Broken Mirrors (9 page)

“How about coming to our place? Ahmad would love to see you too.”

“Who’s Ahmad?” he asked her.

She burst out laughing. He then suggested the meeting be at his apartment at twelve thirty on Friday. He suggested Friday because Ghazala didn’t come that day, and before ending the call he asked her to wear a green dress.

On entering she asked him why he liked green.

She was wearing an orange skirt and a thin white blouse. She said her green dress was at the cleaner’s.

He said he’d changed his mind and now he liked orange. He opened the bottle of chilled white wine, poured two glasses, and said green reminded him of the Green Woman he used to see in his dreams when he was small.

When Karim told Muna the story of the Green Woman, he was struck by the unexpectedness of the memory. He said memory was scary: it woke when it pleased, dropped in as if out of nowhere, and had no rules. He told her about the Iraqi poet he used to meet in a bar in Montpellier. “I’d only meet him when we were drunk and all he’d talk to me about was the poems he hadn’t yet written. Once, I asked him to read me something he’d written recently. He responded that he’d given up writing because every time he went near the blank paper he’d be deluged with memories of his childhood in el-Amarah in Iraq, and these hidden memories scared him and were turning him into a poet who lived poetry instead of writing it.”

“Literature’s different. Poets imagine their memories,” she said. She also said she was very fond of poetry and knew all Mahmoud Darwish’s poems about Rita by heart.

He said he used to think the same, “but it seems memory works in mysterious ways and when it gives up its secrets a person becomes a slave to his past, which he hadn’t known was his.”

They drank the bottle of wine and he listened to her as she recited some lines about Rita. He took her in his arms and heard her whisper incompre​hensible words. He embraced her and she seemed shy. She got into bed
in her clothes. He lay down next to her, naked, lifted the coverlet and saw that she had taken off her clothes. He moved close to her, feeling a blind strangeness: two strange bodies that couldn’t find a rhythm swimming in the darkness of desire, a strangeness that wouldn’t be broken until the last day, when Muna came to him to say goodbye and he took her with water falling from her body and felt sorrow, because he sensed that the end of their relationship had been the moment when it began.

They’d made love as though searching for love. On the last day, he told her that in the beginning they’d been like two blind people and her modesty had been like a veil that prevented him from seeing. When Muna gasped, and he heard a moaning that broke through the barrier of silence, his water burst forth copiously and he took her lips in a long kiss. As he floated above the darkness of his eyes he held tight to her waist to stop himself from drowning.

She pushed him back a little and said she needed air. He retreated, lit a cigarette, and sat facing her on the bed. Muna covered herself with the white sheet, raised her right hand to wave away the smoke of his cigarette, and the sheet slipped off her shoulder and her breast appeared, a hanging white pomegranate. He bent over and took the nipple in his mouth and she covered her chest with the sheet but he didn’t pull back. He pushed his face into the darkness of the white and heard her little gasp before she took his face in her hands and pushed it away.

She said the moment she saw him at his brother’s apartment, she’d decided he was the one. “You know, you and your brother look a lot like each other. Nasim’s been a friend of my husband’s for a long time and your brother’s always been making signs to show that he wants me. I thought he was a drag and would say to myself, ‘What does he think he’s doing? I’m his friend’s wife!’ Then when I saw you, I said it’s you.”

“Meaning you fell in love with me.”

“You’re as much of a drag as your brother. Who said anything about love? Go on, tell me about green.”

“But the green was love.”

“You mean you fell in love with a woman who wears only green?”

“A Green Woman. How can I put it? There was no love, just something strange.”

He told her that the strange thing was how the Green Woman had been sleeping in his memory until she leapt from it.

He lifted the sheet she’d covered herself with and she pulled away as though panic-stricken and pulled the sheet up to her neck.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I want to examine you. Drop the sheet and let me work.”

“Right. I’d forgotten you’re a doctor.”

