Broken Mirrors (39 page)

“The man’s thoughts were very confused,” said Salma. “He came to see me a number of times but would stay for only a few minutes. I don’t know what happened to him during those last months. When he told me he couldn’t see anymore he said it was a psychological thing.

“ ‘I’ve stopped seeing because I hate myself. The whiteness has descended to save me from my own image. It’s so horrible. In the mirror I see the image of my father and hate myself. You know, the idea of the killing of the father is silly. If you kill him you’re killing yourself, and if you don’t kill him you’re committing suicide. I tried to explain the idea to Nasim but he can’t take in anything new and he decided that I meant to kill him when I did the operation on his thigh after he got hurt. And the other one, the smart one, isn’t here. I’m sure he’s become French and has made up his mind to forget us. And I hate people now. I see myself in their eyes, as though their eyes were mirrors. I spit on life!’ ”

Salma said that on his last visit to her, a week before his death, he’d complained that the image of his father was pursuing him. He said a person’s life wasn’t worth an onion skin and that the end was like the beginning because one was compelled to imitate someone else in order to exist. She said she could think of nothing to say and had tried to cheer him up. She told him she was going to make him a glass of lemonade the way he liked it, meaning by chopping the unpeeled lemon finely with sugar, then adding water, orange blossom water, and rosewater to it. “I left him sitting in the living room and when I came back with the lemonade he’d gone. That was the last time.”

Nasim asked what she’d done with the lemonade and she didn’t answer. A smile more like a grimace traced itself on his face as he gripped the glass of chilled lemonade his mother-in-law had brought him from the kitchen and drank it at one go. “Just like the departed,” said Salma. “Your father, God rest his soul, was like you, he loved lemonade. Sometimes he’d put qarqashalli biscuit into it and take out the bits with a spoon and eat them. God rest your soul, Nasri.”

When Karim told Ahmad Dakiz that he longed to visit Tripoli so that he could stop at Batroun on the way and stand in the Hilmi Café and drink the finely chopped Batroun lemonade whose flavor he craved so much, his brother looked at him in surprise and said, “You like lemonade too?” But Ahmad Dakiz picked on his words as a cue to say, “Who doesn’t like Batroun lemonade? Surely you must know the two verses that speak of lemonade and its relation to love?”

“Please, Ahmad, we don’t want to hear that,” said his wife, Muna.

“Let’s hear them,” said Nasim.

“The madam will get upset,” said Ahmad. “Whatever you say, my dear. I won’t, but if you ever want to go to the Fragrant City, and you should, you can forget about Batroun. Go to Ash’ash in the port. It’s a small café opposite the Dakiz Mosque where they make lemonade ice cream. It’s to die for. You get the authentic taste of sailors!”

Nasim smiled as he told his brother that the people of Tripoli have a strange way of talking and refer to bitter lemons as “sailors.”

“If you want to hear a really strange way of talking you should pay a visit to Ahmad’s father,” said Muna. “Tell them about your father, Ahmad.”

“I’d like to visit your father,” said Karim. “It’s been ages since I went to the Fragrant City.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Nasim.

“Many thanks, dear brother, but I’d rather go on my own.”

Ahmad wrote his father’s telephone number on a small piece of paper and gave it to Karim.

“But God help you if you get in touch with him! He’ll talk till kingdom come. Those old codgers don’t know how to stop talking once they get going.”

Later, in bed, Muna would recite the two lines of verse about lemonade to the doctor, rocking with laughter at the childishness of men:

Muna laughed, then said, “Ahmad thought he was giving me what I wanted but I was exhausted. He’d take me on trips to Tripoli, up to the Castle of Saint-Gilles, and give me a tour of the city’s markets, thinking that would make me fall in love with him. I did fall in love with him, I can’t deny it, and then I got sick of all the talk about love and told Ahmad, ‘Come on, let’s get married,’ and we did, and now we’re off to Canada.”

She told him men were like that. They know but they behave as though they don’t because they can’t face the truth. She laughed as she told Karim she was sure he was no different from other men in such matters, and that it was all attributable to a cowardice that could only be explained by men’s fear of women and of the secrets they believe they harbor.

