Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Nasim was certain of one thing — that he wanted this woman, whatever the cost. He’d made major changes in his life for her sake and divorced cocaine. How to explain to someone who’s never tried sniffing the white powder what it means to abandon your nose and lose your appetite and feel as though you’re as heavy as a stone and unable to move your limbs, and then be frozen like a statue, waiting for the desire to evaporate, and by the time it does you’ve turned into something as stiff as a plank of wood?

Cocaine was king of the tables in those days. It was manufactured in Wadi el-Shirbin, a remote village on the slopes of Sannine. Antoine Sebai, who headed the militia in Beirut, asked Nasim to join him as pharmacist. They brought in experts from Colombia and Turkey and started making cocaine and heroin. God looked kindly on their efforts: cocaine was a guest at young people’s tables throughout the war. Nasim, despite amassing a large fortune from his activities, decided to pull out after the killing of Antoine, who was found incinerated in his car. Nasim realized then that he couldn’t challenge the big fish, and that the drugs game was directly tied to the militia’s leadership.

Nasim bent with the wind because he’d learned that the civil war was a bending game, and once you start bending, it becomes a way of life. Nasim wasn’t a coward, but he’d discovered early on that the game wasn’t worth dying for. He’d seen death in his own blood when he bled, and then the news of Michel Hajji’s death had come and paralyzed his capacity for thought. He’d been lying in bed at his father’s apartment when Robert Hayek had arrived soaking from the rain and brought the news. Nasim had been struck speechless. He pulled himself together and went, dragging his injured leg behind him, to the Greek Orthodox hospital where the body, shredded by bullets and wrapped in a white sheet, had been deposited in the morgue. Nasim looked at Michel’s face and found it unrecognizable. The features had been almost erased, as though all dead people look alike. He bent over his friend’s brow and kissed it and was taken aback by the smell of death and the taste of sponge.

Nasim had asked, “Are you sure this is Michel?” and not waited for an answer.

“That’s not him,” he said, retreating and fighting to overcome an insistent feeling of nausea. He bent over next to the wall to vomit but couldn’t. His guts were torn up and he emitted croaking sounds. Robert went over to him and patted him on the back. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. Nasim followed without objecting, saying nothing and feeling fear. He couldn’t explain clearly to Hend what lay behind this fear. How could he tell her he’d been afraid of the body because he hadn’t been able to recognize it? How could he explain why he’d found himself unable to go on fighting? Robert promised he’d get him into the BG Squad, the elite Phalangist military force that was later to become the scourge of the civil war. Nasim was proud of the proposal because it would prove his capability and talents to everyone beyond doubt. Before Michel’s corpse, however, his strength collapsed. He saw himself laid out in the cold locker and imagined Nasri standing in front of the body, wanting to vomit, and he felt the humiliation of death.

“The humiliation of death, my dear sweet Hend,” he said, “is the very essence of humiliation. That’s why when a person wants to die he has to get away from people and surrender himself to nature and die alone and not let anyone see his corpse. But the humiliation of death catches up with everyone and no one can escape it because we have to be buried and that’s where the tragedy lies.”

Hend looked at him in astonishment. Where did such talk, which had no context, come from? She told him she was used to not understanding when he spoke, so she expected nothing from him, but she did want to know exactly what he did for a living.

Was Hend afraid of Nasim as she claimed to his face? Or did she feel pity for him, as she told her mother?

“A man, my dear, is nothing to be afraid of. Men are to be pitied. Poor things, forced all the time to prove that they’re men!”

In this woman Nasim saw the new beginning for which he’d been waiting. He told her he’d always loved her and he hadn’t been lying because from the very first time he met her, at the entrance to the pharmacy, he’d been conscious of the frisson of mystery that radiated from her dainty brown face and slim body. Hend was not short, as her stooped walk might give one to believe, but somehow, with her flat-heeled mules and simple long dress whose color she was always changing but of which the cut was always the same, with her knees that she clasped to her chest when she sat at her ease and her wandering glances which never came to rest on anything in particular, she resembled a creature that slid over things. He’d stood next to her on the sidewalk and made her laugh. He didn’t remember what he’d said or why she’d laughed but she’d said he was “sweet, and funny,” so he decided it was her. He invited her for a coffee and she said she couldn’t because she was waiting for her mother, who had dropped by the pharmacist’s to buy the famous plant potion. He asked for her phone number and she smiled without answering. Then, when he’d seen the love in his brother’s eyes, Nasim had gone back on his decision and made up his mind not to get into a conflict from which he would emerge, as usual, the loser.

The story wasn’t just one of harebrained revenge, as Nasri claimed when announcing his adamant opposition to the marriage.

“You’re going to come with me to ask for her hand whether you like it or not and don’t you dare play the asshole the way you have all your life.”

“I’m against this marriage,” screamed Nasri.

“You’ll do what I tell you or you know what’ll happen.”

“Nothing happened,” Nasim told Hend. “He came and paid you all a visit like a good boy and asked your mother for your hand.”

“But why was your father so absolutely against the marriage? It was terrible, how his jaw dropped, as though he couldn’t speak. Even though my thing with your brother was old and well in the past.”

“He said it was because Karim and I were going to end up like Cain and Abel.”

“What a thing to say! You mean he was plotting for you to kill one another?”

“No, what he was afraid of was that I’d kill my brother. He thought of me as Cain. That’s what he screamed as he was pulling the bullet out of my leg. He said, ‘If you think you’re Cain, I’ll kill you before you can kill your brother.’ ”

What had seemed like a passing misunder​standing between Hend and her husband because of her refusal to allow a maid into their house quickly opened up all the other wounds that she’d thought had healed in the course of the love story she’d lived with Nasim during the year of the chalet, which she thought of as “the year of the grapes.” She had no idea where Nasim managed to find grapes at all four seasons of the year; it was something of a miracle in a city closed off by civil war. He told her he imported the grapes from South America especially for her. “Here it’s winter and there it’s summer. I can bring summer in wintertime. That’s the philosophy of trade, and this is love, which makes a summer of all our days.”

At the chalet they swam during all four seasons and all four seasons had the same name — “the mending of hearts.” Over these seasons, fashioned from the grapes of desire, Hend learned to love herself. The waves of the sea turned into intermeshing mirrors reflecting her face and body, and Nasim’s eyes, which looked at her with rapture, were transformed into windows onto her broken soul.

Following Meena’s deportation, everything had looked ugly. She couldn’t bear to look in the mirror. She came to see her face as a mask she couldn’t take off. She hated her short hair, which fell over her eyes in front and filled them with shadows, and she no longer loved her dainty body or her way of walking with such short steps that an onlooker might have thought she was about to fall over. Hend decided she wanted to get rid of her name, her eyes, and her hair, and that she was capable of dying.