Broken Mirrors (26 page)

“Did you see? I beat the wave!”

She ordered him back to the restaurant, where she wrapped him in her long coat and said they had to go home before he caught a cold, but Karim refused. He opened a new bottle of champagne and raised his glass in a toast to his new country, France, the taste of whose sea he had sampled that day, and with the body of whose most beautiful woman he had been baptized.

“You’re crazy,” she said on their way back.

Karim had said he didn’t want to go home because he’d reserved a room in the hotel.

“Why the hotel?” she asked.

“For the honeymoon,” he said.

“But we’ve been living in the same house for a year and we don’t need all that nonsense,” she said.

“But a marriage isn’t complete without the hotel,” he said.

Bernadette was exhausted but Karim insisted it wouldn’t do. Getting married meant having sex. And when she said she couldn’t because she was having her period, his eyes gleamed: he said that was even better because that way he’d feel as though he’d opened her up.

“How vulgar! What do you mean ‘opened me up’? What could be uglier than ‘opening up’? Thank God it wasn’t you who did that because I would have hated you for the rest of my life.”

Karim laughed and didn’t reply. He said he was cold and needed her body to feel warm and continued steering the little Renault toward the Hôtel Royal.

The next morning he said apologetically that it had just been a
caprice
; he used the French word but was thinking of the Arabic word
nazwa
– from the verb
naza
, meaning “to leap” – which is used only figuratively, to mean “rampant desire.”

The word
caprice
, however, doesn’t have that sense, being only a neutral
expression indicating unexpected desire. He’d said the French word, with a cough, because he couldn’t think of another, then leapt onto his French wife and made love to her, coughing and shuddering.

What, though, had happened to Bernadette?

After six years of marriage and giving birth to two children, the French nurse had become fed up with him and his desire, to the point that he’d begun to feel that desire had abandoned him and the magical whiteness of the Frenchwoman’s body had begun to crack and turn to yellow.

The coughing rescued him from his failure in the matrimonial bed. He had no idea what had happened. He would approach Bernadette, take her in his arms, feel his desire starting to crest, and then, suddenly, before he’d taken her, he’d collapse into nothingness, and the cough would rack him. The woman would get up to make him a cup of lemon balm tea and the grief would spread over her face before she returned to her sleep and her loneliness.

He didn’t tell her that his cough was different now. At the hotel he’d slept with her without bathing or removing the traces of sand and the taste of salt from his body. It was as though he were still eating fish. He’d slip into her and with her and sway above the ropes of flame that shot from his eyes and never stop coughing.

“You’ll get sick,” she said.

The man didn’t care if he got sick. He was like someone swimming, borne upward by the ecstasy, then falling into the depths, then rising again.

Bernadette told him the following morning that she loved him but didn’t want that to happen again.

“Making love during one’s period isn’t healthy, as you must know.”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, wresting the cup of café au lait from her hand and starting to make love to her again.

“But you’re a doctor and you do know.”

“Medicine’s for the hospital but with you I’m a chronic patient.”

The chronic illness became a reality, even with Nadine and Lara. Can a person lose the ability to talk to his children and be afflicted by a kind of dumbness concealed beneath a cough? Karim was enchanted with his two daughters. Nadine was five and Lara three. He told his wife he was now husband to three women and wanted a fourth to feel that the love was complete.

“You’re joking,” said Bernadette. “I know you want a boy.”

He said, “No,” and he wasn’t lying. He felt it was his duty to found a line of women so he could free himself entirely from the burdens of the heavy past that he’d carried with him from Lebanon. The idea of having a son who would grow up to resemble his grandfather terrified him.

“I don’t want a boy. I want to fill the earth with beautiful girls.”

She said he had to be reconciled with his twin brother to smooth the way for a reconciliation with his father.

He said he’d come to France to forget he was one of an illusory pair of twins that had devoured his life and prevented him from learning how to live, and all he wanted of his father was that he be erased from his memory.

