Danny had talked like a parrot repeating things it doesn’t understand. He’d spoken in a husky voice and the words had faltered in his mouth as though refusing to emerge. He’d said he was tired and wanted to sleep. Then his heart had begun beating violently and continuously. Karim had told him he ought to take him to the AUB Hospital’s emergency clinic because his heartbeat was racing, “and I’m not a cardiologist. I don’t know what to do. Come on, get up, and let’s go to the hospital.”
“There’s no need,” said Danny. “This always happens to me when I overdo it with the hashish.”
Karim ordered him to lie on his back. He put three cushions under Danny’s head, gave him a glass of cold water to drink, got a piece of ice from the refrigerator and ordered him to suck it. The heartbeat slowed but Danny didn’t cease his raving.
“Better not talk now. We can talk later.”
Danny never stopped talking. He was like someone speaking to himself. He went on for more than two hours while Karim sat next to him and tried unsuccessfully to break the accumulating sentences down into words. He heard the name Rana often repeated but what did Rana have to do with it? Rana was a member of the AUB cell and was preparing to marry her boyfriend, with whom she’d been living for three years. Karim worked out that Danny had had an affair with Rana and that Sahar had seen them at the Mandarin Café on rue de Verdun when she’d thought he was fighting in the south. He said Sahar had come into the café where he was sitting holding hands with Rana. She’d been to the supermarket with her daughter, and they’d stopped by the café because Suha loved the forêt noire. “She saw me and I didn’t see her. Suha ran to me and I didn’t notice. It was all the effect of the hashish. I was on my way back from Baalbek. You know how the boys are there. It’s cold, they light a charcoal brazier, sit round it, scatter hashish on the charcoal, and the smell rises — the sweetest smell and the best hashish and we’d get stoned without smoking. I left Baalbek stoned and instead of going home I made a date with Rana. I wanted to see her at her apartment. She said it wouldn’t work at home because her boyfriend might come at any moment and she suggested the Mandarin and I don’t know why I agreed and we were screwed.”
“So you love Rana?”
“God forbid! I love Sahar but Rana was, you know, a side dish.”
“And she thinks you’re a side dish?”
“Please, don’t start getting philosophical! Marital infidelity is a necessity for the continuation of a marriage. That’s how people are.”
“So you’ve always betrayed Sahar?”
“What? You don’t betray Hend?”
“Of course I don’t betray her, what do you mean? I love her.”
“If you don’t betray her, it means you don’t love her.”
“So Sahar knew you were betraying her?”
“I don’t know. I think she knew but she turned a blind eye.”
“Turned a blind eye?”
“Sahar is an intelligent woman. She knows that a man’s imagination has no bounds, and imagination is the beginning of betrayal.”
“Why didn’t she turn a blind eye this time?”
“Because we were being defeated. Ever since the Syrian army came in and Kamal Jumblatt, the leader of the Lebanese National Movement, was killed, we’d been in defeat and were being dragged through the mud. And Sahar understood that maybe it was over, maybe she’d only loved me because I inspired thoughts of heroism. Maybe she loved the hero and the hero was being defeated, the hero was going to die. I didn’t die, I became unemployed and unheroic. The revolution had failed and all that was left of it was the civil war and the civil war drags you through the mud, especially when it’s in your home. When she saw me with Rana she couldn’t take it anymore and I was like an imbecile, not seeing what was in front of me, with no idea what was going on till I found the girl hugging me and Sahar screaming at her so that she could leave and go home.”
Karim didn’t see Danny after that night. The man disappeared behind a veil of hashish smoke. Even when Khaled Nabulsi was killed and his wife came and sought refuge at Danny’s apartment, no one could find him. He didn’t answer the phone or open the door. This put Karim in an awkward position and he’d felt like a traitor and a coward telling Khaled’s wife he didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
The woman disappeared behind her veil and Karim experienced his last moments of indecision in Beirut before deciding to go to France.
9
LATER, WHEN HE returned to Lebanon, Hend had looked to Karim exactly as she always had. It was amazing how the woman hadn’t changed, as though she were his Hend and age had added only more of the bloom of youth. He’d expected to see a woman with a body sagging from having given birth to three boys, one who exuded the smell of house and dust and never stopped clucking, like a hen. In the event, her brown skin, tanned and endowed with a new color that seemed to clothe her in a second skin of beauty, gave her complexion the look of sun-ripened fruit and took him by surprise.
As soon as he’d cast off this girl whom he’d worn so long, Karim had turned his back on Beirut. He hadn’t lied to Danny: he had never betrayed her, not because he was uncommonly chaste or faithful, but because he couldn’t. Her aroma, which was like that of shellfish, clung to all his five senses.
Once, they’d gone swimming in front of Rawsheh Rock in Beirut, Hend moving between the two formations, swimming on her back and using her arms as oars and he tried to catch up with her. He’d circled around her and dived beneath her while she surrendered herself to the sound of the sea and to its undulations. Dazzled by sun, water, and salt, she swam alone, heedless of his cries of love and water.
“That’s enough. I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s go back.”
She turned over and said he could go back if he wanted but she was going to swim to the cave.
It was her perpetual swimming rite. She would start by making a circuit of the two rocks that rise opposite the Corniche at the lighthouse, then go to the large rock and swim on her back into the middle of the hole that time has created, forming from the lower part of the rock an arch that continues beneath the water. There she’d close her eyes and surrender to the spray from the waves that crashed off the rock covering her body with droplets of salt water in which burned threads of sunlight. Then she’d turn over and swim toward what the French called “the Pigeon Pool,” where she’d enter the water’s darkness and disappear. Karim had only once been into the cave. He’d swum at her side and they’d entered the vanishing light. He told her he needed air and could hardly breathe and heard her laugh. He pulled back and swam to the entrance of the cave to wait for her and when, after a quarter of an hour, she emerged, he told her he’d been frightened for her because of the creatures of the sea.