Was Hend afraid of Nasim as she claimed to his face? Or did she feel pity for him, as she told her mother?
“A man, my dear, is nothing to be afraid of. Men are to be pitied. Poor things, forced all the time to prove that they’re men!”
In this woman Nasim saw the new beginning for which he’d been waiting. He told her he’d always loved her and he hadn’t been lying because from the very first time he met her, at the entrance to the pharmacy, he’d been conscious of the frisson of mystery that radiated from her dainty brown face and slim body. Hend was not short, as her stooped walk might give one to believe, but somehow, with her flat-heeled mules and simple long dress whose color she was always changing but of which the cut was always the same, with her knees that she clasped to her chest when she sat at her ease and her wandering glances which never came to rest on anything in particular, she resembled a creature that slid over things. He’d stood next to her on the sidewalk and made her laugh. He didn’t remember what he’d said or why she’d laughed but she’d said he was “sweet, and funny,” so he decided it was her. He invited her for a coffee and she said she couldn’t because she was waiting for her mother, who had dropped by the pharmacist’s to buy the famous plant potion. He asked for her phone number and she smiled without answering. Then, when he’d seen the love in his brother’s eyes, Nasim had gone back on his decision and made up his mind not to get into a conflict from which he would emerge, as usual, the loser.
The story wasn’t just one of harebrained revenge, as Nasri claimed when announcing his adamant opposition to the marriage.
“You’re going to come with me to ask for her hand whether you like it or not and don’t you dare play the asshole the way you have all your life.”
“I’m against this marriage,” screamed Nasri.
“You’ll do what I tell you or you know what’ll happen.”
“Nothing happened,” Nasim told Hend. “He came and paid you all a visit like a good boy and asked your mother for your hand.”
“But why was your father so absolutely against the marriage? It was terrible, how his jaw dropped, as though he couldn’t speak. Even though my thing with your brother was old and well in the past.”
“He said it was because Karim and I were going to end up like Cain and Abel.”
“What a thing to say! You mean he was plotting for you to kill one another?”
“No, what he was afraid of was that I’d kill my brother. He thought of me as Cain. That’s what he screamed as he was pulling the bullet out of my leg. He said, ‘If you think you’re Cain, I’ll kill you before you can kill your brother.’ ”
What had seemed like a passing misunderstanding between Hend and her husband because of her refusal to allow a maid into their house quickly opened up all the other wounds that she’d thought had healed in the course of the love story she’d lived with Nasim during the year of the chalet, which she thought of as “the year of the grapes.” She had no idea where Nasim managed to find grapes at all four seasons of the year; it was something of a miracle in a city closed off by civil war. He told her he imported the grapes from South America especially for her. “Here it’s winter and there it’s summer. I can bring summer in wintertime. That’s the philosophy of trade, and this is love, which makes a summer of all our days.”
At the chalet they swam during all four seasons and all four seasons had the same name — “the mending of hearts.” Over these seasons, fashioned from the grapes of desire, Hend learned to love herself. The waves of the sea turned into intermeshing mirrors reflecting her face and body, and Nasim’s eyes, which looked at her with rapture, were transformed into windows onto her broken soul.
Following Meena’s deportation, everything had looked ugly. She couldn’t bear to look in the mirror. She came to see her face as a mask she couldn’t take off. She hated her short hair, which fell over her eyes in front and filled them with shadows, and she no longer loved her dainty body or her way of walking with such short steps that an onlooker might have thought she was about to fall over. Hend decided she wanted to get rid of her name, her eyes, and her hair, and that she was capable of dying.
“You’re right,” she told him. “The two broken hearts have met. Come, let’s get married.”
They married at that crucial moment that Nasim had designated “walking the knife’s edge.” His withdrawal from the world of drugs had left a taste like sawdust in his mouth. He’d found himself alone, stripped of the protection Antoine had guaranteed. The climate which had created the impression that white powder could cover over blood, and that the blending of red and white made money flow like water, had dissipated.
It is hardly true, as novelists say, that wars create a climate of solidarity among people. Wars turn a person into an isolated being, a monster living among monsters, listening only to the howling of the wolves surrounding him on every side. Nasim lived in loneliness and fear. The illusion of the cocaine laboratory had dissolved, all his projects had collapsed, and he found himself having to start from zero. And at zero he met Hend and saw her afresh. He told her that when she appeared in front of him he’d felt as though the mist had cleared. Everything had appeared as though covered with a sort of milky color and he’d thought that cataracts, “the blue water,” had come early — as though his father’s curse had afflicted him with premature blindness. Hend laughed and said the Arabs called it “the white water” while the Greeks had named it “the yellow water,” but what he was claiming was unfounded because when working at the ophthalmologist’s clinic she’d often seen the mark of the disease on people’s pupils and there was nothing like that in his eyes.
At the beginning he’d played the “blue water” game with her. He’d felt alone, life seemed meaningless, and the phantom of his twin brother, who had become a doctor in France, had appeared before him. So he decided to play at love with this timid brown girl whose skin shone in the sun and revealed glimpses of a beauty filled with diffidence. Revenge on his successful brother was no longer on his mind, or so at least he believed and so he tried to explain to her when the angry mask drew itself on his face in reaction to her hurtful words.
Love had come in the midst of the fever of work. Nasim had reestablished himself using the money made from his former trade, and within two years had turned himself into a timber, iron, and petrol merchant. He imported building materials and laughed up his sleeve. He hated the war yet wanted it to go on because it was his only source of livelihood. He smuggled and made money and lived like a king.
He told Hend he loved her but his work required her indulgence. No, he didn’t work in prostitution, as she had accused him of doing. All that had happened was that he’d gone to the souk while the shells were falling and rescued Suzanne and put her in a apartment in the Badawi district, on the edges of Ashrafieh, and started supporting her financially — as any son with a mother whom he had found only after a long absence would have done.
But Hend didn’t want to understand. She spent her time at home with books. He had no idea from where this reading fever had come to her nor why she read only depressing novels. He told her Kafka had nothing to do with them. “What kind of a story is that that you’ve read three times now? All we need is to start turning into cockroaches!”
“But we are cockroaches and we don’t know it. Perhaps if we did we’d find a way out of the situation.”
When Nasim wanted to summarize the crisis in his relationship with the woman, he’d say the problem was one of choosing between life and death. “I love life and all you can see is death. I want to live and go out and get drunk and dance and you want to stay at home. I want to love you and you want me to be fed up with you and everything else.”