She said she didn’t want a Sri Lankan maid because she couldn’t forget the tears of a woman called Meena, who was in her early twenties, plump, lively, and full of the love of life. Meena would come every day to the clinic at three p.m. and give the doctor’s food to Hend, who would take it to the side room where Dr. Said would devour it in minutes before getting back to work.
Dr. Said, who was sixty-five, was one of those rare doctors who believe in medicine. Usually doctors order their patients not to smoke and impose a special diet on them because of cholesterol and blood pressure but don’t themselves stop smoking or devouring fatty foods or developing pot bellies. Dr. Said was different. He followed his own advice because he didn’t want to die. He told Hend he was a doctor and knew why people died, so he was going to close all doors in the face of death and live until he was fed up with life.
Hend couldn’t understand how someone who had passed sixty could not be fed up with life. What was he waiting for, now that all waiting had ended? She’d got fed up before making it to twenty-five. Beirut was the city of boredom and despair, she told the doctor, “because the war keeps repeating itself endlessly and I’m sick of war.”
The doctor told her he couldn’t understand why she talked that way. “War’s like life. Everything in life repeats itself but it’s renewed or gives the impression of renewal. This is the secret of the seasons of nature, and the war too renews itself and its people and its slogans, as though it sums up all time. Modernity mixes in it with backwardness and to its rhythms we discover the meaning of history.”
“I’m sick of myself,” said Hend.
“There’s the mistake,” responded the doctor. “The secret of mankind is love. War gives us the illusion of history and the seasons give us the illusion of nature renewing itself, but love makes us live what is unique. We believe we’re living something special and exciting that no one but us has ever lived. It seems you’re not in love, my dear, even though you’re a cute little thing.”
“Please, doctor! No love, no worries!”
“You’re wrong, Hend. Love and you’ll see.”
“But first I have to find Mr. Right.”
“What are you talking about?” said the doctor. “Love love and you’ll see it can make anyone a Mr. Right.”
And that was how it was. Hend found herself loving love. Husky voices enchanted her and shining eyes intoxicated her. She was like someone sailing seas filled with surprises and discovered that her relationship with Karim had been practice for the love that awaited her.
In Nasim’s disappointment at life she saw her own, in his troubles with his father an echo of her own interrupted childhood, and in his feelings of loneliness something of her own despair and frustration after her sad experience with Meena. She learned from him not to ask. When she asked him about his work he said he didn’t want her to bother about such things and all she had to do was welcome his soul and his love and forget everything else. Hend washed her new world in the waters of the sea. Nasim rented a chalet at the Beach Club pool that looked out over the Bay of Jounieh and sank with his beloved into the saltiness of the sea. He was a champion swimmer and she felt intoxicated whenever the water covered her brown body, which flashed in the sun.
Hend was amazed when Nasim didn’t try to sleep with her during the long chalet days. He would sip kisses from her lips and play around with her but went no further. Hend had no objections, but she wasn’t going to initiate matters. She was afraid of the savage look that drew itself over his eyes when he grew angry.
When they were on the verge of getting married, he asked where she’d like to spend their honeymoon. He proposed going to the island of Crete, in Greece, but she refused. “The honeymoon will be at the chalet in Jounieh,” she said.
He asked her why and she said she’d waited for the honey a long time at the chalet and wanted it nowhere else.
And when he slept with her for the first time he was overcome with amazement.
“So you’re still a virgin!” he said wonderingly as he kissed her on her small brown breasts. He asked her about “him” but she didn’t reply. He tried to speak but she placed her hand over his mouth.
Once they were married Karim’s name had disappeared from circulation. Nasim started referring to his brother in the third person as “him.” Hend understood that this “him” referred to her former lover. She didn’t notice that things had changed fundamentally because she was busy with her pregnancy and the psychological and biological transformations that swept over her during the first three months. It was only after the birth of her first son, Nadim, that she discovered the man she was living with was a mere shadow of the man who had loved her at the chalet in Jounieh. She told him he’d changed. He said it was she who had changed. He didn’t like to be asked where he was going or where he was traveling to or whom he spent his evenings with in Beirut. He said it was work and that they’d agreed she would have nothing to do with the subject. And when she asked him about the source of his growing wealth, he told her it would be better if she just spent the money and didn’t ask how it was obtained. She asked him why he betrayed her with other women and he was furious. The savage look she feared came into his eyes and he told her never to ask him that question again.
Nasim had never told his wife, whom he loved, the secret reason for his refusing to make love to her during the year of passion in the chalet. She’d supposed he was avoiding it because he thought she’d slept with his brother and didn’t want to open up a distance in their relationship. That was true, but only in part. The truth was that he was bidding farewell to his old world with all its prostitutes, and in his innocent sex with Hend he’d found a way to cleanse himself. Then when he discovered Hend was still a virgin he was overcome by a kind of reverence toward her: he got up, went down on his knees before the bed on which she lay naked, and made the sign of the cross. Hend burst out laughing. “Do you think you’re in church?” she asked. “You’re a saint,” he said. “Forget the saints and the fancy talk, he was a coward, that’s all.” He closed her mouth with his hand and asked her not to speak because her words were spoiling the aesthetic quality of the moment.
Nasim had decided to abandon the world of prostitutes and its depravity. He had severed his ties to the past and steeped himself in a love the like of which he hadn’t tasted since his few days with Suzanne.
But without his knowing how or why, he found life leading him by the nose. He justified things to himself at the beginning by saying it was part of his work. Work as a smuggler couldn’t go right without the accessories. He told himself these were the necessities of his work and that no one living in the night of the city and the alleyways of its wars could keep such a life at a distance.
This is not what he told Hend, because he was certain she’d think he was lying, and in fact he was. Or perhaps “lying” isn’t quite accurate, but Nasim didn’t know how the title “liar” had attached itself to him. When your father, your teachers, and everyone else around you decides you’re a liar, you become one even when you’re trying to tell the truth, because you don’t believe yourself.
In one of her fits of anger she told him he’d never loved her and just wanted to take over his brother’s inheritance so he could prove to himself he was better than him and make his revenge proportionate to his childhood torments. Nasim had felt then that the woman wanted to break his heart. He couldn’t answer because the words had stuck in his throat. He remembered that he was supposed to spit the words, the way Suzanne had taught him, but refused to do so because he didn’t want to give up on the woman.