Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He decided to pick up his cup of coffee and go after her into the kitchen. He noticed the heels of her cracked, naked feet and felt the flames of desire but stayed where he was and couldn’t summon up the courage to do anything about it — throw her to the kitchen floor and take her like that without preliminaries or talk, raise her legs and enter her. The doctor’s right hand shook and the thought of rape flashed through his mind.

Sitting there in Beirut, Karim suddenly was intoxicated by the thought of rape, which blended with the spirit of the orange blossom water and the flavor of roasted coffee. He thought Ghazala was right and he should drink Turkish coffee without sugar. She’d told him that the coffee spread on the tongue and coated it with taste, and that sugar spoiled its flavor.

Everything had started when she left his room barefoot after putting the coffeepot on the bedside table and he’d noticed her cracked heels. He’d felt the desire to grab them, pull her down to the floor and throw himself on top of her. He pictured the scene as vividly as if it were happening in front of him and discovered that every cell of his body wanted the woman. But he didn’t dare. Once again Karim discovered that his nobility, or what he claimed as nobility, was just a cover for his fear.

He sat down on his bed, drank a little of the coffee, and a tingling ran through his body; he thought many times about getting up off the bed but didn’t.

He found himself in the kitchen. He didn’t know how he had got out of bed, or where he’d found the courage to stand in front of Ghazala and tell her he’d decided to try her bitter coffee.

He drank the coffee standing in the kitchen while Ghazala came and went, looking at him out of the corner of her eye and behaving as though she didn’t see him. He felt the bitter taste invade his tongue, grew intoxicated on the coffee’s smell and burning taste, and decided that from then on he’d drink only sugarless coffee.

The rape episode had ended with a cup of coffee. He’d stood there waiting for Ghazala to look at him and had only awoken from this state of expectancy when he heard her asking him to leave the kitchen so she could wash it down. This first encounter bore no relation to what would take place later. The short stormy relationship that ended two months after it began, only to take on a bizarre aspect thereafter, had left the Frenchified doctor with the taste of confusion on his tongue.

Karim might say that Ghazala was a symbol of the confusions of Beirut and thus absolve himself — after the moments of terror he lived through as he drank arak and chewed grilled chicken — of the naïveté of the look that had described itself on his features when Matrouk told him the story. When we resort to turning things into symbols it liberates us from responsibility and makes of human experience an arena of random happenings, so that life becomes no more than a story. Karim had come to Beirut to repair his mirror and find his own image again, only to find himself in a reality susceptible to neither symbol nor explanation. Civil war is superior to all other kinds of war in that it resists any explanation. It is total stasis, naked exposure to word and caprice. Ideas can last only if they are put in a vessel that imposes form on them, adding to and subtracting from them. But a civil war has no vessel. It is an assemblage of broken mirrors that run parallel to one another, making of the fragments images that reproduce each other but refuse to form a coherent whole.

The difference between Karim and his twin was that when the doctor found himself incapable of imposing form on things he fled to France and there set about erasing his memory. All that was left of the days of war was the vague image of a ghost which his memory, awakened by extreme drunkenness, had decided to preserve, making of it a vessel for the first stirrings of his love for the Frenchwoman. His brother, Nasim, on the other hand had set about adding, not subtracting, for he wasn’t content with his personal memory. Rather, he had mixed his brother’s into it by taking possession of Hend, who had experienced something resembling a nervous breakdown following Meena’s arrest and expulsion from Lebanon.

Ghazala and Sinalcol overlapped in Karim’s memory even though she took up residence there only briefly before withdrawing and turning into an elusive shadow, while he was never fully present. He was a ghost woven out of people’s words, a shadowy thug whose presence could be detected through the submission of others to his commands because of their fear that his explosive charges would blow away the doors of their shops and spill their guts onto the street. This ghost had turned into a real person whose identity Karim was able to assume, and of whom he told tales that mixed truth and fiction, piquing both the curiosity and astonishment of his French wife.

Karim never dared tell the Ghazala story to anyone, and it would have remained wrapped in oblivion if Ghazala hadn’t come to see him three days before his departure from Beirut, wreathed in smiles, to say that Matrouk had made up with her following Khawaja Nasim’s intervention.

“As you know, doctor, I could never say no to Khawaja Nasim.”

At that moment Karim had understood that his brother had decided to announce, in the midst of the collapse, that he could keep score, and that Nasim had known what was going on all along — and had managed, perhaps, to possess this woman’s body too.

The Ghazala who returned to tidy the apartment and help Karim gather his things for his final departure was not, however, the same woman. The brown-skinned woman of medium height with the well-turned calves and full thighs pulled back at the moment of orgasm, her naked feet cracked with pleasure and water; the Ghazala of the long black hair whose regularly spaced waves formed shadows on the pear-shaped, slightly pendulous breasts that perked up at the ends rising toward rosy nipples; the Ghazala of the large mouth and bee-stung lips, black eyes, and long neck — this was not the Ghazala who returned when the maid came back to help him gather up what he wanted from the apartment.

The woman who came back was different in every way. She had cut her hair and wore a wide dress that erased the contours of her body. Her eyes were without fire and there was a slight stoop to her shoulders. She said she had to apologize to him for getting him mixed up in something that had nothing to do with him. She said she felt it was her duty to tell him the truth and he answered that he didn’t want to know. But he drank her bitter coffee and listened to her story, feeling the knives cutting up his heart.

“You don’t have any right to be angry with me, doctor,” she said. “You were with Madam Muna too.”

“Don’t you dare say a word about Muna!”

Nasim had told him he could take what he wanted from the apartment: he’d decided to sell it along with the unfinished hospital building and the pharmacy and the plot of land in the village of Brumanna where Nasri had dreamed of building a three-story summer house for his two children and theirs. He’d asked him to sign a general power of attorney that would allow him to make the sale so that he could pay off a part of his debts. Karim had signed without discussion. He’d agreed because there was nothing else he could do. He’d left his city stripped of everything, realizing as he signed that he would never be able to go back there.

Ghazala had appeared from he knew not where. On the first day of his encounter with her, the seduction had revolved around coffee and naked feet. Karim hadn’t raped the beautiful maid who had come to his apartment, bringing with her an aura of seduction. The idea of rape had lingered in his mind and become a source of drowsy fantasies that filled that night and the four other nights he spent waiting for her.