He said he didn’t know the man: “It was just my idea that he was my friend because he was like a ghost. The war had created a ghost whom no one ever met. Maybe the man didn’t exist but he became a name and I thought of him as my friend because he fascinated me.”
“How could he fascinate you when you hadn’t met him?” she asked.
“His name fascinated me,” he answered. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it someday.”
He heard her say, “You Lebanese!” and ask him where he kept the coffee because she needed a cup of café au lait.
He leapt out of bed, trotted to the kitchen, and put the little pot in which he boiled the water for his coffee on the stove, explaining to the French nurse that he didn’t drink French café au lait in the morning, he drank Turkish coffee.
“You’re Turkish?” she said wonderingly. “I thought you were Lebanese.”
He said Turkish coffee was Lebanese coffee too and that it was a spécialité libanaise. She laughed and didn’t understand.
As time passed Karim would forget the taste of Turkish coffee because Bernadette hated it and he’d only rediscover its strong flavor and the jolt to the heart that accompanied the first morning sips of it with Ghazala, the maid who brought the taste of things back to his tongue.
When Karim left Beirut for France, his consciousness had been wrapped in fog. All he could remember now of the first months of his stay in Montpellier was the sense of loss that made him accept everything. He was like someone who wanted to forget who he was, forget how events had pulled the carpet from under his feet. He told Bernadette later that he had lost the taste of things and wanted to marry her so he could recover his soul.
The French nurse had been taken by surprise by the offer of marriage the eccentric Lebanese doctor had made six months after they met. She’d told him she was afraid and would prefer it if they could go to Lebanon so she could meet his family before accepting the offer.
He turned his face away and said no. “Not Lebanon. I’ll never go to Lebanon, not now and not after a hundred years. Refuse if you like, but we’ll never go to Lebanon.”
Bernadette couldn’t believe her ears when she heard Karim say he was going to Lebanon to build a dermatology hospital in Beirut. She told him he’d changed a lot. “You’re not the man I married.”
“And you’re not the woman,” he said, and burst out laughing.
He’d told Nasim when recounting his life in France that he’d discovered his other face there. “It’s as though I’m not me. It’s as though over there I was someone else.”
“And now, have you gone back to being you?” Nasim had asked.
“No,” Karim had responded. “Now I’ve become a third person.”
There, in France, Karim had put on the face of the doctor he was to become. He’d found himself one of a circle of physicians around Professor Didier Struffe, a French doctor of Russian origin who was professor of dermatology at the University of Montpellier. Karim passed the concours internat exam, the only foreigner to so do so, alongside a group of outstanding French students. At his first meeting with his Russian professor, he’d said that he’d wanted to study psychology but had been afraid to. He told his professor, while informing him of his decision to study dermatology, that he’d been afraid of himself. “Faced with a patient whose soul has disintegrated, you must yourself possess an unshakeably well-grounded personality, and I don’t.”
Professor Struffe had astonished him by speaking of the skin as the person’s alter ego. “I am my skin,” he would say as he explained to his students that the skin was the most important part of the body. “The skin’s most important function is to moderate between the person and the external temperature. Without skin we would be naked before death,” he said in his first class. “Did you know that the skin of someone weighing seventy kilograms weighs fourteen kilograms and has a surface area of two square meters?” He spoke of the human skin as though it was a work of art, drawing for his students a picture of an organ that contained all the others, and of a consciousness that extended over the entire human body.
The skin of pleasure and the skin of pain. A skin that defines the limits of the body and a skin that connects it to others. A skin that sweats and a skin that blushes. A skin that defends a person and a skin that makes him vulnerable before others. The professor said a person could live without the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, but he could not without the sense of touch, because one who loses his skin loses his life.
Karim Shammas said to his Russian professor: “I get it. No blood and no madness. We’re in the presence of touch and the seductions of the fingers.”
He entered the empire of the skin, the relationships between epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. He told Bernadette, whose belly had started to show stretch marks after the birth of their second daughter, “It’s the dermis, my dear. The fibers have begun to break up and the white skin is the problem. Your white skin has begun to split. I can treat it with ointments or by laser, as you wish.”
The enchantment of skin diseases lies in the fact that treating them is like dealing with artistic phenomena, which is to say it’s like music. The doctor has to discover the rhythm of his patient’s body, at which point the problem is solved, and treating it with ointments is almost like looking for ways in which it can be seduced. Of course, there are diseases that were once resistant to treatment, such as syphilis, which penicillin came along and put an end to. A residue of such diseases continues to exist, and these made Karim’s skin crawl. There was, for example, crêtes de coq disease — or HPV — a kind of wart in the area of the testes or penis, which now, thanks to antibiotics, can be treated.
The world constructed by the Russian professor saved Karim. In Beirut, he had told Muna, as he caressed her damp white thigh, that he could read her via the relationship of his hand to her skin, read the topography of her soul and the intricacies of love.
She said she’d come to say goodbye to him, not listen to a lecture on medicine.
He said he wasn’t lecturing but recounting his feelings and discovering that we can only read love at the end. The poets were wrong when they wrote of the combustion at the beginning of love because that was only an illusion ignited by illusion. The reality could be read at the end, at the moment of loss, and only those who lost were capable of discovering its meanings.
“Cut the philosophy,” she’d said, and busied herself drying her wet body.
Karim stopped talking. He felt he had no right to speak, for when you discover that the game has been played to its end, only silence suits the moment.
Only the body speaks; that was what his studies in Montpellier had taught him. The fingers and palm of the hand contained the entire world.
He told his Russian professor the story of the “spiritual fluids” on which Dr. Dahesh had built his entire doctrine and the students laughed, as did the professor. “This isn’t a class in magic and legerdemain,” he’d said.
Karim didn’t believe those cock-and-bull stories himself; he’d only wanted to provide support for the “I = my skin” idea propounded by his professor. His father’s brief conversion to the Daheshism, which had dominated Beirut’s social and political life in the fifties, had led the pharmacist to learn the art of legerdemain and illusionism. What had caught Karim’s attention, though, were his father’s memories of the most important dermatologist in Beirut, Dr. Marcel Kheneisar, who was a follower of the Daheshian School — founded by an Assyrian from Bethlehem. Dr. Dahesh’s theory stated that one’s skin flowed, and it could allow a person to be present in more than one place. This in turn had driven his father and many other doctors and pharmacists of his ilk to believe in magic as the highest form of religion.