Hend told her mother that when she heard the word “black” she turned on her heel and slammed the door behind her.
“But the doctor’s right. I’d have done the same in his place,” Salma had said. “Suppose it had been you. I would have died.”
Hend went home that day with her shoulders drooping, despondent, and filled with sorrow, but Salma showed no mercy, even reproaching her for losing a job over a stupid point of principle that was no use to anyone. “A maid’s a maid and always will be, that’s how I see things.”
It was in the midst of this sorrow, amounting almost to a nervous breakdown, that the relationship between Hend and Nasim began gradually to slide. Nasim laid out before her a carpet of words. She told him she felt as though she was sliding on soap. “Your words are like soap, and I’m going to start slipping.”
“Slip away and don’t worry about it. I’ll catch you.”
“But it’s soap and the soap’s not real.”
“Come, don’t be scared of my words or the soap.”
“What should I be afraid of?” she asked.
“Be scared that I’m unfaithful, but I could never be unfaithful.”
He spoke to her of the betrayals that surrounded him on every side and said with her he felt safe.
“But I think it’s hard to love you, I don’t know why.”
“Nothing’s hard,” he said, and invited her to go swimming with him at the chalet, and she went.
Hend hadn’t known how to tell Nasim how it had been between her and his brother. She said she couldn’t talk about the subject because it made her feel unfaithful. “It’s as though I were betraying him, even though it was he who left me.”
Nasim told her not to feel guilty as he was the guilty party, if there was a guilty party in the affair.
She said no more — not because she was convinced of his point of view but because love stories seem ridiculous to those who didn’t live them.
Nasim was holding a bunch of white Maghdousheh grapes. He asked her whether she liked grapes and said laughingly that grapes were the fruit of love.
She took a grape from the bunch and said she’d thought pomegranates were the fruit of love.
“That was a long time ago,” he said, and explained to her how low pomegranates had fallen. “In the old days pomegranates stood for a woman’s breasts and when a lover spoke words of love to his beloved he would liken her breasts to pomegranate fruit. Do you know what we mean today when we say ‘pomegranate’? A pomegranate is a hand grenade. See how the pomegranate has fallen from the throne of love and become a part of war? Also, in the old days, my dear Madam Hend, pomegranates were considered the acme of fruit, whereas now they’ve disappeared from people’s tables and they use the juice to make pomegranate treacle, and pomegranate treacle is something sour to go with small fried birds.”
He said pomegranates were finished and the only people who gave them any respect were a few romantics who wept false tears of love.
“But I know a love story that happened because of pomegranates.”
“The lover must have been a liar or a con man and the girl a nincompoop.”
“You’re right,” said Hend. She took the bunch of grapes with its shiny white spheres and started to devour them.
The story of the Sri Lankan maid ended with Nasim selling the maid he’d brought to Beirut to his friend and partner Antoine Sebai, a deal on which he made a thousand dollars, at which point it occurred to him that this was an easy and amusing trade. In the end, though, he decided to keep out of it in an attempt to preserve the last remaining thread connecting him with his wife. Hend refused to agree to let even Ghazala come more than once a week. Then, after six months, she decided to dispense with her services altogether.
Why could Hend no longer understand his language?
He told her she’d known everything from the beginning, during the days at the chalet, and had been happy with his lifestyle. He’d told her everything without telling her anything but she’d understood what he was up to, of that Nasim was certain. If not, then what did it mean when a woman told you she loved you?
Nasim was certain of one thing — that he wanted this woman, whatever the cost. He’d made major changes in his life for her sake and divorced cocaine. How to explain to someone who’s never tried sniffing the white powder what it means to abandon your nose and lose your appetite and feel as though you’re as heavy as a stone and unable to move your limbs, and then be frozen like a statue, waiting for the desire to evaporate, and by the time it does you’ve turned into something as stiff as a plank of wood?
Cocaine was king of the tables in those days. It was manufactured in Wadi el-Shirbin, a remote village on the slopes of Sannine. Antoine Sebai, who headed the militia in Beirut, asked Nasim to join him as pharmacist. They brought in experts from Colombia and Turkey and started making cocaine and heroin. God looked kindly on their efforts: cocaine was a guest at young people’s tables throughout the war. Nasim, despite amassing a large fortune from his activities, decided to pull out after the killing of Antoine, who was found incinerated in his car. Nasim realized then that he couldn’t challenge the big fish, and that the drugs game was directly tied to the militia’s leadership.
Nasim bent with the wind because he’d learned that the civil war was a bending game, and once you start bending, it becomes a way of life. Nasim wasn’t a coward, but he’d discovered early on that the game wasn’t worth dying for. He’d seen death in his own blood when he bled, and then the news of Michel Hajji’s death had come and paralyzed his capacity for thought. He’d been lying in bed at his father’s apartment when Robert Hayek had arrived soaking from the rain and brought the news. Nasim had been struck speechless. He pulled himself together and went, dragging his injured leg behind him, to the Greek Orthodox hospital where the body, shredded by bullets and wrapped in a white sheet, had been deposited in the morgue. Nasim looked at Michel’s face and found it unrecognizable. The features had been almost erased, as though all dead people look alike. He bent over his friend’s brow and kissed it and was taken aback by the smell of death and the taste of sponge.
Nasim had asked, “Are you sure this is Michel?” and not waited for an answer.
“That’s not him,” he said, retreating and fighting to overcome an insistent feeling of nausea. He bent over next to the wall to vomit but couldn’t. His guts were torn up and he emitted croaking sounds. Robert went over to him and patted him on the back. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. Nasim followed without objecting, saying nothing and feeling fear. He couldn’t explain clearly to Hend what lay behind this fear. How could he tell her he’d been afraid of the body because he hadn’t been able to recognize it? How could he explain why he’d found himself unable to go on fighting? Robert promised he’d get him into the BG Squad, the elite Phalangist military force that was later to become the scourge of the civil war. Nasim was proud of the proposal because it would prove his capability and talents to everyone beyond doubt. Before Michel’s corpse, however, his strength collapsed. He saw himself laid out in the cold locker and imagined Nasri standing in front of the body, wanting to vomit, and he felt the humiliation of death.
“The humiliation of death, my dear sweet Hend,” he said, “is the very essence of humiliation. That’s why when a person wants to die he has to get away from people and surrender himself to nature and die alone and not let anyone see his corpse. But the humiliation of death catches up with everyone and no one can escape it because we have to be buried and that’s where the tragedy lies.”
Hend looked at him in astonishment. Where did such talk, which had no context, come from? She told him she was used to not understanding when he spoke, so she expected nothing from him, but she did want to know exactly what he did for a living.