Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“Tell me, please. Why are men like that?” she asked him.

“Like what?” he replied.

“Weak. All a woman has to do is be strong and say it makes no difference to her, and they go to pieces and turn into wet rags.”

He told her he wasn’t that kind of man and wanted to tell her the story of Matrouk, but thought better of it at the last moment. What was he to say? Matrouk and he had both behaved like wet rags. Only Azab had been a man. Though why should we have to believe Ghazala when she said Azab had told her to go back to her husband and children because he didn’t want problems?

Azab wasn’t like that, he’d wanted to say but didn’t.

“If you were to find out tomorrow that your wife was being unfaithful, what would you do?”

“My wife could never be unfaithful,” he said.

Muna had burst out laughing. “You all say that and then you turn into little kittens.”

“And who’s Eduardo?” he asked her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

He wanted to tell her about his father and about the sexual conquests and the unkindness and the cruelty. He wanted to tell her that the only real man was Nasri but how could he boast of something that he’d considered all his life to be shameful and humiliating? And how could he forgive a man who’d etched himself upon his memory as a despicable rapist?

Muna asked what was wrong, laughing, the drops of water scattering over her shoulders. She held out her hands to him but he felt he’d lost all desire.

He asked her again about Eduardo.

She sat on the edge of the couch and told him about a relationship she’d had with a married Italian who worked for the French press agency in Beirut. She said she didn’t know what had attracted her to him, maybe his gray hair and broad shoulders. She said he was fifty — “meaning twenty-four years older than me. You could say he was my father’s age. I’d gone to the agency because I’d thought at first I might work in journalism. ‘Why not?’ I thought. I know French and English and have a degree in French literature. I didn’t want to be a teacher. I met him there. He said he’d like to train me and began hitting on me — you know how men jump up and down like monkeys when they’re trying to get a girl. At the time I was in love with Ahmad and we were about to get married and I don’t know what happened. In fact, nothing happened. He took me out to dinner once at an Armenian restaurant in Ashrafieh and then we went for a walk and found ourselves in front of his building. He said he was inviting me in for a small glass of grappa. I smiled and told him, ‘No, Monsieur Eduardo.’

“Then he started talking in Arabic, which I’d thought he didn’t know. Suddenly his tongue was loosened: ‘You’re backward,’ he said, ‘like all eastern girls. What do think will happen if you come up to my place? Do you think I’m going to rape you?’

“He turned his back and went through the door to the building and I found myself following him and went up and drank grappa. ‘Where’s your wife?’ I asked him. He said she’d gone to visit the children in Cinisello.

“I asked him where this ‘Cinisello’ was. To tell the truth, I thought he was pulling my leg. In the end I told him it was he who was backward because when he made a move and I didn’t respond, he’d sat down on the couch like he was being punished.”

“And then?”

“Then nothing happened. He got up and saw me home and when he tried to kiss me I gave him my cheek.”

She said the story should have ended there because two weeks later she married Ahmad and they went to Italy for their honeymoon and there she discovered Eduardo hadn’t been pulling her leg her because, as she confirmed, there was a small town close to Milan called Cinisello.

She said three months later she’d gone back to the French press agency and met Eduardo. He’d behaved as though nothing had happened and she’d begun her attempts to seduce him.

“I don’t know what came over me. As soon as he saw me he started talking to me in Arabic and said, ‘How are you, child?’ ”

She said she’d felt slighted and made her decision, “and when a woman decides, it happens the way she wants.”

Karim said her story was silly and meaningless.

“He made a fool of you twice, the first time with the grappa and the second by calling you ‘child.’ But what did you want from him? Just married and starting as a teacher — what, you didn’t love Ahmad?”

“Of course I loved him and I still do, but the war.”

“What’s it got to do with the war?”

“It’s how war is,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It happened just like I told you. When I became convinced it wasn’t serious and that he had to wake up and stop behaving as though he was in love, he went to pieces and started chasing me from place to place.”

“And Ahmad?”

“Ahmad knew but behaved like he didn’t, or like he didn’t want to know.”

“And then?”

“It ended.”

“And me?”

“What about you?”

“Has Ahmad found out anything about our relationship?”

“Of course not. Why, are we having a relationship?” She laughed and threw herself onto the bed.

Muna’s laugh sounded in his ears as he listened to Ahmad Dakiz describing the Solidere redevelopment project. On a table in his office he’d put a model of the project as designed by the architect Henri Eddeh previous to the latter’s services being dispensed with following differences with Hariri. In the model the city resembled a curious mixture of Dhahran, Houston, Paris, and an Italian seaside town. In the sea, a few dozen meters from the World Trade twin towers, was an artificial island fated never to see the light of day because of the presence there of a deep marine trough known to the people of Beirut as Dogs’ Hole.

Dakiz spoke briefly about the project, then led his guest to the computer on which he’d installed a program resembling an electronic game. He turned on the computer and Beirut appeared — weeds and trees sprouting from the cracks in its walls — like a ghost town, or a setting for a war movie in a city anywhere in the world.

Maroun Baghdadi said that in his film Circle of Deceit the German director Volker Schlöndorff had discovered the amazing expressiveness of Beirut in ruins as a setting, but the Lebanese had spoiled it with dozens of movies that had turned it from a storehouse of human savagery into banal visual clichés.

Karim said the scene would do as a setting for the moment of resurrection and the end of the world. He was thinking of the terrifying description presented by Ghazala of the end as her other grandmother had imagined it. Dakiz, however, appeared not to be listening. He was preoccupied with making adjustments to the program before starting the game, which Karim would later describe to his brother as “demolishing the demolished.”

“Behold what I shall wreak!” said Dakiz, and suddenly the buildings began to fall, one after another, each disappearing behind a mass of dust before collapsing, broken up into a heap of stones and sand. The architect took the buildings down systematically, starting with Debbas Square, where the Café Laronda and Cinema Dunya were demolished, then turning to Cinema Metropole, and then burrowing off to the right to demolish the police building formerly called the Little Palace; then he entered Mutanabbi Street, where Karim noticed a neon sign on the second-floor balcony of a building apparently untouched by the war and read on it, in English letters, the name Mareeka. “No, don’t you dare demolish Mareeka’s building!” said Karim. But the architect didn’t give him time to finish what he wanted to say, before, on screen, making the beautiful Ottoman house collapse.