Broken Mirrors (8 page)

He said Turkish coffee was Lebanese coffee too and that it was a
spécialité libanaise
. She laughed and didn’t understand.

As time passed Karim would forget the taste of Turkish coffee because Bernadette hated it and he’d only rediscover its strong flavor and the jolt to the heart that accompanied the first morning sips of it with Ghazala, the maid who brought the taste of things back to his tongue.

When Karim left Beirut for France, his consciousness had been wrapped in fog. All he could remember now of the first months of his stay in Montpellier was the sense of loss that made him accept everything. He was like someone who wanted to forget who he was, forget how events had pulled the carpet from under his feet. He told Bernadette later that he had lost the taste of things and wanted to marry her so he could recover his soul.

The French nurse had been taken by surprise by the offer of marriage the eccentric Lebanese doctor had made six months after they met. She’d told him she was afraid and would prefer it if they could go to Lebanon so she could meet his family before accepting the offer.

He turned his face away and said no. “Not Lebanon. I’ll never go to Lebanon, not now and not after a hundred years. Refuse if you like, but we’ll never go to Lebanon.”

Bernadette couldn’t believe her ears when she heard Karim say he was
going to Lebanon to build a dermatology hospital in Beirut. She told him he’d changed a lot. “You’re not the man I married.”

“And you’re not the woman,” he said, and burst out laughing.

He’d told Nasim when recounting his life in France that he’d discovered his other face there. “It’s as though I’m not me. It’s as though over there I was someone else.”

“And now, have you gone back to being you?” Nasim had asked.

“No,” Karim had responded. “Now I’ve become a third person.”

There, in France, Karim had put on the face of the doctor he was to become. He’d found himself one of a circle of physicians around Professor Didier Struffe, a French doctor of Russian origin who was professor of dermatology at the University of Montpellier. Karim passed the
concours internat
exam, the only foreigner to so do so, alongside a group of outstanding French students. At his first meeting with his Russian professor, he’d said that he’d wanted to study psychology but had been afraid to. He told his professor, while informing him of his decision to study dermatology, that he’d been afraid of himself. “Faced with a patient whose soul has disintegrated, you must yourself possess an unshakeably well-grounded personality, and I don’t.”

Professor Struffe had astonished him by speaking of the skin as the person’s alter ego. “I am my skin,” he would say as he explained to his students that the skin was the most important part of the body. “The skin’s most important function is to moderate between the person and the external temperature. Without skin we would be naked before death,” he said in his first class. “Did you know that the skin of someone weighing seventy kilograms weighs fourteen kilograms and has a surface area of two square meters?” He spoke of the human skin as though it was a work of art, drawing for his students a picture of an organ that contained all the others, and of a consciousness that extended over the entire human body.

The skin of pleasure and the skin of pain. A skin that defines the limits of the body and a skin that connects it to others. A skin that sweats and a skin that blushes. A skin that defends a person and a skin that makes him vulnerable before others. The professor said a person could live without the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, but he could not without the sense of touch, because one who loses his skin loses his life.

Karim Shammas said to his Russian professor: “I get it. No blood and no madness. We’re in the presence of touch and the seductions of the fingers.”

He entered the empire of the skin, the relationships between epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. He told Bernadette, whose belly had started to show stretch marks after the birth of their second daughter, “It’s the dermis, my dear. The fibers have begun to break up and the white skin is the problem. Your white skin has begun to split. I can treat it with ointments or by laser, as you wish.”

The enchantment of skin diseases lies in the fact that treating them is like dealing with artistic phenomena, which is to say it’s like music. The doctor has to discover the rhythm of his patient’s body, at which point the problem is solved, and treating it with ointments is almost like looking for ways in which it can be seduced. Of course, there are diseases that were once resistant to treatment, such as syphilis, which penicillin came along and put an end to. A residue of such diseases continues to exist, and these made Karim’s skin crawl. There was, for example,
crêtes de coq
disease – or
HPV –
a kind of wart in the area of the testes or penis, which now, thanks to antibiotics, can be treated.

