He told Hend when he asked her to marry him that he knew she had a broken heart and that he wasn’t offering to mend it for her. In fact, he was offering to join the breaks in his to those in hers. He said Fate had broken his heart too and he wanted her so that he could taste the flavor of the beginning of things once more, because all he could taste now was the end.
Suddenly this rough-spoken man became a mass of tenderness, but Hend hesitated all the same. She told her mother she was afraid of him because he was so like his brother. She said he was Karim but with coarser features. “It’s as though I’ve lived this moment before and heard these words, as though real isn’t real.”
Her mother smiled and said all men resembled one another in the end and marriage was a cup all women had to drink. “You have to marry, daughter.”
“But I don’t love Nasim, Mother.”
“The one you don’t love you come to love, and the one you love you come to hate. That’s life.”
“All right, but why?”
“Don’t make things complicated. See how it goes. It’s better than sitting at home like a care on the heart. Plus, at least you’ll get a child.”
Hend worked as a secretary in the office of the ophthalmologist Said Haddad. Her mother had found her the job after the family’s financial situation had become unbearable but Hend had been planning a different future for herself. She’d finished her degree in political science at the Lebanese University and wanted to find work befitting her aspirations. She dismissed the idea of trying to join the diplomatic corps because Mrs. Salma had said she’d rather live with war than with the humiliation of life abroad. So Hend worked for an advertising company but after three months found herself incapable of coming up endlessly with slogans for washing powders. She thought of working for a government department, but they weren’t taking on new employees, not to mention that to get a position you needed the backing of one of the country’s political leaders, none of whom she knew. In the end she agreed to work as a secretary at the ophthalmologist’s, where she discovered a world of slavery she hadn’t believed still existed in this day and age. Her work was limited to recording the appointments of the patients and taking them in to see the doctor. True, she feared for her sight when faced with the horrible eye diseases she saw and with the idea of blindness that was ever present in the clinic, but in the end she got used to it and ceased to see, discovering that what mankind strives for is to not see. This is the secret of life: to get so used to things that you don’t see them; then when you do lose your sight you discover the enormity of your loss — or so Nasri told her when he spoke to her of his horror of “the blue water,” or cataracts, which devour the eye with their milky whiteness. Listening to her account of the world that she’d discovered in the ophthalmologist’s clinic, Nasri had said things became important only when you lost them, “and I’ve lost everything or I’m about to. That’s why everything now is important to me.”
Nasim could understand nothing of what she was trying to tell him. She was announcing to her husband her categorical objection to the presence of a Sri Lankan or Asian maid in the house and Nasim was trying to persuade her to agree and provide a new model for how to treat maids, but she refused.
She’d tried to tell her husband about the world she’d seen at the ophthalmologist’s clinic but he wouldn’t listen. He’d claimed he was listening but in fact he’d been thinking about other things. Her problem with the man was that from the very beginning he’d refused to listen to her. He’d just kept nodding his head, so she’d found no way out of agreeing to the marriage.
He’d told her about his broken heart but hadn’t mentioned Suzanne. He’d said his heart had been broken when the Jesuit discovered his high marks were the result of deception and he’d felt as though he’d been abandoned in the middle of the double world he inhabited with his brother.
“Karim did nothing. He saw how Father was torturing me, and he just watched. I felt he was happy and enjoyed watching, like when kids take pleasure in torturing a lizard or a kitten, and then I got it that he’s not my twin and the idea of one person with four eyes was an illusion. The discovery of the illusion broke my heart and I ran away from home, maybe Karim told you.”
“No, he didn’t tell me. Karim never talked about you or your father. Where did you go?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There was a woman who took pity on me, a distant relative. She found work for me at a restaurant.”
“And then?”
“Then Father came to the restaurant and started crying in front of everyone. I was embarrassed and went back home.”
“You slept at her place?”
“Of course. What, you think I should have slept on the street?”
“And was she pretty?”
“She was old enough to be my mother. She said, ‘You’re an orphan and I want to adopt you.’ ”
“And why did you go back with your father?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t really think. I just saw him crying and went with him and found myself back home.”
Nasim felt she didn’t believe him but he went on with his lie. He couldn’t retreat because he’d decided not to tell anyone about Suzanne. He’d promised her and he wouldn’t go back on his word. When she’d repulsed him like that on the day he’d gone to visit her as agreed, he’d felt as though the air supply around him had been cut off, that he was surrounded by walls. He’d gone back to the apartment and found his father waiting for him in front of a table resplendent with kibbeh nayyeh and local arak, a platter of kenafeh in the middle.
It hadn’t occurred to Nasim that Karim could have given away his secret to his father. He thought Suzanne must have done it herself, because she was a prostitute and one couldn’t trust a woman of that sort, and it was his mistake. When his brother confessed his betrayal to him, he felt the need to kill. He’d already discovered during the war that people possess only one instinct, which is to kill, and all other instincts branch out from that. You kill to eat, you kill to dominate, you kill to kill. The urge to kill had flashed out suddenly like lightning as he listened to his brother. Blood flashes in the eyes of killers — he’d seen it in his comrades’ eyes — and when his blood had flowed, close to the Salam football ground in Ashrafieh, he’d been scared of both the blood and the eyes. He’d run to his father’s house shaking with fear and collapsed the instant he reached the door, his knees no longer able to support him.
Listening to his brother’s confession, he’d felt the blood flash in his eyes. He said he’d kill him, lit a cigarette, dragged the smoke deep down in his lungs to disperse the ghosts of killing, closed his eyes, and said he was joking. But he wasn’t telling the truth then either.
Hend had told him his brother’s phantom hadn’t left her the past four years and she thought it would be difficult for her to love another man.
“Can you agree to marry a woman who has loved another man?”
He smiled and didn’t answer. He said he’d loved her since he first set eyes on her and hadn’t stopped loving her even when she was going out with his brother. He said he’d retired from the field because he couldn’t be involved in a rivalry with his twin, but now he would compete with her heart. “Your heart can’t refuse my love because I love you from my heart.”
Hend decided that the man didn’t hear and discovered that other people don’t hear either; that it’s easier to see than to hear, because listening requires a kind of collusion with others. And she accepted him. She accepted him because she loved him, or so she thought. The whole thing seemed unreal to her, as though she was living in a dream and had rediscovered with Nasim something of the undulations that she had felt when in love with his older brother.