Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Meena contented herself with sending a picture of the boy to Hend, who, though Meena had asked for nothing, took the picture to Dr. Said’s clinic. The moment he saw her he put his hand over his heart and doubled up, groping for a chair.

“Cut out the playacting,” yelled Hend. “Do you take me for an idiot?”

The doctor took his hand off his chest, stood up straight, and in a shaky voice ordered Hend to get out of the clinic.

What Meena’s letter hadn’t said was that when she was being led in handcuffs to the plane she’d caught sight of a ghost standing in the distance, watching her. Meena was sure the ghost was George.

Hend gave an implacable “no” to the presence of a Sri Lankan maid in her house. “I don’t want a maid, Sri Lankan or anything else. I don’t want anyone to help me with the housework. Aren’t I already a maid myself? What for? What don’t I already have? I’ve got nothing to do all day except sit at home and wait. At least this way I keep myself occupied.”

Hend hated herself. She went to the offices of the human rights NGO and resigned. She told May Nashawati, the president, that she hated herself and hated NGOs. “I’m a liar and you’re liars. I believed myself when I was browbeating the doctor and reassuring Meena but it’s impossible to work in a society based on lies and crime. Our role was to paper over the lie with a worse lie to quiet our consciences, and look at the disaster.”

Hend was crushed when she left the association’s headquarters. She felt as though her voice had been strangled and she could no longer walk. She felt dizzy and nauseous.

“The doctor must be telling everyone I’m a fool now,” she told her mother when she got home, but Salma had no mercy on her daughter. She reminded her of what she’d told her when Hend had returned, so proud of herself, to recount the events of her last meeting with the doctor.

Hend had entered the doctor’s office and said she wanted a word with him.

Dr. Said looked up from the papers in front of him. “Nothing wrong, I hope, my dear?”

“I’ve come to tell you I’ve decided to leave the job because I can’t work with you after what’s happened.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Meena!” she said.

“What?” replied the doctor, in a shaky voice.

“I’m a member of the Association for the Defense of Human Rights and we’ve hired Advocate Iskandar Lahham to take on the case.”

“You?”

“That’s why I can’t go on working for you. I won’t work for racists who have no mercy and exploit people.”

Hend turned to go. The doctor leapt up and grabbed her by the wrist. “No, I won’t let you go till you’ve heard what I have to say.”

“I’ll hear it in court,” she said. “It’s my fault for believing you were ill. I believed you and worried about you and then I realized it was all a show put on to kill Meena and the child in her belly and blackmail your son and force him to go abroad.”

The doctor stood up, trembling, put his hand on his heart, and said in a croak that he’d never forgive her. “You’re like a daughter to me, Hend. Why are you talking to me like this?”

All Hend could remember of what she would refer to as “the doctor’s ravings” were the words “the black child.” The word “black” emerged from between his lips and she saw tar smeared over his tongue and mouth and felt disgusted. He was pretending to bewail his bad luck because he had only that one son: “It would mean ruin, my dear. How could he live in Beirut with a woman of that type? We’d be a laughingstock. And anyway what did I do to God that I should have a black grandson?”

Hend told her mother that when she heard the word “black” she turned on her heel and slammed the door behind her.

“But the doctor’s right. I’d have done the same in his place,” Salma had said. “Suppose it had been you. I would have died.”

Hend went home that day with her shoulders drooping, despondent, and filled with sorrow, but Salma showed no mercy, even reproaching her for losing a job over a stupid point of principle that was no use to anyone. “A maid’s a maid and always will be, that’s how I see things.”

It was in the midst of this sorrow, amounting almost to a nervous breakdown, that the relationship between Hend and Nasim began gradually to slide. Nasim laid out before her a carpet of words. She told him she felt as though she was sliding on soap. “Your words are like soap, and I’m going to start slipping.”

“Slip away and don’t worry about it. I’ll catch you.”

“But it’s soap and the soap’s not real.”

“Come, don’t be scared of my words or the soap.”

“What should I be afraid of?” she asked.

“Be scared that I’m unfaithful, but I could never be unfaithful.”

He spoke to her of the betrayals that surrounded him on every side and said with her he felt safe.

“But I think it’s hard to love you, I don’t know why.”

“Nothing’s hard,” he said, and invited her to go swimming with him at the chalet, and she went.

Hend hadn’t known how to tell Nasim how it had been between her and his brother. She said she couldn’t talk about the subject because it made her feel unfaithful. “It’s as though I were betraying him, even though it was he who left me.”

Nasim told her not to feel guilty as he was the guilty party, if there was a guilty party in the affair.

She said no more — not because she was convinced of his point of view but because love stories seem ridiculous to those who didn’t live them.

Nasim was holding a bunch of white Maghdousheh grapes. He asked her whether she liked grapes and said laughingly that grapes were the fruit of love.

She took a grape from the bunch and said she’d thought pomegranates were the fruit of love.

“That was a long time ago,” he said, and explained to her how low pomegranates had fallen. “In the old days pomegranates stood for a woman’s breasts and when a lover spoke words of love to his beloved he would liken her breasts to pomegranate fruit. Do you know what we mean today when we say ‘pomegranate’? A pomegranate is a hand grenade. See how the pomegranate has fallen from the throne of love and become a part of war? Also, in the old days, my dear Madam Hend, pomegranates were considered the acme of fruit, whereas now they’ve disappeared from people’s tables and they use the juice to make pomegranate treacle, and pomegranate treacle is something sour to go with small fried birds.”

He said pomegranates were finished and the only people who gave them any respect were a few romantics who wept false tears of love.

“But I know a love story that happened because of pomegranates.”

“The lover must have been a liar or a con man and the girl a nincompoop.”

“You’re right,” said Hend. She took the bunch of grapes with its shiny white spheres and started to devour them.

The story of the Sri Lankan maid ended with Nasim selling the maid he’d brought to Beirut to his friend and partner Antoine Sebai, a deal on which he made a thousand dollars, at which point it occurred to him that this was an easy and amusing trade. In the end, though, he decided to keep out of it in an attempt to preserve the last remaining thread connecting him with his wife. Hend refused to agree to let even Ghazala come more than once a week. Then, after six months, she decided to dispense with her services altogether.

Why could Hend no longer understand his language?

He told her she’d known everything from the beginning, during the days at the chalet, and had been happy with his lifestyle. He’d told her everything without telling her anything but she’d understood what he was up to, of that Nasim was certain. If not, then what did it mean when a woman told you she loved you?