Bernadette didn’t believe him despite the fact that she enjoyed the relationship he’d succeeded in establishing with his daughters, which allowed him to treat them as friends and spend all his spare time playing with them.

Suddenly, however, things were turned upside down.

The upheaval started not with the decision to go to Lebanon, as his wife believed, or wanted to believe, but with Karim hearing Hend’s name from his brother’s lips when he announced on the phone that she’d become his wife.

It seems Nasim had hidden the fact of his marriage from his brother
for four years and when his new wife’s name happened to cross his lips he pretended to be amazed that his brother didn’t know.

“I phoned and told you. It just seems you didn’t believe me or didn’t want to believe me.”

“Impossible,” said Karim, overcome by a fit of coughing.

That was the day the coughing and throat-clearing began. Words started to weigh heavily within the mouth of the Lebanese doctor, and intermittent fits of coughing, which turned into chronic coughing in the marital bed, swept over him.

The girls sensed the change and started to distance themselves. No one is quicker at picking up the vibrations of love than children. When he’d been fully preoccupied with them they’d refused to go to sleep without his kisses. When he was forced to stay late at the hospital the girls would be waiting for him in the living room; he’d come home and find them asleep on the couch in the living room, and he’d take off his shoes, run to them barefoot, and carry them to their beds with kisses. Their smiles of contentment were all he needed to feel intoxicated.

He had learned the meaning of intoxication from those kisses. He’d realized that the Arabs were mistaken in attributing the power to enrapture solely to the voice of Umm Kulthoum, even though it made those who sank into it stagger as though drunk.

He told her his father had never got drunk on the smiles of his sons. He was an egotist interested only in his own little pleasures. “I learned rapture here in France. A smile from one of the girls is enough to lift me to heaven, where I stagger with the drunkenness of love.”

Where had it come from, though, this miserable cough? It had turned into a kind of rope knotted tightly round his throat, making him speechless and alienating him from the little world he’d built for himself in France to curl up inside seeking protection from his memories.

Nadine and Lara could feel the man withdrawing, so they started to do the same. With the intuition of children, they picked up on what Bernadette failed to understand until she heard Karim deciding to go to Beirut to build a hospital.

“It’s insanity,” she said. “What’s happening to you? Don’t you realize you’ll destroy all of our lives with this decision?”

He had never lied to Bernadette – as she claimed he had when she heard his decision to go to Lebanon – in their entire married life.

He told her she’d misunderstood him, as she had in the past when she’d misread his motives for cutting off all ties with his country.

Bernadette could hardly believe what happened to the man after they got married: he suddenly turned into a Frenchman and began making efforts to secure a transfer to a job in Paris.

He told her that one could become a true Frenchman only in the environs of Paris. There they spoke proper French, rasped their
r
s, and sucked on the word
oui
as though drinking it.

Bernadette said she hated Paris and living in large cities, which was why she’d left Lyon and chosen to live in Montpellier, a small city that looked out over the Mediterranean. She said she’d first thought of Marseille, whose seaside esplanade had enchanted her, but then she’d felt the city wasn’t French enough and living there would be like living in some city on the North African coast.

But Marseille is Beirut. He said he didn’t like Marseille because its esplanade was like the one in Beirut, and when he’d visited it he’d smelled the smell of civil war.

She said she’d fallen in love with him because he was Lebanese and had something of the perfume of the Orient about him.

The woman hadn’t understood what it meant for the dead to come alive in the living, and Karim was incapable of explaining it to her.

His problems with the dead had begun in Beirut. He’d gone to France to escape them, but they had suddenly awoken, as though they’d been asleep all along inside his soul.

Do the dead sleep inside our souls? And when do we become aware of their having woken?

