She looked at him with her sky-blue eyes and said she didn’t appreciate that kind of humor. They finished their meal in silence and when they went home he didn’t try to have sex with her during their siesta but lay next to her like an angel.
The following Sunday morning Bernadette awoke to a clattering in the kitchen and found her husband fine-chopping parsley and tomatoes and mixing minced meat with onion, the dishes piling up in the sink. She went to help him but he asked her to leave as her presence would spoil the surprise. He said he’d make her a café au lait and bring it to her in the living room.
At one p.m. the surprise had turned into a table covered with vegetables, the tabbouleh and kibbeh nayyeh at their center. He poured the arak and they drank. She said the Ricard tasted different. “Ricard!” he said angrily. “Like Ricard,” she said. At this he explained to her that arak was the essence of white grapes, that it was mixed with aniseed while being distilled, and that it was the most sublime product of the Ottoman Empire at its height and was not to be compared to the aniseed liquor from which Ricard was made. He made her a plate of tabbouleh and she ate and said the salad was nice but there was something in it that tasted strange. He explained to her, as he gave her a piece of the large tomato that he had hollowed out and filled with salt, spices, ice, and arak, that the people of Lebanon sprinkled arak over the tabbouleh, which was not a salad as she thought, but God’s juneina or garden, being all the vegetables produced by the earth mixed with cracked wheat. He explained that the word juneina was the diminutive of janna, meaning Paradise, because the paradise that God had promised Man was an endless garden whose vegetables, fruit, and waters were never depleted.
Bernadette ate of God’s garden, feeling the burning taste of the arak, and just as her tongue started to get used to the arak flavor that permeated the parsley, the time came for the kibbeh nayyeh. He presented her with a plate decorated with mint and white onion, and she had barely inserted her fork into the dish when she heard him say there was no need for a fork. The kibbeh was eaten with bread, using the hand. She placed a morsel in her mouth and tried to get used to its strange taste, closing her eyes to concentrate on appreciating the kibbeh, then asked him what it was. He tried to explain to her that kibbeh was a mixture of mutton, onions, cracked wheat, salt, and spices and resembled steak tartare.
“Now I understand,” she said.
She jumped up and ran to the kitchen, returning with a raw egg, and before the astounded Karim could say or do anything, she’d broken the egg into a small dish and beaten it with her fork preparatory to putting it on top of the dish of kibbeh.
Karim snatched the dish from his wife’s hand and the raw egg spilled onto the table.
“What are you doing?” he yelled in Arabic.
“C’est du steak tartare, non?”
“Absolutely non! Now look what you’ve done.”
The Frenchwoman burst out laughing and took a napkin to remove the traces of egg, which gave off a cloying smell, from the table. He took the plate of kibbeh and threw it into the garbage, trying to explain to her that egg made everything zinikh. When he searched for an equivalent of the word zinikh in French he couldn’t find one — not odeur âcre, not pourriture, certainly not relent acide. How was he to explain to her the meaning of zinikh? He resorted to the dictionary but found nothing and contented himself with saying, “C’est un odeur désagréable.”
She said she understood nothing and that his conduct did not resemble that of the civilized man she had married. He tried to placate her, saying it wasn’t his fault but that of the French language for not including the word zinikh.
Time, however, would change everything. Bernadette ended up making tabbouleh, kibbeh, and all the different casseroles. She didn’t sprinkle arak over the tabbouleh because she discovered that the custom had died out in Lebanon and that Nasri Shammas was the last Lebanese to sprinkle arak over the “vegetable garden,” as the two small boys had called tabbouleh, which became an almost daily dish.
But the issue of language grew in importance: it reached its peak after his brother informed Karim that he’d married Hend, and Karim became afflicted, when talking to his wife, with the habit of coughing through his words.
Dr. Karim Shammas met Nurse Bernadette César at the Tex-Mex bar. The Lebanese doctor was drunk. He had drunk too many beers and tequilas to count. He had no idea how the blonde with blue eyes found her way into his bed. In the morning he got a surprise when she told him she worked as a nurse at the Hôpital Saint Bernard, where he did.
He told her he hadn’t noticed her, perhaps because the white nurses’ uniform was like a veil, and was seeing her now as though for the first time.
“You and the nurses!” she said.
“Me?”
How had he failed to notice the presence of this woman, for whom he’d been looking? Since arriving in France he’d found himself incapable of approaching any blue-eyed blonde. All the women he’d met were brunettes.
Later he’d tell Bernadette that he’d left Beirut to escape the sun, which tanned the earth, the trees, and the women brown.
“Aren’t the leaves of the trees over there green?” she’d asked incredulously.
“Not exactly. You know, it’s just a way of speaking (c’est le sens de la parole),” he said. He saw the confusion in her eyes and tried to explain that “when we Lebanese say ‘it’s just a way of speaking,’ it means we don’t have that particular meaning in mind, or that the meaning doesn’t have a meaning.” He laughed out loud and asked her to forget about it.
Karim had discovered Montpellier’s Tex-Mex bar by chance. He was walking down a dark street and the name caught his fancy. He went in and drank a beer. Suddenly his eyes caught Sophie’s. The tall, well-fleshed woman was standing behind the bar and laughing, the drunks gathered around her. He could see her large firm breasts gleaming through the opening of her blouse. He went up to the bar and found himself beneath the huge bosoms and within range of the loud chortling. Sophie turned toward him and yelled, “A new customer! He has to try the tequila with salt.” The clamoring and murmuring around the bar increased and Karim had the feeling he wasn’t following what was being said. He stood there waiting for his glass of tequila. The woman undid the buttons of her yellow blouse and, with lightning speed, her breasts popped out. She took the bottle of tequila, doused her cleavage, and sprinkled a little salt on while simultaneously seizing Karim’s head. The Lebanese doctor found himself following the droplets with their intoxicating bouquet on their downward course and gobbling at her cleavage. He felt the woman press his head between her huge breasts and that the world was spinning.
She pulled his head out and poured again, and the faces and lips leapt forward. Karim saw his face among those of the others. He tried to gather up the drops with his tongue and the dizziness started. He pulled back and his eyes met those of a French girl with a dainty face smiling at him and nodding her head. He couldn’t remember what they said but in the morning, when he saw the girl in his bed and found out she was the Nurse Bernadette who worked with him at the hospital, he felt a bit embarrassed. He lit his first cigarette of the morning and contemplated the beauty that had been hidden from his eyes throughout the previous months by a nurse’s uniform. She asked him why he’d said the night before that his name was Sinalcol. “You made me laugh,” she said. “You were lapping up the tequila and claiming your name was Sinalcol? C’était sympa.” She explained to him that sin alcohol was Spanish and meant “alcohol-free.” He said he couldn’t remember, and that it was the name of a friend of his so he hadn’t thought about what it meant.