Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He wasn’t waiting for a call from Ghazala: his infatuation for her had evaporated when he’d realized he was scared of her husband. He was waiting, rather, for Muna, whom he knew wouldn’t call. He’d never told Ghazala he loved her. He had believed, as he writhed in her arms, that he was just having sex, and it was only at the end, when his fear had dissipated, that he declared his love — and discovered that he’d been made a fool of.

Then, without warning, Muna had entered his life. He’d met her and her husband, the architect Ahmad Dakiz, at his brother, Nasim’s, apartment, where he’d seen the plans for the hospital for the first time, heard of the plans for the reconstruction of Beirut, and listened to a fantastical story about the Frankish origins of the family from Tripoli to which the architect belonged. He’d told Muna she’d bewitched him and she burst into laughter, saying she didn’t want to hear words of love because they were all the same, and they bored her. Karim didn’t stop talking of love with Muna even though he knew he was in love with Ghazala — as though he were using Muna to cure himself of Ghazala, and Ghazala’s clamor to cure himself of Hend’s silence.

Karim wasn’t able to say how this triangular relationship had taken shape in the midst of the dust of Beirut, or how his heart had been able to bear that emotional maelstrom in the midst of the storms of the renewed civil war. But now he was sitting on his own with no one to keep him company but his glass of whiskey, waiting for a phone call that would never come.

Why had he come back to Beirut? He could admit now that he’d been hit by homesickness the moment his brother had called him about the hospital project. How, though, had he been able to mend, in an instant, the thing in his heart that had been severed ten years earlier? Bernadette was astounded as she listened to him. “Do you think the children and I are going to go and live in the hell of Lebanon? Are you out of your mind? Or do you want to leave us and marry a Lebanese woman so you can treat her like a slave and have a boy by her? For me, c’est fini . No more children. My body’s gone slack. Look at the stretch marks on my belly. And you, like all Oriental men, feel jealous because your brother has fathered three boys and you are still waiting for your crown prince.”

Bernadette was wrong. Karim hadn’t returned to Lebanon with any particular purpose in mind. He’d gone because his homesickness for Beirut had left him incapable of thought, of taking the rational decision his wife was expecting.

“What do you mean, ‘a rational decision’?” he’d asked her. “There’s no such thing as a rational decision where one’s soul is involved.” He’d told her that his soul hurt and that there was no pain worse than that of the soul, but she said she didn’t understand him anymore and wept.

He’d told Bernadette once that he couldn’t stand tears. He said her tears reminded him of his mother, who’d died when he was five. He said the only thing he could remember about his mother was the tears that fell from her eyes and spread over her small white face, and that when they’d taken him and his brother from the apartment to sleep at the neighbors’ and told him his mother was dead, he’d dreamed that same night of tears. He’d seen his mother weep and drown in her tears and her tears had turned into a flood that rose higher and higher till it swallowed the bed and the room and everything.

This nightmare had returned to his dreams only in France, when he went with his wife to visit her family in Lyon, where he’d felt alone, and a stranger. He’d told his wife her family treated him as though he had the mange and that they were racists. She’d laughed and said, “That’s the way they are,” meaning what he took for racism was a distance that her parents maintained even with their own children; he had to let go of his febrile Oriental imagination if he wanted to become acclimatized to his new country and his new life.

That night the nightmare of the tears had returned and he’d felt a murderous loneliness. He’d edged up against his wife, who was sleeping by his side, intending to take her in his arms, but she had shifted away with an involuntary movement. He’d tried to get out of bed to go to the kitchen for a drink of water but hadn’t been able to find his way in the dark. He’d closed his eyes to sleep and seen his mother’s eyes shocked into tears. The next morning he’d told Bernadette he wanted to go home to Montpellier. He’d returned, carrying with him the dream of tears, not knowing why his mother had suddenly awoken in his dream. What does it mean when the dead quicken in the living? And what does it mean for us to carry the dead in our hearts, so that they become part of a life we haven’t yet lived?

He hadn’t told his wife what had occurred. He didn’t know what had gone wrong after they married. In the beginning, in other words during the stage poets refer to as “first love,” his tongue had run wild over everything. He would translate the phrase ‘ ala rasi and say to her submissively “ sur ma tête ” just to hear the ringing laugh that would emerge from between Bernadette’s lips. Then, suddenly, the reign of silence had begun. Or, to be more accurate, it hadn’t come all at once, it had crept in bit by bit and taken over the entire terrain of his relationship with the white-skinned woman with whom he’d fallen in love at first sight when they met at the Tex-Mex bar. He’d started to feel that words were betraying him, that he couldn’t relax in the French language. Words, as his father used to say, are the land in which one feels at home. Sitting with his two sons at the dinner table, he’d ask them to talk. “Entertain me!” he’d say, and the brothers had to tell stories about school while their father sat back and savored the telling.

He couldn’t tell Bernadette, “Entertain me!” He couldn’t fashion his phrases into proper sentences that would make allowances for his wife’s ears, those ears that couldn’t stand to hear cursing in French or Arabic. So he slid into silence, and the stirrings of infidelity began to make themselves felt in his life.

It never occurred to him that Bernadette could be unfaithful to him. He didn’t know where he got this certainty, which quickly evaporated, but he didn’t care. When you stop feeling jealous, love is dead, and Karim felt no jealousy when Bernadette told him she’d gone out with a Swiss doctor who was visiting Montpellier. He just smiled. She flew into a fury and said that she was lying because she knew he was being unfaithful to her and that she had wanted to make him jealous, and that he didn’t love her anymore, and she wept. Unable to abide her tears, he sat on the floor next to her and said he loved her and almost told her about the dream of tears. But he stopped himself. He felt impotence crawling all around him and heard the voice of silence.

With Ghazala, though, he would talk a lot, and with Muna, he savored their banter. He had no idea why, in Beirut, the words poured out of him, as though a well had been opened and everything was lit up. From the moment of his arrival in Beirut, he could see. He’d told Muna that he could see things, because back there the world was enveloped in mist. The magic of Beirut, though, lay in the smoothness of Ghazala’s skin. Who would have believed that a maid from a remote village living in the Mar Elias Camp, in the midst of poverty, beggary, and madness, could radiate with an astounding smoothness the like of which he had never seen in the women whom he treated for skin diseases? Then he’d discovered the secret. It was love. He’d told her about the love that lends delicacy to the body, purifies the skin, and takes the soul up into the waves of the sky. She’d laughed. And when he’d discovered the trick that had been played on him he hadn’t felt thorns in the throat the way men ordinarily do when deceived. On the contrary, he’d felt that the stone of fear had been lifted from his chest. Fear is a humiliation, and once it receded and the story had reached its appointed end, he became as one who dwells on the verge of tears.