The world constructed by the Russian professor saved Karim. In Beirut, he had told Muna, as he caressed her damp white thigh, that he could read her via the relationship of his hand to her skin, read the topography of her soul and the intricacies of love.

She said she’d come to say goodbye to him, not listen to a lecture on medicine.

He said he wasn’t lecturing but recounting his feelings and discovering that we can only read love at the end. The poets were wrong when they wrote of the combustion at the beginning of love because that was only an illusion ignited by illusion. The reality could be read at the end, at the moment of loss, and only those who lost were capable of discovering its meanings.

“Cut the philosophy,” she’d said, and busied herself drying her wet body.

Karim stopped talking. He felt he had no right to speak, for when you discover that the game has been played to its end, only silence suits the moment.

Only the body speaks; that was what his studies in Montpellier had taught him. The fingers and palm of the hand contained the entire world.

He told his Russian professor the story of the “spiritual fluids” on which Dr. Dahesh had built his entire doctrine and the students laughed, as did the professor. “This isn’t a class in magic and legerdemain,” he’d said.

Karim didn’t believe those cock-and-bull stories himself; he’d only wanted to provide support for the “I = my skin” idea propounded by his professor. His father’s brief conversion to the Daheshism, which had dominated Beirut’s social and political life in the fifties, had led the pharmacist to learn the art of legerdemain and illusionism. What had caught Karim’s attention, though, were his father’s memories of the most important dermatologist in Beirut, Dr. Marcel Kheneisar, who was a follower of the Daheshian School – founded by an Assyrian from Bethlehem. Dr. Dahesh’s theory stated that one’s skin flowed, and it could allow a person to be present in more than one place. This in turn had driven his father and many other doctors and pharmacists of his ilk to believe in magic as the highest form of religion.

Karim had wanted to say that the magic of the human skin reminded him of flowing, that a person flows from the tips of his fingers, that to cure his patients all the successful physician has to do is receive that outflow and bring them to a discovery of the balance that finishes off all disease.

Nasri, who had discovered the best ointment for treating burns, thought the only disease for which there was no cure was death. “Death is a disease. It’s the only disease whose sole preventative is desire. When desire is present, death vanishes, and when it ceases to exist, the only choice left is surrender.”

“What does it mean that I’m going back tomorrow to France?” Karim asked himself as he opened his eyes to the sound of the Beirut thunder and listened to the patter of the rain that had enveloped the city.

He saw the ghost of his father approach him, heard the rustle of the loose clothes that Nasri used to insist on wearing to hide his paunch, saw a woman’s hand push his father, saw his father fall to the ground, and beheld black, sticky blood.

He opened his eyes to the sound of the alarm clock, shaved quickly, and descended the long, dark staircase to the entrance of the building, where the taxi was waiting for him.

M
UNA CAME
to Pinocchio’s wearing a green dress and everything about her undulated. The vigor of her thirty years was bursting from her svelte figure, her long thin visage hid a diaphanous veil of sorrow, and her glasses, which covered a part of her face, established a distance between her and the world.

Karim had no idea how things had reached this point. He’d met her at his brother’s place. She’d come to the dinner party with her husband, the architect Ahmad Dakiz. The architect had talked at length of the project to build the hospital, which he was designing, while his wife had sat and said nothing throughout. A few minutes before the evening ended she turned to Karim, asked him about life in France, and expressed her astonishment at the physician’s decision to return to Lebanon. “Who comes back?” she asked, and when Karim answered that a person needs his roots, she burst out laughing. “Ahmad, tell them about your roots and your crusader forefathers!”

Ahmad had recounted snippets of an incredible story and everyone had broken into laughter.

“You mean you’re a crusader
and
a Muslim?” Karim said, laughing.

