Karim had wanted to say that the magic of the human skin reminded him of flowing, that a person flows from the tips of his fingers, that to cure his patients all the successful physician has to do is receive that outflow and bring them to a discovery of the balance that finishes off all disease.
Nasri, who had discovered the best ointment for treating burns, thought the only disease for which there was no cure was death. “Death is a disease. It’s the only disease whose sole preventative is desire. When desire is present, death vanishes, and when it ceases to exist, the only choice left is surrender.”
“What does it mean that I’m going back tomorrow to France?” Karim asked himself as he opened his eyes to the sound of the Beirut thunder and listened to the patter of the rain that had enveloped the city.
He saw the ghost of his father approach him, heard the rustle of the loose clothes that Nasri used to insist on wearing to hide his paunch, saw a woman’s hand push his father, saw his father fall to the ground, and beheld black, sticky blood.
He opened his eyes to the sound of the alarm clock, shaved quickly, and descended the long, dark staircase to the entrance of the building, where the taxi was waiting for him.
4
MUNA CAME to Pinocchio’s wearing a green dress and everything about her undulated. The vigor of her thirty years was bursting from her svelte figure, her long thin visage hid a diaphanous veil of sorrow, and her glasses, which covered a part of her face, established a distance between her and the world.
Karim had no idea how things had reached this point. He’d met her at his brother’s place. She’d come to the dinner party with her husband, the architect Ahmad Dakiz. The architect had talked at length of the project to build the hospital, which he was designing, while his wife had sat and said nothing throughout. A few minutes before the evening ended she turned to Karim, asked him about life in France, and expressed her astonishment at the physician’s decision to return to Lebanon. “Who comes back?” she asked, and when Karim answered that a person needs his roots, she burst out laughing. “Ahmad, tell them about your roots and your crusader forefathers!”
Ahmad had recounted snippets of an incredible story and everyone had broken into laughter.
“You mean you’re a crusader and a Muslim?” Karim said, laughing.
Muna didn’t laugh, though. She said she wanted to emigrate to Canada. “My husband wasn’t able to take me to France because the French are looking for their roots too, but now we’re going to Canada. That’s a country that’s pulled out its roots, which may be better.”
She asked Karim about stretch marks and said she wanted to visit him at his clinic because she was worried about a small problem.
“Where’s the problem?” he asked her.
“It’s not a big deal. Just some marks on my belly from the children. When should I come to the clinic?”
“I don’t actually have a clinic in Beirut,” he said, and gave her his phone number.
Karim didn’t want anything from the woman, who to him had seemed drained. Her white complexion was drained, her beauty was drained, plus the way she twisted her lips when speaking Arabic, after the fashion of francophone Lebanese educated in foreign mission schools, made him furious.
Here in Beirut he’d discovered that he’d never stopped loving Hend, who had become his brother’s wife. But he didn’t know what to do with that love, which had become a nightmare.
He’d told her he hadn’t left her because he’d stopped loving her but because he was afraid, and when you’re afraid, all you feel is fear.
She’d said she didn’t believe him but it didn’t matter anymore because she felt she had to get away from this family and didn’t know how.
She said she wasn’t stupid like her mother. “My mother ran after love and you know what happened. They all died. She loved four men who all died, one after the other. I don’t know if she loved your father but I know she killed all the men she loved and when it was your father’s turn I had to take care of it for her.”
Hend turned around and asked him if he still loved her.
Now, when he recalled the question, he felt that the whole thing had been unreal, more like a dream. Was it reasonable for the woman to ask him about love while talking of murder?
Muna had phoned him to make an appointment so he’d invited her to dinner at a restaurant.
“Dinner? No, impossible. Have you forgotten I’m married?”
“And I’m married too,” he answered, laughing.
They agreed on lunch at Pinocchio’s, where they ate pizza and drank wine.
As he’d expected she didn’t ask him about stretch marks. They talked about everything, meaning about nothing, and in her eyes he saw a certain glow that came from nowhere and revealed to him in her drained whiteness flashes of light escaping from her eyes and lips.
Muna was reaching out to him. She was sitting opposite him in the restaurant, bending forward and extending her left hand, which she placed empty upon the table.
He took hold of her upturned hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m holding your hand,” he answered.
“Why?” she said.
“Ask your hand,” he answered.
He told her, as he lifted the palm of her hand and placed it on his ear before kissing it, that he listened to hands. “Fingers are the gauge of beauty,” he said.
“And the eyes?” she asked.
He saw the translucent honey color shining in hers.
“Your eyes are beautiful,” he said. “I meant at first to specialize in the eye but in France my professor taught me that the skin is the person, and today I’ve discovered the fingers.”
“But the eye is more poetic,” she said.
“There’s nothing poetic about medicine except talking about it. Actually, I was lying to you,” he said. “In fact at the beginning I had it in my mind to specialize in psychiatry but I couldn’t go through with it. I felt I was going mad. One madman can’t treat another.”
She withdrew her hand from his and said, laughing, that she loved mad people.
He took her back to her apartment in his car and as she got out she said that next time she’d consult him as a doctor.
Karim saw himself sliding. There was the Beirut heat, and this woman Muna who was bursting with the color green. Karim didn’t know what color he liked best. When his French wife asked him about colors he’d answer that he didn’t care. That day, though, he discovered he loved green. The color appeared in the form of a short dress that reached down to white knees and enfolded a delicate greenness from which flowed undulations that enveloped her calves.
When Muna came, Karim was living the fever of Ghazala but he didn’t dare place his relationship with the maid in the category of love. Was it reasonable to be in love with a maid? He’d convinced himself she was just a form of sawsanning. True, she wasn’t a prostitute and had nothing in common with that violet-fingernailed woman, but it was just a sexual relationship with no more distant horizons.