Had Nasim been afraid of Hend and her secrets? She’d told him she didn’t know him. “After six years of marriage I’ve discovered I don’t know you.”

He told her she was mistaken and that she didn’t want to believe that he’d turned over a new leaf.

Hend would never be able to forget the night of December 22, 1988. Nasim had come home early carrying a large bag and a bottle of champagne.

“What’s that you’ve brought?” Hend asked.

“A present and champagne,” he said. He said he’d got a present for himself, for his birthday.

“I’m sorry, dear, I completely forgot it’s your birthday today.”

Hend always forgot her husband’s birthday and always apologized a few days later, when Nasim would say he didn’t like celebrating his birthday. That year he’d departed from custom and decided to celebrate his birthday in a special way.

“Okay, so let’s see the present,” she said.

“Not now,” he answered. “When the boys have gone to sleep we’ll open the champagne and you’ll see what a nice present I got.”

Later, Nasim opened the bottle of champagne and turned on the tape recorder with George Wassouf singing “Forget You?” by Umm Kulthoum. Hend stood up and turned down the tape recorder while they were drinking.

“Why did you turn it down?” Nasim asked.

“So I can talk to you,” she said.

“Tonight there’s no need to talk in words. Tonight we’re going to talk another language.” He bounded into the bedroom and returned carrying the gift.

He opened the bag, took out an oblong cardboard box wrapped in shiny red paper, and presented it to his wife.

“It’s your birthday today. The present’s supposed to be for you, not me,” said Hend as she took the gift from her husband.

“Open it!” he said.

“The present’s for me?”

“For you and for me. Just open it and see the lovely surprise. It’s something you never would have thought of.”

And a surprise it was!

When Hend took the Oriental dancer’s costume from the box she was speechless. She took the costume, threw it on the couch, hung her head, and said nothing.

Nasim stood up and went over to her. “It’s for you, my love. Today’s my birthday and I want you to dance.”

“Me?” she said in a husky voice, and burst into tears. She wept from the depths. Everything in her wept. She shook, rocked right and left like a mother that has lost her child, and moaned, though all that emerged from between her lips was a croak.

“Why are you behaving this way, Hend?” he asked. “All women dance for their husbands. What sin have I committed? I just want us to be happy.”

Hend pulled herself together, picked up the dancer’s costume, and threw it in his face. “Get out of here, you and your fucking prostitutes! You want to turn me into a prostitute like them?” It was the only time in her entire life that Hend had used bad language: never before had this shy brown-skinned woman used a vulgar expression; now she found herself with no choice and the abuse poured out of her. “God forgive me!” she said, and went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

The night of his birthday Nasim slept on the couch in the living room. He turned off the tape recorder, emptied the bottle of champagne into his guts, and went to sleep. Nasim had committed no mistake requiring an apology but the following evening he apologized all the same. He said he was sorry but Hend refused to forgive him. Later, when he announced his final turning over of a new leaf, she told him she forgave him everything except that one stupidity.

“I just want to know, what did you think I was?”

“Honestly, love, I meant no harm. All my friends’ women have dance costumes and dance for their men. I thought, why not, maybe our sex life will improve but ‘instead of setting the leg I broke it.’ I apologize a second time.”

He’d wanted to tell her that it was Ahmad Dakiz who had given him the idea but he didn’t so as not to complicate matters further, especially as Hend despised Muna and believed the woman could think of nothing but how to show off her sensuality, as though her whole body were one large multipurpose sex organ. Ahmad had told Nasim that the only way to overcome the tedium of married sex life was with games; he found Oriental dancing at home to be the best stimulus. Nasim was attracted to the idea but failed to interpret it correctly: Dakiz had been talking about stimuli for him, not for his wife. Nasim on the other hand suffered from frigidity in his wife, which was not about to be cured by making her dance.

“Is that how your friends are? They treat their women as though they were prostitutes?”

“Oriental dancing is a refined art, not something for prostitutes,” he said. “Do you know how belly dancing began? It began in Egypt in the days of the pharaohs and took place in temples as a rite of worship. The dancer used to arch her back to present her navel as a gift to the gods.”

“You’re trying to tell me that when you brought the dance costume and made me drink champagne you wanted me to pray? What do you take me for? An idiot?”

