Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“You persuade your daughter! The woman’s driving me insane with those ideas of hers that she gets from God knows where.”

This was how Ghazala made her entrance into the family’s story. It was Imm Fu’ad who suggested Ghazala, but Hend decided to treat Ghazala as a friend and refused to allow her to work in the house like a maid. Imm Fu’ad had worked in Nasri’s apartment after Majda disappeared. To the boys she was just an elderly woman. She came three times a week, cleaned the house, did the wash, made the food, and disappeared. She was rarely seen. She came in the morning after everyone had left the apartment and departed at one p.m., before they got back. She was the ghostly guardian who took care of everything without becoming part of their life. Nasri wanted to keep her outside the family: the Trinity, as he called himself plus the boys, had to remain independent and without external ties. “I didn’t marry to have some strange woman come and share my children with me.” He told his sons no one must be allowed to break their circle. “One day you’ll get married but don’t ever let women come between us. You and your wife are your household but here it’s us three till God sees fit to take us.”

Nasri was unaware of what would in fact befall the Trinity. Time doesn’t teach; it just kills and destroys. When Nasim came to tell him of his decision to marry Hend, Nasri started to shake with rage. The only words he could find to say to his second son were “Beware and again beware!” In Nasim’s decision to marry Hend he saw something approaching a violation of taboos. “Even Cain and Abel weren’t like that. Beware, my son!” But his rage was mixed with sorrow and he mumbled words his son couldn’t make out.

When Karim had gone abroad, his father had felt relief, for the business with Hend and her mother had to be excised from the family; carnal passions had to be kept outside the home. Salma was a carnal passion, and she had left. Nasri had suffered greatly at the ending of the relationship that had connected him to this white-skinned woman, and the bitterness would continue to dog him; and when, one day, he tried to go back to her, he would discover he’d run headlong into a wall of illusion.

When Hend conceived her second child, Nasim decided it was time to bring a maid into the house. He made all the arrangements without consulting his wife. He went to an office that imported Sri Lankan maids, where he discovered that such offices were a gold mine and the trade was a profit-maker on all fronts. He thought of expanding his own operations and opening an office of the same sort alongside his other commercial activities.

Two days before the woman reached Beirut he told his wife to get ready to welcome the maid. He was proud of himself because he’d managed an arrangement with the director of the employment office that was a good deal by any standards: he’d hired a forty-year-old woman who spoke Arabic well, having worked previously in Dubai, and who was the mother of four children.

Nasim was taken aback by Hend’s categorical refusal.

“No way,” said Hend. “It’s a slave trade.” Nasim tried to calm her down and Nasri intervened to say that the story of the Sri Lankan maids was very similar to that of the Lebanese at the beginning of their migration to America. It had begun, he said, at the end of the nineteenth century, with women. His mother’s aunt was a case in point: she’d left her husband and three children in their village in Amioun, migrated to Boston, “and then she got the whole family out and was within an inch of getting my mother out. What sort of work do you think these Lebanese women did in America? Were they university teachers? Obviously not. They were maids. They went and they worked and they slaved and they made it and now the maids’ grandsons and granddaughters bring over servants and are all stuck up. One day, in about a hundred years, Sri Lankan women will start bringing over servants from other countries, and so it goes, it’s the way of the world. Don’t fret over it, my dear.”

Hend refused to stop fretting and said no. How could she tell them that she couldn’t forget Meena’s face and her round belly?

“Meena messed up your mind,” said Salma. “Who leaves a job over some Sri Lankan woman? And, anyway, who can prove George is the boy’s father? They’re all prostitutes, my girl. I’m not saying anything but you know that migration and poverty break families down and they’re women without countries or families. Prostitution becomes normal. It’s always the same with the first generation of immigrants.”

“So the Lebanese are all prostitutes?”

“What kind of talk is that, my girl? Is that how we talk now?”

“Well, all the Lebanese are immigrants. The ones who didn’t migrate overseas migrated from their villages to Beirut.”

“I didn’t say it was so,” said Salma. “I said it was possible.”

“Take yourself, my dear Madam Salma. You ran away from the village with a man who wasn’t your husband, so you can be sure that everyone says about you what you’re saying about others.”

“What sort of person talks to their mother like this?”

“And that’s not all. I know and everyone else knows, so we’d better not say anything and let sleeping dogs lie.”

Hend hadn’t told her husband how her view of the world had changed because of Meena. She’d joined the Association for the Defense of Human Rights, which brought together activists, male and female, in defense of female foreign domestic workers in Lebanon. They’d put together an amazing amount of information on the ill treatment of Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, and Filipino women in Lebanon.

Still, Hend felt that she’d been at fault and it was too late because she’d been unable to do anything about it.

“It’s idiocy,” said Nasim as he looked at the picture of a child with a white complexion that Hend had taken out of her pocketbook.

Hend was ready to admit that she’d been an idiot but she could never forgive George or his father, Dr. Said Haddad.

The friendship between Hend and Meena had developed in the normal way. The Sri Lankan girl came each day carrying the doctor’s meal, and when he finished she’d pick up the empty tiffin box and go back. The friendship grew in waiting and silence. The girl spoke little and when she did, tried to pronounce the English and Arabic words properly, not the way people here in Lebanon think Sri Lankans speak.

Hend asked her which city she was from and she said Colombo.

She asked why she was working as a maid in Lebanon and the girl smiled and didn’t know how to reply.

With Meena’s daily visits to the clinic, though, Hend came to understand that the girl had been unable to complete her studies at teachers’ college because of her father, who suffered from partial paralysis. This had forced him to stop working in his small fabric shop and she’d had to come to Lebanon because her mother, brothers, and sisters had found themselves with no one to provide for them.

“I decided to study Arabic, madam.”

“My name is Hend. Don’t call me madam.”

“ Yes-madam ,” said Meena, and burst out laughing.

In Meena, Hend discovered the mystery of the east. Listening to her story of the mountain on whose summit Adam had left his footprints, she’d said to her, “The real East is there. We’re not in the East, we’re in the middle, which is why we live in a state of confusion over our identity. You’re the real east.” And she said she’d like to visit India and Ceylon.

“We’re not East either, madam. Whole world become West, all of us imitating all of us, which is why sun sets and you don’t know where it’s going to rise.”

Through Meena, Hend discovered a world fenced about with secrets and bitter experiences. She began to notice the theater of balcony friendships and how the maids who lived at the backs of buildings with closed doors went out onto balconies where they communicated in sign language for fear that their mistresses might notice, because they were forbidden to speak.