Broken Mirrors (41 page)

He’d left the apartment for a meeting with the agent of a medical instruments company, then returned at five in the evening to find everything in his apartment shining – but no Ghazala. His meeting had been with Ayoub Tayan, a distant relative of his mother’s whom he hadn’t seen for thirty-five years; in any case the man and the child had nothing in common. He said he was the agent for a medical equipment company and had reequipped the Greek Orthodox hospital, and that he attended mass every Sunday morning because he was a lay leader at the Church of Mar Niqoula. Karim failed to grasp the connection between work and church services and he had a strange feeling about this short, fat fifty-year-old, the contours of whose face were consumed by flesh and the hair of whose eyebrows covered his small eyes so thickly you couldn’t see them. Then he learned from his brother that “the Yoyo,” as the man’s mother, Tante Rose, had called him, was a member of the BG Squad, the special strike force set up by the Phalangists during the war and the instrument with which they had forced Beirut’s Ashrafieh district into submission.

“The Bash brought the world to its knees with the BG Squad,” said Nasim.

“Who’s the Bash?” asked Karim.

“The Bash was Sheikh Bashir, God rest his soul. After all this time you still don’t know who the Bash was!”

“And what’s the Yoyo got to do with it?”

“He was one of the Bash’s right-hand men, but it was his mother’s fault. His mother went to the metropolitan and said to him, ‘Help me, my lord. Your son is going to be lost to us. Bashir is about to send him to his death, along with all the other young boys.’ ”

Everyone had their doubts about the Yoyo’s parentage. Ayoub was the only son of Qustantin Tayan, who died in mysterious circumstances at the start of the war. It’s said he was sitting in his living room when he was struck
by a stray bullet in the upper thigh. The bullet struck an artery, causing him to bleed to death within minutes, and it is thought that he died before the ambulance men could get him to the hospital.

At the time, many accused the metropolitan of having killed his rival, but nothing is sure, for dying in war is like living in it – the product of mere chance. There was however a consensus that the Yoyo looked too much like the metropolitan, and that if you were to hear his voice without seeing him you’d think you were listening to His Reverence Samu’il.

Nasim made a lot of his opinion that the Yoyo was the son of the metropolitan and asked his brother whether he’d met His Reverence Samu’il in Paris.

After the meeting with the Yoyo, in which Nasim had also participated, was over, Nasim insisted on taking his brother to the Chez Sami restaurant in Maameltein. Despite the doctor’s refusal and insistence on returning to the apartment, he found himself in his brother’s car, heading for the restaurant. Thus the possibility of Karim finding Ghazala at home, which was something he’d promised himself, was lost.

Karim wasn’t interested in hearing the story of the metropolitan’s affair with Tante Rose, or how the Yoyo’s relationship to the Bash had continued after Bashir informed him that he had to move from military to economic activities – which resulted in his becoming the biggest commission agent at the Port of Beirut’s Dock Five. The Yoyo was no different from many contractors who had clambered over corpses to garner vast wealth, creating in the process a class of war profiteers. The story of how Metropolitan Samu’il had bequeathed the Yoyo extensive lands in the hinterland of Jbeil was equally meaningless. Even the tales about the disintegration and crumbling of the metropolitan’s bones during his final days, to the point that his body shrank and turned into a ball, and how Tante Rose abandoned him and refused to visit him in the hospital because she couldn’t stand to see him in
that condition – all these were just banal everyday stories such as one might find in the television soap operas of those days. What did interest Karim was the man’s nervous collapse when he found out that the Frenchwoman whom he loved was being unfaithful to him. Nasim said that all the man’s friends had come together to help him regain his psychological balance, and that confiding to him the task of equipping the hospital was part of the treatment.

Once, when his words, being larded with something of the desire that gives them their taste, were still able to reach her, Karim had told Bernadette that what he feared most was his feeling that Beirut had become merely a mirror. He’d told her of the torment of the mirrors – that when he could no longer distinguish between his image and the mirror, he’d decided to flee. “A mirror, my dear, feels pain, because it exchanges itself for what it reflects, so that it forgets who it is. Then, when it tries to recover itself, it discovers it is no longer capable of distinguishing between its own identity and that of others and is forced to forget itself and melt into those reflected images.”

