Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“You’re right,” she told him. “The two broken hearts have met. Come, let’s get married.”

They married at that crucial moment that Nasim had designated “walking the knife’s edge.” His withdrawal from the world of drugs had left a taste like sawdust in his mouth. He’d found himself alone, stripped of the protection Antoine had guaranteed. The climate which had created the impression that white powder could cover over blood, and that the blending of red and white made money flow like water, had dissipated.

It is hardly true, as novelists say, that wars create a climate of solidarity among people. Wars turn a person into an isolated being, a monster living among monsters, listening only to the howling of the wolves surrounding him on every side. Nasim lived in loneliness and fear. The illusion of the cocaine laboratory had dissolved, all his projects had collapsed, and he found himself having to start from zero. And at zero he met Hend and saw her afresh. He told her that when she appeared in front of him he’d felt as though the mist had cleared. Everything had appeared as though covered with a sort of milky color and he’d thought that cataracts, “the blue water,” had come early — as though his father’s curse had afflicted him with premature blindness. Hend laughed and said the Arabs called it “the white water” while the Greeks had named it “the yellow water,” but what he was claiming was unfounded because when working at the ophthal​mologist’s clinic she’d often seen the mark of the disease on people’s pupils and there was nothing like that in his eyes.

At the beginning he’d played the “blue water” game with her. He’d felt alone, life seemed meaningless, and the phantom of his twin brother, who had become a doctor in France, had appeared before him. So he decided to play at love with this timid brown girl whose skin shone in the sun and revealed glimpses of a beauty filled with diffidence. Revenge on his successful brother was no longer on his mind, or so at least he believed and so he tried to explain to her when the angry mask drew itself on his face in reaction to her hurtful words.

Love had come in the midst of the fever of work. Nasim had reestablished himself using the money made from his former trade, and within two years had turned himself into a timber, iron, and petrol merchant. He imported building materials and laughed up his sleeve. He hated the war yet wanted it to go on because it was his only source of livelihood. He smuggled and made money and lived like a king.

He told Hend he loved her but his work required her indulgence. No, he didn’t work in prostitution, as she had accused him of doing. All that had happened was that he’d gone to the souk while the shells were falling and rescued Suzanne and put her in a apartment in the Badawi district, on the edges of Ashrafieh, and started supporting her financially — as any son with a mother whom he had found only after a long absence would have done.

But Hend didn’t want to understand. She spent her time at home with books. He had no idea from where this reading fever had come to her nor why she read only depressing novels. He told her Kafka had nothing to do with them. “What kind of a story is that that you’ve read three times now? All we need is to start turning into cockroaches!”

“But we are cockroaches and we don’t know it. Perhaps if we did we’d find a way out of the situation.”

When Nasim wanted to summarize the crisis in his relationship with the woman, he’d say the problem was one of choosing between life and death. “I love life and all you can see is death. I want to live and go out and get drunk and dance and you want to stay at home. I want to love you and you want me to be fed up with you and everything else.”

Hend refused to go out with her husband to the nightspots that had sprouted like mushrooms at a seaside resort called Maameltein. Just once, because he insisted, she went with him and listened to a young male singer performing Umm Kulthoum songs in a voice with a light coating of huskiness, but she’d felt the place was like a cabaret and that the women were behaving like whores. The dancing started to the rhythm of “You Are My Life” but it wasn’t Oriental dancing. Men and women took over the dance floor and swayed back and forth arbitrarily without moving from their places and their laughter rang through the space. Then, when the singer began singing about Ramallah, a kind of fire ran through the dancing throng and they started yelling the words along with the young singer. At this point Nasim grabbed her hand to pull her onto the dance floor, but she yanked it back and said she wanted to go home because she felt she was choking.

On the way back she said she was amazed at how such people could sing about Ramallah and Palestine while the blood of Shatila and Sabra had yet to dry. Nasim threw his cigar out the window and told her she hated life. “I swear I don’t understand you. What do you expect us to do? People want to live and dance and sing. Ramallah, Shramallah — do you think anyone cares what they’re singing? The people were drunk and wanting to live.”

“That’s the drunkenness of death,” she said.

She hadn’t been able to tell the women from the whores, she said. It was as though the borders of things had broken down and the men had turned into pimps for their wives. “What’s that about? Who could live like that?”

He said it was the war. “War’s like that and we have to live.”

“No. You’re like that and I won’t accept that way of life.”

But Hend couldn’t find another. She felt disgust at the charitable associations that took care of the wounded and disabled because she saw in them the ghost of the Association for the Defense of Human Rights that had done nothing for Meena. At the same time she refused to enter her husband’s world, which she saw as a mirror of the disintegration of Lebanese society, and she could no longer find anything to say to her mother, who saw in her son-in-law, Nasim, the man she’d never managed to find.

“The most important thing in men is generosity, my dear. Your husband’s well off, he’s doing well. Why are you always making a long face? Why can’t you understand that this is your lot in life?”

Karim had no idea why Hend had told him the story of his father’s death. He hadn’t understood exactly what had happened: had she pushed him, or had he fallen as she tried to escape his grasp? Could it really be that Nasri had tried to see how far he could get with her too? If that were so, why had Nasim said Nasri had changed a lot during his last days, exciting only pity and grief?

“It was almost like he was my son but, how can I put it, it was like someone who has a cripple, God forbid, for a son: he feels sorry for him and he loves him. You love your son whatever he is, after all he’s your son, but with your father it’s difficult, I swear it’s difficult. You can’t not feel pity for him but where are you supposed to get the love from? Love has to be new, like Brother Eugène used to teach us at school, and that was why Christ became a baby, so we’d love him. There’s no love without the beginning.”

Nasim recounted how Nasri had become much thinner, and that his skin was turning black and breaking out. If you looked at him from behind, you might think you were looking at a wide pair of trousers with a man hidden inside, but when you were facing him you saw a phantom wreathed in black. Nasri had insisted on dyeing his hair, because the whiteness, whose praises he’d sung while life still coursed through his body, had come to seem hateful. When Nasim mocked his black hair, which looked like a wig, he told him white was the mark of death and he couldn’t stand it anymore because it was the color of blindness.