Broken Mirrors Read Free Page A

mother-in-law!”
    “She was your mother-in-law, now she’s mine. What’s the problem?”
    The conversation had got off to a bad start. Karim hadn’t come to settle old scores or to see the pleasure of revenge on his younger brother’s face. He didn’t know why he’d come, but he did want to open a new page in his life, or so at least he’d persuaded himself. While practicing on the camera he’d bought by taking pictures of his two daughters, he’d told his wife he wanted to devour Beirut with his eyes, to photograph it and apologize to it, to love it all over again. In his wife’s eyes he’d read the words she’d kept repeating to him since their first encounter: “You’re romantic and sentimental.” Now the words had taken on a new meaning. In that distant past, which seemed to Karim to belong to another time, she’d laugh and say “romantic” with lust fluttering in her eyes. Now the word came out dry and bitter.
    They’d drunk the arak and eaten the kibbeh in a silence from which they were rescued only by the racket and naughtiness of the children.
    Hend said nothing. Her mother, Salma, swathed in black, seemed a differentwoman. When Karim entered the apartment and she embraced him, he noted the black that covered her legs, mounting from there to cover everything else. She was wearing thick nylon stockings and the black enveloped her knees and thighs, and she looked like the widow she was.
    Salma hadn’t stopped wearing black since her husband had died prematurely from a clot in the brain, leaving her with a single daughter and a small sum of money that he’d put together from his work on an afforestation project in Abu Dhabi. All the same, this beautiful white-skinned woman had succeeded in making her dresses signposts to the shining whiteness that radiated from her thighs and wrists. A year after her husband’s death, she’d removed the black stockings but she had never stopped wearing black. When Karim met her for the first time, at his father’s pharmacy, he’d been astonished by her beauty and had seen the smile of triumph that was Nasri Shammas’s way of proclaiming a new female conquest. When he met her later at her apartment on his first visit to Hend, he felt a secret frisson run through his body and compared the frankness of her gaze, backed by desire, with the meekness in Hend’s small eyes, her dainty body, and her brownness that glowed as though it had imbibed the sun.
    The powdered sugar that seemed to glisten on Salma’s thighs where they burst out from beneath her short dress, split above the knee, had quickly vanished, however: the woman put an end to the young man’s doubts by speaking, somewhat contemptuously, of his father’s magic herbal remedies that made plants burst with life. Karim had been convinced that his father was making up his love stories to fill his solitude and stave off old age – until the day when his brother had opened a drawer where Nasri had kept the pictures hidden. Upon seeing them, Karim had been overwhelmed by a mixture of disgust and sadness.
    Why do we laugh at lovers’ tales when we do the same sorts of things ourselves? Love should never be disclosed to other people because otherscan accept it only when they are themselves its heroes. He felt revulsion toward his father but pity for himself. How and to whom was he to tell his own story with Ghazala, which had ended in something worse than a scandal? How was he to speak of his conflicting feelings, of his heart that kept changing course and taking him off to he knew not where?
    He thought of an ancient verse and smiled. Suddenly, with the return of the electricity, the apartment burst into light. He heard the hum of the refrigerator, saw himself sitting on the couch holding an empty glass of whiskey, and realized he was ridiculous. He refilled his glass and said out loud,
    M-a-n is so called for his a-m-n-esia
,
    The heart for its constant inconstancy
.
    The electricity! It was enough for the