pain in his ribs and couldn’t inhale. He felt as though his ribs had pierced his chest wall and that his gullet was on fire. He’d bent his neck and couldn’t raise his head again. The woman he loved had made him a laughingstock and murdered him with her mocking laugh.

He told Hend when he asked her to marry him that he knew she had a broken heart and that he wasn’t offering to mend it for her. In fact, he was offering to join the breaks in his to those in hers. He said Fate had broken his heart too and he wanted her so that he could taste the flavor of the beginning of things once more, because all he could taste now was the end.

Suddenly this rough-spoken man became a mass of tenderness, but Hend hesitated all the same. She told her mother she was afraid of him because he was so like his brother. She said he was Karim but with coarser features. “It’s as though I’ve lived this moment before and heard these words, as though real isn’t real.”

Her mother smiled and said all men resembled one another in the end and marriage was a cup all women had to drink. “You have to marry, daughter.”

“But I don’t love Nasim, Mother.”

“The one you don’t love you come to love, and the one you love you come to hate. That’s life.”

“All right, but why?”

“Don’t make things complicated. See how it goes. It’s better than sitting at home like a care on the heart. Plus, at least you’ll get a child.”

Hend worked as a secretary in the office of the ophthal​mologist Said
Haddad. Her mother had found her the job after the family’s financial situation had become unbearable but Hend had been planning a different future for herself. She’d finished her degree in political science at the Lebanese University and wanted to find work befitting her aspirations. She dismissed the idea of trying to join the diplomatic corps because Mrs. Salma had said she’d rather live with war than with the humiliation of life abroad. So Hend worked for an advertising company but after three months found herself incapable of coming up endlessly with slogans for washing powders. She thought of working for a government department, but they weren’t taking on new employees, not to mention that to get a position you needed the backing of one of the country’s political leaders, none of whom she knew. In the end she agreed to work as a secretary at the ophthal​mologist’s, where she discovered a world of slavery she hadn’t believed still existed in this day and age. Her work was limited to recording the appointments of the patients and taking them in to see the doctor. True, she feared for her sight when faced with the horrible eye diseases she saw and with the idea of blindness that was ever present in the clinic, but in the end she got used to it and ceased to see, discovering that what mankind strives for is to not see. This is the secret of life: to get so used to things that you don’t see them; then when you do lose your sight you discover the enormity of your loss – or so Nasri told her when he spoke to her of his horror of “the blue water,” or cataracts, which devour the eye with their milky whiteness. Listening to her account of the world that she’d discovered in the ophthal​mologist’s clinic, Nasri had said things became important only when you lost them, “and I’ve lost everything or I’m about to. That’s why everything now is important to me.”

Nasim could understand nothing of what she was trying to tell him. She was announcing to her husband her categorical objection to the presence of a Sri Lankan or Asian maid in the house and Nasim was trying to persuade her to agree and provide a new model for how to treat maids, but she refused.

She’d tried to tell her husband about the world she’d seen at the ophthal​mologist’s clinic but he wouldn’t listen. He’d claimed he was listening but in fact he’d been thinking about other things. Her problem with the man was that from the very beginning he’d refused to listen to her. He’d just kept nodding his head, so she’d found no way out of agreeing to the marriage.

He’d told her about his broken heart but hadn’t mentioned Suzanne. He’d said his heart had been broken when the Jesuit discovered his high marks were the result of deception and he’d felt as though he’d been abandoned in the middle of the double world he inhabited with his brother.

“Karim did nothing. He saw how Father was torturing me, and he just watched. I felt he was happy and enjoyed watching, like when kids take pleasure in torturing a lizard or a kitten, and then I got it that he’s not my twin and the idea of one person with four eyes was an illusion. The discovery of the illusion broke my heart and I ran away from home, maybe Karim told you.”

“No, he didn’t tell me. Karim never talked about you or your father. Where did you go?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There was a woman who took pity on me, a distant relative. She found work for me at a restaurant.”

“And then?”

“Then Father came to the restaurant and started crying in front of everyone. I was embarrassed and went back home.”

“You slept at her place?”

“Of course. What, you think I should have slept on the street?”

“And was she pretty?”

“She was old enough to be my mother. She said, ‘You’re an orphan and I want to adopt you.’ ”

“And why did you go back with your father?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t really think. I just saw him crying and went with him and found myself back home.”

Nasim felt she didn’t believe him but he went on with his lie. He couldn’t retreat because he’d decided not to tell anyone about Suzanne. He’d promised her and he wouldn’t go back on his word. When she’d repulsed him like that on the day he’d gone to visit her as agreed, he’d felt as though the air supply around him had been cut off, that he was surrounded by walls. He’d gone back to the apartment and found his father waiting for him in front of a table resplendent with kibbeh nayyeh and local arak, a platter of kenafeh in the middle.

