Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim fidgeted in the tepid water and began piecing together the different parts of him that had been dissipated so he could stand. He felt a sting of cold, then leapt out of the tub, dried himself, got dressed in a hurry, lit a cigarette, and sat in the living room waiting for her. He heard the sound of plates being put on the small Formica table in the kitchen and smelled the smell of fried eggs, mixed with garlic and sumac.

“Come and get it, doctor.”

Suddenly he felt hungry. He went into the kitchen and found Ghazala seated in front of the frying pan, and on the table a bowl of tomato salad and a loaf of bread.

“There’s nothing in the house, doctor. It’s good I brought a few eggs and some tomatoes with me.”

She talked about the types of food she made well, laughed as she picked up small mouthfuls of bread which she filled with egg, then dipped in a garlic and sumac broth, and swallowed with gusto. Karim needed silence. He wanted to enjoy the aroma of garlic and sumac, but Ghazala’s inner self seemed to have opened up entirely. She ate and laughed and talked. She told him about her husband, Matrouk, who loved lentil soup after sex, and said she knew that whenever he asked her to make it she had to get ready and wash herself with musk.

She said “musk” and then fell silent, as though she felt she’d made a mistake she couldn’t retract.

“So you’ll be making soup tonight,” he said.

She didn’t answer and ate in silence, then got up, while the doctor looked out the window.

When Karim went into his room and lay on his bed, and the drowsiness began hovering around his eyes, it occurred to him that the siesta was the best thing ever invented. In France, where it didn’t exist and the working day lasted till evening — as though food at lunchtime were not the dividing line between two distinct parts of the day — he despised the siestas of the Lebanese. He thought of them as the product of laziness, remembering how his father would close the shop at noon, eat lunch, and sleep for an hour on the couch in the room at the back so that he could begin life over again. Here though, after two weeks of living in Beirut, he’d realized there was no doing without the siesta. The smell of the city was different after lunch, its sounds died away, and drowsiness spread to all its nooks and crannies.

Karim began his siesta feeling a bitterness that he would later discover to be unjustified. Instead of dying away with the ghosts of sleepiness, his bitterness started to increase. He felt the woman was a devil: instead of his tricking her or exercising power over her, as was supposed to happen in an affair between a man and his maid, she’d taken charge of everything, aroused desire, and then deftly and mockingly withdrawn. The magic had melted in the frying pan with the eggs, and the desire had uncovered the musk with which the woman washed herself for her husband’s sake, not his.

There was no jealousy — not only because Karim knew that jealousy of a mistress’s husband incurs laughter and has no place in the expression of love, but because he’d decided at that instant, as sleep benumbed his limbs, that his relationship with this woman must never be more than purely physical. True, the role of rapist that he’d decided to assume had come to an end on the living room carpet and evaporated entirely in the bathtub, but he was capable of imagining another relationship similar to rape without actually being rape, a relationship of body on body that ended immediately once orgasm was reached and was erased the instant the desire to make love had been satisfied.

Karim nodded off, or it appeared he had done so without realizing, because when he opened his eyes all he could see was darkness. It seemed he’d slept many hours without feeling the tingling of sleep that accompanies dreams. He got out of bed. The apartment was swimming in darkness. He turned on the light and went into the kitchen. On the kitchen table he found a pot of cold coffee covered with a small plate and placed on a tray with a folded piece of paper next to it. He poured the coffee into a cup, drank a little, discovering that it had been flavored with orange blossom water, opened the folded sheet, and read a single word written in an oddly childish hand. He read, “Thanks,” and smiled, feeling his manhood restored to him.

This sexual rite would be repeated twice a week, with the addition of a cooked meal that Ghazala would prepare to make the session “cozy,” as she put it. Over the table she told him many stories of her village, her childhood, her grandmother, her husband, Matrouk, and her love for and fear of Beirut. She filled the place with random talk that blended with the taste of the arak that Karim drank at the table on his own because Ghazala said she was afraid of what might come over her if she drank arak. She’d drunk it a few times, and each time had felt another woman come awake inside her. It had made her afraid and she’d decided never to drink it. When Karim insisted she drink a little from his glass, she took it and sucked at the white liquid. Her eyes glazed, as though she could get drunk on a single drop.

Two months of heedless pleasure uninterrupted by a single moment of unpleasantness. From the second week, Karim would put what he called “the weekly gift” on a plate in the kitchen and she’d take it without saying anything. She’d take it as though she weren’t taking it, in exactly the same way as, in bed, she took as though she were giving. Karim felt no regret about the gift: it was her due as maid and mistress.

Her sudden disappearance, however, caused him anxiety. Suddenly she’d disappeared and she didn’t phone. Karim waited a week before asking his brother about her and the answer only made things more mysterious: “Forget Ghazala. Tomorrow I’ll send you a better maid. Don’t worry about it.”

“Why? What happened?” asked Karim.

“What happened happened,” answered his brother. “Why would you want to get involved? Tomorrow I’ll send you another woman to clean the apartment.”

At first Karim was afraid Ghazala had discovered he was having an affair with Muna. She must have known. She must surely have made herself a copy of the key: this woman who was such a strange combination of cunning and naïveté knew her own interests very well.

The affair with Muna came about by coincidence and was innocent compared to the one with Ghazala. The love he practiced with Muna was full of concealment and shyness. The woman, who had come to him to have her skin treated, said nothing in bed. He would feel her interior quiverings, though not even a sigh escaped her, as though her thin body was the opposite of Ghazala’s in every way.

Why then had he initiated an affair with this woman in the midst of the waves of desire that wooed him? Was it because he wanted to extinguish his desire for Ghazala’s body, that storehouse of inexhaustible convolutions of lust, in that of another woman who seemed soaked in drowsiness and governed by shyness?

Karim didn’t know the answer, or at least he did but didn’t dare confess that he was being an out-and-out bastard. That was what Sawsan had told his brother when he gave her a respectable old age and saved her from abuse and death. For him to say he was a bastard, though, was meaningless. He hadn’t come to Beirut for the sake of Ghazala or Muna, he’d come for the sake of another woman. He’d discovered, however, the moment he entered his brother’s apartment, that that woman no longer existed because the man she’d loved many years before had disappeared.

“The issue, my dear,” he’d said to Hend, “is that exile forces us to recompose ourselves; one has to reinvent oneself each day or lose oneself. But someone who remains in his own country and among his family doesn’t have to do anything. He stays who he is without effort and without having to try to fabricate himself.”