He looked at her with defeated eyes and asked if she’d married him for love.
“Of course,” she replied.
He felt she wasn’t telling the truth but contented himself with her assertion. “If that’s so then let’s just love one another and don’t ask about what I do at work or outside the house.”
“But I want to understand what I mean to you.”
“You’re my wife, the mother of my children, and my life. Please don’t let’s get philosophical. I haven’t changed. This is how I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
“You’re unfaithful to me and you love me? I don’t understand.”
“I’m not unfaithful.”
“Why are you like that?”
“Why is there a war?” he replied.
He said, “Why is there a war?” and felt as though the voice was not his own, as though it was the voice of the man who had murdered his dreams and those of his comrades. Nasim had never had a chance to experience the intoxication of victory. The leader of the Phalangist militias had been elected president of the republic to the whine of the Israeli bombs that had set Beirut on fire, but then Bashir Gemayel had been killed in a huge explosion on September 14, 1982. It was the Feast of the Cross. It had rained water and dust and Nasim remembered being afflicted with a kind of blindness. The dust had covered his face and eyes and he’d felt as though the world had come to an end.
But it had not. The killer had been detained and had stood before the interrogator, but instead of answering the question “Why did you kill Bashir,” he’d asked, “Why is there a war?”
From this Nasim had learned to answer one question with another. When you live in Beirut, or any other city in the Arab world, you have to adapt to the absence of answers and the discovery that every question leads to another question.
He’d said to Hend, “Why is there a war?” not because he didn’t know the answer to her question but because that was the correct answer.
“What has the war got to do with our private lives?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer; she jumped directly to the conclusion and decided he’d deceived her.
She never said she was shocked when she discovered Nasim wasn’t the twin she’d been waiting for, that he only resembled Karim superficially, and that she was going to have to live her whole life with her vanished illusion.
But Nasim heard what she hadn’t said — or so she imagined when she saw the lopsided smile that sketched itself on his lower lip. He’d never claimed he was a copy. In fact, when his brother was mentioned in his presence, he’d say only one word: “Coward.” When his father complained that there was no news from his son and wondered how it could be that he never asked how he was doing in the midst of the hell of war in Beirut, Nasim had said, “Your son’s a dog and a coward. He ran away and he’s making himself out to be a big shot because he married a blonde and speaks French.”
“Anything but a Sri Lankan maid!” said Hend.
Nasim tried to persuade her, and Salma tried, but it was no use.
It was Salma who’d suggested the idea of the maid to Nasim. She’d said she was getting old and couldn’t manage any longer.
“You persuade your daughter! The woman’s driving me insane with those ideas of hers that she gets from God knows where.”
This was how Ghazala made her entrance into the family’s story. It was Imm Fu’ad who suggested Ghazala, but Hend decided to treat Ghazala as a friend and refused to allow her to work in the house like a maid. Imm Fu’ad had worked in Nasri’s apartment after Majda disappeared. To the boys she was just an elderly woman. She came three times a week, cleaned the house, did the wash, made the food, and disappeared. She was rarely seen. She came in the morning after everyone had left the apartment and departed at one p.m., before they got back. She was the ghostly guardian who took care of everything without becoming part of their life. Nasri wanted to keep her outside the family: the Trinity, as he called himself plus the boys, had to remain independent and without external ties. “I didn’t marry to have some strange woman come and share my children with me.” He told his sons no one must be allowed to break their circle. “One day you’ll get married but don’t ever let women come between us. You and your wife are your household but here it’s us three till God sees fit to take us.”
Nasri was unaware of what would in fact befall the Trinity. Time doesn’t teach; it just kills and destroys. When Nasim came to tell him of his decision to marry Hend, Nasri started to shake with rage. The only words he could find to say to his second son were “Beware and again beware!” In Nasim’s decision to marry Hend he saw something approaching a violation of taboos. “Even Cain and Abel weren’t like that. Beware, my son!” But his rage was mixed with sorrow and he mumbled words his son couldn’t make out.
When Karim had gone abroad, his father had felt relief, for the business with Hend and her mother had to be excised from the family; carnal passions had to be kept outside the home. Salma was a carnal passion, and she had left. Nasri had suffered greatly at the ending of the relationship that had connected him to this white-skinned woman, and the bitterness would continue to dog him; and when, one day, he tried to go back to her, he would discover he’d run headlong into a wall of illusion.
When Hend conceived her second child, Nasim decided it was time to bring a maid into the house. He made all the arrangements without consulting his wife. He went to an office that imported Sri Lankan maids, where he discovered that such offices were a gold mine and the trade was a profit-maker on all fronts. He thought of expanding his own operations and opening an office of the same sort alongside his other commercial activities.
Two days before the woman reached Beirut he told his wife to get ready to welcome the maid. He was proud of himself because he’d managed an arrangement with the director of the employment office that was a good deal by any standards: he’d hired a forty-year-old woman who spoke Arabic well, having worked previously in Dubai, and who was the mother of four children.
Nasim was taken aback by Hend’s categorical refusal.
“No way,” said Hend. “It’s a slave trade.” Nasim tried to calm her down and Nasri intervened to say that the story of the Sri Lankan maids was very similar to that of the Lebanese at the beginning of their migration to America. It had begun, he said, at the end of the nineteenth century, with women. His mother’s aunt was a case in point: she’d left her husband and three children in their village in Amioun, migrated to Boston, “and then she got the whole family out and was within an inch of getting my mother out. What sort of work do you think these Lebanese women did in America? Were they university teachers? Obviously not. They were maids. They went and they worked and they slaved and they made it and now the maids’ grandsons and granddaughters bring over servants and are all stuck up. One day, in about a hundred years, Sri Lankan women will start bringing over servants from other countries, and so it goes, it’s the way of the world. Don’t fret over it, my dear.”
Hend refused to stop fretting and said no. How could she tell them that she couldn’t forget Meena’s face and her round belly?
“Meena messed up your mind,” said Salma. “Who leaves a job over some Sri Lankan woman? And, anyway, who can prove George is the boy’s father? They’re all prostitutes, my girl. I’m not saying anything but you know that migration and poverty break families down and they’re women without countries or families. Prostitution becomes normal. It’s always the same with the first generation of immigrants.”