It hadn’t occurred to Nasim that Karim could have given away his secret to his father. He thought Suzanne must have done it herself, because she was a prostitute and one couldn’t trust a woman of that sort, and it was his mistake. When his brother confessed his betrayal to him, he felt the need to kill. He’d already discovered during the war that people possess only one instinct, which is to kill, and all other instincts branch out from that. You kill to eat, you kill to dominate, you kill to kill. The urge to kill had flashed out suddenly like lightning as he listened to his brother. Blood flashes in the eyes of killers – he’d seen it in his comrades’ eyes – and when his blood had flowed, close to the Salam football ground in Ashrafieh, he’d been scared of both the blood and the eyes. He’d run to his father’s house shaking with fear and collapsed the instant he reached the door, his knees no longer able to support him.

Listening to his brother’s confession, he’d felt the blood flash in his eyes. He said he’d kill him, lit a cigarette, dragged the smoke deep down in his lungs to disperse the ghosts of killing, closed his eyes, and said he was joking. But he wasn’t telling the truth then either.

Hend had told him his brother’s phantom hadn’t left her the past four years and she thought it would be difficult for her to love another man.

“Can you agree to marry a woman who has loved another man?”

He smiled and didn’t answer. He said he’d loved her since he first set eyes on her and hadn’t stopped loving her even when she was going out with his
brother. He said he’d retired from the field because he couldn’t be involved in a rivalry with his twin, but now he would compete with her heart. “Your heart can’t refuse my love because I love you from my heart.”

Hend decided that the man didn’t hear and discovered that other people don’t hear either; that it’s easier to see than to hear, because listening requires a kind of collusion with others. And she accepted him. She accepted him because she loved him, or so she thought. The whole thing seemed unreal to her, as though she was living in a dream and had rediscovered with Nasim something of the undulations that she had felt when in love with his older brother.

She said she didn’t want a Sri Lankan maid because she couldn’t forget the tears of a woman called Meena, who was in her early twenties, plump, lively, and full of the love of life. Meena would come every day to the clinic at three p.m. and give the doctor’s food to Hend, who would take it to the side room where Dr. Said would devour it in minutes before getting back to work.

Dr. Said, who was sixty-five, was one of those rare doctors who believe in medicine. Usually doctors order their patients not to smoke and impose a special diet on them because of cholesterol and blood pressure but don’t themselves stop smoking or devouring fatty foods or developing pot bellies. Dr. Said was different. He followed his own advice because he didn’t want to die. He told Hend he was a doctor and knew why people died, so he was going to close all doors in the face of death and live until he was fed up with life.

Hend couldn’t understand how someone who had passed sixty could not be fed up with life. What was he waiting for, now that all waiting had ended? She’d got fed up before making it to twenty-five. Beirut was the city of boredom and despair, she told the doctor, “because the war keeps repeating itself endlessly and I’m sick of war.”

The doctor told her he couldn’t understand why she talked that way.
“War’s like life. Everything in life repeats itself but it’s renewed or gives the impression of renewal. This is the secret of the seasons of nature, and the war too renews itself and its people and its slogans, as though it sums up all time. Modernity mixes in it with backwardness and to its rhythms we discover the meaning of history.”

“I’m sick of myself,” said Hend.

“There’s the mistake,” responded the doctor. “The secret of mankind is love. War gives us the illusion of history and the seasons give us the illusion of nature renewing itself, but love makes us live what is unique. We believe we’re living something special and exciting that no one but us has ever lived. It seems you’re not in love, my dear, even though you’re a cute little thing.”

“Please, doctor! No love, no worries!”

“You’re wrong, Hend. Love and you’ll see.”

“But first I have to find Mr. Right.”

“What are you talking about?” said the doctor. “Love love and you’ll see it can make anyone a Mr. Right.”

And that was how it was. Hend found herself loving love. Husky voices enchanted her and shining eyes intoxicated her. She was like someone sailing seas filled with surprises and discovered that her relationship with Karim had been practice for the love that awaited her.

In Nasim’s disappointment at life she saw her own, in his troubles with his father an echo of her own interrupted childhood, and in his feelings of loneliness something of her own despair and frustration after her sad experience with Meena. She learned from him not to ask. When she asked him about his work he said he didn’t want her to bother about such things and all she had to do was welcome his soul and his love and forget everything else. Hend washed her new world in the waters of the sea. Nasim rented a chalet at the Beach Club pool that looked out over the Bay of Jounieh and sank with his beloved into the saltiness of the sea. He was a champion
swimmer and she felt intoxicated whenever the water covered her brown body, which flashed in the sun.

Hend was amazed when Nasim didn’t try to sleep with her during the long chalet days. He would sip kisses from her lips and play around with her but went no further. Hend had no objections, but she wasn’t going to initiate matters. She was afraid of the savage look that drew itself over his eyes when he grew angry.

When they were on the verge of getting married, he asked where she’d like to spend their honeymoon. He proposed going to the island of Crete, in Greece, but she refused. “The honeymoon will be at the chalet in Jounieh,” she said.