Hend didn’t like her husband’s turning over a new leaf, which had grown into a religious obsession, because she had no interest whatsoever in religion. She had never posed herself philosophical questions regarding the existence of God and didn’t think the issue concerned her. She’d grudgingly
agreed to let her children be baptized in church, “because it can’t be any other way,” as Nasri had said, but she kept religious rites and traditions out of her house. Likewise, the boys were totally shielded from such things, as she’d put them into the Lycée Français, a secular school.

Nasim was bowled over by his father’s death. He stopped spending his evenings outside the apartment and took to attending mass every Sunday. Then he began taking the boys to church with him and discovered that a lay organization existed to offer religion classes to children after mass. He enrolled the boys in Sunday school and things got to the point of his volunteering to teach in it himself. He started reading religious books and invited his wife to go to church with him and the boys. She refused and said that his religious mania was part of a general despair resulting from the long civil war.

She couldn’t explain how she’d agreed to go with him to one of those evening meetings called “vigils,” where a group of men and women met around a monk who looked as though he lived in a cave in the wilderness and whose flowing black robes spread out around him making him seem bodiless, or as though his body were made of some ethereal matter. His eyes were large but vacant and dead, in a face consumed by a long untrimmed beard. This monk had returned from Mount Athos in Greece, where he’d spent twenty years, to found a monastery in a distant village in Akkar. Hend had no idea what had brought him to Beirut or why this particular group of people gathered around him. She thought she’d hear about his experiences of “the mountain of the monks” in Greece. But the monk, whom they addressed as Father Fadi, disappointed her and uttered not a word. The vigil, when it began, consisted of the recitation by candlelight of endless prayers and hymns, in an atmosphere reminiscent of the summoning of spirits. The participants in the celebration appeared to be almost unconscious;
from time to time the lady of the house would appear carrying a brass brazier from which incense poured and give it to the monk, who would wave it right and left over the heads of the seated. Hend felt dizzy and drowsy and her eyelids began to droop, while the eyes of the monk, in contrast, would flash and gaze into hers before the light in them once more died out. She stayed about three hours, resisting sleep and fighting off the monk’s eyes, and at around one in the morning, when he raised his hand to announce a short break and cups of sage tea circulated, she turned to her husband and said they had to go home.

On that night, redolent of the scent of incense and the flavor of sage, Hend had a strange dream that came from she knew not where. She saw herself dressed in an Oriental dancer’s costume, surrounded by a circle of people praying. She was dancing like a professional, shaking her buttocks, going down on her knees, arching her belly, and then letting her head fall back and raising her navel toward the greedily waiting eyes of the monk.

S
HE SAID HER
name was Ghazala. She said she was from a village called Shuhba in Jabal el-Arab, or Jabal el-Durouz, in Syria. She said she was the mother of two small children and didn’t do houses but had said yes for Khawaja Nasim’s sake. “Nasim and Matrouk are like brothers. Matrouk hasn’t worked with anyone else in Lebanon. To tell you the truth, doctor, if it hadn’t been for your brother, we wouldn’t have stayed a moment in Beirut. Who can live in this city? When I married Matrouk all I wanted to do was go to Beirut and when I got to Beirut I wanted to go back to the village. I was so scared and – how can I put it? – it’s like the night we arrived the whole place was lit up with the shelling and I was trembling and all I wanted to do was hide.”

She said she’d agreed to work for Madam Hend “to help her – I’m not a maid, doctor, and Matrouk doesn’t allow me to work as a maid in people’s houses but Madam Hend is different. I couldn’t disappoint Khawaja Nasim. I was with her for several months. What a woman! A gem! When she saw me at work cleaning the apartment she’d jump up and lend a hand, like we were friends. Then she told me I wouldn’t be coming to do work anymore
but that I was to visit her once a week. Every time I go to her she sits with me and won’t let me do a thing. We drink coffee and talk and she starts asking me about the village. She likes me to tell her stories and the one she likes best is the one about my grandmother. She keeps asking me to tell her the same story and then gives me presents for the children and she never gives me secondhand things. Now that’s what I call a lady! She’s got a heart of gold and I feel like she’s my friend and a sister to me.”