“You think I’m stupid? But I’ll tell you all the same. It feels as though your heart has leapt from its place and something inside you is opening up the closed doors of your soul.”
“So he stuck it in you. I knew, I swear, that that was your first betrayal of our relationship.”
“You were an idiot and always will be. If you can believe that trite poetic stuff you can believe anything.”
“You mean you’re having me on?” said Nasim.
“As usual, chéri. Nothing’s changed between us. I say, and you believe like a fool. That’s how we were and how we always will be.”
“You’re the fool, chéri. I’m the one who played you and your father and made you think you were seeing stars at noon. I took you to the sea and brought you back thirsty, as they say. And Suzanne? Is it true you went to see her after I’d gone home and she threw you out saying, ‘Go away, dear, and leave me alone, you, your father, and your brother. You think I’m running a charity?’ ”
“Me? It looks like you’re the one who’s drunk, not me.”
“She told me. You know I’m not one to forget a favor. When the war started I went to the souk and got her out of there and put her up in a small apartment in Ashrafieh and supported her till she died. She’d grown very old and her eyes, poor thing, seemed to have got smaller. The rheuminess had eaten away at them. She told me, ‘You’re the only real man in Lebanon because you’re authentic’ — and then she told me. Unbelievable! Who goes to his brother’s girlfriend? Aren’t you my brother? I swear I don’t know.”
“I didn’t go to her,” said Karim. “She must have said that because she was demented. Maybe she got us mixed up and she meant you when she said me.”
“No way!” said Nasim. “Everyone got us mixed up except women. Women have a strong sense of smell. They never make a mistake.”
“I can’t be sure,” said Karim.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, I’m just talking about the principle of the thing.”
“If you mean something else, forget it right now because there isn’t anything.”
Silence and night, and a sea stretching to infinity. Two rocks, one squatting over the sea and opening its heart to the water and the wind, the other like a piece of the first rock that the waves have separated and that stands there, waiting. And two men standing in silence.
Karim felt he’d fallen into the trap. His younger brother had prepared his revenge with care. He’d lured him with the hospital project knowing that Nasri’s older son wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of returning to Lebanon. He’d lured him with the hospital so he could show him that inheriting everything from their father wasn’t enough. He’d inherited from his brother too, and married a cultured woman who loved the sea, a woman whom in the past he couldn’t have dreamed of approaching.
“You win,” said Karim.
“Win what?” said Nasim.
“Everything, even though I didn’t go to Suzanne and you must know I had nothing to do with it. But it looks as though it’s what you say that’s going to be taken as the truth. In fact it doesn’t matter. What matters is what stays in our memory and your memory is stronger because you are stronger.”
They parted in peace. Nasim took his brother to their father’s apartment, where he was going to live during his stay in Beirut, and went home.
When Nasim got home at two in the morning, Hend was asleep. He lay beside her in bed and felt the urge to have sex. He started to awaken her gently, kissing her here and there on her lips and closed eyes. Half asleep, she asked why he was so late and said she was tired. “Tomorrow, dear. It’s very late now and I’m dog tired.” Nasim kept on at her. He told her he couldn’t stop halfway, he wanted her. “But, dear …” He silenced her with a long kiss on the lips, moved closer, and began to make his way in. Hend closed her eyes again and surrendered to the flood of her husband’s desire. It reminded her of the days of their first love, when he’d always made love to her after they had eaten white grapes that gave off a smell of incense.
Hend couldn’t resist and, despite the conflicting emotions caused by Karim’s return, found herself swept away by that rush of love her husband was capable of giving, and which changed him in bed into another man. The nighttime man seemed to be different from the daytime man, and the man when he was present wasn’t the same as the man when he was absent. By day she felt alienated from his mysterious secret world, and during his nightly absences, from which he’d return exhausted, the smell of alcohol wafting from him, she hated him and felt the need to explode in his face and tell him that marrying him had been a mistake. And when she listened to him as he conducted the rituals of breakfast with his children she felt she was in the presence of Nasri, and that this man, who made no secret of his hatred and contempt for his father, was in fact his double.
That night, when he sat up in bed and lit his cigarette and coughed, she was overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Emerging from the furnace of love and sex she’d felt she was a stranger to herself and to her desire, which had escaped her control.
He told her he hadn’t been able to talk to his brother. “I took him to the Corniche to have a coffee and talk, and instead of talking about the hospital project and how he wanted to run it and whether he was prepared to leave France and come and live in Lebanon or if he wanted something in between, like six months there and six months here, the idiot started telling me his dreams. I don’t know what’s happened to him. Things seem to be mixed up in his head. Maybe he thinks I know how to interpret dreams. And we couldn’t talk, and in the end I had to explain his dream to him.”
“And what was your explanation?” asked Hend.
“Why? Did he tell you the dream? Or maybe you dreamed the same dream. God, what a bind I’ve got myself into!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Hend.
“And you pretend you don’t know either!”
“For God’s sake, stop talking in riddles, or you’ll spoil everything. If you don’t want to talk sensibly, let’s go to sleep.”
Since their first night, when they were at the chalet, Nasim had been smitten with astonishment when Hend’s eyes shone after making love, and even though he’d insisted on not touching his girlfriend’s virginity, the kisses on their own had been enough to turn her eyes into mirrors with shining depths.
He looked into her eyes and said, “For my sake, get up and look at your eyes in the mirror so you can see how they shine. God, it’s beautiful!”
“It’s all right, dear. Tomorrow the two of you can meet and talk. Let’s sleep now.”
“Don’t you want to know the dream?” he asked her.
“You already told me I know it.”
“So you do know it?”
“Please, get these ideas out of your head and let’s sleep.”
She covered herself with the blanket and asked her husband to turn off the light in the bedroom but he sat up straight, lit another cigarette, and told her that his brother had told him her dream about Rawsheh Rock sinking and claimed it as his own.
“Your brother’s crazy,” she said, and turned off the light.
“Don’t you want to know how I answered him?”
“I want to sleep.”
She heard her husband breathing deeply at her side and saw herself in the wakeful darkness. As she went over again in her memory the story of her disappointment with Karim she found herself unable to sleep. Why had he run away like that? Why had he left her feeling undesired? Had he left after the Khaled Nabulsi affair, as he’d said, or after he was asked, supposedly, to write a book about the death of Jamal? On the eve of his departure, sitting in Uncle Sam’s, she’d told him she didn’t believe him and that she’d never have gone with him anyway, not because of her mother but because for a while now she’d begun to smell another woman on him.