Muna didn’t laugh, though. She said she wanted to emigrate to Canada. “My husband wasn’t able to take me to France because the French are looking for their roots too, but now we’re going to Canada. That’s a country that’s pulled out its roots, which may be better.”

She asked Karim about stretch marks and said she wanted to visit him at his clinic because she was worried about a small problem.

“Where’s the problem?” he asked her.

“It’s not a big deal. Just some marks on my belly from the children. When should I come to the clinic?”

“I don’t actually have a clinic in Beirut,” he said, and gave her his phone number.

Karim didn’t want anything from the woman, who to him had seemed drained. Her white complexion was drained, her beauty was drained, plus the way she twisted her lips when speaking Arabic, after the fashion of francophone Lebanese educated in foreign mission schools, made him furious.

Here in Beirut he’d discovered that he’d never stopped loving Hend, who had become his brother’s wife. But he didn’t know what to do with that love, which had become a nightmare.

He’d told her he hadn’t left her because he’d stopped loving her but because he was afraid, and when you’re afraid, all you feel is fear.

She’d said she didn’t believe him but it didn’t matter anymore because she felt she had to get away from this family and didn’t know how.

She said she wasn’t stupid like her mother. “My mother ran after love and you know what happened. They all died. She loved four men who all died, one after the other. I don’t know if she loved your father but I know she killed all the men she loved and when it was your father’s turn I had to take care of it for her.”

Hend turned around and asked him if he still loved her.

Now, when he recalled the question, he felt that the whole thing had been unreal, more like a dream. Was it reasonable for the woman to ask him about love while talking of murder?

Muna had phoned him to make an appointment so he’d invited her to dinner at a restaurant.

“Dinner? No, impossible. Have you forgotten I’m married?”

“And I’m married too,” he answered, laughing.

They agreed on lunch at Pinocchio’s, where they ate pizza and drank wine.

As he’d expected she didn’t ask him about stretch marks. They talked about everything, meaning about nothing, and in her eyes he saw a certain glow that came from nowhere and revealed to him in her drained whiteness flashes of light escaping from her eyes and lips.

Muna was reaching out to him. She was sitting opposite him in the restaurant, bending forward and extending her left hand, which she placed empty upon the table.

He took hold of her upturned hand.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m holding your hand,” he answered.

“Why?” she said.

“Ask your hand,” he answered.

He told her, as he lifted the palm of her hand and placed it on his ear before kissing it, that he listened to hands. “Fingers are the gauge of beauty,” he said.

“And the eyes?” she asked.

He saw the translucent honey color shining in hers.

“Your eyes are beautiful,” he said. “I meant at first to specialize in the eye
but in France my professor taught me that the skin is the person, and today I’ve discovered the fingers.”

“But the eye is more poetic,” she said.

“There’s nothing poetic about medicine except talking about it. Actually, I was lying to you,” he said. “In fact at the beginning I had it in my mind to specialize in psychiatry but I couldn’t go through with it. I felt I was going mad. One madman can’t treat another.”

She withdrew her hand from his and said, laughing, that she loved mad people.

He took her back to her apartment in his car and as she got out she said that next time she’d consult him as a doctor.

Karim saw himself sliding. There was the Beirut heat, and this woman Muna who was bursting with the color green. Karim didn’t know what color he liked best. When his French wife asked him about colors he’d answer that he didn’t care. That day, though, he discovered he loved green. The color appeared in the form of a short dress that reached down to white knees and enfolded a delicate greenness from which flowed undulations that enveloped her calves.

When Muna came, Karim was living the fever of Ghazala but he didn’t dare place his relationship with the maid in the category of love. Was it reasonable to be in love with a maid? He’d convinced himself she was just a form of sawsanning. True, she wasn’t a prostitute and had nothing in common with that violet-fingernailed woman, but it was just a sexual relationship with no more distant horizons.

Muna contacted him five days later and asked for an appointment. He suggested the same restaurant and she responded that she wanted to meet for a professional consultation, which would be impossible in a restaurant.