Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

On top of that, the political choices of the two brothers had intervened: the younger became sole inheritor of the house and pharmacy, while it had become impossible for Karim to return to the east side of Beirut where the Phalangists ruled. Then, after the savage assassination of Khaled Nabulsi, he’d found he couldn’t breathe. The air had been cut off in Beirut and he’d felt he was breathing not air but thorns, so he’d decided to leave and never come back. Everything inside him had died and he no longer cared.

He’d phoned Hend, who had come and sat before him in silence at Uncle Sam’s, close to the American University in Beirut, listening to his sudden decision and saying she wouldn’t go with him because she couldn’t leave her mother.

Her mother, Salma, however, had a different perspective. She’d looked at him with contempt and said the war would never end because it came from inside of them. Where did she get such eloquence? And who was this woman who had so nearly been his mother-in-law?

Hend had said her mother wanted her and her son-in-law to live at home with her because she couldn’t bear to live alone.

“But it’s still too soon,” Karim had said.

“I know, I know. My mother’s a bit childish. She abandoned me when I was young and now she wants to cling to me for the rest of her life. Obviously I don’t want that, but I haven’t the heart.”

“We haven’t agreed to get married yet,” said Karim.

“We haven’t agreed! You’re right, we haven’t talked about it but, you know, I love you and you love me.”

She had told him she loved him and wanted him just when what he called “the oil of desire” had started to run out. Beirut had disappeared under the shelling and this girl had taken the thread of chastity in her hand, as though something had awoken inside her and turned her into something like a wife. Which was the real Hend? When he’d held her in his arms for the first time, she’d trembled like a small bird. They were at her apartment, and her mother wasn’t there. It was the eve of Good Friday, the voice of Fairuz was warbling from the radio: “Let Your son’s death be life for those who seek it,” and Hend was listening, on the verge of tears. He sat down next to her saying nothing but listening to the requiem for Christ. He lit a cigarette, felt the singer’s voice covering him in blue velvet, and had a vision of himself bending over Hend and taking her. She flowed like water, and Fairuz’s velvet blended with Hend’s face, which was covered in dew. He held her to him and everything inside him shuddered.

They were sitting now in the same café, drinking orange juice while she talked to him about her mother and he couldn’t understand how she could say, “I haven’t the heart to leave her,” after all the stories that she’d told him about her childhood at the half-time boarding school, and her unshakeable feeling that her mother was living somewhere else.

He took hold of her hand and she looked around as she withdrew it. “You mustn’t! Any moment someone will see us.” Why hadn’t she said they mustn’t earlier, when, uncaring, she’d looked for opportunities to be alone with him, even discovering dark side streets where he found himself clasped, as he walked with her, by her dainty body, which embraced him and pulled on him and only released him after the final shudder?

He’d told her he was leaving and had taken her hand, which she withdrew without speaking, so he understood that she understood that their love was gone. But he was wrong. He’d discovered his mistake here, in Beirut, when he heard her say her husband had never forgiven her “even though I was a virgin, as you know. Every time he sleeps with me, I feel as though there’s something in his eyes he wants to say but doesn’t.”

“But he knows,” said Karim.

“Did you tell him?” she asked.

“Kind of, but it’s not important.”

That day, he’d taken her hand and she hadn’t withdrawn it or said, “You mustn’t.” She’d let her hand flow and he’d listened to the voice of Fairuz and thought memories were like tears. Why had she spoken of her mother? Who was this woman whom he had to meet at his brother’s apartment the moment he arrived in Beirut?

Hend had told him her mother’s story many times, but each time he was amazed. He found it difficult to believe this story of a woman in the village of Kherbet el-Raheb in the Akkar district who’d left her husband and three children and run away to Beirut to marry the agricultural engineer Sami Naqqash. Salma’s story was full of mystery. She’d met the engineer when he came to work on land reclamation in Akkar and had lost her head: this was what she had told her daughter. “He spoke to me and I lost my head. I, poor thing, was just a child. I was twenty-one and he was forty. Tall, his head shining with white hair. Dark-skinned with a bewitching smile and laughing eyes. He saw me walking on the road. I was carrying Mokhtar, my baby son, may God make his life easy, and he stopped and looked at me and smiled. I felt as though I’d been paralyzed. Then I understood that that’s what love is. No, I didn’t sleep with him or let him kiss me but he used to hold my hand and I could feel his heart beating against my fingers and my heart felt as though it was going to fly away. I fell in love with him and was like a madwoman and I followed him to Beirut and we got married.”

Salma didn’t tell her only daughter the details of this adventure, which had caught the imagination of the people of Kherbet el-Raheb and been transformed into a rustic legend called “Salma and Sami.” Nor had she spoken of how it had ended with her husband — who’d sworn he’d kill her — sitting with the agricultural engineer in the Gemmeizeh Café in Beirut, drawing up with him the contract of settlement which eventually made Salma’s divorce, and marriage to her lover, possible.

The story went that Salma was the most beautiful young woman in the village. She was the fourth and last daughter of Salim Mokhtar, who worked as a hired hand in the wheat fields of Sheikh Deyab Abd el-Karim. Her beauty manifested itself in the milky whiteness of her complexion, which caused the young men of the village to swarm like hornets around her father’s house.

Salma was born nine years after her mother had stopped having children. When his wife got pregnant, Salim Mokhtar was sure God had decided to have mercy on him and give him a son who would keep his name alive; he named the boy Salah and sat down in front of his wife’s belly to wait for him.

The midwife didn’t dare come out of the room, which was swallowed up by the steam that rose from the basins of hot water. Even the child cloaked itself in the surrounding silence. The man heard the first sign of life in the form of a weak crying, quickly stifled. “No!” he cried. “It’s a girl? Salah has turned out a girl?” He left the house and only came back three months later, having slept in the fields and eaten green plants and earth. In the end, though, he did return and he fell captive to the beautiful child who gleamed with a whiteness the like of which none had seen, and once her three sisters had married their cousins, he took to speaking of her as his only daughter. Abu Salah was never seen now without his daughter Salma, whom he addressed as though she were a boy called Salah, and he never tired of playing with her or supervising her schoolwork, so much so that people thought he must have gone slightly mad.

Having completed her studies at the village school, Salma decided to go to the proper school in the town of Halba, which amounted to breaking every tradition of the village — traditions that forbade the education of girls or, when they allowed it, required that the girl not advance beyond the school under the village oak.