Bernadette had knit her brows, as she usually did when facing something difficult to understand, and said she understood. A moment later, though, she burst out laughing and said she hadn’t understood a word. She told him the nicest thing about her relationship with him was that she had never once understood what he meant, and that that was what attracted her to him.

“A mysterious love brought about by your mysterious words.”

She laughed and he laughed and he stopped trying to explain because he was unable to put his feelings about mirrors into clear speech.

Why was his mysteriousness no longer capable of revealing the shadows of love in his wife’s eyes? Worse, his inability to express himself, which Bernadette called mysteriousness, had begun at some point to change into a reason for her to turn on him and criticize his behavior.

When Karim got back to the apartment and entered it in the dark of the power outage, he didn’t find Ghazala. He’d lost Ghazala in the restaurant listening to a trivial story about a trivial man who had made up a trivial love story for his trivial brother to tell him. He had wasted his day in an excellent restaurant that would have served better as a place for lovers’ trysts than for making fun of a love story, however stupid.

Ultimately, the Yoyo proved his story wasn’t stupid by finding a tragic ending for it appropriate to a lover’s tale. Karim though, at the very time he believed he was living a story of physical passion with Ghazala, found himself descending into the depths of melodrama. The Yoyo committed suicide. He put an end to his feeling of humiliation at the mockery of others by shooting himself in the side of the head. Not so Karim. Karim had thought that Ghazala could fill the empty spaces of Beirut with a love that wasn’t like love because it was stripped of all feelings – love without talk of love, desire without the soul being consumed in flames.

Ghazala was pure sex without pointless extras. With her the Frenchified doctor threw himself into a sea of those traditional delights according to which the woman is pawn to the will of the man. The man plays the role of the undisputed master, amuses himself with the woman, and takes her wet with the water of desire. Then, upon rising from the bed of pleasure, he washes her off his body as though she had never been and goes back to life.

Karim’s problem was that, in spite of his attempts to convince himself otherwise, he’d found nothing in Beirut to keep him busy. He came and found that the architectural plans for the hospital building had been made. He’d met with Ayoub so that they could study together equipment purchasing options, but Nasim had decided that the equipment and doctors’ contracts would have to wait awhile because he was expecting a large sum
of money to arrive. At the same time, Ayoub’s suicide came as an early indication that the project was faltering. Karim’s job was reduced to waiting and going to the construction site, where he would listen to the building contractor’s explanation of the progress of the preparations for the start of the work. When he got back to the apartment he’d sit at the table in the office and draw up plans that he knew in his heart would never materialize, despite which he decided to continue the game.

“What does it matter to you? From the moment of your arrival in Beirut the hospital director’s salary has been deposited in the bank in your name. We agreed on five thousand dollars and the money’s there. Think of it as a holiday, brother, take things easy, and the moment the money arrives we’ll start on the construction.”

Nasim had been clear from the start. He’d told his brother that he would underwrite all the costs and the hospital would be a joint-stock company with Nasim holding 51 percent of the shares and Karim 30 percent, the rest to be distributed among the doctors they employed.

“All of them will pay for the shares they buy except you. You won’t pay because this will be in place of your share of what our father left. He didn’t leave us anything worth mentioning but it doesn’t matter; and your salary as a director has nothing to do with what you earn as a doctor. In other words, old boy, the door to a fortune has been opened. The biggest fortune anyone can make in Lebanon is from medicine. Medicine in Lebanon is an oil well. People will pay whatever we ask so long as we maintain an impeccable reputation. And your reputation, which has preceded you to Beirut, is that in France you’re a famous dermatologist. Soon, before we start work, we’ll set up a telephone interview for you about your work in France and from then on your path will be strewn with gold. Money, my brother, is word of mouth. Get some good word of mouth going about yourself and just see how the money flows in.”

Karim hadn’t believed in the potential riches of which his brother had spoken. That wasn’t what he’d come in search of, and had he wanted money he would have gone to the Gulf, where inexhaustible wealth awaits those who wish for it.

