Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

She said she’d agreed to work for Madam Hend “to help her — I’m not a maid, doctor, and Matrouk doesn’t allow me to work as a maid in people’s houses but Madam Hend is different. I couldn’t disappoint Khawaja Nasim. I was with her for several months. What a woman! A gem! When she saw me at work cleaning the apartment she’d jump up and lend a hand, like we were friends. Then she told me I wouldn’t be coming to do work anymore but that I was to visit her once a week. Every time I go to her she sits with me and won’t let me do a thing. We drink coffee and talk and she starts asking me about the village. She likes me to tell her stories and the one she likes best is the one about my grandmother. She keeps asking me to tell her the same story and then gives me presents for the children and she never gives me secondhand things. Now that’s what I call a lady! She’s got a heart of gold and I feel like she’s my friend and a sister to me.”

She said she’d agreed to her husband’s request that she work at the doctor’s apartment because he was Khawaja Nasim’s partner in the hospital project and she considered her work a service to a friend. “Don’t get me wrong, doctor. All I want is for the hospital to do well and then we’ll all get a break. Matrouk can stop working as a laborer and a driver and take over the supervision of cleaning operations at the hospital and that way we’ll all get a break.”

Karim asked her what she wanted most and she said she wanted to buy an apartment in Beirut “and be a lady like the other ladies, like having a Sri Lankan maid and taking a break.”

“A maid!”

“That’s my dream. I know it’s not a dream likely to come true but that’s what I think about. I see myself as a proper lady.”

He told her Hend had refused to have a Sri Lankan maid.

“I know. She told me the story. Hend’s a gem. I told you she’s different from other women. She will never agree to have a maid and I love her and I love her point of view but you asked me about my hopes and dreams and I gave you a frank answer.”

Their first meeting was strange. At seven a.m. Karim heard the sound of the doorbell, seemingly coming from somewhere far away. Then he heard the key turn in the lock and the door open. He leapt out of bed, rushed to the door, and found a woman standing on the doorstep. She was bending forward a little as though about to come in but not coming in. She was holding the key in her right hand and smiling.

“I’m Ghazala,” she said.

“Who?”

“Khawaja Nasim gave me the key and told me you might not be home. I thought I’d come early, sorry to disturb. I thought that way I’d finish my work and get home before the children come back from school.”

“Who are you?” asked Karim, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“You go back to bed. You look tired and I won’t get to your room for a couple of hours.”

Karim focused, sleep now banished, and asked her who she was and what had brought her there so early.

She said she was Ghazala and Khawaja Nasim had sent her to clean the apartment. He’d given her the key and asked her to leave it with the doctor if she found him at home, or if not he would get the key the next day from her husband, Matrouk.

She held the key out to the doctor, who took it from her hand. “Would you like coffee?” she asked.

“No, that won’t be necessary, I’ll make the coffee. But Nasim didn’t say anything to me.”

“The khawaja’s like that,” she said. “He’s always making surprises for people he likes.”

Karim went into the kitchen to make his morning Turkish coffee and Ghazala caught up with him and started cleaning up the sink, in which dirty dishes were piled high.

“How do you like your coffee?” Karim asked her.

“What an idea, doctor!” she said, and went over to the stove to make the coffee. Her brown arm bumped his. She pulled her arm away quickly and looked at him with eyes that she lowered in a coquettish display of false modesty, making Karim feel he was watching a third-rate Egyptian movie. He withdrew from the kitchen to his room and heard Ghazala’s voice asking him how he liked his coffee. There was a sort of seductiveness in her voice, but it was that of a black-and-white melodrama where the maid seduces the hero, or the hero exploits his position and authority to drag the maid to his bed.

He said he liked it Ottoman-style and she asked him what “Ottoman-style” meant, so he answered, “It means medium sweet with just a little extra sugar.” He thought the melodrama was like the coffee that the Lebanese attribute to the Ottomans: there was something in it of the coquetry of the sugar which permeated the gravitas of the coffee, leaving nothing at the bottom of the cup but the residue, which resembled the tears that girls wept over “Ustaz Wahid” as played by the Egyptianized Syrian singer Farid el-Atrash. Karim had never dared proclaim his love of Farid el-Atrash and his passion for his song “Torment,” which went so well with his husky voice. The feelings of torment emerged broken from the singer’s throat, leaving love as a question mark suspended in the space of the hujazkar mode with its repetitive rhythms and Kurdish melancholy. The embarrassment he felt at his affection for the songs of Farid el-Atrash was equaled only by that which he felt at his passion for melodramatic movies, such as that in which Ustaz Wahid weeps over a lost love in Letter from a Woman Unknown . In his youth and during the days of leftist tumult he hadn’t dared reveal this side of his personality to anyone; the fashion was for Sheikh Imam and his revolutionary songs, and Karim loved those songs and learned them by heart, especially “Guevara’s Dead.” But nothing could reach into his innermost soul like the husky voice of Farid el-Atrash, with its mixture of repressed desire and pain.

What had happened with Ghazala? How had things developed? Why had he felt as though his heart was being almost ripped from its place every time he heard the two successive rings of the bell that announced her arrival? And how did it come about that he’d sit in his room waiting for her to finish cleaning the apartment so that she could come to him and lead him to the bathtub, where her hands would be waiting for him?

Everything had started when his arm bumped into hers. He’d gone to his room, as she’d told him to, sat on his bed reading a paper, lit a cigarette, and closed his eyes. Suddenly the smell of coffee erupted and spread like pins and needles through his joints. Ghazala came in, her hair up, and the smell was everywhere; and the two ebony hands reached out holding a tray bearing a coffeepot and a cup from which wafted the fragrance of orange blossom water. Karim was intoxicated by the aroma and asked about it. She said she’d put a little orange blossom water in before boiling the water: “There’s nothing better than the smell of orange blossom spirit.” She said she’d only found out about orange blossom water here in Beirut. “In the village we didn’t have orange blossom or anything of that sort. We plant olives, wheat, and barley. If you could only see the black soil of the Houran plain, doctor! It breaks your heart. The land is cracked with thirst, its skin is broken, and no one can do a thing.”

She asked him why the Lebanese called orange blossom spirit “orange blossom water.” “It’s a spirit, doctor. When you get a whiff of it you feel your spirit expand.”

“Where are you off to?” he asked her. “Sit down and drink a cup of coffee with me.”

“My coffee’s in the kitchen,” she said, “and I don’t like sugar in coffee. The sugar destroys the dignity of the coffee and I don’t know why you people in Lebanon drink your coffee like that, as though you were afraid of the taste and smell of the coffee itself.”