Broken Mirrors (21 page)

“We’re not East either, madam. Whole world become West, all of us imitating all of us, which is why sun sets and you don’t know where it’s going to rise.”

Through Meena, Hend discovered a world fenced about with secrets and bitter experiences. She began to notice the theater of balcony friendships and how the maids who lived at the backs of buildings with closed doors went out onto balconies where they communicated in sign language for fear that their mistresses might notice, because they were forbidden to speak.

“What about you?”

“I’m different. Mr. George not let madam take passport and close door and he say this not humane. Meena’s a human being. If she wants to leave work, she can go but of course Meena not leave. When it was war with Israel we stayed in the apartment. The doctor not able to leave work. Then suicides begin. Mr. George say to the doctor we must go. We went to Brummana. Brummana very nice. I wished we stayed.”

In 1982 people left Beirut to escape the Israeli invasion and left the maids behind in locked apartments, thinking they wouldn’t be away long. However, the siege and shelling of Beirut lasted three whole months, resulting in a tragedy when five maids killed themselves by throwing themselves off balconies before the fighters could force the doors to the apartments.

Meena spent a large part of the war in Brummana because Mr. George said life in Beirut had become intolerable.

“Who’s this Mr. George?” Hend asked.

Meena’s long neck swayed and a smile sketched itself on her lips before she answered that he was the doctor’s only son: he had studied law and was a gentleman.

When Meena phoned Hend and asked her to meet her outside the clinic, Hend invited her to meet her at Chez Jean in Ashrafieh. Hend arrived at eight p.m. to find Meena standing on the sidewalk outside the café, waiting for her. Meena said she’d arrived early but the waiter had thrown her out. “This is a respectable establishment,” he’d said. “We don’t let your kind in.”

“Don’t be upset,” Hend had said. “Walk home with me.”

At home Meena had told her story. She said she’d come to say goodbye because she was going back to her country and wanted to ask her about that ten thousand dollars that the doctor had offered her, and to tell her that she was at a loss and didn’t know what to do.

“We have to take them to court. Are you certain that George is the baby’s father?”

“
Yes-madam
.”

“Don’t keep saying madam and stop talking in Sri Lankan, please!”

Meena smiled and said that the Sri Lankan women called that way of talking “Lebanese,” and the way their mistresses talked to them made them laugh.

Meena told her story. Hend listened and could scarcely believe her ears. She said it was an old story and it would be better to get rid of the baby. She looked at Meena, saw the small fetus curled up inside her belly, and told the girl she was a donkey. “Why did you let him make a fool of you and sleep with you?”

In the summer of 1982, as Beirut writhed beneath the Israeli shelling moaning with thirst and flowing with blood, Meena discovered the virtues of pomegranates and lived in a sort of coma until a pomegranate seed turned into a fetus in the guts of the girl from Colombo.

The story didn’t resemble those of the maids who are raped in Egyptian films. Meena insisted she hadn’t been raped and that now she was paying
the price but that she felt humiliated because George hadn’t just abandoned her, he’d run away. The mistress said he’d gone to America to pursue his studies at Harvard University.

“I left the apartment yesterday and went to live with my friend Mali in Sadd el-Bushriyeh.”

“We’ll bring a case and force them to acknowledge the child,” said Hend.

Hend had only convinced Meena with difficulty of the necessity of staying in Beirut and bringing a court case against George because the girl didn’t want anything, or didn’t know what she wanted.

“The bastard left you and ran off. He has to pay the price.”

Hend didn’t know how Meena had found out that George hadn’t run away, that he’d wanted her up to the last moment but could do nothing because he was afraid his father might die. They’d quarreled, George saying he didn’t know what he was supposed to do and the father yelling that the maid must be forced to get an abortion. Suddenly Dr. Said had fainted and fallen to the floor. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctor diagnosed a stroke and said Dr. Said would have to take care of his health.

