Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

On their wedding night Bernadette was overcome with astonishment as she listened to a strange request from her husband.

They’d signed the marriage contract in the town hall, in the presence of a coterie of French friends, and then they’d all gone on to Palavas-les-Flots, where a banquet of that royal fish, the sea bream, grilled inside a mountain of salt, had been laid out, bottles of champagne had been opened, and white wine had sparkled to the rhythm of the waves.

Karim drank a lot that night, as bridegrooms always do. He danced and ate and said he wanted to become one with the “White Sea,” which from the restaurant balcony looked gray. He took Bernadette’s hand and led her to the beach.

They ran and laughed and rolled on the firm sand of Palavas and he pulled her by the hand and told her that he wanted to swim.

She told him he was crazy and she loved his craziness because it made her laugh. Bernadette’s chortling grew louder as she watched Karim approach the cold water, take off his shoes, and enter the sea in his clothes. She watched him shiver with cold and told him to come back, but he continued. Then she saw a high wave that rolled forward, bringing with it a cold spray that reached the beach, and she screamed with fear and sat down on the sand. He, though, instead of disappearing into the wave, started running so as to beat it to the shore, his clothes soaked.

“Did you see? I beat the wave!”

She ordered him back to the restaurant, where she wrapped him in her long coat and said they had to go home before he caught a cold, but Karim refused. He opened a new bottle of champagne and raised his glass in a toast to his new country, France, the taste of whose sea he had sampled that day, and with the body of whose most beautiful woman he had been baptized.

“You’re crazy,” she said on their way back.

Karim had said he didn’t want to go home because he’d reserved a room in the hotel.

“Why the hotel?” she asked.

“For the honeymoon,” he said.

“But we’ve been living in the same house for a year and we don’t need all that nonsense,” she said.

“But a marriage isn’t complete without the hotel,” he said.

Bernadette was exhausted but Karim insisted it wouldn’t do. Getting married meant having sex. And when she said she couldn’t because she was having her period, his eyes gleamed: he said that was even better because that way he’d feel as though he’d opened her up.

“How vulgar! What do you mean ‘opened me up’? What could be uglier than ‘opening up’? Thank God it wasn’t you who did that because I would have hated you for the rest of my life.”

Karim laughed and didn’t reply. He said he was cold and needed her body to feel warm and continued steering the little Renault toward the Hôtel Royal.

The next morning he said apologetically that it had just been a caprice ; he used the French word but was thinking of the Arabic word nazwa — from the verb naza , meaning “to leap” — which is used only figuratively, to mean “rampant desire.”

The word caprice , however, doesn’t have that sense, being only a neutral expression indicating unexpected desire. He’d said the French word, with a cough, because he couldn’t think of another, then leapt onto his French wife and made love to her, coughing and shuddering.

What, though, had happened to Bernadette?

After six years of marriage and giving birth to two children, the French nurse had become fed up with him and his desire, to the point that he’d begun to feel that desire had abandoned him and the magical whiteness of the Frenchwoman’s body had begun to crack and turn to yellow.

The coughing rescued him from his failure in the matrimonial bed. He had no idea what had happened. He would approach Bernadette, take her in his arms, feel his desire starting to crest, and then, suddenly, before he’d taken her, he’d collapse into nothingness, and the cough would rack him. The woman would get up to make him a cup of lemon balm tea and the grief would spread over her face before she returned to her sleep and her loneliness.

He didn’t tell her that his cough was different now. At the hotel he’d slept with her without bathing or removing the traces of sand and the taste of salt from his body. It was as though he were still eating fish. He’d slip into her and with her and sway above the ropes of flame that shot from his eyes and never stop coughing.

“You’ll get sick,” she said.

The man didn’t care if he got sick. He was like someone swimming, borne upward by the ecstasy, then falling into the depths, then rising again.

Bernadette told him the following morning that she loved him but didn’t want that to happen again.

“Making love during one’s period isn’t healthy, as you must know.”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, wresting the cup of café au lait from her hand and starting to make love to her again.

“But you’re a doctor and you do know.”

“Medicine’s for the hospital but with you I’m a chronic patient.”

The chronic illness became a reality, even with Nadine and Lara. Can a person lose the ability to talk to his children and be afflicted by a kind of dumbness concealed beneath a cough? Karim was enchanted with his two daughters. Nadine was five and Lara three. He told his wife he was now husband to three women and wanted a fourth to feel that the love was complete.

“You’re joking,” said Bernadette. “I know you want a boy.”

He said, “No,” and he wasn’t lying. He felt it was his duty to found a line of women so he could free himself entirely from the burdens of the heavy past that he’d carried with him from Lebanon. The idea of having a son who would grow up to resemble his grandfather terrified him.

“I don’t want a boy. I want to fill the earth with beautiful girls.”

She said he had to be reconciled with his twin brother to smooth the way for a reconciliation with his father.

He said he’d come to France to forget he was one of an illusory pair of twins that had devoured his life and prevented him from learning how to live, and all he wanted of his father was that he be erased from his memory.

Bernadette didn’t believe him despite the fact that she enjoyed the relationship he’d succeeded in establishing with his daughters, which allowed him to treat them as friends and spend all his spare time playing with them.

Suddenly, however, things were turned upside down.

The upheaval started not with the decision to go to Lebanon, as his wife believed, or wanted to believe, but with Karim hearing Hend’s name from his brother’s lips when he announced on the phone that she’d become his wife.

It seems Nasim had hidden the fact of his marriage from his brother for four years and when his new wife’s name happened to cross his lips he pretended to be amazed that his brother didn’t know.

“I phoned and told you. It just seems you didn’t believe me or didn’t want to believe me.”

“Impossible,” said Karim, overcome by a fit of coughing.

That was the day the coughing and throat-clearing began. Words started to weigh heavily within the mouth of the Lebanese doctor, and intermittent fits of coughing, which turned into chronic coughing in the marital bed, swept over him.

The girls sensed the change and started to distance themselves. No one is quicker at picking up the vibrations of love than children. When he’d been fully preoccupied with them they’d refused to go to sleep without his kisses. When he was forced to stay late at the hospital the girls would be waiting for him in the living room; he’d come home and find them asleep on the couch in the living room, and he’d take off his shoes, run to them barefoot, and carry them to their beds with kisses. Their smiles of contentment were all he needed to feel intoxicated.