Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Hend was amazed when Nasim didn’t try to sleep with her during the long chalet days. He would sip kisses from her lips and play around with her but went no further. Hend had no objections, but she wasn’t going to initiate matters. She was afraid of the savage look that drew itself over his eyes when he grew angry.

When they were on the verge of getting married, he asked where she’d like to spend their honeymoon. He proposed going to the island of Crete, in Greece, but she refused. “The honeymoon will be at the chalet in Jounieh,” she said.

He asked her why and she said she’d waited for the honey a long time at the chalet and wanted it nowhere else.

And when he slept with her for the first time he was overcome with amazement.

“So you’re still a virgin!” he said wonderingly as he kissed her on her small brown breasts. He asked her about “him” but she didn’t reply. He tried to speak but she placed her hand over his mouth.

Once they were married Karim’s name had disappeared from circulation. Nasim started referring to his brother in the third person as “him.” Hend understood that this “him” referred to her former lover. She didn’t notice that things had changed fundamentally because she was busy with her pregnancy and the psychological and biological trans​formations that swept over her during the first three months. It was only after the birth of her first son, Nadim, that she discovered the man she was living with was a mere shadow of the man who had loved her at the chalet in Jounieh. She told him he’d changed. He said it was she who had changed. He didn’t like to be asked where he was going or where he was traveling to or whom he spent his evenings with in Beirut. He said it was work and that they’d agreed she would have nothing to do with the subject. And when she asked him about the source of his growing wealth, he told her it would be better if she just spent the money and didn’t ask how it was obtained. She asked him why he betrayed her with other women and he was furious. The savage look she feared came into his eyes and he told her never to ask him that question again.

Nasim had never told his wife, whom he loved, the secret reason for his refusing to make love to her during the year of passion in the chalet. She’d supposed he was avoiding it because he thought she’d slept with his brother and didn’t want to open up a distance in their relationship. That was true, but only in part. The truth was that he was bidding farewell to his old world with all its prostitutes, and in his innocent sex with Hend he’d found a way to cleanse himself. Then when he discovered Hend was still a virgin he was overcome by a kind of reverence toward her: he got up, went down on his knees before the bed on which she lay naked, and made the sign of the cross. Hend burst out laughing. “Do you think you’re in church?” she asked. “You’re a saint,” he said. “Forget the saints and the fancy talk, he was a coward, that’s all.” He closed her mouth with his hand and asked her not to speak because her words were spoiling the aesthetic quality of the moment.

Nasim had decided to abandon the world of prostitutes and its depravity. He had severed his ties to the past and steeped himself in a love the like of which he hadn’t tasted since his few days with Suzanne.

But without his knowing how or why, he found life leading him by the nose. He justified things to himself at the beginning by saying it was part of his work. Work as a smuggler couldn’t go right without the accessories. He told himself these were the necessities of his work and that no one living in the night of the city and the alleyways of its wars could keep such a life at a distance.

This is not what he told Hend, because he was certain she’d think he was lying, and in fact he was. Or perhaps “lying” isn’t quite accurate, but Nasim didn’t know how the title “liar” had attached itself to him. When your father, your teachers, and everyone else around you decides you’re a liar, you become one even when you’re trying to tell the truth, because you don’t believe yourself.

In one of her fits of anger she told him he’d never loved her and just wanted to take over his brother’s inheritance so he could prove to himself he was better than him and make his revenge proportionate to his childhood torments. Nasim had felt then that the woman wanted to break his heart. He couldn’t answer because the words had stuck in his throat. He remembered that he was supposed to spit the words, the way Suzanne had taught him, but refused to do so because he didn’t want to give up on the woman.

He looked at her with defeated eyes and asked if she’d married him for love.

“Of course,” she replied.

He felt she wasn’t telling the truth but contented himself with her assertion. “If that’s so then let’s just love one another and don’t ask about what I do at work or outside the house.”

“But I want to understand what I mean to you.”

“You’re my wife, the mother of my children, and my life. Please don’t let’s get philosophical. I haven’t changed. This is how I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“You’re unfaithful to me and you love me? I don’t understand.”

“I’m not unfaithful.”

“Why are you like that?”

“Why is there a war?” he replied.

He said, “Why is there a war?” and felt as though the voice was not his own, as though it was the voice of the man who had murdered his dreams and those of his comrades. Nasim had never had a chance to experience the intoxication of victory. The leader of the Phalangist militias had been elected president of the republic to the whine of the Israeli bombs that had set Beirut on fire, but then Bashir Gemayel had been killed in a huge explosion on September 14, 1982. It was the Feast of the Cross. It had rained water and dust and Nasim remembered being afflicted with a kind of blindness. The dust had covered his face and eyes and he’d felt as though the world had come to an end.

But it had not. The killer had been detained and had stood before the interrogator, but instead of answering the question “Why did you kill Bashir,” he’d asked, “Why is there a war?”

From this Nasim had learned to answer one question with another. When you live in Beirut, or any other city in the Arab world, you have to adapt to the absence of answers and the discovery that every question leads to another question.

He’d said to Hend, “Why is there a war?” not because he didn’t know the answer to her question but because that was the correct answer.

“What has the war got to do with our private lives?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer; she jumped directly to the conclusion and decided he’d deceived her.

She never said she was shocked when she discovered Nasim wasn’t the twin she’d been waiting for, that he only resembled Karim superficially, and that she was going to have to live her whole life with her vanished illusion.

But Nasim heard what she hadn’t said — or so she imagined when she saw the lopsided smile that sketched itself on his lower lip. He’d never claimed he was a copy. In fact, when his brother was mentioned in his presence, he’d say only one word: “Coward.” When his father complained that there was no news from his son and wondered how it could be that he never asked how he was doing in the midst of the hell of war in Beirut, Nasim had said, “Your son’s a dog and a coward. He ran away and he’s making himself out to be a big shot because he married a blonde and speaks French.”

“Anything but a Sri Lankan maid!” said Hend.

Nasim tried to persuade her, and Salma tried, but it was no use.

It was Salma who’d suggested the idea of the maid to Nasim. She’d said she was getting old and couldn’t manage any longer.