He’d never told his brother the story of Sheikha Murjana, the wife of one of the Gulf sheikhs, who’d come to him at the clinic in Montpellier after a series of cosmetic operations all over her body and asked him to treat her skin, which was thick and given to sweating. He’d prescribed some ointments and told her – when, glorying in the achievements of French cosmetic medicine, she’d shown him an old photo of herself – that he couldn’t recognize her, she’d changed so much. She laughed, revealing two rows of sparkling white teeth, and said she’d been reborn but wanted him to solve her sweat problem. She used vulgar expressions and laughed loudly, as though she’d left modesty behind in her hot country and had become another woman at the hands of some French doctor who had managed to redesign her face, making her nose smaller, lips fuller, forehead higher, and cheekbones more pronounced. The vulgar expressions this fortyish woman used made Karim feel she was wearing a mask. He asked if she covered her hair in her country. She said she covered her face and neck as well, with a thick black cloth that hung down from below her eyes. The Lebanese doctor cleared his throat as he searched for words to express himself but the woman preempted him, saying she had had the cosmetic surgery for her own sake, not to please a particular man or for any other reason. She said it was through such operations that she’d regained her self-confidence, her need to appear attractive to herself. She said a woman not attractive to herself would never be able to attract a man, and that the essence of the game was a dialogue within the ego.

“But after all that surgery there shouldn’t be any need for you to cover your face since the face we see today isn’t your face and you aren’t you.”

“And who told you, doctor, that this isn’t true for everyone? With or without cosmetic surgery, with or without a veil, we all cover and change.”

Sheikha Murjana had studied psychology at the American University in Beirut. “I used to take off my veil and mantle at the door of the airplane the moment I arrived in Beirut. I’d wear jeans, put my long black hair up, and recover my body by surrendering it to the looks of the passersby. But I had to go back to my country to get married to my paternal cousin, and I married and bore a boy and two girls. That’s how the world goes round.”

She said she didn’t understand Lebanese women anymore. “We used to escape from our veils to their unveiledness. What’s happened to your women? Half the women of Lebanon wear veils and the other half go about half naked. Why?”

Karim couldn’t come up with an answer. Should he tell her that Lebanon too was a mirror? And what would such casuistry mean to a woman who came with specific questions and expected clear answers? He gave her medicine for the sweating, prescribed her a diet, and promised her everything would be fine. As to what she thought was “thickness of the skin,” it was, he told her, a simple illusion as there was no such thing as thick skin and thin skin. Her dark complexion made her think that; but it needed to be borne in mind that dark skin was preferable to white as it absorbed heat better.

He massaged her wrist as he told her that her skin was smooth and attractive and only needed some creams to shine and radiate. To this point there was no mention of a story that was still to unfold. This started four months after the encounter, when Karim Shammas received a phone call from Sheikha Murjana thanking him for his medicines and his advice and saying that she was now completely cured of the sweat that used to soak her body from head to toe whenever Sheikh Zeidan came near her. She said she’d discussed matters with Sheikh Zeidan and invited Karim to the Gulf to work there; she mentioned fantastic figures such as he’d never dreamed of.

Karim went only once, to treat a group of the sheikha’s friends. He discovered there that the number of foreign workers in the country was far greater than its inhabitants, who were referred to as “citizens,” and all of whom, women and men, wore traditional dress to distinguish them from the workers, who were referred to as “newcomers.”

When Sheikh Zeidan broached the topic of his staying on to work in the small emirate, Karim was at a loss over how to turn down such a generous offer, so he used his French wife and daughters as an excuse. At his only meeting with Sheikh Zeidan, Karim listened to the strangest analysis he had ever heard of the relationship between the two blessings – Islam and oil – for which the Arabian Peninsula provided a stage. The sheikh recounted that Islam had forced people out of the Arabian Peninsula: Islam was a gateway to conquest, extension, and expansion, so people had left this hot, naked, uninhabitable desert land and settled in the various countries and great settlements of the world, where they lived in the luxury of cities traversed by rivers. Had it not been for the duty of pilgrimage to Mecca, the country would have been emptied of its inhabitants, or of the best of them at any rate. The Arabian Peninsula then had to wait for its new dawn, which began with the discovery of oil. “With oil came air conditioners and instead of people emigrating this became a land for immigrants looking for a crust of bread. Islam gave us glory and forced us out of this land; oil brought us back to it and made us lords of the world once more. The rebirth that began here will radiate to the entire world. It is the product of this encounter, which is a manifestation of divine wisdom.”