The doctor in charge of the case looked at George and said, “Your father’s an old man and you have to keep an eye on him. The worst thing for someone with a heart problem is getting upset. Be careful no one lets that happen.”

Meena said love had taken her by surprise. The Sri Lankan girl who had found herself compelled to work as a maid in Lebanon had arrived in Beirut without any idea of what it meant to live in a city torn apart by war.

She’d gathered that it was better to go to Lebanon than to the Gulf States. The domestic workers’ contractor in Colombo had said Lebanon was better even with the war, and when she asked about the war she was told it was like the war of the Tamil Tigers in her own country. From this she
understood that Beirut was like Colombo – the war affected only its most far-flung splinters. But they’d lied to her: the war was in the heart of Beirut, and the Lebanese may well treat their maids worse.

Meena arrived at Beirut airport to find that maids were treated like cattle. No sooner had she got off the plane than the Sri Lankan women were told to gather and were put in a closed room. A soldier came, took everyone’s passports, and told them not to talk. She found herself in a small room like a prison cell where she remained for about two hours. Then an officer carrying a cane in his hand came and started reading out names. When a young woman heard her name she followed the motion of the officer’s cane and went to stand in front of the door to the room. Eventually the officer had read out the names of all the women in the room and led them outside, where they found three contractors waiting for them, two men and a woman, waving their passports. Meena stood there not knowing what to do. She looked at the officer and asked him about her passport; his answer was a blow with his cane on the back of her neck and a loud laugh. She stopped in her tracks and he gave her another blow with the stick and said something in Arabic. Meena looked at him as though stunned and burst into tears. She saw a man waving a passport and running toward her. He grabbed her hand and took her out to the baggage area. She took her suitcase and found herself stuffed with other maids into a pickup, which took them to an office.

She spent her first night in a closed room resembling the one at the airport and in the morning the white-haired man opened the door and she heard her name. She went out of the room, which had filled with the smell of sweat, and breathed air for the first time. And her mistress was waiting for her.

The man had asked for her passport and pointed to her mistress, who nodded her head and said,
Yalla, yalla!
It was the first Arabic word she learned. The mistress spoke to her in a strange kind of English that had no
trace of verbs, so that she’d say
passport with me
and gesture with her hand toward her chest. Meena answered that she wanted to keep her passport but the mistress insisted on speaking to her in that strange language, saying the conditions of the contract stipulated that the passport stay with her; she would give it back to Meena when the contract was over and she wanted to go back to her country. She made a gesture like a bird beating its wings to clarify the idea.

The bizarre world that Meena had entered quickly started to fall into place. The mistress continued to treat her with arrogance, but the doctor was kind and so was his son. She discovered that things weren’t as bad as they seemed because she was lucky compared to the friends from whom she learned the language of the balconies.

Meena learned Arabic from the television and began leaving the apartment daily to take food to the doctor, and she built herself a world out of waiting. She made a hundred dollars a month, seventy of which she sent to her family and the rest of which she saved, spending nothing on herself. She supposed that after five years, when she’d be twenty-four, she’d return to her country with about fifteen hundred dollars. She’d join the teachers’ college again, study for three years, graduate as a teacher of English, and get married.

In five years her brother would be twenty and he’d have to find work and take over responsibility for the family. She’d decided therefore to go on studying English in Beirut and to learn Arabic, too.

She told Hend her situation was different and she meant it.

The difference she was referring to wasn’t attributable simply to the doctor’s kindness and sympathy but because she’d been able to impose her presence on the family. She became the household’s “little mistress,” as George called her. She cooked all the Lebanese dishes, cleaned the apartment, and took care of everyone. Even the mistress came to like her, though she insisted on continuing to talk Sri Lankan English with her while
holding her nose, which had shrunk following unsuccessful cosmetic surgery, up high, as though she smelled something bad.

