Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Three days later Lebanon was full of corpses. After seeing the pictures of the massacre on the television Meena said she wished she were blind because all she could see in front of her was dead bodies. The doctor had carried a copy of al-Safir and was beside himself. The pictures of the massacre at the Palestinian camps of Shatila and Sabra filled the front page of the newspaper, and that evening the whole family watched the news. Meena was sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room trying to understand what the television was saying, and when she started to understand some of the words that traced themselves over the bloated corpses she got up and ran to her room, where she burst into tears and started banging her head against the wall. George fidgeted in his chair and wanted to get up and go after her but Dr. Said was the first to enter her room and see the blood. The doctor took the woman in his arms, embracing her flowing tears. George reached the room and didn’t understand when he saw blood on his father’s shirt. He went over to them, led Meena by the hand to the bathroom, and washed the cuts on her head. The cuts weren’t serious, just grazes.

George spoke to her but she didn’t answer. She left him and went to her room.

That night George knocked on Meena’s door. She knew it was him but she hesitated. When she opened it he hugged her to his chest. The smell of alcohol wafted from his mouth and he looked like a lost child. He pulled her toward the bed. She said no, then yielded to his kisses.

Meena couldn’t remember what happened after that. She said George talked but she didn’t understand exactly what he was trying to say. She said he was angry because she hadn’t told him she was a virgin but he put his head on her neck and held her to himself for a long time before leaving her room at two in the morning.

Meena said she didn’t blame George. “It was my fault,” she said.

“That was it?” asked Hend.

Meena nodded her head.

“So you only slept with him once?”

The girl was silent and didn’t answer.

“You slept with him a lot. I bet he made a fool of you and told you he loved you.”

“ No-madam . No fool. He never say the word but he say I make him crazy and he wish.”

“He wished what?”

“I don’t know,” said Meena. “I’m mistake. I loved him and I still love him but it’s over.”

Three and a half months later Meena went to the doctor to be sure her misgivings were right and that the interruption of her period was not due to psychological tension, as the social worker whom she met at the church had told her. She wasn’t unhappy. She immediately decided to get rid of the fetus and went back to the house.

She didn’t tell George she was pregnant, she just told him straightaway that she’d decided to get rid of the fetus and wanted his help in finding a doctor to carry out the abortion. George didn’t open his mouth. He put his head in his hands and said, “It’s wrong.” She asked him to get her an early appointment with the doctor, left him in the living room, and went to her room. She heard his footsteps outside the door but he didn’t knock. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

Two days later George came to her room at night and she was waiting for him. He sat on the edge of the bed and said he loved her. She said this wasn’t the time for being emotional and asked him about the doctor. He said he’d made her an appointment with a doctor who worked at the Greek Orthodox hospital and he’d take her there the day after next at nine a.m. “No,” she said, “I’m going to go alone. You shouldn’t have to go through that,” and she asked him the doctor’s name.

At Dr. Salim Hamid’s clinic the surprise that no one had expected occurred. The doctor was kind but after he finished the examination he said he was sorry but couldn’t perform the operation because the fetus was in the fourth month and it would be murder and a sin. “I can’t. I apologize. Go to someone else, maybe they’ll do it, but not me.”

At that moment Meena decided to keep the child. She returned to the apartment exhausted and nauseous. She heard the mistress scream, “Where were you?” while telling her to get lunch ready because Dr. Said had invited some of his friends over, but she didn’t answer. She went to her room and closed her eyes.

She spoke only to George, who came home late, confident that the doctor would have performed the abortion. When he heard his mother yelling to say the maid was refusing to come out of her room, he told her to calm down and went to her. Meena told him she was going to keep the baby, whatever happened.

“Be patient. Maybe I can find another doctor to do the abortion.”

“I don’t want to kill the child, I’m going to keep it. I know I should have been careful. I don’t know what happened, I felt very queasy yet I didn’t take care of things. It’s my responsibility, it has nothing to do with you. It’s my child and I won’t let anyone kill it.”

This was the turning point that led to the bitterness. Had he said he could do nothing, had he washed his hands of the whole business, she would have understood and been understanding, but instead he sat next to her on the bed.

And when George left the room he found his parents waiting for him in the living room. He told them Meena was pregnant. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. It was his fault.

The family was seized by a fit of madness. There were screams and threats. The mistress swore she would kill herself and the father said an abortion was the only solution because if she didn’t get one it would be a death sentence for the whole family. He tried to convince Meena to accept the principle of an abortion but was taken aback by her adamant refusal.

When Dr. Said suffered a stroke, however, everything changed. George disappeared into the hospital with his father because he refused to leave him even for an instant, and when the patient came home George was no longer with him.

The mistress passed the information on to the maid. “George has gone to Harvard and he’ll be there for four years. You’ll have to get your things together and go. We’ve had nothing but trouble from you.”

Dr. Said tried to convince Meena to go through with an abortion. He said he knew all the doctors and would take her to the best.

Meena refused, and Dr. Said’s last offer was ten thousand dollars provided she left Lebanon immediately.

“Tomorrow I don’t want to see your face,” the mistress said.

“Tomorrow evening I’ll bring you the money and the ticket and you’ll leave the day after,” said Dr. Said.

“Never! No way!” said Hend. “You can stay with me if you don’t have a place to sleep and tomorrow I’ll go to the association. We’ll hire a lawyer, bring a case, and smash them to pulp.”

Later Meena would write to Hend to tell her she’d been wrong. “The decision to bring a case was a mistake and there was no need for it.”

Meena returned to her employers’ apartment. She got her things together without saying a word of farewell. From then on things moved fast. The lawyer from the Association for the Defense of Human Rights brought a case against Advocate George Haddad and his father, Dr. Said Haddad, and Dr. Said brought a case against the maid, accusing her of defaming him and his son. Meena was summoned to the Palace of Justice where the judge issued a decision that she be detained pending interrogation. Two days later Hend went with the lawyer to visit Meena at Roumieh Prison, only to discover that a decision had been issued by General Security for her deportation; she’d been deported from Lebanon the next day on board Air Lanka flight 420, destination Colombo via Dubai.

The story didn’t end there. Hend left her job at the clinic and had a nervous breakdown. Meena for her part wrote a letter to Hend six months later in which she told her she’d given birth to a beautiful boy and had wanted to call him Ramoun but everyone there referred to him as Baby Lebanon, and she was going to marry a young man who worked as a tuk-tuk driver; everyone there loved the boy; she was sad only for her heart and because George would never see his son.