Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

She nodded and a lock of hair fell over her eyes. She wiped her eyes and raised her head.

“I don’t know what kind of person your father is but I’ll take care of it. The main thing is you mustn’t kill yourself. Now get out of here.”

The girl left and Yahya was left with an image of her, which refused to go away. That evening Yahya told his mother he wanted the girl as his wife.

“Let’s find out who she is and about her morals and her family first,” said his mother.

“My heart tells me it’s her. I want you to ask for her hand tomorrow, before they marry her to someone else.”

The mother hesitated and looked at her son in surprise. Then he said he’d fallen in love with the girl.

“You must have met her before and been holding out on us.”

Yahya didn’t tell his mother he’d met her only a few hours earlier. In fact, he let them think he’d been in a secret romance with her.

Once Hayat had gone back to wherever she’d come from he felt her eyes had buried themselves in his heart and that he couldn’t not marry her. After they were married, when they were drinking arak at the Mar Sergius Spring restaurant in Ehden, he’d tell her that when she left his office he’d felt his heart plunge. “I suddenly understood Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab’s song, the one that says, ‘I plunged and was done for.’ ‘I plunged’ means both ‘I fell in love’ and ‘I fell down.’ Me too, I fell in love and down and you had to be mine.”

“You’re gallant and noble,” said Hayat. “From now on I’m going to call you Nabil instead of Yahya.”

“The only reason I married you was that I’d fallen in love with you,” he said.

“Fallen in love with me!”

“I fell in love with you the moment I saw you.”

“Impossible. Well, you know best why you fell in love with me. Perhaps you fell in love with me because you loved my love for you.”

“You mean you were in love with me?”

“I came to see you because I was in love with you. I thought it’s either him, or I’ll kill myself.”

When Yahya’s mother went to call on Hayat’s family the next day, her father was astonished by the unexpected visit. Naturally, Nouri Salah — such was the father’s name — knew Yahya’s mother from the bakery and had known her late husband. But he’d never dreamed she would ask for his daughter.

“Give us time to think it over.”

“Think all you like, Abu Tareq, but you know Yahya. Yahya loves the girl and if he doesn’t get her, God alone knows what he’ll do.”

“Our daughters don’t know anything about love and or any such nonsense,” he answered.

“May God be my witness that I warned you. We await your answer,” she said as she rose to go.

“Are you threatening me, neighbor? We don’t give our daughters to layabouts and prison graduates.”

“I’ll inform Yahya of your answer, and God protect us,” she said, and left without looking back.

Before the mother could find an opportunity to tell her son he’d been refused, Imm Tareq, Hayat’s mother, came to Yahya’s house. She didn’t enter but stood at the door, panting. She said they’d set the date for Hayat’s betrothal to Yahya for three days later.

Yahya’s mother had no idea what had happened to make them change their minds in less than two hours, but the woman went to the offices of Sada al-Shamal to tell her son the good news.

“Yes, I know.” he said. “Get yourself ready, mother of the groom!”

Khaled’s story was different in every way. He was an orphan, his father having died when he was three. He’d been raised in his grandmother’s house and had become like a younger brother to his uncle Yahya. All the same, he never joined the organization that his uncle founded. He went to the south and joined the Popular Front and there read Marxist thought and learned the importance of building a vanguard party, and took a serious military course in the forest of Qammoua on the heights of Akkar. Khaled only worked at the bakery after his uncle’s death, when he told his grandmother, “You’ve worked enough. I’ll take care of things.” It was with the bakery, which they renamed the People’s Bakery, that the story of a new death, more tragic yet than the first, would begin.

Had Khaled known that with his decision to marry Hayat he had sentenced himself to the fate that he would meet? His grandmother said it wouldn’t do. “It’s not as though your uncle has children and you have to feel obliged to marry his wife. Forget it, son. The woman’s older than you and it’s not how things are done.” However, Khaled insisted, and was obliged to use force to make her family agree to him becoming her husband.

The torment began once they took up residence under one roof. Hayat told him she respected his decision and his noble intentions but she couldn’t belong to another man.

“I still love Nabil,” she said, “and I can’t.”

“Who’s Nabil?” he asked her.

So she told him her whole story and said she’d loved his uncle Yahya, whom she called Nabil because he was noble.

“You mean that story about getting married to the sheikh was something you made up, and had no basis in truth?”

Hayat smiled and said nothing.

“So you lied to my uncle?”

“No, I didn’t lie. My sister’s story was true and I felt my turn was coming and I’d meet the same fate. Plus I was in love with Nabil.”

“Don’t call him Nabil! His name’s Yahya.”

“You can call him what you like but as far as I’m concerned he’s ‘the noble one.’ ”

She said she released him from any obligation toward her but was sure that if he divorced her, her family would sell her, as then she’d be both a widow and a divorcée; still, he could divorce her and she wouldn’t hold it against him.

At first Khaled had believed that by marrying his uncle’s widow he was fulfilling his moral duty to the memory of his uncle, whom he’d only really got to know after his death, when he found himself gradually changing into a shadow of the dead man. Yahya’s mother was the first to notice what was going on but said nothing. She could see her young grandson gradually turning into another person. Even his voice began to take on a new rhythm. She told him once, as she was leaving the kitchen, that she’d heard Yahya’s voice. “God protect us, it was just like his. Pull yourself together, son. We don’t need another martyr in this house.”

Khaled was patient with Hayat as no other man could have been. She slept next to him in bed for two whole years without him touching her. His love for her burned in his heart. He’d tried but she’d put him off, inventing all kinds of pretexts. But from the night she told him she couldn’t give herself to another man, he decided not to touch her. She cooked, cleaned, and behaved in front of other people like any ordinary wife, but when night came she’d put pajamas on under her nightdress and curl up on one side of the bed, covering her whole body and putting the pillow over her head and falling asleep. For sex with this eccentric woman Khaled substituted dreams. His nights were hot and moist with the water of life. He’d wake from his dreams, rush to the bathroom to wash himself off, then go back to bed. He had no idea whether Hayat was aware of what was happening to him because she wouldn’t move. He’d get up from the bed, look toward her, and see her slumbering on her right side, her long hair spread over the pillow that had fallen off her face. He’d come back from the bathroom and find the same scene, as though the woman had neither felt him leap from the bed nor heard the water running in the bathroom.

Khaled spent two years between nights full of dreams and days in the bakery. His day began at three a.m., when he’d rise to the sound of the alarm clock, take a cold shower, make a cup of coffee into which he put a little orange blossom water, and smoke his first cigarette in front of the open living room window because Hayat disliked the smell of tobacco. Then he’d leave and not get back until six p.m., when he had dinner with his wife and told her stories about the customers. After that he sat in his corner in the living room and read a little before leaving the house again to go to his meetings with the boys, and when he came back at ten at night Hayat would have put on her pajamas and nightdress and be waiting for him. She’d make two glasses of aniseed infusion and they’d drink them in silence, then go to bed.