Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Nasim could understand nothing of what she was trying to tell him. She was announcing to her husband her categorical objection to the presence of a Sri Lankan or Asian maid in the house and Nasim was trying to persuade her to agree and provide a new model for how to treat maids, but she refused.

She’d tried to tell her husband about the world she’d seen at the ophthal​mologist’s clinic but he wouldn’t listen. He’d claimed he was listening but in fact he’d been thinking about other things. Her problem with the man was that from the very beginning he’d refused to listen to her. He’d just kept nodding his head, so she’d found no way out of agreeing to the marriage.

He’d told her about his broken heart but hadn’t mentioned Suzanne. He’d said his heart had been broken when the Jesuit discovered his high marks were the result of deception and he’d felt as though he’d been abandoned in the middle of the double world he inhabited with his brother.

“Karim did nothing. He saw how Father was torturing me, and he just watched. I felt he was happy and enjoyed watching, like when kids take pleasure in torturing a lizard or a kitten, and then I got it that he’s not my twin and the idea of one person with four eyes was an illusion. The discovery of the illusion broke my heart and I ran away from home, maybe Karim told you.”

“No, he didn’t tell me. Karim never talked about you or your father. Where did you go?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There was a woman who took pity on me, a distant relative. She found work for me at a restaurant.”

“And then?”

“Then Father came to the restaurant and started crying in front of everyone. I was embarrassed and went back home.”

“You slept at her place?”

“Of course. What, you think I should have slept on the street?”

“And was she pretty?”

“She was old enough to be my mother. She said, ‘You’re an orphan and I want to adopt you.’ ”

“And why did you go back with your father?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t really think. I just saw him crying and went with him and found myself back home.”

Nasim felt she didn’t believe him but he went on with his lie. He couldn’t retreat because he’d decided not to tell anyone about Suzanne. He’d promised her and he wouldn’t go back on his word. When she’d repulsed him like that on the day he’d gone to visit her as agreed, he’d felt as though the air supply around him had been cut off, that he was surrounded by walls. He’d gone back to the apartment and found his father waiting for him in front of a table resplendent with kibbeh nayyeh and local arak, a platter of kenafeh in the middle.

It hadn’t occurred to Nasim that Karim could have given away his secret to his father. He thought Suzanne must have done it herself, because she was a prostitute and one couldn’t trust a woman of that sort, and it was his mistake. When his brother confessed his betrayal to him, he felt the need to kill. He’d already discovered during the war that people possess only one instinct, which is to kill, and all other instincts branch out from that. You kill to eat, you kill to dominate, you kill to kill. The urge to kill had flashed out suddenly like lightning as he listened to his brother. Blood flashes in the eyes of killers — he’d seen it in his comrades’ eyes — and when his blood had flowed, close to the Salam football ground in Ashrafieh, he’d been scared of both the blood and the eyes. He’d run to his father’s house shaking with fear and collapsed the instant he reached the door, his knees no longer able to support him.

Listening to his brother’s confession, he’d felt the blood flash in his eyes. He said he’d kill him, lit a cigarette, dragged the smoke deep down in his lungs to disperse the ghosts of killing, closed his eyes, and said he was joking. But he wasn’t telling the truth then either.

Hend had told him his brother’s phantom hadn’t left her the past four years and she thought it would be difficult for her to love another man.

“Can you agree to marry a woman who has loved another man?”

He smiled and didn’t answer. He said he’d loved her since he first set eyes on her and hadn’t stopped loving her even when she was going out with his brother. He said he’d retired from the field because he couldn’t be involved in a rivalry with his twin, but now he would compete with her heart. “Your heart can’t refuse my love because I love you from my heart.”

Hend decided that the man didn’t hear and discovered that other people don’t hear either; that it’s easier to see than to hear, because listening requires a kind of collusion with others. And she accepted him. She accepted him because she loved him, or so she thought. The whole thing seemed unreal to her, as though she was living in a dream and had rediscovered with Nasim something of the undulations that she had felt when in love with his older brother.

She said she didn’t want a Sri Lankan maid because she couldn’t forget the tears of a woman called Meena, who was in her early twenties, plump, lively, and full of the love of life. Meena would come every day to the clinic at three p.m. and give the doctor’s food to Hend, who would take it to the side room where Dr. Said would devour it in minutes before getting back to work.

Dr. Said, who was sixty-five, was one of those rare doctors who believe in medicine. Usually doctors order their patients not to smoke and impose a special diet on them because of cholesterol and blood pressure but don’t themselves stop smoking or devouring fatty foods or developing pot bellies. Dr. Said was different. He followed his own advice because he didn’t want to die. He told Hend he was a doctor and knew why people died, so he was going to close all doors in the face of death and live until he was fed up with life.

Hend couldn’t understand how someone who had passed sixty could not be fed up with life. What was he waiting for, now that all waiting had ended? She’d got fed up before making it to twenty-five. Beirut was the city of boredom and despair, she told the doctor, “because the war keeps repeating itself endlessly and I’m sick of war.”

The doctor told her he couldn’t understand why she talked that way. “War’s like life. Everything in life repeats itself but it’s renewed or gives the impression of renewal. This is the secret of the seasons of nature, and the war too renews itself and its people and its slogans, as though it sums up all time. Modernity mixes in it with backwardness and to its rhythms we discover the meaning of history.”

“I’m sick of myself,” said Hend.

“There’s the mistake,” responded the doctor. “The secret of mankind is love. War gives us the illusion of history and the seasons give us the illusion of nature renewing itself, but love makes us live what is unique. We believe we’re living something special and exciting that no one but us has ever lived. It seems you’re not in love, my dear, even though you’re a cute little thing.”

“Please, doctor! No love, no worries!”

“You’re wrong, Hend. Love and you’ll see.”

“But first I have to find Mr. Right.”

“What are you talking about?” said the doctor. “Love love and you’ll see it can make anyone a Mr. Right.”

And that was how it was. Hend found herself loving love. Husky voices enchanted her and shining eyes intoxicated her. She was like someone sailing seas filled with surprises and discovered that her relationship with Karim had been practice for the love that awaited her.

In Nasim’s disappointment at life she saw her own, in his troubles with his father an echo of her own interrupted childhood, and in his feelings of loneliness something of her own despair and frustration after her sad experience with Meena. She learned from him not to ask. When she asked him about his work he said he didn’t want her to bother about such things and all she had to do was welcome his soul and his love and forget everything else. Hend washed her new world in the waters of the sea. Nasim rented a chalet at the Beach Club pool that looked out over the Bay of Jounieh and sank with his beloved into the saltiness of the sea. He was a champion swimmer and she felt intoxicated whenever the water covered her brown body, which flashed in the sun.