Broken Mirrors Read Free Page B

electricity to come back for his black thoughts to be swept aside. Karim decided to view his life as comedy. Nothing was worth tormenting oneself over because the true nature of things was unclear. With a sudden pang of affection for his father, he had a vision of him lying dead in the middle of the living room and laughed at the meaning​lessness of it all.
    He’d told Muna that the sorrows of separation were meaningless. He’d kissed her lips, which were wet with water, and laughed as he slept with her for the last time. He’d said they had to make their last time more beautiful than the first. He reminded her how shy and afraid she’d been and that the language of the body was wordless. He told her that their affair must not end in the dumbness with which it had started and made love to her before her body had time to dry, pulling the towel from her and laughing as he took her.
    Muna had arrived without warning. It was seven a.m. when Karimopened the door and saw her standing there hesitantly, wearing her morning exercise clothes, which were stained with sweat. “I came to say goodbye. We’re leaving for Canada in a week.”
    She went into the living room. Karim left her and went into the kitchen, put the coffeepot on the flame, and heard the shower being turned on in the bathroom.
    She stood there, wearing the white towel that covered her body and left only her thin white legs visible, and said she was sad. He hadn’t asked why she was sad but had laughed and approached her and said that her wet body was the best way to say goodbye.
    He turned on all the lights in the apartment and went to the kitchen, where he took a handful of zaatar, scattered it over a piece of dry bread, and devoured it.
    “It’s all because I drank a lot without eating anything. It’s over. That story is finished and tomorrow, in France, there won’t be a story, there mustn’t be a story,” he thought to himself.
    He’d stretched out on the couch, started to feel the creeping numbness that comes before sleep, shaken himself awake in a panic, set the alarm for four thirty a.m., and sunk into a deep sleep.
    Karim Shammas was sitting impatiently in the black Mercedes taxi that was taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. All at once the sky lit up and the whistling started. The driver ducked to protect himself from the mortar shells that had begun to fall on the airport road. Suddenly the car veered off. Karim heard the screeching of the tires and felt everything shake. He closed his eyes and prepared for death. He heard the driver shout that he was going back to Beirut. He opened his eyes and asked him to keep going and get him to the airport. Then the car stopped and he heard the driver’s voice say through the screeching of the tires that he couldn’t.“If you want to go on, sir, find yourself another car. I’ve got children and I want to go home.”
    Karim had a vision of himself as another person. He got out of the car, bent over the trunk, lifted out his suitcase, set off down the middle of the dusty, garbage-strewn road, and thought that he’d reached the end of the world.
    This was how his Beirut adventure ended, with a ringing in his ears and a feeling that he was supporting himself with his shadow. When he caught sight of the Beirut airport building, with its ruined façade, he looked back and wept.

2
    W HEN K ARIM S HAMMAS agreed to return to Beirut for the hospital construction project, he didn’t know that the civil war, which had come to an end in Lebanon, would begin anew within him.
    “The war will never end,” Mrs. Salma had said to him when she saw him in front of his father’s pharmacy on Zahret el-Ehsan Street in Beirut. When he’d seen the woman, who covered her head with a black silk scarf, coming out of the pharmacy, he had wanted to run but instead remained rooted to the spot.
    The woman, who was in her fifties, approached him, gave him a contemptuous look, and asked him why he was