She closed her eyes and held still. Karim saw a thin white thread bursting out from below the whiteness of her belly, which flowed as though it were a mirror. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t like white skin because it crumbled beneath his eyes and that brown skin, which was like the hues of wheat, resisted being pulled apart because it was thicker. The whiteness of Muna’s skin, however, seemed different from any that he’d seen as a doctor in France. He massaged the thin thread with his finger and told Muna that the stretching wasn’t important because it didn’t affect her beauty, but he could prescribe her an ointment if she wanted.

“Are you speaking as a doctor or as something else?”

“As a doctor, naturally. If I wanted to speak as something else I’d have to become a poet, faced with such beauty,” he said.

“Please, cut that out. So the ointment will get rid of the white line?”

“Not completely. The human body is made to show the marks of time but it will diminish it.”

He told her he’d write down the name of the ointment for her and she would have to apply it once a day, after bathing, for ten days. “Then we’ll see.”

Muna tried to cover herself but the doctor took the sheet in both hands. “Can anyone cover the sea?”

“What a horrible comparison!” Muna said. “If any of my students wrote a simile like that he’d get a zero.”

The doctor laughed and told her that when he saw her body he’d been reminded of the story of the “White Mediterranean Sea” and the Palestinian teacher at AUB who insisted that his students use the right names. “That sea,” the teacher used to say, pointing out the window, “we used to call the White Sea until the westerners imposed the term ‘Mediterranean’ on us. We give our seas the names of colors because our eyes always see them as colored. That’s why we have the White Sea, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea. Only the Dead Sea has no color, because it’s dead.” Karim said they’d laughed at the teacher and he’d only understood what he meant when he saw her body enveloped in its whiteness and beheld nothing before him but the sea.

“A bad metaphor. That’s all,” she said, putting on her glasses and covering herself. At that moment, Karim reignited. He couldn’t work out what had happened to him with this woman because he disliked glasses and he never did like the color white, but in this city he’d found himself set on fire by things he thought he hated. The glasses made him lose control and he found himself holding Muna to him once more.

“No, that’s enough. Once is enough. Tell me the story from the beginning and then we’ll see.”

Karim had discovered that real words, meaning words that fill the mouth and impart the taste of fruit, come only after making love. “That was the secret of the Arabs,” he told Bernadette during the early days of their love.
He told her that the secret of
One Thousand and One Nights
lay in this, that Scheherazade never opened her mouth until they had made love. She filled three years’ worth of nights with words and when the love ended the story ended. She’d told the mad king, “That’s it,” and brought the three sons she’d borne to plead for her, or so she could threaten him with them.

No, he hadn’t put it like that. In fact, at the time he’d said the opposite of what he thought now. He’d said then that love made the story endless because “one thousand and one nights” doesn’t imply a set number of nights: the number opens infinite doors. The stories might go on forever, and the love too.

Karim lit a cigarette and began to cough. He ran to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of ice-cold water.

“Eduardo was like that,” said Muna.

“Who’s Eduardo?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let me go and make tea.”

She wrapped herself in the white sheet and went to the kitchen, so he followed her.

“Please, I don’t like men who come into the kitchen. Wait for me in the bedroom.”

She returned with two glasses of tea and lay down on the bed. Karim sat next to her and started to narrate.

“Once upon a time, there was a woman …”

“Not like that. I don’t want a story from
One Thousand and One Nights
. I want your story with the Green Woman.”

Karim said that stories had to begin somewhere, which is why our ancestors had used the past imperfect tense, because everything was born imperfect and would die imperfect, but he didn’t want to tell that story now because the color green no longer mattered, so he was going to tell her another story. As the story seeped from Karim’s memory, the scene struck
him as ridiculous. A woman lying on the bed, her eyes shining behind her spectacles, and a naked forty-year-old man, his white skin shining with sweat that added color to the hair on his chest, sitting at the end of a bed holding a glass of tea in his left hand and a filterless Gauloise in his right, puffing cigarette smoke into the air, and telling the story of a green woman.