Had Nasri woken them when he died, besieged by white, or was it because Karim had made the mistake of calling himself Sinalcol when he met Bernadette in the bar? Bernadette had laughed as she explained to the Lebanese doctor what the word meant in Spanish. Karim laughed too because he’d thought the name could be the hook with which to catch the blond French nurse who made him feel as though he had at last arrived in France.

Bernadette, though, hadn’t given up the game of calling her husband by the name of Sinalcol when he was making love to her, as though it had become their spur to sexual desire.

And when Karim had yelled at her, in the midst of his coughing, to stop using the name, Bernadette had understood that the spell was broken.

But was Sinalcol dead?

Had his disappearance following the entry of the Syrian army into Tripoli been an announcement of his death? Does disappearance equal death?

Karim knew that more than seventeen thousand Lebanese had disappeared during the war as a result of abductions carried out by militias at the flying sectarian checkpoints, and he knew that, most of the time, to be abducted in Lebanon meant to die.

Still, Sinalcol’s disappearance did not necessarily mean that he was dead. He could have emigrated to America or Brazil and disappeared there, as many Lebanese war criminals who are now businessmen all over the world had done.

Karim didn’t know the man’s real name, but Sinalcol had become the phantom that exemplified the Lebanese Civil War in the country’s northern capital in the years 1975 and 1976; after the Syrian army’s invasion of the city, no one had seen him and no one knew what had happened to him. He was described as keeping his face covered with a red checkered scarf, moving through the darkness of the night and picking out a small number of commercial establishments on whose metal doors he would write the word “Sinalcol” in red chalk. The next night he’d go past the same shops and collect the protection money that their owners had put into the small cardboard boxes that he’d left the night before. Defaulters would find the doors to their shops dynamited.

Sinalcol never once stole. He’d blow off the metal door and go his way. The owner would arrive to find his goods untouched and realize he had better pay up at once … and so on and so forth.

Sinalcol became the talk of the city and stories were made up about him. Khaled tried to kill him but failed, and that was yet another story …

When Bernadette asked him to describe Sinalcol to her, he found himself at a loss for words. He could find no French word for
shabbeeh
, a term the common language of the people of Lebanon had come up with and which attributed to the phantoms of the civil war certain acts, such as robbery, extortion, and murder at checkpoints based on the religion specified on a person’s identity card; so he said something Bernadette couldn’t understand – he said he was a
fantômiseur
.

He’d wanted to make an adjective from the word
fantôme
and all he could come up with was a term that made things even more obscure. Never having
seen him, he didn’t know how to describe the man. In response to her insistence, however, he’d begun describing him, only to discover that he was describing his brother.

“Amazing! Did Sinalcol really look so much like you?” she asked.

It was Danny’s fault. The tall blond man, who had studied philosophy in Paris and returned to Lebanon to make the revolution he’d tasted on the streets of the Quartier Latin, had been his window onto the world of the civil war.

Karim had cared nothing about the civil war. He was the opposite of his brother. How could one care about a war among religious sects when one felt no allegiance to any sect or religion?

He’d told Nasri he hated this country for committing suicide every hundred years and felt no allegiance to it. The man nodded in agreement but said war wouldn’t break out again. “A bit of faking around like in 1958 and then the Americans will come and sort it out.”

After the Americans had come and gone and not sorted it out, Nasri had uttered his famous aphorism: “This war has come to drag all wars into the mud. After the Lebanese war there won’t be any respectable wars anywhere.”

Karim found he’d become a part of the war involuntarily, even though he never actually fought. He claimed to have taken part in the fighting but he hadn’t. His war had been limited to two training courses, the first at the Nahr el-Bared Camp close to Tripoli, where he’d found himself involved, without realizing it, in clashes that broke out between the Lebanese army and the Fedayeen, and the second in a village near Tyre where he met Jamal. In both instances Danny had been behind it.

Danny should have died, the way heroes are supposed to, but he stayed
alive and returned to his job teaching philosophy at the French Lycée in Beirut, and after his divorce he disappeared from the scene.