Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

In five years her brother would be twenty and he’d have to find work and take over responsibility for the family. She’d decided therefore to go on studying English in Beirut and to learn Arabic, too.

She told Hend her situation was different and she meant it.

The difference she was referring to wasn’t attributable simply to the doctor’s kindness and sympathy but because she’d been able to impose her presence on the family. She became the household’s “little mistress,” as George called her. She cooked all the Lebanese dishes, cleaned the apartment, and took care of everyone. Even the mistress came to like her, though she insisted on continuing to talk Sri Lankan English with her while holding her nose, which had shrunk following unsuccessful cosmetic surgery, up high, as though she smelled something bad.

Meena couldn’t recall George being present in her life at all. The young man would leave the apartment in the morning and not get back until night. Meena rarely saw him in the apartment. Dr. Said joked with her about how beautiful she was and would say she’d arrived ten years too late. “If you’d come ten years ago, I would have been in trouble, but now no . The engine’s kaput and gone rusty, my dear, and it’s all down to age and the madam.”

Meena had imposed her presence and felt as though her loneliness in this strange city and her dealings with the Lebanese, who behaved as though they were the most refined nation in the world even though they spent all their time cutting each other’s throats, were the desert she must cross in order to discover herself, as her blind grandmother had taught her.

She met other girls from her country only on Sunday, when she went to the church of Saint Francis. Meena wasn’t a Christian but church was her only way of meeting colleagues. She was convinced that prayer meant contemplation of the self, that the Buddha was manifest everywhere, and that she would find repose in the burning candles fragrant with incense.

Each Sunday she returned to the apartment feeling sad after having listened to stories of oppression, torment, and even rape. She felt she’d fallen into a trap and there was nothing she could do about it. At church she also met a group of young Lebanese men and women who would come from time to time and ask how the maids were, promising them help. Meena realized there was a barrier inside every Lebanese person that prevented all empathy and recognition of the other. Hatred exists everywhere and she remembered the terror she’d felt in Colombo. The same terror, the same war.

Meena knew all this and felt it deep inside her, so what had happened to put her in this quandary?

Hend said Dr. Said had put on a show for his son. “You think you can tell me anything about him? I know him inside out, he’s the biggest play actor in the world. All the time he’s putting on an act for his patients and pretending to be sicker than they are when actually he’s as healthy as a monkey.”

“ No-madam , I know him. I just don’t know why he did that.”

“What I want to know,” said Hend, “is why you did that.”

The sun was setting behind the pine trees and Meena was standing on the balcony of the Brummana house alone. She could see a bo tree in the midst of the forest. She could hear the tree speak in the wind that blew through its branches. She felt like going down from the balcony to the tree and asking it to rid her ears of the sound of lamentation that filled the skies of Beirut. She saw her grandmother sitting beneath the holy tree looking at her and speaking sounds that Meena couldn’t hear. Her grandmother had said that the sound of the wind in the bo tree leaves was the voice of the dead. “The dead never leave us. They talk to us through the sounds of the branches, they care about us, and they teach us what to do.”

Meena heard the voices of the dead and saw the water. She didn’t understand what had happened to her in Lebanon. She felt lonely, as though she’d gone deaf. Arabic, which she had tried to learn, was intractable and closed, and the English she used to know had begun to fade away into that strange linguistic mix her mistress used in her dealings with her. So she sought refuge in water. She spent so much time washing and scrubbing the house that she made the mistress angry. It was true that the building where Dr. Said lived had an electric generator and an artesian well but the mistress lived in a state of constant terror at the idea of the city running out of water. Meena therefore exploited the times when the mistress was out of the house to shower and play with water, especially on the large, wide balcony.

The obsession with cleanliness, with twice-daily showers, and with picking everything up to wash made Dr. Said laugh. He saw in it repressed desires and told his wife to leave the girl alone, saying “when the well runs dry we’ll decide what to do.”

This woman of water and soap hated Lebanese food and found herself without a sense of taste. She’d learned to cook all the different Lebanese dishes but for herself she cooked her own food, mixed with spices, hot pepper, and the flavor of life. She couldn’t fathom the attitude of her mistress, who, as soon as she smelled the food that Meena was preparing in a corner of the large kitchen, would hold her nose and open the windows, screaming, “ Windows! Open windows! ” in the maid’s face.

When the doctor decided to go up to Brummana to escape the inferno of the Israeli invasion, Meena felt a terrible sense of estrangement. Something had changed in these Lebanese who fled the sounds of shells in Beirut for the mountain resort, which soon was teeming with people. She no longer liked leaving the house because the comments people made on the streets were full of racism, and in the eyes of the young men she could read hatred and rapine.

She told Khawaja George she was afraid.

In Brummana she’d begun to get to know George, the doctor’s only son, who kept to the house, read the newspapers, and never stopped smoking.

She’d thought she was alone in the house when she was surprised to find George entering the kitchen, carrying some pomegranates.

“What’s that strange smell?” said George.

“I’m cooking, mister.”

“It smells like Indian food and I like Indian food.”

He asked her to put a little of the food on a plate for him and said it tasted good.

He gave her the pomegranates and asked her to seed them.

“Be careful you don’t let a single seed fall on the floor because every pomegranate contains within it one of the seeds of the pomegranates of paradise,” he said. He said the people of that country had once worshipped the god of love, whose name was Ramoun and who lived in the pomegranate trees.

She finished seeding the pomegranate, put the red seeds into a glass bowl, and took it out to the balcony where he was sitting.

“That day, he saw me,” said Meena. She told Hend that she’d felt how his eyes had seen her and that he’d put his hand on her cheek and told her she was beautiful.

“And after that you slept with him?” asked Hend. “God, what a silly goose!”

“ No-madam . After, nothing.”

She said he’d asked her what perfume she used and she’d smiled and answered that she wore water perfume. She asked him if he could smell the water and he replied that water didn’t have a smell and burst out laughing. Meena laughed too and said the scent of water could be detected only on people’s bodies, and that the only real scent was the scent of people. She said her grandmother had told her people were created from mud and water, and that their original smell was the smell of soil moistened with rain.

Meena said everything had happened at the Feast of the Cross. The Feast of the Cross that fell on September 14, 1982 arrived weighted down with the rain of sorrow. On that day Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian militia allied with Israel, who had become president of the Republic of Lebanon, was killed. Brummana looked haggard and black. People stood in the roads, stunned. She heard Dr. Said tell his son that he’d been expecting this outcome. George wept as he said that the dream was dead.