He said the woman was called Majda and she used to come to their apartment once a week to clean. But she wasn’t a maid, or didn’t behave like one. She would arrive in a hurry and leave in a hurry. She was said to have had three children but they’d all died at birth, “and I don’t know … We knew she was married to a man called Abu Sultan and that this Abu Sultan didn’t work. Then, when Majda disappeared, we discovered the truth.

“She was the only woman Father didn’t view as a sex object. He was a strange man. A pharmacist, and cultured, and he read a lot. He’d made a special niche for himself in his little community, which was limited to his friends at the Gemmeizeh Café, where he went every day to play backgammon. All the same he became – how can I put it? – he became another person when he laid eyes on a woman of any kind whatsoever. He used to say each age possesses its own special magic. But he talked of Majda with respect, didn’t lounge about in front of her, and watched his language. She was pretty. A strange woman. She didn’t speak a word. She’d come in the morning, do the laundry and the cleaning as if there were no one else there, then gather up her stuff and go home.

Majda disappeared twice over. The first time was when she got pregnant, the second when she gave birth to her baby in a welter of hemorrhaging and blood.

The story goes that Majda suffered a great deal at her husband’s hands and that he didn’t work. He’d beat her to pocket the money she brought back from working as a maid in people’s houses. Then he discovered his path
in life: he manufactured a sort of hump for himself and became a beggar. He’d go off every day to the area of Ras Beirut, where no one knew him, and work all day. Back home he would shrug off his hump, snatch his wife’s money, and set off to get drunk and consort with prostitutes.

“Am I boring you?” asked Karim.

“Not at all,” said Muna, yawning. “But where’s the story? I mean what’s the topic and what happened to make you fall in love with the maid?”

“That’s not what the story’s about. It has nothing to do with that. I mean, I didn’t fall in love with her. I got scared.

“Majda lived with her husband in a shack located at the entrance of the Zaroub el-Haramiyeh settlement, an area considered in those days to lie outside the confines of the city even though it was close to el-Burj Square. The inhabitants were the unemployed and every kind of vagabond, thief, and beggar. The wooden shacks were roofed with corrugated iron sheets that gave no protection from the cold in winter or the heat in summer. Still, the inhabitants found in it a refuge from homelessness. You only had to pay three lira a month to Wajih, one of the men working for Hajj Murad, a Beirut gang leader, for him to allow you to build yourself a wooden shack. Wajih, who was in his early thirties, wore a red tarbush like his boss Hajj Murad, and imposed charges on the inhabitants of the shacks. These he called rents, the individual amounts being determined by his mood and his estimate of how much you could pay.

“The issue was that Wajih could never see eye to eye with Abu Sultan, who refused to pay the charges on the grounds that he was too poor and who would make a scene, weeping and wailing, on the street. Even when he found himself a steady job as a beggar it changed nothing, till it reached the point at which the shack was to be demolished.

“Wajih told Majda that were it not for his belief that she was a holy woman and his being a God-fearing man, he would have burned the shack
with man and wife inside. ‘As you know, we fear only the Good Lord in His Heaven but what can I say? You made me feel as though my hand was paralyzed.’

“Was Majda a saint? Wajih and many others were convinced of it after seeing her green apparition appear next to the ruins of the shack.

“I honestly don’t know. What everyone does know is that Majda almost died. She went into labor at four in the afternoon. It was winter, she couldn’t move, she saw the blood and started screaming. The people of the neighborhood came running and didn’t know what to do. After a short while someone called the midwife – her name was Imm Saad – who immediately began tearing sheets into strips and placing them on Majda’s belly to soak up the blood. The shack filled with the smell of blood – the bedding, the pillows, their belongings. The midwife yelled that she could do nothing to stop the hemorrhaging – ‘Call the Red Cross, the woman’s going to die before our eyes!’ – and the blood never stopped. Majda was at death’s door. The ambulance arrived and took her to the hospital and she gave birth to a boy after a difficult operation.

“Once the woman had been taken to the hospital, the neighborhood women volunteered to clean the shack. They took out the furniture and scrubbed the floor. The furniture that was unsalvagable got thrown onto the rubbish tip at the end of the lane.