He didn’t tell her that his cough was different now. At the hotel he’d slept with her without bathing or removing the traces of sand and the taste of salt from his body. It was as though he were still eating fish. He’d slip into her and with her and sway above the ropes of flame that shot from his eyes and never stop coughing.
“You’ll get sick,” she said.
The man didn’t care if he got sick. He was like someone swimming, borne upward by the ecstasy, then falling into the depths, then rising again.
Bernadette told him the following morning that she loved him but didn’t want that to happen again.
“Making love during one’s period isn’t healthy, as you must know.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said, wresting the cup of café au lait from her hand and starting to make love to her again.
“But you’re a doctor and you do know.”
“Medicine’s for the hospital but with you I’m a chronic patient.”
The chronic illness became a reality, even with Nadine and Lara. Can a person lose the ability to talk to his children and be afflicted by a kind of dumbness concealed beneath a cough? Karim was enchanted with his two daughters. Nadine was five and Lara three. He told his wife he was now husband to three women and wanted a fourth to feel that the love was complete.
“You’re joking,” said Bernadette. “I know you want a boy.”
He said, “No,” and he wasn’t lying. He felt it was his duty to found a line of women so he could free himself entirely from the burdens of the heavy past that he’d carried with him from Lebanon. The idea of having a son who would grow up to resemble his grandfather terrified him.
“I don’t want a boy. I want to fill the earth with beautiful girls.”
She said he had to be reconciled with his twin brother to smooth the way for a reconciliation with his father.
He said he’d come to France to forget he was one of an illusory pair of twins that had devoured his life and prevented him from learning how to live, and all he wanted of his father was that he be erased from his memory.
Bernadette didn’t believe him despite the fact that she enjoyed the relationship he’d succeeded in establishing with his daughters, which allowed him to treat them as friends and spend all his spare time playing with them.
Suddenly, however, things were turned upside down.
The upheaval started not with the decision to go to Lebanon, as his wife believed, or wanted to believe, but with Karim hearing Hend’s name from his brother’s lips when he announced on the phone that she’d become his wife.
It seems Nasim had hidden the fact of his marriage from his brother for four years and when his new wife’s name happened to cross his lips he pretended to be amazed that his brother didn’t know.
“I phoned and told you. It just seems you didn’t believe me or didn’t want to believe me.”
“Impossible,” said Karim, overcome by a fit of coughing.
That was the day the coughing and throat-clearing began. Words started to weigh heavily within the mouth of the Lebanese doctor, and intermittent fits of coughing, which turned into chronic coughing in the marital bed, swept over him.
The girls sensed the change and started to distance themselves. No one is quicker at picking up the vibrations of love than children. When he’d been fully preoccupied with them they’d refused to go to sleep without his kisses. When he was forced to stay late at the hospital the girls would be waiting for him in the living room; he’d come home and find them asleep on the couch in the living room, and he’d take off his shoes, run to them barefoot, and carry them to their beds with kisses. Their smiles of contentment were all he needed to feel intoxicated.
He had learned the meaning of intoxication from those kisses. He’d realized that the Arabs were mistaken in attributing the power to enrapture solely to the voice of Umm Kulthoum, even though it made those who sank into it stagger as though drunk.
He told her his father had never got drunk on the smiles of his sons. He was an egotist interested only in his own little pleasures. “I learned rapture here in France. A smile from one of the girls is enough to lift me to heaven, where I stagger with the drunkenness of love.”
Where had it come from, though, this miserable cough? It had turned into a kind of rope knotted tightly round his throat, making him speechless and alienating him from the little world he’d built for himself in France to curl up inside seeking protection from his memories.
Nadine and Lara could feel the man withdrawing, so they started to do the same. With the intuition of children, they picked up on what Bernadette failed to understand until she heard Karim deciding to go to Beirut to build a hospital.
“It’s insanity,” she said. “What’s happening to you? Don’t you realize you’ll destroy all of our lives with this decision?”
He had never lied to Bernadette — as she claimed he had when she heard his decision to go to Lebanon — in their entire married life.
He told her she’d misunderstood him, as she had in the past when she’d misread his motives for cutting off all ties with his country.
Bernadette could hardly believe what happened to the man after they got married: he suddenly turned into a Frenchman and began making efforts to secure a transfer to a job in Paris.
He told her that one could become a true Frenchman only in the environs of Paris. There they spoke proper French, rasped their rs, and sucked on the word oui as though drinking it.
Bernadette said she hated Paris and living in large cities, which was why she’d left Lyon and chosen to live in Montpellier, a small city that looked out over the Mediterranean. She said she’d first thought of Marseille, whose seaside esplanade had enchanted her, but then she’d felt the city wasn’t French enough and living there would be like living in some city on the North African coast.
But Marseille is Beirut. He said he didn’t like Marseille because its esplanade was like the one in Beirut, and when he’d visited it he’d smelled the smell of civil war.
She said she’d fallen in love with him because he was Lebanese and had something of the perfume of the Orient about him.
The woman hadn’t understood what it meant for the dead to come alive in the living, and Karim was incapable of explaining it to her.
His problems with the dead had begun in Beirut. He’d gone to France to escape them, but they had suddenly awoken, as though they’d been asleep all along inside his soul.
Do the dead sleep inside our souls? And when do we become aware of their having woken?
Had Nasri woken them when he died, besieged by white, or was it because Karim had made the mistake of calling himself Sinalcol when he met Bernadette in the bar? Bernadette had laughed as she explained to the Lebanese doctor what the word meant in Spanish. Karim laughed too because he’d thought the name could be the hook with which to catch the blond French nurse who made him feel as though he had at last arrived in France.
Bernadette, though, hadn’t given up the game of calling her husband by the name of Sinalcol when he was making love to her, as though it had become their spur to sexual desire.
And when Karim had yelled at her, in the midst of his coughing, to stop using the name, Bernadette had understood that the spell was broken.
But was Sinalcol dead?