Meena couldn’t recall George being present in her life at all. The young man would leave the apartment in the morning and not get back until night. Meena rarely saw him in the apartment. Dr. Said joked with her about how beautiful she was and would say she’d arrived ten years too late. “If you’d come ten years ago, I would have been in trouble, but now
no
. The engine’s kaput and gone rusty, my dear, and it’s all down to age and the madam.”

Meena had imposed her presence and felt as though her loneliness in this strange city and her dealings with the Lebanese, who behaved as though they were the most refined nation in the world even though they spent all their time cutting each other’s throats, were the desert she must cross in order to discover herself, as her blind grandmother had taught her.

She met other girls from her country only on Sunday, when she went to the church of Saint Francis. Meena wasn’t a Christian but church was her only way of meeting colleagues. She was convinced that prayer meant contemplation of the self, that the Buddha was manifest everywhere, and that she would find repose in the burning candles fragrant with incense.

Each Sunday she returned to the apartment feeling sad after having listened to stories of oppression, torment, and even rape. She felt she’d fallen into a trap and there was nothing she could do about it. At church she also met a group of young Lebanese men and women who would come from time to time and ask how the maids were, promising them help. Meena realized there was a barrier inside every Lebanese person that prevented all empathy and recognition of the other. Hatred exists everywhere and she remembered the terror she’d felt in Colombo. The same terror, the same war.

Meena knew all this and felt it deep inside her, so what had happened to put her in this quandary?

Hend said Dr. Said had put on a show for his son. “You think you can tell me anything about him? I know him inside out, he’s the biggest play actor in the world. All the time he’s putting on an act for his patients and pretending to be sicker than they are when actually he’s as healthy as a monkey.”

“
No-madam
, I know him. I just don’t know why he did that.”

“What
I
want to know,” said Hend, “is why
you
did that.”

The sun was setting behind the pine trees and Meena was standing on the balcony of the Brummana house alone. She could see a bo tree in the midst of the forest. She could hear the tree speak in the wind that blew through its branches. She felt like going down from the balcony to the tree and asking it to rid her ears of the sound of lamentation that filled the skies of Beirut. She saw her grandmother sitting beneath the holy tree looking at her and speaking sounds that Meena couldn’t hear. Her grandmother had said that the sound of the wind in the bo tree leaves was the voice of the dead. “The dead never leave us. They talk to us through the sounds of the branches, they care about us, and they teach us what to do.”

Meena heard the voices of the dead and saw the water. She didn’t understand what had happened to her in Lebanon. She felt lonely, as though she’d gone deaf. Arabic, which she had tried to learn, was intractable and closed, and the English she used to know had begun to fade away into that strange linguistic mix her mistress used in her dealings with her. So she sought refuge in water. She spent so much time washing and scrubbing the house that she made the mistress angry. It was true that the building where Dr. Said lived had an electric generator and an artesian well but the mistress lived in a state of constant terror at the idea of the city running out of water. Meena therefore exploited the times when the mistress was out of the house to shower and play with water, especially on the large, wide balcony.

The obsession with cleanliness, with twice-daily showers, and with
picking everything up to wash made Dr. Said laugh. He saw in it repressed desires and told his wife to leave the girl alone, saying “when the well runs dry we’ll decide what to do.”

This woman of water and soap hated Lebanese food and found herself without a sense of taste. She’d learned to cook all the different Lebanese dishes but for herself she cooked her own food, mixed with spices, hot pepper, and the flavor of life. She couldn’t fathom the attitude of her mistress, who, as soon as she smelled the food that Meena was preparing in a corner of the large kitchen, would hold her nose and open the windows, screaming, “
Windows! Open windows!
” in the maid’s face.

When the doctor decided to go up to Brummana to escape the inferno of the Israeli invasion, Meena felt a terrible sense of estrangement. Something had changed in these Lebanese who fled the sounds of shells in Beirut for the mountain resort, which soon was teeming with people. She no longer liked leaving the house because the comments people made on the streets were full of racism, and in the eyes of the young men she could read hatred and rapine.